A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 8

 

[This is the last entry in the Leonardo Shapiro biographical series.  Shapiro’s return to the New Mexico terrain where he roamed with the Appleseed Circus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where he got married, and where his son was born, initiated a period of nostalgic contemplation. 

[Out of this reflection came a focus on the children of Vallecito, the little collection of homes where he and Spartacus built his retirement house in the sacred Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and generated three plays (two of which were meant for children).  It also produced a long poem about his father, mother, and grandfather, and the start of a libretto of a planned opera about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose marriage he saw as a contrast with that of his own parents.

[This final period of Shapiro’s life also brought about the last production of his career, the staging of Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to Shapiro.  To close the circle of his life, the director arranged for the young Riverside Repertory Theatre Company to tour the show to Baltimore and perform there at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project, the space where The Shaliko Company made its début 23 years before.  Poignantly, Shapiro was too sick at the end to make the fateful trip east with his troupe.

[I hope ROTters have been reading along with the narrative of Leo Shapiro’s life and work.  If you haven’t and are just joining the thread, I heartily recommend that you go back to the beginning and pick up the first seven parts of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro.”  Parts 1 through 7 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 and 4 May.]

In conjunction with his work with neighborhood children, Shapiro experimented with radio drama (Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun: Radioromance, 1993), a play for children (Who Stole Summer?, 1994), and a television script (Runaway Sam in the Promised Land: an after school fairy tale for television, 1994).  The author had sent me copies of all these scripts, which I read with great interest—especially the last one.

His concern for ecology and the environment, and especially his focus on nuclear pollution, are openly reflected in these plays, as are several of his philosophic interests.  Nothing Is Ever Lost, which is not a children’s script, is based on Doctor Faustus; it actually begins as a radio broadcast of Marlowe’s play (which The Shaliko Company produced in 1988) and transforms into a search for a missing shipment of radioactive waste from the “Los Alamos National Weapons Complex.” 

In Who Stole Summer?, the play he presented at his home with the local children, Shapiro used an actual event in the valley—the infestation of grasshoppers—to develop a fable of toxic pollution and government collusion with commercial interests. 

Though this is a children’s play, Shapiro employs language and allusions that are almost certainly too sophisticated or obscure for most of the preteenagers and young adolescents with whom he was working: What 11-year-old in 1994, for instance, would know Leonard Peltier (b. 1944), the jailed American Indian activist, or recognize a character called “Dead Nixon,” the embodiment of the evil government conspirators?  (His television script also includes language and images that no broadcaster would likely accept for its airwaves, and he even wrote of his radio play that it “seems unproduc[e]able.”)

Perhaps the most personally revealing of Shapiro’s three New Mexico scripts is his teleplay, which he dedicated to his son, Spartacus.  Runaway Sam in the Promised Land, set in New York (the other two take place in New Mexico and the Four Corners), is the magical tale of a 10-year-old boy who goes off in search of a mythical Jerusalem because he thinks finding it will prevent the break-up of his parents’ marriage. 

While Shapiro makes comments along the way regarding homelessness, AIDS, and police overzealousness, what he seems to be doing is retelling—from his point of view, assuredly—the dissolution of his own marriage to Candace Tovar in 1973 (when Spartacus was only two; by 10, he was already living with his mother, away from his father). 

Back in the immediate locale of his idyllic wedding to Tovar and the birth of his son, a time on which he clearly looked back with nostalgic fondness, and engaging in considerable introspection, he revisited this episode in his life.  From his letters, it’s obvious that Shapiro was, indeed, reflecting at length on his first stay in Taos, his life then, and, specifically, his wedding to Tovar. 

He’d also been thinking about his mother, who’d died of lung cancer on 12 February 1994—Shapiro returned to Saint Paul in December of 1993 to nurse her—but he was conscientiously trying to “erase the tapes” of his past: “I want to escape from my painful memories and I want to explore them,” he wrote, “I want to make something happen, but I want to stay comfortable, I want to act but I don’t want to do it YET.  I drift.”

Nonetheless, he obviously found himself dwelling not only on his own marriage, but that of his parents as well.  Rosalía Triana thought that in the Julius and Ethel libretto, Shapiro “romanticized [the Rosenberg’s] love as being the opposite of his awful memories of his own parents.”

(In brief, Julius [1918-53] and Ethel [1915-53] Rosenberg were arrested for having passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War.  They were tried for espionage in 1951 and executed on 19 July 1953, but the case generated a great deal of controversy which continued until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

(Despite evidence from Soviet files showing that the couple were probably guilty, some Americans continued to feel that the trial, in the midst of the so-called “Red Scare” of the 1950s, could not have been fair, that the secrets the Rosenbergs stole were of little value since the Soviet scientists certainly already possessed them, and that the death penalty was too severe a punishment were it not politically motivated.

(As might be guessed, the Rosenbergs were an enduring symbol for Shapiro and he had begun planning the opera based on their marriage even before he left New York for retirement.)

Shapiro had had a great deal of trouble writing the book for this opera—the existing text is only a little over five pages—because, Triana felt, he had conflicted feelings about the material.  In Shapiro’s script, Julius Rosenberg says of the time he met Ethel: “I knew she was for me if she’d have me, and I’ve loved her ever since that night. . . .  I know they can never part us.  Nothing will.”

In contrast with this sentiment, in a poem Shapiro also began composing before he left New York, he wrote in brutal and disturbing phrases of the dissolution of his parents’ marriage in 1951—right around the time of the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others for the theft of the United States’ nuclear secrets.  He started the poem with the lines, “When my Father dumped my Mother, / . . . / When their marriage split asunder,” and continued near the end:

Daddy, Daddy, why’d you do it?

Why’d you hit me, why’d you leave us?

(Did you steal our Money too?)  Daddy, Daddy, why’d you die?

The poem, which is untitled, also focuses on his father’s infidelity and, plainly, his physical brutality and his death. 

Working on both of these texts and the script of Runaway Sam at the same time, Shapiro was clearly going over and over the parts of his life that concerned family, marriage, and children.  In addition to the poem about the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and the idealized contrast to it in the libretto, Shapiro was transcribing and editing a recording that he’d asked his mother to make of recollections of her family’s history, which includes her father’s criminal activities, but also many descriptions of the pain and harmful consequences, particularly for her younger son, of her divorce from Shapiro’s father.     

Shapiro was also working on his own memoir at the time of his final illness and while most of what he’d sketched out by the time he died covered the positive aspects of his life—his time at the Windsor Mountain School and the period of the Appleseed Circus in New Mexico are most thoroughly discussed—he does mention incidents and occasions that were clearly painful and unpleasant.

In Runaway Sam, Max and Sally live in Brooklyn (where Shapiro had lived when he ran Shaliko) and Max drives “an ancient green V.W. van” (the very vehicle in which Shapiro arrived in Taos in 1969).  Sam’s father is a sculptor who “makes weird statues” which he displays on the streets, refusing to make anything saleable despite his wife urging.

Sally’s a dancer with commercial prospects who no longer wants to continue the bohemian existence they’ve been living.  The parallels between Max/Sally and Leo/Candy are too close to miss, and there’s even a character late in the script called Rosalie, the name Shapiro’s last romantic partner used before she returned to her home state of New Mexico. 

Among the causes of the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Tovar, for instance, was her devotion to a career in the commercial musical theater.  As we’ve seen, Tovar’d begun in this arena at NYU and in her summer employment in musical theater companies.  Shaliko’s work, reflecting Shapiro’s vision, was certainly not in this popular-entertainment vein.

What the play reveals about the real Shapiro, however, is how he saw himself—or thought others saw him.  Sally/Candy accuses Max/Leo of living a “red diaper fantasy” and asks him, “Why keep fighting a battle that’s already lost?  You can say what you want and get paid for it,” pointing out that people on the streets where Max puts his art “just trash it or take it away.  People don’t want to see that stuff in their neighborhood.” 

When Sally boasts, “People know my name now, they know who I am.  They like me,” and tells Max that New York magazine plans a feature article on her, he calls it all “[s]terile empty New York new speak” and declares it a “scam success” that doesn’t mean anything to him. 

(“Newspeak” is the fictional language of the totalitarian state invented by George Orwell [1903-50] in 1984, designed to restrict the words, and therefore the thoughts, of the citizens.  In contemporary usage, it refers to the language of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words used by politicians and officials—and Shapiro would add advertisers—to deceive the listener.)

Throughout the script, Shapiro has Sally characterize Max as a disengaged, judgmental solipsist who refuses to live in the real world; he, in turn, considers her a sell-out.  In the end, however, after Sam has failed to find Jerusalem and his father and mother confirm they can no longer live together, Max acknowledges, “I got caught by an idea about our life, now I don’t know . . . .”

In July 1995, Shapiro was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer and the doctors had expected him to die within six months of the diagnosis.  Triana recorded that Shapiro quipped at the time, “What do you get when you’ve been pissed off all your life?”

In August 1996, Shapiro returned to professional stage work, directing the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque in Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play he acknowledged as deeply meaningful to him, with Triana, as Arkadina. 

Shapiro’d been introduced to the Riverside company when he spoke to a theater class at the University of New Mexico in which Joe Pesce (not to be confused with the popular New Jersey-born film actor and comedian Joe Pesci), a company member, was a student. 

Pesce, who’d go on to play Konstantine in Seagull, shared Shapiro’s focus on Grotowski and Chaikin and was impressed with the director’s associations with them.  Pesce apprenticed himself to Shapiro—in exactly the way the director envisioned theater should be learned, as a “creative oral transmission of the secrets of the theater.” 

Later, Shapiro approached Riverside, Pesce recorded, and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  The company worked for over a year on The Seagull from rehearsal through performances. 

It was the final year of Shapiro’s life and for the five months of rehearsals, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro’d built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantine’s play—and nights watching Shapiro’s videotapes or talking with him.  (It was the same stage the director had built for Snow White and Who Stole Summer?)  It was a demonstration of the oral transmission of his theatrical lore.

The Riverside Rep production of Seagull, which used the Jean-Claude van Itallie (1936-2021) translation from the 1970s (published in 1995), was presented in Albuquerque from 22 August to 14 September 1996 (Tres Amigos Theatre; KiMo Theatre).  The set was designed by Shapiro, himself, and Spartacus designed the seagull prop used in the play-within-the-play.   

Ann L. Ryan of the Albuquerque Journal, dubbed the show “splendid” and labeled it “a vivid, heartfelt production.”  The reviewer added: “There’s an immediacy to this ‘Seagull’ that makes it feel like a long, late summer evening: haunting, lovely and ephemeral.”

In the Weekly Alibi, Sharon Kayne reported that “Riverside Repertory Theatre has that depth [required for Chekhov], and in this production of The Seagull, they show it.”

Ryan went on to compliment the company and, by implication, its director: “I’ve seen almost all of the actors in this show before in other productions, and I’ve never seen any of them better.”  Kayne observed: “The ensemble as a whole suffers from no weak links, which gives the production a sort of seamless quality. . . .  [T]he performances are excellent.  Director Leonardo Shapiro has done well.”

The director arranged for the company to tour the show to Baltimore, where it was mounted on 6-17 November at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project where Shaliko had begun with the première of Children of the Gods in 1973, but Shapiro was unable to make the trip east to oversee the performances.  Though he’d been seeking experimental and alternative treatment for the illness, he was too weak by November 1996 to travel. 

The ”brash young troupe,” as Brennen Jensen characterized Riverside Rep in Baltimore’s City Paper, “serves up a sparkling version of The Seagull.  It’s a rakish retooling that brings Chekhov’s comedic touches to the fore . . . .”  The reviewer continued, “The performances are exemplary all around,” and concluded that “laughter, not glumness, marks this successful staging.”

In the Baltimore Sun, J. Wynn Rousuck, who’d reviewed Shaliko’s Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in 1986 and reminded Baltimoreans how breathtaking he’d found it, observed that “the director draws the audience into the work by occasional direct address, by having the actors enter and exit through the audience, and by setting the stage so we become part of the audience for the play-within-a-play.”  “The result,” the review-writer continued, “is a ‘Seagull’ with definite Shapiro touches (including the type of ensemble work derived from an extended rehearsal period . . .).” 

On the website Aisle Say, Richard Gist wrote of Riverside Rep’s visit to Charm City “under Leonardo Shapiro’s inspired direction,” that ”it so appealingly captured” the “’looking-on,’ almost voyeuristic, quality . . . in this richly wrought production of Chekhov’s difficult classic.” 

Gist ended his review by affirming that “when the final curtain of this refined, handsomely atmospheric production rang down, and this zealous, gutsy, highly talented troupe . . . came out for its call, I could not keep from being inspired by stirrings . . . for it is an undertaking well worth experiencing.”  And The Sun’s Rousuck concluded his notice with “what ‘The Seagull’ has to say about the struggles of the serious artist makes it a logical swan song for this long-embattled director.”

Despite the doctors’ prognosis, Shapiro continued for a year-and-a-half, often rehearsing The Seagull at his home in Vallecito—sometimes from his sickbed—in the afternoon after returning from morning chemotherapy treatments in Albuquerque, about a 100-mile drive one way. 

He only decided to undergo chemotherapy in June 1996, after he started rehearsals in March, and company member Kerry Weddle (b. 1973?), who played Nina, believed that the director did so in order to give him more time with Riverside and Seagull. 

He was afraid to die, Weddle said, but knew that no treatment would effect a cure; Seagull, she felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.”  As the troupe attested, Shapiro demonstrated what he meant by “theater is a healing art.”

Shapiro’s discomfort was considerable at the end.  The cancer left the director weak and easily fatigued.  In the midst of his notes for his planned memoir, he wrote, “Now what?  Pain seems worse . . ., worse each day.  New lumps and hard bumps have [broken] out here in the pain, pain, pain.” 

In November, he wrote, “Doing The Seagull was good.  Pain is bad”—though he added optimistically that he was looking for something easy to work on for two to three weeks.  Members of the Riverside Repertory also noted the toll the cancer was taking on Shapiro, remarking both on the precipitous deterioration in his condition between the auditions and the end of the rehearsals and on the hardship he was having while he was working. 

The end of Seagull’s run, wrote T. D. Mobley-Martinez, who’d reported for the Albuquerque Tribune and attended some final Seagull rehearsals, wasn’t a happy prospect for Shapiro because that meant confronting the inevitable future.  “I’d rather do something beautiful,” he told another reporter, “than dwell on my symptoms.”

When Riverside Rep members visited Shapiro on his 51st birthday in January 1997, he was so confused he spoke about preparing them for the tour to Baltimore which had already taken place two months earlier. 

Seagull was Shapiro’s last project.  I don’t even know that he was able to do any writing. 

In late 1995 or early 1996, Philip C. Kolin (b. 1945), a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi for whom I had done some work, was putting together a collection of essays on Death of a Salesman in anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 1999.  He asked me if I knew anyone who’d be interested in writing about a special connection to the play, and I told him about Shapiro.

Kolin asked me to approach Shapiro, who said he’d be interested.  He died before he could write the piece.  Leonardo Shapiro died of the cancer on 22 January 1997, fifteen days after his 51st birthday.  He was buried in New Mexico. 

(I learned of Shapiro’s passing when I had called him a day or so after he died, unbeknownst to me, to check on the Salesman essay.  Sparticus answered the phone and told me his dad had just died.  On 1 April, Elena Prischepenko wrote to all Shapiro’s friends and colleagues to announce his death and let us know about a memorial service in his honor at the La MaMa Annex in New York City on the 16th.  I delivered the chronology of his career, having accidentally become his Boswell.)

The New York director’d had a profound effect on this young troupe.  (Aside from most of the actors’ youth, the company’d only formed in 1993.)  At a rehearsal about a week before Seagull opened in Albuquerque, a journalist in attendance recorded one of the members declaring: “We’re watching a master at work.”

At another rehearsal, a different reporter observed this exchange:

“You know what he’s doing,” [Richard] Van Schouwen [who played Trigorin] says.  “He’s painting a picture.  Only he’s not just using one brush or one color.  He’s, like, putting a dab of yellow here or a spot of light there.”

You start working with him, [Cynthia] Sousa [Seagull’s Paulina] says, and you see his great ability.  You see him bring out things that you never realized you had.

He’s a perfectionist, [Sandra] Timmerman [stage manager] says.  And through his perfectionism, the standards of the company have risen.

“We can never go back,” Pesce says.  “We really love him.”

When they returned from the tour to Baltimore, the Riverside Rep took a six-month break.  “We’re going into a small hiatus,” explained company artistic director Michael Najjar, who played Semyon in Baltimore but didn’t perform in Albuquerque, “to work on our acting and directing skills in a workshop setting.”

In a letter about a year-and-a-half after the production, Kerry Weddle said that the company’s year with Shapiro had quite shaken them up.  It took them some months to come to grips with the experience, but then the taste for the stage welled up and they all went back to work.  As far as I can tell, they’re still working.

[Thank you, readers, for delving into this history of one whom I consider a fascinating theater artist.  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my account of Leonardo Shapiro’s life and work and have gotten something of an idea why I think Leo is worth knowing about. 

[Back in 2011, my friend and a frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, wrote an homage to two theater artists he’d known whom he felt were remarkable.  He called the post “Saints of the Theater.”  Well, Leo Shapiro was certainly no saint—but I daresay he was well worth having known.  I’m grateful I got a chance to.

[I knew Leo for only a brief part of his life, from June 1986, when I met and interviewed him in Baltimore during the Theatre of Nations, through the end of his life—a little under 11 years.   After seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore—a show that left me awed and thrilled, I confess—I began casually to follow the work of The Shaliko Company, becoming more and more intrigued with Leo’s art.  

[My interest in Leo and the company, however, was predicated on the work, not vice versa.  During the time I knew Leo, he and I weren’t really friends, though we were something more than merely professional acquaintances.  We never really collaborated on any of his projects, though I helped superficially with his war-protest collage, Collateral Damage, in 1992 and began to help him with the abortive 1991 revival of Strangers on which he’d asked me to serve as dramaturg.  Since that production never materialized, our work together didn’t get very far, either. 

[In preparation for the Drama Review profile of Shapiro and Shaliko, I regularly attended rehearsals of Kafka, Blue Heaven, and Collateral Damage; watched several Trinity/La MaMa classes; and, at Leo’s invitation, attended occasional performances to which he took his students. 

[I spoke to him often, of course, including many hours of formal, taped interviews; read all his scripts and the many articles he’d written—not to mention the sometimes angry letters-to-the-editor he sent—watched videotapes of past performances and looked through scores of still photographs; and read most, if not all, of the reviews and articles about his productions.  I plowed through the files and records of The Shaliko Company and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and spoke to dozens of Leo’s friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, students, and board members. 

[By the time I wrote “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” at the end of 1992, I probably knew more about Shaliko than any other single person except Leo—but I knew it only as a researcher knows something; I didn’t know Leonardo Shapiro as a man.  We never had a drink together, or a meal.  We never chatted about anything aside from his work—he seldom asked me about my work (except, of course, the TDR article)—and I never saw him except when he was working or I was.  At his La MaMa memorial, I was charged with delivering a survey of Leo’s work; personal remembrances were left to the others who knew him longer and better. 

[Despite the distance, I’ve been profoundly affected by my association with Leo Shapiro.  Kirk, who never met Leo but knows Jane Mandel, one of Shaliko’s original members, had mentioned to her my continuing occupation with the life and work of her old colleague and friend.  Even six years after his death—and more than 20 since she stopped working with him—Mandel acknowledged that she still missed him and thought about him every day. 

[A member of the Riverside Repertory evaluated Shapiro’s effect on the company, as I reported above: “We can never go back.”  Andrea Lord, who’d known Shapiro briefly in Taos in 1969 and 1970, wrote, “Leonardo was a kind and generous man. . . .  I still see him and am grateful for the memories.”  Nina Martin, whose path diverged from Shapiro’s more than a decade before his death, remembered him as “a very generous person and a committed artist that I was privileged to work with.” 

[My association with Leo wasn’t nearly as intimate as Mandel’s or as intense as Lord’s, yet I find that I now evaluate things the way I think Leo would have.  I’ve found I constantly wonder how Leo would appraise a performance I’m seeing, appreciate an exhibit at a gallery I’m visiting, view a book or story I’m reading—or, perhaps most frequently, react to a political event or statement that’s being reported in the day’s news. 

[If I pass a place I associate with Leo—the home of a former colleague, the East Village neighborhood of the Shaliko office, the territory around Taos and Chamisal, New Mexico—he reappears in my thoughts; if I see or read about some writer, artist, movement, or artwork linked to him—a production of Ghosts somewhere, Joe Chaikin’s, Jerzy Grotowski’s, Murray Bookchin’s, or Max Roach’s death, a passing mention of the Situationists, a lithograph by Pudlo Pudlat in a gallery—it causes me to conjure him again.  My own father died not quite a year before Leo, but I think of Leo almost as frequently. 

[I’ve reported that he was displeased at first when “Techniques of Testimony” was published because he thought some of what I related was uncomplimentary.  After moving to New Mexico, Leo wrote that he’d “bought out the press run” of the TDR issue and passed the article out to his new colleagues in the Riverside Rep. 

[Since Leo’s early death, I see this effort as a kind of record of the work of this relatively unknown theater artist.  Obviously, I admired—admire—Leo.  Why else would I have followed his career after seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore?  Why agree to write the profile for TDR?  It’s probably clear that I think he was underappreciated in his lifetime. 

[I hope I’ve made at least an attempt to show that my judgment is based on something more than emotion and sentiment, however.  But that other part—the sense that I owe it to his memory to get this right—I can’t dismiss as objective or intellectual incentive.  As little as I knew him in life, or got to know him afterwards, Leo’s in me now.  And though I know his ego wouldn’t let him like everything I’ve reported here, I fervently hope I’ve done him proud.  Somehow, that’s important.]