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.]