A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2

 

[My biography of Leonardo Shapiro, avant-garde theater director and auteur, continues below with the teenager’s transfer from schools in Miami Beach and Dade County, Florida, in his sophomore year of high school to a private, progressive prep school in Massachusetts, the Windsor Mountain School.

[You’ll hear about the immense influence the school and its people had on the incipient artist, and where it led him both in the short term and in the long term.  Part 2 of the bio will also cover Shapiro’s exposure to the theater of Greenwich Village’s Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, his introduction to Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and the General Strike for Peace, his first stops along the college road that ultimately led him to New York University and his meeting with Jerzy Grotowski, one of his two main theater models (covered in the upcoming Part 3).

[I admonish readers just coming upon this multi-part post to go back to Part 1 (posted on 16 April) first.  I will be identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

After years of struggling and hopping from one school to another, Shapiro’s parents transferred him in September 1960 to the Windsor Mountain School, a progressive private school in Lenox, Massachusetts, that, in the words of one former student, specialized in educating “kids who were the black sheeps of their family” in an atmosphere free of rules and administrative repression. 

Shapiro’s Windsor Mountain classmate, Jeffrey Horowitz (b. 1946), who’s the founder of New York’s Theater for a New City, observed that the student body included “a number” of “misfits” and that the school encouraged and supported them. 

Here, Shapiro came under the sway of Gertrud Bondy (1889-1977), the director, and her son Heinz (1924-2014), the headmaster.  It was to be a big change for the young man.  (For the story of the Bondys and Windsor Mountain, see “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” 12 October 2011.)

The young rebel, as unsettled from his unstable home life as he was resistant to his previous educational environments, fell “immediately in love with Lenox”—the cultured “Old New England” resort town; the woods, where, he remarked, jazz musician Charlie Mingus used to stay and where the new student took long walks; the old lighthouse tower; the Music Inn, Jacob’s Pillow, and the nearby Tanglewood Music Center; and especially the town’s old library with its “big wing chairs, lots of books, old books, old smells.”

Indeed, after his disheartening experiences under the tutelage of the Miami-Dade public school system and the Admiral Farragut Academy, Shapiro felt free and at home at Windsor Mountain.  To the teen activist, starting at Windsor Mountain “was like entering the United States of America, that mythical participatory land I had read about in civics textbooks at Biscayne Elementary School, at Nautilus Junior High School” but which he felt was as unreal as the Ozzie and Harriet world of 1950s television. 

He arrived in Lenox at the end of the 1960 presidential campaign and watched on 8 November as “the young and dynamic Jack Kennedy” defeated Richard M. Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74), the would-be successor to “the old general,” Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61).  The old regime “was on [its] way out” and “it was time for a New Frontier”—and so was young Shapiro, “fourteen and ready for a new life.” 

(The New Frontier was the name given to the brief administration of John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63].  He was immensely popular with young people in the U.S. and abroad.)

Windsor Mountain offered a great deal in this vein: students as young as 13 or 14 were already reading Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek; 1883-1957) and William Golding (British; 1911-93)—Shapiro gained some renown on the campus for his essay on The Lord of the Flies—the school theater program was staging European drama like Max Frisch’s (Swiss; 1911-1991) Biedermann and the Firebugs, Jean Giraudoux’s (French; 1882-1944) The Enchanted, and others; and many of the 200 Windsor Mountain students “seemed already to be professional artists” in poetry, painting, and theater.  Classmate Horowitz believed it was probably at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro first encountered serious theater. 

Indeed, Shapiro called Windsor Mountain “the key to everything, any education I ever got,” both from the college-level texts the school used and from his extramural adventures, for it was at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro began hitchhiking to New York City to participate in political demonstrations, see theater, and meet some of the people he would later claim as influences and inspirations. 

At school, the newly-minted student artist took to calling himself “Leonardo da Vinci Shapiro” because he saw himself as a great artist—a practice he gave up when he came to New York because he realized the braggadocio raised expectations he wouldn’t be able to satisfy.   

In his second year at Windsor Mountain (his junior year), before he got involved in campus theater himself, Shapiro lived in a basement room near a staircase in the garage building, a room which shared a wall with the theater’s green room, a backstage room used as a meeting space or common room by members of the company. 

He could hear the actors rehearsing and he said he could tell when they were just talking and when they were saying lines “by the tone, pitch and rhythm of their words, even though I couldn’t make out the words themselves, I never forgot the difference in the sound.”  The latter, he declared, was the more “interesting” and “meaningful”: “It was, in many ways, better than real.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” 

Indeed, he didn’t: Shapiro recorded that when he came to direct Jean Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (November 1964; Leo directed and played Creon), and concentrated on the “light and music and rhythm and timing” and other aspects of the staging, “it just came so easy, it was so natural.” 

(Readers may well recognize the similarity between this anecdote about Shapiro’s introduction to theater, and one I related earlier about Shapiro’s year at the Farragut Academy four years before.  I don’t know if there were two similar incidents or if Shapiro’s memory was faulty, erroneously placing the same incident in two different places. 

(I knew about the Farragut anecdote earlier, but didn’t learn of the Windsor Mountain story until Rosalía Triana sent me the uncompleted memoir on which Shapiro’d been working at his death.  It was too late to ask him about the apparent coincidence.)

The Windsor Mountain theater group, under the “ambitious” direction of drama teacher Frances Benn (“Franny”) Hall (1918-2014), was always busy, with plays constantly in rehearsal, and soon Shapiro became involved as an actor.  He remembered auditioning first for the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s (French; 1868-1918) classic, which he recalled the school troupe ultimately didn’t stage.

Then Shapiro remembered doing a reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and being impressed with the play’s “notion of far off America” and the way Ibsen (Norwegian; 1828-1906) delved into the characters’ pasts so that, just as in Ghosts, which Shapiro would direct for Shaliko some 14 years later, they saw their “long buried secrets coming to life.”  It was “[m]y first taste of Ibsen!” Shapiro exclaimed, speaking of a playwright who came to mean a great deal to the nascent theater artist.

The young actor’s first full-fledged production was Maurice Maeterlinck’s (Belgian; 1862-1949) Pélléas and Mélisande in the school’s outdoor amphitheater—a performance for graduation in June 1962.  He began listening to the recordings of plays and poetry—Dylan Thomas (Welsh; 1914-53), whose “Lament” he used to recite in the school’s smoking room; William Butler Yeats (Irish; 1865-1939) reading “The Second Coming”; and Samuel Becket’s (Irish; 1906-89) Endgame. 

Shapiro would stage a street-musical adaptation of Yeats’s poem in 1969 (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009) and he’d direct the Beckett play in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1993. 

Poetry, an important focus of English teacher E. James (“Jim”) Hall (d. 1982), was still “really the thing” for Shapiro; he wanted to be a poet, not an actor, “but somehow they seemed similar to me,” and he went on to other roles in Edward Albee’s (1928-2016) The Sandbox, Frisch’s Biedermann, Giraudoux’s Enchanted, and Yeats’s Purgatory. 

Shapiro recorded that he liked Purgatory for its poetry, of course, and “because it was dark and tragic in that wind-swept gothic way, all that!”—qualities that presaged many of his later focuses.  It’s probably no coincidence, however, that Purgatory recounts the story of an Old Man (the role Shapiro played) who returns with his son to the burnt-out remains of the house where he had been born and which is haunted by the spirit of his mother, who died giving him birth. 

On the night that his drunken father, who neglected the Old Man’s mother while squandering and gambling away her possessions, had set the fire, the Old Man had stabbed him and fled, and he there stabs his son, in whom the Old Man sees the reflection of his own feckless father, to stop the cycle and put his mother’s soul at rest.  

Yeats intended the 1938 play as an allegory of modern Ireland, but Shapiro certainly saw a macabre reflection of his own autobiography in it.  The very macabre character of the echo is certainly part of the equation, especially if we note that Shapiro was about 16 at the time, not only a teenager—to whom such a vision might naturally appeal anyway—but the exact age of the Boy in Purgatory and the age the Old Man had been when he stabbed his father.

A remarkable number of the plays and playwrights whom Shapiro would later admire, produce, and emulate were introduced to him at the Windsor Mountain School, either in his classes, such as Jean Anouilh (French; 1910-87), or in the school theater, like Ibsen, Yeats, and Beckett.  Others, of course, he experienced on his visits to New York City—which he might well have seen as an adjunct to his Windsor Mountain education in a way. 

Shapiro frequently left Windsor Mountain’s campus to attend political rallies and protests, including the General Strike for Peace in New York City in January and February 1962 and a March 1962 anti-nuclear rally in Times Square. 

There were, in fact, two peace marches in 1962 sponsored by the General Strike and organized by Julian Beck (1925-85) and Judith Malina (1926-2015), founders of the Living Theatre.  One took place on Monday, 29 January, at the end of which Beck called for a “non-violent work stoppage” which never materialized.  This is the one Shapiro spoke of often.

When Shapiro arrived in New York City to participate in this General Strike, the 16-year-old was unfamiliar with the Living Theatre.  It was the political activism of the Becks and their friends, the principal organizers of the strike, that drew the young would-be poet and he didn’t discover the Becks’ other life until they offhandedly remarked, “You know, by the way, we have this theater downstairs.” 

In fact, Shapiro’s arrival in New York City in January 1962 for the General Strike for Peace began his involvement with the Becks and the Living Theatre at the same time that they were rehearsing their production of Man Is Man by Bertolt Brecht (German; 1898-1956), which premièred the following September and which Shapiro recorded that he saw in his early, heady days exploring New York’s Greenwich Village theater scene.

The 16-year-old aspiring poet had previously kept art and political activism separate: “I kept thinking it was sort of one or the other: One was either . . . in the movement and trying to work to change things, or one was an artist.”  The Becks showed Shapiro that art and political action not only were not mutually exclusive endeavors, but were integrally linked.

Working on the strike every day with the Becks and others in the movement and the theater, the teenager saw them “break new artistic ground and work out political concerns” and discovered he “loved that world a lot.”

When Shapiro began to make theater on his own, he used the Becks and the Living Theatre as models for much of his work and principles.  To be sure, of a list of personalities, movements, and works of art that Shapiro said had influenced him, at least a third have a substantial Living Theatre connection as well. 

The second strike occurred on Monday, 5 November, and launched a week of demonstrations and protests.  Performances of the Living Theatre’s Man Is Man were suspended from 4 to 13 November to free its cast and crew to participate in the “general strike for peace week.”  Though he never mentioned it, it’s certainly possible, even likely, that Shapiro hitchhiked to New York again to participate in the second strike as well.

The anti-nuke protest occurred on Saturday, 3 March 1962.  It was in opposition to the United States’ resumption of atmospheric testing and Shapiro had a vivid memory of the demonstration:

It was a peaceful demonstration in Times Square—where the TKTS booth is now. . . . .  There were 500 of us demonstrating, and the riot squad came in on horseback and mowed us down.  It was just like that scene in Doctor Zhivago—it was out of nowhere, for no reason.  Times Square was red with blood.  I had never seen anything like this: I got hit on the head by a billy club; Judith Malina was pregnant—I saw her trampled by a horse; I saw Julian Beck get his skull cracked.  I was hit twice—they rode over me and hit me and . . . the cop turned around and rode back over me.  I mean, fucking Times Square was red with blood. . . . . 

It was just like the story that my family told me about the Cossacks.  It was exactly the same as the pogroms—or it felt that way when you were under the horses.  And it was not acknowledged.  It could happen right there in Times Square in broad daylight, and not be acknowledged.  I was just shocked.  I’ve never gotten over that; I’m still shocked.

(The TKTS booth, opened by the Theatre Development Fund in 1973, sells half-price tickets for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows on the day of performance.  It’s in Duffy Square, a small triangle of land at the northernmost end of Times Square. 

(Beck was seriously hurt and was briefly hospitalized with injured ribs and a punctured lung.  An account of this incident, from Beck’s perspective, is in John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage [New York: Grove Press, 1995], 170-74, or in Beck’s own “Report from Times Square,” Evergreen Review 6.24 [May-June 1962]: 121-25.)

Far from suppressing such political engagement by its students, Windsor Mountain encouraged it, but Shapiro was a standout.  Sporting “an Afro, but before Afros” and customarily dressed all in black with colorful Mexican vests, “Leo was out there” even among the many at the school who exhibited, even flaunted, an individualism both of intellect and of temperament.  As Horowitz characterized him:

Leo was not afraid of being very, very different from everyone else.  He was genuinely different.  He was seeing the inadequacy of the social structure for him at a very early age.  He wasn’t just angry with it or rebelling, he could understand that . . . .

Gertrud and Heinz Bondy had established an atmosphere in Lenox where adolescents were encouraged to “find their own voice” and engage in “radical political thought” as well as “self-motivated artistic endeavors.”  It wasn’t long before Shapiro was reveling in that political thought, as his account of a “one man demonstration” he conducted shows: 

I remember walking the streets of Lenox, Massachusetts with a homemade sign and leaflets on this day [i.e., 6 August, Hiroshima Day—the day on which the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945] in 1961, age 15.  I had a letter from the A.C.L.U. explaining in detail, with citations, my constitutional right to free expression, and being told (as the cops dragged me away to the two cell station upstairs . . .) that the town of Lenox was founded some 12 or 20 years before the adoption of the United States Constitution, and that therefore their laws took precedence.  And they had a law against RED signs, against signs on Sunday, against handing out leaflets and against me.  I think it was my first jail time up north—a surprise that it was as bad as the South—the ignorance and Zombie slavish hostile stupidity hurt me and shook me as it still does.

(The town of Lenox, Massachusetts, was settled in 1750 and incorporated in 1767.  The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and took effect in 1789.)

While in New York for those rallies and protests, Shapiro further indulged his growing curiosity about theater.  As I briefly noted earlier, one of the most significant experiences of his nascent theatrical education was seeing the Living’s Man Is Man in the fall of 1962.  (Directed and designed by Julian Beck, the production starred Judith Malina and Joseph Chaikin [1935-2003], who won an Obie Award for his performance.)  The anti-war and anti-military play, first written in 1925, but revised many times over the rest of Brecht’s lifetime, came to mean a great deal to Shapiro.

There were, in fact, two simultaneous productions of Brecht’s Mann ist Mann on the New York stage then; the other one, billed as A Man’s a Man, was produced by the New Repertory Theatre Company.  There was considerable debate in the New York press over these dueling Brechts (see my two-part post, 24 and 27 January 2014). 

As a mark of the influence of this theater experience, Shapiro’s first non-student production in New York, the 1967 anti-war street musical he co-authored, Brother, You’re Next, was an adaptation of Man Is Man set during the Vietnam war.  Shapiro considered Man Is Man as one of his main influences and “basically stole” Brother, You’re Next from the Brecht play (see my post on 26 January 2010). 

Beside the Living’s Man Is Man and its productions of Jack Gelber’s (1932-2003) The Connection and Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities, the young student saw Jean Genet’s (French; 1910-86) The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel (1919-2005) at the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue; a double bill of Becket’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Edward Albee’s Zoo Story at the Provincetown Playhouse off Washington Square; William Snyder’s (1929-2008) popular Off-Broadway drama Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker directed by Ulu Grosbard (Belgian-born American; 1929-2012) at the Sheridan Square Theatre, Eugène Ionesco’s (Romanian-French; 1909-94) Bald Soprano at the Gate Theatre at Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place; and the month-long Theater of the Absurd series at the Cherry Lane where he saw Kenneth Koch’s (1925-2002) Bertha and Jack Richardson’s (1934-2012) Gallows Humor.

All these productions were part of the incipient Greenwich Village/East Village Off-Off-Broadway movement (see my posts, “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018). 

Later, he “hung around” Ralph Cook’s (1928-2013) Theatre Genesis, a playwrights’ theater that focused on new American writers, and discovered Joe Cino’s (1931-67) Caffe Cino, to which he’d been drawn by the poetry—he heard readings of Dylan Thomas there, he recalled—and the politics.  He also saw folksingers Bob Dylan (b. 1941), who was Shapiro’s cousin, and Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) and a performance of William Saroyan’s (1908-81) Hello Out There—a production to which he would refer again later. 

(Theatre Genesis, founded by Cook in 1964, produced, among others, the early plays of Sam Shepard [1943-2017]; Charles L. Mee, Jr. [b. 1938]; Leonard Melfi [1935-2001]; and Adrienne Kennedy [b. 1931].  Shapiro first saw Charles Dizenzo’s (b. 1938) The Drapes Come, which he directed at Antioch College in May 1965, at Theatre Genesis, where it had premièred on 12 February 1965.  The theater was located in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery at East 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, one block north of the East Village apartment where Shapiro later established the office of the Shaliko Company.

(Joe Cino’s coffeehouse, the progenitor of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, opened at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958 and closed soon after Cino’s suicide in 1967.  By the early 1960s, playwrights began reading their scripts there, and eventually staging them. 

(This performance of Hello Out There occurred in March or April 1963—some chronologies put it in 1962—and starred Al Pacino [b. 1940] as the Young Man, his début before a paying audience, according to several Pacino biographies. 

(Pacino also spent time at the Living Theatre in the early 1960s, working as an occasional stagehand—on, among other productions, The Connection.  These were some of the same years that Shapiro was spending time there.  It is speculation, of course, but it may very well be that Shapiro went to see that particular show at the Caffe Cino because a young actor he’d met at the Living was in it.

(Irving Shapiro and Beatrice “Beatty” Zimmerman [1915-2000], Bob Dylan’s mother, were first cousins; the Zimmermans and the Shapiros lived in Hibbing, Minnesota, at the same time, though the boys only saw each other at occasional family events. 

(Shapiro, of course, left Minnesota as a very young child when he, his mother, and his elder brother moved to Florida in 1951.  Dylan, who was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and moved to Hibbing in 1947, was also closer in age to Shapiro’s brother, Gary, than he was to the stage director. 

(Shapiro tried to enlist Dylan’s support for Shaliko in the early days of the company, but the most Dylan did was respond to one of Shapiro’s letters.  If there was any resentment over the singer’s lack of support, however, Shapiro still considered Dylan one of his inspirations and influences.)

Upon graduating from Windsor Mountain in 1963, Shapiro joined the Pen Players, a summer theater group at Miami-Dade Junior College (since 2003, the four-year Miami-Dade College), where he continued to act in productions such as Eugene O’Neill’s (1888-1953) Desire Under the Elms and Man on the Rocks, an original play by the troupe’s director, Richard Paul Janaro (1927-2017), and to direct Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

In Man, Shapiro played a “doomed intellectual,” his friend Jeffrey Horowitz reported.  Horowitz, whom Shapiro brought into the group, said the play was “terrible,” but Shapiro reveled in his role because, Horowitz observed, “it gave Leo the license to be depressed, intense and smart”—a description that sounds a great deal like the characteristics Shapiro said appealed to him in Yeats’s Purgatory.

Shapiro first “started to identify myself with theater” at MDJC and Janaro may have been his first acting instructor.  Shapiro said he enrolled at MDJC, where he stayed for only one semester in 1964, because his father had disowned him. 

When Irving Shapiro “re-owned” his son, Shapiro recorded, the nascent director transferred to Antioch College (1964-65), a small, progressive school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, dedicated to the kind of cooperative education that Shapiro had seen at the Windsor Mountain School; he left without graduating, however.  

While he was enrolled there, though, Shapiro took a job as actor-in-residence at Lake Erie College, a women’s school in Painesville, Ohio, 225 miles northeast of Antioch.  There he appeared in productions of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and O’Neill’s Hughie and Marco Millions.  Despite this work, it was at Antioch that Shapiro lost interest in acting. 

In November 1965, Shapiro directed Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch, a play he’d selected for himself perhaps because of echoes of his own family situation (Medea takes revenge on Jason for leaving her and their children and marrying a younger woman) and it makes a socio-political statement which he supported (Medea, despite her horrific acts, is the heroine of the play because she’s true to her nature, however violent and destructive; Jason remains the man of compromise, the sell-out).

Medea was probably Shapiro’s first directing undertaking after the introduction of the idea that art and politics could be combined.  At Antioch, he turned to directing full time. 

[The biographical sketch of Leonardo Shapiro continues with Part 3 on Saturday, 22 April.  I hope readers will come back then to pick up Shapiro’s story when he enters NYU’s School of the Arts and studies with Jerzy Grotowski, the world-renowned Polish theater theorist and experimenter.  ROTters will see how that experience turns out to be the start of one of Shapiro’s most transformative periods.] 

 

'The Connection'

[15 July is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the original Living Theatre production of The Connection. The play ran for years in the Living's rep, accumulating 778 performances between 15 July 1959 and 31 March 1963. In view of this historic moment, I’m now posting this report, which I wrote a few days after seeing the revival, in recognition of the importance of the event.]

I took the opportunity of the revival of the Living Theatre’s landmark production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection to go down to Loisaida on 5 February and check out this bit of theater history. Charles Isherwood had given the revival of The Connection, which ran from 8 January to 13 February, a decidedly mixed review in the Times, but it happens that I wrote the entry for the play in The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993), so I wanted to see it myself. It's not often that you get to go back a little in time and check out a theatrical experience that had such an impact, perhaps even changing everything that came afterwards. (No less a figure than Edward Albee, who made his own successful Off-Broadway debut the next year, asserted, "I was so affected and energized by 'The Connection.' It was exciting, dangerous, instructive and terrifying . . . .") You can go back and look at the paintings and sculptures that redirected the Dark Ages into the Renaissance or launched Impressionism. You can read Zola's Thérèse Raquin and see how literary realism began, but you can't go back and witness the time Sophocles stunned Athens by introducing a third actor to the stage or recapture the astonishment in the audiences the first time they saw Hair in the late '60s (despite its popular, Broadway-bound revival just now). Sure, there are revivals of Ibsen’s Doll House and Osborne's Look Back in Anger, but they are usually re-conceptions or modern interpretations. Few directors want to reconstruct their predecessors' results; they want to create their own. But here was the Living attempting to recreate the production that, in its way, defined mid-century American avant-garde theater, and Judith Malina, the original director, was going to stage it again herself. I sure had to take a shot at that.

Of course, no one can really turn the clock back, and the times have gone by: the original actors are dead or retired, Julian Beck (who designed the original set) is gone, and none of us is as theatrically naïve as the spectators were in the summer of '59. The Living Theatre's old building at 6th Avenue and 14th Street is still standing (it's an eyeglass store now), but the company's moved many times since then, including a five-year self-exile in Europe, so the performance space is different and the Lower East Side in the 2009 isn't Greenwich Village at the end of the 1950s. But maybe something of the old atmosphere remains hovering about the city, like that sweet smell New Yorkers experienced last January, when the revival opened, but couldn't identify until a month later. Maybe there's still a little Proustian magic in the madeleine, and a glimpse of that remarkable experience is possible even in 2009. (And it's not like I can't get lost in a theatrical world, either. I still remember seeing Pat Carroll in GS3 back in June 1980 and literally thinking, as I was watching the performance, "Gee, Stein's a fascinating person. I'm so glad I met her.")

Well, as theater history, a so-called museum production, The Connection was fine, and I'm more than glad to have seen it, even half a century after the fact. I'm trusting Malina, who is 82 now, to have recreated the basic theatrical mise-en-sène of the original staging as much as is possible with a new cast (only one of whom could possibly have even been alive in 1959!) and a different performance space. I have enough of an imagination to conjure up in that little theater offering the whopping great experience with the prompting of Malina's backward glance. I think I can also put myself in the mindset of the less-jaded and theatrically less-well-traveled spectator who sat there in 1959 and had never seen anything like it before. (To be honest, I was a little primed before I walked into the theater on Clinton Street. Having read something of the production when I did the research for the CGAT article--and having pretty much grown up with the notion of the famous Connection because it is part of theater lore--I may have been projecting the show in my imagination onto the one at the Living last winter. What can I do?)

I'll assume that most people know the outline of Gelber's Connection, that "it focused on the lives of heroin-addicted musicians listlessly awaiting their 'connection,' Cowboy" (as I wrote for CGAT) and that a jazz ensemble jammed on and off during the play. The audience is an "invited" bunch allowed to eavesdrop on this bit of "real life," which is an improvised play with producer and playwright in attendance, and a film crew on hand to record the experience. (Now it's a video crew.) The Connection, of course, was never actually improvised: Jack Gelber, who died in 2003, wrote it, after all (and it's published), though some of the dialogue might have been spontaneous‑‑or developed from spontaneity during rehearsals. (The Living had never been an improvisatory troupe up till then, though they later did engage in audience-interaction in some of their performances.) The "real life" witnessed by the spectators on 14th Street wasn't real--the characters were actors, not junkies (though, of course, being both wasn't impossible). There were, in fact, rumors that the cast were real addicts and that real smack was shot up on stage; it wouldn't surprise me if Julian Beck had started those rumors himself to keep the curious coming downtown. There were also reports of spectators fleeing the theater, finding the spectacle a bit too real and too hard to take; in London, audiences booed and shouted. Nothing like that happened down on Clinton Street (but, once again, I could imagine it that way 50 years ago).

There's little, if any, plot in The Connection: the characters wait in Leach's loft for Cowboy to arrive; he arrives; they get high. The end. The drama in The Connection is what everyone does while they wait--first for the dealer, then for the high to take hold. (Malina says that everyone's on a "search for the ecstatic," which the musicians look for in their music, Sister Salvation looks for "in the promise of Redemption," and the junkies in "the flash of the heroin.") They bicker, they philosophize, they confess--often to us, since we're "there"--and each character gets a soliloquy, delivered directly to us. I don't think that was a brand-new concept even in '59--the idea of the audience being literally present for the characters--but it wasn't common. And married to the edginess of the jonesing characters, the doping, and the general seamy alienness of the life they're witnessing up close, it's easy to see how a middle-class audience at the end of the Eisenhower era might find this experience exciting, even disturbing--but The Connection became the Living's most successful and, after Paradise Now, its most iconic performance and, as I noted, has gone down in theater history. (It was also filmed in 1962 and the music, composed by Freddie Redd, was recorded in 1960.)

In 1959, some critics rejected it, some embraced it. Louis Calta of the Times called the play "a farrago of dirt, small-time philosophy, empty talk and extended runs of 'cool' music"; and Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune said that "the evening produced in me a restive feeling that we are at the end of the road, now, and faced with a choice: We must either return to believing in the possibility of art, which was the point we started at, or abandon the pretense to art altogether." Kenneth Tynan of Harper's Bazaar, the New Yorker, and London's Observer called The Connection "the most memorable theatrical experience at present accessible in New York," while Brooks Atkinson declared it "an engrossing piece of theatre in an obsessive style" that "cannot be ignored" in the Sunday Times. (In 2009, the critics were more united in their dismissal.)

Okay, all that's sort of prologue. As a contemporary theater experience, we got problems. Most of them are predictable and probably insurmountable, given the passage of time. As for the script, for example, it's hard to get exercised about junkie artists in our midst. After the '60s, with the deaths of so many from overdoses (Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison) and the celebrity junkies of the ensuing decades (Amy Winehouse, anyone?), it's just not shocking anymore. We've all lived too much since the '50s. The wasted lives, the days spent waiting for a fix or a high--well, even broadcast TV has that story in prime time a couple of times a week. (Hell, there's been a dope-dealing suburban mom on cable once a week for the past four years! Another cable net has a reality show of addiction interventions--though I can't imagine why anyone'd want to watch it!) Nothing anyone says in The Connection is shocking anymore. We've heard it all, sometimes in our own homes. Nothing Malina could have done, short of rewriting Gelber from scratch, could have changed that. (The characters don't shoot up on stage, by the way; it's done off stage, in the bathroom. That kind of mid-century squeamishness has passed, too: even the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series showed the great detective injecting himself with cocaine on screen.)

Then, theatrically: the concept of the "improvised" play, even the fake-improvised play, isn't new anymore, either. Plays with music aren't innovative now; they're commonplace: Sam Shepard did it in 1972 in The Tooth of Crime, for instance. Playing to a real audience is also a technique many companies have used or experimented with (Leo Shapiro, an avant-garde director I’ve written about, made it a hallmark of his work), just like confessional direct-address--on which entire Broadway (and HBO) performances have been based. All of the scary-fascinating new ideas for theater that Malina and Gelber originally incorporated in their production concept have become standard (which, of course, is why The Connection is historically significant). I don't know if you can go home again, but you can't run the clock back for real. The Connection is no longer an experience of unique impact; it is just a tribute. It's a little like comparing the first time I heard The Beatles sing "Hello Goodbye" in 1967 and hearing the current cover of the song by the Jonas Brothers: they sound a lot alike, but the impact isn't there.

Unhappily, though, it's not just the passage of the decades that damaged The Connection. Malina intended the current production to be present-day, not a glimpse into the late '50s. There were references to Starbucks, cell phones, and the current resident of the White House (unnamed, but clearly alluded to), not to mention the appearance of the afore-mentioned digital video camera. So, on top of all the other lost flashpoints, we have some anachronisms that drain the play of its full power. First, in 2009, the drug the junkies are waiting around for probably wouldn't be heroin--or at least not exclusively heroin. My inclination would be crack or meth, considering the demography of the group. (Cocaine would probably be out of their financial reach, as would pharmaceuticals.) Second, the music that would surround a bunch of 20-something dopers would less likely be jazz these days than rock. (The ensemble was a bass, a sax, drums, and a piano. Today there would probably be an electronic keyboard and electric bass in for the piano and strings. And, by the way, I'm not even gonna start wondering where the piano and drum set came from. Okay, maybe Leach has a piano in his pad, but does the drummer carry all his drums with him when he goes to someone's place to wait for his dealer?) Jazz is almost too high-toned now to fit the atmosphere of Gelber's world. The Man with the Golden Arm was 1955; if they made it today, the Sinatra character would be a rocker (and he'd be doing coke, crack, or meth). If you're gonna update, I think you hafta update, man. No half measures.

(Despite the updating, Gary Brackett--variously designated Director of Production and Director of Design--put a hula hoop on the wall of the loft, much to the consternation of the Times's Isherwood, who wondered why no one hula'd. Also, in the one truly absurdist moment--well, two: it was repeated in the second act--an unnamed man strode into the loft carrying a small case. Everyone stopped talking and watched as he opened the case to reveal a Victrola, plugged it into a light socket, and played a jazz 45. It wasn't an iPod, a CD-player, or even a tape-player, but an old-fashioned portable turntable. And a 45, to boot! So, is it real--present day--or is it Memorex--the '50s?)

I don't know if a '50s setting would have worked better--we spectators having been invited up to see an improvised play set a half century ago--but there might have been less time-bending that way. Other problems wouldn't have been so easily solved, and Judith Malina has to take responsibility for these. It's the acting, folks. Now, none of the actors was bad, but none was really more than competent. (I won't single out or name most of the actors because this was an ensemble performance and it was the group as a whole that failed. Isherwood did mention a couple of the cast members specially, but I don't feel that's warranted.) I imagine they'd all have done well enough in a conventional play, even a classic. But the fake improvisation and the audience-engagement didn't come anywhere near off. Everyone was so . . . well, actorly. This was especially so in the soliloquies each character has, when he (there are no women in the gang; the only female character is Sister Salvation, played by Malina herself) addresses us, and we're supposed to feel he's talking to us straight. But nothing in these moments seemed the least spontaneous or organic. The "producer," Jim Dunn (Tom Walker), was perhaps the worst: he seemed exactly like an actor playing a director in a sketch. As the "playwright," Jaybird (as in "naked as a . . ."?), Gelber's stand-in, Eric Olson was awkward and uncomfortable, as if he didn't know his lines or his cues or something. One of the cameramen (Isaac Scranton) kept saying, "That's the way it is. That's the way it really is." It's supposed to be a true expression of realization and bare-faced reaction but it sounded more like the mantra of the painter George Frederick Watts in Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater (which I saw a few weeks earlier last winter by the Women’s Project): "The Utmost for the Highest"--a hollow, meaningless phrase. The musicians were good as a band, but as characters, they were no better than the actors. (Their musical performances were terrific, but that was a problem for me, too. They weren't jamming while hanging around waiting for their fixes; they were performing. I never decided if they were supposed to be just noodling on their instruments because that's what musicians do when they're idle or if the virtuosity of their playing was another of Gelber's absurdist aspects, like the Victrola man and Sister Salvation. To enhance the improvisatory dynamic of the play, I think I'd have gone with the jam-session approach. Although, the absurdist take might "explain" the availability of the piano and the drum set . . . .) I don't know if Malina cast actors who couldn't handle the style of the script, or if she misdirected them. Either way, it's her fault.

The rest of the production went along with the foregoing: The set was too neat, and I don't mean in the sense of cleanliness. Leach says he keeps his place clean, but the walls weren't worn or marred, nothing was especially distressed; a tablecloth he spread on a table to cut up a pineapple looked as if it might have just come from K-Mart. (By the way, aren't pineapples slightly expensive as far as fresh fruit goes? These guys have no money--few of them have jobs.) The costumes were the same. Sam wore open-laced combat boots, but they didn't look like they ever touched pavement. Everyone was suitably sloppy, but more like frat boys than wasted junkies. (They were all clean-shaven, too--an anomaly in these days of the scruffy look even in the chicest of surroundings!) Nary a wrinkle could be detected, much less a tatter or a stain. (Mom may not like her boy's wardrobe, but she keeps it laundered, ironed, and mended!) I've seen pictures of the MAT's production of The Lower Depths that looked grottier than this set and its inhabitants. It all just supported the sense that this Connection was all fake. Whatever the problems inherent in the 50-year-old script, this was unnecessary.

So, as a piece of theater history, okay; as a piece of theater, what a downer. I guess nothing's authentic anymore, not even the Living Theatre.

[There was one line that has been annoying me since I saw the show. I wasn’t sure if it was an author's error, an actor's error, or a character's error. (Later I had a look at the published script, and that’s what Gelber wrote. So it’s either a playwright’s error or a character error.) Solly, the group's philosopher and thinker, played by Anthony Sisco, goes on in two bits about the speed of light. He says several times that it's "186,000 miles per second, per second." Now, I haven't taken physics or anything like it since junior year in high school (don't ask when that was!), but I remember that "per second, per second" (or "per second squared") is not a measure of speed; it's a measure of acceleration. It's not how fast something goes, but how fast it goes faster. Anachronisms are one thing; factual mistakes are something else again.]