A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5

 

[“A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5” begins with Shaliko’s last production at the Public Theater and the last show of the original company before Shapiro re-formed it five years later.  It continues with the director’s foray into freelancing—which eventually led to his devastating split with Joseph Papp and his contentious departure from the Public. 

[As you’ll read, Shapiro restarted Shaliko briefly, failed, and then tried again, forging his enduring association with the legendary Ellen Stewart and the La MaMa E.T.C.

[A trip to the Soviet Union introduced Shapiro to Russian playwright and director Mark Rozovsky, whose play Kafka: Father and Son became so meaningful to the American theater man that he staged it three times. 

[The last incarnation of The Shaliko Company moved into Shapiro’s period of “Original Collaborative Work” and the première of the company’s most audience-pleasing production, The Yellow House.  (It was this production that introduced me to Shapiro and Shaliko’s work.)

[As I’ve been saying since Part 2 of this bio series, I admonish readers who are just joining this look at Leonardo Shapiro’s personal history to go back to the beginning and read the first four parts before trying to make sense of Part 5.  Parts 1 through 4 were posted on 16, 19, 22, and 25 April.]

Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck, produced at the Public in 1976 with Joseph Chaikin in the title role, was the last Shaliko play affiliated with the New York Shakespeare Festival (see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020). 

Shapiro said he chose Woyzeck because he was looking for a play to do with Chaikin, whom the founder of Shaliko had known since his teens when he hung out at the Living Theatre, of which Chaikin had been a member, and with whom Shapiro had participated in workshops with Grotowski in Poland in 1975.  

They agreed that Büchner’s (1813-37) anti-heroic soldier would be a good vehicle for the actor.  The resemblance between the characters of Franz Woyzeck and Galy Gay in Brecht’s Man Is Man, for which Chaikin had won an Obie in 1963 (and which Shapiro had seen), shouldn’t be overlooked as a force in this selection, however. 

Woyzeck was a co-production with Chaikin’s Other Theatre, his successor to the Open Theatre, which disbanded in 1973.  (The Other Theatre was co-founded in 1975 with playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie [1936-2021].  In 1974, Chaikin had co-formed the Working Theater with Peter Kass and Kristin Linklater [1936-2020].)

Shapiro said Woyzeck was the company’s “most normal show,” all planned in advance because the cast included non-company members.  The production, which Shapiro characterized as “a prophetic vision of the devaluation of Man in the modern world,” nonetheless illustrated a recurring Shaliko theme: the lot of the common man.

The production earned widely divergent reviews, but critics generally either loved it or hated it.  Most critics who didn’t like the production invoked, as they had with Ghosts, Shapiro’s violation of the 19th-century values of the play.  Other critics had high praise for the show.  Harold Clurman (1901-80) of The Nation, for instance, concluded that “the production registers; one remembers it.”  

Yet, it wasn’t the critics who drove Shapiro from the Public Theater but his mentor, Joseph Papp.  Two Shaliko actors about whom Shapiro cared most had left the company following Woyzeck and Shapiro disbanded it. 

He decided to try his hand at freelance directing.  As a young director, Shapiro had hired out to the NYU School of the Arts in 1972 to stage The Women at the Tomb by Michel de Ghelderode (Belgian [Flemish]; 1898-1962) with a student cast.  The performances were mounted at the school’s studio space at 111 Second Avenue in the East Village from 8 to 10 May.

So in December 1976, the nascent freelancer started out his independent directing stint with the première of The Youth Hostel at the Public Theater, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  (The three plays, which are set before, during, and after sex respectively, were presented at the Public as Three Short Plays.  The first and third plays on the bill were Summer Evening, directed by Wilford Leach [1929-88] and Mr. Frivolous, directed by Lee Breuer [1937-2021].)

The 45-minute-long play by itself would be no more than a footnote in Shapiro’s career—except for two points: it cemented the life-long friendship with Shawn the director had had since NYU and it was his entrée as an independent director at the New York Shakespeare Festival.  These both led directly to the abortive directorship of the musicalized Misanthrope in 1977 which generated the rift with Joseph Papp that haunted Shapiro the rest of his life. 

It had been Shawn who convinced Papp to hire Shapiro for Youth Hostel by affirming his belief in his young friend after the director had left the Public Theater the previous year.  It had also been Shawn who brokered the original connection between The Shaliko Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Later, as we’ll see, Shawn brought Shapiro the script of Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor from London.

Then from 13 to 29 May 1977, the Working Theater presented coo-me-doo, or they’re only made of clay under Shapiro’s direction.  A song-and-dance collage of love imagery (from Chaucer to Ginsberg) conceived by Kristin Linklater, co-founder of the troupe with Peter Kass and Joseph Chaikin.  The piece ran in the company’s Off-Off-Broadway space on West 12th Street in the far west Village.

Some years before staging The Youth Hostel, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s (French; 1622 [baptized]-1673) Misanthrope with Shaliko but let the project drop.  The composer, Margaret Pine, one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it (see “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021). 

Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over the timbre of the production.  Shapiro refused to make changes in the production as Papp demanded, he said, and the impresario fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own.  From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker (1927-2019), recommended J Ranelli (1938-2019), another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that Shapiro “could not handle” the musical adaptation and that what he and Pine had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh viewpoint, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur ultimately demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production.

(The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile [1942-2011], credited with the staging.  An additional composer and orchestrator were also brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.) 

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.   Even years later, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly.

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Twenty years after the event, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . . .  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

The root of the young director’s problem, he learned, was that “I have problems with authority, and I have had problems with producers . . . .  I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  The issue had already appeared in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No, and it would surface again later in the failure of his work on Karen Malpede’s (b. 1945) Blue Heaven and his difficulties with the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program. 

(I interviewed Malpede twice, once in February 1992 as part of my work on the TDR profile of Shapiro and again on 17 July 1992 for Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present [“An Interview with Karen Malpede,” 8.1 (1993)]; republished as “Karen Malpede” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman [University of Alabama Press, 1996].  The July transcript was posted on Rick On Theater on 5 November 2014.)

Following the Misanthrope debacle, Shapiro gave freelancing one more try, apparently successful.  In 1979, Shapiro signed on with Atlanta’s Academy Theatre, the city’s longest-running professional theater, to direct a production of Molière’s Tartuffe (12 January-10 February). 

The Atlanta Constitution dubbed Shapiro’s Tartuffe “a rowdy, bawdy gem, the delight of the year so far.”  Reviewer Helen C. Smith added, “There is nothing subtle about this ‘Tartuffe.’  Guest director Leonardo Shapiro has taken great risks, and for the most part they work extremely well.”

In the Atlanta Gazette, Liza Nelson reported:

Director Shapiro has given the play a physical, almost acrobatic interpretation, with much thrashing and falling about on stage.  He has not, however, lost the emotional edge of the poetry of Tartuffe through the buffoonery.

It went well enough for the Academy to invite him back—and for him to return.  In a press release for William Shakespeare’s (English; 1564 [baptized]-1616) Richard III, part of the troupe’s next season, the Academy noted that Shapiro’s Tartuffe had been “critically acclaimed” and “broke all box office records.”

He led the company’s production of Richard, which ran from 2 to 31 May 1980.  Like his Shaliko productions before and after this period, Shapiro’s Richard III was not strictly conventional.  An Academy Theatre memorandum noted:

The closest I can come in expressing Leo’s treatment of RICHARD III, is to call it “total theatre”.  The production encompasses the entire theatre . . . the aisles, the balcony, players enter from outside entrances, the street.  The back of the house.

In terms that might have described Shaliko’s Ghosts a few years earlier, the memorandum continued:

The theatrical experience of having the play performed in essentially a 360° space, gives the audience a role too—they’re in the play, they could touch the players, can feel the heat of the torches . . . ; their proximity to the action prevents merely passive attention to the play.

Earlier that year, Shapiro directed the première of Friends by Crispin Larangeira (b. 1940), a four-character comedy involving an aging couple who’ve bever been able to forgive each other for staying married so long, their friend on whom they take out their resentment, and the wife’s niece who tries to take the friend away.  It ran 10-27 January 1980 at the New Federal Theatre on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Larangeira’s play got a mixed reception, but Shapiro’s staging was judged “ferociously inventive” (Village Voice) and “simple and smooth” (Villager).  Indeed, Tish Dace of the Soho Weekly News said that Shapiro “has an extraordinary capacity for helping actors achieve performances at once natural and ingenious.”

While all the freelance productions received mostly respectable to good reviews—the Atlanta Constitution, for instance, described the classical revivals as “wild and wickedly funny” and “stylish and highly charged” respectively and Marilyn Stasio called Shapiro’s direction of The Youth Hostel “tart” in Cue—Shapiro found he had “totally lost the reason for what I was doing.”

Disenchanted with freelance directing, Shapiro tried to recapture the spirit of ten years earlier when he formed Shaliko.  In 1981, with actress, director, and circus artist Cecil MacKinnon (b. 1945), he attempted to re-form the troupe with a season at Saint Peter’s Hall on West 20th Street in New York’s Chelsea, beginning what Shapiro classified as “Work on New International Plays, Commissions, and Musical Adaptations.” 

Productions in this vein included Daniel Mark Epstein’s (b. 1948) verse play, The Midnight Visitor (December 1981-January 1982); Andrea Dunbar’s (English; 1962-90) The Arbor from England (September-October 1983); Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son from Russia (February-March 1985); Mac Wellman’s (b. 1945) Whirligig (April-May 1989); and the Russian-language première of Kafka: Father and Son in Moscow (spring 1990). 

This second phase of Shaliko ran until 1990—the first phase, from 1972 to 1977, Shapiro dubbed “Meetings with Classical Texts”—but the start was abortive and Shapiro produced only the première of Midnight Visitor in the first season. 

A mystery about a widow, her three daughters, and one daughter’s fiancé gathered in the old family home, The Midnight Visitor attracted Shapiro because of his “weakness for poetry,” which he said had been “one of the few consistent themes in Shaliko from the beginning.” 

Though the production and acting were generally appreciated, the play, described by one critic as “a Gothic opera without the music,” received unanimously bad reviews and Shapiro later concluded that it was simply a bad script. 

After Midnight Visitor, the second production of the new Shaliko Company was to be Molière’s Don Juan starring Christopher Walken (b. 1943) as Don Juan and Wallace Shawn as Sganarelle.  Unhappily, the intended production of what Shapiro said was one of his favorite plays and Molière’s best miscarried for reasons having more to do with Hollywood than New York. 

Because of the death of actress Natalie Wood (29 November 1981; b. 1938), Walken’s co-star on the MGM film Brainstorm (released in 1983), which was in production at the time, the actor’s obligation was unexpectedly extended during the filming and he became unavailable.

Shapiro had everything tied to the plans for the season and when the first play failed and the second foundered, Shaliko lost all its funds and Shapiro was forced to cancel the season.

In 1983, Shapiro tried again to relaunch Shaliko, this time in partnership with Elena Prischepenko (b. 1955), who performed as Elena (or Helen) Nicholas.  (Prischepenko is married to artist and illustrator Scott Cunningham [b. 1956] and sometimes also goes by the name Helen Cunningham.) 

Wallace Shawn had brought a new play, Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor, from England where it had been produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre to accclaim in 1980, and Prischepenko wanted to produce it in New York.  Shapiro approached Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), who agreed to let him present the play at La MaMa, beginning Shaliko’s association with the Experimental Theatre Club. 

The Arbor provides examples of a number of Shapiro’s principles.  Dunbar, a 15-year-old girl when she wrote the script as a school assignment, had never even seen a play.  An abused child, pregnant and abandoned, she simply wrote down what had happened to her during the day before she went to bed every night, each scene a snapshot of a discrete incident.  

“It’s totally unmediated,” the director explained.  “It is raw experience.”  Shapiro described the play as “about the lumpen proletariat written by the lumpen proletariat,” as if Franz Woyzeck had written Woyzeck.

Allan Wallach described the play in Long Island’s Newsday:

Dunbar didn’t give “The Arbor” a traditional structure or the insights of a writer in touch with her deepest feelings.  The play is a succession of short scenes, most of them as devoid of emotion as snapshots.  Before each scene, the central character [played by Prischepenko], given the author’s own name, provides a brief, Brechtian summary of what will follow.

Wallach also described the play as “a lurid autobiography written in a style which careens between a kitchen table naturalism and an Epic Theater presentational mode” and characterized Shapiro’s production as “energetic.”  Overall, the reviews were mixed, leaning toward the unappreciative. 

Shapiro’s move into La MaMa in 1983 began his second attempt to reestablish Shaliko, but it was a very different company from that disbanded in 1977.  Shapiro acknowledged that the revival was little more than a use of the name to produce shows from project to project.  There was no longer the financial support for a standing company, and many of the original group had left the theater or gone elsewhere to work. 

With their permanent home at the Public Theater no longer available, the freedom to spend months developing ensemble performances was gone.  The length of Shaliko runs was drastically curtailed, reducing the vital contact with an audience they needed to complete the work on their performances and restricting the company’s exposure as well as the chance to build word of mouth. 

Furthermore, La MaMa, more closely identified with a certain kind of theater associated with New York’s East Village than is the New York Shakespeare Festival, did not have the drawing power of the Shakespeare Festival for either audiences or reviewers, and Shaliko productions that might otherwise have attracted valuable attention, like The Yellow House and Kafka’s 1985 première, went under-noticed. 

The association with La MaMa, however, had benefits.  Stewart encouraged Shapiro to rebuild his company merely because she liked him.  She had a reputation since she started the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1961, as Café La MaMa) of supporting non-establishment writers, directors, and theater companies from around the country and the world and she accepted Postmodern theater well before the mainstream culture did. 

She also judged artists not on their proposals, résumés, or track records, but on an almost mystical individual response to their personalities.  Since she never read texts, never did any kind of “in-depth analysis about anybody about anything,” never went to rehearsals unless asked, and seldom even saw a show at La MaMa, Shapiro had virtually complete freedom.  “I don’t go watching what Leo does,” said Stewart; “[h]e’s very secure here.” 

Of course, no strings meant precious little support.  What had always been a rough theater by intention had now become also a poor theater by circumstances.  Stewart provided Shaliko performance and rehearsal space, but didn’t support the company in any other way beyond box office services.  Shaliko even paid its own producer-publicist. 

At the Public Theater, which had given Shaliko no money, Shapiro’d had scene shops, prop and costume collections, and an extensive administrative apparatus available; at La MaMa he had none of these. 

In March 1984, Shapiro and Prischepenko went to Russia with a group of theater professionals under the auspices of the Citizens Exchange Council, a non-profit organization which fostered cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

The group included director Peter Sellars (b. 1957), director of the Boston Shakespeare Theatre until June 1984 when he resigned to become artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s sort-lived American National Theatre; New York City’s Quaigh Theatre artistic director Will Lieberson (1916-95), and several other directors and playwrights. 

At the Soviet writers’ union, Shapiro made “a rather intemperate . . . speech” about seeing so many plays in Moscow with “happy endings.”  He asked the assembled playwrights why they didn’t “have the courage to talk about life as it really was.” 

According to Shapiro, after the session, Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937; see “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020) told him, “I have play, no happy ending, you want?”  They arranged to meet secretly and the playwright turned over the manuscript of Kafka: Father and Son (Russian: Кафка: отец и сын), “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.” 

Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka, based mostly on a 100-page letter Franz Kafka (Czech; 1883-1924) wrote, but never sent, to his father (November 1919; Letter to His Father/Brief an der Vater) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical tale, at the Moscow Art Theater studio but the Ministry of Culture of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov (1914-84; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1982-84) suppressed it because the Czech embassy protested. 

Kafka was persona non grata in his native country and, the embassy charged, discussions of his works had been the incitement for the start of the Prague Spring of 1968.

Shapiro and Prischepenko smuggled the manuscript out of the U.S.S.R. in their suitcases, and Prischepenko translated it when they got back to the United States.  In January 1985, Shapiro mounted Albert Bermel’s Thrombo, a poorly received political farce about Americans in Africa, as a non-Shaliko production.  In March, he presented the world première of Kafka at La MaMa in a further attempt to relaunch Shaliko as a company. 

Much in line with previous and subsequent Shaliko efforts, Shapiro viewed Kafka: Father and Son as “another exploration of social creativity and repression through the autobiographical lens of the misfit artist . . . .”  It was, he averred, his “most overtly personal piece” and he remarked, “In rehearsal, I find that I am dramatizing my own life.” 

The director also saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression.  He felt a connection among his father, Joseph Papp, and Hermann Kafka (1854-1931), but the connection to Irving Shapiro was more pervasive even than that. 

“The play struck a very deep chord in me,” Shapiro admitted.  “It spoke to me immediately about my own childhood and my own difficult relationship with my father.”  Everything in the production—the sets, costumes, props, images—was drawn from his childhood “encounters” with his father. 

Unfortunately, the production garnered little of the compelling press attention needed to ignite the effort to restart the company: the New York Times didn’t send a critic and Robert Massa of the Village Voice didn’t like it.  The only timely coverage was a smattering of fringe papers.  Paul Berman of The Nation, writing after the closing of the production, about which he wasn’t entirely positive, lamented:

Kafka: Father and Son, by Mark Rozovsky, arrived at the morgue recently after receiving, as far as I know, no more than two paragraphs of mention anywhere—and those paragraphs a spade and shovel. . . .

The play has some of the intensity of Kafka himself . . ., an intensity that comes from enormous compression of thought and feeling, so that every line carries a truth on the surface and another truth below and an electric charge from one to the other. . . .   [T]here were brilliant aspects, too, which managed to distort the sense of distance between audience and stage so thoroughly that Christopher McCann, who played Kafka the Son, seemed to loom as if in a close-up, like one of those famous photographs of Kafka’s face and haunted eyes. . . . 

And to think that such a play has come and gone without an escort of critics waving and shooting fireworks.

Shapiro changed the design of Kafka for the 1990 version he mounted in Russia and the 1992 revival in New York.  The director continuously reworked his plays, though he seldom got a chance actually to restage them.  (Kafka was the only Shaliko play he remounted not once, but twice—not counting workshops.)

After the first production of Kafka: Father and Son, Shapiro moved into the third phase of his work.  In 1986, with the first professional production of The Yellow House, he began creating what he designated as “Original Collaborative Work.”  Though this effort (from 1986 to 1992) overlapped his work on new plays and commissions (1981 to 1990), it marked a change in the kind of material that occupied most of his attention. 

Instead of finding (or commissioning) texts that spoke to subjects of interest to him, he began creating pieces for what he wanted to communicate.  The performance pieces were far larger in scope than Shaliko’s previous work, and drew on more and more diverse sources for materials and themes. 

Additionally, works like The Yellow House and those that followed were changed, sometimes radically, to occupy each new venue.  The Yellow House also marked Shapiro’s most aggressive efforts to restart Shaliko. 

Shapiro began developing The Yellow House, called The Van Gogh Project in its early stages, in a 1984 workshop with students and faculty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was artist-in-residence.  (See “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018).

Having conceived an intense interest in Vincent van Gogh (Dutch; 1853-90) early in his life, Shapiro spent time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam while at the 1976 Holland Festival (1-23 June) with Woyzeck.  He began working on a van Gogh piece six years later, “when I was 36 and thinking of killing myself.” 

He was identifying with the painter who, he believed, had been “suicided by society” (a phrase quoted from an Antonin Artaud [French; 1896-1948] essay about the painter in 1965’s Artaud Anthology) when he was 37, but when Shapiro had finished Yellow House four years later, he was already 40 and “had missed jumping out my window of opportunity.”

Working with composer-singer-violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), Shapiro and his team created The Yellow House from letters between the painter and his brother Theo as a vehicle for the “personal testimony about the life and the mission of the artist,” a recurring theme in Shapiro’s work.

As a collaboratively built piece, The Yellow House changed as it developed.  At Trinity, it had been “frontal, chronological, direct [and] biographical,” but when the piece was restaged at La MaMa in February 1986 and then at Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations, UNESCO’s periodic global theater festival, in June, it had become more intricate, less linear, and more metaphorical. 

The Yellow House also reintroduced the Shaliko technique of the multiple casting of one role, which Shapiro had used in 1974’s The Measures Taken, passing the role of the Young Comrade among several members of the ensemble as prescribed by Brecht’s script.  In Yellow House, four actors, including a woman, played van Gogh in various avatars: Young Vincent, the Painter, the Mirror, and Self Portrait.  In one remarkable scene, the three last appeared together as the Painter painted his Self Portrait from his reflection in the Mirror.

Shaliko sets were often interactive and in The Yellow House, when van Gogh went mad, the furniture danced in mid-air, manipulated like marionettes by the actors, themselves, in full view of the audience.  Shapiro also staged the production at TON specifically for the huge, vaulting North Hall of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  (The site-specific set was designed by Jerry Rojo, a frequent collaborator of Shapiro’s.)

In a climactic scene that couldn’t have occurred at the La MaMa mounting, the director staged his most striking theatrical effect.  Using the high, vaulted ceiling at the Peabody, Shapiro projected van Gogh’s Starry Night 30 feet above the audience’s heads and had one of the actors playing the painter climb up a rope 23 feet into the “sky” where he stood on a pipe to “paint” the picture.

The Yellow House was perhaps Shaliko’s prettiest production.  Though essentially ignored by critics outside Baltimore (there was one review of the New York production in the theatrical trade paper Back Stage), it received excellent notices at the Theatre of Nations.  Non-linear in structure and surrealistic in design, it was visually stunning, captivating audiences and critics alike. 

This is the production that introduced me to Shapiro’s work.  I was reporting on TON and attended as many of the performances as I could.  I also interviewed several of the artists at the festival, one of whom was Shapiro.  I was greatly taken with Yellow House, possibly the most striking production at TON and one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever seen.  (I didn’t see Shapiro again after that for four years.)

The Yellow House, which Shapiro described in publicity as an “image opera,” began the exploration of the synthesis of arts in performance with Kabuki and Beijing Opera as paradigms.  It was an effort to apply practically Shapiro’s impulse to view gesture as language—to make the non-verbal elements of the performance text as vital and communicative as the literary text.

Though previous Shaliko shows had included music and dance—or at least choreography—with The Yellow House, Shapiro began complecting music, sound, dance, movement, speech, poetry, and slide projections—later film and video, too—more and more into his pieces. 

[The sixth segment of Leonardo Shapiro’s biography will be posted on Monday, 1 May.  I’ll be chronicling Shapiro’s initiation of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and Shaliko’s continuation of its efforts to make collaborative theater.

[I hope that ROTters are finding this biographical series as interesting to read as I had in composing it.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6” on May Day.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 4

 

[Part 4 of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” below, starts with the theater director’s return to New York City after his two-year sojourn in New Mexico and the Four Corners.  Having formed his second performing group, the Appleseed Circus, the first he launched on his own, Shapiro assembled a group of actors to initiate his second and most significant troupe, the Shaliko Company, whose name was a product of his New Mexico experience. 

[All of his previous experiences and influences coalesced to guide Shapiro’s experimentation in founding Shaliko.  As you’ll see, the company’s earliest productions were manifestations of what he’d learned up to this point.  

[You’ll also see that many of Shapiro’s childhood experiences and interests began to show up in his artistic work, as they would continue to do for the rest of his life.  Unhappily, the same was true of his problems, faults, and obsessions.

[Furthermore, this section of the bio looks at Shapiro’s contentious relationship with the press, a development which had profound effects on the theater artist’s work and life.

[As I have, starting with the second installment of the bio post, I strongly suggest to all readers who haven’t been following along since Part 1, that they go back and pick up the earlier segments of “A Biography” (16, 19, and 22 April) before reading this segment.  As with any chronological narrative, later parts will make more sense if you know what went before.]

Returning to New York in 1971 after the dissolution of the Appleseed Circus, Shapiro sought out the actors he’d known in the 1960s at New York University’s theater program.  Among Shapiro’s other acquaintances at NYU had been director André Gregory (b. 1934), founder of the Manhattan Project; Omar Shapli, who started the improvisational group Section 10; and director-teacher Richard Schechner, who launched the Performance Group (forerunner of the Wooster Group).  They’d all started their companies after studying with Grotowski and employed, in one way or another, the techniques Grotowski taught.  

Filled with ideas by Kass, Carl Weber, and Grotowski, and inspired by the examples of his predecessors—certainly because of the Becks’ influence, and Theater Genesis’s example—Shapiro put Shaliko together in January 1972 using former NYU students, including Candace Tovar, who was now his wife; Margaret Pine; Tom Crawley; and Linda Putnam.

The first Shaliko (Shapiro would re-form the troupe twice over its existence) was a group of young actors committed to exploring together the possibilities of performance as an expression of personal, artistic, and social concerns.  The overarching aim of this ensemble was “a new synthesis of theatrical forms that is directly rooted in our belief in the importance of learning to speak the truth in public to a public that has been conditioned since childhood by euphemism, packaging and illusion.”

From its formation, Shaliko was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary ensemble of American performers and collaborators of European, African, and Hispanic descent as well as artists from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, drawing on the traditions of Native American cultures, European experimentalism, and Asian classical arts. 

In the early months of its formation starting in late January 1972, The Shaliko Company spent time getting to know one another through games and exercises.  They devoted 30 hours a week—outside their bread-and-butter jobs—to physical training (10-15 hours) and work on texts (15-20 hours). 

Actor Christopher McCann (b. 1952), an early member of the ensemble, recalled that exercises like “blind combat,” in which the actors wear blindfolds and circle one another wielding wooden swords and out of which eventually grew the troupe’s first project, produced “a kind of physicality that ensued with people searching each other out—that enlivened your senses to what was happening in the room even though you couldn’t see anything.” 

Shapiro described the process of arriving at Shaliko’s first production:

We spent two months exploring our range.  Seeing what we could do and how far we could push ourselves.  Developing techniques that could use the new possibilities we were discovering.  By March [1972], we became more text-oriented and started trying out material.  We went through texts rather quickly, using them as tools to further our own growth, pushing them to their limits, then moving on to richer material. . . .  We were looking for a script that spoke directly to the needs we felt we shared with our audience, a script strong enough to take all we could put of ourselves into it and still maintain its own integrity.  By June, we had discovered the Greeks.

Not surprisingly, considering Shapiro’s early literary aspirations, among the earliest texts with which Shaliko experimented were poetry.  After testing Kenneth Koch’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1962), “a grade school skit, celebrating the American myth,” in February 1972 and discovering that it was “too thin” and “would not bear our weight,” the nascent Shaliko took up W. H. Auden’s (British-American; 1907-73) ballad “Victor,” a 1937 narrative of how modern society produces lost souls—elements of which sentiment found their way into Strangers in 1990.

Company literature stated that “Victor,” in its rendition of the story of a man who is so conditioned by his father’s rigid moral upbringing that he is alienated from society, “reflects our interest in making theatrical sense out of narrative material.” 

(The theme of parents sacrificing their children was a constant of Shapiro’s artistic work.  It appeared both literally and figuratively in many Shaliko works over the years.)

In May came Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-97) “September on Jessore Road” (1971), a long lyric poem describing the devastating 1968 floods and famine in India and chastising the U.S. for using its wealth to bomb Southeast Asians instead of sending humanitarian assistance to desperate Indians. 

At the same time that Shapiro and his new troupe were planning to work on Ginsberg’s poem, they also intended to begin work on another poetic theater piece, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe, a celebration of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik establishment of the Soviet Union.  This is significant, even though the planned “street show” adaptation never occurred, because a decade-and-a-half later, Shaliko would develop a modern version of this play about revolution (see “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018). 

During the planned rehearsals of Mystery-Bouffe, the company wanted to develop an adaptation of William Golding’s The Inheritors, a 1955 novel which relates the destruction of the primitive Neanderthals by the more advanced Homo sapiens, but ultimately couldn’t secure the rights.  Then, after a year, the demand to produce became “pretty intense” and, “blind combat” having evolved into the Trojan War, Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis, premièred in February 1973 at Philip Arnoult’s (b. 1941) Theatre Project in Baltimore.  (See my post, “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021.)

In May, Shaliko presented it in New York as part of an NYU Ensemble Theatre Project festival, a venture intended as a showcase for the work of small performing troupes spawned by the School of the Arts.  Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, a friend from the NYU days who followed Shapiro’s work from the beginning, pronounced Children “incredibly exciting.” 

The inaugural production also began Shaliko’s work on some of Shapiro’s most fundamental techniques and theatrical principals.  His employment of circus arts was fully in evidence in Children, which led inevitably to the work on the real-time event (see my post on 6 July 2021), which is dependent on the audience-performer relationship. 

The connection is straightforward.  Theater artists create illusions, Hovey Burgess, the NYU circus-arts teacher, believed.  “Circus is more real” because, he insisted, “[e]verything that happens in the circus should really be happening.”  What the audience sees, Burgess pointed out, is what is happening at that moment.  These notions formed the foundation of Shaliko productions for the rest of Shapiro’s career.

Also starting with Children, Shapiro developed an actor-audience contract that made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” under the influence of Russian and Soviet master filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and theater experimentalist Vsevolod Meyerhold (Russian; 1874-1940). 

As New Leader critic Albert Bermel (1927-2013) noted, “Around and above the playing area . . . stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses.  Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers,” with, as Shapiro put it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.”

A similar relationship between the performers and the spectators was established in almost all of Shaliko’s productions throughout its existence.  Shapiro frequently affirmed: “What I want to do is to make passionate art involved with the audience.”

In the earliest shows, such as Children of the Gods, it was made clear to the audience what its role was.  As Shaliko and Shapiro matured, the specific audience-performer relationship became less explicit—but it was always part of Shapiro’s production plan.

The explorations of the real-time experience, the theater as thought-provoker, and the involvement of the audience in the performance event all had their most undiluted expression in Shaliko’s second production, Brecht’s The Measures Taken. 

The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project and on 30 September at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, introduced Shaliko to Joseph Papp (1921-91) who saw a performance at NYU and offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as their home.  (Under Dickinson’s sponsorship, Shaliko toured Pennsylvania, including several union halls and prisons.)

The production, described as “a vigorous American adaptation,” moved into the Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Measures, one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or “teaching plays,” was written in 1930.  The play’s first English translation had been commissioned in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities when it questioned Brecht, but the play’s apparent defense of Communist Party actions found little sympathy at either HUAC or, evidently, many theater groups. 

(Ironically, the socialist Guardian, New York City’s weekly newspaper of the Communist Party USA, dubbed Shaliko’s production “anticommunist” and declared, “In the guise of ‘honoring’ Brecht it is actually a stab in the back.”)

Shapiro, in fact, saw in the play’s investigation of the murder of a Young Comrade by a detachment of Soviet Agitators sent to China to foment revolution, a debate on political terrorism, a way to study “the paradoxes of radical committment [sic].”

Shaliko selected Measures almost by accident.  Following Children of the Gods, the company had begun work on a stage version of H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) The Time Machine, one of several “fantasy projects” Shapiro developed over the years because of his continuing interest in science fiction and utopian visions.  The production never materialized, and the company began tossing about for another project. 

Shapiro had earlier suggested The Measures Taken, but the company rejected it as too “hard-edged,” not to mention that, as a learning play, it was considered boring.  (Brecht’s Lehrstücke were meant as indoctrination for young communist party members; they weren’t intended for performances before the general public.)

While Shapiro was away from New York in Saint Paul “sitting shiva” for his father (who had died on 15 January 1974), the company reconsidered the Brecht play.  When the director returned from Minnesota in late January 1974, he found the actors reading Measures. 

After Children, a number of the original company members had left Shaliko, including Tovar; Shapiro was in the throes of reorganizing the company; his marriage was dissolving, and he’d just left his hometown after Irving’s death.  He threw himself into the rehearsals for Measures, which he began to see not as a staged lecture, but “as a rip-roaring kind of . . . kung-fu Western.” 

In Measures, the role of the audience was the most specific of any Shaliko production.  Shapiro used direct address between the Control Council and the spectators and at the outset, the Chief Commissioner states: “[W]e are asking you to represent students.” 

Because the Control Council questioned the theatergoers about what was going on in the play, the real-time event was also most obvious, and the play was different every night.  “Every night the audience went out arguing with each other,” which, of course, was what Shapiro had formed Shaliko to provoke.  These techniques were never as blatant again.

Measures was well received by audiences, eventually playing over 300 performances, joining in repertory Shaliko’s April 1975 offering at the Public, an environmental production of Ibsen’s Ghosts (see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (shaliko’s ghosts, 1975), 6 September 2014). 

Shapiro’s model for Ghosts was a séance with “the actors haunting the audience, as if spirits of the past; the audience haunting the characters, spirits of the future,” so designer Jerry Rojo (1935-2018) created for the Public’s small (99 seats) Susan Stein Shiva Theater, a former movie theater, “an environment of lush Victoriana, where the audience pockets function as walls separating the rooms of this Victorian environment” which he thought of as “womb-like.”  Shapiro was most pleased with the lighting:

To encourage an historical environmental reality for audience/performer there was an authentic use of props and light.  The lighting was created by using period practical electric light fixtures (1910) to achieve a natural incandescent light.  And the performers were directed to actually control the illumination for the play.

Shapiro’s point with the Shaliko production of Ghosts was that the past haunts the present; he evoked it in the program with an allusion to the Norwegian playwright: “We sail,” Shapiro quoted Ibsen (from the 1875 poem “A Letter In Rhyme”), “[w]ith a corpse in the cargo.”

Set designer Jerry Rojo noted that the “actors . . . really use their own private worlds as catalysts for the roles,” which is a fine thumbnail definition of basic Stanislavskian acting. 

The description also suggests the seeds of what would become “testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013), though Shapiro pointed out that Ghosts was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience.

In Children and Measures, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children and students being indoctrinated in party practice in Measures—but in Ghosts, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors.

This form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, a direct parallel to Grotowski’s practice, though sometimes the spectators of both Grotowski’s performances and Shapiro’s didn’t recognize their roles. 

In The Yellow House, for instance, the audience was supposed to stand in for Theo van Gogh (Dutch; 1857-91), the painter’s brother, but the relationship was never acknowledged.  (In the first version, in fact, an actor portrayed Theo from a microphone behind the audience, who never saw him.) 

In Ghosts, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro’s séance paradigm helps explain his interest in scenes which weren’t so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some reviewers.

Shaliko’s third production, or its critical reception, revealed something else about Shapiro’s theatrical world.  Shapiro was developing a fraught relationship with the press. 

Shapiro insisted that most audiences responded with “eagerness and enthusiasm.”  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), critic and longtime editor of the Best Plays annuals, called the production “distinguished” and Richard Schechner proclaimed, “The show is very good, and important.  People should see it[.  Y]ears from now they may lie and pretend they did.”  

Peter Kass, Shapiro’s former acting teacher at NYU, even went to the length of sending Joseph Papp a telegram asking, “Do you know that the most extraordinary production of Ghosts is being given by the Shaliko Company at the Public Theater.”

In the New York-area press, only Barbara Ettorre of Women’s Wear Daily and Emory Lewis of The Record in New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County praised the production, with Lewis writing that Shapiro “has staged this probing play with extraordinary finesse.  He choreographed every movement.  The work becomes a dance of life.”  (Readers should note that in years past, both Women’s Wear Daily and the Bergen Record were considered significant critical voices in New York theater.)

In St. Louis, according to Judy Newmark, Shapiro “endowed Henrik Ibsen’s classic with the vitality and strength that may have characterized its original performance before the turn of the century.”  Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post that Shapiro’s “inventive staging . . . produces the immediacy that can draw the audience into the world of the play” and that Shaliko’s “most original conception of the play . . . never falls back on standard interpretations.” 

Many critics, however, including Clive Barnes of the Times, Marilyn Stasio of Cue, Julius Novick of the Village Voice, Martin Gottfried and Richard Watts of the New York Post, Edith Oliver of the New Yorker, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News, didn’t appreciate Shapiro’s concept of the production.

(It’s notable that the New York Post ran two reviews, one by Martin Gottfried and one by Richard Watts, both negative, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News felt strongly enough that he published two negative reviews himself, one in the daily paper and one in the Sunday edition.  The Times also ran a daily notice by Clive Barnes and then Walter Kerr published his Sunday column.)

Calling the production “thoroughly mindless,” Timesman Kerr (1913-96), who carried a lot of weight in the New York theater world, gave an entirely negative appraisal of the performance in his Sunday “Arts and Leisure” column of 13 April 1975.  It was so dismissive that it compelled Shapiro to write a rebuttal, which ran on 11 May. 

The Shaliko director wrote:

Are we going to allow these guardians of public taste to stand between us and fresh experience, or can we somehow restore criticism to its proper role as a stimulant to discussion and invention, rather than a limit imposed by a select few on what artists and audiences are allowed to say, feel, do, dare?

Noting that “the pattern of rejection . . . finally became clear,”  Shapiro and the New York Shakespeare Festival (later renamed the Public Theater) published an announcement for Ghosts in the Village Voice and the Soho Weekly News which juxtaposed the critical response in 1891, the play’s London début, with that in New York in 1975.  

Later that same year, Shapiro spoke at “a colloquium of critics”—a regular meeting of the New York City membership of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA)—at La MaMa “and made the mistake of saying exactly what I thought.”

In a 1991 Village Voice column, Shapiro wrote a broadside in which he alleged, “After 25 years in the theater, I know what everybody knows.  The critics hate the theater [and] the artists hate the critics . . . .”

(The Voice appended to the column as an epigraph the famous quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!” just to be certain no one missed Shapiro’s point.  The author affirmed that he hadn’t used this quotation; the paper’s editors inserted it.  Indeed, Shapiro’s typescript of the essay doesn’t include the quotation.)

Pretty much from Ghosts on, Shapiro and most of the New York City theater writers had an adversarial relationship—and Shapiro was mostly on the losing side.

[Part 4 is the mid-point in this eight-part biographical sketch of the experimental theater-maker Leonardo Shapiro.  Part 5, which I’ll be posting on Friday, 28 April, takes up the continuation of his history with The Shaliko Company, which he disbanded and restarted twice before closing it for good after 20 years.

[You’ll read about Shapiro’s brief stint as a freelance director and the end of his association with Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  This led to his relationship with Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

[Please come back to Rick On Theater for the next installment of my biography of Leonardo Shapiro.  I’m sure you will find it revealing, for both those who knew the director and those who didn’t.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 3

[This installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” starts with the young directing student enrolling at NYU in its newly formed School of the Arts.  He immediately met several of the people who’d be important to his artistic development, including Jerzy Grotowski, John Arden and Margareta D’Arcy, Peter Kass, Richard Schechner, and Carl Weber. 

[Shapiro also met many others during this time who had an influence on his understanding of theater, art, and the social contract.  He also launched his first non-student production and his first piece of political theater, which evolved into his first theater troupe.  The tyro director also took his first professional directing job at this time—and had his first taste of failure.

[Finally, in a major jog in his life path, Shapiro took off for the West Coast and was diverted in Taos, New Mexico, for a two-year sojourn that turned out to be one of his most formative experiences.  He created his second company, a political guerrilla-theater troupe that traversed the Four Corners. 

[Again, I strongly recommend that readers just picking up this multi-part post to go back to Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 16 and 19 April) first.  I’ve been identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

Shapiro did eventually register at the newly established School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) at New York University in 1966, from which he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing in 1969.  By his own account, however, his tenure there was precarious. 

Shapiro enrolled in the Theater Program at NYU’s School of the Arts, which had just been launched in 1965, in its first class.  He was accepted largely on the basis of his prior experiential learning, and his time at NYU was arguably Shapiro’s most practically and professionally influential educational influence, especially combined with the Windsor Mountain experience, which founded the intellectual and philosophical basis of his thinking.

Not only did Shapiro get schooling from faculty such as Peter Kass (1923-2008), his acting teacher and a protégé of several Group Theatre members; Carl Weber (1925-2016), an actor and dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble, and assistant director to Brecht; and Richard Schechner (b. 1934), whose teaching remained influential long after Shapiro left school, but he worked with visiting theater pros John Arden (1930-2012) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99). 

Other influential teachers at NYU of whom Shapiro spoke were Hovey Burgess (b. 1940), former clown and juggler (with Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus) who taught circus skills, one of Shapiro’s favorite classes, and Omar Shapli (1930-2010), a director, teacher, and founder of the Chicago-based improvisational group Section 10, who taught theater games.

Many of Shapiro’s NYU schoolmates became important figures in his artistic development.  Of special note were:

·  Fred Aronow (b. 1945), a cameraman and sound recordist who was an MFA student in Film Studies who introduced Shapiro to the Taos Indians and the San Gerónimo festival in New Mexico in 1969.

·  Tom Crawley (1940-95), an actor and SOA graduate who was a participant with Shapiro in the 1967 Grotowski workshop and a cast member of the original Brother, You’re Next street performances (1967).

·  Larry Pine (b. 1945) and his wife Margaret Rachlin Pine (b. 1948), actors and both SOA graduates who were Shapiro’s closest friends in the 1960s and ’70s.  Larry was a cast member of Brother, You’re Next and a participant in the 1967 Grotowski workshop; he was an original member of André Gregory’s Manhattan Project.  Margaret, also a composer, was an original member of the Shaliko Company and the composer for the musical adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope produced by New York Shakespeare Festival (1977), originally under Shapiro’s direction.

·  Linda Putnam (b. 1944), an actress with Appleseed Circus in New Mexico (1970-71) and an original member of the Shaliko Company; an SOA graduate, Linda joined Shapiro in New Mexico with her husband, David, in 1970.

·  Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), a playwright and actor and the author of The Youth Hostel (1976), which Shapiro directed at the Public Theater; a schoolmate of Shapiro’s and a supporter of the Shaliko Company who brought Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor (1983), the U.S. première of which Shapiro staged, from London.  He also conducted a seminar for Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.

· Candace Tovar, (b. 1947), an actress, singer, and dancer, and SOA graduate who became Shapiro’s wife in 1970; their son, Spartacus, was born in 1971.  Candace was in New Mexico with Shapiro in 1970-71, and became a member of the original Shaliko Company; they divorced in 1973, but Candace is a central character in Shapiro’s 1994 semi-autobiographical play, Runaway Sam in the Promised Land.

In 1967, NYU hired British playwright John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, 1959) as a visiting lecturer in the undergraduate theater program at the brand-new SOA; he taught a course on politics and theater.  Out of this class came a remarkable performance project, War Carnival, conceived, at the behest of the students, by Arden, an artist long associated with leftist causes; his wife, actress Margaretta D’Arcy (b. 1934); and NYU theater games instructor Omar Shapli.

The students of acting, directing, and playwriting developed the project and events in New York City around the time of its conception bore on the theme of the project, presented beginning in the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May 1967 (see “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010).  One of those directing students was the young Leonardo Shapiro, already a political radical and anti-war activist.

Shapiro—whom Arden described as a “balding bearded-weirdy”—was drawn to Arden, a mix of English establishment and international bohemian.  Described as a “combination medieval passion play and modern day Play-In,” War Carnival was conceived principally by D’Arcy.  It was a 10-hour, blatantly anti-Vietnam war street fair (except that it was staged in an NYU studio space on 2nd Avenue).

In 1967, Jerzy Grotowski, who would become one of Shapiro’s two main theater models and inspirations (the other was Bertolt Brecht), conducted his first American workshop at NYU.  Grotowski and Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90), Grotowski’s principal actor, taught a four-week “methodology” series from 6 to 30 November in which Shapiro, one of only four directing students in the class, participated.  

While Shapiro was doing the Grotowski workshop, he and a band of classmates wrote and performed the guerrilla street play Brother, You’re Next, the adaptation of Brecht’s Man Is Man.  Shapiro and two of his classmates, Stephen Wangh (b. 1943) and Robert Reiser (b. 1941), wrote the script (based on improvisations by the cast) and Chris Rohmann (b. 1942), the only member of the company who wasn’t an NYU student (he’d been bought in from Ohio by Wangh), composed the music.

The young street performers were all facing the Vietnam war draft.  The ends of their student deferments were looming, and several of the students had already been called for military service.  “[T]here was lots and lots of dead people coming back and we were all scared shitless,” said Larry Pine, one of the Brother company. 

Sharing some themes and plot points with both Hair, which opened Off-Broadway the same year, and Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 film by Stanley Kubrick (1928-99), one of Shapiro’s acknowledged inspirations, Brother tells the story of a draftee at first determined to escape military service, but who eventually learns that “war is so much fun” and readily participates in it. 

The play was performed in unannounced appearances in parks and on street corners around New York City.  (The troupe did one series of performances indoors as part of an anti-Vietnam war event organized in January 1968 by the Theatre for Peace, a project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam.)  One of the two published reviews of the indoor shows affirmed that Brother was a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”

In the spirit of ’60s activism, the company gave the script royalty-free to any group across the country that wanted to present it.  Shapiro remembered hearing about performances of Brother by groups in Chicago and cities in California and Minnesota and requests by other groups.

The cast of Brother, You’re Next became the kernel of the New York Free Theater, a street troupe which performed protest songs and sketches all over the five boroughs of New York City from 1968 until the mid-1970s (see my post on 4 April 2010).  

Shapiro, Wangh, Rohmann, and Reiser co-founded the NYFT, “a street and community theater of social and political involvement” which operated under the aegis of NYU’s School of the Arts.   The Free Theater eventually launched community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence,” but in 1968 and 1969 devoted itself to street performances.  (Shapiro left New York City for the West Coast in the summer of 1969.)

In New York Times listings of free events during the summer of 1969—the Free Theater was a street theater, but not a guerrilla troupe; their appearances were scheduled and publicized—the theater described itself as “street actors in ‘involvement’ theater and satire,” mounting performances in neighborhoods all over the city, on street corners, in parks, and on college campuses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.   

(No appearances were announced in this list for either the borough of Staten Island or suburban areas outside the city.  One reason might have been that the New York City subway system doesn’t reach those locations, though the troupe included Staten Island in a list of its targeted areas.) 

The little band of pacifist theater artists originally launched NYFT to combat racism and racist attitudes among the diverse population of New York City.  It was a direct response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929), on 4 April 1968.  (Toward the end of its existence, NYFT expanded its mandate to accommodate other social ills, but that was after Shapiro’s departure from New York.)

In late 1968, while Shapiro was still a student at NYU, and during the time that Brother, You’re Next was touring the streets of New York City, the neophyte director was hired for his first professional job.  It was not an auspicious start to his career. 

The Off-Broadway producer of Yes Yes, No No, Beverly Landau, approached director Peter Rivers to stage Ronnie Paris’s comic “fantasy picture of a cold and glittering world of women without men” at the Astor Place Theatre in the East Village.  Rivers declined but recommended Shapiro in an attempt, Shapiro believed, to teach the younger artist “that a professional takes anything and makes it work at its own level, and a professional doesn’t judge everything and just do a few great classics.” 

The lesson may not have taken: Shapiro, feeling that the play wasn’t very funny on its own merits, “took a few liberties here and there, sort of spiced it up.”  Playwright Paris (1924-1992), who was also a producer of the show, objected when she saw a rehearsal the day before previews were to begin, and “freaked out.” 

To be precise, the director had moved the setting from an ordinary home to a cave seven miles down after a nuclear holocaust; since the cast included only women, Shapiro decided that all the men had been wiped out.  The “dripping stalagmites” of the set and ragged costumes were hardly the tea-and-false-eyelashes milieu Paris had anticipated. 

One day at rehearsal, Shapiro recalled, someone on the production staff said something offensive to Candace Tovar, who was then Shapiro’s girlfriend and had merely happened by the theater on an errand for Shapiro—and Shapiro knocked the fellow to the floor.  That act abruptly ended any collaboration between Shapiro and the playwright and producers, which dissolved then and there.  

Yes Yes, No No opened under Peter Rivers’s direction on 31 December 1968 and was dismissed in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 1969 by Clive Barnes, who described it as “a vaguely realistic play, in which the symbols and stultified ritualistic dialogue offer no insights into the realism.”  He added, “No one is going to get much of a chariot race out of a horse and buggy.”  The play closed after one performance. 

It probably didn’t help the reception of the play that, after Shapiro’s departure on the night before the start of performances, the producers of Yes Yes, No No couldn’t afford (nor, probably, did they have the time) to redesign and rebuild the set with which he’d left them.  As a result, Shapiro recorded, while the producers had reset the action, recostumed the actors, and seated them on furniture to drink tea, they still did so “in the middle of this dripping cave.”

In thesummer of 1969, largely on the strength of Brother’s reception, Ecology Action West, an environmental activist group in Berkeley, invited Shapiro to start a street theater for them, and he took off for California. 

He recorded that he’d been approached by Jo Ann Schmidman (b. 1948), the socially-committed experimental director and founder in 1968 of the feminist Omaha Magic Theater, to work for her, but he declined because the contract contained what Shapiro characterized as “this ridiculous morals clause” mandated by the city. 

After finishing his last project at NYU—a production of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities in the spring of 1969 which he deemed his “thesis”—he left New York on a meandering route west that took him to visit SOA classmate Linda Putnam and her husband David in Boston; the Woodstock rock festival in upstate Bethel, New York (15-17 August); and Ram Dass’s retreat in Millbrook, New York.

(Ram Dass [1931-2019] the former Richard Alpert, had been a Harvard colleague of Timothy Leary [1920-1996], the advocate of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD.  Dass started the International Foundation for Internal Freedom [IFIF], a sort of proto-commune, in 1963.  Later, Dass would establish an unofficial headquarters at Lama, one of the New Mexico communes with which Shapiro would become associated.)

On his way west, Shapiro stopped in Milwaukee where Candace Tovar was performing at the Melody Top, a summer tent theater; adopted Grushenka, “a large, longhaired dog of some brownish color,” from a Milwaukee pound; picked Tovar up; and drove to Minnesota to visit his family.  Then he headed south and west through Pipestone, Minnesota; the Black Hills of South Dakota; and Denver, where Tovar left to return for her final year at NYU. 

Shapiro stopped his “old green VW bus with a red flag stenciled with Che Guevara” for lunch one day in Taos, New Mexico.  Propitiously, he’d arrived on San Gerónimo Day, a bright, sunny Tuesday, 30 September, and happened to meet Fred Aronow, whom he knew from New York University and who was the assistant cameraman and sound recordist for a documentary film on ecology and the environment which was focusing on the Taos Indians. 

San Gerónimo Day is the annual feast day for the patron saint (Saint Jerome) of Taos Pueblo—each pueblo and village in 16th-century New Spain was assigned a patron by the Conquistadors—celebrated by a two-day festival that is part religious observance and part secular carnival marking the harvest.  The Anglo town of Taos marks the day with a parallel celebration.

(I have a two-part post on “Taos & Taos Pueblo”; the first installment, subtitled “Background” and posted on 24 May 2012, gives a description of the San Gerónimo Festival, among other aspects of life at the pueblo.  The second installment, “History,” was posted on 27 May 2012.)

At the time of Shapiro’s arrival in Taos, Shelly (1928-75) and Mary Louise Grossman (b. 1930) and their collaborator, John N. Hamlet (1911-82), were in the area filming the last of Our Vanishing Wilderness, their eight-episode series of half-hour television films for National Educational Television, the predecessor of the Public Broadcasting Service.   

The film, The Water Is So Clear that a Blind Man Could See, focuses on the Pueblo Indians who, the Grossmans said, have a “reverence for land” and a “love of trees and other elements of nature,” and “inadvertently practice conservation with a willingness to sacrifice for the preservation of nature.”  The filmmakers observed, also, that the Taos Pueblos had “resisted the advance of modern civilization.”  (The series premièred on New York’s WNET on Sunday, 11 October 1970, and ran weekly until 29 November; the Taos episode aired on 22 November.)

Aronow, who’d graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Film and Television of NYU’s School of the Arts in 1969—the same year that Shapiro had graduated from the undergraduate directing program—recalled that he’d been in the central plaza of Taos when he heard someone call his name.   

The plaza had been closed to traffic for a performance of “some colonial period Spanish dance music” by local singer-accordionist Jennie Vincent (1913-2016), part of the Fall Fiesta, the city’s parallel celebration to the San Gerónimo Festival at the pueblo, and Aronow was surprised to see an East Village acquaintance calling to him from the dirty, beat-up, hand-decorated bus. 

Aronow took his friend to Taos Pueblo where the film crew’d been working daily for several weeks already and been given access to areas and aspects of the pueblo and the festival that tourists seldom see.  Shapiro was stunned to encounter a living culture, unlike those of other Native American societies he’d known in Minnesota and Florida, with “a live and lively oral tradition, unbroken for thousands of years and a rich ritual and dramatic ceremonial life.” 

Shapiro didn’t go on to California; he remained in New Mexico for two years.

Taos and its surrounding countryside holds attractions for many who come whether only to visit or to stay.  Photographer William Davis (b. 1943) was drawn to its beauty—“a result,” he believed, “of a rare combination of mystical and human elements.”

As John Nichols (b. 1940; author of The Milagro Beanfield War, 1974)—who moved to Taos not long before Shapiro came there, had written extensively about the area, and recorded one of Shapiro’s largest protest events—said of Taos Mountain, which physically, emotionally, and psychologically dominates the town, the pueblo, and all the villages of the valley:  it “casts spells” to keep people from leaving and lure back those who try. 

It does seem to have cast a spell on Shapiro, who returned 20 years later “in pain, fleeing from New York, from Career, from the intractability of the American dream.”  For those who came to escape establishment America, there was a spirit conjured up by the combination of the times, the land, and the people who gravitated there that generated ideas and ways of living in reaction to America’s consumerist society. 

In Shapiro’s view, “Everybody was making up social structures, cooperatives of various kinds, a newspaper,” and Andrea Lord (b. 1946), who’d arrived in Taos from Los Angeles in the spring of 1969, saw the commune community as “a new way of being,” where “[p]eople were opening up their minds to new information . . ., new ways of relating to everything and everyone.” 

On Shapiro’s first night at The Family commune, Roger Sundell (b. 1936?), who was working on a film about the commune  (Peace, Love, 2 Hours—Taos, 1970), said to him, “Want to build a house, go ahead,” and Shapiro summed up, “[A]nybody could live there, it was like making it up as they went along, together.”   “It was a very exciting time,” Lord concluded, “full of promise and hope,” and Shapiro decreed, “It was a scene, it was sort of astonishing, out in the middle of nowhere.”

(The Family, a group-marriage commune, was one of the many hippie enclaves located near Taos in the 1960s and ’70s.  It had about 50 members who lived together a few miles from Taos in a two-bedroom adobe house and a school bus.  Though Shapiro was never fully a member of The Family, this was the group with which he appears to have been most closely allied in Taos.  His first theater piece in Taos was sponsored by The Family. 

(The Family ran a natural-food store, a free medical clinic, the Taos Community Information Center, and an alternative school, all serving the hippie community in and around Taos.  The commune also published Fountain of Light, the best-known of the counterculture newspapers of the movement, to which Shapiro contributed at least one article.)

Soon after arriving in Taos that fall, Shapiro presented The Second Coming, a music-theater piece based on William Butler Yeats’s 1921 poem exploring the polarities between the spiritual and the physical realms (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”). 

He was drawn to Yeats’s poem because, first, he’d developed an awareness of the poet’s work at Windsor Mountain where he worked on Yeats’s Purgatory in his senior year and, second, he responded viscerally to the sound of the verse, especially, he said, on recordings of Yeats reading it himself.  (He quoted Yeats saying, “I want all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung.”)

Much of the sentiment Shapiro would later put into his productions and his writings can be seen in lines of the poem which warn:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Shapiro saw socio-political implications in these lines and others in the poem (explored in “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”), but he also just had the idea of doing something meaningful on Halloween so The Second Coming was a kind of ceremony beginning with an invocation from British occultist, Satanist, and student of magic Aleister Crowley (1875-1947; see my post, “‘The Wickedest Man In The World’: Aleister Crowley,” 28 September and 1, 4, 7, and 13 October 2019).   The core group of performers was from The Family where Shapiro was doing a workshop. 

The performance of Second Coming started at midnight on 31 October/1 November 1969, a brisk, chilly Friday/Saturday, in a canyon of the Rio Grande River Gorge about 15 miles outside of town which Shapiro dubbed “The Midnight Theater.”  

Shapiro and Lord both recalled that Second Coming was quite successful, attracting about 100 spectators or so, and the director declared he was impressed that there was an audience in the Taos area for such a spectacle.  Further, Lord believed, the performance gave “some kind of creative center and expression” to the nascent counterculture community, which was still “very untried and vulnerable.”

Not long after the performance of The Second Coming, a woman he met at The Family took Shapiro later in the fall of 1969 to the Zuni Pueblo, about 280 miles southwest of Taos, for his first time seeing the shalako ceremony (see my post, “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010). 

The ceremony, observed in November or December each year on or around the winter solstice, reenacts the Zuni creation story.  (The solstice was on 22 December that year; the shaliko ceremony commenced at midnight on 8 December.)

The shalakos are deities who serve as messengers from the gods to the Zuni people.  They are represented in the ceremony by dancers in 9- or 10-foot-tall masks.  Shapiro was so impressed by the event that when he started his company in New York City in 1972, he named it after these sacred figures.

In his first weeks in Taos, Shapiro lived in his VW bus, moving from commune—among them the famous Hog Farm near Taos, The Family, and Lorien north of Questa (24 miles north of Taos)—to commune “to Pizza Parlor parking lot.”  He met a young couple who sold jewelry to tourists at the pueblo and he made beadwork for them to sell, a skill Shapiro had learned way back at Camp Thunderbird in the 1950s. 

Eventually he rented a $15-a-month, four-room, adobe house in Dixon in Rio Arriba County, 20 miles southwest of Taos up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, surrounded by national forest land—“farther away from everyone and everything than I had ever been.”  As he did when he returned a quarter of a century later, he reveled in “all the land you can walk on in a day.”

The new arrival recounted that in his first week there, he returned to the adobe house one day and “found a pile of dog shit on my bed.”  Examining it more closely, Shapiro discovered that the deposit was actually several buttons of peyote.  It turned out that some members of the Hog Farm commune had made a trip to Texas or Mexico “and come back bearing gifts, planting seeds like Johnny Appleseed . . . .”

Lonely and increasingly obsessed with the war in Southeast Asia, Shapiro conceived of the Appleseed Circus, “[a] street theater without streets,” and began inviting people to come west and join him.  The origins of the troupe were in the invitations he issued at the end of a theater column he wrote for Fountain of Light, the Family commune newsletter:

Free workshop sessions begin at the Gallery House Jan. 12, 13 and 14, two 2[‑]hour sessions a day at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.  Improvisation, circus techniques, theatre games, basic acting and mime, everybody welcome if your [sic] a little crazy and willing to work.  Looking to produce a “play” for Washington’s Birthday, Feb. 22 [still a federal holiday until 1970].  Formal rehearsals start Feb. 1.  Contact thru Taos Community Information Center.

The notice attracted local interest and the messages he sent east brought friends from home starting early in 1970.  Candace Tovar and the Putnams all moved into the Dixon adobe, forming a mini-commune of their own—one that functioned not as a farm, but a theater.  This little “anarchist cell” began recruiting members by advertising in local newspapers—there were numerous counterculture publications circulating in the area.  People started coming.

The young director’s principal notion was a “political, tribal traveling theatre/circus of myth consciousness and social integration.”  Shapiro served as “Mr. Theorist,” he said, “writing little manifestos” inspired by the events in Czechoslovakia (“Prague Spring,” 5 January-21 August 1968) and Paris (“May 68,” 2 May-23 June 1968) the previous year and what they were reading every day in the newspapers; David Putnam, a carpenter with a Harvard degree, was the designer and builder. 

The new band of activists thought there was going to be a revolution, and the Appleseed Circus was born from that impulse.  “We were hiding out in the hills, and had no connections with anybody,” Shapiro wrote later.  “We were pretty focused, we were following through on” their activist opposition to the war in Vietnam. 

Shapiro’s initial idea was for the troupe to travel in horse-drawn wagons like a real 19th-century circus, but they soon discovered that there were too many fences across the countryside and so they were relegated to automobiles and roads.  At the start, the small band had only Shapiro’s Volkswagen bus and the Putnams’ Ford panel van, but then they built the flat-bed stage they would use for their guerrilla performances. 

The wagon was built on the frame of a pick-up truck which the troupe got from the dump.  They did the welding at the N&M Garage, a cooperative garage in Taos that let them use its equipment.  The result was a massive structure, some 11 feet high, weighing perhaps as much as two tons.  The sides folded down for transport, and then folded up to an 11-foot platform to form the stage, which was about three feet off the ground.  It ended up a cumbersome vehicle and the company had difficulty figuring out the steering. 

Within a year, the troupe began collecting vehicles and, ultimately, the Appleseed Circus traversed the countryside surrounding Taos County in two school busses, a bread van, the truck pulling a wagon, and Shapiro’s green minibus.  The nomadic troupe, numbering at its peak about 20 people, roamed in this motley assortment of vehicles like an old-fashioned circus from its base in Dixon into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona doing guerrilla theater. 

For their performances, the Circus players wore green overalls with big red felt apples on them and, Shapiro recalled, an ‘A’ created by one of the company members.  “[T]o me all these things were poetry, were theater,” he wrote.  “I lived in a very pure world.” 

On 4 July 1970, Shapiro and Candace Tovar were married in a “barefoot dawn wedding on top of Picuris Peak”; their son, Spartacus, who would return to the area with his father in 1992 and 1993 to help build Shapiro’s retirement home, was born on 18 March of the next year.

On 5 and 6 August 1970, Shapiro’s “cheerleaders of the revolution” mounted Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos), a two-day environmental-theater event in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in observation of the 25th anniversary of the Hiroshima atom-bomb raid.  (See my post, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009.)

John Nichols, the novelist and essayist from Taos who attended the rally, described Shapiro’s motivation.  After outlining at length the history of LASL (now known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory), Nichols generally invoked the “few hardy boys and girls and men and women (not yet in exile or underground or on the FBI’s top ten) who wish to carry on the dialogues that might, by some wondrous miracle, prolong man’s minute upon this tortured planet.” 

The New York Times described this event as “the first large-scale demonstration at the laboratory” and noted that the demonstrators had been “escorted by the police, watched by undercover agents and filmed by 13 government cameramen.”  Shapiro, himself, recalled that he had been “warned off, threatened, bullied and shot at” during the month preceding the demonstration and shots were fired at his Dixon house “a couple times” as intimidation. 

The Appleseed Circus, as it traveled like a Gypsy caravan through small towns of the Four Corners (the only area where four states—Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado—meet; about 260 miles west of Taos) in vehicles barely holding together, never really coalesced as a performing troupe except for the Los Alamos protest and, while he was rehearsing A Man’s a Man, Shapiro felt frustrated at the lack of professionalism. 

When the Circus went to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1970, spending the winter in David Putnam’s father’s barn, so Shapiro could recruit professional actors, not just “a propaganda thing,” the troupe began to fall apart.  Shapiro’s intention had been to enlist “eastern actors” and “build up a show and do a college tour.”  “That was a mistake,” Shapiro recalled; “it didn’t work.  It wasn’t based on that kind of an aesthetic.  When I started Shaliko, it was in order to do something that would be more professionally oriented and less political.”

The little band, which included a now-pregnant Candace Tovar, wended its way through Colorado, where, in Boulder, Shapiro sold the green VW bus in which he had arrived in New Mexico two years earlier, and Kansas, where Tovar was arrested for stealing a grapefruit in Dodge City, and Ohio, where Shapiro and Putnam shoplifted an ice cream machine to sell for cash to buy gasoline. 

Because they had painted “Kill Precedence” on the side of one of the school busses in which they were traveling—and living—and because President Nixon was in Columbus, Ohio (19 October 1970), they attracted the attention of police.  “We were literally accompanied from one end of Ohio to the other,” Shapiro recalled.  Thus, the remnants of the Appleseed Circus returned east and, eventually, to New York City at the start of 1971. 

The end of his time in New Mexico also ended what Shapiro considered his apprenticeship: being active in “the movement,” observing the Open and Living Theatres, working with John Arden and Peter Kass at NYU, working with Grotowski, studying Brecht and the Group Theatre, creating Brother, You’re Next, the abortive directorship of Yes Yes, No No, organizing the New York Free Theater and Appleseed Circus, attending the shalako ceremony, and mounting the protest at Los Alamos.

The sojourn in New Mexico, however, provided Shapiro with a number of residual influences.  First, it strengthened his abiding interest in circus performances, an attraction which had begun in Hovey Burgess’s NYU circus-arts classes.

Second, The Shaliko Company drew its name from the Zuni name for the spirits who carry messages between their world and ours.  Shapiro’d had an affinity for Native American culture since his childhood in Minnesota, and his time in New Mexico only deepened it. 

Third, Shapiro conceived the private aspiration of one day returning to New Mexico to live and write poetry when he left the theater.  He eventually bought a piece of mountain land near Taos and, with his son’s help, built a home not far from the mountain slope where he and Candace Tovar celebrated their wedding and, in 1993, Shapiro fulfilled his dream.

[As you see, Shapiro designated this whole period as his apprenticeship, and in Part 4, ROTters will begin to see where that period of learning and experimenting led him.

[The next installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will be published on Tuesday, 25 April.  I’ll be covering the foundation of The Shaliko Company, the East Village troupe Shapiro directed for 20 years (over three incarnations) until his retirement from New York theater and resettlement in New Mexico.  

[This is arguably the most creative period of his artistic life, separating everything else into “Before Shaliko” and “After Shaliko.”  I invite all readers to come back to Rick On Theater for Part 4 of the bio post to see where this step leads the still-developing theater artist.]