A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 3

[This installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” starts with the young directing student enrolling at NYU in its newly formed School of the Arts.  He immediately met several of the people who’d be important to his artistic development, including Jerzy Grotowski, John Arden and Margareta D’Arcy, Peter Kass, Richard Schechner, and Carl Weber. 

[Shapiro also met many others during this time who had an influence on his understanding of theater, art, and the social contract.  He also launched his first non-student production and his first piece of political theater, which evolved into his first theater troupe.  The tyro director also took his first professional directing job at this time—and had his first taste of failure.

[Finally, in a major jog in his life path, Shapiro took off for the West Coast and was diverted in Taos, New Mexico, for a two-year sojourn that turned out to be one of his most formative experiences.  He created his second company, a political guerrilla-theater troupe that traversed the Four Corners. 

[Again, I strongly recommend that readers just picking up this multi-part post to go back to Parts 1 and 2 (posted on 16 and 19 April) first.  I’ve been identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

Shapiro did eventually register at the newly established School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) at New York University in 1966, from which he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing in 1969.  By his own account, however, his tenure there was precarious. 

Shapiro enrolled in the Theater Program at NYU’s School of the Arts, which had just been launched in 1965, in its first class.  He was accepted largely on the basis of his prior experiential learning, and his time at NYU was arguably Shapiro’s most practically and professionally influential educational influence, especially combined with the Windsor Mountain experience, which founded the intellectual and philosophical basis of his thinking.

Not only did Shapiro get schooling from faculty such as Peter Kass (1923-2008), his acting teacher and a protégé of several Group Theatre members; Carl Weber (1925-2016), an actor and dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble, and assistant director to Brecht; and Richard Schechner (b. 1934), whose teaching remained influential long after Shapiro left school, but he worked with visiting theater pros John Arden (1930-2012) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99). 

Other influential teachers at NYU of whom Shapiro spoke were Hovey Burgess (b. 1940), former clown and juggler (with Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus) who taught circus skills, one of Shapiro’s favorite classes, and Omar Shapli (1930-2010), a director, teacher, and founder of the Chicago-based improvisational group Section 10, who taught theater games.

Many of Shapiro’s NYU schoolmates became important figures in his artistic development.  Of special note were:

·  Fred Aronow (b. 1945), a cameraman and sound recordist who was an MFA student in Film Studies who introduced Shapiro to the Taos Indians and the San Gerónimo festival in New Mexico in 1969.

·  Tom Crawley (1940-95), an actor and SOA graduate who was a participant with Shapiro in the 1967 Grotowski workshop and a cast member of the original Brother, You’re Next street performances (1967).

·  Larry Pine (b. 1945) and his wife Margaret Rachlin Pine (b. 1948), actors and both SOA graduates who were Shapiro’s closest friends in the 1960s and ’70s.  Larry was a cast member of Brother, You’re Next and a participant in the 1967 Grotowski workshop; he was an original member of André Gregory’s Manhattan Project.  Margaret, also a composer, was an original member of the Shaliko Company and the composer for the musical adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope produced by New York Shakespeare Festival (1977), originally under Shapiro’s direction.

·  Linda Putnam (b. 1944), an actress with Appleseed Circus in New Mexico (1970-71) and an original member of the Shaliko Company; an SOA graduate, Linda joined Shapiro in New Mexico with her husband, David, in 1970.

·  Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), a playwright and actor and the author of The Youth Hostel (1976), which Shapiro directed at the Public Theater; a schoolmate of Shapiro’s and a supporter of the Shaliko Company who brought Andrea Dunbar’s The Arbor (1983), the U.S. première of which Shapiro staged, from London.  He also conducted a seminar for Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.

· Candace Tovar, (b. 1947), an actress, singer, and dancer, and SOA graduate who became Shapiro’s wife in 1970; their son, Spartacus, was born in 1971.  Candace was in New Mexico with Shapiro in 1970-71, and became a member of the original Shaliko Company; they divorced in 1973, but Candace is a central character in Shapiro’s 1994 semi-autobiographical play, Runaway Sam in the Promised Land.

In 1967, NYU hired British playwright John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, 1959) as a visiting lecturer in the undergraduate theater program at the brand-new SOA; he taught a course on politics and theater.  Out of this class came a remarkable performance project, War Carnival, conceived, at the behest of the students, by Arden, an artist long associated with leftist causes; his wife, actress Margaretta D’Arcy (b. 1934); and NYU theater games instructor Omar Shapli.

The students of acting, directing, and playwriting developed the project and events in New York City around the time of its conception bore on the theme of the project, presented beginning in the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May 1967 (see “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010).  One of those directing students was the young Leonardo Shapiro, already a political radical and anti-war activist.

Shapiro—whom Arden described as a “balding bearded-weirdy”—was drawn to Arden, a mix of English establishment and international bohemian.  Described as a “combination medieval passion play and modern day Play-In,” War Carnival was conceived principally by D’Arcy.  It was a 10-hour, blatantly anti-Vietnam war street fair (except that it was staged in an NYU studio space on 2nd Avenue).

In 1967, Jerzy Grotowski, who would become one of Shapiro’s two main theater models and inspirations (the other was Bertolt Brecht), conducted his first American workshop at NYU.  Grotowski and Ryszard Cieślak (1937-90), Grotowski’s principal actor, taught a four-week “methodology” series from 6 to 30 November in which Shapiro, one of only four directing students in the class, participated.  

While Shapiro was doing the Grotowski workshop, he and a band of classmates wrote and performed the guerrilla street play Brother, You’re Next, the adaptation of Brecht’s Man Is Man.  Shapiro and two of his classmates, Stephen Wangh (b. 1943) and Robert Reiser (b. 1941), wrote the script (based on improvisations by the cast) and Chris Rohmann (b. 1942), the only member of the company who wasn’t an NYU student (he’d been bought in from Ohio by Wangh), composed the music.

The young street performers were all facing the Vietnam war draft.  The ends of their student deferments were looming, and several of the students had already been called for military service.  “[T]here was lots and lots of dead people coming back and we were all scared shitless,” said Larry Pine, one of the Brother company. 

Sharing some themes and plot points with both Hair, which opened Off-Broadway the same year, and Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 film by Stanley Kubrick (1928-99), one of Shapiro’s acknowledged inspirations, Brother tells the story of a draftee at first determined to escape military service, but who eventually learns that “war is so much fun” and readily participates in it. 

The play was performed in unannounced appearances in parks and on street corners around New York City.  (The troupe did one series of performances indoors as part of an anti-Vietnam war event organized in January 1968 by the Theatre for Peace, a project of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam.)  One of the two published reviews of the indoor shows affirmed that Brother was a commitment “to a theater of propaganda in the best sense of the word.”

In the spirit of ’60s activism, the company gave the script royalty-free to any group across the country that wanted to present it.  Shapiro remembered hearing about performances of Brother by groups in Chicago and cities in California and Minnesota and requests by other groups.

The cast of Brother, You’re Next became the kernel of the New York Free Theater, a street troupe which performed protest songs and sketches all over the five boroughs of New York City from 1968 until the mid-1970s (see my post on 4 April 2010).  

Shapiro, Wangh, Rohmann, and Reiser co-founded the NYFT, “a street and community theater of social and political involvement” which operated under the aegis of NYU’s School of the Arts.   The Free Theater eventually launched community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence,” but in 1968 and 1969 devoted itself to street performances.  (Shapiro left New York City for the West Coast in the summer of 1969.)

In New York Times listings of free events during the summer of 1969—the Free Theater was a street theater, but not a guerrilla troupe; their appearances were scheduled and publicized—the theater described itself as “street actors in ‘involvement’ theater and satire,” mounting performances in neighborhoods all over the city, on street corners, in parks, and on college campuses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.   

(No appearances were announced in this list for either the borough of Staten Island or suburban areas outside the city.  One reason might have been that the New York City subway system doesn’t reach those locations, though the troupe included Staten Island in a list of its targeted areas.) 

The little band of pacifist theater artists originally launched NYFT to combat racism and racist attitudes among the diverse population of New York City.  It was a direct response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929), on 4 April 1968.  (Toward the end of its existence, NYFT expanded its mandate to accommodate other social ills, but that was after Shapiro’s departure from New York.)

In late 1968, while Shapiro was still a student at NYU, and during the time that Brother, You’re Next was touring the streets of New York City, the neophyte director was hired for his first professional job.  It was not an auspicious start to his career. 

The Off-Broadway producer of Yes Yes, No No, Beverly Landau, approached director Peter Rivers to stage Ronnie Paris’s comic “fantasy picture of a cold and glittering world of women without men” at the Astor Place Theatre in the East Village.  Rivers declined but recommended Shapiro in an attempt, Shapiro believed, to teach the younger artist “that a professional takes anything and makes it work at its own level, and a professional doesn’t judge everything and just do a few great classics.” 

The lesson may not have taken: Shapiro, feeling that the play wasn’t very funny on its own merits, “took a few liberties here and there, sort of spiced it up.”  Playwright Paris (1924-1992), who was also a producer of the show, objected when she saw a rehearsal the day before previews were to begin, and “freaked out.” 

To be precise, the director had moved the setting from an ordinary home to a cave seven miles down after a nuclear holocaust; since the cast included only women, Shapiro decided that all the men had been wiped out.  The “dripping stalagmites” of the set and ragged costumes were hardly the tea-and-false-eyelashes milieu Paris had anticipated. 

One day at rehearsal, Shapiro recalled, someone on the production staff said something offensive to Candace Tovar, who was then Shapiro’s girlfriend and had merely happened by the theater on an errand for Shapiro—and Shapiro knocked the fellow to the floor.  That act abruptly ended any collaboration between Shapiro and the playwright and producers, which dissolved then and there.  

Yes Yes, No No opened under Peter Rivers’s direction on 31 December 1968 and was dismissed in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 1969 by Clive Barnes, who described it as “a vaguely realistic play, in which the symbols and stultified ritualistic dialogue offer no insights into the realism.”  He added, “No one is going to get much of a chariot race out of a horse and buggy.”  The play closed after one performance. 

It probably didn’t help the reception of the play that, after Shapiro’s departure on the night before the start of performances, the producers of Yes Yes, No No couldn’t afford (nor, probably, did they have the time) to redesign and rebuild the set with which he’d left them.  As a result, Shapiro recorded, while the producers had reset the action, recostumed the actors, and seated them on furniture to drink tea, they still did so “in the middle of this dripping cave.”

In thesummer of 1969, largely on the strength of Brother’s reception, Ecology Action West, an environmental activist group in Berkeley, invited Shapiro to start a street theater for them, and he took off for California. 

He recorded that he’d been approached by Jo Ann Schmidman (b. 1948), the socially-committed experimental director and founder in 1968 of the feminist Omaha Magic Theater, to work for her, but he declined because the contract contained what Shapiro characterized as “this ridiculous morals clause” mandated by the city. 

After finishing his last project at NYU—a production of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities in the spring of 1969 which he deemed his “thesis”—he left New York on a meandering route west that took him to visit SOA classmate Linda Putnam and her husband David in Boston; the Woodstock rock festival in upstate Bethel, New York (15-17 August); and Ram Dass’s retreat in Millbrook, New York.

(Ram Dass [1931-2019] the former Richard Alpert, had been a Harvard colleague of Timothy Leary [1920-1996], the advocate of psychedelic drugs, especially LSD.  Dass started the International Foundation for Internal Freedom [IFIF], a sort of proto-commune, in 1963.  Later, Dass would establish an unofficial headquarters at Lama, one of the New Mexico communes with which Shapiro would become associated.)

On his way west, Shapiro stopped in Milwaukee where Candace Tovar was performing at the Melody Top, a summer tent theater; adopted Grushenka, “a large, longhaired dog of some brownish color,” from a Milwaukee pound; picked Tovar up; and drove to Minnesota to visit his family.  Then he headed south and west through Pipestone, Minnesota; the Black Hills of South Dakota; and Denver, where Tovar left to return for her final year at NYU. 

Shapiro stopped his “old green VW bus with a red flag stenciled with Che Guevara” for lunch one day in Taos, New Mexico.  Propitiously, he’d arrived on San Gerónimo Day, a bright, sunny Tuesday, 30 September, and happened to meet Fred Aronow, whom he knew from New York University and who was the assistant cameraman and sound recordist for a documentary film on ecology and the environment which was focusing on the Taos Indians. 

San Gerónimo Day is the annual feast day for the patron saint (Saint Jerome) of Taos Pueblo—each pueblo and village in 16th-century New Spain was assigned a patron by the Conquistadors—celebrated by a two-day festival that is part religious observance and part secular carnival marking the harvest.  The Anglo town of Taos marks the day with a parallel celebration.

(I have a two-part post on “Taos & Taos Pueblo”; the first installment, subtitled “Background” and posted on 24 May 2012, gives a description of the San Gerónimo Festival, among other aspects of life at the pueblo.  The second installment, “History,” was posted on 27 May 2012.)

At the time of Shapiro’s arrival in Taos, Shelly (1928-75) and Mary Louise Grossman (b. 1930) and their collaborator, John N. Hamlet (1911-82), were in the area filming the last of Our Vanishing Wilderness, their eight-episode series of half-hour television films for National Educational Television, the predecessor of the Public Broadcasting Service.   

The film, The Water Is So Clear that a Blind Man Could See, focuses on the Pueblo Indians who, the Grossmans said, have a “reverence for land” and a “love of trees and other elements of nature,” and “inadvertently practice conservation with a willingness to sacrifice for the preservation of nature.”  The filmmakers observed, also, that the Taos Pueblos had “resisted the advance of modern civilization.”  (The series premièred on New York’s WNET on Sunday, 11 October 1970, and ran weekly until 29 November; the Taos episode aired on 22 November.)

Aronow, who’d graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Film and Television of NYU’s School of the Arts in 1969—the same year that Shapiro had graduated from the undergraduate directing program—recalled that he’d been in the central plaza of Taos when he heard someone call his name.   

The plaza had been closed to traffic for a performance of “some colonial period Spanish dance music” by local singer-accordionist Jennie Vincent (1913-2016), part of the Fall Fiesta, the city’s parallel celebration to the San Gerónimo Festival at the pueblo, and Aronow was surprised to see an East Village acquaintance calling to him from the dirty, beat-up, hand-decorated bus. 

Aronow took his friend to Taos Pueblo where the film crew’d been working daily for several weeks already and been given access to areas and aspects of the pueblo and the festival that tourists seldom see.  Shapiro was stunned to encounter a living culture, unlike those of other Native American societies he’d known in Minnesota and Florida, with “a live and lively oral tradition, unbroken for thousands of years and a rich ritual and dramatic ceremonial life.” 

Shapiro didn’t go on to California; he remained in New Mexico for two years.

Taos and its surrounding countryside holds attractions for many who come whether only to visit or to stay.  Photographer William Davis (b. 1943) was drawn to its beauty—“a result,” he believed, “of a rare combination of mystical and human elements.”

As John Nichols (b. 1940; author of The Milagro Beanfield War, 1974)—who moved to Taos not long before Shapiro came there, had written extensively about the area, and recorded one of Shapiro’s largest protest events—said of Taos Mountain, which physically, emotionally, and psychologically dominates the town, the pueblo, and all the villages of the valley:  it “casts spells” to keep people from leaving and lure back those who try. 

It does seem to have cast a spell on Shapiro, who returned 20 years later “in pain, fleeing from New York, from Career, from the intractability of the American dream.”  For those who came to escape establishment America, there was a spirit conjured up by the combination of the times, the land, and the people who gravitated there that generated ideas and ways of living in reaction to America’s consumerist society. 

In Shapiro’s view, “Everybody was making up social structures, cooperatives of various kinds, a newspaper,” and Andrea Lord (b. 1946), who’d arrived in Taos from Los Angeles in the spring of 1969, saw the commune community as “a new way of being,” where “[p]eople were opening up their minds to new information . . ., new ways of relating to everything and everyone.” 

On Shapiro’s first night at The Family commune, Roger Sundell (b. 1936?), who was working on a film about the commune  (Peace, Love, 2 Hours—Taos, 1970), said to him, “Want to build a house, go ahead,” and Shapiro summed up, “[A]nybody could live there, it was like making it up as they went along, together.”   “It was a very exciting time,” Lord concluded, “full of promise and hope,” and Shapiro decreed, “It was a scene, it was sort of astonishing, out in the middle of nowhere.”

(The Family, a group-marriage commune, was one of the many hippie enclaves located near Taos in the 1960s and ’70s.  It had about 50 members who lived together a few miles from Taos in a two-bedroom adobe house and a school bus.  Though Shapiro was never fully a member of The Family, this was the group with which he appears to have been most closely allied in Taos.  His first theater piece in Taos was sponsored by The Family. 

(The Family ran a natural-food store, a free medical clinic, the Taos Community Information Center, and an alternative school, all serving the hippie community in and around Taos.  The commune also published Fountain of Light, the best-known of the counterculture newspapers of the movement, to which Shapiro contributed at least one article.)

Soon after arriving in Taos that fall, Shapiro presented The Second Coming, a music-theater piece based on William Butler Yeats’s 1921 poem exploring the polarities between the spiritual and the physical realms (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”). 

He was drawn to Yeats’s poem because, first, he’d developed an awareness of the poet’s work at Windsor Mountain where he worked on Yeats’s Purgatory in his senior year and, second, he responded viscerally to the sound of the verse, especially, he said, on recordings of Yeats reading it himself.  (He quoted Yeats saying, “I want all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung.”)

Much of the sentiment Shapiro would later put into his productions and his writings can be seen in lines of the poem which warn:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Shapiro saw socio-political implications in these lines and others in the poem (explored in “Cheerleaders of the Revolution”), but he also just had the idea of doing something meaningful on Halloween so The Second Coming was a kind of ceremony beginning with an invocation from British occultist, Satanist, and student of magic Aleister Crowley (1875-1947; see my post, “‘The Wickedest Man In The World’: Aleister Crowley,” 28 September and 1, 4, 7, and 13 October 2019).   The core group of performers was from The Family where Shapiro was doing a workshop. 

The performance of Second Coming started at midnight on 31 October/1 November 1969, a brisk, chilly Friday/Saturday, in a canyon of the Rio Grande River Gorge about 15 miles outside of town which Shapiro dubbed “The Midnight Theater.”  

Shapiro and Lord both recalled that Second Coming was quite successful, attracting about 100 spectators or so, and the director declared he was impressed that there was an audience in the Taos area for such a spectacle.  Further, Lord believed, the performance gave “some kind of creative center and expression” to the nascent counterculture community, which was still “very untried and vulnerable.”

Not long after the performance of The Second Coming, a woman he met at The Family took Shapiro later in the fall of 1969 to the Zuni Pueblo, about 280 miles southwest of Taos, for his first time seeing the shalako ceremony (see my post, “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010). 

The ceremony, observed in November or December each year on or around the winter solstice, reenacts the Zuni creation story.  (The solstice was on 22 December that year; the shaliko ceremony commenced at midnight on 8 December.)

The shalakos are deities who serve as messengers from the gods to the Zuni people.  They are represented in the ceremony by dancers in 9- or 10-foot-tall masks.  Shapiro was so impressed by the event that when he started his company in New York City in 1972, he named it after these sacred figures.

In his first weeks in Taos, Shapiro lived in his VW bus, moving from commune—among them the famous Hog Farm near Taos, The Family, and Lorien north of Questa (24 miles north of Taos)—to commune “to Pizza Parlor parking lot.”  He met a young couple who sold jewelry to tourists at the pueblo and he made beadwork for them to sell, a skill Shapiro had learned way back at Camp Thunderbird in the 1950s. 

Eventually he rented a $15-a-month, four-room, adobe house in Dixon in Rio Arriba County, 20 miles southwest of Taos up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, surrounded by national forest land—“farther away from everyone and everything than I had ever been.”  As he did when he returned a quarter of a century later, he reveled in “all the land you can walk on in a day.”

The new arrival recounted that in his first week there, he returned to the adobe house one day and “found a pile of dog shit on my bed.”  Examining it more closely, Shapiro discovered that the deposit was actually several buttons of peyote.  It turned out that some members of the Hog Farm commune had made a trip to Texas or Mexico “and come back bearing gifts, planting seeds like Johnny Appleseed . . . .”

Lonely and increasingly obsessed with the war in Southeast Asia, Shapiro conceived of the Appleseed Circus, “[a] street theater without streets,” and began inviting people to come west and join him.  The origins of the troupe were in the invitations he issued at the end of a theater column he wrote for Fountain of Light, the Family commune newsletter:

Free workshop sessions begin at the Gallery House Jan. 12, 13 and 14, two 2[‑]hour sessions a day at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.  Improvisation, circus techniques, theatre games, basic acting and mime, everybody welcome if your [sic] a little crazy and willing to work.  Looking to produce a “play” for Washington’s Birthday, Feb. 22 [still a federal holiday until 1970].  Formal rehearsals start Feb. 1.  Contact thru Taos Community Information Center.

The notice attracted local interest and the messages he sent east brought friends from home starting early in 1970.  Candace Tovar and the Putnams all moved into the Dixon adobe, forming a mini-commune of their own—one that functioned not as a farm, but a theater.  This little “anarchist cell” began recruiting members by advertising in local newspapers—there were numerous counterculture publications circulating in the area.  People started coming.

The young director’s principal notion was a “political, tribal traveling theatre/circus of myth consciousness and social integration.”  Shapiro served as “Mr. Theorist,” he said, “writing little manifestos” inspired by the events in Czechoslovakia (“Prague Spring,” 5 January-21 August 1968) and Paris (“May 68,” 2 May-23 June 1968) the previous year and what they were reading every day in the newspapers; David Putnam, a carpenter with a Harvard degree, was the designer and builder. 

The new band of activists thought there was going to be a revolution, and the Appleseed Circus was born from that impulse.  “We were hiding out in the hills, and had no connections with anybody,” Shapiro wrote later.  “We were pretty focused, we were following through on” their activist opposition to the war in Vietnam. 

Shapiro’s initial idea was for the troupe to travel in horse-drawn wagons like a real 19th-century circus, but they soon discovered that there were too many fences across the countryside and so they were relegated to automobiles and roads.  At the start, the small band had only Shapiro’s Volkswagen bus and the Putnams’ Ford panel van, but then they built the flat-bed stage they would use for their guerrilla performances. 

The wagon was built on the frame of a pick-up truck which the troupe got from the dump.  They did the welding at the N&M Garage, a cooperative garage in Taos that let them use its equipment.  The result was a massive structure, some 11 feet high, weighing perhaps as much as two tons.  The sides folded down for transport, and then folded up to an 11-foot platform to form the stage, which was about three feet off the ground.  It ended up a cumbersome vehicle and the company had difficulty figuring out the steering. 

Within a year, the troupe began collecting vehicles and, ultimately, the Appleseed Circus traversed the countryside surrounding Taos County in two school busses, a bread van, the truck pulling a wagon, and Shapiro’s green minibus.  The nomadic troupe, numbering at its peak about 20 people, roamed in this motley assortment of vehicles like an old-fashioned circus from its base in Dixon into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona doing guerrilla theater. 

For their performances, the Circus players wore green overalls with big red felt apples on them and, Shapiro recalled, an ‘A’ created by one of the company members.  “[T]o me all these things were poetry, were theater,” he wrote.  “I lived in a very pure world.” 

On 4 July 1970, Shapiro and Candace Tovar were married in a “barefoot dawn wedding on top of Picuris Peak”; their son, Spartacus, who would return to the area with his father in 1992 and 1993 to help build Shapiro’s retirement home, was born on 18 March of the next year.

On 5 and 6 August 1970, Shapiro’s “cheerleaders of the revolution” mounted Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos), a two-day environmental-theater event in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in observation of the 25th anniversary of the Hiroshima atom-bomb raid.  (See my post, “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009.)

John Nichols, the novelist and essayist from Taos who attended the rally, described Shapiro’s motivation.  After outlining at length the history of LASL (now known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory), Nichols generally invoked the “few hardy boys and girls and men and women (not yet in exile or underground or on the FBI’s top ten) who wish to carry on the dialogues that might, by some wondrous miracle, prolong man’s minute upon this tortured planet.” 

The New York Times described this event as “the first large-scale demonstration at the laboratory” and noted that the demonstrators had been “escorted by the police, watched by undercover agents and filmed by 13 government cameramen.”  Shapiro, himself, recalled that he had been “warned off, threatened, bullied and shot at” during the month preceding the demonstration and shots were fired at his Dixon house “a couple times” as intimidation. 

The Appleseed Circus, as it traveled like a Gypsy caravan through small towns of the Four Corners (the only area where four states—Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado—meet; about 260 miles west of Taos) in vehicles barely holding together, never really coalesced as a performing troupe except for the Los Alamos protest and, while he was rehearsing A Man’s a Man, Shapiro felt frustrated at the lack of professionalism. 

When the Circus went to Pennsylvania in the fall of 1970, spending the winter in David Putnam’s father’s barn, so Shapiro could recruit professional actors, not just “a propaganda thing,” the troupe began to fall apart.  Shapiro’s intention had been to enlist “eastern actors” and “build up a show and do a college tour.”  “That was a mistake,” Shapiro recalled; “it didn’t work.  It wasn’t based on that kind of an aesthetic.  When I started Shaliko, it was in order to do something that would be more professionally oriented and less political.”

The little band, which included a now-pregnant Candace Tovar, wended its way through Colorado, where, in Boulder, Shapiro sold the green VW bus in which he had arrived in New Mexico two years earlier, and Kansas, where Tovar was arrested for stealing a grapefruit in Dodge City, and Ohio, where Shapiro and Putnam shoplifted an ice cream machine to sell for cash to buy gasoline. 

Because they had painted “Kill Precedence” on the side of one of the school busses in which they were traveling—and living—and because President Nixon was in Columbus, Ohio (19 October 1970), they attracted the attention of police.  “We were literally accompanied from one end of Ohio to the other,” Shapiro recalled.  Thus, the remnants of the Appleseed Circus returned east and, eventually, to New York City at the start of 1971. 

The end of his time in New Mexico also ended what Shapiro considered his apprenticeship: being active in “the movement,” observing the Open and Living Theatres, working with John Arden and Peter Kass at NYU, working with Grotowski, studying Brecht and the Group Theatre, creating Brother, You’re Next, the abortive directorship of Yes Yes, No No, organizing the New York Free Theater and Appleseed Circus, attending the shalako ceremony, and mounting the protest at Los Alamos.

The sojourn in New Mexico, however, provided Shapiro with a number of residual influences.  First, it strengthened his abiding interest in circus performances, an attraction which had begun in Hovey Burgess’s NYU circus-arts classes.

Second, The Shaliko Company drew its name from the Zuni name for the spirits who carry messages between their world and ours.  Shapiro’d had an affinity for Native American culture since his childhood in Minnesota, and his time in New Mexico only deepened it. 

Third, Shapiro conceived the private aspiration of one day returning to New Mexico to live and write poetry when he left the theater.  He eventually bought a piece of mountain land near Taos and, with his son’s help, built a home not far from the mountain slope where he and Candace Tovar celebrated their wedding and, in 1993, Shapiro fulfilled his dream.

[As you see, Shapiro designated this whole period as his apprenticeship, and in Part 4, ROTters will begin to see where that period of learning and experimenting led him.

[The next installment of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will be published on Tuesday, 25 April.  I’ll be covering the foundation of The Shaliko Company, the East Village troupe Shapiro directed for 20 years (over three incarnations) until his retirement from New York theater and resettlement in New Mexico.  

[This is arguably the most creative period of his artistic life, separating everything else into “Before Shaliko” and “After Shaliko.”  I invite all readers to come back to Rick On Theater for Part 4 of the bio post to see where this step leads the still-developing theater artist.]

 

New York Free Theater

[Thirty-two years ago this month, a little band of pacifist theater artists in their early 20’s launched a street theater intended to combat racism and racist attitudes among the diverse population of New York City. It was a direct response to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., murdered 32 years ago today. The New York Free Theater only operated for a few years and toward the end, it expanded its mandate to accommodate other social ills, but its origins in April 1968 was single-minded. I’ve written several times about Leonardo Shapiro, who was one of the leaders of NYFT, and here is another episode from Leo’s early activism, a period that continued to influence and inform his life and art for the remainder of his life.]

In the spring of 1968, a circle of NYU schoolmates including Leonardo Shapiro, Stephen Wangh, Larry Pine, and Margaret Rachlin Pine (plus former Brandeis University sociology major Chris Rohmann) co-founded the New York Free Theater, “a street and community theater of social and political involvement” which operated under the aegis of NYU’s School of the Arts. Following on the heels of Brother, You’re Next, an anti-Vietnam-war street musical which the NYU friends and Rohmann composed and staged on the streets of New York City, the Free Theater evolved (see ROT, 26 January 2010). (Though the Free Theater did not actually produce Brother, the performances of that play did continue after the founding of the troupe and the Brother company formed the core of NYFT.)

Chris Rohmann, the composer for Brother, recalled that the impetus for the founding of the troupe had been the assassination on 4 April 1968 of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the founders proposed the Free Theater that month, beginning street performances on Manhattan’s upper west side at 72nd Street and Broadway (its “Broadway opening”) on 15 July. Rohmann reported that the African-American artists in their circle began saying things like, “That’s it. We have to do black theater for black people,” and the white artists responded, “Yes, and we need to do theater about racism for white people.” One leader of the troupe said, “Our performances are directed toward white people,” and early proposals for the troupe cited The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly called the “Kerner Report”) which held, “White racism is responsible for the explosive mixture” that broke out into the race riots of summer 1967. “We are trying to engage and involve our audience, especially whites.” No less a journal than the Christian Science Monitor reported that “the New York Free Theater invades  the suburbs or mid-Manhattan streets and presents plays aimed at uncovering white racism and provoking discussion between actors and audience.”

The Free Theater eventually launched community workshops “intended to aid participants in directing neighborhood programs relating to racism, narcotics and violence” but in 1968 and 1969, the company devoted itself to street performances. (The group lasted until about 1971, but its final months were only haphazardly productive due mostly to financial problems.) In New York Times listings of free events during the summer of 1969, the theater described itself as “street actors in ‘involvement’ theater and satire,” mounting performances in neighborhoods all over the city, on street corners, in parks, and on college campuses in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The Free Theater performed on its own much of the time, under the official sponsorship of the city, but it also participated in organized programs such as the Mayor John Lindsay’s 1968 summer venture, Broadway in the Streets.

Though NYFT announced the broad goal of “democratizing the arts” so as to “help all of us develop our creative capacities,” a promotional brochure explained that the company’s mission was to help halt the racial, ethnic, and social fragmentation of New York society. In a testimonial in the pamphlet, Mayor Lindsay acknowledged the troupe’s efforts in the “all-important work” of “rebuild[ing] the sense of community and common cause” the city had lost, calling its method “unique, inventive, and unusually effective.” The brochure affirmed that NYFT was

an integrated ensemble of actors dramatizing social themes and using techniques of audience involvement which keep the spectators from dissociating themselves from the action and issues of the play. We also guide the audience toward alternatives and avenues of action, encouraging people into community-oriented projects.

“Our technique is one of improvisation and audience involvement,” declared a company member, “encouraging people to take steps toward unified community action. . . . . White people and black people and Puerto Rican people out there, . . . they’re directing their hostility toward each other instead of working together--if that’s still possible in a society like ours.” Rohmann, who described his function as “songwriter and one-man band,” looked back on the company’s origins and observed, “We invented a theater that involved people in current issues by combining the immediacy of guerrilla theater with audience participation.” Monsignor Robert J. Fox of the New York archdiocese attested that the young actors “present thought-provoking drama about society today, drawing crowds of people into intense involvement with . . . the issues . . . such as poverty, peace, and racism” and New York Shakespeare Festival founder Joseph Papp wrote, “The spectators become participants in the dramatic action, and develop a heightened understanding of the need to join together on positive social action.” An article on New York City radical performance groups observed that NYFT “stages dialogues and confrontations at meetings where they have not been invited.” “Our main goal,” explained Rohmann, “is to play for people who don’t agree with our themes.”

(On at least one occasion, the tables were turned on the New York Free Theater and they found themselves on the receiving end of an unplanned confrontation. NYFT had been slated to appear at Fillmore East, the East Village rock music venue, for an overnight benefit on 22-23 October 1968 for the legal defense fund for Columbia University students who had been arrested during the student strike there the previous spring. The benefit had been organized by Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre, with Shapiro’s group and Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater among those scheduled to perform. After an audience-participation piece by the Living Theater--the first scene of Paradise Now--a group from Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an East Village radical anarchist hippie group, seized the stage and demanded the free use of the theater one night a week for the community, threatening to burn the theater if Bill Graham, the Fillmore’s owner, did not agree. After lengthy negotiations mediated by Beck, Graham conceded to the group’s demands--though he never actually complied with the agreement.)

At a rally on 10 April 1969 at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, an “open hearing” in support of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), an NYFT spokesman asserted other goals for the troupe, presenting a decidedly more radical and activist profile. (Before settling on the name New York Free Theater, and before that briefly the Free Theater of New York, the troupe dubbed itself a “theater of action.”) It “hop[ed] to decentralize, anarchize and democratize the arts,” in order to “destroy repressive arts institutions,” the speaker said, denouncing especially what he called “bureaucratized arts institutions.” “The Free Theater brings radical arts festivals into forgotten, oppressed communities,” declared the speaker. To change “basic social institutions and processes,” the NYFT representative demanded “radical social transformation.”

The company asserted that they researched the communities where they performed and suited their texts to the concerns of each audience. In Flatbush, for instance, the material would reflect the conditions in Brooklyn; if the audience was largely teenaged, “we try to talk their language,” said a troupe leader. Though Free Theater promotional material said the actors “work closely with local groups” in business, politics, and civic affairs to get their advice on community problems, potential audience proclivities, performance locations, and so on, so that they “inspire” neighborhood organizations to take action for “community change,” a journalist who had been invited to attend an NYFT event in August 1969 depicted them in conflicting terms: conscientious and sincere in their beliefs but out of their element in some of the neighborhoods in which they operated. Made up of largely middle-class youths, the Free Theater seemed to confront conservative whites in working-class neighborhoods who reacted with hostility and aggression. Responding as if their hometown had been invaded by hippies, they scolded the actors: “Why don’t you do this where you live?” During a performance in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which included dancing to a rendition of The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” singing a song called “Grass,” presenting a mock television commercial for “downers,” and performing a sketch about army training, one spectator yelled, “We’re gonna get some pipes and crack you people’s heads!” the article reported, accompanied by choruses of “Take a bath” and “Get a job” from others on the street.

The troupe made a point to travel to neighborhoods that had never seen street theater, and it sometimes seemed as though the material the Free Theater offered was outside the grasp of the audience: after the drug ad parody, one spectator muttered, “Disgusting,” as others looked perturbed, apparently believing the cast was really stoned. The army training skit fell afoul of a pair of Vietnam veterans, one of whom asked the crowd, “Are we going to stand for them using the flag for this?” The former Green Beret having commandeered the microphone, the NYFT sound technician turned it off, ending the performance. The actors asked the audience to vote on whether the show should continue. Almost no one did.

At Greenwich Village performances, by contrast, competing with traffic, noise, and crowded sidewalks, the troupe attracted curious and appreciative passersby, many of whom rushed across the street or paused their shopping to watch; some even joined in the singing or took up a dance beat. The performers invariably received what Rohmann called “Manhattan applause.” In Park Slope, where the Free Theater had its acrimonious confrontation with the residents, the shopkeepers wondered why the actors had to set up in front of their stores; in the Village, the sidewalk vendors moved closer to the performers to capitalize on the crowd they knew was about to form.

In black and Puerto Rican districts, the troupe was tolerated with bemusement. As Florynce Kennedy, an African-American civil- and women’s-rights activist-lawyer whom NYFT had invited to address them, admonished the troupe, “As long as you haven’t confronted your own oppressors, you have no business going into other people’s neighborhoods and telling them they’re oppressed.” Kennedy was referring to the support that the Free Theater received through NYU and the city. Troupe members paid themselves salaries of $90, and no less a counterculture figure than radical activist Abbie Hoffman scolded them when he learned they did not pass the hat for their funds. “Liberals,” he sneered, and added, “I really ought to send them a bill.”

NYFT was better appreciated, or at least drew less opprobrium, in the heart of middle-class New York, such as East 47th Street in Manhattan. In another testimonial in the promotional brochure, Carl Rachlin, legal director for the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (and father of NYFT founding member Margaret Rachlin Pine), confirmed that the Free Theater devoted its efforts “to bring[ing] the white middle class to a realistic confrontation of these problems [of racism and violence] and to involve the white middle class in the resolution of them.”

To be fair, many participants--and the officials of the supporting organizations--found the NYFT both effective and beneficial. “In the tradition of Shakespeare, another great street-player, the Free Theater examines the folly and tragedy of modern urban living, offering as an alternative to our plight a celebration of life and love,” wrote one neighborhood newspaper. “The Free Theater talks about what is relevant to all age groups.” The writer from the Village Voice who reviewed one of NYFT’s street performances concluded, “After most indoor productions my impulse is to join the rush for transportation. After street theatre I want to linger and continue the dialogue.” And the national magazine Life pronounced its verdict:

There are skeptics, of course, who call Mayor Lindsay’s project a sugary placebo that cannot cure any basic social ills. Nonsense. Lindsay’s pills are sweet, but effective, too. They help get at sources of social ills by offering concern, affection and a high value on individual worth. What’s more this new breed of theater is pushing culture out of the elaborate centers and museums into the places where people struggle and grow. And the ultimate reward will not be what culture can do for the people, but what they can do for culture.

A street performance on 22 July 1968 which dealt with “the disastrous state of civil rights” in the United States demonstrated NYFT’s aim “to improve intergroup relations throughout the metropolitan area.” Before an audience of about 300 at the Avenue of the Americas and 50th Street on that early Monday afternoon, a cast of ten NYFT members gave a performance of songs and playlets. While all of the plays were original, the songs, intended to attract a crowd, ranged from rock-and-roll standards (in one appearance, they opened with the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”) to original compositions (at a Queens performance, the cast sang “Summertime in New York”). At a late July performance, the cast sang “Summertime” to illustrate the hardships of New York’s poor in the summer heat. The Free Theater’s repertoire also included another original song called “Riot”--almost certainly a response to the race riots that wracked the country in the middle and late 1960s--the lyrics of which contained the repeated line “Are you afraid” and ended with the verse:

Please--talk to me.
We cannot be safe for long.
Can I be your hand to save our life?
Or am I the gun that kills you?

Rohmann recalled that people began to assemble on the sidewalk as soon as the group started setting up. A performance habitually began with cast members installing the sound equipment and then practicing their juggling and tuning the guitar as other actors put up the multi-colored NYFT banner. In the Rockefeller Center neighborhood on a summer Monday that first year, the performers played drums, tambourines, a trumpet, and a guitar and distributed castanets and sticks among the audience so that the mostly young executives and secretaries could keep the beat. In one scenario, two men, one white and one black, scuffled; suddenly the two men drew guns; the guns went off. At a Queens performance on a different Monday, 19 August 1968, at Main Street and Northern Boulevard in Flushing, some passersby started to call for police until they realized they were witnessing a performance--one which Mayor Lindsay, leaning against a lamppost, watched after arriving at a nearby airport by helicopter. At the end of the 15-minute Manhattan performance, the company polled the spectators, about 75 per cent white, to engage them in the effort to reshape the racial outlook of Caucasians and to motivate them to act against racism; eight of the spectators voted for the white man to die, two called for the black man’s death, everyone else abstained. In Queens, the entire audience of 50 or 60, including the mayor, agreed that neither man should die. When the cast went into the Manhattan audience for small-group discussions, many spectators objected that the choices had been too limited.

“People do get shook up from watching our performance,” a company leader reported of a Brooklyn appearance. Rohmann observed that in Manhattan, especially Greenwich Village, the audiences generally agreed with the points the Free Theater made and they were applauded; when they played Brooklyn, say, they got “less applause” but “Brooklyn is where the cast learns a lot more about the people they live with.”. “They got so shook up in Cypress Hills two weeks ago that people pelted us and our cars with eggs,” noted a Free Theater leader, speaking of a Brooklyn neighborhood. Rohmann contrasted two other performances: one at which employees of a large national company “sacrificed their lunch hour to see our show” and the other at which a spectator tossed a tomato at the actors. As Lindsay saw it, NYFT’s work made people pay attention: “It seems to get people involved, even if they don’t want to become involved.”

In other sketches, a young black woman was auctioned off to an African-American man in the audience for $1 million and the group sang a song which ridiculed white liberals in lyrics like this:

Love thy nigger as thyself.
Keep thy gun upon thy shelf.
Speed thy money all for welfare.
Give the black man all of thy pity.
And get thy children out of the city.

In a fourth scene, a young white woman told a black youth that African Americans are treated the same as whites: “You can go to war like anyone else,” said the woman. “The enemy doesn’t discriminate.”

“What about integration, housing and employment?” the man asked her.

“You can’t shove these things down the white man’s throat,” she responded.

By 1969, the Free Theater had begun to look at other social ills than racism, including economic ones such as what they called “credit buying.” In an hour-long playlet called I’ve Been Screwed, White by Rohmann and Wangh, the group presented a woman who was compelled to buy. After opening with several rock songs to gather the audience in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the cast shifted to the theme song, “Buy American,” and then the interracial crowd watched a woman from the ghetto try to purchase her way into mainstream American society on the installment plan. She bought a car she did not want, then went into debt to pay for it. After taking out loan after loan, she finally refused to get that last loan-to-pay-all-loans, whereupon she was declared un-American.

By 1970, the company members were recruited from area high schools students and the focus had shifted to their concerns: the generation gap, parental pressures, educational pabulum, and, still, Vietnam. Rohmann described an August 1970 performance on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn of one of the playlets focusing on the issues of teenagers:

It features 18-year-old Jacqueline Dupree as a well-meaning kid who keeps getting trapped between what she wants and what she’s told to be by parents, teachers, friends, employers. A group of self-styled gurus leads her from one misadventure to another: ‘We’re the Helpful Happies / And we’re here to help to make you happy, / Happy, happy, happy all the time!’ . . . . Jackie is surrounded by her ‘supporters’ who are chanting ‘You can make it! You can make it! Climb! Climb! Climb!’ Trying to get away, she follows their instructions by scaling a step-ladder. As she reaches the top the crowd’s hysterical chant changes to ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’ Looking around wildly from her 12-foot perch, she screams and throws herself headlong to the ground. The audience gasps audibly, then applauds as the other actors catch her six inches from the sidewalk.

The troupe usually did two performances like these a day, five days a week. The plays were based on group improvisations around social issues in the daily news reports and shaped with the guidance of a director and a playwright. The company altered the scenes a bit as they moved from one neighborhood street corner to another and shifted their roles from scene to scene, sometimes espousing the position of the white liberal; other times, the black militant’s outlook; and in still other instances, the white racist point of view. “We aim . . . to irritate the bigot, to encourage the egalitarian and to dramatize to well-intentioned people who have done nothing while riots brew,” said one NYFT leader.

As the company itself described it: “By involving our audience in mutual experiences with a highly mobile, highly fluid, highly entertaining form of theater, we revive the original communal functions of the Greek and Medieval drama.” The NYFT casts set out to create “a highly intimate actor-audience relationship” that “actively involved them in the dramatic event and challenged them to respond” to the issue under exploration. Other aims of the company were its objective to “dissolve the boundaries between art and life” and its call for “a non-competitive coalition” to attain their ends. Steven Wangh, the Free Theater’s first director, also declared that the company was conceived as a way “for us--as artists in society--to become involved in the problems or the day.”

[Leo Shapiro led The Shaliko Company out of New York’s East Village from 1972 until he retired to New Mexico in 1992. He died there in 1997 just after he turned 51. In the brief time that I knew him, Leo was one of the most intriguing artists in any discipline whom I’d ever met. My contact with Leo in that short period still has repercussions in my life.]