A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6

 

[In “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6,” the young director becomes a teacher in his own performing arts program.  We’ll see how he adapts many of the lessons he learned at the Windsor Mountain School and some of the philosophies espoused by Paul Goodman. 

[Following The Yellow House, Shaliko continued on the path of company-built theater with some of Shapiro’s most ambitious performance pieces—many of which were never fully realized.  One of the new plays, Punch!, was the proximate cause of Shaliko loss of NEA funding, an event that caused Shapiro to sound off in a number of published articles.

[As I have done since Part 2 was posted, I recommend that all ROTters who are just joining this series go back first and read Parts 1 through 5, published on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, before reading this installment.  By now, I’ve introduced many people, events, and ideas important to Shapiro’s life and art that I’ve identified and explained.  Subsequent parts of this bio post won’t make much sense if you haven’t read about those first.]

The 1984 Van Gogh Project workshop in Hartford produced a byproduct that constituted one of Shapiro’s most rewarding occupations outside Shaliko.  The workshop was the culmination of the director’s work as artist-in-residence at Trinity College from 1983 to 1985, as a result of which the college invited Shapiro to develop and supervise an advanced performing arts program. 

Judy Dworin (b. 1949), head of the department under which the program was to be established, and Shapiro discussed the efficacy of sending a test group of students to New York City to expose them to the practicalities of performance in the professional worlds of dance and theater. 

The outcome was a three- or four-day field trip to New York in the spring of 1984 during which Shapiro and Dworin took their students to various performances and rehearsals and toured the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village and the Joyce Theater, a dance venue at Eighth Avenue and 19th Street in Chelsea. 

For what he described as the “seed” of what became the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, Shapiro also arranged with artists to work with the visiting students.  At Shapiro’s request, when Trinity College made the offer for the program, it was based at La MaMa in New York City and administered from Hartford.

In the fall of 1986, the first Trinity/La MaMa Program got underway with eight Trinity College students.  The structure of the program that first term essentially remained the structure for the six years Shapiro ran it.  The students resided in the city for a 13-week semester, immersing themselves in its arts and cultural offerings while taking classes overseen by Shapiro. 

The program consisted of three courses: Performance Workshop, Seminar, and Internship.  The Performance Workshop, taught by professional artists at La MaMa’s East Village rehearsal studios, was the practical, hands-on class, breaking down into movement, voice, and “text and image work.” 

Among the artists and others the TLM students worked with, met informally, or saw in performance or rehearsal, were actor-director Joseph Chaikin, actor-director Judith Malina, actor and activist Vanessa Redgrave, New Vaudevillian and later actor Bill Irwin (b. 1950), avant-garde composer-musician John Cage (1912-92), circus artist and director Cecil MacKinnon, dancer-choreographer Nina Martin, performance artist-musician Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), and the new-music ensemble Kronos Quartet.

TLM students interned at places like the Asia Society, Dance Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HOME for Contemporary Theater and Art, Kei Takei’s Moving Earth, Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies, New Dramatists, Performance Space 122, Ping Chong and Company, or the Wooster Group, and even individual artists like playwrights María Irene Fornés (1930-2018), Charles L. Mee, and Mac Wellman; lighting designer Blu (the professional name of William Lambert); composer Elliot Goldenthal (b. 1954); and actress-performance artist Robbie McCauley (b. 1942).

Along with the formal classes, readings, and papers, Trinity/La MaMa students got a perspective on the world of the performing arts, indeed art and culture in general.  A prominent aspect of Shapiro’s TLM, in fact, was the interconnection of the arts. 

To him, this meant not only that dancers, painters, actors, and other artists were interdependent or that art draws on all the forms of culture that exist in a society, but also that art and artists are part of that society and form a segment of the community from which they come and to which they play. 

Shapiro believed that the city should be an extension of the classroom and unquestionably related to Shapiro’s appreciation for Paul Goodman’s epic Bildungsroman, The Empire City (1959), which he said was an inspiration for his conception for Trinity/La MaMa.

It was also bound to his admiration for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where students lived in close association with practicing artists and so learned about “the financial sacrifices, the commercial aspects such as getting a gallery and selling art, the politics of publication, and inevitably the necessity of making a decision for art.”

(Goodman [1911-72] was someone Shapiro named as an influence and he was briefly a teacher at Black Mountain and an associate of the Living Theatre.  His 1962 book, The Community of Scholars, describes many of the practices at Black Mountain and tenets of Shapiro’s educational philosophy.)

A disagreement with Trinity College led Shapiro to resign the program he helped create after the fall 1992 term, though the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program itself continued to operate under new directors.  (I don’t, in fact, know if the program still exists, now thirty years after Shapiro’s departure.  According to Wikipedia, it does, but has changed substantially.)

The split with Trinity came at the same time that Shapiro was having a similar dispute with Karen Malpede and George Bartenieff (1933-2022), respectively, the playwright and co-producer of Shapiro’s last show in New York City, Blue Heaven, and harks back to his dismissals from Yes Yes, No No and The Misanthrope. 

The breach came as the result of a specific incident in 1992 which heightened the acrimony and the sense of separation, both physical and psychological, Shapiro had with the college.  The fundamental reason, however, was a recurrence of Shapiro’s lifelong problem with bosses. 

The key seems to have been “control”: if Shapiro was—or felt he was—under the thumb of an outside authority (even a legitimate and appropriate one), he bristled and rebelled, and usually scuttled the project by engineering a fight.  Shapiro had run TLM for six years according to his own dictates, insulated from the administrative control of the Theatre and Dance Department of Trinity College way off in Hartford, Connecticut. 

Following The Yellow House, Shapiro put together a contemporary version of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe as a project of Shaliko’s residency with the Department of Dance & Theatre of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. 

Billed as “A Circus Opera,” Mystery History Bouffe Goof was intended to be performed in a tent with high-wire and trapeze artists, stilt-walkers, and a circus band, translating Mayakovsky (Russian; 1893-1930) “from the past into the future.” 

With allusions to Vsevolod Meyerhold, Seagull’s Konstantine Treplyev, and his own dream, Shapiro pronounced “circus opera” “a new form with moving sculptures, dissident art, prophetic poetry, ritual choreography, giant puppets and wild music.”

Unhappily, Shaliko never completed Mystery History, though they performed pieces of it in March 1987 at Manhattanville College; in August at the Yellow Springs Institute artists’ colony in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania; and in September at Creative Time’s Art on the Beach at Hunters Point in New York City’s borough of Queens. 

(Creative Time, the organizers of Art on the Beach as part of a program to bring art to the city’s public spaces, was a peripatetic non-profit arts organization that mounted art installations and performances in unlikely sites all over New York City.  In 1987, Art on the Beach ran at Hunters Point, a “six-acre site that still looked more like the garbage dump it once was” than the home of an art exhibit, from 24 July to 20 September 1987.) 

Mystery History Bouffe Goof, envisioned as “a multidisciplinary collaboration between visual and performing artists,” was performed on the evenings of 13 and 16 September 1987 (see “Speaking Truth To Power”).

Starting at dusk and playing into the evening as the Manhattan skyline, centered on the United Nations complex across the East River to the northwest, began to light up in the background—the only artificial light in the production—the  allegorical and mobile Mystery History Bouffe Goof meandered through eight other large-scale artworks on the “rocky, riverside mound” to its own set piece on the riverbank, “two giant wood figures tugging at a fragile blue globe suspended above a small gray battleship.” 

Alvin Klein called Mystery History “extravagant” in the New York Times and observers of the workshop at Yellow Springs remarked on “the incredibly resilient, energetic quality of the production, which swept the audience up into a posture of a kind of similarly resilient reception.”  Saying that the performance “inflamed” them, the workshop viewers added, “It was interesting to be a participant while a spectator, which is very different from the way one normally is a spectator . . . .”

Concurrent with Mystery History Bouffe Goof, the company was mounting Punch!, adapted from an anonymous 1827 Punch-and-Judy puppet play.  (This project precipitated the loss of Shaliko’s NEA funding the following year.) 

Developed in collaboration with choreographer Nina Martin and actors Elena Nicholas (Prischepenko), Cristobal Carambo (b. 1950), and Michael Preston (b. 1969), the performance was “a physical theater piece created as an investigation of violence and escapism.”  The set, representing contemporary urban locales, was a human-sized puppet theater designed by Shapiro and painted in primary colors by Goro Fujii (1929-2005), and the actors wore brightly colored Commedia-like half-masks.  (See “Punch! (Shaliko Company, 1987),” 4 September 2021.)

The text of Punch! was taken verbatim from the pre-Victorian puppet play that delighted children for generations.  (There were a few interpolations, such as “Shoot the nigger!” and “You look all right.  Here’s another!” which is an alleged quotation of Bernhard Goetz [b. 1947], the so-called Subway Vigilante who shot four black youths he thought were about to attack him on a New York City subway on 22 December 1984.) 

Shaliko’s Punch! was clearly no children’s amusement.  It was loud and aggressive, assaulting the audience’s senses and, sometimes, their sensibilities (but never their persons).  If The Yellow House was Shaliko’s prettiest show, Punch! was, in Shapiro’s own words, its “nastiest, ugliest” one. 

Shapiro said when he was planning Punch!, “It’s about . . . the way that we identify with violence and why it is that somebody can beat seven people to death in an hour and everybody thinks it’s a scream.”  Nevertheless, the critical reception was positive in the three venues where it played: La MaMa in New York City in May 1987; the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in August; and in Glasgow, Scotland, in September. 

On WBAI radio, Rick Harris pronounced himself “very impressed” with Shapiro and his company for a “very, very fine piece of work” which he declared “theatrically inventive.”  In The Nation, Thomas M. Disch described the production as “a remarkable spectacle that ranges from chucklesome to breathtaking, and from thought-provoking to off-putting” and predicted that it “has every chance of becoming a classic of the New Vaudeville.”

At the Edinburgh Festival, The Scotsman reported that Shaliko and Punch!

connect the events of the old legend with unvarnished, day-to-day truths, but also reveal its deep roots in the subconscious and in popular culture. . . . .  This is a harrowing brutal, sometimes gruesome piece, definitely not children’s entertainment, but always performed with awesome skill and always thoughtful and arresting.

After describing the production at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre as “most skilful [sic]” and the cast as “brilliant, acrobatic and paradoxically charming,” the Glasgow Herald warned, “You won’t—if you ever have done so—watch a Punch and Judy show again with amusement after experiencing this production . . . .”

In 1988, however, largely because of the Endowment’s site reports on Punch!, Shaliko lost its NEA Theater Program funding, followed by the loss or reduction of its grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and most of its support from corporations, foundations, and private sources.  Shaliko’s general funding—the company still got grants for specific projects—wasn’t restored until 1992, the year Shapiro decided to close Shaliko and retire to New Mexico.

Shapiro believed the defunding was based on “the content and (political) nature of the work,” and there’s evidence that the National Endowment for the Arts was being influenced politically around the time of Shaliko’s defunding. 

After the grants to the notorious “NEA Four” were rejected on 29 June 1990, after having been approved by the agency’s peer review panel, the performance artists—Karen Finley (b. 1956), John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), and Tim Miller (b. 1958)—sued the Endowment on 27 September on the grounds that their grants had been illegally denied for political reasons rather than artistic ones. 

When the government settled the suit out of court on 4 June 1993, it tacitly admitted that Chairman John Frohnmayer (b. 1942) and the Endowment had been making political determinations, at least in the early 1990s.  This isn’t proof, however, that the agency had become politicized as early as 1988 or that Shapiro and his troupe had been the subjects of politically-oriented exclusion.

As a byproduct of his campaign to regain Shaliko’s NEA grants, Shapiro, ever the anti-authoritarian, began a broader offensive against the powers who control the arts funding and, in general, cultural confirmation within our society. 

Between April 1990 and January 1992, he published at least eight articles or interviews—some of them quite vehement—focusing, at least in part, on the NEA and the issue of arts funding and support.  In “The Tip of the Iceberg” in the September 1991 Performing Arts Journal, written shortly after the contretemps over the “NEA Four” and the promulgation of the anti-obscenity pledge for grantees (called by many artists the “loyalty oath,” a reference to a McCarthy-era practice), Shapiro took on the NEA and the funding/validation establishment:

We don’t have a National Endowment for the Arts, we have a National Allowance for Polite Artists . . . .  If there were a real Endowment, it would a) belong to the artists, uncensored, as a trust for our use in making the creative work necessary for the health of society; b) it would grow.  Endowments are permanent and they grow.

In a fall 1991 column in Theatre Times, the publication of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (ART/NY), Shapiro went even further.  After proposing a number of programs the Alliance should undertake in support of experimental artists, he scolded his colleagues: “Somehow the non-profit theatres have come to blindly imitate the structure of the corporations and foundations we are dependent on.”

In his most virulent attack on his own peers, in the entertainment industry trade paper Back Stage of 24 January 1992, he called them “cowards and pseudo-corporate parasitic wannabees, failed junior partners of Broadway and Hollywood” who are afraid to risk the corporate world’s disapproval and their own conformist visions of success.  Referring to the Stanley Kubrick movie Spartacus, which held personal significance for him (readers will remember that his son is named Spartacus), Shapiro decried angrily that

we are still slaves; we are still ruled by Rome; we are still fighting and killing each other for our owners’ amusement; we are still bought and sold in the stinking marketplace; we are still unaware of our birthright, of our creative human power, even of our simplest personal needs.

The loss of the NEA Theater Program funding after Punch! hurt Shaliko financially, of course, but it enraged Shapiro morally.  “Isn’t the function of the artist supposed to be to tell the truth?” he pleaded in a 20 April 1990 interview in the weekly New York Press.  “How can you blame him when he does?” 

When the New York Press, a newspaper with a right-of-center sensibility, published a satirical “quiz” about the NEA and the First Amendment (18-24 July 1990, about a month after the grant rejections for the “NEA Four”), Shapiro responded.  In answer to a question about “Our Friend, the Government,” he averred in anti-statist terms that “the government is not our friend.  It is supposed to be our servant and is in fact our master.” 

He also emphasized the connection between funding denials and effective censorship by pointing out that “not giving the artist the necessary support to create prevents everybody from experiencing that art; supporting the artist and creating the art forces nobody to experience it.”

(If this makes Shapiro appear to have no sense of humor at all about this, consider his response to a question on reconciling complaints about defense spending with support for unrestricted arts funding.  After admitting that he objected to the use of his tax money to kill people around the world, Shapiro added: “And yes, I would also be against the government using my money to fund artists to kill people, no matter how elegantly.”)

Somewhat ironically, almost a year after publishing his admonition in Theatre Times, Shapiro found himself at odds with ART/NY itself—for now-familiar reasons.  The director was going to chair the art committee, but he and the Alliance had differing views of what the committee’s responsibility was. 

While the Alliance expected Shapiro’s panel to gather information on the activities of New York artists and report to its board, Shapiro believed his duty was to report to the citizens of New York City.  The upshot of this fundamental disagreement with the organization, a manifestation of Shapiro’s habitual anti-authoritarianism, was his resignation from the Alliance’s board.

Shapiro’s struggle with the NEA and his fight for adequate arts funding in general continued, as did his efforts to complete the work on Shaliko’s pieces that were still in progress.  In part because of the funding loss, but for reasons of scheduling and space availability as well, neither The Yellow House nor Mystery History Bouffe Goof was remounted after the production of Punch! had returned from Scotland. 

While still exploring the uses of power as in Mystery History, Shapiro reverted in 1988 to the sources the original Shaliko Company had used: the classics.  He turned to Christopher Marlowe’s (English; 1564 [baptized]-93) The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592), which Shapiro called “the first great theatrical poem of the English language” (see “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016).

Certainly he was drawn to the play, which he had wanted to do for years, by his affinity for the poetry he described as “this sort of wild beast that Shakespeare domesticated.”  Shapiro maintained “that poetry is the basis of theater.”  It isn’t surprising, then, that many of Shapiro’s acknowledged influences were theater poets: Euripides, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Ibsen, Anton Chekhov (Russian; 1860-1904), Auden, Tennessee Williams (1911-83), Mayakovsky, Brecht, Beckett. 

The Shaliko director, readers will recall, also had a fascination with magic and this was another reason he decided to do Doctor Faustus.  We’ve seen how Shapiro used stage magic as a child to create a sense of control over a hostile world and that he viewed theater as a form of magic because it’s transformative, much as the Navajo healing chants are transformative. 

In the chants, a sick person becomes a holy person and, as Shapiro wrote, in theater, the spectators turn the actors into “super-human beings.”  In the radio play he wrote in retirement, Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun, inspired by Doctor Faustus, Shapiro put these words into the mouth of a character called Dr. Henry Faustus:

When I was a boy I did magic tricks.  I made things appear and disappear, I changed one thing into another.  I found things that were lost and lost things that were found.  Cards, balls, silk handkerchiefs, rabbits.  Now I’m 500 years old.  You’d think I would have learned better tricks.

Using an environment designed by Jerry Rojo for the La MaMa Annex, with original music composed by David Linton (b. 1956), Shapiro planned a production of Doctor Faustus “full of surprises: appearances, disappearances, and transformations. . . . .  Angels will fly and devils change shape.  We want the play to be as scary and dangerous today as it was for Marlowe’s audience 400 years ago.”

In addition to the magic tricks, Shapiro incorporated many low-comedy gags in the Shaliko production, such as the performance of the Seven Deadly Sins, which was danced to Linton’s electronic compositions in skeleton costumes. 

Though it played its full one-month run, the troupe’s Doctor Faustus was both a critical and an emotional failure.  Several reviews were mixed, but the two most important critical voices were harsh. In the New York Times, Mel Gussow called Shaliko’s Doctor Faustus an “unexciting production” and a “spiritless affair” that’s “lessened by the actors.” 

Jonathan Kalb was even blunter in the Village Voice, writing: “[A]ll the actors are miscast, the set is well designed but poorly utilized, and the production offers no coherent ideas about the play’s action . . . .” 

From Marlowe’s demons from Hell, Shaliko shifted to demons from space in Whirligig, commissioned from Mac Wellman in 1989 and performed at the Cooper Square Theatre (East 7th Street in the East Village) from 5 April to 7 May. 

Described by one wag as “William Inge meets Rod Serling meets The Three Stooges,” Whirligig was a display of pyrotechnical language and sight gags featuring a green-haired runaway girl who meets a metallic spaceman at a bus station in the middle of nowhere. 

Visiting Earth to discover why we’re so happy, the Man, known as a Weird, had escaped a marauding band of female space warriors, the Girl Huns, and the Girl had run away from her goody-goody, materialistic sister. 

Not that the plot was so easy to follow, or so significant to begin with.  It was Wellman’s language and the political satire, biting if sometimes obscure, that drove this production.  Like all Shaliko work, Whirligig was political—the isolated bus stop is Wellman’s stand-in for a fascist universe. 

Politics aside, Whirligig was also a very physical play like much of Shaliko’s work.  The small cast included Cecil MacKinnon and Michael Preston, veteran circus performers, and Wellman created a piece for this group that would also let him do what he wanted to do with language. 

Once again, however, the press showed little interest.  Those critics who did come, including Michael Feingold of the Village Voice, mostly conceded that they didn’t understand the play, but some enjoyed the theatrics anyway; Feingold wasn’t among these last, though.

[I invite all ROTters who've been following along through the sixth part of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” above, to return to Rick On Theater for the next installment on Thursday, 4 May.  I’ll be taking Shapiro through his last big collaborative theater piece with Shaliko, the unfinished Strangers, which I dubbed the potential culmination of his quest for a new form of theater.

[You’ll also hear about the final Shaliko production and Shapiro’s last show in New York City as the theater artist retires to New Mexico in a return to his sipapu, his place of emergence, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.]