NOTES FROM VIEWING STRANGERS ON VIDEOTAPE
[I made the notes below
while I was watching videotapes of two performances of the Shaliko Company’s Strangers during its
workshop run at the Washington Square Church, in Greenwich Village,
Manhattan. The play ran 1-24 March 1990,
and because it was a workshop, there were no reviews.
[There was some press coverage, though, but only one neighborhood newspaper, the Villager, that came out during the run; two other articles came out later: High Performance in the Winter issue, 1990, which included an interview with the director, and a long and detailed analyses, also with an interview with Shapiro, in Text and Performance Quarterly, in October 1991.
[I have made some explanatory insertions (in brackets), but otherwise, I’ve left my note-taking shorthand as I wrote it. I’m trusting that it’s not so arcane as to be incomprehensible.]
10/22[/1990] – Saturday performance [Washington Square Church, New York City; March 1990]
Choreography for party scene? Phys. characters not clear or specific; movement frenetic, but undifferentiated.
Words not always clear – bad acoustics + tape fidelity? May need more careful speech work.
Unfocus speakers @ mikes as you said [see Part 3: “A Conversation with Leonardo Shapiro,” 14 January] – shadows good – or mikes behind scrims?
Action scenes: more specific? Activities/movement too general and unfocused; not nec. mimetic – more hard-edged.
What does aud. know at start? Program?
Multiple-action scenes – very exciting and energizing. Are they clear enough?
Multiple voices: Many actors as one char./one actor as many chars. – very interesting; seems clear – depersonifies characters – OK?
[Shapiro employed this technique in several productions, including The Yellow House, the first Shaliko production I saw in 1986. It’s a common convention in many Asian theater forms, most notably kabuki, and when I pointed this out to him and asked if he was familiar with Asian theater, he told me he wasn’t. After that conversation, however, he read up on some Asian theater forms and consciously began using some of the practices about which he learned.
[Readers should note that Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), Shapiro’s principal theatrical models, were both heavily influenced by Asian theater. One of Brecht’s favorite actors was Mei Lanfang (1894-1961), a renowned star of Chinese opera, and he borrowed a lot from that performance form. Grotowski was influenced by, among other Asian forms, Indonesian wayang topeng (dance drama) and wayang orang (“human” drama).]
The more animated the vocal track, the more it takes focus from action track. Which is more important and when? May be OK – doesn’t happen all the time.
Radiation costumes (patients) and tape – repeatable symbols for other “waste”? (re: Naipaul metaphor)
Yes, Robbie [McCauley] is best actress – most expressive (esp. body); others need to match her expressiveness for clarity. She is less “non-person” than others – more “Stanislavsky,” less impassive automaton. Which do you want?
Shadow visuals, too. Esp. X’s [stage crosses].
Colors seem very subdued throughout. Can you use some specific color bursts to focus special moments? The contrast would be forceful way to attract attention where needed.
Why does Cathy [Biro] (Lisa [Steinberg]) become Hedda [Nussbaum], end Act II? Why not continue w/Robbie? Why confuse these characters/actors?
Is connection w/UFO’s clear?
Ghost Dance is beautiful theatrically. Is it connected to rest? Does aud. see this connection? Can it be set up better? [Ghost Dance is explained in Part 3 (14 January)—the conversation transcript.]
Aud. contact tentative (in Ghost Dance) – can it be strengthened? Start earlier? Model it by cast? Can cast move into aud. and stay with them through end of scene? Aud. does not seem to know what to do, how they’re part. Aud. are the “living” – let “dead” cast “return” to them by staying among them.
Ending w/Hedda privileges her and spotlights her –
why not end with Brazil? Then Ghost
Dance? Too obvious?
§ §
11/5[/1990] – Sunday performance [Washington Square Church; March 1990]
Leide discovering the blue stuff w/Hedda as voice
track is very effective theatrically.
Does it need focusing or pointing?
Should L’s movements w/stuff be more specific? Less dialogue (Hedda)? Split focus w/so many words to hear – want
more on L?
I-5 (p. 10), “Share the Stuff,” seems very dark. Is it the tape? Would more light hurt it?
Specificity of movements for ea. char. in I-6 (Musical Sequence) is poor – needs to be sharper, too general. ([M– G–] lacks energy and commitment.)
Words over mikes are very hard to understand. Bad acoustics, bad tape fidelity, or bad vocal
work by actors? How well do you want us
to hear words?
Example of lack of specificity: Leide after she
throws up – what happens to her? If
lights still on her, she must continue action somehow, not just stop.
Overall, visual far stronger and clearer than dialogue. Words sometimes just bkgrd. noise indicating emotional level, but not intellectual content.
Dumb shows are most vivid and clearest actions. [These would be the Goiania story, which is told wordlessly.] Actions and movements seem most specific, and commitment and understanding of actors seems strongest. NB: Nativity Sc. (II-6).
Suggest need for more specific work w/actors on mvmt. and actions in other scenes. Often seem to be moving solely as blocking, w/no content. Is that what you want? Abstract, non–mimetic OK, but not aimless and unfocused.
Am disturbed by conflicting focuses btn vocal track
and action track. Should be equal? If not, which predominates?
Shadow plays in house is very striking. [House set was a frame of metal pipe covered with newspaper. Actors did shadow play behind it.]
Poetry scenes (e.g.: III-1) are also very powerful. More commitment to language and to emot. content. Freed from realism of language? Seem cleaner-edged and more specific, less muddy and confused (on part of actors, therefore for aud.)
Visual image of III-1 is extremely compelling. Lighting and positioning of actors work
together wonderfully.
“New” script still does not reflect taped perf. exactly. Change order of scenes in script after perf? [This refers to the undated script Shapiro gave me which predated the performance on the tape. Changes seemed to have been made in rehearsal that weren’t recorded in the script.]
Non-miked speech is much clearer – 100% intelligible. Must be mikes in space that muffle voices. [This is confirmed by Shapiro in Part 3.]
So much Hedda dialogue puts a lot of focus on that
story – makes play seem to be about her.
Needs to be split up w/other material and deemphasized.
Really like Ghost Dance. Is there more of this material to use elsewhere? The non-literalness is very theatrical, striking, and provocative; can the final GD be set up by some early foreshadowing?
Aud. work in GD needs to be developed – very awkward and uncertain. Are there other places to incl. audience to est. this convention? Smaller places to foreshadow this big one?
Unimportant, personal question: Is there any other useful instrument than piano for GD? Something more “native”––flute or string? Piano sounds so bland and “white-bread.”
Are they saying the dedications as they hand out the candles? I never heard that on first tape – other aud. can’t hear, either, I presume. Should they?
allmahlich should be allmählich
Stromung should be Strömung
[Cathy Biro recites some verses of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in German.]
* * * *
[Long after the 1991 Strangers project was abandoned, after Leo Shapiro left New York and retired to New Mexico, even 7½ years after Shapiro death, I had some thoughts about the play and the director’s relationship to it. Plainly, these ideas weren’t pertinent to my abortive work as dramaturg for a potential Shaliko production, but I had profiled Shapiro and his company for TDR in 1993 ("Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," The Drama Review (Winter 1993)), and I’d shadowed him for many months in 1992.
[Shapiro and I weren’t actually friends—we didn’t socialize together during the time I knew him (1986 to his death), but we were mutually respectful professional colleagues. During the work on “Techniques of Testimony,” I watched Shapiro work on two productions and several other projects; watched him teach in the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program; interviewed him and his colleagues, collaborators, and students; combed his personal and company files; and dug up reviews of his productions, articles and other pieces he’d written (going back even to college and his time with the New Mexico communes in the late 1960s).
[Though many people knew Shapiro far better than I did, I eventually knew more about his work—and even his life, too, probably—than anyone else, possibly including him. After the TDR profile was published, I decided that I had so much more material on Shapiro and his work that I should expand it into a book-length endeavor. That work was never completed, I regret to say.
[“Techniques of Testimony” was specifically about Shapiro’s work with the Shaliko Company. “Commitments and Consequences,” as the book was tentatively entitled, went back into his childhood and young adulthood before he founded Shaliko, and continued into his retirement and up to his death. (I’ve posted parts of the book on Rick On Theater over the years.)
[As a result of this continuing focus on Leonardo Shapiro and his theater, even in 2004, I was thinking about him and his work. (Kirk Woodward, my longtime friend and frequent contributor to ROT, often acted as my “reader,” and so he knew a lot about Shapiro, Shaliko, and “Commitments and Consequences.”)
[I’ve edited the two e-mails below slightly for ease of
reading. Some irrelevant remarks have
been eliminated as well. Otherwise, I’ve
left my casual e-mail prose and abbreviations intact as I wrote them. Unfortunately, I didn’t save Kirk’s responses
and my e-mail archive doesn’t go back past 2011.]
From: [Rick]
To: Kirk Woodward
Subject: Re: Hierarchies
Date: Wednesday, 30 June 2004 3:00 PM
Kirk—
. . . .
I had a somewhat peculiar thought late last night. Actually, it was very early this a.m.—I have to take Thespie out in the middle of the night, usually 3-5 a.m. when I get up to use the john. [My dog, Thespis, was about 16 or 17 at this time and, among other old-age issues, he was incontinent and couldn’t make it through a night without going out.]
The idea itself isn’t so peculiar—as a matter of fact, it’s embarrassing that I hadn’t thought of it much, much earlier—it’s the way it came to me that’s odd. It’s usually already dawn when I go out with Thesp, so you can read news headlines pretty well.
I pass the vending boxes for all the papers on my corner, and I glance at them as I pass—and the Daily News cover caught my eye. Did you see it—it’s kind of a strange cover, almost an editorial and pretty harsh in its phrasing. It’s about the release of Joel Steinberg [see Part 1 for a brief identification], and it got me thinking. Hedda Nussbaum is a principal figure in Shapiro’s Strangers, as you may recall—he uses her testimony (incl. stuff about how JS hates being stared at—the very point the DN uses) as part of the dialogue.
[The New York Daily News of Wednesday, 30 June 2004, had several articles about the release of Steinberg that day. The one that mentioned his dislike of being stared at is “Daily News Says.” There was a tease for the article on the tabloid’s cover, which was what I caught that morning in the newspaper vending box window.
[Other stories covering Steinberg’s release in the Wednesday issue were: “Sick Mind Survived Stretch Behind Bars” by Michael Daly, “After 17 Years, The Monster Walks Free” by Joe Mahoney and Tracy Connor, and “Say Lawyer Forged Judge’s Signature” by John Marzulli. (The paper of 29 June also had multiple articles on the same topic.)]
So the JS cover got me thinking about Strangers again, and I decided that that play, Leo’s last large company-developed project, was really sort of autobiographical. (This is way too complex a thought to do here, and I haven’t sorted it all out cogently yet, so just go with it for the mo.) Leo WAS a “stranger”: he saw himself as an outsider—not just an av.-gardist, but a real outsider. He ID’d with all the “strangers” in the play—they were HIM!
I began to think thru the other stuff he did and the people he admired and was drawn to ([American] Indians, David Wojnarowicz, the Beats, prisoners) and how he described himself in various situations (he was one of only 2 Jews at [Admiral] Farragut Academy [a military prep school in St. Petersburg, Fla.], for instance; he was a lone Anglo among “Cuba’s angry exiles” in his Miami schools, and so on) and the kinds of philosophy and politics he espoused—it’s all about being on the outside. Not just ahead of the crowd, but completely different. Strangers is an expression of this sense of himself in a way that all the other pieces only suggested.
The odd thing for me is that I have almost all of this in The Book [Kirk’s and my private reference to “Commitments and Consequences”] somewhere or another, but I never put it together coherently. (Okay, this isn’t coherent, either—but it’s basted together some.) I have to work it out and see if it’s consistent—at least as consistent as anything about a living person can be.
(There was an article in yesterday’s Times’ science sec. that disparaged the tendency we all have to psychoanalyze people at a distance—like that book on the Big Men, as you have been calling them, I wrote you about some weeks ago which this article even mentions, and other such attempts at “literary psychoanalysis.”
[The Times article is “The Perils of Putting National Leaders on the Couch” by Sally Satel (New York Times, 29 June 2004, in the “Science Times” section [sec. F]). The book is either Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin A. Frank (Regan Books, 2004), or Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior by Jerrold M. Post (Cornell University Press, 2004)—both are mentioned in the article.]
(Even if I had the credentials to try that, I don’t have the standing to do it, so I have to guard against making psychological pronouncements. But I CAN lay out my observations and suggest a connection/interpretation, I think. In fact, I think I’m supposed to do that.)
Usually when I take Thespie out in the early a.m., I have no trouble getting right back to sleep. This morning, I lay in bed for several minutes pondering this connection (Leo liked to talk about “connecting the dots”—esp. in the context of Strangers) until I finally got back up, switched on a light, and made some notes so when I got up later, I wouldn’t have forgotten 1) what I had been thinking of and 2) how I got to it.
(I’ve done that before—had an idea I thought was good, then later couldn’t remember what it was—only that I had had this great idea!) Okay, this isn’t brilliant—esp. since I should have thought of it years ago—and maybe you saw it right away when you read The Book. As I said, it’s all in there—just not connected up and labeled. Think it’s anything? When I get it more cogently worked out, with examples and evidence, maybe I’ll lay it on you again.
~Rick
From: [Rick]
To: Kirk Woodward
Subject: Re: Hierarchies
Date: Thursday, 1 July 2004 1:06 PM
Kirk—
. . . .
I may have known Leo, but I didn’t know him all that well. Or that closely. I also wasn’t analyzing him when we talked—even if I had known how to do that. Also, a lot of what I know about him is second- and third-hand—stuff other people told me (and some of that was stuff other people had told them!).
It’s also easy to cherry-pick—one of the faults the Times article pointed out (and, to an extent, what you suggest Holroyd is doing—tho’ it’s not for psychoanalysis)—by citing only the behaviors that fit our (my) “diagnosis.”
[Holroyd is almost certainly Michael Holroyd (b. 1935), an English biographer, because he wrote a four-volume biography of George Bernard Shaw and a one-volume revised edition (Bernard Shaw [Random House, 1997]) that Kirk read (and cited several times) in his “Re-Reading Shaw,” posted irregularly in five parts on ROT between 3 July and 2 September 2016). Kirk is a great fan of Shaw and has posted on him several times on this blog.]
One difference may be that I didn’t decide first that Leo was this or that and then set out to prove it; I’m finding descriptions/diagnoses that fit the character I observed or have read about.
(Remember, I actually said I thought he was manic-depressive—bipolar, they call it today. Acc. to Rosalía [Triana, Shapiro’s last romantic partner], he may actually have been [diagnosed as] a “borderline personality with narcissistic tendencies.” After I read up on that, it seems to fit—and he was taking medication that’s prescribed for it. The same meds are prescribed for other conditions, too, however.)
Anyway, I haven’t said Leo was “borderline”; I’ve only reported that some people believed he was and he exhibited some of the symptoms.
And furthermore, as far as the Strangers/stranger thing is concerned, I’m not really going to “diagnose” Leo, but offer an opinion—clearly my right, and even my responsibility, I think—on how he situated himself in that context.
Clearly, he chose to make that piece for a reason. (Remember, all art is a response to something—even if I’m the only one to have said that.) He may have been introduced by one of his students to the story of the Brazilian family with the cesium, but he put the spin on it and assembled all the other materials that ended up comprising Strangers. And he chose the title, didn’t he?
I don’t imagine he actually thought of it as autobiographical, but he did acknowledge that many of his plays spoke to him about his own life—Kafka[: Father and Son by Mark Rozovsky, 1985, 1990, 1992] was about him and his father; so was Woyzeck [Georg Büchner, 1976] in a way (the guy who sold Woyzeck the knife was modeled after Leo’s dad in his production).
[Shapiro had a fraught relationship with his father, Irving Shapiro (1912-74). Irving and Shapiro’s mother, Florence (1913-94), separated in 1949 and divorced in 1951, He left her with Leo (his birth name; b. 1946) and his older brother, Gary (b. 1941), without money or an income.]
The revelation to me when I lit on this connection was the understanding that Leo wasn’t a leader of the opposition, a guy way out in front with others following behind him. That’s Ibsen. (Remember the Ibsen remark I quoted in defense of Leo’s reinterpretation of Ghosts? “A crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my earlier books. But I myself am there no longer, I am somewhere else—far away ahead of them—or so I hope.”)
Leo was outside the whole process, not just in front of it. (It may be significant—altho’ unwittingly so—that one of the books he found important was Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi [1943]. One lesson of the book is that, when faced with the choice of playing a game one way or another—well or badly, say—there is always one other choice that is seldom recognized: Not to play the game at all.)
Leo didn’t just elect to play the game by different rules—he elected not to play at all; he played his own game. He suffered for it—society doesn’t take kindly to people who don’t play its game. It is also significant, I think, that he admired the Situationists [see “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3 February 2012]—they made up their own games, too, usually to subvert the proscribed games society determined we should play. The Situationists weren’t trying to lead society anywhere. They were trying to break it!
David Wojnarowicz [1954-92; see “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March 2011] didn’t want to be admitted to the mainstream, he wanted to smash it. The Beats didn’t want entree to the establishment’s salons—they wanted to create their own milieu. The same with the Hippies—esp. the communards of N.M. in the ’60s [with whom Shapiro lived and worked in 1969-71]—a culture that was really “counter.” And the anarchists are, by definition, against anything society structures—they want to tear it down.
(Many of his literary heroes are also stalwart outsiders: Horatio from Empire City [1959 novel by Paul Goodman], Woyzeck, Galy Gay [main character of Brecht’s Man Is Man (1926), a play important to Shapiro], the protags. of both Hesse books he liked—Steppenwolf [1927] and Magister Ludi, Konstantin Treplyev [character in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), another play important to Shapiro, which he staged in 1996, just before his death], Spartacus [whose name he gave his own son], and so on.
I also suspect that his affinity for sci-fi works in here somehow, too—but I’m not enough of an expert on the genre to spot it off-hand. And if you remember my brief description of the TV play he wrote based on his own marriage [Runaway Sam in the Promised Land (1994)], the character of his wife was becoming a mainstream dancer—People mag. liked her, she was proud to assert—and he was an adamantly unmarketable artist whose works no one would buy. That’s pretty much a committed outsider, I think.)
I’m just thinking on my feet—well, really my tochas: I’m sitting down—but I think this is making some sense. He loved AmerIndian culture—and they were the ultimate outsiders (tho’ not by their own choosing). The Taos Pueblos [Shapiro lived in the Taos area both in the 1960s-70s and in his retirement in 1993-97], whom Leo really admired, were—are still—steadfast in their opposition to assimilation. They want to stay outsiders to the Anglo society.
(By the way, if you’ve never read any Frank Waters [1902-95; a writer of Native-American heritage whom Shapiro greatly admired], pick one up. Start with his novel The Man Who Killed the Deer [1942]. He also has non-fiction books about the Pueblo and Hopi Indians [Masked Gods: Navajo and Pueblo Ceremonialism (1950); Pumpkin Seed Point (1969)].)
~Rick
[One artist who was a true outsider and with whom Shapiro identified but whom I didn’t mention was Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). The director not only admired van Gogh as an artist, but he created his most successful performance piece, The Yellow House (1986; see my post on 9 February 2018), from the painter’s letters to his brother, Theo (1857-91).
[Quoting the title of a 1947 Surrealistic essay by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), Shapiro called the artist “The Man Suicided by Society,” using the essay to suggest some of the parallels he saw between himself and van Gogh.
[Writing “Commitments and Consequences” gave me a perspective on Shapiro’s work that allowed me to recognize motifs and themes, of some of which he told me he wasn’t even aware. (Some of them even had foreshadows in theater he’d made years before he formed the Shaliko Company.) That’s how I eventually spotted the self-referential aspect of Strangers—and why I was somewhat chagrined that I hadn’t seen it years earlier. (I did insert this revelation into The Book, by the way.)]
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