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.]

'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.