A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 7

 

[The seventh installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” picks up with The Shaliko Company’s last company-built piece, 1989’s Strangers.  As you’ll read, Shapiro never completed the work on this play, and it was only performed in workshops; nevertheless, it was a significant achievement for the company. 

[The following spring, the theater artist traveled again to Russia, this time to stage Mark Rosovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son in Russian for the playwright’s own company.  He also organized three political theater events involving world-renowned actress Vanessa Redgrave, one of them in London.

[While directing his last New York show, Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, Shapiro got himself arrested—for the last time, I believe—during a pro-environment demonstration, soon after which he disbanded Shaliko for the final time and retired to New Mexico.

[As I have all along, I urge readers of this biographical series to go back and start with Part 1 if you haven’t been following along chronologically from the start.  Parts 1 through 6 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 May.]

Following Whirligig, Shaliko began work on its last collaborative production, Strangers, a performance piece assembled from reports—all the dialogue was quoted material—of several unrelated incidents (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014; also “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg’s View,” 8, 11, 14, and 17 January 2023). 

The story of Strangers was based on reports of two junk dealers in Goiania, Brazil, who found an abandoned nuclear-medicine machine and spread the radioactive core around their family and neighborhood, eventually leaving four family members dead, hundreds of neighbors contaminated, and parts of their city quarantined for radiation exposure.  (I posted an account of this incident in “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987,” 9 August 2020.)

Shapiro combined the Goiania tale, told mostly without words, with newspaper headlines from the day of each performance and first-person accounts of events such as Jim Jones’s (1931-78) last sermon at the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978; Hedda Nussbaum’s (b. 1942) 1988 testimony in the trial of Joel Steinberg (b. 1941) for the 1987 murder of Lisa (1981-87), their illegally adopted daughter; statements by the mothers of the dead and missing Atlanta children in the early 1980s; reports by people claiming to have been kidnapped by UFO’s; and pornographic dialogue from 970-JAIL, a phone-sex recording.  

To this bricolage of “public sources,” Shapiro added Gustav Mahler’s (Austro-Bohemian; 1860-1911) 1904 Kindertotenlieder (songs of the death of children), a cycle of songs on the loss of children set to music of intense sadness evoking enormous grief, and stanzas from Rainer Maria Rilke’s (Austrian; 1875-1926) Duino Elegies (published 1923), which “talks about the balance between the angels and people.”

Strangers was a study of “the contradictions involved in the meeting of traditional and technological cultures,” conjuring up the “dark Satanic mills” William Blake (English; 1757-1827), who was an influence on Shapiro, cited as symbols of the mechanized society of the Industrial Revolution which bowed to the hegemony of Newtonian science and Lockean reason over native intelligence and spirituality. 

Strangers ended with a litany of the dead of Atlanta, Jonestown, and Goiania, and trance songs from various versions of the Native American Ghost Dance from this nineteenth-century rite that Plains Indians believed would resurrect their dead ancestors (see “The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians,” 5 July 2014).  Along with raising dead Indians, the practice was believed to have the power to annihilate by supernatural means the intruding white people—and their insidious technological culture—and return the land to an aboriginal paradise.

It is also in keeping with Shapiro’s animus for the establishment: the middle-aged Leonardo Shapiro recalled the eight-year-old Leo Richard Shapiro who, readers will remember, “danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily ever after.”

Shapiro built Strangers out of four distinct layers which he called “tracks,” an analogy to the recording industry in which each instrument and voice is recorded separately then assembled into an integrated performance.  The director deliberately elected not to mix the four elements of Strangers, leaving them “independent but inter-related.”

The four tracks, operating independently and contrapuntally at the same time, were the action track, the almost wordless enactment of the Goiania story; visual, the set, costumes, props, and various effects Shapiro engineered with shadow, light, and color; vocal, the “libretto” made up of the testimony taken from published sources and which actors delivered over microphones on the set; and instrumental, the Mahler recording and original music composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach (1924-2007) and played live by musician Francisco Mora (b. 1947).    

In his detailed analysis of the work-in-progress for Text and Performance Quarterly, Michael Wright, a playwright, director, and teacher, observed that Strangers was “not easily absorbed in one viewing.”  Another observer, Richard Schechner, described the performance as “a mess.”

Only two publications covered Strangers in New York City as reports on a work-in-progress.  (Wright’s study was published over a year after the workshop closed.)  In High Performance, the performance-art journal, Allen Frame called the piece “a dirge-like collage of the bad news of the last decade,” explaining, “There were no laughs, no absurdity, and no ironic edge in Strangers.”  

The writer and photographer continued: “Balancing the heaviness was the sophisticated touch of director Leonardo Shapiro . . . .  He elicits performances that are strong and compassionate . . . .  He stages narrative incidents abstractly but clearly, with a minimum of props and an absence of clutter.”  

In The Villager, a neighborhood weekly, Todd Olson asserted: “‘Strangers’ is a performance to watch, even to witness.”  The performance, Olson wrote, “is impressive in its athleticism as well as its sheer mass.  It is an hour and 45 minutes of running, flying and suspension.”  The Shaliko Company, said Olson, “are non-traditional storytellers” and they and Strangers “warrant watching.”

At the end of my 2014 post on Strangers, I reported that after working on this material, I decided that Strangers was really autobiographical in a way.  I never ran this notion by Shapiro, but I think it’s true.  Shapiro was a “stranger”: he saw himself as an outsider—not just an avant-gardist, but a real outsider.  He identified with all the “strangers” in the play—they were him! 

I began to think through the other work he did and the people he admired and was drawn to (American Indians, the artist David Wojnarowicz, the Beats, prisoners) and how he described himself in various situations (he was one of only two Jews at Farragut Academy, for instance; he was a lone Anglo among “Cuba’s angry exiles” in his Miami schools, and so on) and the kinds of philosophy and politics he espoused—it’s all about being on the outside.  Not just ahead of the crowd, but completely different.  Strangers is an expression of this sense of himself in a way that all the other pieces only suggested.

That Strangers was left unrealized was one of Shapiro’s greatest regrets.  Despite its immense complexity and apparent impenetrability in its initial form, it represented a potential culmination of all the theories and techniques which Shapiro’d been developing over a lifetime of making theater. 

Unfinished or not, however, Strangers represented the pinnacle of Shaliko’s work in terms of its sophistication, scope, complexity, and daring.  Clearly, Strangers was a major step towards the new theatrical form for which Shapiro had been searching.  If he’d managed to continue his search, Strangers would surely have been recorded as the breakthrough event.

After a Strangers workshop at Yellow Springs in March 1989, Shapiro traveled to Moscow in December to cast and oversee the set design of the Russian-language première of Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  The play went into rehearsal in April 1990 at the playwright’s own Nekitsky Gate Theatre and was presented in the spring of 1990.  It subsequently went on tour in the USSR and U.S., playing a run at Trinity College as part of “Contemporary Theater in the Soviet Union,” 2-3 December.

Then he flew to London to direct Jerusalem For Reconciliation at the Royal Albert Hall (28 April 1991), an “international peace concert for children of all nationalities in the Middle East suffering from war,” produced by Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937) as a benefit for UNICEF and the Arab Women’s Association with a cast that also included Kris Kristofferson, Maurice Béjart, Simon Callow, Duran Duran, and artists from around the world. 

Redgrave had put the one-night event together and asked Shapiro to come to London to direct it.  He and Redgrave had met initially when Redgrave was in New York performing Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending on Broadway in 1989 (Neil Simon Theatre; 24 September-17 December).  He’d taken some Trinity/La MaMa students to a performance and they met with Redgrave, first backstage at the Neil Simon Theatre, then in her apartment over tea. 

Shapiro subsequently helped Redgrave produce The Wall Breaks, an all-star benefit on 10 December 1989 at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre for The Memorial Society for the Victims of Stalin’s Repressions in the Soviet Union.

In return, Redgrave appeared at a Shaliko benefit at the United Nations on 12 February 1990, hosted by the United Nations Society of Writers, with, among others, monologist Spalding Gray (1941-2004), actors Harvey Fierstein (b. 1954), Olympia Dukakis (1931-2021), Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), and Joanne Woodward (b. 1930); poet Allen Ginsberg; playwright John Guare (b. 1938); directors Peter Hall (1930-2017) and Joseph Chaikin; and jazz percussionist Max Roach. 

In exchange for his work on Jerusalem, Shapiro got Redgrave to come to New York for Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars) at the La MaMa Annex (5-8 June 1991), an anti-Persian Gulf war (Operation Desert Shield: 2 August 1990-17 January 1991; Operation Desert Storm: 17 January-28 February 1991) theatrical collage he conceived as a benefit for the War Resistors League and Oxfam America.

In January and February 1992, Shapiro was in production for The Shaliko Company’s first show of the year, a second revival of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village.  (The first “revival” was the 1990 Russian-language première he mounted in Moscow.)

Why was Shapiro doing a remount of the two-character, psychological, language play instead of his more usual Shaliko production, a physical, socially conscious, politically oriented, multi-cultural theater piece?  Shapiro explained flatly: “After 25 years in the New York theater . . . it’s all we can afford.”

He’d hoped that this production would garner Shaliko some much-needed rewards: critical attention, box-office income, a move to a more commercial theater, and cash in the form of grants and donations.  Kafka, which Shapiro described as “the most conventional piece we’ve done in a long time,” was supposed to keep Shaliko afloat for another season and shore it up enough to mount Shapiro’s more expansive works, on hold for lack of money. 

Even before Kafka was restaged, Shapiro’d begun working on Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (see “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 and 14 May 2020; also “‘As It Is in Heaven,’” 25 March 2011).  In September and October 1992, the play, set in an East Village café with an artist’s studio in back, was staged in Theater for the New City’s Seward and Joyce Johnson Theater, which was set up as a working café with catered drinks and Middle-Eastern food. 

Shapiro and a cast, some of whom were in the final production of Blue Heaven, had been doing readings of Malpede’s play, then called Going to Iraq, at Greenwich Village’s Westbeth Theatre Center, a co-producer with Shaliko and TNC.  Between 23 and 27 March 1992, Going to Iraq was broadcast on radio on WBAI in New York City in five parts.

As plans for the play were underway, the principal figures in the production of Going to Iraq were organizing Roadkill, a street event on 3 May with text by Karen Malpede and Leonardo Shapiro and co-produced with Theater for the New City, performed as the closing event of the First Annual Eco-Festival.  Organized as a procession through the streets in the East Village to protest the damage done to human society by the automobile, the main performer was George Bartenieff.

Unluckily, the Sunday of the procession was only five days after the riots had begun in Los Angeles in response to the 29 April 1992 acquittal of the four white police officers charged in the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.  Police in New York, on alert because of the reports of unrest there like that in San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and nearby New Rochelle, New York, were nervous and wary of any disturbances. 

As the procession of artists, performers, and spectators accompanied by two loud percussion bands arrived at Tenth Street and Avenue A, a cordon of police stopped the march.  Shapiro and five more participants in Roadkill were arrested, including 21-year-old Spartacus Shapiro.  Since no one actually did anything remotely criminal—I was present at the event as I was still working on the TDR article—all charges were eventually dropped against those arrested.  It was just the last time in a long chain that Leonardo Shapiro was arrested.

Rehearsals for Malpede’s play, now under its new title, Blue Heaven, began on 10 August.  Shapiro‘s elaborate mise-en-scène included a live trio playing music specially composed by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld (b. 1948), and with one character, John—played by actor Nicky Paraiso (b. 1951) who’s also a pianist—as a band member; live video broadcast by video artist Maria Venuto (b. 1965), who moved about the playing area with her camera during the performance; and scenes staged amongst the patrons’ café tables. 

There was no seat in the audience which did not require the spectator to turn around at one time or another—reminiscent of the environment Jerry Rojo had created for Shaliko’s Ghosts almost 20 years earlier—and the spectators had to decide where to look and listen to the life of the Heaven Cafe swirling around them.  Shapiro, who conceived Blue Heaven’s mise-en-scène, originally concocted a highly theatrical event which, aside from the live music and videos, employed film, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects. 

At the first rehearsal, Shapiro described the environment for Blue Heaven and some images he wanted the actors to hold onto.  He likened the atmosphere to the Caffe Cino performance of William Saroyan’s Hello Out There he had seen back in the 1960s (the one that had featured Al Pacino, I presume) and admonished the actors to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices with theirs,” so the actors would speak of themselves through the dialogue.  This was the director’s instruction regarding testimony (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”).

The production was designed to draw the spectators into the world of what the script calls the “sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries” of the Lower East Side—once again, the unrepresented, like Galy Gay of Man Is Man, Franz Woyzeck, Andrea in The Arbor, and the people of Goiania—who lived, worked, or visited at the Heaven Cafe during the time when the United States unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian Desert.

Tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the other had begun to develop within a few weeks of the start of rehearsals.  Before rehearsals began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede expressed excitement in my February 1992 interview with her for all of the director’s proposed plans for the production.  But at the end of the rehearsal period, recriminations (which I won’t recount) flew back and forth.

The relationship between the playwright and the director finally broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as director on 13 September, four days before the official opening of the show.  Malpede took over direction of the production in practice, but no director was listed in the program.

Knowing Shapiro’s tendency to engineer clashes with nearly everyone with whom he worked over the years, and recognizing that Shapiro and Malpede each had strong opinions, an aggressive personality, and an unrelenting individuality, it’s likely that despite previously successful collaborations, friction was inevitable and that the blame was on both sides. 

It’s also likely that Shapiro’s old problem with sharing authority with someone else had returned.  On the simplest level, Malpede felt that Shapiro had usurped her authority as playwright and turned Blue Heaven into his own project—the same allegation Judy Dworin leveled at Shapiro when he left the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the same year (and clearly, by his own account, how Shapiro had behaved in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No). 

It may be no coincidence that Shapiro’s very next production suffered similar difficulties in February 1993.  He encountered frustrations with the Chetana Theatre in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, which escalated to an impasse. 

Shapiro made a long-planned trip to Calcutta under the sponsorship of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, a program of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the cultural propaganda agency of the U.S. Foreign Service, to direct Beckett’s Endgame in Bengali. 

It had taken two years to finalize the plans for the Calcutta production, which the director called “one of my favourites [sic]” that he had dreamed of presenting “for a long time.”

Suman Mukherjee (b. 1966), who brought Shapiro to Calcutta, was a director with the Chetana Theatre and Shapiro’s assistant on Endgame.  “Beckett in an Indian context,” according to Mukherjee, a 1990 TLM student from India, “seemed out of place.”  Further, Shapiro didn’t “take his time” to learn the way the Indian actors, who were prominent stage veterans in Calcutta, habitually rehearsed. 

They expected the director to “have an answer to everything concerning the play” and when Shapiro invoked his ‘Let’s find out’ response, the actors misconstrued this as lack of knowledge—though Mukherjee, who admired the director, affirmed that the director “lived with the play 24 hours” a day. 

After a ten-day “workshop,” the production was supposed to have begun a three-month tour of India, but the actors stopped communicating with Shapiro and the actor-director collaboration came to an abrupt end. 

Despite Mukherjee’s attempts to mediate, “[e]go”—on both sides, it seems—“became an obstructive factor,” the conflict escalated, and the breach became impossible to heal.  The result was a total rupture: the actors refused to perform again after the opening performance on 19 February and Shapiro left Calcutta.

That same month, Shapiro formally shuttered the Shaliko Company (having resigned from the directorship of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the previous fall).  He’d built a house, with the help of his son, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico during 1992.  The Sangre de Cristos are sacred to the Taos Pueblos.

In June 1993, Leonardo Shapiro retired from New York theater and moved to the tiny “populated place” of Vallecito: population, 767; elevation, 7,060 feet (1¼ miles); 32 miles south-southwest of Taos, where in 1969 Shapiro had broken his trip west.  (Vallecito in Taos County shouldn’t be confused with Vallecitos, 73 miles to the northwest in neighboring Rio Arriba County.)

From Vallecito, Shapiro wrote, “I am slowly getting in touch with the world here, with the sun and moon and stars, with wood and mud and seasons, with neighbors and trucks and dogs, with kids and birds and clouds,” declaring that “it’s a lot like paradise!”  As a post script to one letter, he even chuckled, “Once in a while I realize for a moment that the birds are talking to me.” 

The escapee from New York did, indeed, find himself enfolded in his new community.  Even before his house was completed, while he was living in a tent “with his fax machine and his telephone,” his new neighbors, whom Shapiro characterized as “helpful and friendly,” immediately included him in their lives.  On his first Fourth of July in Vallecito, his new neighbors, Larry and Barabra Malisow, invited him to join the neighborhood families to “eat berries and cream and drink wine” and set off fireworks in the driveway. 

Shapiro reciprocated in his own way after the house was finished by holding a housewarming at the end of July 1993 that featured a performance by the neighborhood children, some dozen or so aged five through 12, of an adaptation of Snow White.  “It was great!” declared Shapiro. 

The Malisows, whose youngest daughter, five-year-old Ivy, was in the cast, concurred, noting with approval and awe that the director and teacher treated the children as if they were adults and professionals, demanding from them discipline and concentration.  “He never talked down to them, and assumed that they understood anything he gave them—using political and social issues—and they got it!” observed Rosalía Triana. 

It's little wonder, given this readiness to accept a stranger, that he found a contrast between his new and old surroundings.

Shapiro retired from New York theater, but not theater in general—or other endeavors.  He conceived many projects for his retirement.  In addition to plans to direct Vanessa Redgrave in Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, and hopes to build his “real rep company,” he contemplated a production of Marguérite Duras’s (French; 1914-96) L’Amante Anglaise with British actress Frances de la Tour (b. 1944) and Gerald Hiken (1927-2021), the American actor; a co-production of Büchner’s Danton’s Death with Yuri Lyubimov’s (Russian; 1917-2014) Taganka Theater; and an opera based on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in collaboration with video artist Paul Garrin (b. 1957) and Marilyn Zalkan (b. 1967), Shaliko’s former administrator and composer of the music for the 1992 production of Kafka: Father and Son. 

He also still harbored the hope that he could find a producer for a new production of Strangers with Max Roach performing his own music.  In Vallecito, he had drafted several scenes of Julius and Ethel, A Love Story, an opera in collaboration with composer Noa Ain (1942-2019) and made “a lot of notes”; he was working on a poem, Refuge, he had begun in India; and he was writing The Big Hit!, “a satirical backstage mystery novel, . . . in the fond hope that it will make money for me.”

He was preparing to accompany Vanessa Redgrave to Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade in September 1993 to help with peace concerts sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other activities, but he never went.  (Redgrave made the trip as planned as a special envoy for UNICEF.)

In December 1994, he was developing plans for a “large event” in Los Alamos over three days in August 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid.  He called this commemoration Days of the Dead at Los Alamos, in reference to the annual Mexican celebration.  “I have been putting off plunging in on this,” he wrote.  “I have no enthusiasm for dealing with all those people, but I’m here, and it’s my thing, and it needs to be done, and I probably will get it together,” he predicted.  He dropped out of the event the next year.

Though the refugee from the big city wasn’t entirely open to the communal way of life presented by little Vallecito, he did participate in the community.  Barbara Malisow related that Shapiro joined in Seders at Passover, which, like most valley activities, included many neighbors who convened at different homes year to year, and even scripted the service for the group.  (Passover 1994 was sundown, 26 March, to sundown, 3 April; in 1995, the holy days would have fallen shortly before the cancer diagnosis, 14-22 April.)

His contributions to the life of the little valley, however, always came back to the children: “[W]hen he played for our kids or something,” Larry Malisow asserted, “that was priceless.”  Although Shapiro could spend much of his time “not really extending himself, or wanting to be part of what was going on around,” as Larry Malisow noted, the children were obviously special to him. 

In August, he wrote and presented Who Stole Summer? or The Trick and Treat Show: Fantasia for kids and band instruments—a play all about Happy Valley, New Mexico, which is under attack by grasshoppers and pollution—on the backyard stage he had built.  (Barbara Malisow related that at the time, the valley had, in fact, suffered “a huge infestation” of grasshoppers.)

Confronting nuclear and toxic pollution and the threat of casinos in the area, Who Stole Summer? was a complete production, with sets and costumes—the latter designed by the Malisows’ daughter Lauren, a student of costume design writing a thesis on a related topic, who later became an assistant designer at the Santa Fe Opera—featuring 25 to 30 children and teenagers from the neighborhood and nearby valleys and performed before some 90 adults. 

Barbara Malisow affirmed that Shapiro liked the children so much that he really got to know “their different personalities,” and, when he knew he was dying, he arranged specific bequests for each child “according to how he perceived them.”  “And every child that got something was pretty happy with what he left them, you know,” added Larry Malisow.  “So, he saw things in them—even though he may not . . . he didn’t react that way.”

[Shapiro’s retirement to New Mexico marked the start of the last phase of the director’s life and career.  In the eighth and final installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” to be published on Sunday, 7 May, you’ll hear about his work with neighborhood children and his period of introspection.

[Shapiro mounted one more professional production with a young troupe in Albuquerque, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, during which time he was under treatment for fatal cancer.]