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.] 

 

Dueling Brechts, Part 2

[“Dueling Brechts, Part 2” begins where Part 1, published at the end of last week,  stopped, after detailing the history of Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann and the rivalry between the two New York City producing companies, the renowned Living Theatre and the more conventional New Repertory Theatre Company, in 1962.  (If you haven’t read Part 1, I urge you to go back and pick up the beginning of the tale first.)  In Part 2, I’ll cover the play’s structure and themes and the press coverage of the Off-Broadway productions, including some of the reviews.  ~Rick]

As the CSC promo I cited in the introduction to the first part of this discussion suggests, Mann ist Mann is about the total manipulability of the human character.  As Begbick puts it (in Nellhaus’s rendition of the line in CSC’s publicity): “A man will be rebuilt here like an automobile, / Be renamed and lose nothing at all in the deal.”  According to the Living Theatre’s 1962 press release, “The play is described by Brecht as a ‘comic play’ and deals with the transformation of the day laborer, Galy Gay, into a human fighting machine.  The action . . . illustrates how the forces of society compel men everywhere to change their personalities to suit the ‘needs’ of the day.”  In the New York Times, Sam Zolotow reported in 1962 that Julian Beck, director of the Living’s Man Is Man, “described the play as ‘the hilarious tragedy of an individual’s absorption into the system.’”  Also in the Times, reviewer Howard Taubman observed, “Brecht knew only too well . . . how men could be reconstructed in personality and how they could be diverted from decency into brutality.”

Dramaturgically, what’s at play here is a relatively early manifestation of Brecht’s belief in the mutability or relativity of identity (a manifestation of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a philosophical concept popular in some circles in Weimar Germany, loosely translated as the “New Objectivity,” but for which “New Pragmatism” seems more apt, at least in this case) whereby a person sloughs off one personality or set of principles and takes on another or others as convenience or practicality dictates.  Gay comes to see that “a man is what people want him to be.”  In Brecht’s view, he can even discard his most strongly held standards because the society the writer perceived—and is ours any better today than his was in 1925?—is so warped that he might not only surrender himself and his friends to expediency, but also his principles.  As Begbick explains:  “Herr Bertolt Brecht claims: Man is man / And as he claims this, so any man can / But Herr Bertolt Brecht tonight proves with ease, / You can make a man whatever you please.” 

Galy Gay, of course, is exhibit one here—but Widow Begbick isn’t averse to shifting loyalties to better her fortunes (like Mother Courage, whom Begbick greatly resembles) and Bloody Five is virtually stripped of his identity through Begbick’s machinations, though, unlike Gay, the sergeant’s persona isn’t replaced with another one.  Even Jeriah Jip (the original) accepts the necessity of switching identities with Galy Gay.  The shift may be motivated by good intentions or bad, the consequences may be bad or good, and the individual may be willing or reluctant, coerced or bamboozled.  Gay, for instance, has help in deciding to morph into Jeriah Jip, human fighting machine, but he’s easily persuaded and doesn’t take available opportunities to make other choices.  “Before the sun has dipped down seven times,” says Uriah Shelly, one of the machine gunners, as Gay’s new companions plan his transformation, “this man must be made into another man. . . .  One man’s like another.  Man is man.”  

Though many New York reviewers in 1962 reported that Mann ist Mann is about “brainwashing,” the script makes very clear that Brecht didn’t have in mind a psychological indoctrination or Skinnerian behavior modification, but something more akin to the insidiousness of propaganda and advertising and the power of the capitalist marketplace.  Both Julian Beck and Joseph Chaikin pointed out that Galy Gay has several opportunities simply to “go away,” escape his conversion into a soldier—but he doesn’t take them up.  As Uriah says of his new comrade, “There’s a man who can’t say no” (unless otherwise indicated, my quotations from the play are drawn from the Living Theatre’s script).  He’s manipulated and hoodwinked, the way advertising does, and eventually convinced to be what his comrades want him to be.  Even Eric Bentley stated that the issue of “brainwashing” isn’t handled in the play “in the crude sense of Korea, but the subtler sense of Madison Avenue and popular indoctrination.”  As Uriah remarks, “A man like that really will change all on his own.  Throw him into a puddle, in two days he’ll grow webs on his feet.”  Gay isn’t so much brainwashed in the Manchurian Candidate sense as sold on the life of a soldier.  (That film, about the political repercussions of Chinese brainwashing during the Korean War, was released in October 1962, just after the plays started to run.  Richard Condon’s novel was published in 1959.)  When Polly Baker, another of his new companions, tells Gay, “In war time a soldier’s life is especially pleasant.  Only in battle does a man attain his full measure,” and lays out the advantages of being a soldier, the erstwhile handyman responds, “I see, a soldier’s life is very pleasant.”  Even the “elephant” Gay is made to “sell” illegally is the product of false advertising: it’s a hodgepodge of bits and pieces found around Begbick’s canteen, draped over one of the soldiers, but Gay is persuaded that it’s a magnificent beast worth a great deal of money.  

In addition to the themes of “a man is what people want him to be” and “a man had best eat what is everyone’s dish,” Mann ist Mann has an anti-military and anti-war sentiment that, even in the years before our full engagement in Vietnam, might have caught the attention of pacifist and non-interventionist Americans, as well as anti-nuclear activists.  It’s certainly possible that some of the excess attention was the result of, in addition to the theatrical coincidence, some international affairs arising at the same time. As John Tytell points out in The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (1995), there was a particularly momentous convergence of art and politics while the aggressively anti-military Mann ist Mann was playing.  In January, the Becks had organized the General Strike for Peace during another of the frequent East-West political crises focused on West Berlin, less than six months after the construction of the Wall, and then “the loony fanaticism of the military mind,” as Tytell put it, was frighteningly manifested under front-page banner headlines in the New York Times. 

On 23 October 1962, a little more than a month after the plays opened, the paper reported that President John F. Kennedy had revealed conclusive evidence of Soviet missile bases on Cuba that were capable of launching nuclear weapons at the United States.  “[T]he propagandistic bellicosities of the cold war,” wrote the Living’s chronicler, “had suddenly heated to a boiling point.”  Accompanied by aggressive language on all sides of the looming crisis, the Times continued to report ultimatums, rejections, name-calling, and threats of retaliation, reaching a peak when a U-2 reconnaissance plane filming the bases was shot down over Cuba on 27 October.  For weeks, until Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev finally retreated from the brink of confrontation, the world suffered, in Tytell’s words, “unprecedented tensions and fears of Armageddon.”  It’s easy to understand why, in the midst of the so-called Cuban missile crisis, the press and the populace might respond to Mann ist Mann as an expression of their own fearful sentiments. 

Lines like “soldiers . . . are the worst people on earth” and “Since he’s a soldier, he can’t have any sense” probably had resonance for the burgeoning anti-military community who were demonstrating in Times Square as recently as March 1962 (when Julian Beck was seriously injured by a mounted police officer) or at the Pentagon in June.  (Keep in mind that, though I don’t know if the New Rep company had a political agenda or not, Beck and the Living Theatre were actively leftist.  The Becks, in fact, were rehearsing Man Is Man while preparing for a second General Strike for Peace scheduled for 5 November.  The Living’s production and the lines I’ve quoted from its script will have had a clear political emphasis.)  The war in Mann ist Mann has been “long expected,” yet no one knows who the enemy is to be or what the cause is.  The heroism that is celebrated by the play’s soldiers is against innocents—prisoners in the case of Bloody Five, the battle-hardened sergeant, and a fort full of civilian refugees, “most of them hard-working and friendly human beings,” in Galy Gay’s instance.  

Along with its anti-militarism, Mann ist Mann has other appeals for certain disaffected elements of American society.  Widow Begbick is the merchant, the buyer and seller, the capitalist, who manipulates and finally helps sell out the innocent Galy Gay, a scenario that can be seen as anti-capitalist.  (Remember that Brecht was a Marxist.)  There is also the mocking argument that an individual is weak until he joins a group: “Keep this in mind, men: What’s one man?  One is none,” a position which many counterculture activists (as well as libertarians) would have found specious.  Finally, in a passage that evokes a kind of Luddite, anti-automation stance, Brecht can be seen to disparage the notion that technology is a universal benefit:  

The human personality is being placed under a magnifying glass, the man of character minutely examined.  Nothing’s left untouched.  Bottom’s up; it’s time for a change.  Technology takes over.  At the lathe and at the conveyor belt, size doesn’t matter; the big man’s the same as the little man. . . . .  Man is nothing!  Modern science proves that everything is relative.  

The presence on the stage of Greenwich Village’s Theatre de Lys—now the Lucille Lortel—of George Tabori’s collage, Brecht on Brecht, which opened in January 1962 with a cast of luminaries that included Kurt Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, may have also attuned New York’s press and theater audiences to things Brecht.  Furthermore, the Living had successfully presented another Brecht translation by Nellhaus, In the Jungle of Cities, in 1960 and then took it on tour to Europe just before embarking on the production of Man Is Man.  In the air, according to the newspapers, were potential productions of Nellhaus’s translation of Brecht’s Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti (never produced here), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (produced by George Tabori on Broadway as Arturo Ui in 1963), and Mother Courage and Her Children (produced on Broadway by Cheryl Crawford, also in 1963).  As Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post quipped, Bertolt Brecht was “a pretty hot property right now”!  

The critical response to the two productions was quite divergent.  Several of the most important reviewers admitted that they found Brecht difficult to take, his politics unconvincing, his dramaturgy disconcerting, and his popularity among certain segments of the audience incomprehensible and suspect.  (Among these notices were “‘Man Is Man’ a Bore, Bore, Bore,” 19 September, by Robert Coleman of the New York Mirror; “Off-Broadway: Brecht Play Is Over-Long,” 19 September, by John McClain of the New York Journal-American; “Two on the Aisle: Brecht Looks at Brainwashing,” 19 September, by Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York Post; and “The Living Theatre Offers ‘Man Is Man,’“ 20 September, by Whitney Bolton of the Morning Telegraph.  Many of these reviewers repeated their positions after the opening of A Man’s a Man as well.)  By some assessments, the New Rep production and Bentley’s translation was deemed the critical victor of the match-up, but others frankly disagreed.  (An unidentified teletype, possibly part of an Associated Press filing, tallied that “[t]he Living Theater’s ‘Man Is Man’ won qualified approval from 3 of 6 reviewers.  ‘A Man’s a Man,’ presented by the New Repertory Company at the Masque, won 4 endorsements as the better effort.”  I have no clue which notices the reporter considered, as I have copies of about two dozen reviews for both productions, not counting a couple I just ignored as surfeit.)  Some split their vote or dismissed both productions and the play (and the playwright) as well.  And a few disparaged the play but still chose a favorite.  As Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post declared: “And may the best man win.”  (Get it?)

A case in point is Michael Smith’s Village Voice review, by far the longest press piece generated by the dueling Brechts (about 2400 words as compared to under 700 for the next longest review), which favored the Living Theatre’s Man Is Man because the Masque’s A Man’s a Man “doesn’t stick in the brain and itch like the Living Theatre’s,” in which “the high points in Julian Beck’s staging are very, very high.”  Nonetheless, Smith denied that Mann ist Mann is a major Brecht play (and “seems to harm Brecht that [it] should now be done twice . . . before his more important works have been done here at all”).  Smith pointed out that Brecht wrote Mann ist Mann when he was just 26 and called it “a loose-limbed, gawky, whimsical parable.”  He thought that “both productions of ‘Mann Ist Mann’ are . . . misled”  because they presented the play as anti-military (as I myself believe), but Smith denied this interpretation (even though he acknowledged that may have Brecht’s intention when he revised the play in 1953).  Smith also listed a number of what he saw as dramaturgical weaknesses, concluding that Mann ist Mann “is a failure, finally, because it comes nowhere near convincing me that its message is either new, important, or particularly true.”  

(In criticizing the play, Smith averred, “‘Mann Ist Mann’ is not a major work of Bertolt Brecht and not a major work at all.”  In the brouhaha that swirled around the openings and performances of the dueling Brechts, both Eric Bentley and Julian Beck actually responded to Smith’s provocation.  In an interview about the work on the play, Joe Chaikin had declared, “We discovered that here was a really major play.”  But that was on 6 September, before Smith’s 27 September review.  On 4 October, however, the Village Voice, Smith’s own paper, ran a column called “Says Eric Bentley: ‘A Man’s a Man’ Is A Magnificent Play” in which Brecht’s adaptor demurred, “One is following expectation, not fact, when one classifies the early poetry and drama [of Brecht] as in any way inferior.  Brecht was at the height of his powers when he was . . . twenty (1918). . . .  I submit that his early period is one of greatness.”  Point by point, including oversights and misunderstandings by detractors, Bentley offered proof that “‘A Man’s a Man’ belongs integrally to this period.”  On 11 October, the weekly published “‘Man Is Man’ Is A Major Work” by Beck.  In it, the director wrote bluntly, “‘Man Is Man’ is a major work.  The Living Theatre has always tried to concern itself with major works.”  He spent the rest of the column, a little under 1200 words, making his argument.)

Of the two concurrent productions, Smith wrote that they were “radically different in aims and means.”  New Rep’s A Man’s a Man is “outer-directed,” he said, “oriented toward its audience, toward engaging the audience’s interest and attentions toward startling and hopefully amazing the audience.”  He acknowledged, however, “Much of it is superb.”  The Living’s Man Is Man, on the other hand, was “inner-directed,” with “none of the tricks, none of the dazzling surface.”  Smith saw that Beck’s staging was “ragged and rough, without even gestures toward polish,” and “aims at the play, not at the audience.”  In contrast to the uptown performance, the Living’s “achieves an extraordinary inner intensity and a grinding momentum.”  

Earlier in the Village Voice, Jane Kramer interviewed the two Galy Gays, comparing the actors’ appearances and their acting styles and letting Chaikin and Heffernan speak about how they saw the role.  “The two young actors who have been chosen to play the porter,” Kramer wrote, “are, physically and artistically, startlingly different theatre types.”  The New Rep’s Heffernan she described as “a tall, lean, rubber-faced actor” (he’s also blond and blue-eyed, according to another writer) whose earlier roles for the renowned Phoenix Theatre on and Off-Broadway were often classical (Hamlet, The Tempest, Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars).  Chaikin, who started with the Living Theatre (until he launched his own company, the Open Theater, in 1963) in productions of such contemporary, often experimental, works as Jack Gelber’s The Connection, Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities, and William Carlos Williams’s Many Loves, was depicted as “small, intent” (plus “compact, wiry, dark-haired”—and also blue-eyed)  When it came to discussing the character, Kramer reported that “Chaikin raced through the script, pointing out line after line,” explaining that he was “terribly involved in this part,” while Heffernan “was far calmer about the part.”  Surprisingly, though Heffernan sounded more the intellectual and academically schooled text analyst and Chaikin more visceral and instinctual, they seemed to have like senses of the role they were rehearsing—expressing similar ideas in different words.  

The Post’s Tallmer, taking a humorous perspective, wrote that column with the unreadable headline, “Let’s Get It Straight: (A) Man(’s) Is (a) Man,” in which he imagines a confused conversation between two theatergoers about which performance was which or, as Tallmer put it, “Which Brecht has the Tony?”  (Okay, those of you who are under a certain age won’t get that little gag.  That was a take-off on the tag line from a Toni Home Permanent commercial, “Which twin has the Toni.”)  The journalist added a pun that “The Tony is only given out for Broadway.  This is Off-Broadway.”  The discussion between the couple, which owed something to Abbott and Costello, gave some pointers about how to keep the rival productions apart.  (I may reprint the whole article as a comment following this post after it’s pubished.)  The Voice article whose headline made actual reference to the famous Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s On First?: Brecht Fathers Twins As Off-B’way Season Nears,” wasn’t itself humorous, but reviewed some of the changing plans for which production would hit the boards first, observing, “Both groups want the advantage of ‘springing’ the play on the public, as both feel it is an important work, and it is this that accounts for the confusion on opening dates.  If both productions were to open on the same night”—a briefly considered possibility, apparently—“it would force the daily critics to prejudge in their choice of which opening to attend.”

In Women’s Wear Daily, Thomas R. Dash pronounced the New Rep’s A Man’s a Man “enthralling theatre” and Bentley’s adaptation “pungently powerful drama.”  Hancock’s staging, Dash wrote, “gives the play a theatrical celerity and the raffishness required without sacrificing one scintilla of the playwright’s ironic commentaries.”  He concluded, “If you want the Kiplingesque flavor of an imperial army in India on the way to conquest, combined with Brecht’s depth, penetration and prescience . . . you can get it all in one package  at the Masque Theatre.”  Of the Living’s Man Is Man, Dash’s colleague, Martin Gottfried, however, found that the “hallmarks of Brecht”—“social irony, idealistic bitterness and theatrical vitality”—“are less overwhelming than usual, and are combined with a muddled intellectual scheme.”  With Beck’s direction and Walter Caldon’s score “reminiscent of Kurt Weill,” the production “all sounds like a second-rate ‘Threepenny Opera.’”  Of the play, Gottfried said, “While the bitterness in its view of man as ignorant of himself is provocative, Mr. Brecht has forsaken human dignity without adequate explanation.”  He added that since “Mr. Brecht does not challenge the mind in ‘Man is Man,’ . . . it also becomes intellectually inconsequential.”  Gottfried continued, however, “But never theatrically inconsequential. . . .  It is always interesting and it is always very good theatre.”  His conclusion, though, was that “[a]s an intellectual [Brecht’s] credits—in this play—are lesser.”

The Christian Science Monitor covered both performances in a single notice and Melvin Maddocks summed up, “It may as well be said bluntly that the New Repertory is the better one.  Visually it has a large edge with its bold use of painted masks and music hall stylization.”  Hancock, A Man’s a Man’s director, “made his production cleanly audible and ordered, points on which the Living Theater with cluttered, bitty, and vaguely noisy scenes falls far behind.”  Declaring, “It was a case of one’s company and two’s a crowd,” the Newark Evening News’s Milch asserted that “the two productions differ substantially.  But not enough . . . to justify both at the same time.”  Comparing the two scripts, Milch felt, “The original version [New Rep’s A Man’s a Man] was far ahead of its time in showing . . . modern totalitarians and their methods.  But the later version [the Living’s Man Is Man], refined and sharpened by Brecht . . ., is even more effective.”  Milch called A Man’s a Man “jazzed up with gimmicks,” but “it didn’t equal its predecessor,” he concluded.  “One vote for Downtown,” Milch announced.

Among those who questioned the very need to present a Brecht play (let alone this Brecht play), George Oppenheimer of Newsday dismissed the Living’s production as having acting that “varies from acceptable to deplorable,” a stage design that’s “skimpy,” and direction that’s “even skimpier” and went on to state, “Nor did the play appeal to me,” complaining that the plot was “accompanied by turgid symbols, songs that are ‘langweilig’ [boring, tedious] rather than Kurt Weillish and an almost complete absence of Brecht’s dramatic flair and originality.”  (A German pun?  Really?)  Having only read the reviews of New Repertory’s A Man’s a Man, Oppenheimer nonetheless decided the Living’s Man Is Man “was the better of the two” and feeling “too staggered by the impact of the first” staging to go to the second one, declared, “Any ensuing report will have to wait until time has salved my trauma.”  In the Morning Telegraph, Whitney Bolton stated unambiguously, “Nothing that takes place on the stage of the Living Theatre, off-Broadway, convinces me that the present, panting cult for the works of Bertolt Brecht is anything but a pseudo-intellectual banding together of somewhat addled Gee-Whizzers.”  A day later, Bolton wrote that Bentley’s translation was “more artfully and even intellectually correct,” but he said nothing about the New Rep’s production, aside from praising some of the acting, except that he preferred Joe Raposo’s score to Walter Caldon’s.  Bolton continued that “the play is almost a burlesque, a shambles of disorderly speech and blurred intentions.”  More significantly, he insisted, “I cannot, although I try, understand the sudden fantastic cult for Brecht” and further asserted, “Now you have but to wave his name and people are interested, some are breathless.”  At the end, Bolton stated what must be the obvious:              

I am not a devotee of Brecht.  I am not expecting to become one.  I have shut no doors.  I still could be convinced, but this wholesale onslaught of Brecht as though he were the greatest theatrical and humanitarian spokesman in human history bores me stiff. 

In his second report, Bolton concluded, “If I do not fire salvos of cheer it is because I cannot find it in me to be a Brechtian.”  (In an unusual move, the Morning Telegraph ran another opinion: in an omnibus column a week after the openings, George Freedley said of Man Is Man, “This is Brecht without compromise or concession.”  The columnist, who was at the time also the first Curator of the New York Public Library’s Theatre Collection, wrote that A Man’s a Man “was brilliantly performed with a gaiety which is likely to win audiences” and that the production “is one not to be missed.”  Freedley didn’t cite a preference between the interpretations.)

Nadel, the Telegram & Sun writer who filed three separate notices, ultimately came down on the side of Man Is Man at the Living.  He concluded, Man Is Man’s “transformation is bound to be more shocking, more dramatic and more vividly explicit in depicting society’s crime against mankind in destroying the individual by changing him into a destructive machine.”  While acknowledging the “piquant little charms” of the New Rep’s A Man’s a Man, “which make the parable more palatable and the evening more fun,” Nadel complained that “it dilutes rather than concentrates the play’s purpose.”  

In his more detailed descriptions, the Telegram & Sun reviewer explained that at the Masque, “Comic values of the play are rather well exploited, and the alternating of the harsh and mild scenes makes Brecht’s brutal message somewhat easier to digest.”  He added, however, “The Brechtian force is something director John Hancock and his cast achieve only intermittently.”  The Bentley-New Rep A Man’s a Man, Nadel felt, “relies largely on devices, some of which are neither successful nor necessary.”  Never having seen a play directed by Brecht, Nadel nonetheless concluded, “I strongly suspect that the prevailing style of  ‘A Man’s a Man,’ at the Masque, isn’t his.”

Of the first New York production, Nadel declared, “Not everyone knows how to put Brecht on stage.  The Living Theater knows.”  The Beck-Nellhaus Man Is Man was “a production as far removed from conventional American theater as anything could be.  Nothing was done to charm the audience; in fact no mercy was shown.”  The comedy, “which seems anything but comic in the Living Theater production,” was “percussive, insistent and vivid; lusty, lurid and Germanic.”  Nadel’s only complaint was “that it never lets up.  There is no change of pace, no momentary quiet to prepare for a climax to come.”

In the New York Times, the most important source of critical opinion in New York City theater, Howard Taubman, warning in both cases that Brecht’s style can be off-putting and irksome to some theatergoers (“But stay with him,” the review-writer advised), chose the Bentley translation and the New Rep’s A Man’s a Man.  The script, he wrote, was “tougher in texture, tighter in construction and more focused in dramatic drive than” Nellhaus’s.  “The earlier version is more effective because it is leaner and sharper,” said Taubman, especially praising Bentley’s use of “a vivid American idiom that suits American actors.”  The performance, which Taubman pronounced “a Brecht production of character,” had “a greater consistency of style” which “approaches the manner and mood of the Brecht theater in East Berlin.”  The Living’s Man Is Man, by contrast, “is not yet the tightly knit affair it should become,” though “under Julian Beck’s staging . . . the performance grows in power and impact as it goes along.”  

Walter Kerr, arguably one of the most recognizable names in theater criticism in the middle of the 20th century, also preferred A Man’s a Man, but he had strong reservations about the play itself.  “Surely Mr. Brecht possessed some sort of magical command over the excitements of sheer theater if he once managed to make the exhibit at hand seem anything but obvious, untidy, and wantonly overlong,” Kerr insisted in the Herald Tribune.  He described the play as a “bizarre and grisly comedy” and “Bertolt Brecht’s tin-pan hymn to the world that hate makes.”  It was “overblown, repetitious, a single-track machine moving horizontally in space” whose “bitter humor, at least as we hear it now, is not always funny enough to sustain the improvisation (and, indeed, the padding) needed to keep the conceit on the move,” wrote the Trib’s reviewer.  In the end, Kerr begrudged that “Brecht is a figure we must get to know in performance if we are to understand his considerable contemporary influence.”  

Opening his review of A Man’s a Man with the words “This one,” Kerr made clear his preference for “which of the two current productions . . . to see.”  Bentley’s text was “tight and workable” and Hancock’s direction “has got the tinsel look and the saxophone sound of Brecht’s cabaret-style sermon, right off.”  The New Rep’s production, Kerr asserted, “is sound enough in wind and limb and ear and eye . . ., serving not only Brecht but off-Broadway well.”  On the other hand, Beck’s staging of Man Is Man “tends to disprove the play’s point,” said Kerr dismissively.  “It would seem to be extraordinarily difficult to turn another director into Bertolt Brecht.”  Nellhaus’s translation was “odd, deliberately disjointed,” the reviewer felt, and the Living’s Man Is Man lacked both the stability of acting and directing to demonstrate the character instability Brecht intended.  “The staging itself goes for . . . eccentricity for its own sake, and awkward at that,” reported Kerr.  His brutal conclusion was, “This is failing work, possessed neither of a design of its own nor, it is to be hoped, of Brecht’s.” 

Observing, “The cult of Bertolt Brecht is having a big week,” Richard Watts, Jr., confessed in the New York Post, “But I remain something of a heretic about Brecht.”  The Living’s Man Is Man, Watts reported, “tends to repeat its points until it becomes wearisome. . . .  [H]aving made his case clear enough, the didactic quality in Brecht took over, and . . . he resembles a lecturer with blackboard and pointer repeating his arguments and re-emphasizing them lest they be missed by his slower pupils.”  New Rep’s A Man’s a Man, he reported, “has a vitality, clarity, forcefulness and sardonic humor that made it far more effective than” the Living’s version.  The second performance “comes off much better,” Watts said, “because the story . . . was so frankly done in music hall terms.”  The Post reviewer explained that “the accent was on the wild farcical quality of the Brecht narrative and the savage bitterness of its implications was allowed to come through chiefly by suggestion.”

In the New York Mirror, Robert Coleman observed, “Brecht has enjoyed a popularity here that is difficult to understand.  He has maintained a cult that finds humor in his dialogue that we do not.”  After damning Man Is Man with faint praise, Coleman explained that he wouldn’t be attending New Rep’s A Man’s a Man because, “Frankly, we have had enough of old-hat Brecht for one week.”  The man from the Mirror departed with, “As Sam Goldwyn is reported to have said: ‘Include us out.’”

Like the Morning Telegraph’s Bolton, John McClain made a blunt acknowledgement in the New York Journal-American that “I do not worship at the shrine of Bertolt Brecht, and so the devout had better take their business elsewhere.”  Brecht, McClain asserted, “refuses to tell a plausible tale, or to project a feasible message, in terms that are readily understandable.”  Though he praised the Living’s Man Is Man as “a fine production,” McClain declared in his next notice that the New Rep’s A Man’s a Man “was infinitely superior to” Man Is Man.  “It almost made sense,” he quipped.  Calling Mann ist Mann “drenched in fuzzy symbols and oblique language,” McClain felt that the New Rep “had gone a long way to sharpen it up” and that their version “was produced with more imagination and fresher mountings.”   Reiterating bluntly, “I still don’t like the play,” the Journal-American  reviewer concluded sardonically, “I guess I am just a non-Brecht (which, in a free translation can probably mean non-bright).”  

[I’ve written many pieces for ROT about Leonardo Shapiro, his Shaliko Company, and the work he’s done as a director.  One of those pieces, “Brother, You’re Next,” posted on 26 January 2010, is about a 25-minute musical adaptation of Mann ist Mann reset to the Vietnam war which Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Chris Rohmann, and Robert Reiser wrote for guerrilla performances on the streets and in the parks of New York City in 1967.  (Shapiro had seen the Living Theatre’s 1962 production of Man Is Man and the play came to mean a great deal to him.  He would later direct Joe Chaikin in Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.)  Curious readers are invited to turn to this post as a kind of sidebar to the current article.

[Shapiro left New York for points west in the summer of 1969, spending two years leading the Appleseed Circus, a guerrilla-performance troupe in the area near Taos, New Mexico.  (I’ve written some about this endeavor, too, in Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos)” and “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 5 August and 31 October 2009, respectively) and one of Shapiro’s unrealized plans for the troupe was a presentation of A Man’s a Man for which he was in rehearsal when he pulled up stakes and returned to New York City.

[Out of necessity, I’ve cherry-picked the critical remarks I’ve used here, and I didn’t cite any evaluations of the acting.  With so many papers publishing at the time, it was just too much, but generally they all agreed, with a few exceptions, that the performances were good or excellent. The curious ROTter, especially anyone who was born after, say, 1960 or came to New York City after that year, might wonder about some of the newspapers I’ve cited above.  Not only did New York have many more daily papers than it does today, among them the papers whose titles I listed at the beginning of the post, but the theater beat was covered by papers from the suburbs (Bergen Record, Long Island Press, neither of which are quoted here) and neighboring cities (Newark Evening News, Newark Star Ledger) which were considered important voices in theater reportage and reviewing.  Today national newspapers like USA Today or the Wall Street Journal might run a review of a big show in New York, but in years gone by, such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor and Women’s Wear Daily played an important role in covering New York City’s theater scene.  Among magazines, Time and Newsweek both used to write regularly about New York theater and arts, and there was Cue, eventually folded into New York magazine.  Further coverage was afforded by the Associated Press and United Press International, the wire services, as well as the local television stations, both independents and network affiliates, which all had theater reviewers on their news staffs.  The New York Times was still considered the most important and influential critical voice, but it had a lot of competition.]