Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

'Blue Heaven' (or 'Going to Iraq') – Part 2

[Below is the second part of my account of the production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven in September and October 1992.  In this section, I’ll recount the rehearsal process, the departure of director Leonardo Shapiro, the performances, and the critical reception..

[If you haven’t read Part 1 (11 May), which gives the background and origin of this production, I strongly recommend going back and reading that before starting Part 2.  My introduction to the first installment also explains how I got to be involved in the production and the perspective from which I was observing it.

[Part 1 also contains the identifications of all the people involved in the productions, including the actors who played the characters in Blue Heaven’s première.   Without that information, following this account will be confusing.]

The Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater is located at the western end—that is, the rear—of the ground floor of TNC’s building.  Its long dimension runs east-west, with the entrance from the lobby at the northern end of the short, eastern wall of the theater.  The set configuration established on 14 August (according to the thumbnail sketch in my hand-written notes; I didn’t transcribe the diagram into my word processor) located the triangular bandstand at the middle of the eastern wall, just left of the entrance, pointing into the center of the room. 

Aria’s studio, set off from the rest of the cafe set by a scrim,  was in the southwest corner, dominated by the bed oriented southwest to northeast. Along the long southern wall, near the eastern end, was Sada’s booth, a raised counter-like structure that looked a bit like a judge’s bench.  Sada sat there, ensconced in her observation post, overseeing the world of the Heaven Cafe, her domain. 

Herbie’s kitchen was on stage in front of the southern wall—across the cafe from the bleachers.  Several TV monitors were arrayed on the risers along the northern side of the playing area, creating an off-stage space behind them.  On these screens were shown both the live video Maria Venuto was shooting during the performances and the pre-recorded videos of war news, “candid” shots (including the viral video of the little blond tyke who sang “You Are My Hero” at the Super Bowl), politicians’ speeches (George H. W. Bush declaring the start of the bombing), and so on.

A kind of open off-stage space was established along the eastern expanse of the Johnson, between the back of the bandstand and the wall; it was visible, but ambiguous.  The center of the performance area was the cafe floor, occupied by the band platform and the tables and chairs.

Along with the Seagull film sequence and the taped and live video projections on the multiple monitors in the performance space, director Leonardo Shapiro employed actors speaking through microphones and singing some of the dialogue.  (One such scene is described in “As It Is in Heaven,” 25 March 2011.)  There were also scenes behind a scrim or with film and numerous effects, tricks and gags, masks, wigs, and funny faces.  Shapiro was greatly influenced by, among other performative forms, circus, theater games, and masks..

The director reconciled this extensive theatricality with the drive for truth and reality in acting by saying, “Nothing is pretend.”  The real is real, he insisted, and the artificial is artificial—in contrast to the stage magician invoked by Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie who presents pretense disguised as reality.  (Shapiro included Williams among his acknowledged influences and was attracted to stage magic from his early childhood.)

Sue Jane Stoker, stage manager of Blue Heaven, affirmed that Shapiro “allowed an enormous leeway for the actors to create.”  She recognized that, after some early trepidations, many actors in Blue Heaven “found his work very liberating.”  Stoker reported: “He gave [the actors] this framework . . ., and [the characters] were very much the creations of those actors.”

Shapiro gave few specific directions during rehearsal; the most he did was ask an actor to speak more loudly or more softly, or he might ask her to move to a different part of the acting area.  There were no Stanislavskian discussions of psychological motivation: Shapiro did not let the actors indulge their emotions and then discuss those feelings with them.  Stoker, describing Shapiro as a “visual director,” said, “He works more from the outside in.”

While watching Blue Heaven rehearsals, I was consciously looking for the way Shapiro communicated what he wanted from the actors.  In the years when the director had a permanent ensemble, I knew from interviewing him and many of the original Shaliko actors how Shapiro’s technique and the company style was developed over time.  In those years, Shapiro and his troupe worked on shows for months.

But I didn’t know Shapiro or Shaliko then; all the Shaliko shows I’d seen since 1986 (The Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore) had casts the director assembled from the pool of actors he knew and had worked with and others cast from outside his circle.  Gone were the years of working together closely and working for months on one production.  So how did he get the kinds of stylized and highly physical performances I’d seen?

I never saw it.  More to the point, I never heard it; I never heard Shapiro give oral instructions to his cast.  I went to nearly every rehearsal; I was teaching an evening class in New Jersey, so I missed two rehearsals a week, but I was in attendance for five days a week.  In the end, I had to ask about this.

Actress Rosalie Triana explained that he did it by body language: “He wouldn’t say a word.  Or he’d throw out a word and nothing else.  And I’d be standing there, but I would know even from his breathing . . . to go further.”  

“I do it in the tone of voice,” explained Shapiro; “I do it in the way I’m breathing; I do it in how close I am to them physically.  I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ all the time, and I’m always . . . .  You know, I’m right there.  When they’re working, I’m on top of them, going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’”

“It’s like a conductor,” he continued, again using a musical reference.  “You don’t just describe . . . .  I mean, how many words are there?  Andante, adagio—you know—presto.  You know, there’s a very limited vocabulary, and the rest is communicated personally.  I’m communicating to them the same way they’re communicating to the audience.  I’m in their face.  There’s no actor that doesn’t know how I feel.”

George Bartenieff, who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a 1977 Obie as a director of TNC and later, individual acting Obies in 2001 and 2006, remarked that the work on Blue Heaven was “like living the experience” as he had in the Living Theatre’s The Brig (which won three Obies in 1964). 

Michael Preston, a Shaliko actor who is also a circus artist—he performed as Rakitin with the Flying Karamazov Brothers from 1991 through 2000—who was in the 1992 revival of Kafka: Father and Son with Bartenieff, compared this part of the Shaliko experience to circus work “where nothing is rehearsed.”

The process of improvising and experimenting got more complex when technical and other elements were added.  Since Blue Heaven had a live band, Shapiro incorporated music into many of the scenes, even directing the actors, like Nicki Paraiso at the piano or Bartenieff, to sing some lines.  While some of this work was abandoned, some remained as part of the performance text. 

In one rehearsal, Bartenieff had improvised an a cappella melody for some lines which composer Gtetchen Langheld later picked up on her saxophone.  After a few rehearsals, Bartenieff no longer sang, but the music remained as part of the score. 

(I asked Shapiro when he came up with the idea to have these lines sung.  He told me: “At the moment.  I mean, in rehearsal.”  I was a little surprised: “Just right there, and it happened?”  “Yeah,” conformed the director.  “It was just a thought that occurred to me.”) 

Then Shapiro continued volubly.  “I remember the day . . . that I had Nicki go to the piano to play during the scene.  It says in the script he’s supposed to get a cup of coffee. . . .  That was an exciting study for me.  That was a really exciting moment, when I discovered that the music . . . . 

“I mean, I had known I wanted Nicki to play the piano.  And I had known I wanted him to play during the scene.  But I hadn’t . . . .  You know, that was a sort of general, vague thought, not like anything real.  And finding that specific moment was very important, and it opened up a key to a lot of things.  But it was a long time between that and singing.  I mean, what he did . . . .  I don’t think he sang the first day. I think he just played the piano.“  (This is the scene I described in “As It Is In Heaven, referenced earlier.)

The director asked Paraiso to sing one of his lines at the next session, and then a week or so later, Shapiro said, he asked Lee Nagrin to sing, and then Bartenieff and Triana in another scene. 

Max Roach, a jazz percussionist who’d collaborated with Shapiro on Strangers, compared the director’s rehearsal method to a Charlie Parker improvisation in which no one knew what the result would be until the piece was finished.  Rehearsals for Blue Heaven didn’t always go smoothly, however. 

The Shaliko Company was originally formed in 1972 as a permanent troupe and they worked together for a year before presenting their first public performance.  Even after that first company broke up, Shapiro continued to work with a small cadre of artists who mostly all knew one another and one another’s working methods, especially Shapiro’s.  By the middle and late 1980s, the director began casting actors from open auditions, usually one or two within a cast made up largely of his ad hoc rep ensemble.

Among the cast of Blue Heaven, though, were several actors who not only didn’t know Shapiro, but who apparently weren’t comfortable with his method of working.  The director acknowledged that several cast members hadn’t been his own choices as Karen Malpede had written some roles for specific actors: Herbie for Bartenieff; Dee for Sheila Dabney, and Sada for Nagrin; other actors had been cast from auditions. 

It was evident that not all the actors were prepared to trust Shapiro, nor he them.  The actors who were cast from open auditions were joining a company that had been working together on and off for weeks and even months.

Further, since Shapiro wasn’t in sole control of the production—Malpede, of course, being the authority on  the script and Bartenieff, as executive director of TNC, the co-producer of the show—problems with elements of the production that were out of his hands, principally technical aspects associated with the theater (for which Bartenieff was responsible), often thwarted attempts to do meaningful work in rehearsals. 

Traditionally-trained actors, those who came out of conservatory or university acting programs, for instance, sometimes seemed in rehearsals to be uncomfortable that Shapiro didn’t give them conventional acting guidance.  During the work on Blue Heaven, stage manager Stoker determined that “it was very frustrating for some of the actors because some of them I doubt had ever worked in this way . . . .”

A few actors “found it very disorienting just to be given the outer directions rather than the discussions,” Stoker observed, and found that some of these seemed to ask themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ in the early stages of the rehearsal.  Still, among company members who committed to Shapiro’s methods, the work progressed much the same way as it had in Kafka sessions and resulted in honest, often profound performances.

In the introduction to The Theatre of Images (see “The Theatre of Mixed Means & The Theatre of Images,” 26 January 2020), Bonnie Marranca’s discussion of the avant-garde theater of the mid-1970s, she described the type of acting espoused by Shapiro as characteristic of the theater of images.  She believed that the actors thus become another medium for the director’s concept, a variation, perhaps, on Gordon Craig’s Über-marionette, the completely effaced actor.  (Edward Gordon Craig, 1872-1966, discussed his view of acting in “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” On the Art of the Theatre.)

In Shapiro’s productions, however, the actors were expected to adhere to a more Brechtian approach: to express not their “innermost core,” but their thoughts and experiences as they were reflected in the actions and circumstances of their roles.  His words, taken from notes for the first rehearsal of Blue Heaven, were to “cross document our lives with [the] characters’ lives, our props with theirs, our gestures with theirs, our voices with theirs . . . .”  (This is the acting technique Shapiro called “testimony,” discussed in the blog post referenced earlier.)

“What I’m trying to do now is more like opera,” said Shapiro, distancing his work from conventional Western Realism, “but I think that’s what theater is.”  He called music “the mother art, from which all performance derives” and attributed to music the cornerstones of performance: “time keeping, structure, the revelation of hidden and unspeakable mysteries, and, perhaps, for some, the keys to the locks of the mysteries.”  

At the first rehearsal of Blue Heaven, for instance, the director told his cast that the “most important element” was the “music,” by which he meant not the live band that would be part of the production, but the “rhythm, pitch, and tone” of the language.  In notes for the cast, Shapiro said, “Play strong and hard, like a jazz band.”

One of Shapiro’s principal goals, as I noted previously, was to make theater with the audience, not just for it.  “[T]he real work on [a production] is done in front of people,” he pointed out, which means that the cast doesn’t really know before previews—or opening night if there have been no previews—“that this will all be shaped into something coherent.”  Direct contact with the audience in the Heaven Cafe was built into the performance, and Shapiro expected to develop this audience-performer interplay during previews. 

The preparation for this contact, however, began in the earliest rehearsals.  Shapiro didn’t close his company’s rehearsal sessions to friends and guests and he encouraged the actors to stay at rehearsals after their stage work was done so that there were always spectators and the actors were never in a private world, isolated from observers. 

Shapiro had even asked the actors who were “off-stage” to remain in the cafe set and they often hung out along the east wall behind the band platform, sitting on the floor leaning against the black drapes while other scenes were being rehearsed.  (While observing the work on Blue Heaven, the director encouraged me to sit at different tables in the set rather than on the periphery of the performance space as I had when I watched rehearsals for Kafka: Father and Son.)    

Another effect the origin of which I missed was where the stylized performances came from.  When I watched rehearsals for Kafka, I was surprised to see that they seemed to be proceeding along lines not very different from traditional (that is, Stanislavskian) directors’ work.  It didn’t really look like the kind of work that I’d seen in Shaliko performances. 

Then I skipped several sessions because the director had scheduled a series of technical sessions such as the recording of some voices and loading in the set—and when I came back for the first performance, there was all this acting behavior that I never saw: rhythm—rhythmic movement, rhythmic speech.  I couldn’t understand where it had come from, where it happened.

These were the “musical elements” of the performance, by which Shapiro didn’t mean the accompaniment that Langheld’s combo played, but the music in the actors’ performances.  Since I’d apparently missed the source of this in Kafka, I was determined to see how it happened with Blue Heaven.    

I skipped a few Blue Heaven rehearsals at the end because of my class and because Shapiro scheduled technical rehearsals just before opening.  Now, in most conventional American productions, actors are often not called for tech rehearsals, or function merely as bodies to be lit and voices against which to test sound levels. 

If scenes are even run, it’s usually only to check tech cues, exits and entrances, and the placement of props.  Techs commonly proceed “from cue to cue,” meaning that dialogue and action are skipped unless they trigger a technical cue.  For actors—never mind observers—these sessions are extremely enervating.

But when I came back, I found the same thing that I saw at Kafka.  Perhaps in a somewhat rudimentary form, but I was watching a recognizable version of a Shaliko production rather than what Shapiro had called “this sort of American Realistic” presentation.  I had to ask the director about this after Blue Heaven closed.

Shapiro affirmed: “[T]those technical rehearsals . . . is where I do a lot of my work. . . .  I do a lot of my work with actors in techs.  And I redo everything in techs.  You know, and I usually spend about a week at it.” 

Actor Triana, for instance, confirmed that she unexpectedly found herself called upon actually to act during the early technical rehearsals for Blue Heaven: “I was so startled, I found something completely new for that moment.”

The tech rehearsals are “when I actually composed the scenes,” Shapiro explained.  “So while we’re waiting for them to redo the light, and I finally see what I’m gonna see, that’s when I compose the repetitions, the silences, all the elements that compose the scenes musically and visually.  Because those two things have to go together.” 

“It’s just like setting the dance to the music.  I have to have the lighting to set the scene to.  I did it with an idea up front, but then I see what’s actually achievable, when I’m actually there.  And I changed all those scenes totally.  I mean, I basically found those scenes in the lighting rehearsal.”

Shapiro always scheduled a series of preview performances for his shows.  They were essentially dress rehearsals before an audience, but they were essential for his work on the performer-spectator relationship.  The director had been building that into his shows since his earliest ones as a nascent professional, from the 1967 Brother, You’re Next through 1996’s Seagull.

For Blue Heaven, this was particularly significant because of the environmental mise-en-scène: the actors badly needed to practice the interaction with the audience, and that can only really happen under performance conditions.  But the technical rehearsals were delayed because things weren’t ready or available when Shapiro needed them.  (The director put the blame for this on Bartenieff as the co-producer in charge of the venue.  Among other complaints, Shapiro said that the cancellation of previews had been due to technical delays caused when Bartenieff didn’t supply the promised crews four days in a row.)

As a consequence, the previews were delayed and ultimately cancelled.  That meant that the actors never got a chance to work with the tech or the spectators until paying theatergoers and reviewers were in the theater.  The production essentially wasn’t finished when it opened.

By this time, tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the other had escalated  beyond mollification.  At the time I interviewed Malpede in February 1992, she and Shapiro had had great mutual respect.  When I asked her about the staging several times in early rehearsals, Malpede appeared pleased and even enthusiastic.  The director and Bartenieff had worked together successfully three time before Blue Heaven (Collateral Damage, Kafka, and Roadkill), plus the staged readings and the WBAI broadcast. 

Before rehearsals began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede expressed excitement in my 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 now) flew back and forth.

Among the kinder things Malpede said about her former collaborator in a written statement she sent me, she called Shapiro “a REHEARSAL MONSTER” (her typography).  In the chronology Shapiro compiled before his death, his comment in the entry for 1992 reads “Blue heaven and hell,” and the title he gave the computer file that was his notes for the first Blue Heaven rehearsal was “Blue Hell.” 

The relationship between the playwright and the director broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as director on 13 September, four days before the official opening of the show, though he retained credit in the program for the mise-en-scène used in the production.  Malpede took over direction of the production in practice, but no director was listed in the program.

The company split into three camps: Dabney and Nagrin lined up with Malpede and Bartenieff; Paraiso and Triana supported Shapiro, as did stage manager Stoker; Christen Clifford, Joseph Kellough, Lailah Bragin, and Beverly Wideman were caught in the middle.  Everyone’s opinions were colored by personal loyalty. 

When Malpede assumed the de facto directorship of Blue Heaven, she immediately removed much of Shapiro’s physicality, leaving the focus more on her words.  My note on Monday, 14 September, the first rehearsal after Shapiro was fired, was: “The atmosphere is much more down tonight than last Friday.  Is it just a kind of emotional exhaustion from the turmoil of the past few days?” 

I wasn’t able to see the opening performance on the 17th, but a friend of mine went and reported back to me.  Rich told me that he’d liked the play in general, though his date was less enthusiastic.  Both of them found the ideas too numerous and uncohesive—a problem I had with Malpede’s script from the beginning, and a complaint you’ll see the reviewers also voiced—but that bothered Rich less than it did his date. 

Rich didn’t notice any tentativeness on the part of the actors, but reported that he had occasional problems hearing dialogue over effects such as the music and sound, and he couldn’t see through the scrim masking Aria’s studio from his table back near the band platform.

My friend also remarked on the humor; he was unsure if he was supposed to laugh.  One bit he mentioned was the hanging of yellow ribbon and flags: a grip releases the ribbon from the door after Herbie returns and wraps it around his neck; it snaps across the room to the shutter of Sada’s booth.  Then Herbie’s entangled in the ribbon when he and Sada dance to “Blue Heaven” and they get all wrapped up in yellow ribbon and flags. 

I think Rich wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a serious comment on the war and the displays of patriotism than were common during the period of the combat, culminating in that tickertape parade, or if it was just slapstick comedy by Herbie in his clown persona.

My friend also commented that a scene with Aria and Herbie when she’s talking about Mendieta’s death and he’s talking about the Gulf war didn’t come together in his mind.  He didn’t put the two instances of violence together (a complaint one reviewer also made).

I was at TNC on Friday, the 18th (which was press opening).  My notes read:

Performance is very careful—not tentative, but controlled.  It’s not a rehearsal but it isn’t a full-out show.  The cast seems a little unsure what to do about the audience.  They need to accept us as part of the environment and just deal with us.  [In an earlier note that evening, I wrote: “Nicki whispered ‘Excuse me’ on his way to the bandstand.  I’d prefer he said it aloud without self-consciousness.”]  They mustn’t be afraid to touch us or move chairs or talk to us when necessary.  Mostly they need to let it all hang out.

I remarked that the audience seemed attentive, but added, “maybe too much.”  I even doubled-down, noting further: “Very concentrated,” but I wondered, “Is it to hear over the music?”

A week later, on Friday, 25 September (the day the Newsday review came out), I saw the show again and I noticed that few spectators seemed very aware of the film and video projections.  Most of them didn’t even seem to know they were going on.

I also observed             that there was a noticeable lessening of the connections the actors had to the material.  They were saying lines, but losing the words.  They weren’t really connecting to each other, as if each character existed separately from the rest. 

I noted several changes—the small part of Mary, the patriotic paraphernalia seller, had been cut, for example, although I don’t know how long before the 25th that had happened—suggesting that Malpede was still working on the production, and this may have accounted for the lack of connection if the actors were focusing on new routines.

Pretty much by any measure, TNC’s première of Blue Heaven was a failure.  The theatrical vision Shapiro had devised for the production never came to realization.  Malpede never got to see her play on stage in a finished state; it was little more than a workshop with tech.  If you take the perspective that even that form wasn’t what the playwright had imagined, then she didn’t even get a workshop.

A nascent professional relationship between Leonardo Shapiro and Karen Malpede that had begun about a year earlier and produced three successful joint projects, not to forget some early workshops of Blue Heaven, disintegrated precipitously.  With it went another collaboration, the one with veteran actor George Bartenieff.

Shapiro’s personal relationship with Rosalie Triana, which had started during the production of Blue Heaven (and had a part in the disruption of the association with Malpede) continued until his 1997 death.  He retired from New York theater, however, so whatever professional connection he might have established with other members of the production team ended when he pulled up roots and moved to the mountains of New Mexico near Taos (where he’d spent about two years doing guerrilla theater between 1969 and 1971).

The production of Blue Heaven itself got only three reviews—one of which didn’t even appear until the show had closed—and they weren’t good.  (See below for some quotations from the press coverage.)  The play has had no afterlife (as far as I know), either on stage or in print.  Because the title-change had been at Shapiro’s behest, when Malpede returned to Blue Heaven after the production closed, she retitled it Going to Iraq again. 

The first press notice for TNC’s Blue Heaven was Julius Novick’s “‘Blue Heaven,’ a Spirit of Avant-Garde Past” in Long Island’s Newsday (Friday, 25 September).  Novick called the production “mainly a stale imitation of the bold American avant-garde theater that flourished 20-odd years ago.” 

The Newsday reviewer compared Blue Heaven unfavorably to The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69, the adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae conceived and directed by Richard Schechner at the Performing Garage in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in lower Manhattan in 1968; the work of the Living Theatre from around 1968; and The Blacks by Jean Genet in 1961 as directed by Gene Frankel at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village. 

Novick quipped that there “is no total nudity, but a couple of actresses shmoosh themselves with red and black paint, and one of them tries painting on the wall with her bare breasts.”  He added: “In the spirit of the ’60s, Malpede is bound and determined to be what used to be called ‘relevant.’”

Though Novick did recognize that Malpede “is firmly opposed to violence, especially violence directed at women,” he confessed, “It is hard to know exactly what the defenestration of Ana Mendieta, the gulf war, and the denizens of the cafe have to do with one another.”

“In one respect, however,” found the review-writer, “‘Blue Heaven’ parts company with its sources.  The avant-garde theater of the ’60s was frequently attacked for de-emphasizing the spoken word, but Malpede appears to fancy herself a maker of eloquent and powerful speeches. . . .  Much of this stuff,” Novick judged, “is delivered by the actors with an empty vociferousness that does nothing to increase the impact.”

As for “[m]itigating factors,” the Newsday writer found that “Gretchen Langheld’s jazz score . . . has a calm, reflective authority.  Lee Nagrin sings and shouts and complains with a certain panache . . ., and Nicki Paraiso underplays with striking dignity as the AIDS-man.“

He held back some when it came to George Bartenieff, who “as Herbie has some funny moments, along with many unfunny ones, as he impersonates various low comedians.”

Novick concluded” “The actors do not disgrace themselves, but they cannot prevail against the besetting sins of ‘Blue Heaven,’ which were also the besetting sins of the ’60s avant-gardism at less than its best: pretentiousness and incoherence.”

In his New York Times notice, which came out on Wednesday, 30 September, Mel Gussow observed that the Ana Medieta-Carl Andre story “is the intriguing inspiration for Karen Malpede’s ‘Blue Heaven.’”  Then he lamented, “Unfortunately, the play has pretensions equal to its aspirations.  Instead of focusing intensely on the artist’s death and its repercussions, Ms. Malpede paints on a broad and diffuse canvas, moving all the way from a consideration of avant-garde art in the 1960’s to AIDS to the war in the Persian Gulf.”

“The play itself is like an artifact of another theatrical time.” Gussow pointed out.  Describing the environmental Heaven Cafe set, the Timesman found (as I did), “The approach is reminiscent of Jim Cartwright’s ‘Road.’”

Gussow also saw a resemblance to “works that preceded” Road, referring to Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, which débuted at La Mama E.T.C. in 1965 and then was revived in New York City by the Circle Repertory Company and Chicago’s Steppenwolf in 1984-85 at Circle Rep in Greenwich Village, “all to the disadvantage of ‘Blue Heaven.’”

“Where Mr. Wilson’s cafe crackled with life and language,” affirmed the Times reviewer, “Ms. Malpede’s cafe is languorous.  Monologues, especially those delivered by Lee Nagrin . . ., seem to last an eternity. Almost every scene is attenuated . . . .  At the same time, George Bartenieff as the cafe’s cook has to work overtime trying to be funny, mimicking Groucho, Harpo and Dracula. . . .” 

The play, Gussow reported, “ostensibly deals with the mixed allegiances of [Aria].  With insufficient explanation, [the sculptor] is eventually on her way to Iraq as a documentary film maker.”

“As author and director,” concluded Gussow, “Ms. Malpede gathers ideas and images from diverse sources, using film and video . . . while gratuitously referring to Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and others more adept than she is at theatrical experimentation.  It all adds up to a long evening of artistic borrowing.”

The review-writer’s one good word was: “On only one level does the play express a novel perspective and that is in the jazz score by Gretchen Langheld.”

The last review to be published, New York Native’s “Something Borrowed,” didn’t appear until after Blue Heaven closed; the cover date was Monday, 19 October; the play closed on the 11th.  (The Native, though, had a practice of post-dating its issues by about a week, so it probably hit the newsstands around the 12th—the day after closing.) 

                                                                                                               

In his review, L. C. Cole reported (with a now familiar perspective): “Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven was a total environmental theater piece with music, containing most of the multi-media trappings that heralded a work that wants simultaneously to captivate and liberate its viewers.”

Cole also found, like his colleagues, that “Malpede used this loose collection of people to toss out many ideas about art and justice, and with the help of Leonardo Shapiro . . ., came up with many ways of presenting them.”  He mentioned Aria’s “sense of doom and futility,” Herbie’s deflection of “the pain of their situation by cavorting like a vaudevillian clown,” and AIDS-sufferer John’s singing “about his condition at the piano.  Amputated limbs, cancerous uteruses, bombing victims—a host of social ills found their theatrical exemplar in one form or another.”

“But if the barrage of images and sounds was unsettling,” the Native reviewer found, “it wasn’t always because our consciences were being prodded or because the illustrations were so disturbingly apt.  It was,” he complained, “often a matter of not liking to be harangued on a point over which one is in total agreement.  Greater rights and freedom for women, compassion for the poor and sick, an end to all wars—such ideas are hardly fuel for heated disagreement.”

The review-writer thought that “Blue Heaven suffered secondarily from a meandering storyline, which often covered the same ground in different guises, and,” he added, “preachy writing that grated the more it tried to approximate poetry.  But its primary failure was in matching visual style and message.”

The play’s “blunt message played to the converted, who are no longer astonished by post-avant-garde pranks and high-tech tricks,” Cole felt.  “It was therefore puzzling (if not disheartening) to watch a play which so often criticized modern artists for their barren, derivative products, buil[d] its supreme moments out of the prop bag and shtick gags of ten to thirty years ago.  If its creators intended to revitalize these old concepts, they misguided their efforts, but my guess,” Cole judged, “is simply that they don’t see as far as they pretend.”

“There was nevertheless a fair display of talent on the stage,” the Native writer acknowledged.  “Highlights were Gretchen Langheld’s torchy sax playing, Lee Nagrin’s grandiose sing-song style as Sada, and the way Nicky [sic] Paraiso slyly underplayed his role as the man with ‘AIDS.’ 

On the other hand, Cole felt, ”Rosalie Triana’s Aria carried on as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders.  George Bartenieff’s Herbie had [s]ome good comic moments, but his non-sequetorial slapsticking was often the most glaring example of what belonged to a different era.”

As small as this sample is, I still find the near-unanimity of the reviewers’ opinions remarkable.  Reading as many reviews as I do when I prepare my play reports for Rick On Theater, I can tell you that even among just three notices, to find that they virtually agree on the same flaws, the same moments of excellence, the same writing problems, the same acting issues is astonishing. 

These three papers don’t cater to the same readership, either: one’s a major daily broadsheet with a national—even international—rep, another’s a local daily tabloid whose readers mostly come from the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk and the Borough of Queens, and the third’s a (now defunct) gay weekly based in Manhattan.