A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5

 

[“A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 5” begins with Shaliko’s last production at the Public Theater and the last show of the original company before Shapiro re-formed it five years later.  It continues with the director’s foray into freelancing—which eventually led to his devastating split with Joseph Papp and his contentious departure from the Public. 

[As you’ll read, Shapiro restarted Shaliko briefly, failed, and then tried again, forging his enduring association with the legendary Ellen Stewart and the La MaMa E.T.C.

[A trip to the Soviet Union introduced Shapiro to Russian playwright and director Mark Rozovsky, whose play Kafka: Father and Son became so meaningful to the American theater man that he staged it three times. 

[The last incarnation of The Shaliko Company moved into Shapiro’s period of “Original Collaborative Work” and the première of the company’s most audience-pleasing production, The Yellow House.  (It was this production that introduced me to Shapiro and Shaliko’s work.)

[As I’ve been saying since Part 2 of this bio series, I admonish readers who are just joining this look at Leonardo Shapiro’s personal history to go back to the beginning and read the first four parts before trying to make sense of Part 5.  Parts 1 through 4 were posted on 16, 19, 22, and 25 April.]

Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck, produced at the Public in 1976 with Joseph Chaikin in the title role, was the last Shaliko play affiliated with the New York Shakespeare Festival (see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020). 

Shapiro said he chose Woyzeck because he was looking for a play to do with Chaikin, whom the founder of Shaliko had known since his teens when he hung out at the Living Theatre, of which Chaikin had been a member, and with whom Shapiro had participated in workshops with Grotowski in Poland in 1975.  

They agreed that Büchner’s (1813-37) anti-heroic soldier would be a good vehicle for the actor.  The resemblance between the characters of Franz Woyzeck and Galy Gay in Brecht’s Man Is Man, for which Chaikin had won an Obie in 1963 (and which Shapiro had seen), shouldn’t be overlooked as a force in this selection, however. 

Woyzeck was a co-production with Chaikin’s Other Theatre, his successor to the Open Theatre, which disbanded in 1973.  (The Other Theatre was co-founded in 1975 with playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie [1936-2021].  In 1974, Chaikin had co-formed the Working Theater with Peter Kass and Kristin Linklater [1936-2020].)

Shapiro said Woyzeck was the company’s “most normal show,” all planned in advance because the cast included non-company members.  The production, which Shapiro characterized as “a prophetic vision of the devaluation of Man in the modern world,” nonetheless illustrated a recurring Shaliko theme: the lot of the common man.

The production earned widely divergent reviews, but critics generally either loved it or hated it.  Most critics who didn’t like the production invoked, as they had with Ghosts, Shapiro’s violation of the 19th-century values of the play.  Other critics had high praise for the show.  Harold Clurman (1901-80) of The Nation, for instance, concluded that “the production registers; one remembers it.”  

Yet, it wasn’t the critics who drove Shapiro from the Public Theater but his mentor, Joseph Papp.  Two Shaliko actors about whom Shapiro cared most had left the company following Woyzeck and Shapiro disbanded it. 

He decided to try his hand at freelance directing.  As a young director, Shapiro had hired out to the NYU School of the Arts in 1972 to stage The Women at the Tomb by Michel de Ghelderode (Belgian [Flemish]; 1898-1962) with a student cast.  The performances were mounted at the school’s studio space at 111 Second Avenue in the East Village from 8 to 10 May.

So in December 1976, the nascent freelancer started out his independent directing stint with the première of The Youth Hostel at the Public Theater, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  (The three plays, which are set before, during, and after sex respectively, were presented at the Public as Three Short Plays.  The first and third plays on the bill were Summer Evening, directed by Wilford Leach [1929-88] and Mr. Frivolous, directed by Lee Breuer [1937-2021].)

The 45-minute-long play by itself would be no more than a footnote in Shapiro’s career—except for two points: it cemented the life-long friendship with Shawn the director had had since NYU and it was his entrée as an independent director at the New York Shakespeare Festival.  These both led directly to the abortive directorship of the musicalized Misanthrope in 1977 which generated the rift with Joseph Papp that haunted Shapiro the rest of his life. 

It had been Shawn who convinced Papp to hire Shapiro for Youth Hostel by affirming his belief in his young friend after the director had left the Public Theater the previous year.  It had also been Shawn who brokered the original connection between The Shaliko Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Later, as we’ll see, Shawn brought Shapiro the script of Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor from London.

Then from 13 to 29 May 1977, the Working Theater presented coo-me-doo, or they’re only made of clay under Shapiro’s direction.  A song-and-dance collage of love imagery (from Chaucer to Ginsberg) conceived by Kristin Linklater, co-founder of the troupe with Peter Kass and Joseph Chaikin.  The piece ran in the company’s Off-Off-Broadway space on West 12th Street in the far west Village.

Some years before staging The Youth Hostel, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s (French; 1622 [baptized]-1673) Misanthrope with Shaliko but let the project drop.  The composer, Margaret Pine, one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it (see “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021). 

Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over the timbre of the production.  Shapiro refused to make changes in the production as Papp demanded, he said, and the impresario fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own.  From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker (1927-2019), recommended J Ranelli (1938-2019), another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that Shapiro “could not handle” the musical adaptation and that what he and Pine had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh viewpoint, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur ultimately demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production.

(The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile [1942-2011], credited with the staging.  An additional composer and orchestrator were also brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.) 

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.   Even years later, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly.

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Twenty years after the event, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . . .  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

The root of the young director’s problem, he learned, was that “I have problems with authority, and I have had problems with producers . . . .  I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  The issue had already appeared in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No, and it would surface again later in the failure of his work on Karen Malpede’s (b. 1945) Blue Heaven and his difficulties with the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program. 

(I interviewed Malpede twice, once in February 1992 as part of my work on the TDR profile of Shapiro and again on 17 July 1992 for Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present [“An Interview with Karen Malpede,” 8.1 (1993)]; republished as “Karen Malpede” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman [University of Alabama Press, 1996].  The July transcript was posted on Rick On Theater on 5 November 2014.)

Following the Misanthrope debacle, Shapiro gave freelancing one more try, apparently successful.  In 1979, Shapiro signed on with Atlanta’s Academy Theatre, the city’s longest-running professional theater, to direct a production of Molière’s Tartuffe (12 January-10 February). 

The Atlanta Constitution dubbed Shapiro’s Tartuffe “a rowdy, bawdy gem, the delight of the year so far.”  Reviewer Helen C. Smith added, “There is nothing subtle about this ‘Tartuffe.’  Guest director Leonardo Shapiro has taken great risks, and for the most part they work extremely well.”

In the Atlanta Gazette, Liza Nelson reported:

Director Shapiro has given the play a physical, almost acrobatic interpretation, with much thrashing and falling about on stage.  He has not, however, lost the emotional edge of the poetry of Tartuffe through the buffoonery.

It went well enough for the Academy to invite him back—and for him to return.  In a press release for William Shakespeare’s (English; 1564 [baptized]-1616) Richard III, part of the troupe’s next season, the Academy noted that Shapiro’s Tartuffe had been “critically acclaimed” and “broke all box office records.”

He led the company’s production of Richard, which ran from 2 to 31 May 1980.  Like his Shaliko productions before and after this period, Shapiro’s Richard III was not strictly conventional.  An Academy Theatre memorandum noted:

The closest I can come in expressing Leo’s treatment of RICHARD III, is to call it “total theatre”.  The production encompasses the entire theatre . . . the aisles, the balcony, players enter from outside entrances, the street.  The back of the house.

In terms that might have described Shaliko’s Ghosts a few years earlier, the memorandum continued:

The theatrical experience of having the play performed in essentially a 360° space, gives the audience a role too—they’re in the play, they could touch the players, can feel the heat of the torches . . . ; their proximity to the action prevents merely passive attention to the play.

Earlier that year, Shapiro directed the première of Friends by Crispin Larangeira (b. 1940), a four-character comedy involving an aging couple who’ve bever been able to forgive each other for staying married so long, their friend on whom they take out their resentment, and the wife’s niece who tries to take the friend away.  It ran 10-27 January 1980 at the New Federal Theatre on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Larangeira’s play got a mixed reception, but Shapiro’s staging was judged “ferociously inventive” (Village Voice) and “simple and smooth” (Villager).  Indeed, Tish Dace of the Soho Weekly News said that Shapiro “has an extraordinary capacity for helping actors achieve performances at once natural and ingenious.”

While all the freelance productions received mostly respectable to good reviews—the Atlanta Constitution, for instance, described the classical revivals as “wild and wickedly funny” and “stylish and highly charged” respectively and Marilyn Stasio called Shapiro’s direction of The Youth Hostel “tart” in Cue—Shapiro found he had “totally lost the reason for what I was doing.”

Disenchanted with freelance directing, Shapiro tried to recapture the spirit of ten years earlier when he formed Shaliko.  In 1981, with actress, director, and circus artist Cecil MacKinnon (b. 1945), he attempted to re-form the troupe with a season at Saint Peter’s Hall on West 20th Street in New York’s Chelsea, beginning what Shapiro classified as “Work on New International Plays, Commissions, and Musical Adaptations.” 

Productions in this vein included Daniel Mark Epstein’s (b. 1948) verse play, The Midnight Visitor (December 1981-January 1982); Andrea Dunbar’s (English; 1962-90) The Arbor from England (September-October 1983); Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son from Russia (February-March 1985); Mac Wellman’s (b. 1945) Whirligig (April-May 1989); and the Russian-language première of Kafka: Father and Son in Moscow (spring 1990). 

This second phase of Shaliko ran until 1990—the first phase, from 1972 to 1977, Shapiro dubbed “Meetings with Classical Texts”—but the start was abortive and Shapiro produced only the première of Midnight Visitor in the first season. 

A mystery about a widow, her three daughters, and one daughter’s fiancé gathered in the old family home, The Midnight Visitor attracted Shapiro because of his “weakness for poetry,” which he said had been “one of the few consistent themes in Shaliko from the beginning.” 

Though the production and acting were generally appreciated, the play, described by one critic as “a Gothic opera without the music,” received unanimously bad reviews and Shapiro later concluded that it was simply a bad script. 

After Midnight Visitor, the second production of the new Shaliko Company was to be Molière’s Don Juan starring Christopher Walken (b. 1943) as Don Juan and Wallace Shawn as Sganarelle.  Unhappily, the intended production of what Shapiro said was one of his favorite plays and Molière’s best miscarried for reasons having more to do with Hollywood than New York. 

Because of the death of actress Natalie Wood (29 November 1981; b. 1938), Walken’s co-star on the MGM film Brainstorm (released in 1983), which was in production at the time, the actor’s obligation was unexpectedly extended during the filming and he became unavailable.

Shapiro had everything tied to the plans for the season and when the first play failed and the second foundered, Shaliko lost all its funds and Shapiro was forced to cancel the season.

In 1983, Shapiro tried again to relaunch Shaliko, this time in partnership with Elena Prischepenko (b. 1955), who performed as Elena (or Helen) Nicholas.  (Prischepenko is married to artist and illustrator Scott Cunningham [b. 1956] and sometimes also goes by the name Helen Cunningham.) 

Wallace Shawn had brought a new play, Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor, from England where it had been produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre to accclaim in 1980, and Prischepenko wanted to produce it in New York.  Shapiro approached Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), who agreed to let him present the play at La MaMa, beginning Shaliko’s association with the Experimental Theatre Club. 

The Arbor provides examples of a number of Shapiro’s principles.  Dunbar, a 15-year-old girl when she wrote the script as a school assignment, had never even seen a play.  An abused child, pregnant and abandoned, she simply wrote down what had happened to her during the day before she went to bed every night, each scene a snapshot of a discrete incident.  

“It’s totally unmediated,” the director explained.  “It is raw experience.”  Shapiro described the play as “about the lumpen proletariat written by the lumpen proletariat,” as if Franz Woyzeck had written Woyzeck.

Allan Wallach described the play in Long Island’s Newsday:

Dunbar didn’t give “The Arbor” a traditional structure or the insights of a writer in touch with her deepest feelings.  The play is a succession of short scenes, most of them as devoid of emotion as snapshots.  Before each scene, the central character [played by Prischepenko], given the author’s own name, provides a brief, Brechtian summary of what will follow.

Wallach also described the play as “a lurid autobiography written in a style which careens between a kitchen table naturalism and an Epic Theater presentational mode” and characterized Shapiro’s production as “energetic.”  Overall, the reviews were mixed, leaning toward the unappreciative. 

Shapiro’s move into La MaMa in 1983 began his second attempt to reestablish Shaliko, but it was a very different company from that disbanded in 1977.  Shapiro acknowledged that the revival was little more than a use of the name to produce shows from project to project.  There was no longer the financial support for a standing company, and many of the original group had left the theater or gone elsewhere to work. 

With their permanent home at the Public Theater no longer available, the freedom to spend months developing ensemble performances was gone.  The length of Shaliko runs was drastically curtailed, reducing the vital contact with an audience they needed to complete the work on their performances and restricting the company’s exposure as well as the chance to build word of mouth. 

Furthermore, La MaMa, more closely identified with a certain kind of theater associated with New York’s East Village than is the New York Shakespeare Festival, did not have the drawing power of the Shakespeare Festival for either audiences or reviewers, and Shaliko productions that might otherwise have attracted valuable attention, like The Yellow House and Kafka’s 1985 première, went under-noticed. 

The association with La MaMa, however, had benefits.  Stewart encouraged Shapiro to rebuild his company merely because she liked him.  She had a reputation since she started the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (1961, as Café La MaMa) of supporting non-establishment writers, directors, and theater companies from around the country and the world and she accepted Postmodern theater well before the mainstream culture did. 

She also judged artists not on their proposals, résumés, or track records, but on an almost mystical individual response to their personalities.  Since she never read texts, never did any kind of “in-depth analysis about anybody about anything,” never went to rehearsals unless asked, and seldom even saw a show at La MaMa, Shapiro had virtually complete freedom.  “I don’t go watching what Leo does,” said Stewart; “[h]e’s very secure here.” 

Of course, no strings meant precious little support.  What had always been a rough theater by intention had now become also a poor theater by circumstances.  Stewart provided Shaliko performance and rehearsal space, but didn’t support the company in any other way beyond box office services.  Shaliko even paid its own producer-publicist. 

At the Public Theater, which had given Shaliko no money, Shapiro’d had scene shops, prop and costume collections, and an extensive administrative apparatus available; at La MaMa he had none of these. 

In March 1984, Shapiro and Prischepenko went to Russia with a group of theater professionals under the auspices of the Citizens Exchange Council, a non-profit organization which fostered cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

The group included director Peter Sellars (b. 1957), director of the Boston Shakespeare Theatre until June 1984 when he resigned to become artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s sort-lived American National Theatre; New York City’s Quaigh Theatre artistic director Will Lieberson (1916-95), and several other directors and playwrights. 

At the Soviet writers’ union, Shapiro made “a rather intemperate . . . speech” about seeing so many plays in Moscow with “happy endings.”  He asked the assembled playwrights why they didn’t “have the courage to talk about life as it really was.” 

According to Shapiro, after the session, Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937; see “Mark Rozovsky & The Theater at the Nikitsky Gate,” 5 October 2020) told him, “I have play, no happy ending, you want?”  They arranged to meet secretly and the playwright turned over the manuscript of Kafka: Father and Son (Russian: Кафка: отец и сын), “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.” 

Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka, based mostly on a 100-page letter Franz Kafka (Czech; 1883-1924) wrote, but never sent, to his father (November 1919; Letter to His Father/Brief an der Vater) and parts of “The Judgment” (1912), Kafka’s most autobiographical tale, at the Moscow Art Theater studio but the Ministry of Culture of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov (1914-84; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1982-84) suppressed it because the Czech embassy protested. 

Kafka was persona non grata in his native country and, the embassy charged, discussions of his works had been the incitement for the start of the Prague Spring of 1968.

Shapiro and Prischepenko smuggled the manuscript out of the U.S.S.R. in their suitcases, and Prischepenko translated it when they got back to the United States.  In January 1985, Shapiro mounted Albert Bermel’s Thrombo, a poorly received political farce about Americans in Africa, as a non-Shaliko production.  In March, he presented the world première of Kafka at La MaMa in a further attempt to relaunch Shaliko as a company. 

Much in line with previous and subsequent Shaliko efforts, Shapiro viewed Kafka: Father and Son as “another exploration of social creativity and repression through the autobiographical lens of the misfit artist . . . .”  It was, he averred, his “most overtly personal piece” and he remarked, “In rehearsal, I find that I am dramatizing my own life.” 

The director also saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression.  He felt a connection among his father, Joseph Papp, and Hermann Kafka (1854-1931), but the connection to Irving Shapiro was more pervasive even than that. 

“The play struck a very deep chord in me,” Shapiro admitted.  “It spoke to me immediately about my own childhood and my own difficult relationship with my father.”  Everything in the production—the sets, costumes, props, images—was drawn from his childhood “encounters” with his father. 

Unfortunately, the production garnered little of the compelling press attention needed to ignite the effort to restart the company: the New York Times didn’t send a critic and Robert Massa of the Village Voice didn’t like it.  The only timely coverage was a smattering of fringe papers.  Paul Berman of The Nation, writing after the closing of the production, about which he wasn’t entirely positive, lamented:

Kafka: Father and Son, by Mark Rozovsky, arrived at the morgue recently after receiving, as far as I know, no more than two paragraphs of mention anywhere—and those paragraphs a spade and shovel. . . .

The play has some of the intensity of Kafka himself . . ., an intensity that comes from enormous compression of thought and feeling, so that every line carries a truth on the surface and another truth below and an electric charge from one to the other. . . .   [T]here were brilliant aspects, too, which managed to distort the sense of distance between audience and stage so thoroughly that Christopher McCann, who played Kafka the Son, seemed to loom as if in a close-up, like one of those famous photographs of Kafka’s face and haunted eyes. . . . 

And to think that such a play has come and gone without an escort of critics waving and shooting fireworks.

Shapiro changed the design of Kafka for the 1990 version he mounted in Russia and the 1992 revival in New York.  The director continuously reworked his plays, though he seldom got a chance actually to restage them.  (Kafka was the only Shaliko play he remounted not once, but twice—not counting workshops.)

After the first production of Kafka: Father and Son, Shapiro moved into the third phase of his work.  In 1986, with the first professional production of The Yellow House, he began creating what he designated as “Original Collaborative Work.”  Though this effort (from 1986 to 1992) overlapped his work on new plays and commissions (1981 to 1990), it marked a change in the kind of material that occupied most of his attention. 

Instead of finding (or commissioning) texts that spoke to subjects of interest to him, he began creating pieces for what he wanted to communicate.  The performance pieces were far larger in scope than Shaliko’s previous work, and drew on more and more diverse sources for materials and themes. 

Additionally, works like The Yellow House and those that followed were changed, sometimes radically, to occupy each new venue.  The Yellow House also marked Shapiro’s most aggressive efforts to restart Shaliko. 

Shapiro began developing The Yellow House, called The Van Gogh Project in its early stages, in a 1984 workshop with students and faculty of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was artist-in-residence.  (See “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018).

Having conceived an intense interest in Vincent van Gogh (Dutch; 1853-90) early in his life, Shapiro spent time at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam while at the 1976 Holland Festival (1-23 June) with Woyzeck.  He began working on a van Gogh piece six years later, “when I was 36 and thinking of killing myself.” 

He was identifying with the painter who, he believed, had been “suicided by society” (a phrase quoted from an Antonin Artaud [French; 1896-1948] essay about the painter in 1965’s Artaud Anthology) when he was 37, but when Shapiro had finished Yellow House four years later, he was already 40 and “had missed jumping out my window of opportunity.”

Working with composer-singer-violinist Julie Lyonn Lieberman (b. 1954), Shapiro and his team created The Yellow House from letters between the painter and his brother Theo as a vehicle for the “personal testimony about the life and the mission of the artist,” a recurring theme in Shapiro’s work.

As a collaboratively built piece, The Yellow House changed as it developed.  At Trinity, it had been “frontal, chronological, direct [and] biographical,” but when the piece was restaged at La MaMa in February 1986 and then at Baltimore’s Theatre of Nations, UNESCO’s periodic global theater festival, in June, it had become more intricate, less linear, and more metaphorical. 

The Yellow House also reintroduced the Shaliko technique of the multiple casting of one role, which Shapiro had used in 1974’s The Measures Taken, passing the role of the Young Comrade among several members of the ensemble as prescribed by Brecht’s script.  In Yellow House, four actors, including a woman, played van Gogh in various avatars: Young Vincent, the Painter, the Mirror, and Self Portrait.  In one remarkable scene, the three last appeared together as the Painter painted his Self Portrait from his reflection in the Mirror.

Shaliko sets were often interactive and in The Yellow House, when van Gogh went mad, the furniture danced in mid-air, manipulated like marionettes by the actors, themselves, in full view of the audience.  Shapiro also staged the production at TON specifically for the huge, vaulting North Hall of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  (The site-specific set was designed by Jerry Rojo, a frequent collaborator of Shapiro’s.)

In a climactic scene that couldn’t have occurred at the La MaMa mounting, the director staged his most striking theatrical effect.  Using the high, vaulted ceiling at the Peabody, Shapiro projected van Gogh’s Starry Night 30 feet above the audience’s heads and had one of the actors playing the painter climb up a rope 23 feet into the “sky” where he stood on a pipe to “paint” the picture.

The Yellow House was perhaps Shaliko’s prettiest production.  Though essentially ignored by critics outside Baltimore (there was one review of the New York production in the theatrical trade paper Back Stage), it received excellent notices at the Theatre of Nations.  Non-linear in structure and surrealistic in design, it was visually stunning, captivating audiences and critics alike. 

This is the production that introduced me to Shapiro’s work.  I was reporting on TON and attended as many of the performances as I could.  I also interviewed several of the artists at the festival, one of whom was Shapiro.  I was greatly taken with Yellow House, possibly the most striking production at TON and one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever seen.  (I didn’t see Shapiro again after that for four years.)

The Yellow House, which Shapiro described in publicity as an “image opera,” began the exploration of the synthesis of arts in performance with Kabuki and Beijing Opera as paradigms.  It was an effort to apply practically Shapiro’s impulse to view gesture as language—to make the non-verbal elements of the performance text as vital and communicative as the literary text.

Though previous Shaliko shows had included music and dance—or at least choreography—with The Yellow House, Shapiro began complecting music, sound, dance, movement, speech, poetry, and slide projections—later film and video, too—more and more into his pieces. 

[The sixth segment of Leonardo Shapiro’s biography will be posted on Monday, 1 May.  I’ll be chronicling Shapiro’s initiation of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and Shaliko’s continuation of its efforts to make collaborative theater.

[I hope that ROTters are finding this biographical series as interesting to read as I had in composing it.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6” on May Day.]

'Woyzeck' (The Shaliko Company, 1976) – Part 2

[Welcome back to my reconstruction of Leonardo Shapiro’s staging of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, his 1836 unfinished play.  In Part 2, below, I discuss the physical production at New York City’s Public Theater in the spring of 1976 and then present a sampling of the critical reception. 

[If you haven’t read Part 1 of “Woyzeck,” I strongly recommend going back to 11 July and do so before reading this conclusion.  Aside from covering the background of the Shaliko-New York Shakespeare Festival-Other Theatre production of the classic play, I identify and define many of the names, concepts, and terms that recur below.]

Woyzeck’s physical production was relatively simple, even for the Shaliko Company.  It was  entirely made of construction scaffolding—a technique director Leonardo Shapiro would use again in The Yellow House in 1986.

Jerry Rojo (b. 1935), who had worked with Chaikin and the Open Theater previously, was going to do the set for Woyzeck.  The environmental theater designer had also conceived several Shaliko  sets, including 1975’s Ghosts as well as the aforementioned Yellow House. 

The set he conceived for Woyzeck, however, was going to cost $10,000.  Shapiro told the designer, “I’m sorry, we just can’t afford it,” and the director proceeded to design the Woyzeck set out of scaffolding that was $500 including pick-up and delivery.  (The costs are approximately the equivalent of $45,000 and $2,250 today.)

Shapiro recounted:

It was all made out of standard scaffolding, including the boards.  They delivered it.  We put it together in one day.  When the show was over, we called them and they took it back. 

The scheme not only saved the company both money and time, but there wasn’t any waste, pointed out the director.  He was rather proud of that because if they’d have built a set themselves, “When you’re done with it, then you just throw it away.”  His way, the scaffolding company retrieved it.

Rojo didn’t end up designing the final set, but his concept for it,  which Shapiro still labeled “lovely” (irrespective of the cost), held true for the cost-saving alternative.  Rojo characterized Martinson Hall, the production’s venue at the Public Theater, as “an elegant 19th-century room with a high ceiling, clear story [sic; ‘clerestory’] light and fluted columns.”

Rojo asked rhetorically, “So how do we deal with that room for Woyzeck which is brutal, bare and has to do with a class system?  Well, in our idea we agreed that we would play against the room.”

Shapiro said he “wanted something simple, rough, and symmetrical” to fit inside the Martinson’s “beautiful cast iron pillars.”  The scaffolding fit the bill.  As Shapiro explained his vision:

I was interested in medieval wagon shows and Las Vegas runways and Kabuki Hanamichi and vaudeville stage pictures.  I wanted Woyzeck to keep bursting out into the audience unsupported, like a Chaplin drunk.

(Charlie Chaplin, 1889-1977, was one of the few actors Shapiro admired.  The hanamichi is a long, thin, raised platform that runs from the back of a Japanese Kabuki theater, through the audience, to connect with the main stage.)

Shapiro and Rojo, continued the designer, decided to work against the room’s elegance, “so we thought we’d come into it with a kind of violence by using steel pipes and raw timber—rough-hewn timbers growing right out of these white, thin columns.”

The scaffolding was a close approximation of what Rojo had devised—only cheaper  and less labor-intensive.  As one reviewer described the result, it was “all so casual, scaffolding and planks set under the vaultlike interior of the Public Theatre’s Martinson Hall . . . .”  Another writer affirmed that “the setting [coordinated] with the space on which it is set in a uniquely creative manner.”

Two wooden runways (a pair of hanamichi?) formed a cross at one end of the Martinson with the scaffolding around them beneath the “vaulted ceiling and Romanesque arches,” creating what another reviewer dubbed “a dismal Kafkaesque setting.”  The audience viewed the performance from three sides.

Patricia McGourty’s costumes were in the same vein: plain, simple, ragged, and soiled.  Woyzeck, for instance, wore baggy uniform pants that were made from quilted moving blankets or furniture pads, held up by wide suspenders.  Shapiro explained that he “was thinking of early [Bertold]] Brecht and [Samuel] Beckett tramps, Bert Lahr and Red Skelton.” 

In line with both Shapiro’s tendency and Chaikin’s practice, the two artists, who both put considerable emphasis on physical performance, conceived a specific, stylized walk for Woyzeck.  As the director described it, it “was a broken, stuttering deconstruction . . . of Mick Jagger’s runway strut.” 

(Chaikin remarked later that he found himself falling into his character off stage: “I was walking down the street, and about four steps I took was in the walk of Woyzeck without my wanting to at all.  Pieces of the character stick to me.”

The response in the press, which was large, was decidedly mixed and leaned toward the negative.  Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News opened his notice with, “It is with a heavy heart, not to mention limbs, that I bring you news of George Buechner’s ‘Woyzeck’ . . . .”  Watt continued: “Taking Buechner’s . . . creation, . . . the Shaliko people have subjected it to so bald, lifeless, and deliberately untheatrical a treatment that the result is a non-play.”

Watt isn’t kinder to Chaikin, describing him as “short” and “dough-faced” and deemed that he played Woyzeck “so vacantly as to have almost no presence at all.”

In the New York Post, Sylviane Gold found Shaliko’s approach to the play “almost gothic—Woyzeck as a bewildered, bisexual madman,” which Gold thought might “serve if Buechner shared the romantic outlook of his contemporaries [Alfred] de Musset [1810-57] and [Victor] Hugo [1802-85].”  Of Chaikin’s performance, Gold declared that “his Woyzeck takes over the stage from the rest of the company . . . .  But it’s a Woyzeck that’s bereft of humanity, an automaton, a lobotomized stutterer whose words are shouted in a monochromatic voice.” 

Her response to the walk Shapiro and Chaikin devised is that Woyzeck “moves in a dream, heavy-limbed and distracted and understanding nothing.  But Buechner’s Woyzeck understands too much and that’s his problem.” 

The New York Times’ Clive Barnes launched into his review saying that “one would like to welcome Leonardo Shapiro’s production” of Woyzeck, “but in all honesty one cannot.”  He specified his reasons: “Mr. Shapiro’s staging appeared crude, emblematic and undramatic.  The grim setting was not ineffective, but most of the acting had a dull brashness to it.” 

“There was one real exception to the general rule of mediocrity, however, and this was Joseph Chaikin’s performance,” continued Barnes. 

[H]is portrayal here was masterly in its crumbling, shambling dignity.  With bright raising eyes stuck in a gray potato face, with his voice reduced to an oppressed monotone and his gestures imprisoned to the futility almost of grimace, Mr. Chaikin wandered through the play as if subconsciously in search of a better cast. 

Barnes’s colleague at the Times, Walter Kerr, was curiously almost complimentary—he had hated Shaliko’s Ghosts the year before so much that Shapiro answered him back in the reviewer’s very own paper—remarking that

the very shaky Shaliko Company has here done better than customary work.  Apart from some flamboyant symbolism . . . the staging by Leonardo Shapiro is plain but graphic, the figures in this barren landscape could have come from a skilled if academic genre painter, and guest‐actor Joseph Chaikin in the central role is a decided bonus.

Mr. Chaikin, eyes red‐rimmed, mouth working convulsively whenever an interior rage overtakes him, moves from his early pontification to an ultimate animalism about as effectively as an actor can, I think, and is genuinely disturbing as he tries to rid himself of the bloody knife he cannot find water deep enough to hide.

In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach found that Chaikin’s Woyzeck was “persuasively played” as a “man who expresses his thoughts almost  stammeringly, his eyes rimmed with red, his smile fixed and empty, his movements limp and tentative until, when he commits the murder, they become almost spastic.”

A few days later, in the same paper, George Oppenheimer expressed the opposite opinion.  “The staging by the company’s director, Leonardo Shapiro, and the acting by its members reduce Buechner to incomprehensible gibberish,” he wrote. 

Ross Wetzsteon, the theater editor of the Village Voice, asked several reviewers each to write about the Shapiro-Chaikin Woyzeck, which he dubbed “the most eagerly anticipated production of the season.”  The “debate” was entitled “A Dream Production Falls Flat.”

Julius Novick:  Leonardo Shapiro’s production at the Public Theatre is literal and uninspired.  Worse, its rhythms are all wrong. . . .  Mr. Shapiro’s staging is slow and placid, with the scenes separated by discreet little flute-and-drum-accompanied blackouts that are fatal to the play’s necessary momentum.

[T]he confrontation [of Chaikin and Woyzeck] is a fizzle.  Mr. Chaikin is a cuddly, friendly actor, slightly built and fuzzy-haired, with a soft voice and soft contours. . . .  [H]e is unable to turn himself into jagged, violent Woyzeck.  He works away at it intelligently and conscientiously, with  staring eyes and slack jaw, angular scarecrow movements, and a stammer that develops into veritable seizures of inarticulacy; but in spite of all his efforts he remains essentially a teddy-bear.

Arthur Sainer:  I’m in an obvious minority among my Voice colleagues and the daily press concerning the virtues of the current production.  Despite director Leo Shapiro’s tendency to simplify what seems to me Buchner’s complex and sometimes contradictory vision . . . , I found Shapiro’s production in all its bareness a most compelling one.

First, there’s Joseph Chaikin’s masterly portrayal.  Joe’s Woyzeck is physically like a landscape overrun by the enemy: bruised, scorched, pockmarked; the tanks of the oppressor lie heavily on this terrain . . . .

Joe inhabits Woyzeck’s spirit with feelings of distress and compassion so harrowing that it sometimes becomes difficult to watch . . . .

I like much of what I would call the “dryness” of the Shaliko production. . . .  This dryness, this lack of resonance suggests that Woyzeck’s life is flying by as if in a dream.

What I find a problem is the multiplicity of styles. 

Ross Wetzsteon:  While Chaikin effectively conveys the sense of the fatefully tortured victim (though it must be said that with such an ineptly directed cast, he seems tortured by nothing more menacing than a gaggle of clowns), he utterly fails to convey any sense of complex consciousness.

Some performances give the exhilarating effect of a man walking a tightrope without a net—what’s missing here is not the net but the tightrope.

Terry Curtis Fox:  There is a moment, early in this production, when Chaikin stands stage-center and begins to stutter.  It is not just a moment of speech—the blocked mind causes the entire body to shudder, the tremble’s final emergence as comprehensible sound become the transformation of impulse by will.  It should, of course, be a major statement of character: the blocked Woyzeck released.  It isn’t.  The reason, I think, is that it is instantly recognizable as Chaikinesque shtick . . . .  [T]he power is missing because the rest of the Shaliko Company is not acting in anything approximating a similar style.

Shapiro’s troup[e] acts in an agitprop, caricaturist style which is wholly opposed to Chaikin’s performance:  Where Chaikin attempts to make the unfeeling human, the Shaliko actors drain all the feeling from their parts. . . .  Chaikin behaves like an imported actor doing a star turn in a company whose values differ significantly from his own.

Shapiro has developed neither metaphor nor mechanism.  He has merely given his company an idea of acting, been given by the presence of Joseph Chaikin an opposing idea of acting, and hoped that this clash would provide ample feeling for tragedy.  It doesn’t . . . .  Lacking sufficient control of the acting on stage, Shapiro loses control of the play.

Eileen Blumenthal:  Leo Shapiro’s direction aims at peopling the play in part with just . . . rich stage cartoons, and this strikes me as precisely the right way to deal with the expressionist elements of the play.  The approach is, of course, a fragile and difficult one, and at this point in the production several of the major cartoons have not quite hit their resonance.  But the production is still growing . . . and the cartoons are becoming richer.

And Chaikin’s performance is complex and arresting.  While he plays Woyzeck as a deeply pained, human character, he also gives him a subtle surreal dimension . . . which keeps Woyzeck in the same play as the cartoon-like drum-major, captain, and doctor.

[T]he production . . . probably errs slightly toward presentational—toward showing Woyzeck and his world rather than inhabiting them. 

Erika Munk:  I’m not priggish about the inviolability of scripts—but if you want to mess around with Buchner, you better be Alban Berg.  This production makes a multitude of pointless or condescending changes . . . but there are three crucial distortions: Marie’s character, the role her child plays, and a passive simplification of Woyzeck’s nature.

. . . I think [the distortion] means that while this production might come up with some affection for dead women, it has no use for live ones.

This lengthy critical exchange somewhat exercised Chaikin and he wrote to Wetzsteon (who wrote back).  Referring to the Voice article’s headline, the actor wrote:

It is important for me to make clear that doing Woyzeck was not my dream. . . .  Woyzeck was among six or seven plays which I’ve always found compelling and I hoped that a circumstance would arise, or that I might bring one about, to make it possible to work on—either directing or acting.

Chaikin also said:

The idea of a symposium was a good one, but having “the most eagerly anticipated production of the season” was bound to bring out the sourness even more than otherwise.  I want also to make clear that I feel that there are many weaknesses in the production and in my performance.  In any case, it was a good idea to take many views, but under the heading “Chaikin’s Dream” I experience it as obscene journalism.

To be accurate, Wetzsteon didn’t call the production “Chaikin’s Dream” exactly.  “A Dream Production Falls Flat,” the headline, seems to me to refer not to a dream the actor had, but to one the Voice writers had—or the potential audience for the production—entertaining a vision of the actor’s return to the stage after so long a hiatus in a role seemingly perfect for him.

Now, a tag line above the article’s title did read “theatre: chaikin’s woyzeck,” so Chaikin could be excused if he felt the headline was addressed to him.

We know, incidentally, that Chaikin wasn’t entirely happy with the work on Woyzeck.  He alludes to some weaknesses in his performance, and in a Drama Review article that came out in 1981, the actor confessed:

It wasn’t so comfortable with Leo Shapiro in Wozzeck [sic].  I think Leo is very interesting, and gifted, and it’s not to do with him, but it’s to do with our relationship and that particular material.  I felt if I had an opinion, he had not to regard it because it wasn’t his idea.  I had to stop having opinions.  And he’s a very able director.  I think it was a bind we got into.

It should be noted, though, that in an earlier TDR interview, Chaikin attributed his reluctance to offer opinions not so much to Shapiro’s attitude as to his own fears that because the cast knew him as a prominent director, his ideas would, first, be accepted too easily or, second, be entirely ignored.

In another statement, Chaikin felt that, in comparison to two performances after Woyzeck—his collaboration with Sam Shepard in 1979, Tongues and his and Steven Kent’s adaptation of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing in 1981—he was constrained by the material:

I would have liked to have (had) the same elbow room with Wozzeck as I had with Texts and Tongues in that it’s an unfinished play. . . .   I’m so drawn to the play, but when I was finally doing it, it was just so unrelentingly dark and windowless.

Indeed, Chaikin expressed trepidations about the decision to do the production: “In the beginning, I felt awful about doing it.  At first, I thought it was a real compromise . . . .”

Wetzsteon responded almost three weeks later:

I’m sorry you were so upset about our coverage of “Woyzeck,” in particular that you put so much emphasis on the headline rather than the concept.

The Voice editor defended the use of the term “most anticipated event” and apologized for the headline that had so disturbed Chaikin.  He emphasized, however, “that the important decision was to have a number of critical sensibilities . . . write about this production.”

To return to the press response to the Shaliko-Other Theatre Woyzeck, Marilyn Stasio, writing in Cue magazine (a well-regarded New York entertainment weekly absorbed into New York magazine in 1980), said the play “happens to play like thunder.”  Stasio explained:

Shapiro uses a fluid, almost nonchalant staging technique to relate the story . . . .The tight company . . . slips lithely in and out of its shadowy character roles, conveying with wonderfully economic strokes Büchner’s savage satiric portraits of 19th-century society.

“Joseph Chaikin’s Woyzeck functions as the magnetic focal point of this impressive production,” wrote the Cue writer. 

Confining the poor doomed devil’s humanity to his eyes, Chaikin shrinks his body into a beaten-down, shuffling wreck.  He is Brecht’s Schweik brought to his knees, Chaplin’s tramp crushed by a joke suddenly turned ugly and unfunny.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Charles Ryweck affirmed that “‘Woyzeck’ emerges, in Joseph Papp’s presentation of the Shaliko Company’s production . . . as little more than of perfunctory interest to other than confirmed theatre buffs.”  Ryweck specified that “Leonard[o] Shapiro . . . has not notably helped to bring into focus this admittedly fragmentary play with his non-theatrical direction.” 

The production, the HR reviewer did feel, “is distinguished by the performance of Joseph Chaikin . . . who captures beautifully this trampled upon, desperate little man with intimations of the unleashed demons lurking inside him.”

“The cumulative effect [of the play] should be devastating,” thought the New Yorker’s Edith Oliver.  “But this performance is elaborate and glum and muddled and entirely lacking in the dramatist’s irony; it is also poorly acted by almost everyone in the company.” 

The “almost” in Oliver’s assessment of the acting was apparently a reference to Chaikin, who, the New Yorker review-writer attested, “plays [Woyzeck] with eloquence, most of that eloquence being physical.”

He walks with an odd, shambling gait, like a puppet.  His face, most of the time, is numb and expressionless and his eyes nearly unfocused; suddenly they blaze with overwhelming feeling—hurt or anger.  He shuffles along and then abruptly stops, sensing a movement in the earth beneath him or seeing a vision of blazing light in the sky.  All of the character is in every muscle of his body, and when he speaks, he speaks to a purpose.  None of his lines go to waste.

Harold Clurman, the great 20th-century director and sometime reviewer, described the Public Theater production in The Nation thus:

The more or less young people of the Shaliko Co. under Leonardo Shapiro’s direction present the play on a tier of bare wooden platforms in an expressionism veering between horrifically crude vaudeville and impassioned shouting, with all but two of the actors playing a variety of parts.

Clurman added, “Despite the limitation of means at the company’s disposal and the general patchiness of the attack, manifesting more dedication and ambitious purpose than finished execution, the production registers; one remembers it.”

Of Chaikin’s work, the Nation reviewer observed that he “enacts Woyzeck with a make-up of bloodstained deprivation in a fashion which shows marks of Grotowski training.  He throws himself into the part with sustained physical and vocal energy of unusual ferocity, versatility and clarity of intention.”

Back in the ’70s, there were many press outlets, both newspapers and magazines, that were significant critical voices in New York theater, but either no longer exist (Cue, from which I quoted above, is an example) or are no longer important to theater coverage.  Another one of these was the Women’s Wear Daily (which now publishes as an online magazine under the title WWD—the original paper’s nickname—but doesn’t post theater reviews).

Reviewer Christopher Sharp reported that “the production succeeds in translating Buchner’s powers of narration and poetry onto the stage.”  Sharp admonished that “those who are interested in seeing this forerunner of modern drama to rush to Lafayette St. before this fine production goes away.”

“Chaikin has the perfect look and build for Woyzeck,” asserted Sharp.  “There is a fire in his eyes that clashes against his awkward movements.”

The WWD reviewer concluded, “One gets the impression from this production that we are seeing the play from Woyzeck’s point of view.  The scenes are short and abrupt, and they flicker on the stage like bad cinematography.  There is little doubt that Woyzeck sees images in this way.”

In the Record of suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, Emory Lewis dubbed the NYSF production “both flawed and fascinating at the same time.”  He continued, “Leonardo Shapiro . . . has staged ‘Woyzeck’ with careful attention to its offbeat style.  He choreographs every movement.  In his vision, the parable becomes a dance of death.”

“The actors are superb,” declared Lewis.  “They use their bodies with great skill.  Obviously they all have been thoroughly trained in acrobatics.  Most sing and play instruments.”

Of the lead actor, the Record reviewer found, “Joseph Chaikin . . . is magnificent.  He captures the lost quality of Woyzeck . . . .  I like the way he seems to move in several directions at the same time.”

William J. Raidy of the now-defunct Long Island Press, locally known as the LIP, labeled the NYSF production “a fine revival” with “Joseph Chaikin turning in a superb performance.”  Raidy added, “The Shaliko company, while perhaps making ‘Woyzeck’ too contemporary in its adaptation, has caught much of the outcry and almost comic-tragedy of Buchner’s drama . . . .”  The LIP reviewer explained the former remark as referring to “a few dramatic tricks I feel are not right for the original spirit of this 19th century . . . drama . . . .”

“Leonardo Shapiro has directed this production of ‘Woyzeck’ as if the players were some sort of toys or torn rag dolls,” Raidy reported, continuing that “for the most part, the production works very well.  It is certainly enhanced by Chaikin’s touching performance . . . .”

The LIP journalist felt that “Mr. Chaikin’s an exceptionally gifted performer and for his presence alone, I would recommend a visit to ‘Woyzeck.’”

In addition to the exchange of letters between Chaikin and Ross Wetzsteon of the Village Voice, Chaikin received appreciative letters from spectators.  Two that were preserved include one from an Off-Broadway director and producer who financed the historic 1961 St. Mark’s Playhouse production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, drama teacher and playwright Geraldine Lust (1920-87).

Lust also directed plays for the Living Theatre and conducted workshops and directed for the Open Theater.  Having studied directing under Lee Strasberg and helped launch Stella Adler’s acting school, Lust wrote on 25 March 1976:

[I] am delighted that [Clive Barnes] appreciated the commitment of your performance.

It is still haunting me, and I am still afraid for Woyzeck’s soul.  If there is any way, during the run of the play that I might see it again . . ., I’d love to.

Distinguished playwright Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931), who, by 1976 had already won an Obie and been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Creative Artists Public Service grant, was a member of the downtown theater scene (many of her early plays were produced at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village). 

On 26 March, she dropped Chaikin a hand-written note:  “I’ll always remember your performance in Woyzeck.”  She added a request: “Wish you’d do my plays some times [sic] even though they’re old.” 

(Chaikin would, in fact, direct one of Kennedy’s plays: in 1995, he staged A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White at the Signature Theatre in New York City.)

In the early days of his company, Shapiro advocated touring and participating in theater festivals.  Indeed, taking productions to festivals around the world had a special importance for Shapiro.  “It’s important to me for the same reason  that having a company is important to me,” he explained: “To be a citizen and to find some way to have some base in which I can say something about the way things are done.” 

After the NYSF production of Woyzeck ran at the Public, Shapiro took it abroad to the Holland Festival.  The production played at the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam from 8 to 22 June 1976.  (He even took the scaffolding idea with him: the New York supplier picked up its material, as Shapiro had wished, and “[w]hen the show went to Europe, I got scaffolding there.”)

We’ve heard after the fact how Chaikin identified disappointments in his performance in Woyzeck.  Shapiro did, too.  Some years after the production, the director wrote: “Our Woyzeck was softer than I would have liked.  Our Usurer wasn’t Jewish.  Woyzeck stabbed Marie with a rubber knife.” 

Following the run of Woyzeck, Shapiro disbanded The Shaliko Company.  The two actors in the troupe about whom he cared most, he explained, Mary Zakrzewski (who played Margaret, Marie and Woyzeck’s neighbor and Marie’s friend) and Chris McCann (b. 1953; Andres, Woyzeck’s fellow soldier, friend, and confidant), had left Shaliko following the run.  The two had been among the original core of actors Shapiro had recruited four years earlier to form the new company.  

After disbanding the company, Shapiro decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn (b. 1943). 

Shapiro and composer Margaret Pine (b. 1948), another of Shaliko’s original members, had developed a musical version of Molière’s Misanthrope.  Shapiro brought it to Papp to produce and the impresario agreed.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro refused to make changes and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

Thus ended Shapiro’s association with NYSF—and opened a rift between the director and the producer that never healed.  When Shapiro re-formed Shaliko, he had to find a new home.  He connected with La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), and the troupe worked out of La MaMa E.T.C. for its last decade of producing—and Shapiro established the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, his teaching program from 1986 to 1992 with Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, there as well.

[Only occasionally do I append a list of sources with a post, but it seems useful and interesting in this case to catalogue all the press coverage for the Shaliko-NYSF-Other Theatre  Woyzeck.  Here’s my bibliography for Leonardo Shapiro’s Woyzeck:

• Albrecht, Ernest. “Runway show never quite gets of ground.” Home News [New Brunswick, NJ] 25 Mar. 1976: 37.
• Barnes, Clive. “Stage: ‘Woyzeck’ Revived.” New York Times 25 March 1976: 43.
• Clurman, Harold. “Theatre.” Review of Woyzeck. Nation 10 Apr. 1976: [445-]46.
• Gold, Sylviane. “A Shell of a Play.” New York Post 25 March 1976: 17.
• Guernsey, Otis L., Jr. Curtain Times: The New York Theater: 1965-1987. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987. 340 [passing mention]
• Hill, Holly. “Classics of 19th century good off-Broadway fare.” Reporter Dispatch [Westchester Rockland Newspapers, White Plains, NY] 5 April 1976, sec. B: 6.  [Same review appeared in other chain papers under different headlines.]
• Jenner, Cynthia Lee. “Disastrous Ego Trip.” Villager [New York] 1 April 1976: 6, 15.
• Kellman, Alice J. “Joseph Chaikin the Actor.” Drama Review 20.3 (T71: Sept. 1976): 17-26.
• Kerr, Walter. “Theater: Stage View: The Trouble With ‘Woyzeck.’” New York Times 4 April 1976, sec. D: 1, 5.
• Klein, Barbara. “‘Woyzeck’ a Waste.” Paterson News [Paterson, NJ] 25 Mar. 1976: 30.
• Lawrence, Linda. “Neatly staged work lacks feeling.” Chelsea Clinton News [New York] 1 April 1976: 15.
• Lester, Elenore. “‘I Am The Audience In Action.’” New York Times 7 Mar. 1976, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”):  5, 34.
• Lewis, Emory. “Lively Arts: ‘Woyzeck’ engrossing.” The Record [Hackensack, NJ] 25 March 1976, sec. B: 18.
• Malcolm, Tom. “‘Woyzeck’ Fails To Satisfy.” Montclarion [Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ] 23 Apr. 1976: 12.
• Mullen, Ron. “off-broadway: ‘Woyzeck.’” Where It’s At [New York City] 5.15 (12 Apr. 1976): 16, 18, 20.
• Oliver, Edith. “Off Broadway: ‘Woyzeck,’ Sort Of.” New Yorker 5 April 1976: 96, 98.
• Oppenheimer, George. “Theater/II: An Enchanting Evening, by Jove!” Newsday [Melville, NY] 4 April 1976, part II: 9, 21.
• Pegnato, Lisa J. “Breathing in a Different Zone: Joseph Chaikin.” Drama Review 25.3 (T91: Fall 1981): 7-18.
• Rabkin, Gerald. “The Human Beast.” Soho Weekly News [New York] 1 April 1976: 32-33.
• Raidy, William A. “First Nighter: ‘Woyzeck’ fascinating drama.” Long Island Press [Jamaica, NY] 25 March 1976, “Everyday Magazine”: 14.
• Rojo, Jerry. “Interview: Jerry Rojo: Environmental Theatre.” Performing Arts Journal 1.1 (Spring 1976): 20-28.
• Ryweck, Charles. “Stage Review: Woyzeck.” Hollywood Reporter 31 Mar. 1976: 6.
• Sainer, Arthur. “How Is It Going to Come Together?” Village Voice [New York] 11-17 March [1976]: 141, 143.
• S[ainer], A[rthur]. “Voice Centerfold: Chaikin Puts ‘Woyzeck’ Together.” Village Voice [New York] 15 Mar. 1978: 60-61.
• Schechter, Joel. “American Dramaturgs.” Drama Review 20.2 (T70: June 1976): 88-92.
• Sharp, Christopher. “The Theater: ‘Woyzeck.’” Women’s Wear Daily [New York] 25 March 1976: 11.
• Stasio, Marilyn. “Chaikin Says ‘Yes’ to ‘Woyzeck.’” Cue [New York] 10 April 1976: 21-22.
• Stasio, Marilyn. “Reviews: Theatre: The Vision.” Cue [New York] 3 April 1976: 10.
• Wallach, Allan. “In Review/II: Stage: A universe so desolate.” Newsday [Melville, NY] 25 March 1976, sec. A: 8-9.
• Watt, Douglas. “Overdoing the dumb act.” Daily News [New York] 25 March 1976: 92.
• Watts, Richard. “The Week in Theater: ‘Vanities’ Looks at Three Women.” New York Post 29 March 1976: 42.
• Wetzsteon, Ross; Julius Novick; Arthur Sainer, Terry Curtis Fox; Ellen Blumenthal, and Erika Munk, “Theatre: Chaikin’s Woyzeck: A Dream Production Falls Flat.” Village Voice [New York] 5 April 1976: 123-24. 

 [There are 32 articles above, including 24 reviews.  The rest are interviews and other kinds of reports.  Some of these periodicals have online archives, like the New York Times, but some only permit access to subscribers; others don’t go back as far as 1976.  (I’ve quoted from other sources that aren’t on this list, articles and interviews that aren’t specifically about Woyzeck.  Some of these are recorded interviews I conducted and others are unpublished typescripts, neither of which are available publicly.)

[Libraries will have collections of some of the titles above, most notably the New York Public Library (which keeps some in different locations, such as Women’s Wear Daily in the Science, Industry, and Business Library, Cue and the Hollywood Reporter at the Library for the Performing Arts, and the New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.  Some of the above reviews and articles are only available as clippings in the files of the LPA at NYPL. 

[Other libraries, such as university libraries, will have smaller collections and may restrict access,  I can only tell you that at the time I gathered this material when I was doing the research, in the years before the Internet, it took me months and years to assemble this collection.  Of course, I didn’t have a handy list off of which to work.]