[I
met Leonardo Shapiro on 28 June 1986 in Baltimore when I interviewed him at the
Theatre of Nations international theater festival, sponsored biennially at that
time by the International Theatre Institute, an arm of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
[Shapiro’d brought his theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, to present their current production, The Yellow House, at the first TON to be held in North America. (It’s still the only time TON has been hosted on this continent.) The avant-garde director was one of the artists I spoke to formally for my coverage of the festival for my newsletter, Directors Notes, the house organ of the American Directors Institute, a service organization for artistic and stage directors (now defunct). I was also writing an article on the festival for The Drama Review.
[(My report was published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986; “Theatre of Nations” ran in TDR in the spring issue of 1987. I republished my longer TDR version of the report on Rick On Theater as “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986” on 10 November 2014.)
[I’d been so impressed with Yellow House that I began to keep tabs on Shapiro’s and Shaliko’s work. I saw a number of their shows until, in 1992, Richard Schechner, who’d been one of my professors in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies and was at the time also the editor of The Drama Review, asked me to write a profile of Shapiro and his company for the journal.
[For the rest of that year, I shadowed Shapiro, dug through his files; collected articles by and about him; interviewed him several times; watched videos of past productions; and interviewed his colleagues, company and cast members, Shaliko board members, and others who knew him, his work, and aspects of his life.
[The immediate result, of course, was the TDR profile, "Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," which was published in The Drama Review winter issue of 1993 (37.4 – T140). Beyond that, I had collected hundreds of documents, video and audio tapes, notes, and random pieces of information on Shapiro’s past, Shaliko, and most of his activities before and after the New York company.
[Since I started ROT, I’ve posted many articles about Shapiro and his theater. I realized, however, that I’ve never written much about his biography. I decided to remedy that oversight, and below is the beginning of the outcome. There’s a caveat, however. I really only knew Leonardo Shapiro as a maker of theater, so there’s little content about love affairs, friendships, his marriage and son, and the like.
[There is, though, quite a lot about his theater work. Now, while I do cover his productions, there are many of the most important ones for which I give only the briefest description. That’s because those particular shows have been the subjects of detailed posts of their own. I’ve cross-referenced those posts and interested readers should go to them separately if they want more information. (I’ve also cross-referenced other past posts that relate to Shapiro, such as some of his theater techniques that I’ve discussed on ROT.)
[The Shapiro bio turned out to be longer than I anticipated when I started out. Leonardo Shapiro led a life that was short, but crowded with incident. Therefore, I’ll be posting this piece in sections. “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will run in eight parts, one every three days, starting today, 16 April, and continuing through Sunday, 7 May. Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, 19 April.
[One last point: I’ve kept an annotated copy of the bio with all my sources recorded. I’ll be glad to share this information with anyone who wants it, but you should be aware that most of the sources I used are primary—interviews, notes of conversations, e-mails, letters, and so on. The only extant copies of these sources are in my personal files.
[Other sources are rare, such as documents from Shapiro’s records for Shaliko and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, and aren’t easily accessible anywhere but my files. Still others are just hard to find, such as clippings from small-town newspapers, obscure publications, or various archives around the country.
[One resource even I didn’t have is now available—if you can come to New York City to consult it, however. The Leonardo Shapiro papers are now in the Billy Rose Theatre Division archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The call number for the collection is *T-Mss 1998-019 (go to archives.nypl.org -- Leonardo Shapiro papers).
[Because of the prominence of New York City, especially its borough of Manhattan, in this history, a brief overview of the city for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with its layout would be helpful. First, as most know, New York City is made up of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Of these, only Manhattan and, briefly, Brooklyn and Queens figure in this discussion.
[Brooklyn, which used to be a separate city and is the most populous borough, was the site of Shapiro’s residence. It lies at the western tip of Long Island, west of Queens and across the East River from lower Manhattan.
[Queens, New York’s largest borough, also lies east of Manhattan across the East River on Long Island between Brooklyn to the south and west and Nassau County to the north and east. The area known as Hunters Point, where a Shaliko production of Mystery History Bouffe Goof was presented, is part of the neighborhood of Long Island City, on the East River where the Newtown Creek divides Queens from Brooklyn, directly across from mid-town Manhattan at 34th Street (south of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel).
[New York is also a city of distinct neighborhoods. In Manhattan, those named in this post, the borough’s principal art and performance venues, are as follows:
• East Village, The Shaliko Company’s home territory: from East 14th Street south to Houston and Fifth Avenue east to the East River (including the section now known as NoHo at the southern end)
• Greenwich Village (sometimes called the West Village or, simply, the Village): on the island’s west side between 14th Street on the north and Houston Street on the south, from Fifth Avenue on the east to the Hudson River on the west
• SoHo (which stands for South of Houston) stretches from Houston Street south to Canal Street and from the Bowery west to the Hudson River
• Chelsea: from West 14th Street on the south to 30th on the north and from Sixth Avenue on the east to the Hudson
• Theatre District: centering on Times Square, extending north from West 40th to 53rd Street and west from Sixth to Ninth Avenue; Theatre Row, home to many Off-Broadway theaters and companies, is West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues (officially; unofficially it now extends to 11th Avenue)
• Times Square (not geometrically a square; closer to two triangles emanating north and south from West 45th Street, where north-south Seventh Avenue intersects northwest-southeast Broadway): formed by the intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and West 42nd Street; with adjacent Duffy Square, Times Square is a bowtie-shaped space five blocks long between 42nd and 47th Streets; Duffy Square is the northern triangle of Times Square, bounded by 45th and 47th Streets, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue (known for the TKTS reduced-price theater tickets booth)
• Lower East Side (also often called Loisaida because of the predominantly Spanish-speaking population): formerly including what is now the East Village and NoHo, now running from the Bowery on the west to the East River and south from East Houston Street to Canal (on the southwest) and the East River (on the southeast).]
Leo Richard Shapiro was born on 7 January 1946 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. (He would adopt his professional name, Leonardo, many years later.) His mother, Florence (1913-94), recalled that he was an active and inquisitive child—walking and talking before he was a year old, spending a great deal of time outdoors, and demanding attention from visitors to his parents’ home.
Florence and Leo’s father, Irving (1912-74), separated in 1949 and subsequently divorced in 1951. Florence noted that Leo became difficult and hard to handle after her divorce. Where he’d been “full of the devil” but “warm and loving” before, Florence Shapiro said, after the separation, the boy’s antics became “more malicious.”
Shapiro’s childhood in Saint Paul and, especially, Miami, where his mother moved with Leo and his older brother, Gary (b. 1941), was clearly stressful and difficult and in it lie many clues to his subsequent behavior, both personal and professional.
According to his recollections and those of his mother, the fault lay largely with Irving, whom Florence married in 1935. When the young couple became engaged, Leon Gleckman (1894-1941), Florence’s father, hired Irving at the Republic Finance Company, the loan company Gleckman had started with the money he’d made as a bootlegger.
(The accounts of the years of Florence Shapiro’s marriage to Irving and of Leo Shapiro’s childhood, especially in regard to his father, are almost entirely from their perspective as recalled decades later. Other members of the Shapiro family, notably Florence and Irving’s eldest son, Gary, remember this family history differently and recount it with a variant interpretation.)
Gleckman, known as “the Al Capone of Saint Paul” because he controlled the illegal liquor business in Minnesota’s capital city, was a notorious—and, apparently, beloved—figure in the Prohibition-era Saint Paul underworld of the 1920s and ’30s. (See my post on Rick On Theater, “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018.)
(Gleckman’s criminal history is largely recounted in Paul Maccabee’s John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 [Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995]. A musical play, Last Hooch at the Hollyhocks by Lance Belville [1935-2020], was performed at the Saint Paul Arts and Science Center in 1990. It featured Leon Gleckman as a character, and one of Florence’s younger sisters attended a performance. The Hollyhocks Club was a saloon owned by Jack Peifer [1898-1936], Gleckman’s rival and friend from Minneapolis.)
Something of a dandy and a man-about-town, Gleckman ran several legitimate businesses—such as a tire store, a wallpaper store, a Cord-Auburn dealership, and the loan company (which was certainly a money-laundering operation)—as well as a political machine which put selected politicians in local offices.
After Gleckman’s death in 1941, Irving Shapiro ran the loan company and started a number of other enterprises. He was, in fact, quite prosperous, despite the straits in which Florence and their children lived after she and her husband divorced. “He cried poor and lived rich,” Florence protested.
(Irving Shapiro’s business interests included ownership of the historic Hamm Building at 408 St. Peter Street in Saint Paul, in which Republic Finance, an automobile loan firm, was located; a chain of used car lots called Kennedy Motors; a Hudson automobile agency in Saint Paul; and the Gale (for his sons, Gary and Leo) Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Fargo, North Dakota.
(Details of Gleckman’s death in an automobile accident on 14 July 1941—and more of his criminal record—are related in “Gleckman, Ex-City Boss, Dies in Crash,” Saint Paul Dispatch 14 July 1941. It’s very likely that Gleckman’s single-car accident—he ran into a bridge abutment—was suicide.
(Shapiro once confided to me that Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] Death of a Salesman held special meaning for him; it may have been significant to Shapiro that Willy Loman’s death in the play, also a suicide, was nearly identical to Gleckman’s.)
When Gleckman went to prison on tax charges, he’d transferred his stock to his daughter. Officially, Irving Shapiro was just an employee of Republic Finance; he and Gleckman had had an oral agreement about his earnings participation but he had no ownership rights.
(Leon Gleckman had been convicted of federal charges stemming from his illegal liquor business, and sent to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, twice, once in 1927 for six months of an 18-month sentence on charges of liquor conspiracy and again in 1934 for 18 months for tax evasion.
(Gleckman was facing a potential third term in prison at the time of his death. There’d also been state and local charges of bribery of a juror for which Gleckman had served six months in Minneapolis in 1938. In January 1940, Gleckman had also been convicted in New York in a Brooklyn bank fraud case and sentenced to six months in jail.)
After his father-in-law’s death, Irving couldn’t use Gleckman’s assets to secure loans so he insisted his wife sign everything over to him “so we can make money.” When Florence resisted, he flew into a terrifying rage and assaulted her.
Florence fled the house, but when she returned home, she made a decision she later came to regret: at her husband’s suggestion, she signed her holdings over to their elder son, Gary, less than a year old at the time. Thus, she lost de facto control of the family businesses and income to her husband; when he reached the age of 21, Gary signed everything over to his father and Florence lost de jure control. In later years, Leonardo Shapiro would deem that his father had stolen the family’s money.
Both Leonardo and Florence Shapiro asserted that after Irving started making money, he became “self-important” and “domineering.” He’d always had a quick and sometimes violent temper, and Florence affirmed that he’d never really wanted children. Despite this, she added, once his sons were born, he focused on them.
He wasn’t good at taking the boys out to play catch, she said, “but the sun rose and set on you two kids.” Although Shapiro insisted that he had no recollection of having lived with his father, he does have vivid images of his father’s physical and emotional abuse. Florence averred, Irving did whatever he wanted “no matter what” and he began taking business trips and vacations without his family.
On one trip to Hawaii in probably 1949 (according to Gary Shapiro’s reckoning), he met Lee Hoffman (1929-2002), a younger woman—Florence Shapiro thought Hoffman was only 17 at the time, though she was actually 19 or 20—with whom he began an affair. In 1949, when Florence and Irving Shapiro separated, she recorded that her husband told her he didn’t love her and realized he never had.
(Hoffman—who was related to actor Dustin Hoffman [b. 1937] through her mother's second marriage—and Irving Shapiro, then 36 or 37, met on a cruise ship to the island territory. Hoffman, accompanied by her mother, had been a student at a post-high school finishing school at the time. The couple divorced around 1966, Gary Shapiro reported, and Irving remarried again around 1970. He was a widower at the time of his death in 1974.)
The Shapiros were divorced in June 1951, and Florence moved with her children to Miami. Irving and Florence had been married for 15 years, and Leo was 5½ years old. In July, Irving Shapiro married Hoffman.
In Florida, Florence and the two young brothers were pretty much isolated—except, at various times, for Blackie, Leo’s cocker spaniel; two parakeets; two turtles; and a goldfish—because Irving had forbidden his family to visit.
Even Florence’s family found reasons not to come to her support and she couldn’t stand up to her former husband, who, she said, “could be very charming, a lot of fun, but he could turn it on and off like night and day.” If she brought home something decent to wear, she recorded, she’d have to return it while Irving always had tailor‑made suits.
With her loss of control of the family income Florence had financial problems and she and Irving constantly argued over money. Irving Shapiro became more impressed with himself: when, for instance, he decided that the socks Leo wore weren’t good enough, he bought his son cashmere ones—and then deducted the cost from his child-support payments. To pay expenses her allowance didn’t cover, Florence sold the diamond ring that her mother had given her.
(Florence Shapiro reported that at the same time that Irving was gaining control of her assets, her mother, Leon Gleckman’s widow, sold her shares of her husband’s businesses to her son-in-law for $2,000. It became Florence’s responsibility to make the monthly maintenance payments to her mother which had previously come from Mrs. Gleckman’s own holdings. Rose Gleckman died on 8 May 1962.)
Leo’d never had emotional problems before the divorce and Irving’s remarriage, according to Florence, but afterwards, tension in the family increased and the boy began to show its effect.
When Leo was little, his mother affirmed, he was very affectionate, forever laughing and smiling—though he was constantly “into things.” He had been very active, always climbing up poles or over the furniture; he had to be watched all the time for fear he would hurt himself. The boy was wild and mischievous—his mother compared him to the comic-strip character Dennis the Menace (whom Shapiro insisted he never found funny)—and Florence didn’t know how to handle him.
Florence related one episode from her son’s infancy in which he pulled out the drawers of a chest and started climbing them like steps until the chest fell over. She described how her son would climb up on the bathroom sink and shave with his father’s razor and, later, in Florida, how he would disappear into the men’s room at Wolfie’s, the famous delicatessen restaurant in Miami Beach, only to be discovered washing his hair so he could dry it under the hand dryer. At a Lincoln Road travel agency in Miami, there was a window display of an airplane circling the globe; Leo would ride the plane.
Unfailingly sweet and nice, little Leo really liked people and frequently wanted to give gifts to his parents’ friends. Until he was three, everything had been fairly normal, Florence said, but after his parents’ separation and divorce, he started taking his unhappiness out on others. “Apparently the separation was hurting you,” Shapiro’s mother observed, “and it was coming out in other ways.”
Leo’s behavior deteriorated, and he became hard to manage. He’d regularly come home with little presents for his mother—then she found out he was shoplifting. He fought viciously with his brother over inconsequentialities like a ping-pong game and his mother recalled that one time Leo took the framed wedding picture of his father and Lee Hoffman and broke it.
Other incidents that Florence recounted include Leo’s throwing an egg at a neighbor's house out of jealousy “because they were a family.” He also cut the flowers out of the living room draperies with scissors and drew pictures with crayons on his bedroom lampshade.
When a babysitter wanted Leo to do something he didn’t want to do, he picked up a baseball bat and, later, he was expelled from Cub Scouts for hitting the Pack Leader on the head with a rock. We’ll see later that this behavior may have been in part symptoms of hyperactivity/attention-deficit disorder, a childhood condition that wasn’t well known when Shapiro was a child.
There were also constant problems at school. When a teacher failed Leo in reading and Florence went to see what was wrong, the teacher complained that the boy had read a whole book the first day it was assigned instead of one page a day as she’d specified and that he kept his homework uncollected in his desk.
At another school, a teacher complained that he would continually tell her she was wrong. (Florence recorded that the teacher was wrong, but added that that didn’t help the situation.) At a private school, one teacher reported Leo sat looking out of the window not paying attention, while another said he was a leader. On a different occasion, a schoolmate had Leo’s report card and wouldn’t give it to him and Leo tore the child’s shirt. He was suspended from another school for hitting a teacher with a ruler.
In another incident, Leo stayed home from school with a virus but didn’t seem to be getting better. When the truant officer came to see why the boy hadn’t returned, Florence discovered that Leo’d been dumping his medication in the closet. He was afraid to go back, he protested, because a schoolmate was threatening him with a knife.
Part of this problem may have been that, as one psychologist determined, though Leo was still emotionally a child, he was functioning intellectually at a college level.
Between 1951 and 1960, Shapiro attended eight different schools—including the Windsor Mountain School, to which he transferred in 1960 as a sophomore. (He went to one school twice, separated by a year at another school.) He never went to the same school for more than two years and most he attended for one year or even less.
In 1956, in an attempt to impart some order to their son’s schooling, Florence and Irving transferred Leo to the Admiral Farragut Academy, a military school in St. Petersburg, Florida, for sixth grade. It was an expensive decision, but Leo resisted the regimentation and, though he made good grades at Farragut, kept threatening to run away.
Though he returned to the public schools the next year, Shapiro remembered that he was introduced to theater while he was at Farragut, recounting that for punishment he was sent to a room in the basement of the main building that was beneath the theater.
He could hear the student actors rehearsing above him, and found himself drawn to this new form of expression. (Shapiro told a similar story of hearing rehearsals at the Windsor Mountain School, the prep school in Massachusetts where he finished high school—this time through the wall of his dorm room.)
It was at Farragut, too, that Leo became aware of his religious roots, discovering his Judaism and joining a synagogue. Shapiro said that he was one of only two Jews at Farragut, and this sense of isolation, of being an outsider, may have turned his attention to the faith of his family.
As early as second grade, one headmaster noted that Leo’s behavior changed markedly when his father was in town—the boy would throw chairs and act out in school—and suggested Leo get psychiatric treatment. The suggestion angered Irving Shapiro who insisted his son leave the school.
By seventh grade, the boy began getting physically ill, the bouts of illness invariably coming after Leo’d spent time with his father. On one occasion that Shapiro recalled specifically, he spent a day with his father at the Thunderbird Motel in Miami Beach. He was sick in bed all day while his father was at the pool and when Irving came back to the room, his son remembered, he hit the boy for being ill.
The stress was pervasive: the night before Gary graduated from high school in 1959, Leo threw up. Florence learned that Leo had developed an ulcer. He was not yet 14.
Florence had thought Leo was suffering from hyperthyroidism, or Graves’ disease, which results in elevated metabolism and activity. At first, doctors tried a mild sedative, but that made the boy worse. Then a big change came over Leo when another doctor started giving him Dexedrine, a stimulant prescribed today for attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity.
It should be noted, however, that potential ADHD—one of the most common childhood behavior problems—wasn’t the only psychological difficulty with which Shapiro would be associated. Later in life, he would take Prozac, an anti-depressant, and Rosalía Triana (b. 1946), his last romantic partner, reported that Shapiro’d been “diagnosed” with borderline personality disorder (BPD) with narcissistic tendencies.
As children, most people with BPD are emotionally unstable, impulsive, and often bitter or angry, although their chaotic impulsiveness and intense emotions may make them popular at school. At first, they may impress people as stimulating and exciting, but their relationships tend to be unstable and explosive.
Common aspects of the narcissistic tendencies also line up with Shapiro’s behavior: “a grandiose sense of self-importance”; “seek[ing] excessive admiration from others and fantasiz[ing] about unlimited success or power”; a belief of being “special, unique, or superior to others”; an “often . . . fragile self-esteem.”
(I have no confirmation of a medical determination of BPD for Shapiro, though it’s certain that Shapiro, himself, provided Triana this revelation; neither Shapiro nor his mother mentioned the condition and Shapiro was already dead when I learned of this, so I couldn’t ask him.
(Even though the symptoms seem to match Shapiro’s behavior, I have no expertise in the fields of psychology or psychoanalysis, so this suggestion is speculative despite Triana’s assertion. The diagnosis of ADHD, however—though that name wasn’t used at the time of Shapiro’s childhood—and the prescriptions for Dexedrine and Prozac are all confirmed by either Shapiro‘s or his mother’s reports.)
As soon as he started using Dexedrine, Leo calmed down and despite all his problems, his mother said Leo seemed a happy child. In his “up mood,” everybody loved Leo: he was attractive and charming, hardworking and energetic, winning prizes and generally astonishing people with his accomplishments.
Leo tirelessly played cowboys-and-Indians with another child—Florence didn’t record whether her son was more often the cowboy or, given his life-long fascination, the Indian—and rode his bicycle all over the neighborhood with Blackie, the spaniel puppy that Irving Shapiro’s business partner had given him for his first birthday back in Saint Paul, chasing behind.
The boy’s interest in Native Americans began, he asserted, when he attended Camp Thunderbird in Bimidji, Minnesota (“home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox”), in the summers of 1954 through 1957. There he learned “Navajo riding songs, wood craft, quillwork, the hoop dance, and campfire etiquette.”
“For three years, I wanted to be an Indian,” Shapiro wrote later. “I made ceremonial regalia, did beadwork, danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily ever after.” The childhood fantasies matured into lifelong adult focus and artistic and philosophic application.
The Navajo healing sings the youngster learned about at camp became Shapiro’s “clearest model . . . for healing theatre,” Shapiro affirmed. (I posted an article on this blog about the chants called “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” on 15 May 2013.) His affinity for the rituals, arts, and beliefs of America’s native peoples permeated all of his work with Shaliko; indeed, it was at the base of his principal philosophy: that theater is transformative and that art is and should be integral to our whole culture.
Leo regularly took three buses to the public library in Bayfront Park on Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami, where he exhausted the library’s collection of books on Indians, and also took piano lessons, composing a song for Florence on the piano she had rented for him.
As a result of shifting from one school to another, Leo had few close friends. He had strong interests, however—Indians, science fiction, magic—and focused intently on them. When the boy wanted to learn a card trick, for instance, he would practice and practice: nothing would stop him.
For 12-year-old Leo Shapiro, magic became a refuge from a world he found ugly and inhospitable. As his mother recalled, when her son was in seventh or eighth grade, he met a retired magician named Al Cohn on the bus to the public library. Shapiro described the man as “bald, old, smoked a cigar, and [had] 20 fingers; I was in love.”
Cohn (1891-1988), known as the “Sponge Ball King” for a famous trick he invented and sold, had retired to Miami in 1951 after owning the Magic Centre on Eighth Avenue near Times Square in New York City for many years. Given the boy’s response to him, Cohn may have been Leonardo Shapiro’s first surrogate father in a line that continued well into adulthood.
He taught the boy some sleight-of-hand tricks and soon Leo started taking daily lessons from him; attended Saturday-morning meetings of the Magic Roundtable, a magician’s group, at the MacArthur Hotel in South Beach; and even performed at bar mitzvot and children’s parties in Miami Beach:
I gradually moved up from guinea pig to stooge to accomplice, to junior magician. I started to create my own routines. I acquired a stage name, a hand-me-down tuxedo, a bright red cummerbund, and actually made some money performing at children’s parties.
Leo’s devotion to magic lasted several years, Florence remembered, and like his other pursuits, it was a total commitment. It also, like many of his other childhood pursuits, found expression in his stage productions.
Miami Beach in the 1950s was a “concrete fake Art Deco landfill,” in Shapiro’s view, and his Dade County public school was a restrictive and confining environment. Performing magic tricks surely gave young Leo at least the feeling of control over his surroundings, his “violent peers, their bullying parents,” and “the Cuban Revolution’s . . . angry exiles,” perhaps in the same way that Indian shamans, in whom Shapiro would later take an interest, took control of the nature around them through magic.
The science fiction books were clearly an escape, too: “I used them like drugs,” he said. Shapiro disclosed that he read a novel or two every day, including Isaac Asimov’s multi-generational Foundation Trilogy with its theme of social evolution in a universe of many diverse worlds—an obvious appeal for young Shapiro.
We’ll see that both science fiction, which he said gave him “a Utopian imagination,” and magic would continue to be an interest for Shapiro well into his professional adulthood.
[Part
2 of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will be posted on Wednesday. I’ll pick up with Shapiro’s transfer to the
Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, for 10th grade. This move marked a great change in the young
man’s life and was a major influence on his path toward becoming a theater
artist. Be sure to return to Rick On Theater on the
19th to continue this story of Leonardo Shapiro’s life and work.]
