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.]

'The Misanthrope' – The Musical

 

[I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company, an experimental theater troupe based in the East Village.  I got to know Leo Shapiro in 1986, when I covered the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place in Baltimore that year.  I was very taken with his company’s work, represented then by The Yellow House (see my post on 9 February 2018), a company-created play about painter Vincent van Gogh.

[My report on the ToN was published in The Drama Review of Spring 1987.  A separate article on The Yellow House appeared in the same issue.

[Six years later, TDR editor Richard Schechner asked me to write a profile of Leo and his company.  I shadowed Leo for several months and “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” was published in TDR in the Winter 1993 issue.

[Combing through Shaliko’s files and interviewing Leo and his colleagues and collaborators, I eventually put together a fairly complete history of his and the company’s work over his lifetime.  Though the original article focused exclusively on the work of The Shaliko Company (1972-93), I expanded that focus and included a record of Leo’s independent work, for a prospective book. 

[One production that fell into that category was an abortive staging of a musical based on Molière’s The Misanthrope for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977. Below is an account of that ill-fated production.

[Leo died of bladder cancer in Vallecito, New Mexico, on 22 January 1997.  He was 15 days past his 51st birthday.]

New York City’s Shaliko Company’s second production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), introduced the troupe to Joseph Papp (1921-91), who offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as its home—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.  The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project, was in performance at New York University.

Playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), whom Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Shaliko’s founder and artistic director, had known since his NYU-student days and who had a relationship with Papp and the NYSF, praised Measures to Gail Merrifield (b. ca. 1935), Papp’s wife and the NYSF director of new play development, who saw it and then brought Papp to the Shaliko production.  Measures moved into the NYSF’s Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Following Measures, Shaliko presented Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975) and then Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1976).  (For accounts of the latter two productions, see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko's Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014, and “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020.)  After Woyzeck, however, the two actors about whom Shapiro cared most, Mary Zakrzewski and Chris McCann (b. 1952), left Shaliko, Zakrzewski to quit the professional theater and McCann to pursue commercial aspirations. 

Shapiro disbanded the company and 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.  Some years earlier, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666) with Shaliko but let the project drop. 

The composer, Margaret Pine (b. 1948), 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.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro had cast John McMartin as Alceste, John Bottoms as Philante, Helen Gallagher as Arsinoé, and Virginia Vestoff as Célimène but, according to the director, Papp wanted performers who had worked at the Public in the past, including Raul Julia and Patti LuPone or Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. 

“He wanted the Broadway pitch,” Shapiro opined.  “He wanted a Broadway musical hit.  He was hungry for another Chorus Line . . . .”  Papp acquiesced to Shapiro’s casting plans but ultimately the producer objected to the timbre of the production:

Like, Joe was upset because Alceste was too sexy.  He was upset because they were too sexy as a couple—Alceste and Célimène.  He thought that Alceste was too angry.  He thought that Alceste was too much the hero. 

He couldn’t stand that I had a scene in which Alceste and Philinte held hands.  He thought that was just awful and he said, “Are they homosexuals?  Why are they holding hands?  You can’t have that happen.”  And I said, you know, “They’re best friends.  They, as far as I know, are not homosexual.  But if they are, it’s none of your business, Joe.  I mean, that’s not the point I’m making in any case.”  And he said, “Well, you can’t make that point.”  

He said, “The audience won’t understand that.”  I said, “I am teaching the audience that.  That’s why I’m doing it.  I want them to see it.  You know.”  He just couldn’t understand that you can create a convention in that way.  He felt like this means A; it can’t mean B.  This is what it meant to him.  I’ve never forgotten that.  I don’t know what . . . .  He had this lexicon of things, you know.

Shapiro refused to make changes, he said, and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

(A Chorus Line opened at the Public Theater on 15 April 1975.  It moved to Broadway’s Shubert Theatre on 25 July and stayed there for 15 years, closing on 28 April 1990 after 6,137 performances, winning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical, and, as of 2005, grossing over $277 million for the Public Theater.  The New York Shakespeare Festival’s share of the profits supported the company’s efforts for years and the play continues to produce income every time it’s revived or the 1985 film is shown.)

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own. 

According to the New York Shakespeare Festival, Margaret Pine brought The Misanthrope to Papp in October 1976 after having considered other companies, including André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, and the director Mel Shapiro.  (Stage director Mel Shapiro [b. 1937] is not related to Leonardo Shapiro.  He previously directed—and adapted—the musical version of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona for NYSF in 1971, for which he won an Obie Award, among other productions for the company.) 

According to Joan C. Daly, an attorney for NYSF, Papp maintained that Leonardo Shapiro became part of the project because he had worked with Pine “in developing the concept of such a production, and she brought him along.”  (Daly [b. 1925] was a lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, attorneys for NYSF.)

From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur, whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  As both Jeffrey Horowitz, Shapiro’s prep school schoolmate, and Marilyn Zalkan, Shaliko’s long-time administrator, have remarked, Shapiro had no background in music or musical theater. 

Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker, recommended J Ranelli, another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro.  (Parker [1927-2019], late Vice President of Curtis Brown, Ltd., not only represented Wilbur [1921-2017] and Ranelli [1938-2019], but also Bill Gile [1942- 2011], the director who eventually replaced Shapiro on 7 October 1977.)

Wilbur, however, had approved of Margaret Pine as the composer, but did not approve of Shapiro as director and even as early as March 1977, Wilbur held “lingering doubts about Leo Shapiro as director.”  In addition, Wilbur’s contract with NYSF stipulated that his text would remain intact unless he authorized changes.  This provision clearly would make it difficult to accommodate songs and may have ultimately helped sabotage the production. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that “while there was merit in the concept of presenting ‘The Misanthrope’ with music, Mr. Shapiro could not handle it” and that what Pine and Shapiro 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 view point, 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 also objected to the alterations to his translation and demanded immediate restoration of “unauthorized cuts” in his text. 

At the same time, he insisted that he’d approved Margaret Pine as the composer but hadn’t agreed to any other composer and hadn’t been consulted on the replacement of her songs with anyone else’s.  

Finally, Wilbur demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production. 

According to Horowitz, Shapiro’s long-time friend who’d been in the cast of Shawn’s Youth Hostel at NYSF, there was more to the contretemps, much of it the fault of Shapiro. 

After the director disbanded The Shaliko Company in 1976 and left the Public Theater, Papp was angry at him and Shapiro began gaining a reputation for someone “who had problems.”  Shawn brokered Shapiro’s return later in 1976 to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director. 

Papp’s ultimate rejection of Shawn’s plays for the regular NYSF season had nothing to do with Shapiro’s direction, but then the producer hired Shapiro for Misanthrope and trouble started to appear.  “He wouldn’t listen to Papp,” said Horowitz, founder, in 1979, and artistic director of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience.  “He was rigorous about his visions.”  Shapiro’s friend went even further, however:

I began to be aware then, starting in the late ’70s—around that time that Papp fired him—that he was having a great deal of trouble putting together his ideas and the community’s understanding of those ideas.

Shapiro’s fellow artistic director had watched, he said, as Shapiro’s acclaim began to deteriorate.  He saw his friend begin in the early 1970s with great respect and strength, both among critics and theater professionals like Papp.  Horowitz called that Shapiro, at the start of his career, “an enfant terrible,” a “brilliant iconoclast.”  Then, Horowitz recounted, “Something happened where he began to get a reputation as someone who had once been very good but was no longer that.”

If Horowitz is correct—and it must be said that he wasn’t present for the Misanthrope rehearsals, nor had he been a member of Shaliko—then this may have been another instance of Shapiro’s inability to function as part of a team or to defer to anyone else’s ideas.  

He would do this again in 1992, with similar consequences, with playwright Karen Malpede over the direction Blue Heaven and the administration of Trinity College over the management of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, which the Hartford, Connecticut-based college administered and Shapiro conducted in New York City.  (A blog article on Blue Heaven is posted on 11 and 14 May 2020.)

Regardless of the perspective, however, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly:

I worshiped Joe; he was like my father, you know.  I came there after my father died and I basically identified Joe as my father and I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my life.  I thought it was home. 

I never got over being fired by Joe.  It never had occurred to me that it was possible.  I never knew you could be fired; I didn’t know about contracts. 

I didn’t know it was his show; I thought it was my show.  I’d never done a show that wasn’t my show.  I mean, I made it up; it was my idea.  It was my idea to do a musical of The Misanthrope.  I mean, what was his about it? 

You know, I didn’t understand what was on paper.  I never looked at anything on paper.  I don’t have contracts; I don’t deal with that world.

(Shapiro met Papp and moved his company into the Public Theater only a few months after the death of his father, from whom he was estranged and with whom he had a strained relationship all through his life, on 15 January 1974.  The timing certainly played a large part in Shapiro’s incipient relationship with the impresario.)

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.  “I just was beaten.  That’s really like the worst experience of my life, getting fired off that show.”

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Even years later, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . .  I don’t know that I’d say I admire him a lot.  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

He noted that there was some of Irving Shapiro in George Bartenieff’s 1992 portrayal of Hermann Kafka, but he also admitted that there were aspects of Papp in it as well.  Shapiro, after all,  saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression (see my post about this play on 5 and 8 November 2015). 

Part of the root cause of the failure of Shapiro’s freelance directing outing at the Public was his understanding—or lack of understanding—of the standing of an independent director.  Reviewing his motivation to disband Shaliko, Shapiro lamented, “[I] thought I could do bigger work without a company. . . .  I was wrong.  Working freelance didn’t work.  I wasn’t free to address issues I cared about in radical ways; I wasn’t free to rehearse for months at a time or develop original work.”

Aside from losing his company and being unable to develop his own material, Shapiro learned that he was simply no good at working for other people such as producers and artistic directors who had control over his work.  “I have had problems with producers . . .,” he confessed.  “And that’s . . . a character defect . . . .  And I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  

This was the basis, of course, of his falling out with Papp, with whom Shapiro had gotten along fine as long as Papp had functioned simply as sugar-daddy.  When he found himself contending with Papp over the substance of a production, Shapiro discovered he couldn’t follow orders.  Being fired by Papp left Shapiro confused:

I think that that experience has a lot to do with the fact that I basically can’t work for anyone else.  I think that I didn’t know what it was like to have somebody have power over your work and be able to say, “You can’t do this.  You have to do it my way.”  Artistically that had never happened to me and it was such a dreadful experience that I really avoided it one way or another ever since.  I mean, I basically don’t work for other people.

Papp and Shapiro never reconciled and Shapiro continued to feel cheated because he had left Misanthrope unfinished, something he said he had never done before.  (This assertion isn’t true.  Shapiro was fired from Yes Yes, No No, his first professional job as a director, before the show opened on New Year’s Eve 1968; it closed after one performance.)

An abortive attempt at a reconciliation did occur in 1984.  In a letter to Papp, Shapiro wrote, “It was nice to talk to you, it helped me set some things at rest.”  (Shapiro wrote on Trinity College letterhead rather than Shaliko Company stationery and provided his Hartford campus and residence phone numbers.  Did the younger director feel that an academic base was more likely to get Papp’s sympathetic attention?) 

Shapiro went on to broach a number of subjects, including several “projects I am interested in” (which included Edward Bond’s Lear, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Ibsen’s Little Eyolf), but Papp rebuffed the overtures.  The letter bears handwritten notes by Gail Merrifield Papp, instructions for a member of the New York Shakespeare Festival staff to respond “for JP.” 

Merrifield described Shapiro as “a director that once worked here, old rift that recently got dealt with” and she instructed the staff member to reply with “the 5 No’s”—referring to the one-word marginal and interlinear annotations she had made by each of Shapiro’s proposals or suggestions—“without being brutal.” 

The tone, at least of Merrifield’s notes, was brusque and dismissive, however.  Even though neither Papp nor his wife themselves had reached out to Shapiro, having delegated that task to a subordinate, when Papp died of prostate cancer on 31 October 1991, losing the chance to make up with the man he had thought of as his father hit Shapiro very hard.  “I really thought that it was my fault that I didn’t make up with him,” he lamented.

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, credited with the staging. 

An additional composer and orchestrator were brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.  (In fact, NYSF delayed opening the production to critics until 22 November, when the run was nearly over.) 

Helen Gallagher (b. 1926), who played Arsinoé, reported at the end of November that changes in everything, including her performance, were being incorporated right up until the press opening.  NYSF files confirm that new music, costumes, and set designs were being incorporated in the production as late as 10 November, and that new orchestrations were still on order at that date. 

Some of the responsibility for the failure might devolve to the new directorial team: Gile’s principle success, for which he won a Tony nomination, was the light and frivolous entertainment, Very Good Eddie (21 December 1975-5 September 1976), and the replacement composer was the flamboyant “glam rock” figure Jobriath (also “Jobriath Boone,” among other stage names; né Bruce Wayne Campbell, 1946-83), who, in an interview, once replied, “I am a true fairy.”  One reporter remarked on the need in this case for “his fairy magic.”

Though there’d been a fair amount of anticipatory press before the production started performances, I could only find four reviews of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Misanthrope.  According to a comment in Richard Eder’s New York Times notice, published on Thursday, 24 November, the Public only invited press to the show on Tuesday, 22 November, and would be closing the production on Sunday, 27 November.

In a review entitled “Miscued Musical ‘Misanthrope,’” Eder observed that all the personnel changes “has resulted is a confusion of purposes and directions, a stageful of misconceived ideas jostling one another for breathing space.”  He quipped that the festival’s belated invitation to reviewers “was for obituaries.”

“Everything is blurred and coarsened,” complained the reviewer of the musicalized version, which he labeled an “absurd trivialization.”  He protested, “The comedy of thought and character has been replaced by a comedy of gesticulation and pratfalls.” 

Of the score, Eder reported, “What the songs don't obscure is blotted out by the noisy, slapstick style of performance,” and dubbed the music “mediocre.”

The Times review-writer even had negative things to say about the physical production, finding that all the energy of the cast, which was all he felt it displayed, “is absorbed by an overlarge and extremely ugly set: fake black marble floors and columns upon which a few pieces of classical French furniture sit as if on consignment.”

(In his negative appraisal of the production, Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News described the set as a “formal, marblelike setting, severe enough for Racine . . . .”  For readers who aren’t up on references to classical French drama, Jean Racine [1639-99], a contemporary of Molière [1622-73], was a Neo-classical dramatist who wrote primarily tragedies.  One of his best-known is Phèdre [1677], on a production of which I reported on ROT on 13 October 2009.)

In the Soho Weekly News, Tish Dace, writing on 1 December, joked that “Thanksgiving week brought a real turkey in the Public Theatre’s . . . Misanthrope.”  (24 November had been Thanksgiving Day in 1977.)  She added, “Molière must have been spinning in his grave at the tacky trumpery.” 

“[T]his production confuses the crass with the comedic,” wrote Dace.  “These aren’t fops and coquettes, these are weirdos.”  The SWN reviewer exempted one cast member, John Bottoms as Philante, when she lambasted the work of the company as “dross.”

“All of this transforms a work of genius into a debased disaster of the most dreary kind,” Dace snapped.  She panned the costumes as “in keeping with the overall gross taste,” concluding, “The totality is vulgarity cultivated as an art.”

I won’t go on to summarize the other notices.  Their headlines tell the tale, I think:

·   “Molière Goes Down the Drain” (Ted Hoffman, Villager)

·   “More misadventure than ‘Misanthrope’” (Douglas Watt, Daily News)

It's noteworthy, I think, that Leonardo Shapiro, The Shaliko Company, and The Misanthrope are all omitted from Papp’s biographies: Stuart W. Little’s Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American Theater (1974) and Joe Papp: An American Life (1994) by Papp and Helen Epstein.

[Past posts on Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company are:

·   “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009

·   “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009

·   “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010

·   “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010

·   “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010

·   “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011

·   “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep’” by Leonardo Shapiro, 7 May 2011

·   “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013

·   “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 & 6 March 2014

·   “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·   “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 & 8 November 2015

·   “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 13 January 2016; “Faust Clones, Part 3,” 21 January 2016

·   “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018

·   “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018

·   “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018

·   “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 & 14 May 2020

·   “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020

[I haven’t included posts on topics to which I was introduced by Leo or those in which he was mentioned in passing.]

Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?

(SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975)

On Thursday, 6 March 1975, The Shaliko Company began previews of Leonardo Shapiro’s environmental production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, only its third offering, at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater, where it ran from 2 April to 16 May.  The staging concept had been Shapiro’s strategy to bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact.  In many of Shapiro’s productions, he placed actors in or near the audience, turned the auditorium lights on during the performance, had actors address the spectators directly, and enlisted the audience’s participation in aspects of the performances.  

Shapiro said his model for Ghosts was a séance with “the actors haunting the audience, as if spirits of the past; the audience haunting the characters, spirits of the future.”  The original title of the play, Gengangere, is Danish, the language in which Ibsen wrote the play, for ‘revenants,’ supernatural creatures resembling either spirits or reanimated corpses like vampires or zombies that return from the dead to terrify the living.  (‘Ghosts’ would be spøgelse in Danish and spøkelse in Norwegian; ‘revenant,’ from the French verb revenir, means ‘to return’ or ‘to come back.’)  

In this spirit, designer Jerry Rojo created for the Public’s 99-seat Susan Stein Shiva Theater (then called the Little Theater), a former movie house, “an environment of lush Victoriana, where the audience pockets function as walls separating the rooms of this Victorian environment” which he thought of as “womb-like.”  Shapiro was most pleased with the lighting: 

To encourage an historical environmental reality for audience/performer there was an authentic use of props and light.  The lighting was created by using period practical electric light fixtures (1910) to achieve a natural incandescent light.  And the performers were directed to actually control the illumination for the play.

(In the interest of accuracy, it should be noted that theatrical lighting was used, but not within the playing areas of the set.  Stage lights were used outside the “house” to simulate sunlight as it appeared through the windows.  Within the house, only practicals were used.  Also, the reader will no doubt notice the discrepancy between Rojo’s reference to the house as “Victorian” and his later reference to the period as 1910, which is Edwardian, as was recognized by several critics.)

Shaliko’s Ghosts stressed “that the sickness which Ibsen attacked still strangles us,” an obsession, the director stated, with which the playwright contended “all his life.”  Shapiro called the play “a tragedy whose characters are trapped by an environment made up of the inheritance of ideas and conventions of the past.  An environment which they have spent their lives dutifully building.”  He validated his interpretation by quoting Mrs. Alving from Act Two of Rolf Fjelde’s translation of the play:

It’s not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that lives on in us, but all kinds of old dead doctrines and opinions and beliefs.  They’re not alive in us, but they hang on all the same and we can’t get rid of them.

Shapiro evoked the idea that the past haunts the present again in the Ghosts program with another allusion to the Norwegian playwright: “We sail,” Shapiro quoted Ibsen, “[w]ith a corpse in the cargo.”  This conviction also justified Shapiro’s effort to cross-pollinate the present of the real world with the diegetic past of the play by requiring his actors to realize “experientially these same consequences rather than paying them lip service while sitting in chairs.”  As Jerzy Grotowski, whose theories were immensely influential for the young director, admonished the students in his 1967 workshop at NYU in which Shapiro had participated: “Compare the experience with your own, compare the two.”  

Georg Büchner’s 1837 play, Woyzeck, presented at the Public in 1976 with Joseph Chaikin in the title role, was the fourth play Shaliko produced and the end of the period, from 1972 to 1977, which Shapiro designated as “Meetings with Classical Texts.”  In the Postmodernist vein, he regarded these texts as “found objects” to be treated as librettos which, as Grotowski intended, furnished “only a theme” that Shapiro used to create “a new, independent work, a theater production.”  Robert Brustein, a renowned critic, producer, playwright, writer, and teacher, opined that “if dramatic classics are not seen with fresh eyes they grow fossilized—candidates for taxidermy” and that “great plays can be ‘desecrated’ by excessive piety as much as by excessive irreverence.”  Shapiro’s approach, demonstrated in Children of the Gods (1973) as well as Ghosts, was clearly an interpretation of the Situationists’ détournement, which allows artists to appropriate material created by others and redirect its purpose and meaning, like recaptioning a comic strip, in order to detach it from its usual cultural perspective and provide a kind of Brechtian distancing.  (The Situationists, a radical art and political movement that started in France in the mid-1950s, were one of Shapiro’s acknowledged influences.  I posted “Guy Debord & The Situationists” on 3 February 2012.)  Shapiro certainly applied this tactic with Children of the Gods, which Shaliko had assembled from several classical Greek texts, and Ghosts, whose physical mise-en-scène and thematic focus Shapiro had radically reinterpreted.  He also similarly treated Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974), for which the director didn’t toe Brecht’s own political line and into which he introduced episodes when the audience directly questioned the characters on stage.  

Essentially, Shapiro made no changes in Fjelde’s translation of Ghosts (though Fjelde, himself, made some minor adjustments for this production), and his directorial approach was more traditional and less physical (though not passive, by any measure) than on either of Shaliko’s two previous productions.  Rojo called it “expressionistic,” by which he meant “actors who really use their own private worlds as catalysts for the roles,” a fine thumbnail definition of basic Stanislavskian acting.  Though Shapiro pointed out that Ghosts was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro’s séance paradigm helps explain his interest in scenes which weren’t so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some critics.

This isn’t to say that the Shaliko production of Ghosts was entirely conventional, even putting aside the environmental setting.  “Our production attempts to re-vitalize the shock of the original production 80 years ago,” a company announcement declared, “by both being true to Ibsen’s time and place and his desire for complete naturalism and, at the same time, making the play true to contemporary experience.”  (Ghosts was written in 1881 and presented in London in 1891, then in New York City in 1894.)  What Shapiro had in mind, it seems, is what Brustein compared in his essay “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” (posted on ROT on 10 March 2011) to the “poetic metaphor,” a production that has the “potential for rediscovering the original impulses and energies of the material.”  (See also my own blog article, “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” 18 September 2009.)  

Casting his “qualified” vote for “conceptual directing,” Brustein submitted that directors like Shapiro “are more interested in generating provocative theatrical images—visually expressed through physical production, histrionically through character and relationships—that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”  Shapiro delineated his rationale for the production:

[T]he point of environmental theater is simply its concentration on the reality of the actual transactions going on during the theatrical event—the complicated three-way meeting between audience, actors, and text which happens, each time uniquely, during the performance: those two or three hours when they are locked together in spiritual combat in a dark room . . . . .  The play itself—in its text, thematic content, etc.—is the key element of the equation: it provides the purpose of the transaction, and therefor[e] determines its form. 

As Rojo characterized Shaliko’s approach, “Ghosts is a very sexual play.  Oswald returns to Mommy’s womb.  Mrs. Alving is hot for Pastor Manders.  Oswald kisses Regina . . . . .  Also, the relationship between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders is probed to a greater sexual depth—as well as her sexual relationship to her son.”  Despite the more traditional audience-performer relationship, neither this sexual perspective nor the environmentalism sat well with many critics.  Walter Kerr of the New York Times recorded that the production “not only dispenses with the proscenium arch but . . . makes it virtually impossible to locate the actors anywhere.”  Calling the production “thoroughly mindless,” Kerr gave this appraisal of the performance:

Scenes were played in small, raised pockets of space at the far corners of the miniature auditorium or on a balcony so narrow that spectators sitting on the edge of it—feet dangling into space—had to duck or take the damage whenever the performers waxed fierce.  In the latter instance, spectators sitting under the balcony could of course, see nothing at all.

That wasn’t all that chagrined Kerr.  He felt uncomfortably close to the theatrical event: “My own first brush with the ‘environment’ came when I found Ibsen’s housemaid, Regina, watering a plant that tended to lap over my toes; being quick of mind and body, I deftly avoided pneumonia.”  Jane Mandel, who played the role, recalled it differently: “Of course, I never did water his foot, but he was just making a point.  I guess it was kind of like, ‘Who needs this’; I mean, ‘Why do we need [a Ghosts] like this.’” 

As to the sexuality, Kerr was no less graphic than he was regarding the environmental staging:

In this “Ghosts,” Mrs. Alving is a highly sexual wench, a condition partly brought about by her long sexual deprivation and partly by the fact that she is to be seen sashaying around the premises with a wine bottle in her hand—rather as though “Ghosts” and “Ten Nights in a Barroom” were playing back-to-back in repertory and she’d got the performance dates confused.  In any event, she makes a headlong dive at poor Manders, pastor though he be, and kisses him with such cobra-like passion, slithering the while, that he feels himself compelled to hurl her to the floor. 

Kerr’s reaction so exercised Shapiro that he responded in the Times several weeks later.  He upbraided Kerr for objecting “to the closeness and the three-dimensional physical placement of the set because it made him work.  He had to turn his head, follow the action, grasp the connections, at times even choose what was most important.”  Warning against museum productions of classic plays, which Peter Brook characterized as “buried in deadly sentimentality and complacent worthiness . . . approved largely by town, scholar and press,” Shapiro decried a “theater of dead forms and ideas done with professional ease and distance by professional but bored actors.”  In advance press materials, the company justified its production in terms reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s renunciation of “literary masterpieces . . . fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time”:

This is neither a museum piece reproduction of an expose of Victorian Norwegian life nor an avant garde pastiche using Ibsen’s title as a cover.  It is a shocking, though often humorous, examination of the way in which we sacrifice our love of life for our (usually second-hand) ideas about the way we are supposed to be leading our lives. 

Quoting innovative Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, Brustein proclaimed, “The Theatre is not archeology,” insisting that it’s “not frozen in time but rather subject to discovery.”  “[C]harges of ‘desecration’ are meaningful,” Brustein warned, “only if you subscribe to the idea of a ‘definitive’ production.”  The critic, teacher, and producer likened those “purists” who demand “faithful” productions to “Switzers before the gates of the Vatican, defending sacred texts against the barbarians.” 

Justifying his open staging of Ghosts a few years later, Shapiro spoke of good reasons for using period elements in a production, but admonished that “using these objects doesn’t mean you must reproduce all the clap-trap and bric-a-brac of 19th-century stagecraft, certainly not for Ibsen, who did so much to revolutionize that stagecraft.”  The Shaliko director cautioned against simply imitating an experience neither the company nor the audience had had first hand because this would “risk reducing the credibility of your mutual pool of life experience” which was the initial rationale for doing the play.  Quoting Ibsen’s own declaration that “a passionate writer needs to be acted with passion,” Shapiro wrote:

The so-called “realistic” conventions imposed on [Ibsen] in most theaters today have become as suffocating as the stale air in Helene Alving’s house, and interfere on a practical level with any real attempt to communicate the power and poetry of Ibsen’s vision, or to make good on his desire to create a real experience for the audience which will allow them to see the truth about their own relationships.

He was fighting against what Brook dubbed “the Deadly Theatre,” which relies on “old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects” instead of issuing a “challenge to the conditioned reflexes” of artists, audiences, and critics habituated by received tradition.  Shapiro seemed to be attempting what Brustein designated as “penetrat[ing] the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equiv­alent.” 

Shapiro described his own Ghosts environment as “a little like [the board game] Clue”:

The audience sat in padded black spaces inside the house, spread between, beneath, above, and seemingly in the rooms.  Some of the rooms were all or partly out of sight, and from them could be overheard a particularly dirty deal being made in secret, a hidden love scene, an especially harrowing physical confrontation. 

The young director thought the experience should involve not seeing, but overhearing, as we sometimes do in life—or as people sometimes experience ghosts.  Richard Kostelanetz, in his study The Theatre of Mixed Means, saw this as a characteristic of Shaliko’s type of theater:

Narrative, when it exists, functions more as a convention than a revelatory structure or primary component, for the themes of a piece are more likely to emerge from the repetition of certain actions or the coherence of imagery.  The comprehension of a mixed-means piece, then, more closely resembles looking at a street or overhearing a strange conversation than deducing the theme of a drama:  The longer and more deeply the spectator dissects and assimilates its sound-image complex and associates the diverse elements, the more familiar he becomes with the work. 

Many reviewers, including Clive Barnes of the Times, Marilyn Stasio of Cue, Julius Novick of the Village Voice, Martin Gottfried and Richard Watts of the New York Post, Edith Oliver of the New Yorker, and Douglas Watt of the Daily News, didn’t appreciate this concept.  Watt, in fact, felt so strongly about the whole experimental theater scene that he ran two negative reviews, the second one in the Sunday News in which he disparaged several avant-garde stagings of classic plays, including Shaliko’s Ghosts (with reference to the troupe’s previous show, Brecht’s Measures Taken), the Manhattan Project’s version of Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, and Brecht’s Mother Courage by Richard Schechner’s Performance Group.  Like Kerr, Watt had complaints about the seating arrangements, but he saved his strongest opprobrium for the acting and directing: the “seemingly demented” actors were “children at play” with only “a nodding acquaintance with stage demands,” “acting as though they’d never set foot on a stage but . . . encouraged to go out and make believe they were putting on a performance.”  Shapiro’s “misdirection” resulted in a “childish travesty” that “mangled Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’” into an “idiotic farce” that “seemed ever on the verge of turning into a porno farce, if there is such a genre.”  (Watt confessed that he “slinked out of the Engstrand apartment” and left the performance early.  For some reason, just as he misidentified Schechner’s troupe as the “Performing” Group, Watt kept calling the Alvings by Regina’s family name.)  

In Shapiro’s view, the press thinks they own the standards of Western drama such as Ghosts: “They feel like Ibsen is their writer, the middle class is their turf, that we misrepresented the bourgeoisie or whatever.  They saw this as a play in which people sit around in chairs and talk and if you don’t sit around in chairs and talk then you’re fucking it up.”  This reflects the critical fallacy that Michael Kirby, a playwright, actor, teacher, and theater writer, affirmed perpetuates the cultural status quo by privileging “what has been thought to be ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ in the past” while “stifling” innovation and experimentation.  

Shapiro, however, insisted that most Ghosts audiences, responding with “eagerness and enthusiasm,” “laughed, cheered, . . . and, at the end, cried.”  Richard Brestoff, an actor who was then a student in NYU’s Master of Fine Arts program (and later taught and wrote books on acting), observed, “The Shaliko Co. had burst the play wide open—and now I like many Spiritualists believe that Ghosts can live.”  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., critic and longtime editor of the Best Plays annuals, called the production “distinguished”; Mark Hall Amitin, a consultant and producer who was executive director of a non-profit agency representing experimental theater companies, described it in a letter to the New York Times as “exciting” and “daring”; theater professor, avant-garde director, and editor of The Drama Review Richard Schechner proclaimed, “The show is very good, and important.  People should see it[.  Y]ears from now they may lie and pretend they did”; and Peter Kass, Shapiro’s former acting teacher at NYU, even went to the length of sending Joseph Papp a telegram asking: “Do you know that the most extraordinary production of Ghosts is being given by the Shaliko Company at the Public Theater.”

At least one theater person objected openly, however.  On 28 April 1975, the Venture Theatre Club, a now-defunct Off-Off-Broadway actors’ showcase theater in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, took out an advertisement in the Village Voice to protest the notice run by The Shaliko Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival which juxtaposed the critical response in 1891, the play’s London debut, with that in New York in 1975.  Mary Bozeman Raines, Venture’s founder, objected that 

the critics’ adverse reactions in 1891 to the play itself . . . were printed alongside excerpts from the critics’ adverse reactions in 1975 to the current production at the Public Theatre.  This juxtaposition, besides being extremely presumptuous, is misleading . . . .  We feel that Ibsen has been ill-served by the ad, as well as by the production, and that Joseph Papp owes him a public apology for both. 

In the New York area press, however, only Emory Lewis of The Record of New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County and Barbara Ettorre of Women’s Wear Daily (both significant critical voices at that time) praised the production, with Lewis writing that Shapiro “has staged this probing play with extraordinary finesse.  He choreographed every movement.  The work becomes a dance of life.”  Ettorre warned, “One must abandon any preconceptions and approach it with a fresh mind . . . .  As a result, the ghosts of the past . . . loom even more suffocatingly.”  She summed up, “It is a vibrant evening, preserving some of the genteel Ibsen quality.”  In St. Louis, however, according to Judy Newmark, Shapiro “endowed Henrik Ibsen’s classic with the vitality and strength that may have characterized its original performance before the turn of the century.”  Newmark wrote in the St. Louis Post that Shapiro’s “inventive staging . . . produces the immediacy that can draw the audience into the world of the play” and that Shaliko’s “most original conception of the play . . . never falls back on standard interpretations.”  

In his New York Times response to Kerr, Shapiro asked, “What is it that critics hate?  That which is visceral and immediate . . . .”  He demanded, “What kind of theater do people really want?”  Critics like Kerr, Shapiro assumed, preferred a “theater of dead forms and ideas” performed by professional actors with no bond with the audience or the outside world.  In his discussion of “the Deadly Theatre,” Peter Brook put the blame for the perpetuation of this phenomenon on “the deadly spectator.”  This kind of viewer, among whom Shapiro would doubtlessly have placed Kerr, “emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself.”  He goes to see “plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way—they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up, just the way they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres” and confuses this “intellectual satisfaction” with a true theatrical experience.  Shapiro even recounted an exchange with the late Jan Kott, “a critic whose work I very much admire,” at an exhibit of early production photographs of Ibsen’s plays: “These pictures make me sure of something I had begun to suspect,” the theater scholar told Shapiro—“that these plays must be done exactly as they were originally done.  They are absolutely historical pieces.”  

Shaliko’s director, conversely, believed the troupe’s audiences wanted “a theater of involvement, of new forms and ideas in which the voices of the past are joined and amplified by the voices of the present in productions which are committed to breaking ground for the future.”  The mainstream critics, however, rejected this approach, as Elinor Fuchs, respected theater critic and scholar, noted: “New York’s critical establishment seems ever more deeply establishmentarian. . . . .  It appears unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the obvious erosion of the humanistic certainties associated with” the traditional interpretation.  Conventional Realism, Tennessee Williams contended, “with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness”—unrelated, he asserted, to the “organic” truth represented by art.  In its day, Ibsen’s theater was revolutionary, both in its themes and in its theatrical style, and what Shapiro saw as so vital in those old photographs was that very revolutionary intensity.  “[W]e will be guilty of cheap nostalgia and sentimentality,” he argued, “if we try to re-create their vision as if nothing had happened in this terrible century when so much has happened.” 

What Shapiro was trying to create with Ghosts was Brook’s “Rough Theatre,” an Artaudian theater of cruelty that “deals with men’s actions, and . . . is down to earth and direct—because it admits wickedness and laughter”—some of the very things that had bothered Kerr.  This theater, Brook argued, raises “questions and references” which spectators “can retain and relate to . . . when they recur transposed, diluted and disguised, in life.”  Reminding us that Realism was an innovative technique when Ibsen wrote plays like Ghosts, Shapiro argued that to continue to impose that style on his works today defeats the effort “to communicate the power and poetry of Ibsen’s vision, or . . . to create a real experience for the audience.”  He warned that, like Ibsen, other classical writers had lost their immediacy in the United States because their plays are treated as “self-contained aesthetic objects, like paintings” and mounted in “flat literal productions.”  “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us,” Artaud wrote.  “We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.”  These works are dialogues, Shapiro explained: one half is the playwright’s text and the other’s the audience.  Traditional productions ignore the second half of the dialogue: 

You can only make their work seem dull or dated or predictable by treating them as finished properties, as aesthetic objects to be put on safe display. 

The task is to take them as living poetry, as diagrams—like a wiring chart that describes a complicated series of paths through which powerful currents can flow and produce transforming energy.

Dubbing these traditional stagings “ho-hum classics,” playwright Mac Wellman, a one-time collaborator of Shapiro’s, submitted that they belong “in the simple time of clocks,” unlike “the Wild Time of nonlinear narrative” which “can bend, slow, break or fork.”  Elinor Fuchs saw the dichotomy of the apparent expectations, indeed, requirements, of Kerr and others and Shapiro’s approach as no less than a struggle between the orthodoxy of “‘standards,’ ‘taste,’ ‘high culture,’” on the one hand and “a move by hitherto invisible perspectives—racial, sexual, multicultural—to invade the dominant culture” on the other.  She reminded critics that traditional aesthetics aren’t “divinely ordained,” but one choice among many, one that “carries . . . an ideological price tag.”  Shapiro put it this way: “There must be a way to allow the dead to live within us, to help us in our effort without relinquishing our life and the life of our time.  This is the problem, whether the dead shall become part of the living, or the living part of the dead.” 

Shapiro’s admiration of Henrik Ibsen was predicated on the Norwegian’s plays, which Shapiro deemed innovative and, indeed, revolutionary, having shaken up European society even to the point of causing riots.  Ibsen appealed for a “revolution of the spirit,” and George Bernard Shaw even construed the Norwegian’s message as a radical call to purge ourselves of all our received knowledge: “If you are a member of a society, defy it; if you have a duty, violate it; if you have a sacred tie, break it.”  Indeed, sounding very much like Shapiro himself, Ibsen stated (in a proclamation that might be the playwright’s own manifesto of a theater of cruelty):

My plays make people uncomfortable because when they see them they have to think, and most people want to be effortlessly entertained, not to be told unpleasant truths. . . .  People who are afraid of being alone with themselves, thinking about themselves, go to the theatre as they go to the beach or to parties—they go to be amused.  But I find that people’s eyes can be opened as well from the stage as from a pulpit.  Especially as so many people no longer go to church. 

There’s ample evidence that Shaliko’s environmental production of Ghosts, Shapiro’s radical vision, isn’t so alien to Ibsen’s intentions as reviewers like Walter Kerr and Douglas Watt decreed.  Both prominent reviewers revealed their positions on experimental and innovative theater going into the performance.  Some two-and-a-half months before he reviewed Shaliko’s Ghosts, Kerr wrote (in a Times column subtitled “Were These . . . Revivals . . . Necessary?”): “[W]e don’t need revivals . . . unless a director or a very special company of actors has discovered an urgently personal way of introducing them to us, persuading us that in some sense they’d been strangers before.”  Arrogating to himself the determination of who’s “special” and what constitutes a worthy revival, Kerr insisted, too, that “we do know the plays, have seen them,” oblivious to the likelihood that many ordinary—as opposed to professional—theatergoers might not have seen them—or might just wish to see them again.  (He also disregarded the truth that even a failed experiment has value—and does not eradicate either the play’s text or previous performances.  It’s not, after all, painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.)  In his Sunday notice, in which he labeled the Shaliko actors “amateurs,” Watt unambiguously proclaimed:

Now, I don’t pretend to know exactly what this new esthetic is, if we can call it an esthetic, but I do deplore it if for no other reason than that it opens the floodgates to amateurism.  Which is why I think such catchy labels as Theater of the Absurd and Theater of the Ridiculous are noxious, conferring, as they do, a form of respectability on what is all too often plain nonsense.

Kerr, Watt, and other establishment reviewers, it seems, went into Ghosts with their objections already firmly in place before they even took their seats.

It shouldn’t be overlooked, first, that Ibsen was never an absolute realist.  Early in his career, the young playwright wrote that “literal reality has no place in art,” a sentiment he never abandoned despite appearances.  Many analysts of Ibsen’s work, including Anton Chekhov, remarked on the underlying unreality in his plays.  His is the illusion of reality, and it became most obvious in his last plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), which are existential and psychological landscapes of an inner reality.  When We Dead Awaken, in fact, hints that Ibsen had ended his focus on the realistic series he had begun with A Doll House (1879) and was ready to move on to something “in quite another context; perhaps, too, in another form.”  Ibsen’s very words anticipated Shapiro’s own ambition.  

Second, Ibsen began writing for an essentially 18th-century stage featuring wing-and-drop scenery and verse or lofty, heroic language.  Only after exposure to the realistic staging of the Meininger troupe of Germany, where he was honored by Duke George II in 1876, did he begin writing the realistic plays for which he’s renowned.  In fact, it was Ibsen’s dramaturgical innovations, considered then to be avant-garde and experimental, that began the practice of Realism in European drama.  Once having settled on his new style, he demanded that his language be treated as actual conversation and that the actors performing his plays look and behave like ordinary people in real-life situations.  Shaw, in fact, insisted that in his characters, Ibsen not only brought the audience on stage but their situations as well.  Rendering on stage the people his audiences knew and met everyday in circumstances they experienced in their own lives shocked many spectators and critics at the time.  Additionally, after seeing the Meininger, Ibsen began creating settings that were individualized for each scene, and he wrote scenes that changed as the situation required, rather than employing one setting, to be created with stock scenery, throughout the drama.  Lighting, one of Ibsen’s principal concerns just as it was for Shapiro in Ghosts, was specifically and carefully determined to set the atmosphere as well as the locale of each scene.  Ibsen wanted his audiences to feel they were watching actual events taking place in real places so that they were drawn into the drama rather than remaining outside of it. 

By the middle of the 20th century, stage Realism had become standard theatrical practice.  No longer new, innovative, or experimental, it had pretty much reached its pinnacle early in the century with productions that included live animals on stage and the reconstruction of actual places, examples of the kind of staging Richard Paul Janaro, Shapiro’s first college director, disparaged as “kitchenism” (and which a director-teacher of my own dubbed “gee-whizz Realism”).  Not only wasn’t it shocking any longer, by mid-century it was hardly noticeable, either dramatically or theatrically.  Brecht had even declared Ibsen obsolete in 1934 because his works “no longer move anybody” and the modern audience “can’t learn anything from them” and in 1945, Tennessee Williams, himself often erroneously considered a Realist, called for a “new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.”  

Perhaps most significantly for Shapiro, Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of Shapiro’s strongest influences who had directed or appeared in many Ibsen plays, disparaged the traditional naturalistic approach to Ibsen: “The urge to show everything, come what may, the fear of mystery, of leaving anything unsaid, turns the theatre into a mere illustration of the author’s words.”  Thus criticizing the technique of the Moscow Art Theater (where he trained), Meyerhold justified stylization for Ibsen.  His 1906 production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler intended to convey an “impression” of reality, to show what the Russian director sensed “behind” the play.  He eschewed “lifelikeness” in an effort to lead the audience to its own understanding of the play through the use of “new unfamiliar means”—a classic description of Brechtian “alienation” (Verfremdung) or its Russian predecessor (priëm ostranneniya) and of Shaliko’s theatrical philosophy.  Meyerhold, in fact, had also experimented in 1906 with Ghosts and his staging can be seen as a kind of prototype for the Shaliko production.  Having dispensed with the main drape and the footlights which separated the audience from the performers, Meyerhold built a forestage over the orchestra pit and extended the playing area out into the auditorium to bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact.  Like Shapiro, the Russian innovator turned the auditorium lights on during the performance.

From Shapiro’s standpoint, then, the response was self-evident: given Ibsen’s determination to enliven the stage with revolutionary techniques and practices, extending the continuum from Romanticism to Realism and Naturalism, isn’t it a reasonable step further along that road to place the audience among the actors, within the environment, so that they experience the drama even more as if it were happening around them—just as Ibsen had desired 100 years before?  If Ibsen insisted that his characters speak language that sounds like ordinary speech and that the audience should seem to be listening in on overheard conversations, isn’t a next logical step for the actors/characters to speak in tones that really require overhearing, from places not quite visible to each spectator, in sometimes low volumes, even whispers?  Ibsen was adamant about rejecting asides and soliloquies and he began using actual whispers (as distinct from stage whispers), heard neither by the other characters on stage nor the audience (in The Wild Duck, 1884, and Rosmersholm, 1886, for instance).  Wouldn’t it then be reasonable for contemporary actors to stop declaiming (that is, “projecting”) their dialogue when the characters would probably speak in intimate tones?  Is it a violation of Ibsen’s wishes that the audience have to select where to look and to whom to listen, just as they might have to in real life?

And if Ibsen insists on lighting that seems natural and true to the circumstances of the scene, wouldn’t it be the next logical step to create lighting that comes entirely from actual fixtures in the rooms (that is, “practicals”), rather than the artificial lighting of theatrical instruments?  In keeping with Ibsen’s dictates, Shapiro would have insisted, wouldn’t it be appropriate for the characters themselves to control the lights in the house, rather than the unseen hand of a lighting technician?

This isn’t to say that any of these techniques would work either dramatically or theatrically in any given production, of course.  That depends on the creativeness of the director and designers, as well as the execution of any design and production concept.  (It also isn’t meant to suggest that there aren’t other, divergent steps leading along a different continuum with the same beginning.)  But doesn’t it suggest that, far from being a perversion of Ibsen, a violation of his theatrical spirit, such an experiment is an extension of that spirit and even an attempt to return to his plays the kind of revolutionary energy with which he created them?  While it might be entirely valid to say that the attempt failed, that the experiment didn’t work, it wouldn’t be valid to state that the experiment shouldn’t have been made at all, that the concept was a travesty.  Indeed, in the year Ibsen died, when Meyerhold directed his production of Ghosts, the highly theatrical, expressionistic director Max Reinhardt staged a production of the play with designs by Ibsen’s compatriot, the expressionistic painter Edvard Munch, that provided a mere suggestion of scenery making use of ghostly shadows to evoke both mood and theme.

Ibsen considered himself a true avant-gardist in the sense that he was forever out in front of literary and theatrical conventions, not to mention political trends.  He invoked his own independence as evidence that he was always moving away from the prevailing practices:

But I firmly believe that an intellectual pioneer can never gather a majority around him . . . . .  The majority, the masses, the mob, will never catch him up; he can never rally them behind him.  I myself feel a similarly unrelenting compulsion to keep pressing forward.  A crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my earlier books.  But I myself am there no longer, I am somewhere else—far away ahead of them—or so I hope. 

Given Ibsen’s insistence that the spectator at his plays should “feel as though he were invisibly present” in the world of the play and his belief, specifically of Ghosts, that the “effect of the play depends greatly on the audience feeling that they are listening to something that is actually happening in real life,” how far afield could Shapiro have been with the concept of his production 94 years after Ibsen’s play first shocked readers?  If Ibsen was as anti-conventional as he claimed, might he not have demanded that 20th-century productions of his provocative plays be staged provocatively, defying the conventions of our day as Ibsen had those of his?  He might agree with Pirandello, who also insisted, “Unwilling­ness to take up old works, to modern­ize and streamline them for fresh production, betrays indifference, not praiseworthy caution.”  While the execution of Shapiro’s concept for Ghosts might not have pleased Ibsen in the end, it’s hard, in the face of the dramatist’s own declarations, to require that this play and any other classic works “be done exactly as they were originally done” over a century ago, as Jan Kott demanded.  

[I don’t use footnotes on ROT, but occasionally I feel it’s useful to supply a list of my sources for quotations and other references.  Below are the works and documents on which I drew for “Staging Classic Plays”; many are available in bookstores or libraries, though a few, namely the archival material and the interviews, aren’t generally accessible.  (I’m nevertheless including those references for the sake of completeness.)

• Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
• Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Tran. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• Braun, Edward. The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979.
• Brecht, Bertolt.  Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and tran. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
• Brecht, Stefan; Peter L. Feldman; Donald M. Kaplan; et al. “On Grotowski: A Series of Critques.” Drama Review 14.2 (T46: Winter 1970): 178-211.
• Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Discus Books, 1968.
• Brustein, Robert. “Stage View: Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” New York Times 11 November 1988, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”): 5, 16.
• Crawley, Tom. “The Stone in the Soup: Jerzy Grotowski’s First American Workshop.” Unpublished typescript. [New York:] Thomas F. Crawley, 1978.
• “Dramatics Instructor Revolts Against ‘Kitchenism.’” Falcon Times [Miami-Dade Junior College; Miami, FL] 3 May 1962: 3.
• Fuchs, Elinor. “‘Cymbeline’ and It’s Critics: A Case Study: Misunderstanding Postmodernism.” American Theatre [Theatre Communications Group, New York] 6.9 (Dec. 1989): 24, 26-31.
• Guernsey, Otis L., Jr. Curtain Times: The New York Theater: 1965-1987. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987.
• Hand-written notes, note-taker unknown. N.d. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archive. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc. Archive. MSS 121. Box 35. Folders 41: “The Shaliko Company, 1974.” Fales Library and Special Collections. New York University Libraries. New York, NY.
• Kass, Peter. Telegram to Joseph Papp. 17 May 1975.
• Kerr, Walter. “Stage View: An Agreeable Evening With H. L. Mencken: Were These . . . Revivals . . . Necessary?” New York Times 26 Jan. 1975, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”):1, 7.
• Kerr, Walter. “Stage View: A Kung Fu Version of Ibsen.” New York Times 13 Apr. 1975, sec. D (“Arts and Leisure”): 5.
• Kirby, Michael. “Criticism: Four Faults.”  Drama Review 18.4 (T63: Dec. 1974): 59-68.
• Kostelanetz, Richard. The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances. New York: Dial Press, 1968.
• Mandel, Jane. Telephone interview with author. 4 Mar. 1992.
• Newmark, Judy. “Shaliko Company Gives ‘Ghosts’ At University.” St. Louis Post 10 Feb. 1975, sec. B: 4.
• Lewis, Emory. “Lively Arts: Ibsen’s modern outlook.” Record [Hackensack, NJ] 3 Apr. 1975, sec. C: 12.
• Lugné-Poe, [Aurélien-François]. Ibsen (Paris: Éditions Rieder, 1936).
• McNamara, Brooks; Jerry Rojo; and Richard Schechner. Theatres, Spaces, Environments: Eighteen Projects. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975.
• Meyer, Michael. Ibsen: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
• Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre. Tran. and ed. Edward Braun. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969.
• New York Shakespeare Festival. Ghosts program. 1975.
• Shaliko Company, The. “Ghosts.” Announcement of availability for touring. N.d. Mark Hall Amitin/World of Culture for the Performing Arts, Inc. Archive. MSS 121. Box 35. Folders 41-42: “The Shaliko Company, 1974.” Fales Library and Special Collections. New York University Libraries. New York, NY.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “Back Talk: ‘Which Excesses Are the Critics Attacking?’” New York Times 11 May 1975, sec. D (“Arts and Leisure”): 5.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. Interview with author. Baltimore, MD. 28 June 1986.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. Interview with author. New York, NY. 3 Mar. 1992.
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “Notes for a Speech on Staging Ibsen.” Typescript. [1978].
• Shapiro, Leonardo. “The Tip of the Iceberg: Creativity and Repression in the U.S.” Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sept. 1991): 25-41.
• Shaw, Bernard. Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings. Ed. J. L. Wisenthal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
• Venture Theatre Club. Newspaper advertisement protesting the Shaliko Ghosts notice. Village Voice [New York] 28 Apr. 1975: 94.
• Watt, Douglas. “Children at Play in ‘Ghosts.’“ Daily News [New York], 3 Apr. 1975: 104.
• Watt, Douglas. “Look at New School of Dramatic Thought.” Sunday News [New York] 13 Apr. 1975, sec. 3: 3.
• Wellman, Mac. “A Chrestomathy Of 22 Answers to 22 Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater.” Theater [New Haven, CT; Yale School of Drama] 24.1 (Nov. 1993): 43-51.
• Wiles, Timothy J. The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Williams, Tennessee. “Production Notes.” The Glass Menagerie. Ed. Robert Bray. New York: New Directions Publishing Co, 1945[1999], xix-xxii.

[Some of the sources above are also available in other editions, such as Wellman’s idiosyncratic essay, which has been published as the preface to a volume of his plays, and Williams’s Glass Menagerie note, which has been included in most published editions of the play.  If any reader feels the need for more specific references, feel free to contact me via a Comment on this post.  I’ll do my best to satisfy you.]