Theater: A Healing Art

 

[I’m going to explore the notion that theater has the power to heal underma the right circumstances.  I’m not thinking of anything magical or supernatural, though perhaps spiritual in a secular sense, and almost certainly psychological.  I’m also not going to claim that all theatrical performances are healing events, or that all the ones that are, are intended to be.  

[The healing qualities of theater aren’t an alien concept.  The Aristotelian concept of catharsis, the cleansing that tragic drama brings about, is well known to even the most casual of theater students, for instance.  I recently read an essay about a modern production of an Indonesian wayang (shadow play) that was devised to heal the residents of Bali after the terrorist bombing there on 12 October 2002 disrupted the natural balance that is sought for in Balinese religion (I. Nyoman Sedana, “Theatre in a Time of Terrorism: Renewing Natural Harmony after the Bali Bombing via Wayang Kontemporer,” Asian Theatre Journal [Univ. of Hawai’i Press] 22.1 (Spring 2005): 73-86).

[I’ll be confining myself here to performances in the United States with reference to American drama and theater.  You can be sure, however, that the same concepts and principals operate in all Western theater and almost certainly in non-Western theater as well.]

Last 10 July, I posted a collection of articles on Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, a play by former U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel Scott Mann about combat service in Afghanistan and its effects on the GI’s and their families.  In a 7 July interview with Mann on CNN News Central, Jim Sciutto, chief national security correspondent and a co-anchor of News Central, Mann labeled the play and its production “a very, very healing program of storytelling and shared experience.” 

In “Retired Green Beret Scott Mann Examines ‘Holistic Horror Of War’ In ‘Last Out’” by Brian McElhiney in the Stars and Stripes of 2 July 2023, Gary Sinise, whose charitable foundation subsidized a national tour of Last Out, said of the 1980 play Tracers, a progenitor of Mann’s play by and about Vietnam vets, that “The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”

In a 1992 interview, Leonardo Shapiro, the experimental theater director about whom I’ve written many times now in Rick On Theater, pronounced, “[I] see theater not as a secular entertainment but as some kind of healing ceremony . . .” and later wrote, “The theatre is a healing art.”

What do they mean by “healing theater”?  How is theater a “healing art”?  To begin with, none of these people is alluding to psychodrama, the psychological therapy technique—with which healing theater bears some superficial similarities.

The principal differences between healing theater and psychodrama are significant, however.  First, we’re talking about a type of theater, not a type of therapy.  Healing theater happens in a theater (or some space that’s used as a theater) and it’s open to the public, whether paying or admission-free.  The performers may be professional actors or amateurs, but they’re usually rehearsed and follow a script or scenario with no more improvisation than any theatrical performance.

Second, psychodrama effects the participants, who are patients; but healing theater works on both the participants, from the writers and creators to the actors, crew, and production staff, and the spectators.

Shapiro wrote in 1993 that the Navajo sings, which he learned about as a boy at summer camp in Minnesota, became his “clearest model . . . for healing theatre.”  So, let me say a bit about the Navajo sings to which Shapiro likened theater’s healing properties (see “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” posted on Rick On Theater on 15 May 2013).

Many American Indian societies, including the Navajo Nation, don’t see disease as biological, physiological, or psychological maladies, but as a reflection of disharmony in society or the world.  This is then manifested in a person’s illness.  The healing rite requires repairing this environmental disorder.  The Navajo healing ceremony includes prayers, songs, sandpaintings, sweat baths, ritual bathing, face- and body-painting, and other ritual practices dedicated to accomplishing this. 

The healing chants, or songs, not only cure the patient, but also benefit the patient’s family, everyone else who attends the ceremony (that is, the audience), and the entire Navajo Nation.  The ceremony attracts spirits who return balance and harmony to the society or the world. 

Shapiro mounted Roadkill, a protest against the damage done by automobiles both to the city environment and to human bodies, in 1992.  It was the final event of the First Annual Eco-Festival whose text was by playwright Karen Malpede, and it was billed as “A street piece created as a healing ceremony.”

The idea kept cropping up throughout his career.  Of his company’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1988), the director characterized it as “an exorcism of our own damned cynicism, our own devils, our own false contracts”—clearly forms of societal discord.  (See my discussion of this production in “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 15 January 2016.)

Shapiro conceived 1989’s Strangers as a “healing ceremony which contains within it a narrative of destruction and mourning for the family [at the center of the narrative] as a vehicle of human culture and civilization.”  (I discuss this play in “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014.)

I even think that a reason for the significance Shapiro placed on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, which became the director’s last production in 1996, was connected to his notion of theater as a healing art. 

Seagull was extremely significant to Shapiro from his earliest days as a theater enthusiast—before he made it his life’s endeavor.  He expressly chose the Chekhov play for what he knew would be his final production.

Certainly the play deals with several of Shapiro’s career-long concerns—the place of the artist in society and the sacrifice of children, most pointedly—but hidden within the text is Konstantine Treplev’s statement (from Jean-Claude van Itallie’s 1973 translation):

Then, when Spirit and Matter merge harmoniously, become one—the reign of Universal Will shall begin. 

It also seems to me that one effect, perhaps serendipitous, of his work on the production was a tangible example of theater as a healing art.

Shapiro was dying of inoperable bladder cancer when he embarked on the production.  His prognosis when he was diagnosed in July 1995 was six months, but he lived for a yead-and-a-half—until Seagull was rehearsed, presented in Albuquerque (the home base of the young company staging the play), took the show to Baltimore (where Shapiro’s Shaliko Company premièred its first production in 1973), and returned to New Mexico.

The director was in considerable pain, which most observers could plainly see, but he persevered because, he said, “I’d rather do something beautiful than dwell on my symptoms.”  The artistic work couldn’t cure the cancer, he knew, but it could make the life he had left tolerable and even rewarding.  It could heal Shapiro’s spirit.

The healing chants of the Navajo Indians are also transformative, which is a characteristic that Shapiro also saw in modern western theater.  The sick person is transformed into a Holy Person by the performance and the society is simultaneously transformed.

Theatrical theorist Antonin Artaud also saw theater in this light: 

I shall seek out what has been preserved and is reappearing, the old mythical tradition of the theater in which the theater is regarded as a therapy, a way of healing comparable to certain dances of the Mexican Indians.

The Navajo healing ceremonials combine song, dance, and pantomime to make simple dramas.  The texts of the chants are long, epic passages about the legendary heroes and Holy People of the tribe.  The ritual songs and ceremonies comprise what the part-Cheyenne writer Frank Waters (1902-95; see “Frank Waters,” 4 May 2012), who focused on the Native American experience, called “myth-dramas,” a little like medieval European mystery or miracle plays, which are passed orally from one generation to the next to preserve the legends and traditional history of the tribe.

This is the connection Leonardo Shapiro saw between theater and the healing powers of Native American art.  And whether one sees this as a spiritual or psychological process, it’s the benefit that Scott Mann, Gary Sinise, and Shapiro, and many others, find in theatrical performances beyond either entertainment or edification.

On 2 and 5 September 2022, I blogged on The Last Cyclist, the reconstruction of a 1944 cabaret from the Terezin concentration camp.  I didn’t say so in my report, but I believe that this performance of Karel Švenk’s (1917-45) satire, was another example of theater as a healing art—and it accomplished this on two levels almost 80 years apart.

When Švenk (1917-45) wrote his cabarets, he often included one song, composed as the finale for his first Terezin cabaret, called the “Terezin March.”  It appeared in the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist because it “was so energizing and electrifying, it so captured the hopes of people living with a sense of numbing despair.”

As reported in my post “‘Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin’” by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022), in the cabarets, “Life in the camp is treated lightly with a powerful sense of humour, rendering the play, as if it were, ‘a joyful resistance[.]’”  This was the healing effect of the cabarets for the concentration camp inmates and the cabaret performers.  It helped make it possible for the prisoners to persevere even under the horrendous circumstances of the camps.

At Terezin, Švenk had resolved “to strengthen and raise the morale of the prisoners.  Which he did, using laughter and satire as his most potent weapons.”  For 21st-century audiences of the reconstruction of The Last Cyclist, I think the effect is two-fold.

For the largely non-Jewish casts of the reconstruction productions, it was an inspiration to learn more about the Holocaust.  Adapter Naomi Patz and director Edward Einhorn attested that the participants were extremely moved by their involvement in The Last Cyclist.  Fighting anti-Semitism, which has grown in both frequency and intensity in recent years, depends greatly on consciousness-raising, especially among non-Jews. 

As we’ll hear with regard to Last Out and Tracers, the telling of the stories of peoples who have suffered is a way of relieving the pain and salving the wounds.  It works on those who do the telling and those who participate by hearing the telling, like the observers at the Indian healing ceremonies are returned to harmony just as the person sung over is. 

In the present-day performances of Cyclist, the audience in the house at the West End Theatre Off-Off-Broadway or the one at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the film play the part of the Terezin inmate spectators at the final dress rehearsal; the film’s viewers, by extension (assisted by the camera work), do so as well.  In the words of Neil Genzlinger, who reviewed the 2013 Off-Off-Broadway staging, this was “theater as a chance to bear witness.”  Jews and non-Jews in the audiences of Cyclist benefit from the healing forces of the story-telling. 

As Jennifer Farrar of the Associated Press put it:

. . . watching the crude but well-performed and affecting production that opened Thursday night at the West End Theater, one can’t help thinking about what it was like to actually be trapped in the horrific situation of the original performers and their fellow inmates in those rehearsal audiences.

Theater about immense tragedies like the Holocaust and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, about victims and sufferers like Jews imprisoned in death camps or soldiers who saw too much violence and death, aren’t the only healing experiences the art can provide.  After the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City, residents here suffered their own forms of PTSD.  The city closed down and many New Yorkers holed up at home, afraid to venture out.

As David Romàn remarked in his 2002 essay “Introduction: Tragedy” in Theatre Journal, “going to see a show was linked with ‘getting back to normal,’ as if theatregoing was a routine daily activity.”  The New York Times asked in its review of Urinetown, whose Broadway première, postponed a week, had been scheduled for the night the theaters reopened: “Can we laugh and thrill to a musical at a time like this? . . .  When every individual spirit as well as the national one can use all the bolstering it can get, “Urinetown” is not just a recommended tonic.” 

The answer is yes.  When Romàn saw Urinetown, he had this to say of the experience: “What was most interesting about the show was the readiness of its audience to enjoy the performance.” 

One Broadway performer, Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman, a dancer/choreographer and producer, a former Rockette, saw it this way:

Two nights after Sept. 11 and the terrorist attacks, Broadway reopened, and I returned to the theater to put my fears on hold, suit up in sequins and sing and dance the classic American backstage musical “42nd Street.”  I was worried that it was too soon and too disrespectful to go back to work.  Not to mention that I was still scared of the city and unsure about what was going on.  How could I smile at a time like this? 

When I got to the Ford Center for the Performing Arts [now the Lyric Theatre], I was comforted at the sight of all my co-workers – a sign of life as it was before Sept. 11.  There was an announcement that the families of the brave firefighters and police officers who had rushed to the World Trade Center had been invited to join us at the theater by the show’s producers.  It was overwhelming to realize that they would be our first audience since the tragic events of only two days before. Nerves were taut and tears were in everyone’s eyes.

Michael Cumpsty, one of the stars of the show, gave a short curtain speech thanking the audience for being there (about 900 people filled half the theater).  He said how grateful we were to share their company at such a time and that we hoped to relieve their minds for the next several hours.

The orchestra started and from behind the curtain, where the ensemble (including myself) was uncertainly waiting to begin, we could feel a sigh of relief from the audience.  It was as if the great sounds of the orchestra playing [original 1933 film score composer] Harry Warren’s music were calming and comforting the anxious people, promising them that their worries were in someone else’s hands for even a brief time.

When the curtain went up, the crowd let out an enormous burst of applause, more thunderous and heartfelt than on opening night.  It was so surprising that a group of us onstage started to cry.  But as I looked at the crowd, imagining their pa6.in and filled with my own, I felt a great desire to succeed, to take their minds off this unstable world for a short while and guide them into the world of theater.  That was what they wanted.

Suddenly, I realized, I was experiencing exactly what I had read about in textbooks.  The original 1933 movie version of “42nd Street” was a musical created to help raise the spirits of Americans during the Depression.  And it seemed extremely important to do the same that night.  I even understood the value of the American chorus girl. Sometimes, wearing patent-leather shoes and girlie costumes has made me feel frivolous.  But that night was not about what I might want to say as a woman.  It was about escaping reality.  About beauty, music and comedy.  And it worked.  The laughter that Thursday was so rewarding.  It was not disrespectful; it was necessary.

At the end of the show, we waved the American flag.  Hearing the applause, seeing the uplifted faces, the flag rippling in the air, was immensely moving.  What the audience was applauding was not our talents but our attempts to help in any way possible.  That this gave them some comfort made me very proud to be a performer.

Shusterman was describing for the New York Times the healing she felt as a performer, what she saw in her fellow cast members, and what she sensed from the spectators.  And 42nd Street isn’t an account of the event that had knocked all these people off balance.  What helped restore them to some measure of psychic harmony was the capacity of theater to form a community, even a temporary one. 

David Romàn had a similar experience, from the perspective of the theatergoer rather than the performer, when he saw The Full Monty.  He found that

what struck me most about the production was the sheer virtuosity of the performers—including the musicians in the pit—their professionalism, their sense of purpose in performing for us.  In the end, I too joined the standing ovation that was so effortlessly offered to the company by the full house.  I was very pleased to be in this audience and the next day’s Urinetown’s audience, even if the shows themselves weren’t completely satisfying or memorable.  Perhaps it didn’t really matter what show I was attending that weekend.  Most likely, I would have experienced the same feelings of audience connection and inflated enthusiasm at any show that hadn’t closed in the theatre district in the wake of September 11th.  These felt like little triumphs for all of us, a slight shift in the mood and tone of the city and its people.

Romàn defined the essence of his theater experience in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy by noting, “Liveness was at the core of these events.” 

The performing arts offered people the chance to be with other people and experience themselves together. In this sense, we were as much audiences for ourselves as we were for the performances.

As my friend Leonardo Shapiro characterized this phenomenon: “Culture is a story told around a fire.  It is the conversation between the young and old.  It is the fire on your face and the cold on your back.  The link between your experience and mine.”  

He was assuredly speaking of theater, as he pointed out, “Americans quite desperately need some place to gather around the fire and tell each other stories and their dreams. . . .  Theater is meant to be a place where you act out your dreams and fantasies . . . .”

In the American Theatre magazine of December 2002, Linda Frye Burnham, a writer who focuses on performance and community art, chronicles a communal theater project “to pull Union County [South Carolina] back from the brink of disintegration.”

The back story is that in 2000, Union County was in financial straits because of the collapse of the textile industry, leading businesses and schools to close as towns across the county faced bankruptcy, forcing young people to flee the area looking for work elsewhere, shrinking the local population. 

Not only that, but the town of Union, the county seat, was nationally notorious as the home of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children in 1994 by driving her car into the town lake.  She then invented the story that an unknown black man had taken her car and kidnapped the children, and the area had never recovered from the infamy of the murders and the racist lie Smith used to escape blame.

Seeking a solution for the county’s dire troubles, community leaders turned to a cultural project they’d seen work in Miller County, Georgia, nine years earlier: they engaged the Chicago-based Community Performance Inc. (now called Community Performance International) to help them develop a play based on the county’s history, culture, and, most importantly, its stories—some of them not told for centuries.

The project, entitled Turn the Washpot Down, involved the whole community—black and white, young and old, rich and poor—and the finished play was performed in the summer of 2002.  Said Jules Carriere, one of the CPI cowriters of the script, of the county residents, “They didn’t want to settle for sweetness.  They wanted to tell the hard stuff . . . .”

In the end, Burnham characterized Washpot as “an intimate theatre of place.  Its potent impact is derived from its truth, the resonance of shared ordeals and delights, its portrait of a place like no other.”  The editor of the local paper in Macon, Georgia, wrote of that county’s similar effort, that it was “a performance that is not only healing but also compelling, authoritative, confident theatre.”

Union County’s Washpot not only healed individual people—the participants, their fellow Union County citizens, spectators at the performances whether local or visitor—but it returned a community that was disintegrating back to harmony: the very definition of a healing ceremony.

As a conclusion to her report, Burnham wrote a perfect characterization of healing theater:

Once in a while in my travels, I see graffiti scrawled on a wall somewhere: “Art Saves Lives.”  I feel in my bones it is true.  Even if Turn the Washpot Down doesn’t save Union’s life, it has already saved its soul.

[The work of Community Performance Inc./Community Performance International as described by Linda Frye Burnham in her AT article (“A More Perfect Union,” December 2002) is truly interesting.  Her account of the development of Turn the Washpot Down is also fascinating.  I highly recommend looking into both.  (Unfortunately, the AT online archive doesn’t go back as far as 2002, so the issue isn’t available on the Internet.  A slightly different version of the article, however, is accessible at https://wedgeblade.net/files/archives_assets/21889.pdf; many libraries will have back issues of AT as well.)]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 8

 

[This is the last entry in the Leonardo Shapiro biographical series.  Shapiro’s return to the New Mexico terrain where he roamed with the Appleseed Circus in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where he got married, and where his son was born, initiated a period of nostalgic contemplation. 

[Out of this reflection came a focus on the children of Vallecito, the little collection of homes where he and Spartacus built his retirement house in the sacred Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and generated three plays (two of which were meant for children).  It also produced a long poem about his father, mother, and grandfather, and the start of a libretto of a planned opera about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose marriage he saw as a contrast with that of his own parents.

[This final period of Shapiro’s life also brought about the last production of his career, the staging of Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to Shapiro.  To close the circle of his life, the director arranged for the young Riverside Repertory Theatre Company to tour the show to Baltimore and perform there at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project, the space where The Shaliko Company made its début 23 years before.  Poignantly, Shapiro was too sick at the end to make the fateful trip east with his troupe.

[I hope ROTters have been reading along with the narrative of Leo Shapiro’s life and work.  If you haven’t and are just joining the thread, I heartily recommend that you go back to the beginning and pick up the first seven parts of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro.”  Parts 1 through 7 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 and 4 May.]

In conjunction with his work with neighborhood children, Shapiro experimented with radio drama (Nothing Is Ever Lost, or All in Good Fun: Radioromance, 1993), a play for children (Who Stole Summer?, 1994), and a television script (Runaway Sam in the Promised Land: an after school fairy tale for television, 1994).  The author had sent me copies of all these scripts, which I read with great interest—especially the last one.

His concern for ecology and the environment, and especially his focus on nuclear pollution, are openly reflected in these plays, as are several of his philosophic interests.  Nothing Is Ever Lost, which is not a children’s script, is based on Doctor Faustus; it actually begins as a radio broadcast of Marlowe’s play (which The Shaliko Company produced in 1988) and transforms into a search for a missing shipment of radioactive waste from the “Los Alamos National Weapons Complex.” 

In Who Stole Summer?, the play he presented at his home with the local children, Shapiro used an actual event in the valley—the infestation of grasshoppers—to develop a fable of toxic pollution and government collusion with commercial interests. 

Though this is a children’s play, Shapiro employs language and allusions that are almost certainly too sophisticated or obscure for most of the preteenagers and young adolescents with whom he was working: What 11-year-old in 1994, for instance, would know Leonard Peltier (b. 1944), the jailed American Indian activist, or recognize a character called “Dead Nixon,” the embodiment of the evil government conspirators?  (His television script also includes language and images that no broadcaster would likely accept for its airwaves, and he even wrote of his radio play that it “seems unproduc[e]able.”)

Perhaps the most personally revealing of Shapiro’s three New Mexico scripts is his teleplay, which he dedicated to his son, Spartacus.  Runaway Sam in the Promised Land, set in New York (the other two take place in New Mexico and the Four Corners), is the magical tale of a 10-year-old boy who goes off in search of a mythical Jerusalem because he thinks finding it will prevent the break-up of his parents’ marriage. 

While Shapiro makes comments along the way regarding homelessness, AIDS, and police overzealousness, what he seems to be doing is retelling—from his point of view, assuredly—the dissolution of his own marriage to Candace Tovar in 1973 (when Spartacus was only two; by 10, he was already living with his mother, away from his father). 

Back in the immediate locale of his idyllic wedding to Tovar and the birth of his son, a time on which he clearly looked back with nostalgic fondness, and engaging in considerable introspection, he revisited this episode in his life.  From his letters, it’s obvious that Shapiro was, indeed, reflecting at length on his first stay in Taos, his life then, and, specifically, his wedding to Tovar. 

He’d also been thinking about his mother, who’d died of lung cancer on 12 February 1994—Shapiro returned to Saint Paul in December of 1993 to nurse her—but he was conscientiously trying to “erase the tapes” of his past: “I want to escape from my painful memories and I want to explore them,” he wrote, “I want to make something happen, but I want to stay comfortable, I want to act but I don’t want to do it YET.  I drift.”

Nonetheless, he obviously found himself dwelling not only on his own marriage, but that of his parents as well.  Rosalía Triana thought that in the Julius and Ethel libretto, Shapiro “romanticized [the Rosenberg’s] love as being the opposite of his awful memories of his own parents.”

(In brief, Julius [1918-53] and Ethel [1915-53] Rosenberg were arrested for having passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War.  They were tried for espionage in 1951 and executed on 19 July 1953, but the case generated a great deal of controversy which continued until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

(Despite evidence from Soviet files showing that the couple were probably guilty, some Americans continued to feel that the trial, in the midst of the so-called “Red Scare” of the 1950s, could not have been fair, that the secrets the Rosenbergs stole were of little value since the Soviet scientists certainly already possessed them, and that the death penalty was too severe a punishment were it not politically motivated.

(As might be guessed, the Rosenbergs were an enduring symbol for Shapiro and he had begun planning the opera based on their marriage even before he left New York for retirement.)

Shapiro had had a great deal of trouble writing the book for this opera—the existing text is only a little over five pages—because, Triana felt, he had conflicted feelings about the material.  In Shapiro’s script, Julius Rosenberg says of the time he met Ethel: “I knew she was for me if she’d have me, and I’ve loved her ever since that night. . . .  I know they can never part us.  Nothing will.”

In contrast with this sentiment, in a poem Shapiro also began composing before he left New York, he wrote in brutal and disturbing phrases of the dissolution of his parents’ marriage in 1951—right around the time of the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others for the theft of the United States’ nuclear secrets.  He started the poem with the lines, “When my Father dumped my Mother, / . . . / When their marriage split asunder,” and continued near the end:

Daddy, Daddy, why’d you do it?

Why’d you hit me, why’d you leave us?

(Did you steal our Money too?)  Daddy, Daddy, why’d you die?

The poem, which is untitled, also focuses on his father’s infidelity and, plainly, his physical brutality and his death. 

Working on both of these texts and the script of Runaway Sam at the same time, Shapiro was clearly going over and over the parts of his life that concerned family, marriage, and children.  In addition to the poem about the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and the idealized contrast to it in the libretto, Shapiro was transcribing and editing a recording that he’d asked his mother to make of recollections of her family’s history, which includes her father’s criminal activities, but also many descriptions of the pain and harmful consequences, particularly for her younger son, of her divorce from Shapiro’s father.     

Shapiro was also working on his own memoir at the time of his final illness and while most of what he’d sketched out by the time he died covered the positive aspects of his life—his time at the Windsor Mountain School and the period of the Appleseed Circus in New Mexico are most thoroughly discussed—he does mention incidents and occasions that were clearly painful and unpleasant.

In Runaway Sam, Max and Sally live in Brooklyn (where Shapiro had lived when he ran Shaliko) and Max drives “an ancient green V.W. van” (the very vehicle in which Shapiro arrived in Taos in 1969).  Sam’s father is a sculptor who “makes weird statues” which he displays on the streets, refusing to make anything saleable despite his wife urging.

Sally’s a dancer with commercial prospects who no longer wants to continue the bohemian existence they’ve been living.  The parallels between Max/Sally and Leo/Candy are too close to miss, and there’s even a character late in the script called Rosalie, the name Shapiro’s last romantic partner used before she returned to her home state of New Mexico. 

Among the causes of the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Tovar, for instance, was her devotion to a career in the commercial musical theater.  As we’ve seen, Tovar’d begun in this arena at NYU and in her summer employment in musical theater companies.  Shaliko’s work, reflecting Shapiro’s vision, was certainly not in this popular-entertainment vein.

What the play reveals about the real Shapiro, however, is how he saw himself—or thought others saw him.  Sally/Candy accuses Max/Leo of living a “red diaper fantasy” and asks him, “Why keep fighting a battle that’s already lost?  You can say what you want and get paid for it,” pointing out that people on the streets where Max puts his art “just trash it or take it away.  People don’t want to see that stuff in their neighborhood.” 

When Sally boasts, “People know my name now, they know who I am.  They like me,” and tells Max that New York magazine plans a feature article on her, he calls it all “[s]terile empty New York new speak” and declares it a “scam success” that doesn’t mean anything to him. 

(“Newspeak” is the fictional language of the totalitarian state invented by George Orwell [1903-50] in 1984, designed to restrict the words, and therefore the thoughts, of the citizens.  In contemporary usage, it refers to the language of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words used by politicians and officials—and Shapiro would add advertisers—to deceive the listener.)

Throughout the script, Shapiro has Sally characterize Max as a disengaged, judgmental solipsist who refuses to live in the real world; he, in turn, considers her a sell-out.  In the end, however, after Sam has failed to find Jerusalem and his father and mother confirm they can no longer live together, Max acknowledges, “I got caught by an idea about our life, now I don’t know . . . .”

In July 1995, Shapiro was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer and the doctors had expected him to die within six months of the diagnosis.  Triana recorded that Shapiro quipped at the time, “What do you get when you’ve been pissed off all your life?”

In August 1996, Shapiro returned to professional stage work, directing the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque in Chekhov’s classic The Seagull, a play he acknowledged as deeply meaningful to him, with Triana, as Arkadina. 

Shapiro’d been introduced to the Riverside company when he spoke to a theater class at the University of New Mexico in which Joe Pesce (not to be confused with the popular New Jersey-born film actor and comedian Joe Pesci), a company member, was a student. 

Pesce, who’d go on to play Konstantine in Seagull, shared Shapiro’s focus on Grotowski and Chaikin and was impressed with the director’s associations with them.  Pesce apprenticed himself to Shapiro—in exactly the way the director envisioned theater should be learned, as a “creative oral transmission of the secrets of the theater.” 

Later, Shapiro approached Riverside, Pesce recorded, and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  The company worked for over a year on The Seagull from rehearsal through performances. 

It was the final year of Shapiro’s life and for the five months of rehearsals, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro’d built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantine’s play—and nights watching Shapiro’s videotapes or talking with him.  (It was the same stage the director had built for Snow White and Who Stole Summer?)  It was a demonstration of the oral transmission of his theatrical lore.

The Riverside Rep production of Seagull, which used the Jean-Claude van Itallie (1936-2021) translation from the 1970s (published in 1995), was presented in Albuquerque from 22 August to 14 September 1996 (Tres Amigos Theatre; KiMo Theatre).  The set was designed by Shapiro, himself, and Spartacus designed the seagull prop used in the play-within-the-play.   

Ann L. Ryan of the Albuquerque Journal, dubbed the show “splendid” and labeled it “a vivid, heartfelt production.”  The reviewer added: “There’s an immediacy to this ‘Seagull’ that makes it feel like a long, late summer evening: haunting, lovely and ephemeral.”

In the Weekly Alibi, Sharon Kayne reported that “Riverside Repertory Theatre has that depth [required for Chekhov], and in this production of The Seagull, they show it.”

Ryan went on to compliment the company and, by implication, its director: “I’ve seen almost all of the actors in this show before in other productions, and I’ve never seen any of them better.”  Kayne observed: “The ensemble as a whole suffers from no weak links, which gives the production a sort of seamless quality. . . .  [T]he performances are excellent.  Director Leonardo Shapiro has done well.”

The director arranged for the company to tour the show to Baltimore, where it was mounted on 6-17 November at Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project where Shaliko had begun with the première of Children of the Gods in 1973, but Shapiro was unable to make the trip east to oversee the performances.  Though he’d been seeking experimental and alternative treatment for the illness, he was too weak by November 1996 to travel. 

The ”brash young troupe,” as Brennen Jensen characterized Riverside Rep in Baltimore’s City Paper, “serves up a sparkling version of The Seagull.  It’s a rakish retooling that brings Chekhov’s comedic touches to the fore . . . .”  The reviewer continued, “The performances are exemplary all around,” and concluded that “laughter, not glumness, marks this successful staging.”

In the Baltimore Sun, J. Wynn Rousuck, who’d reviewed Shaliko’s Yellow House at the Theatre of Nations in 1986 and reminded Baltimoreans how breathtaking he’d found it, observed that “the director draws the audience into the work by occasional direct address, by having the actors enter and exit through the audience, and by setting the stage so we become part of the audience for the play-within-a-play.”  “The result,” the review-writer continued, “is a ‘Seagull’ with definite Shapiro touches (including the type of ensemble work derived from an extended rehearsal period . . .).” 

On the website Aisle Say, Richard Gist wrote of Riverside Rep’s visit to Charm City “under Leonardo Shapiro’s inspired direction,” that ”it so appealingly captured” the “’looking-on,’ almost voyeuristic, quality . . . in this richly wrought production of Chekhov’s difficult classic.” 

Gist ended his review by affirming that “when the final curtain of this refined, handsomely atmospheric production rang down, and this zealous, gutsy, highly talented troupe . . . came out for its call, I could not keep from being inspired by stirrings . . . for it is an undertaking well worth experiencing.”  And The Sun’s Rousuck concluded his notice with “what ‘The Seagull’ has to say about the struggles of the serious artist makes it a logical swan song for this long-embattled director.”

Despite the doctors’ prognosis, Shapiro continued for a year-and-a-half, often rehearsing The Seagull at his home in Vallecito—sometimes from his sickbed—in the afternoon after returning from morning chemotherapy treatments in Albuquerque, about a 100-mile drive one way. 

He only decided to undergo chemotherapy in June 1996, after he started rehearsals in March, and company member Kerry Weddle (b. 1973?), who played Nina, believed that the director did so in order to give him more time with Riverside and Seagull. 

He was afraid to die, Weddle said, but knew that no treatment would effect a cure; Seagull, she felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.”  As the troupe attested, Shapiro demonstrated what he meant by “theater is a healing art.”

Shapiro’s discomfort was considerable at the end.  The cancer left the director weak and easily fatigued.  In the midst of his notes for his planned memoir, he wrote, “Now what?  Pain seems worse . . ., worse each day.  New lumps and hard bumps have [broken] out here in the pain, pain, pain.” 

In November, he wrote, “Doing The Seagull was good.  Pain is bad”—though he added optimistically that he was looking for something easy to work on for two to three weeks.  Members of the Riverside Repertory also noted the toll the cancer was taking on Shapiro, remarking both on the precipitous deterioration in his condition between the auditions and the end of the rehearsals and on the hardship he was having while he was working. 

The end of Seagull’s run, wrote T. D. Mobley-Martinez, who’d reported for the Albuquerque Tribune and attended some final Seagull rehearsals, wasn’t a happy prospect for Shapiro because that meant confronting the inevitable future.  “I’d rather do something beautiful,” he told another reporter, “than dwell on my symptoms.”

When Riverside Rep members visited Shapiro on his 51st birthday in January 1997, he was so confused he spoke about preparing them for the tour to Baltimore which had already taken place two months earlier. 

Seagull was Shapiro’s last project.  I don’t even know that he was able to do any writing. 

In late 1995 or early 1996, Philip C. Kolin (b. 1945), a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi for whom I had done some work, was putting together a collection of essays on Death of a Salesman in anticipation of its 50th anniversary in 1999.  He asked me if I knew anyone who’d be interested in writing about a special connection to the play, and I told him about Shapiro.

Kolin asked me to approach Shapiro, who said he’d be interested.  He died before he could write the piece.  Leonardo Shapiro died of the cancer on 22 January 1997, fifteen days after his 51st birthday.  He was buried in New Mexico. 

(I learned of Shapiro’s passing when I had called him a day or so after he died, unbeknownst to me, to check on the Salesman essay.  Sparticus answered the phone and told me his dad had just died.  On 1 April, Elena Prischepenko wrote to all Shapiro’s friends and colleagues to announce his death and let us know about a memorial service in his honor at the La MaMa Annex in New York City on the 16th.  I delivered the chronology of his career, having accidentally become his Boswell.)

The New York director’d had a profound effect on this young troupe.  (Aside from most of the actors’ youth, the company’d only formed in 1993.)  At a rehearsal about a week before Seagull opened in Albuquerque, a journalist in attendance recorded one of the members declaring: “We’re watching a master at work.”

At another rehearsal, a different reporter observed this exchange:

“You know what he’s doing,” [Richard] Van Schouwen [who played Trigorin] says.  “He’s painting a picture.  Only he’s not just using one brush or one color.  He’s, like, putting a dab of yellow here or a spot of light there.”

You start working with him, [Cynthia] Sousa [Seagull’s Paulina] says, and you see his great ability.  You see him bring out things that you never realized you had.

He’s a perfectionist, [Sandra] Timmerman [stage manager] says.  And through his perfectionism, the standards of the company have risen.

“We can never go back,” Pesce says.  “We really love him.”

When they returned from the tour to Baltimore, the Riverside Rep took a six-month break.  “We’re going into a small hiatus,” explained company artistic director Michael Najjar, who played Semyon in Baltimore but didn’t perform in Albuquerque, “to work on our acting and directing skills in a workshop setting.”

In a letter about a year-and-a-half after the production, Kerry Weddle said that the company’s year with Shapiro had quite shaken them up.  It took them some months to come to grips with the experience, but then the taste for the stage welled up and they all went back to work.  As far as I can tell, they’re still working.

[Thank you, readers, for delving into this history of one whom I consider a fascinating theater artist.  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my account of Leonardo Shapiro’s life and work and have gotten something of an idea why I think Leo is worth knowing about. 

[Back in 2011, my friend and a frequent contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, wrote an homage to two theater artists he’d known whom he felt were remarkable.  He called the post “Saints of the Theater.”  Well, Leo Shapiro was certainly no saint—but I daresay he was well worth having known.  I’m grateful I got a chance to.

[I knew Leo for only a brief part of his life, from June 1986, when I met and interviewed him in Baltimore during the Theatre of Nations, through the end of his life—a little under 11 years.   After seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore—a show that left me awed and thrilled, I confess—I began casually to follow the work of The Shaliko Company, becoming more and more intrigued with Leo’s art.  

[My interest in Leo and the company, however, was predicated on the work, not vice versa.  During the time I knew Leo, he and I weren’t really friends, though we were something more than merely professional acquaintances.  We never really collaborated on any of his projects, though I helped superficially with his war-protest collage, Collateral Damage, in 1992 and began to help him with the abortive 1991 revival of Strangers on which he’d asked me to serve as dramaturg.  Since that production never materialized, our work together didn’t get very far, either. 

[In preparation for the Drama Review profile of Shapiro and Shaliko, I regularly attended rehearsals of Kafka, Blue Heaven, and Collateral Damage; watched several Trinity/La MaMa classes; and, at Leo’s invitation, attended occasional performances to which he took his students. 

[I spoke to him often, of course, including many hours of formal, taped interviews; read all his scripts and the many articles he’d written—not to mention the sometimes angry letters-to-the-editor he sent—watched videotapes of past performances and looked through scores of still photographs; and read most, if not all, of the reviews and articles about his productions.  I plowed through the files and records of The Shaliko Company and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and spoke to dozens of Leo’s friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, students, and board members. 

[By the time I wrote “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” at the end of 1992, I probably knew more about Shaliko than any other single person except Leo—but I knew it only as a researcher knows something; I didn’t know Leonardo Shapiro as a man.  We never had a drink together, or a meal.  We never chatted about anything aside from his work—he seldom asked me about my work (except, of course, the TDR article)—and I never saw him except when he was working or I was.  At his La MaMa memorial, I was charged with delivering a survey of Leo’s work; personal remembrances were left to the others who knew him longer and better. 

[Despite the distance, I’ve been profoundly affected by my association with Leo Shapiro.  Kirk, who never met Leo but knows Jane Mandel, one of Shaliko’s original members, had mentioned to her my continuing occupation with the life and work of her old colleague and friend.  Even six years after his death—and more than 20 since she stopped working with him—Mandel acknowledged that she still missed him and thought about him every day. 

[A member of the Riverside Repertory evaluated Shapiro’s effect on the company, as I reported above: “We can never go back.”  Andrea Lord, who’d known Shapiro briefly in Taos in 1969 and 1970, wrote, “Leonardo was a kind and generous man. . . .  I still see him and am grateful for the memories.”  Nina Martin, whose path diverged from Shapiro’s more than a decade before his death, remembered him as “a very generous person and a committed artist that I was privileged to work with.” 

[My association with Leo wasn’t nearly as intimate as Mandel’s or as intense as Lord’s, yet I find that I now evaluate things the way I think Leo would have.  I’ve found I constantly wonder how Leo would appraise a performance I’m seeing, appreciate an exhibit at a gallery I’m visiting, view a book or story I’m reading—or, perhaps most frequently, react to a political event or statement that’s being reported in the day’s news. 

[If I pass a place I associate with Leo—the home of a former colleague, the East Village neighborhood of the Shaliko office, the territory around Taos and Chamisal, New Mexico—he reappears in my thoughts; if I see or read about some writer, artist, movement, or artwork linked to him—a production of Ghosts somewhere, Joe Chaikin’s, Jerzy Grotowski’s, Murray Bookchin’s, or Max Roach’s death, a passing mention of the Situationists, a lithograph by Pudlo Pudlat in a gallery—it causes me to conjure him again.  My own father died not quite a year before Leo, but I think of Leo almost as frequently. 

[I’ve reported that he was displeased at first when “Techniques of Testimony” was published because he thought some of what I related was uncomplimentary.  After moving to New Mexico, Leo wrote that he’d “bought out the press run” of the TDR issue and passed the article out to his new colleagues in the Riverside Rep. 

[Since Leo’s early death, I see this effort as a kind of record of the work of this relatively unknown theater artist.  Obviously, I admired—admire—Leo.  Why else would I have followed his career after seeing The Yellow House in Baltimore?  Why agree to write the profile for TDR?  It’s probably clear that I think he was underappreciated in his lifetime. 

[I hope I’ve made at least an attempt to show that my judgment is based on something more than emotion and sentiment, however.  But that other part—the sense that I owe it to his memory to get this right—I can’t dismiss as objective or intellectual incentive.  As little as I knew him in life, or got to know him afterwards, Leo’s in me now.  And though I know his ego wouldn’t let him like everything I’ve reported here, I fervently hope I’ve done him proud.  Somehow, that’s important.]

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 7

 

[The seventh installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” picks up with The Shaliko Company’s last company-built piece, 1989’s Strangers.  As you’ll read, Shapiro never completed the work on this play, and it was only performed in workshops; nevertheless, it was a significant achievement for the company. 

[The following spring, the theater artist traveled again to Russia, this time to stage Mark Rosovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son in Russian for the playwright’s own company.  He also organized three political theater events involving world-renowned actress Vanessa Redgrave, one of them in London.

[While directing his last New York show, Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, Shapiro got himself arrested—for the last time, I believe—during a pro-environment demonstration, soon after which he disbanded Shaliko for the final time and retired to New Mexico.

[As I have all along, I urge readers of this biographical series to go back and start with Part 1 if you haven’t been following along chronologically from the start.  Parts 1 through 6 were posted on 16, 19, 22, 25, and 28 April, and 1 May.]

Following Whirligig, Shaliko began work on its last collaborative production, Strangers, a performance piece assembled from reports—all the dialogue was quoted material—of several unrelated incidents (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014; also “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg’s View,” 8, 11, 14, and 17 January 2023). 

The story of Strangers was based on reports of two junk dealers in Goiania, Brazil, who found an abandoned nuclear-medicine machine and spread the radioactive core around their family and neighborhood, eventually leaving four family members dead, hundreds of neighbors contaminated, and parts of their city quarantined for radiation exposure.  (I posted an account of this incident in “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987,” 9 August 2020.)

Shapiro combined the Goiania tale, told mostly without words, with newspaper headlines from the day of each performance and first-person accounts of events such as Jim Jones’s (1931-78) last sermon at the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978; Hedda Nussbaum’s (b. 1942) 1988 testimony in the trial of Joel Steinberg (b. 1941) for the 1987 murder of Lisa (1981-87), their illegally adopted daughter; statements by the mothers of the dead and missing Atlanta children in the early 1980s; reports by people claiming to have been kidnapped by UFO’s; and pornographic dialogue from 970-JAIL, a phone-sex recording.  

To this bricolage of “public sources,” Shapiro added Gustav Mahler’s (Austro-Bohemian; 1860-1911) 1904 Kindertotenlieder (songs of the death of children), a cycle of songs on the loss of children set to music of intense sadness evoking enormous grief, and stanzas from Rainer Maria Rilke’s (Austrian; 1875-1926) Duino Elegies (published 1923), which “talks about the balance between the angels and people.”

Strangers was a study of “the contradictions involved in the meeting of traditional and technological cultures,” conjuring up the “dark Satanic mills” William Blake (English; 1757-1827), who was an influence on Shapiro, cited as symbols of the mechanized society of the Industrial Revolution which bowed to the hegemony of Newtonian science and Lockean reason over native intelligence and spirituality. 

Strangers ended with a litany of the dead of Atlanta, Jonestown, and Goiania, and trance songs from various versions of the Native American Ghost Dance from this nineteenth-century rite that Plains Indians believed would resurrect their dead ancestors (see “The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians,” 5 July 2014).  Along with raising dead Indians, the practice was believed to have the power to annihilate by supernatural means the intruding white people—and their insidious technological culture—and return the land to an aboriginal paradise.

It is also in keeping with Shapiro’s animus for the establishment: the middle-aged Leonardo Shapiro recalled the eight-year-old Leo Richard Shapiro who, readers will remember, “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.”

Shapiro built Strangers out of four distinct layers which he called “tracks,” an analogy to the recording industry in which each instrument and voice is recorded separately then assembled into an integrated performance.  The director deliberately elected not to mix the four elements of Strangers, leaving them “independent but inter-related.”

The four tracks, operating independently and contrapuntally at the same time, were the action track, the almost wordless enactment of the Goiania story; visual, the set, costumes, props, and various effects Shapiro engineered with shadow, light, and color; vocal, the “libretto” made up of the testimony taken from published sources and which actors delivered over microphones on the set; and instrumental, the Mahler recording and original music composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach (1924-2007) and played live by musician Francisco Mora (b. 1947).    

In his detailed analysis of the work-in-progress for Text and Performance Quarterly, Michael Wright, a playwright, director, and teacher, observed that Strangers was “not easily absorbed in one viewing.”  Another observer, Richard Schechner, described the performance as “a mess.”

Only two publications covered Strangers in New York City as reports on a work-in-progress.  (Wright’s study was published over a year after the workshop closed.)  In High Performance, the performance-art journal, Allen Frame called the piece “a dirge-like collage of the bad news of the last decade,” explaining, “There were no laughs, no absurdity, and no ironic edge in Strangers.”  

The writer and photographer continued: “Balancing the heaviness was the sophisticated touch of director Leonardo Shapiro . . . .  He elicits performances that are strong and compassionate . . . .  He stages narrative incidents abstractly but clearly, with a minimum of props and an absence of clutter.”  

In The Villager, a neighborhood weekly, Todd Olson asserted: “‘Strangers’ is a performance to watch, even to witness.”  The performance, Olson wrote, “is impressive in its athleticism as well as its sheer mass.  It is an hour and 45 minutes of running, flying and suspension.”  The Shaliko Company, said Olson, “are non-traditional storytellers” and they and Strangers “warrant watching.”

At the end of my 2014 post on Strangers, I reported that after working on this material, I decided that Strangers was really autobiographical in a way.  I never ran this notion by Shapiro, but I think it’s true.  Shapiro was a “stranger”: he saw himself as an outsider—not just an avant-gardist, but a real outsider.  He identified with all the “strangers” in the play—they were him! 

I began to think through the other work he did and the people he admired and was drawn to (American Indians, the artist David Wojnarowicz, the Beats, prisoners) and how he described himself in various situations (he was one of only two Jews at Farragut Academy, for instance; he was a lone Anglo among “Cuba’s angry exiles” in his Miami schools, and so on) and the kinds of philosophy and politics he espoused—it’s all about being on the outside.  Not just ahead of the crowd, but completely different.  Strangers is an expression of this sense of himself in a way that all the other pieces only suggested.

That Strangers was left unrealized was one of Shapiro’s greatest regrets.  Despite its immense complexity and apparent impenetrability in its initial form, it represented a potential culmination of all the theories and techniques which Shapiro’d been developing over a lifetime of making theater. 

Unfinished or not, however, Strangers represented the pinnacle of Shaliko’s work in terms of its sophistication, scope, complexity, and daring.  Clearly, Strangers was a major step towards the new theatrical form for which Shapiro had been searching.  If he’d managed to continue his search, Strangers would surely have been recorded as the breakthrough event.

After a Strangers workshop at Yellow Springs in March 1989, Shapiro traveled to Moscow in December to cast and oversee the set design of the Russian-language première of Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son.  The play went into rehearsal in April 1990 at the playwright’s own Nekitsky Gate Theatre and was presented in the spring of 1990.  It subsequently went on tour in the USSR and U.S., playing a run at Trinity College as part of “Contemporary Theater in the Soviet Union,” 2-3 December.

Then he flew to London to direct Jerusalem For Reconciliation at the Royal Albert Hall (28 April 1991), an “international peace concert for children of all nationalities in the Middle East suffering from war,” produced by Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937) as a benefit for UNICEF and the Arab Women’s Association with a cast that also included Kris Kristofferson, Maurice Béjart, Simon Callow, Duran Duran, and artists from around the world. 

Redgrave had put the one-night event together and asked Shapiro to come to London to direct it.  He and Redgrave had met initially when Redgrave was in New York performing Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending on Broadway in 1989 (Neil Simon Theatre; 24 September-17 December).  He’d taken some Trinity/La MaMa students to a performance and they met with Redgrave, first backstage at the Neil Simon Theatre, then in her apartment over tea. 

Shapiro subsequently helped Redgrave produce The Wall Breaks, an all-star benefit on 10 December 1989 at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre for The Memorial Society for the Victims of Stalin’s Repressions in the Soviet Union.

In return, Redgrave appeared at a Shaliko benefit at the United Nations on 12 February 1990, hosted by the United Nations Society of Writers, with, among others, monologist Spalding Gray (1941-2004), actors Harvey Fierstein (b. 1954), Olympia Dukakis (1931-2021), Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), and Joanne Woodward (b. 1930); poet Allen Ginsberg; playwright John Guare (b. 1938); directors Peter Hall (1930-2017) and Joseph Chaikin; and jazz percussionist Max Roach. 

In exchange for his work on Jerusalem, Shapiro got Redgrave to come to New York for Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars) at the La MaMa Annex (5-8 June 1991), an anti-Persian Gulf war (Operation Desert Shield: 2 August 1990-17 January 1991; Operation Desert Storm: 17 January-28 February 1991) theatrical collage he conceived as a benefit for the War Resistors League and Oxfam America.

In January and February 1992, Shapiro was in production for The Shaliko Company’s first show of the year, a second revival of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York’s East Village.  (The first “revival” was the 1990 Russian-language première he mounted in Moscow.)

Why was Shapiro doing a remount of the two-character, psychological, language play instead of his more usual Shaliko production, a physical, socially conscious, politically oriented, multi-cultural theater piece?  Shapiro explained flatly: “After 25 years in the New York theater . . . it’s all we can afford.”

He’d hoped that this production would garner Shaliko some much-needed rewards: critical attention, box-office income, a move to a more commercial theater, and cash in the form of grants and donations.  Kafka, which Shapiro described as “the most conventional piece we’ve done in a long time,” was supposed to keep Shaliko afloat for another season and shore it up enough to mount Shapiro’s more expansive works, on hold for lack of money. 

Even before Kafka was restaged, Shapiro’d begun working on Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (see “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 and 14 May 2020; also “‘As It Is in Heaven,’” 25 March 2011).  In September and October 1992, the play, set in an East Village café with an artist’s studio in back, was staged in Theater for the New City’s Seward and Joyce Johnson Theater, which was set up as a working café with catered drinks and Middle-Eastern food. 

Shapiro and a cast, some of whom were in the final production of Blue Heaven, had been doing readings of Malpede’s play, then called Going to Iraq, at Greenwich Village’s Westbeth Theatre Center, a co-producer with Shaliko and TNC.  Between 23 and 27 March 1992, Going to Iraq was broadcast on radio on WBAI in New York City in five parts.

As plans for the play were underway, the principal figures in the production of Going to Iraq were organizing Roadkill, a street event on 3 May with text by Karen Malpede and Leonardo Shapiro and co-produced with Theater for the New City, performed as the closing event of the First Annual Eco-Festival.  Organized as a procession through the streets in the East Village to protest the damage done to human society by the automobile, the main performer was George Bartenieff.

Unluckily, the Sunday of the procession was only five days after the riots had begun in Los Angeles in response to the 29 April 1992 acquittal of the four white police officers charged in the beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.  Police in New York, on alert because of the reports of unrest there like that in San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and nearby New Rochelle, New York, were nervous and wary of any disturbances. 

As the procession of artists, performers, and spectators accompanied by two loud percussion bands arrived at Tenth Street and Avenue A, a cordon of police stopped the march.  Shapiro and five more participants in Roadkill were arrested, including 21-year-old Spartacus Shapiro.  Since no one actually did anything remotely criminal—I was present at the event as I was still working on the TDR article—all charges were eventually dropped against those arrested.  It was just the last time in a long chain that Leonardo Shapiro was arrested.

Rehearsals for Malpede’s play, now under its new title, Blue Heaven, began on 10 August.  Shapiro‘s elaborate mise-en-scène included a live trio playing music specially composed by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld (b. 1948), and with one character, John—played by actor Nicky Paraiso (b. 1951) who’s also a pianist—as a band member; live video broadcast by video artist Maria Venuto (b. 1965), who moved about the playing area with her camera during the performance; and scenes staged amongst the patrons’ café tables. 

There was no seat in the audience which did not require the spectator to turn around at one time or another—reminiscent of the environment Jerry Rojo had created for Shaliko’s Ghosts almost 20 years earlier—and the spectators had to decide where to look and listen to the life of the Heaven Cafe swirling around them.  Shapiro, who conceived Blue Heaven’s mise-en-scène, originally concocted a highly theatrical event which, aside from the live music and videos, employed film, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects. 

At the first rehearsal, Shapiro described the environment for Blue Heaven and some images he wanted the actors to hold onto.  He likened the atmosphere to the Caffe Cino performance of William Saroyan’s Hello Out There he had seen back in the 1960s (the one that had featured Al Pacino, I presume) and admonished the actors to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices with theirs,” so the actors would speak of themselves through the dialogue.  This was the director’s instruction regarding testimony (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”).

The production was designed to draw the spectators into the world of what the script calls the “sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and visionaries” of the Lower East Side—once again, the unrepresented, like Galy Gay of Man Is Man, Franz Woyzeck, Andrea in The Arbor, and the people of Goiania—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.

Tensions between Shapiro on the one hand and Malpede and Bartenieff on the other had begun to develop within a few weeks of the start of rehearsals.  Before rehearsals began, but after the preliminary readings and workshops had been conducted, Malpede expressed excitement in my February 1992 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) flew back and forth.

The relationship between the playwright and the director finally broke down completely and Shapiro was fired as director on 13 September, four days before the official opening of the show.  Malpede took over direction of the production in practice, but no director was listed in the program.

Knowing Shapiro’s tendency to engineer clashes with nearly everyone with whom he worked over the years, and recognizing that Shapiro and Malpede each had strong opinions, an aggressive personality, and an unrelenting individuality, it’s likely that despite previously successful collaborations, friction was inevitable and that the blame was on both sides. 

It’s also likely that Shapiro’s old problem with sharing authority with someone else had returned.  On the simplest level, Malpede felt that Shapiro had usurped her authority as playwright and turned Blue Heaven into his own project—the same allegation Judy Dworin leveled at Shapiro when he left the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the same year (and clearly, by his own account, how Shapiro had behaved in his first professional directing job, Yes Yes, No No). 

It may be no coincidence that Shapiro’s very next production suffered similar difficulties in February 1993.  He encountered frustrations with the Chetana Theatre in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, which escalated to an impasse. 

Shapiro made a long-planned trip to Calcutta under the sponsorship of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture, a program of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the cultural propaganda agency of the U.S. Foreign Service, to direct Beckett’s Endgame in Bengali. 

It had taken two years to finalize the plans for the Calcutta production, which the director called “one of my favourites [sic]” that he had dreamed of presenting “for a long time.”

Suman Mukherjee (b. 1966), who brought Shapiro to Calcutta, was a director with the Chetana Theatre and Shapiro’s assistant on Endgame.  “Beckett in an Indian context,” according to Mukherjee, a 1990 TLM student from India, “seemed out of place.”  Further, Shapiro didn’t “take his time” to learn the way the Indian actors, who were prominent stage veterans in Calcutta, habitually rehearsed. 

They expected the director to “have an answer to everything concerning the play” and when Shapiro invoked his ‘Let’s find out’ response, the actors misconstrued this as lack of knowledge—though Mukherjee, who admired the director, affirmed that the director “lived with the play 24 hours” a day. 

After a ten-day “workshop,” the production was supposed to have begun a three-month tour of India, but the actors stopped communicating with Shapiro and the actor-director collaboration came to an abrupt end. 

Despite Mukherjee’s attempts to mediate, “[e]go”—on both sides, it seems—“became an obstructive factor,” the conflict escalated, and the breach became impossible to heal.  The result was a total rupture: the actors refused to perform again after the opening performance on 19 February and Shapiro left Calcutta.

That same month, Shapiro formally shuttered the Shaliko Company (having resigned from the directorship of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program the previous fall).  He’d built a house, with the help of his son, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico during 1992.  The Sangre de Cristos are sacred to the Taos Pueblos.

In June 1993, Leonardo Shapiro retired from New York theater and moved to the tiny “populated place” of Vallecito: population, 767; elevation, 7,060 feet (1¼ miles); 32 miles south-southwest of Taos, where in 1969 Shapiro had broken his trip west.  (Vallecito in Taos County shouldn’t be confused with Vallecitos, 73 miles to the northwest in neighboring Rio Arriba County.)

From Vallecito, Shapiro wrote, “I am slowly getting in touch with the world here, with the sun and moon and stars, with wood and mud and seasons, with neighbors and trucks and dogs, with kids and birds and clouds,” declaring that “it’s a lot like paradise!”  As a post script to one letter, he even chuckled, “Once in a while I realize for a moment that the birds are talking to me.” 

The escapee from New York did, indeed, find himself enfolded in his new community.  Even before his house was completed, while he was living in a tent “with his fax machine and his telephone,” his new neighbors, whom Shapiro characterized as “helpful and friendly,” immediately included him in their lives.  On his first Fourth of July in Vallecito, his new neighbors, Larry and Barabra Malisow, invited him to join the neighborhood families to “eat berries and cream and drink wine” and set off fireworks in the driveway. 

Shapiro reciprocated in his own way after the house was finished by holding a housewarming at the end of July 1993 that featured a performance by the neighborhood children, some dozen or so aged five through 12, of an adaptation of Snow White.  “It was great!” declared Shapiro. 

The Malisows, whose youngest daughter, five-year-old Ivy, was in the cast, concurred, noting with approval and awe that the director and teacher treated the children as if they were adults and professionals, demanding from them discipline and concentration.  “He never talked down to them, and assumed that they understood anything he gave them—using political and social issues—and they got it!” observed Rosalía Triana. 

It's little wonder, given this readiness to accept a stranger, that he found a contrast between his new and old surroundings.

Shapiro retired from New York theater, but not theater in general—or other endeavors.  He conceived many projects for his retirement.  In addition to plans to direct Vanessa Redgrave in Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan, and hopes to build his “real rep company,” he contemplated a production of Marguérite Duras’s (French; 1914-96) L’Amante Anglaise with British actress Frances de la Tour (b. 1944) and Gerald Hiken (1927-2021), the American actor; a co-production of Büchner’s Danton’s Death with Yuri Lyubimov’s (Russian; 1917-2014) Taganka Theater; and an opera based on H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in collaboration with video artist Paul Garrin (b. 1957) and Marilyn Zalkan (b. 1967), Shaliko’s former administrator and composer of the music for the 1992 production of Kafka: Father and Son. 

He also still harbored the hope that he could find a producer for a new production of Strangers with Max Roach performing his own music.  In Vallecito, he had drafted several scenes of Julius and Ethel, A Love Story, an opera in collaboration with composer Noa Ain (1942-2019) and made “a lot of notes”; he was working on a poem, Refuge, he had begun in India; and he was writing The Big Hit!, “a satirical backstage mystery novel, . . . in the fond hope that it will make money for me.”

He was preparing to accompany Vanessa Redgrave to Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade in September 1993 to help with peace concerts sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other activities, but he never went.  (Redgrave made the trip as planned as a special envoy for UNICEF.)

In December 1994, he was developing plans for a “large event” in Los Alamos over three days in August 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima raid.  He called this commemoration Days of the Dead at Los Alamos, in reference to the annual Mexican celebration.  “I have been putting off plunging in on this,” he wrote.  “I have no enthusiasm for dealing with all those people, but I’m here, and it’s my thing, and it needs to be done, and I probably will get it together,” he predicted.  He dropped out of the event the next year.

Though the refugee from the big city wasn’t entirely open to the communal way of life presented by little Vallecito, he did participate in the community.  Barbara Malisow related that Shapiro joined in Seders at Passover, which, like most valley activities, included many neighbors who convened at different homes year to year, and even scripted the service for the group.  (Passover 1994 was sundown, 26 March, to sundown, 3 April; in 1995, the holy days would have fallen shortly before the cancer diagnosis, 14-22 April.)

His contributions to the life of the little valley, however, always came back to the children: “[W]hen he played for our kids or something,” Larry Malisow asserted, “that was priceless.”  Although Shapiro could spend much of his time “not really extending himself, or wanting to be part of what was going on around,” as Larry Malisow noted, the children were obviously special to him. 

In August, he wrote and presented Who Stole Summer? or The Trick and Treat Show: Fantasia for kids and band instruments—a play all about Happy Valley, New Mexico, which is under attack by grasshoppers and pollution—on the backyard stage he had built.  (Barbara Malisow related that at the time, the valley had, in fact, suffered “a huge infestation” of grasshoppers.)

Confronting nuclear and toxic pollution and the threat of casinos in the area, Who Stole Summer? was a complete production, with sets and costumes—the latter designed by the Malisows’ daughter Lauren, a student of costume design writing a thesis on a related topic, who later became an assistant designer at the Santa Fe Opera—featuring 25 to 30 children and teenagers from the neighborhood and nearby valleys and performed before some 90 adults. 

Barbara Malisow affirmed that Shapiro liked the children so much that he really got to know “their different personalities,” and, when he knew he was dying, he arranged specific bequests for each child “according to how he perceived them.”  “And every child that got something was pretty happy with what he left them, you know,” added Larry Malisow.  “So, he saw things in them—even though he may not . . . he didn’t react that way.”

[Shapiro’s retirement to New Mexico marked the start of the last phase of the director’s life and career.  In the eighth and final installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” to be published on Sunday, 7 May, you’ll hear about his work with neighborhood children and his period of introspection.

[Shapiro mounted one more professional production with a young troupe in Albuquerque, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, during which time he was under treatment for fatal cancer.]