'Blue Heaven' (or 'Going to Iraq') – Part 2

[Below is the second part of my account of the production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven in September and October 1992.  In this section, I’ll recount the rehearsal process, the departure of director Leonardo Shapiro, the performances, and the critical reception..

[If you haven’t read Part 1 (11 May), which gives the background and origin of this production, I strongly recommend going back and reading that before starting Part 2.  My introduction to the first installment also explains how I got to be involved in the production and the perspective from which I was observing it.

[Part 1 also contains the identifications of all the people involved in the productions, including the actors who played the characters in Blue Heaven’s première.   Without that information, following this account will be confusing.]

The Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater is located at the western end—that is, the rear—of the ground floor of TNC’s building.  Its long dimension runs east-west, with the entrance from the lobby at the northern end of the short, eastern wall of the theater.  The set configuration established on 14 August (according to the thumbnail sketch in my hand-written notes; I didn’t transcribe the diagram into my word processor) located the triangular bandstand at the middle of the eastern wall, just left of the entrance, pointing into the center of the room. 

Aria’s studio, set off from the rest of the cafe set by a scrim,  was in the southwest corner, dominated by the bed oriented southwest to northeast. Along the long southern wall, near the eastern end, was Sada’s booth, a raised counter-like structure that looked a bit like a judge’s bench.  Sada sat there, ensconced in her observation post, overseeing the world of the Heaven Cafe, her domain. 

Herbie’s kitchen was on stage in front of the southern wall—across the cafe from the bleachers.  Several TV monitors were arrayed on the risers along the northern side of the playing area, creating an off-stage space behind them.  On these screens were shown both the live video Maria Venuto was shooting during the performances and the pre-recorded videos of war news, “candid” shots (including the viral video of the little blond tyke who sang “You Are My Hero” at the Super Bowl), politicians’ speeches (George H. W. Bush declaring the start of the bombing), and so on.

A kind of open off-stage space was established along the eastern expanse of the Johnson, between the back of the bandstand and the wall; it was visible, but ambiguous.  The center of the performance area was the cafe floor, occupied by the band platform and the tables and chairs.

Along with the Seagull film sequence and the taped and live video projections on the multiple monitors in the performance space, director Leonardo Shapiro employed actors speaking through microphones and singing some of the dialogue.  (One such scene is described in “As It Is in Heaven,” 25 March 2011.)  There were also scenes behind a scrim or with film and numerous effects, tricks and gags, masks, wigs, and funny faces.  Shapiro was greatly influenced by, among other performative forms, circus, theater games, and masks..

The director reconciled this extensive theatricality with the drive for truth and reality in acting by saying, “Nothing is pretend.”  The real is real, he insisted, and the artificial is artificial—in contrast to the stage magician invoked by Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie who presents pretense disguised as reality.  (Shapiro included Williams among his acknowledged influences and was attracted to stage magic from his early childhood.)

Sue Jane Stoker, stage manager of Blue Heaven, affirmed that Shapiro “allowed an enormous leeway for the actors to create.”  She recognized that, after some early trepidations, many actors in Blue Heaven “found his work very liberating.”  Stoker reported: “He gave [the actors] this framework . . ., and [the characters] were very much the creations of those actors.”

Shapiro gave few specific directions during rehearsal; the most he did was ask an actor to speak more loudly or more softly, or he might ask her to move to a different part of the acting area.  There were no Stanislavskian discussions of psychological motivation: Shapiro did not let the actors indulge their emotions and then discuss those feelings with them.  Stoker, describing Shapiro as a “visual director,” said, “He works more from the outside in.”

While watching Blue Heaven rehearsals, I was consciously looking for the way Shapiro communicated what he wanted from the actors.  In the years when the director had a permanent ensemble, I knew from interviewing him and many of the original Shaliko actors how Shapiro’s technique and the company style was developed over time.  In those years, Shapiro and his troupe worked on shows for months.

But I didn’t know Shapiro or Shaliko then; all the Shaliko shows I’d seen since 1986 (The Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore) had casts the director assembled from the pool of actors he knew and had worked with and others cast from outside his circle.  Gone were the years of working together closely and working for months on one production.  So how did he get the kinds of stylized and highly physical performances I’d seen?

I never saw it.  More to the point, I never heard it; I never heard Shapiro give oral instructions to his cast.  I went to nearly every rehearsal; I was teaching an evening class in New Jersey, so I missed two rehearsals a week, but I was in attendance for five days a week.  In the end, I had to ask about this.

Actress Rosalie Triana explained that he did it by body language: “He wouldn’t say a word.  Or he’d throw out a word and nothing else.  And I’d be standing there, but I would know even from his breathing . . . to go further.”  

“I do it in the tone of voice,” explained Shapiro; “I do it in the way I’m breathing; I do it in how close I am to them physically.  I say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ all the time, and I’m always . . . .  You know, I’m right there.  When they’re working, I’m on top of them, going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’”

“It’s like a conductor,” he continued, again using a musical reference.  “You don’t just describe . . . .  I mean, how many words are there?  Andante, adagio—you know—presto.  You know, there’s a very limited vocabulary, and the rest is communicated personally.  I’m communicating to them the same way they’re communicating to the audience.  I’m in their face.  There’s no actor that doesn’t know how I feel.”

George Bartenieff, who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a 1977 Obie as a director of TNC and later, individual acting Obies in 2001 and 2006, remarked that the work on Blue Heaven was “like living the experience” as he had in the Living Theatre’s The Brig (which won three Obies in 1964). 

Michael Preston, a Shaliko actor who is also a circus artist—he performed as Rakitin with the Flying Karamazov Brothers from 1991 through 2000—who was in the 1992 revival of Kafka: Father and Son with Bartenieff, compared this part of the Shaliko experience to circus work “where nothing is rehearsed.”

The process of improvising and experimenting got more complex when technical and other elements were added.  Since Blue Heaven had a live band, Shapiro incorporated music into many of the scenes, even directing the actors, like Nicki Paraiso at the piano or Bartenieff, to sing some lines.  While some of this work was abandoned, some remained as part of the performance text. 

In one rehearsal, Bartenieff had improvised an a cappella melody for some lines which composer Gtetchen Langheld later picked up on her saxophone.  After a few rehearsals, Bartenieff no longer sang, but the music remained as part of the score. 

(I asked Shapiro when he came up with the idea to have these lines sung.  He told me: “At the moment.  I mean, in rehearsal.”  I was a little surprised: “Just right there, and it happened?”  “Yeah,” conformed the director.  “It was just a thought that occurred to me.”) 

Then Shapiro continued volubly.  “I remember the day . . . that I had Nicki go to the piano to play during the scene.  It says in the script he’s supposed to get a cup of coffee. . . .  That was an exciting study for me.  That was a really exciting moment, when I discovered that the music . . . . 

“I mean, I had known I wanted Nicki to play the piano.  And I had known I wanted him to play during the scene.  But I hadn’t . . . .  You know, that was a sort of general, vague thought, not like anything real.  And finding that specific moment was very important, and it opened up a key to a lot of things.  But it was a long time between that and singing.  I mean, what he did . . . .  I don’t think he sang the first day. I think he just played the piano.“  (This is the scene I described in “As It Is In Heaven, referenced earlier.)

The director asked Paraiso to sing one of his lines at the next session, and then a week or so later, Shapiro said, he asked Lee Nagrin to sing, and then Bartenieff and Triana in another scene. 

Max Roach, a jazz percussionist who’d collaborated with Shapiro on Strangers, compared the director’s rehearsal method to a Charlie Parker improvisation in which no one knew what the result would be until the piece was finished.  Rehearsals for Blue Heaven didn’t always go smoothly, however. 

The Shaliko Company was originally formed in 1972 as a permanent troupe and they worked together for a year before presenting their first public performance.  Even after that first company broke up, Shapiro continued to work with a small cadre of artists who mostly all knew one another and one another’s working methods, especially Shapiro’s.  By the middle and late 1980s, the director began casting actors from open auditions, usually one or two within a cast made up largely of his ad hoc rep ensemble.

Among the cast of Blue Heaven, though, were several actors who not only didn’t know Shapiro, but who apparently weren’t comfortable with his method of working.  The director acknowledged that several cast members hadn’t been his own choices as Karen Malpede had written some roles for specific actors: Herbie for Bartenieff; Dee for Sheila Dabney, and Sada for Nagrin; other actors had been cast from auditions. 

It was evident that not all the actors were prepared to trust Shapiro, nor he them.  The actors who were cast from open auditions were joining a company that had been working together on and off for weeks and even months.

Further, since Shapiro wasn’t in sole control of the production—Malpede, of course, being the authority on  the script and Bartenieff, as executive director of TNC, the co-producer of the show—problems with elements of the production that were out of his hands, principally technical aspects associated with the theater (for which Bartenieff was responsible), often thwarted attempts to do meaningful work in rehearsals. 

Traditionally-trained actors, those who came out of conservatory or university acting programs, for instance, sometimes seemed in rehearsals to be uncomfortable that Shapiro didn’t give them conventional acting guidance.  During the work on Blue Heaven, stage manager Stoker determined that “it was very frustrating for some of the actors because some of them I doubt had ever worked in this way . . . .”

A few actors “found it very disorienting just to be given the outer directions rather than the discussions,” Stoker observed, and found that some of these seemed to ask themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ in the early stages of the rehearsal.  Still, among company members who committed to Shapiro’s methods, the work progressed much the same way as it had in Kafka sessions and resulted in honest, often profound performances.

In the introduction to The Theatre of Images (see “The Theatre of Mixed Means & The Theatre of Images,” 26 January 2020), Bonnie Marranca’s discussion of the avant-garde theater of the mid-1970s, she described the type of acting espoused by Shapiro as characteristic of the theater of images.  She believed that the actors thus become another medium for the director’s concept, a variation, perhaps, on Gordon Craig’s Über-marionette, the completely effaced actor.  (Edward Gordon Craig, 1872-1966, discussed his view of acting in “The Actor and the Über-marionette,” On the Art of the Theatre.)

In Shapiro’s productions, however, the actors were expected to adhere to a more Brechtian approach: to express not their “innermost core,” but their thoughts and experiences as they were reflected in the actions and circumstances of their roles.  His words, taken from notes for the first rehearsal of Blue Heaven, were to “cross document our lives with [the] characters’ lives, our props with theirs, our gestures with theirs, our voices with theirs . . . .”  (This is the acting technique Shapiro called “testimony,” discussed in the blog post referenced earlier.)

“What I’m trying to do now is more like opera,” said Shapiro, distancing his work from conventional Western Realism, “but I think that’s what theater is.”  He called music “the mother art, from which all performance derives” and attributed to music the cornerstones of performance: “time keeping, structure, the revelation of hidden and unspeakable mysteries, and, perhaps, for some, the keys to the locks of the mysteries.”  

At the first rehearsal of Blue Heaven, for instance, the director told his cast that the “most important element” was the “music,” by which he meant not the live band that would be part of the production, but the “rhythm, pitch, and tone” of the language.  In notes for the cast, Shapiro said, “Play strong and hard, like a jazz band.”

One of Shapiro’s principal goals, as I noted previously, was to make theater with the audience, not just for it.  “[T]he real work on [a production] is done in front of people,” he pointed out, which means that the cast doesn’t really know before previews—or opening night if there have been no previews—“that this will all be shaped into something coherent.”  Direct contact with the audience in the Heaven Cafe was built into the performance, and Shapiro expected to develop this audience-performer interplay during previews. 

The preparation for this contact, however, began in the earliest rehearsals.  Shapiro didn’t close his company’s rehearsal sessions to friends and guests and he encouraged the actors to stay at rehearsals after their stage work was done so that there were always spectators and the actors were never in a private world, isolated from observers. 

Shapiro had even asked the actors who were “off-stage” to remain in the cafe set and they often hung out along the east wall behind the band platform, sitting on the floor leaning against the black drapes while other scenes were being rehearsed.  (While observing the work on Blue Heaven, the director encouraged me to sit at different tables in the set rather than on the periphery of the performance space as I had when I watched rehearsals for Kafka: Father and Son.)    

Another effect the origin of which I missed was where the stylized performances came from.  When I watched rehearsals for Kafka, I was surprised to see that they seemed to be proceeding along lines not very different from traditional (that is, Stanislavskian) directors’ work.  It didn’t really look like the kind of work that I’d seen in Shaliko performances. 

Then I skipped several sessions because the director had scheduled a series of technical sessions such as the recording of some voices and loading in the set—and when I came back for the first performance, there was all this acting behavior that I never saw: rhythm—rhythmic movement, rhythmic speech.  I couldn’t understand where it had come from, where it happened.

These were the “musical elements” of the performance, by which Shapiro didn’t mean the accompaniment that Langheld’s combo played, but the music in the actors’ performances.  Since I’d apparently missed the source of this in Kafka, I was determined to see how it happened with Blue Heaven.    

I skipped a few Blue Heaven rehearsals at the end because of my class and because Shapiro scheduled technical rehearsals just before opening.  Now, in most conventional American productions, actors are often not called for tech rehearsals, or function merely as bodies to be lit and voices against which to test sound levels. 

If scenes are even run, it’s usually only to check tech cues, exits and entrances, and the placement of props.  Techs commonly proceed “from cue to cue,” meaning that dialogue and action are skipped unless they trigger a technical cue.  For actors—never mind observers—these sessions are extremely enervating.

But when I came back, I found the same thing that I saw at Kafka.  Perhaps in a somewhat rudimentary form, but I was watching a recognizable version of a Shaliko production rather than what Shapiro had called “this sort of American Realistic” presentation.  I had to ask the director about this after Blue Heaven closed.

Shapiro affirmed: “[T]those technical rehearsals . . . is where I do a lot of my work. . . .  I do a lot of my work with actors in techs.  And I redo everything in techs.  You know, and I usually spend about a week at it.” 

Actor Triana, for instance, confirmed that she unexpectedly found herself called upon actually to act during the early technical rehearsals for Blue Heaven: “I was so startled, I found something completely new for that moment.”

The tech rehearsals are “when I actually composed the scenes,” Shapiro explained.  “So while we’re waiting for them to redo the light, and I finally see what I’m gonna see, that’s when I compose the repetitions, the silences, all the elements that compose the scenes musically and visually.  Because those two things have to go together.” 

“It’s just like setting the dance to the music.  I have to have the lighting to set the scene to.  I did it with an idea up front, but then I see what’s actually achievable, when I’m actually there.  And I changed all those scenes totally.  I mean, I basically found those scenes in the lighting rehearsal.”

Shapiro always scheduled a series of preview performances for his shows.  They were essentially dress rehearsals before an audience, but they were essential for his work on the performer-spectator relationship.  The director had been building that into his shows since his earliest ones as a nascent professional, from the 1967 Brother, You’re Next through 1996’s Seagull.

For Blue Heaven, this was particularly significant because of the environmental mise-en-scène: the actors badly needed to practice the interaction with the audience, and that can only really happen under performance conditions.  But the technical rehearsals were delayed because things weren’t ready or available when Shapiro needed them.  (The director put the blame for this on Bartenieff as the co-producer in charge of the venue.  Among other complaints, Shapiro said that the cancellation of previews had been due to technical delays caused when Bartenieff didn’t supply the promised crews four days in a row.)

As a consequence, the previews were delayed and ultimately cancelled.  That meant that the actors never got a chance to work with the tech or the spectators until paying theatergoers and reviewers were in the theater.  The production essentially wasn’t finished when it opened.

By this time, tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the other had escalated  beyond mollification.  At the time I interviewed Malpede in February 1992, she and Shapiro had had great mutual respect.  When I asked her about the staging several times in early rehearsals, Malpede appeared pleased and even enthusiastic.  The director and Bartenieff had worked together successfully three time before Blue Heaven (Collateral Damage, Kafka, and Roadkill), plus the staged readings and the WBAI broadcast. 

Before rehearsals began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede expressed excitement in my interview with her for all of the director’s proposed plans for the production.  But at the end of the rehearsal period, recriminations (which I won’t recount now) flew back and forth.

Among the kinder things Malpede said about her former collaborator in a written statement she sent me, she called Shapiro “a REHEARSAL MONSTER” (her typography).  In the chronology Shapiro compiled before his death, his comment in the entry for 1992 reads “Blue heaven and hell,” and the title he gave the computer file that was his notes for the first Blue Heaven rehearsal was “Blue Hell.” 

The relationship between the playwright and the director broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as director on 13 September, four days before the official opening of the show, though he retained credit in the program for the mise-en-scène used in the production.  Malpede took over direction of the production in practice, but no director was listed in the program.

The company split into three camps: Dabney and Nagrin lined up with Malpede and Bartenieff; Paraiso and Triana supported Shapiro, as did stage manager Stoker; Christen Clifford, Joseph Kellough, Lailah Bragin, and Beverly Wideman were caught in the middle.  Everyone’s opinions were colored by personal loyalty. 

When Malpede assumed the de facto directorship of Blue Heaven, she immediately removed much of Shapiro’s physicality, leaving the focus more on her words.  My note on Monday, 14 September, the first rehearsal after Shapiro was fired, was: “The atmosphere is much more down tonight than last Friday.  Is it just a kind of emotional exhaustion from the turmoil of the past few days?” 

I wasn’t able to see the opening performance on the 17th, but a friend of mine went and reported back to me.  Rich told me that he’d liked the play in general, though his date was less enthusiastic.  Both of them found the ideas too numerous and uncohesive—a problem I had with Malpede’s script from the beginning, and a complaint you’ll see the reviewers also voiced—but that bothered Rich less than it did his date. 

Rich didn’t notice any tentativeness on the part of the actors, but reported that he had occasional problems hearing dialogue over effects such as the music and sound, and he couldn’t see through the scrim masking Aria’s studio from his table back near the band platform.

My friend also remarked on the humor; he was unsure if he was supposed to laugh.  One bit he mentioned was the hanging of yellow ribbon and flags: a grip releases the ribbon from the door after Herbie returns and wraps it around his neck; it snaps across the room to the shutter of Sada’s booth.  Then Herbie’s entangled in the ribbon when he and Sada dance to “Blue Heaven” and they get all wrapped up in yellow ribbon and flags. 

I think Rich wasn’t sure if this was meant to be a serious comment on the war and the displays of patriotism than were common during the period of the combat, culminating in that tickertape parade, or if it was just slapstick comedy by Herbie in his clown persona.

My friend also commented that a scene with Aria and Herbie when she’s talking about Mendieta’s death and he’s talking about the Gulf war didn’t come together in his mind.  He didn’t put the two instances of violence together (a complaint one reviewer also made).

I was at TNC on Friday, the 18th (which was press opening).  My notes read:

Performance is very careful—not tentative, but controlled.  It’s not a rehearsal but it isn’t a full-out show.  The cast seems a little unsure what to do about the audience.  They need to accept us as part of the environment and just deal with us.  [In an earlier note that evening, I wrote: “Nicki whispered ‘Excuse me’ on his way to the bandstand.  I’d prefer he said it aloud without self-consciousness.”]  They mustn’t be afraid to touch us or move chairs or talk to us when necessary.  Mostly they need to let it all hang out.

I remarked that the audience seemed attentive, but added, “maybe too much.”  I even doubled-down, noting further: “Very concentrated,” but I wondered, “Is it to hear over the music?”

A week later, on Friday, 25 September (the day the Newsday review came out), I saw the show again and I noticed that few spectators seemed very aware of the film and video projections.  Most of them didn’t even seem to know they were going on.

I also observed             that there was a noticeable lessening of the connections the actors had to the material.  They were saying lines, but losing the words.  They weren’t really connecting to each other, as if each character existed separately from the rest. 

I noted several changes—the small part of Mary, the patriotic paraphernalia seller, had been cut, for example, although I don’t know how long before the 25th that had happened—suggesting that Malpede was still working on the production, and this may have accounted for the lack of connection if the actors were focusing on new routines.

Pretty much by any measure, TNC’s première of Blue Heaven was a failure.  The theatrical vision Shapiro had devised for the production never came to realization.  Malpede never got to see her play on stage in a finished state; it was little more than a workshop with tech.  If you take the perspective that even that form wasn’t what the playwright had imagined, then she didn’t even get a workshop.

A nascent professional relationship between Leonardo Shapiro and Karen Malpede that had begun about a year earlier and produced three successful joint projects, not to forget some early workshops of Blue Heaven, disintegrated precipitously.  With it went another collaboration, the one with veteran actor George Bartenieff.

Shapiro’s personal relationship with Rosalie Triana, which had started during the production of Blue Heaven (and had a part in the disruption of the association with Malpede) continued until his 1997 death.  He retired from New York theater, however, so whatever professional connection he might have established with other members of the production team ended when he pulled up roots and moved to the mountains of New Mexico near Taos (where he’d spent about two years doing guerrilla theater between 1969 and 1971).

The production of Blue Heaven itself got only three reviews—one of which didn’t even appear until the show had closed—and they weren’t good.  (See below for some quotations from the press coverage.)  The play has had no afterlife (as far as I know), either on stage or in print.  Because the title-change had been at Shapiro’s behest, when Malpede returned to Blue Heaven after the production closed, she retitled it Going to Iraq again. 

The first press notice for TNC’s Blue Heaven was Julius Novick’s “‘Blue Heaven,’ a Spirit of Avant-Garde Past” in Long Island’s Newsday (Friday, 25 September).  Novick called the production “mainly a stale imitation of the bold American avant-garde theater that flourished 20-odd years ago.” 

The Newsday reviewer compared Blue Heaven unfavorably to The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69, the adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae conceived and directed by Richard Schechner at the Performing Garage in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in lower Manhattan in 1968; the work of the Living Theatre from around 1968; and The Blacks by Jean Genet in 1961 as directed by Gene Frankel at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village. 

Novick quipped that there “is no total nudity, but a couple of actresses shmoosh themselves with red and black paint, and one of them tries painting on the wall with her bare breasts.”  He added: “In the spirit of the ’60s, Malpede is bound and determined to be what used to be called ‘relevant.’”

Though Novick did recognize that Malpede “is firmly opposed to violence, especially violence directed at women,” he confessed, “It is hard to know exactly what the defenestration of Ana Mendieta, the gulf war, and the denizens of the cafe have to do with one another.”

“In one respect, however,” found the review-writer, “‘Blue Heaven’ parts company with its sources.  The avant-garde theater of the ’60s was frequently attacked for de-emphasizing the spoken word, but Malpede appears to fancy herself a maker of eloquent and powerful speeches. . . .  Much of this stuff,” Novick judged, “is delivered by the actors with an empty vociferousness that does nothing to increase the impact.”

As for “[m]itigating factors,” the Newsday writer found that “Gretchen Langheld’s jazz score . . . has a calm, reflective authority.  Lee Nagrin sings and shouts and complains with a certain panache . . ., and Nicki Paraiso underplays with striking dignity as the AIDS-man.“

He held back some when it came to George Bartenieff, who “as Herbie has some funny moments, along with many unfunny ones, as he impersonates various low comedians.”

Novick concluded” “The actors do not disgrace themselves, but they cannot prevail against the besetting sins of ‘Blue Heaven,’ which were also the besetting sins of the ’60s avant-gardism at less than its best: pretentiousness and incoherence.”

In his New York Times notice, which came out on Wednesday, 30 September, Mel Gussow observed that the Ana Medieta-Carl Andre story “is the intriguing inspiration for Karen Malpede’s ‘Blue Heaven.’”  Then he lamented, “Unfortunately, the play has pretensions equal to its aspirations.  Instead of focusing intensely on the artist’s death and its repercussions, Ms. Malpede paints on a broad and diffuse canvas, moving all the way from a consideration of avant-garde art in the 1960’s to AIDS to the war in the Persian Gulf.”

“The play itself is like an artifact of another theatrical time.” Gussow pointed out.  Describing the environmental Heaven Cafe set, the Timesman found (as I did), “The approach is reminiscent of Jim Cartwright’s ‘Road.’”

Gussow also saw a resemblance to “works that preceded” Road, referring to Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, which débuted at La Mama E.T.C. in 1965 and then was revived in New York City by the Circle Repertory Company and Chicago’s Steppenwolf in 1984-85 at Circle Rep in Greenwich Village, “all to the disadvantage of ‘Blue Heaven.’”

“Where Mr. Wilson’s cafe crackled with life and language,” affirmed the Times reviewer, “Ms. Malpede’s cafe is languorous.  Monologues, especially those delivered by Lee Nagrin . . ., seem to last an eternity. Almost every scene is attenuated . . . .  At the same time, George Bartenieff as the cafe’s cook has to work overtime trying to be funny, mimicking Groucho, Harpo and Dracula. . . .” 

The play, Gussow reported, “ostensibly deals with the mixed allegiances of [Aria].  With insufficient explanation, [the sculptor] is eventually on her way to Iraq as a documentary film maker.”

“As author and director,” concluded Gussow, “Ms. Malpede gathers ideas and images from diverse sources, using film and video . . . while gratuitously referring to Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman and others more adept than she is at theatrical experimentation.  It all adds up to a long evening of artistic borrowing.”

The review-writer’s one good word was: “On only one level does the play express a novel perspective and that is in the jazz score by Gretchen Langheld.”

The last review to be published, New York Native’s “Something Borrowed,” didn’t appear until after Blue Heaven closed; the cover date was Monday, 19 October; the play closed on the 11th.  (The Native, though, had a practice of post-dating its issues by about a week, so it probably hit the newsstands around the 12th—the day after closing.) 

                                                                                                               

In his review, L. C. Cole reported (with a now familiar perspective): “Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven was a total environmental theater piece with music, containing most of the multi-media trappings that heralded a work that wants simultaneously to captivate and liberate its viewers.”

Cole also found, like his colleagues, that “Malpede used this loose collection of people to toss out many ideas about art and justice, and with the help of Leonardo Shapiro . . ., came up with many ways of presenting them.”  He mentioned Aria’s “sense of doom and futility,” Herbie’s deflection of “the pain of their situation by cavorting like a vaudevillian clown,” and AIDS-sufferer John’s singing “about his condition at the piano.  Amputated limbs, cancerous uteruses, bombing victims—a host of social ills found their theatrical exemplar in one form or another.”

“But if the barrage of images and sounds was unsettling,” the Native reviewer found, “it wasn’t always because our consciences were being prodded or because the illustrations were so disturbingly apt.  It was,” he complained, “often a matter of not liking to be harangued on a point over which one is in total agreement.  Greater rights and freedom for women, compassion for the poor and sick, an end to all wars—such ideas are hardly fuel for heated disagreement.”

The review-writer thought that “Blue Heaven suffered secondarily from a meandering storyline, which often covered the same ground in different guises, and,” he added, “preachy writing that grated the more it tried to approximate poetry.  But its primary failure was in matching visual style and message.”

The play’s “blunt message played to the converted, who are no longer astonished by post-avant-garde pranks and high-tech tricks,” Cole felt.  “It was therefore puzzling (if not disheartening) to watch a play which so often criticized modern artists for their barren, derivative products, buil[d] its supreme moments out of the prop bag and shtick gags of ten to thirty years ago.  If its creators intended to revitalize these old concepts, they misguided their efforts, but my guess,” Cole judged, “is simply that they don’t see as far as they pretend.”

“There was nevertheless a fair display of talent on the stage,” the Native writer acknowledged.  “Highlights were Gretchen Langheld’s torchy sax playing, Lee Nagrin’s grandiose sing-song style as Sada, and the way Nicky [sic] Paraiso slyly underplayed his role as the man with ‘AIDS.’ 

On the other hand, Cole felt, ”Rosalie Triana’s Aria carried on as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders.  George Bartenieff’s Herbie had [s]ome good comic moments, but his non-sequetorial slapsticking was often the most glaring example of what belonged to a different era.”

As small as this sample is, I still find the near-unanimity of the reviewers’ opinions remarkable.  Reading as many reviews as I do when I prepare my play reports for Rick On Theater, I can tell you that even among just three notices, to find that they virtually agree on the same flaws, the same moments of excellence, the same writing problems, the same acting issues is astonishing. 

These three papers don’t cater to the same readership, either: one’s a major daily broadsheet with a national—even international—rep, another’s a local daily tabloid whose readers mostly come from the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk and the Borough of Queens, and the third’s a (now defunct) gay weekly based in Manhattan.

'Blue Heaven' (or 'Going to Iraq') – Part 1

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner, who was planning a series of articles on experimental theater companies that had begun in the 1960s and ’70s and were still producing. At the time, I was working a little as a freelance dramaturg with Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company (which I’ve mentioned many times on Rick On Theater), having met Leo and seen the company’s work at the Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore in 1986.

[Since I’d written for TDR before, Richard and Leo agreed that I might be the person to do the profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series. (I don’t believe the series actually materialized in the end. "Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," however, was published in the Winter 1993 issue of TDR.)

[For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo, interviewing him and his colleagues, friends, critics, and employers; attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing; observing classes for his Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program; combing through the company’s files and records; and generally gathering everything I could on Shaliko and Leo that might be pertinent.

[The Shaliko Company’s main project during that time was the environmental production at Theater for the New City of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, and I attended most of the rehearsals starting on 10 August. Shortly before opening, Leo, Karen, and I decided to try to get a little early publicity for the production by submitting an article on the work-in-progress to the Village Voice, and I set out to write it.

[The result was published as “As It Is in Heaven” on 22 September 1992 (posted on ROT on  25 March 2011 [http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-it-is-in-heaven.html]; I posted an unpublished, early version of the article on the blog on 10 July 2019 as part of “Some Women Writers from the Archives” [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/07/some-women-writers-from-archives.html]).

[I’d also interviewed playwright Malpede before rehearsals began (“An Interview with Karen Malpede,” Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present 8.1 [1993], reprinted as “Karen Malpede” in Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights [Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996]; the interview was posted on ROT on 5 November 2014, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/11/an-interview-with-karen-malpede-1992.html), as well as during the work as part of my research for the TDR article.

[As far as I can find, the play hasn’t been published and I’m also not aware of any other productions other than the TNC staging, except a reading over WBAI radio in March 1992.]

At about 6:30 Eastern Standard Time on the evening of Wednesday, 16 January 1991, President George H. W. Bush and his U.N.-sanctioned coalition began raining bombs on Saddam Hessein’s Iraq.  (It was 2:30 Thursday morning in Baghdad.)  Hussein had invaded neighboring Kuwait in August 1990 with the intention of annexing the emirate as a province of Iraq.  

The 1991 Persian Gulf war ended on Thursday, 28 February, but Leonardo Shapiro, an experimental theater director, artistic director of The Shaliko Company, and an inveterate anti-war activist who’d been arrested on several occasions protesting the war in Vietnam as a teenager, had already begun making plans for a protest performance.

When on Monday, 10 June, a tickertape parade was planned in lower Manhattan to honor the troops of Operation Desert Storm, as the combat in Iraq was called, Shapiro staged Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), an anti-Gulf War theatrical collage he conceived as a benefit for the War Resistors League and Oxfam America, at the La MaMa Annex (now known as the Ellen Stewart Theatre) in New York City’s East Village on 5-8 June 1991.

This counterpoint to the victory parade, headlined by Vanessa Redgrave, was assembled from poems, monologues, scenes, and playlets composed by many writers.  One of them was Karen Malpede, an activist and playwright whose professional habitat, like Shapiro’s, was the East Village and the Lower East Side.  The writer and the director were familiar with each other’s work and admired each other for both their art and their politics.

During the collaboration on Collateral Damage, Malpede had already drafted her latest play, Going to Iraq, which included unequivocal criticism of the Persian Gulf war, but it was unfinished.  The playwright did a reading in September 1991 which Shapiro attended.  He let Malpede know that he’d like to direct the play. 

Malpede pointed out that after Collateral Damage, Shapiro staged a revival of Russian dramatist Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son whose cast included George Bartenieff—with whom Malpede was living.  So she was already becoming favorably familiar with the director’s work.

Malpede and Shapiro began working on the play for a co-production of Shaliko; Theater for the New City, an Off-Off-Broadway theater complex at 1st Avenue and 10th Street in the East Village; and Westbeth Theatre Center, a now-defunct performing arts complex at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets Greenwich Village in a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists.  The production would be mounted in TNC’s Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

The executive director (and co-founder in 1971 with Crystal Field, then his wife) of TNC was Malpede’s romantic partner, Bartenieff, an alumnus of the Living Theatre.  (Bartenieff left TNC in 1992 and he and Malpede married two years later.)  He was cast as Herbie, the cook of the Heaven Cafe, a principal character in the play.  Playwright Malpede wrote several roles in Blue Heaven for specific actors.

Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  (One speech from Going to Iraq was part of the text of Collateral Damage, delivered by avant-garde actress Ruth Maleczech, co-founder in 1970 of the New York City Mabou Mines experimental theater troupe.)

The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the 1985 death of artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85), who fell or was thrown from the East Village apartment of her artist husband, Carl Andre (b. 1935).  For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991. 

Shapiro and Shaliko presented two staged readings of Going to Iraq.  The first reading with Shapiro was at Westbeth in December 1991 with a cast consisting of Nicki Paraiso, Christen Clifford, Sheila Dabney, George Bartenieff—who all would go on to the full production—and Carrie Sophia Malpede-Hash, Malpede’s then-12-year-old daughter, some months after Collateral Damage and the tickertape procession through Lower Manhattan’s “Canyon of Heroes.”  

The second reading was at TNC with essentially the same cast except Paraiso (who was unavailable) and Clifford (who was out of town)—and Lee Nagrin joined the company, on 16 January 1992, the first anniversary of the start of the Gulf war.  On the basis of the readings, Going to Iraq was named a Voice Choice by the Village Voice.

A five-part radio broadcast of the script was aired on WBAI, an independent, non-commercial, left-leaning radio station in New York City, from 23 to 27 March 1992.  Among the cast for the readings were Bartenieff, Dabney, and Gordana Rashovich, who read Aria, played in the full production by Rosalie Triana.

Shapiro and his cast began rehearsals for the fall mounting of Going to Iraq on Monday, 10 August 1992.  Between the four June 1991 performances of Collateral Damage and that date, Shapiro and Shaliko were engaged in the two readings of Going to Iraq and the radio performance in March 1992.  Shapiro was already in rehearsal for his second revival (the first English-language revival) of Kafka (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 25 January-8 February 1992; see my post on ROT on 5 and 8 November 2015).

He also participated in Roadkill on 3 May, a street event with text by Malpede and Shapiro performed as the closing event of the First Annual Eco-Festival, co-produced by Shaliko  and the Theater for the New City on the streets and empty lots of the East Village.  Bartenieff was a principal performer in Roadkill, which protested the pollution and pedestrian injuries and deaths caused by automobiles on American roads.  (As part of his performance, Bartenieff had a monologue that evoked a car that had gone out of control on lower Fifth Avenue on 23 April 1992, ultimately killing five people and injuring 26 in Washington Square Park.

By August, Shapiro’d already been working on Going to Iraq for about a year, even before Kafka: Father and Son was restaged, but much of the cast and the environmental mise-en-scène were new.  Ultimately, the play even acquired a new title: Blue Heaven.  The title change had been at Shapiro’s behest, apparently because he felt Malpede’s original one was too on the nose—if that was so, I agreed with him (though I never told anyone that)—but I never heard the playwright balk.

Malpede explained her rationale for the change:

One reason we changed the title [from Going to Iraq] was to address the deeper issues that the play is about, and not just to focus people’s minds on a war that is too easy for them to dismiss.  We wanted to make it more difficult to dismiss that war by opening up the field of vision and call the play Blue Heaven.  It has to do with the song [“My Blue Heaven” by Walter Donaldson and George A. Whiting, 1924] as the quintessential version of make-believe America. 

According to WBAI’s promos for their broadcast of the play, it’s an

antiwar tragi-comedy about conditions of life in this country which supported and . . . reflected [the] war in the Persian Gulf.  The play takes place in a Lower East Side cafe, a pressure cooker where the lives of artists, merchants, ancient gods, modern prophets, and media stars fatally intersect.  It begins as warm psychological realism and becomes a searing surrealist exploration of the effects of public violence on private imagination.

The East Village cafe is Sada’s Heaven Cafe with an artist’s studio in back.  A “sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries,” as the script calls them, comes into the cafe and, little by little, the lives of these characters intersect.  Act I of Blue Heaven begins on the morning of 16 January 1991, earlier on the day that was the start of the coalition bombing of Iraq.  Act II takes place during and shortly after the war in the Persian Gulf.

                                         

Aria (Rosalie Triana), a sculptor, and Sierra (Lailah Hanit Bragin), her 10-year-old daughter, have been evicted from their apartment and have moved into the studio in the back of the Heaven Cafe.  Aria is in the throes of a creative block, made worse by the news—seen in a newspaper headline shown on video monitors—of the possible murder of another sculptor with whose husband Aria’s having an affair.  

The Heaven’s owner, Sada (Obie-winning dancer-choreographer Lee Nagrin), doesn’t like having Aria and Sierra around.  To her, the sculptor represents the latest artist of the moment: sex-obsessed, morbid, solipsistic.  Sada herself, though, is angry, morose, and anguished.

Herbie (Bartenieff, another Obie-winner), the cafe’s cook and handyman who’s identified with the Greek god Hermes, plays a sort of court jester to the aging and domineering Sada, trying to keep her in good humor.  (According to playwright Malpede, Hermes is the “primal lover” but also “escorter of souls to the underworld.”  The dramatist quotes Camille Paglia in the program that the “early Hermes” was depicted “as a mature bearded man” who’s also a “healer”—his symbol is the caduceus, the winged staff entwined by two serpents that’s the emblem of healing.)

Eventually, other Lower East Side denizens come in take shelter in the cafe: Dee (Sheila Dabney, yet another Obie-winner), a black female junkie; Dee’s teenaged junkie friend, Jill (Christen Clifford), whose lost a leg; John (Nicki Paraiso, a Bessie Award-winner), a young man with AIDS; and Daniel (Joseph Kellough), a promising young director.  Another visitor is Mary (Beverly Wideman), a middle-aged matron who’s selling “Support the Troops” bumper stickers, yellow-ribbon magnets, and other paraphernalia to subsidize patriotic organizations.

Herbie-as-Hermes is identified in the script as a healer, and the playwright affirmed that both he and Aria are “healers.”  But Malpede further observed that Shapiro called all the characters “wounded healers.”  For Shapiro, though, from Brother, You’re Next, a 1967 street performance that was his first New York City theater work (see 26 January 2010), through Children of the Gods, his first Shaliko show in 1973, to Strangers (1990; see 3 and 6 March 2014) and Blue Heaven, his protagonists were always the powerless, abandoned, or despised of society whose efforts to lift themselves up often meet with failure and death. 

Herbie’s depicted as a healer, according to Malpede, and she sees his relationship to Aria, who serves as the play’s central character, as “a kind of muse dynamic, where he sees in her things about her that she doesn’t see or doesn’t believe yet in herself, and his seeing allows her to be.” 

Aria’s also of mixed Israeli-Palestinian heritage and the playwright created her as

torn in as many directions as I could tear her.  So, she’s Palestinian and Israeli; and that’s not enough, so she’s the mistress of a man who’s married; and that’s not enough, so the married man whose mistress she is actually kills his wife; and she’s a wanderer, a homeless person, coming from nowhere with no place to call her own; she’s a mother; she’s an artist; she’s a lover; she’s blocked.  In as many different ways as I could pull her apart, I wanted to pull her apart because I do feel that that’s not only my situation often, but it is a woman’s situation . . . .

TNC’s Johnson Theater was a cavernous, concrete, open room, about 70 feet long and 45 feet wide (3,150 square feet—about two-thirds the area of a basketball court; it’s been remodeled some since 1992).  For Blue Heaven, it was set up as a working cafe with drinks and food catered by Palmyra, a Middle-Eastern restaurant at 1st Avenue and 9th Street, a block south of TNC. (In early plans, Shapiro had considered producing Blue Heaven in a real night club or bar, or perhaps different bars on succeeding weekends.) 

The elaborate mise-en-scène included a live trio playing music specially composed by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld, and with one character, John—played by actor Nicki Paraiso who is also a pianist—as a band member (the third member of the combo was guitarist James Rohler); live video broadcast by video artist Maria Venuto, who moved about the playing area with her hand-held camera during the performance; and scenes staged amongst the patrons’ cafe tables. (There were also bleacher seats along one side of the playing area.)   

Shapiro intended to fill the Heaven Cafe set with life so that spectators at the tables surrounded by the action, would have to decide where to look and listen.  There was no seat in the audience which didn’t require the spectator to turn around at one time or another. 

Watching as Blue Heaven took shape, two things intrigued me most.  First was the prospect of being immersed in the action—not only being in the cafe, but being in contact with the characters was an exciting and engaging prospect.  We were going to share in the examination of life with them.  

The closest theater adventure to what I projected TNC’s Blue Heaven would be was Jim Cartwright’s Road when I paid a visit to a block in an English rust-belt town and was given a resident’s-eye-view of its reality.  (Road was first produced as what was then dubbed “promenade theater,” where the actors and the spectators shared the same space, in 1986 at London’s Royal Court Theatre.  It was then produced in New York by Lincoln Center Theater at La MaMa in 1988, when I saw it in September at the Annex on E. 4th Street.)

Second was Malpede’s poetic consideration of aspects of our world: the artist in society, war, AIDS, homelessness, domestic violence, drugs—all concerns of director Shapiro’s as well  The specific events she evokes are part of who we are but, more immediately, the efforts her characters make to survive each day are totally familiar to us.  If we don’t actually know these people, we’ve encountered them over and over again at work, in our neighborhoods, and in places like the Heaven Cafe

As we’ll see, these possibilities never came to be.

The director originally concocted a highly theatrical event which, aside from the live music and videos, employed film, pre-recorded video, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects.  The production was designed to draw the spectators into the world of the unrepresented, a frequent subject of Shapiro‘s theater—who lived, worked or visited at the Heaven Cafe during the time when the United States unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian desert.

‘How does an artist respond to such a momentous happening?’ Malpede wondered.  ‘What is her responsibility at such a time?’  Having created the character of Aria, a half-Israeli, half-Palestinian artist (whose name is meant to evoke Ariadne, the ancient Greek mythical figure), Malpede used Blue Heaven to investigate the question.  “All of us experienced the war,” Malpede pointed out to me at an early rehearsal, “and most of us also experienced the death of Ana Mendieta.  These are two contemporary historical events that are part of our lives.” 

At the same time, one of Shapiro’s perennial themes, as most clearly considered in Kafka (1985, 1990 [in Russian], 1992), The Yellow House (1986; see my post on ROT on 9 February 2018), and Blue Heaven, was the place of the artist in society.  In each of these pieces, too, the central figure is an artist struggling with the creation of a work of art: Franz Kafka writes “The Judgment”; Vincent van Gogh, in The Yellow House, paints his Self-Portrait and Starry Night; and sculptor Aria in Blue Heaven fights a creative block. 

Blue Heaven also centers loosely on a film production, involving several of Blue Heaven’s characters, of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play in part about art and artists.  “It speaks to artists about creativity,” said Shapiro, “and getting caught up in the ‘theater world.’”  Ironically, Shapiro eventually directed a production of The Seagull, a play he acknowledged was deeply meaningful to him, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1996.  It was his last work.  (Shapiro died of cancer on 22 January 1997, 15 days after his 51st birthday.)

(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played the sculptor Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana, also played Arkadina in Shapiro’s Albuquerque Seagull.  She had portrayed Ana Mendieta, the real-life artist on whom Aria is modeled, earlier in 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work—on West 57th Street in Manhattan.  Note that Triana, who’s a Latina, used the anglicized first name Rosalie at the time she appeared in Blue Heaven and is listed in the program and other production materials that way.  She returned to her home state of New Mexico when Shapiro retired there in 1993 and she’s resumed her Hispanic given name, Rosalía.)

Blue Heaven was rehearsed in five weeks (originally planned as four weeks plus a week of previews), though that came after months of scattered workshops and readings (albeit, with different casts).  I’d been invited to observe the process by both Shapiro and Malpede, so except where otherwise noted, the account of the rehearsals and the production are taken from my notes and conversations with Shapiro, Malpede, and other participants.  A certain degree of subjectivity, however, is inevitable.

The rehearsal period for Blue Heaven started out pretty much as other Shaliko rehearsals I’d seen had.  (I had also attended rehearsals for Kafka at the end of 1991.  I worked a little on Collateral Damage, but because that was a collage and the artists, including the writers and performers, were all volunteers, the rehearsals were rather ad hoc and somewhat haphazard.) 

The company gathered at TNC for the first session and read the script.  Shapiro had told me that since he didn’t know at the first rehearsal what he wanted, he always started with a sit-down read-through.  He derived his ideas about a production from rehearsals and the actors’ work, so he needed to “see where we are, where we’re starting from.” 

For the most part, Shapiro just let the actors read on that first day, seldom interrupting unless somebody was “just wrong-headed.”  Shapiro’s only instructions were words to the effect of “Let’s read it for sense.  Let’s just get it out there”—all he usually needed to say, he felt, since most of his casts had worked with him previously.  The director, though, did admonish the actors to work on the language of Blue Heaven, especially Malpede’s “rhythm, pitch and tone,” from the beginning.

Shapiro’s goal was always to make what was happening on stage as “authentic” as the life the audience was living off stage.  In rehearsals for Blue Heaven, for example, Shapiro told the cast, “The play is set a year ago, but the production is happening now.  We here in this room are doing this now.”  (This notion is part of Shapiro’s concept of the “real-time event”’ I touch on this in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.)  “[D]eveloping a piece with the audience,” Shapiro declared, “is as important as developing a piece for the audience.” 

As noted, Shapiro had said very little during the initial script-reading, except that he described the environment and some images he wanted the actors to hold onto.  One image was William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, a 1939 play (and 1948 movie) set in a saloon, but he likened the performance atmosphere to the Caffe Cino production of Saroyan’s one-act play Hello Out There he had seen back in the 1960s. 

The import of these two references was two-fold.  First, Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace in The Time of Your Life could be taken as a prototype of Sada’s Heaven Cafe in Malpede’s play, where the denizens create a kind if mini-community.  “The cafe represents community,” said Shapiro.  “That’s why people go to cafes. . . .  [B]ecause they want community.” 

Second, Joe Cino’s Village coffeehouse provided a place for artists, writers, and performers to show their work amidst patrons having coffee and pastries, Shapiro’s model for the production of Blue Heaven. 

(I covered the Caffe Cino, which Shapiro had frequented in his teens and early 20’s, in two posts: “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018.  I never confirmed this with the director, but I think the production of Hello Out There Shapiro meant was in 1963 and starred Al Pacino in his first stage appearance before a paying audience.)

Caffe Cino (1958-68) may have been Shapiro’s image for the play and the milieu, but I see another progenitor.  At the turn of the 19th century in New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods were restaurants or bars that offered entertainment along with food and drink.  They were a sort of a downscale precursor of the modern-day night club or cabaret, with songs and comic sketches that were largely satiric, often politically pointed, and frequently rude.  In fact, the German ones were called Kabaretten (and the French called their places café-concerts)—but the Italian name, the phenomenon’s most common label, was caffè-concerti.  Indeed, I think these establishments were a kind of prototype of what the Caffe Cino was like when it first started.  (Joe Cino was, after all, a proud Sicilian-American.)

The entire play (except for the film of The Seagull, projected on a wall of the set, which was shot on location) takes place in the Heaven Cafe, so the actors moved among the cafe tables and the spectators-cum-patrons, occasionally even addressing them directly. 

The cafe set evolved over the rehearsal period.  The configuration changed and changed again as the physical performance text developed.  As of the first rehearsal, Shapiro had determined that there’d be little built scenery, and that remained true.  At that first session he advised the cast to use the space of the Johnson as it was—an “empty theater.”

The performance space within the Johnson was demarked principally by the area occupied by the large, round cafe tables; otherwise, it was the walls of the Johnson itself.  There were “blacks” hanging a few feet from the eastern wall and the easternmost quadrant of the southern wall.  In performance, the cafe was all washed in soft blue light—hence the new name for the play: blue candles on the tables, blue Christmas lights hanging from the walls, and blue paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

[This is the first installment of my account of the production of Leonardo Shapiro’s production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven at the Theatre for the New City in 1992.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days for the concluding half of “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),]