The Bread and Puppet Theater

 

[Bob Morris’s article on Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater ran in the New York Times’ “Arts and Leisure” section on 20 August 2023; it was reported from Glover, Vermont, Bread and Puppet’s longtime home base.

[Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Lüben, Silesia, which was then part of Germany (in 1945, it was returned to Poland).  In 1945, just before the end of World War II, his family fled to Germany and they eventually settled in West Berlin in the early ’50s and Peter finished his education there. 

[He worked in sculpture, graphics, and dance in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and, moving to Munich, he founded a dance company.  He met a young Russian-born American woman who was studying in Munich, and in 1959, they were married.

[In 1961, he moved to the United States with his wife, Elka, and together they founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City on the Lower East Side in 1963.  In 1970, the Schumanns moved to a farm in Glover, Vermont, and reestablished Bread and Puppet there, where it’s been based for 53 years.  (Elka Schumann died in 2021; her obituary is posted below, following “He’s Still Kneading Art.”] 

“HE’S STILL KNEADING ART, AND SOURDOUGH RYE”
by Bob Morris 

But Peter Schumann’s is 89. What happens to Bread and Puppet Theater when he’s gone?

Under an unforgiving sun during a heat wave in July, Peter Schumann, the 89-year-old artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater, rang a hand bell on a rolling hillside in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before him a post topped with a giant grasping papier-mâché hand towered high like a maypole. Two dozen performers encircled it.

“Walk slower, get closer to each other,” shouted Schumann, a tawny bearded man. More giant hands on poles rose up, seemingly reaching to the clouds in prayer. Then the group sang a dirge-like song as birds called from a nearby pine forest that is home to handmade memorial huts for friends and family. In two days, this surreal ritual was to be recreated in the debut of “The Heart of the Matter Circus and Pageant,” part of the 60-year-old company’s season of Sunday shows.

In July and August, the theater’s events run on weekends and are either free or modestly priced: indoor avant-garde performances, an outdoor circus featuring playful political sketches with towering effigy-like figures and a rowdy band, and side shows created by company members on compact stages are among the offerings.

Schumann, a German immigrant who has retained his accent, came to New York City in the 1960s and found a potent way to respond in the streets to the war in Vietnam and social injustice: towering papier-mâché and cardboard figures. Influenced by John Cage and Merce Cunningham and exposed to the happenings of Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, he conceives his experimental collaborative pieces from a cauldron of ideas about the joys and ills of a conflicted capitalist world. Often they are drawn from the news, sometimes from legends. Some are reviewed well, others not. Schumann, uninterested in praise or media attention, keeps making them.

In addition to directing, he sculpts, paints (on discarded bedsheets, walls and cardboard), and creates posters, calendars and printed chapbooks. He also uses an outdoor oven to bake coarse sourdough rye bread to feed audiences that can grow to a thousand or more in August.

“We bring the starter for the dough everywhere we perform,” Schumann said on that pre-opening Friday last month while baking for about 50 summer company members. He knows that like his work, his bread can be challenging to chew, but hopefully nourishing and worth the trouble.

Lately, Bread and Puppet Theater, which performs all over the world, has been growing. Its domestic touring schedule — to colleges, theaters, city plazas and small towns via a school bus covered with Schumann’s celebratory images of everyday life (coffee cups, flowers, the occasional “Ah!”) — included 66 stops last fall with a company of 30, twice the size of previous years. Print sales are up, too. Renewed interest in live performance and the current political climate may explain it. But appreciation for the company’s sustainable, handmade tactility and poetic anti-authoritarianism is nothing new.

Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” cited its “beauty, magic and power” in a blurb for “Rehearsing With Gods,” a 2004 book about the company. Grace Paley marched with the group starting in the 1960s, and wrote a poem inspired by its policy of speaking up and speaking out. Julie Taymor, who used natural materials, papier-mâché and puppets in the stage adaptation of “The Lion King,” referenced some of Schumann’s stock puppet figures in her 2007 Beatles movie, “Across the Universe.” Kiki Smith, the sculptor, in an interview on the Smithsonian’s archive website, talked about the company’s “epic and biblical qualities” and of seeing its performances often in her youth.

Guided by Schumann’s uncompromising views about greed, racism and militarism, the collective has questioned the World Bank, the treatment of Indigenous people and, to some in-house and public consternation, the providing of arms to Ukraine instead of ways to negotiate.

“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland. “There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”

The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021 [see her obituary below], on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power. (One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)

But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?

“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.

“This company has always been an iffy little enterprise that depends way too much on me,” his father said of Bread and Puppet, which has a million-dollar annual budget raised through touring, print sales, tickets and donations, but no direct corporate or government funding. “Is it sustainable when I’m gone and will people recognize it as important?”

Those questions remain unanswered as Schumann’s incessant creation of new work keeps the focus on the present.

Inside a barn last month, a couple of hours after the rehearsal for the “Heart of the Matter” pageant, several dozen performers from around the world — paid puppeteers, interns, community volunteers — presented their proposed circus acts. Schumann typically reviews and critiques the sketches.

Most of the acts had a whimsical tone. A man imitating a bee (collapsing bee colonies the inspiration) did a frenetic waggle around a cardboard city that transformed itself into a tangle of dancing urbanites. An orca ambushed yachting billionaire puppets. When somber-looking tree figures appeared with a narrator reading facts about boreal forests versus the more flammable monoculture ones burning in nearby Canada, Schumann became agitated.

“It’s too cliché, something everyone already knows,” he shouted. “You have to stop using so many words and solve things puppetry-wise.” Then he jumped to his feet and started moving people and puppets around. He had puppeteers throw the trees and then dance with them, causing some confusion.

“It’s what you do, not what you say,” he said. “It’s puppetry, not preaching.”

He told them he would return in a half-hour to see a revision. Then, as dinnertime approached, he excused himself to help the kitchen staff make potato pancakes — a recipe from his war-torn childhood.

With admirable control, the puppeteers discussed how to rework their savaged piece, each giving the others time to suggest solutions. It was a utopian vision of collaboration, agile and practical — and typical of how the company functions.

“Peter has a strong directional voice,” said Ziggy Bird, 26, a company member who took notice of Schumann’s work in a theater history class at Temple University. “It’s never personal and some of the most beautiful moments come from frustration, which can be a kick in the pants.”

“Schools of art are teaching solo enterprises, but what people do here is the opposite — they collaborate,” Schumann said while smoking a cigar, drinking a can of beer and stirring a vat of potato pancake batter to be fried on an outdoor stovetop. This collaborative process has birthed companies far beyond Vermont, including Papermoon Puppet Theater in Indonesia, Y No Había Luz in Puerto Rico and Great Small Works in New York City.

“It’s a way of making art and living with a strong level of engagement and concern,” said Clare Dolan, a puppeteer and a Bread and Puppet Theater board member who assists Schumann. She was preparing a circus act about the sending of cluster bombs to Ukraine. “There are incredible ripples that come from Peter that show up in theaters, parades and art-making around the world.”

John Bell, the board’s president and a professor who runs the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, has been with the company since 1973, around the time it relocated to Vermont from New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, first to Goddard College and then to the land in Glover.

“In a way Bread and Puppet is an art project of Peter’s and we are only here to help him realize it,” he said. “So we don’t know what will happen once he’s gone, especially because he believes in responding to the present.” While Schumann is “dealing with being an older person these days,” Bell added, the moment he starts working, his pace accelerates.

That seems an understatement.

At the dress rehearsal on Saturday for the circus (canceled the next day because of a rainstorm that flooded Vermont) Schumann aggressively finessed the burning forest act and others. Later he performed in an indoor show billed as a mass, “Idiots of the World Unite Against the Idiot System”; it was a good-natured critique of everything from “the empire’s false sense of freedom” to a highway system that kills wild animals. He fiddled a hybrid violin and trumpet while making an abstract speech and then led the cast of 30 in an exasperated “Aaaagh.”

After that a quartet performed a Beethoven fugue.

Done listening, he drove his Subaru wagon up a dirt road to a studio to finish one of his “Heart of the Matter” paintings.

“He’s always had a manic creative energy and right now he’s been working with wild abandon, trying to squeeze it all in,” Max Schumann observed. “When our mother passed away, his grief was intense, but the work helped keep him alive.”

In fact, when Elka Schumann died, the circus and pageant carried on the same weekend.

Now Schumann lives without the life partner who helped make many things work at Bread and Puppet. He thinks about her often and visits the memorial he made to her in his pine forest — a sculptural relief of a couple embraced. At night he sometimes sits on his porch listening to the parties down on his farm, pleased about what he and his wife have inspired and sustained. Sometimes he joins in, dancing with abandon.

“Everyone’s busy planning my funeral, and I’ve already had a stroke and a second is probably on the way,” he said as he painted with a steady hand. “But I work and smoke cigars and drink beer anyway because I have no inclination to be healthy, only to enjoy what I do.”

He put the last paint stroke on his recycled bedsheet and stepped away.

“OK, this series is finished,” he said. “Now I can go on to what’s next.”

[Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and is the author of Assisted Loving (Harper, 2008) and Crispin the Terrible (Callaway Editions, 2000).  He’s written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Southampton Review, Town and Country, and other publications, and has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.  He also collaborated with actress Diahann Carroll on her award-winning memoir, Diahann Carroll in Conversation with Bob Morris (Audible Audiobook; Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2009).

[I’ve written a great deal about experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) on this blog.  Shapiro came to New York City often as a young teenager, hitchhiking from his boarding school in Massachusetts in the early 1960s.  The young theater novice encountered Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater at that time, and they became a significant influence on the nascent theater artist.]

*  *  *  *
“ELKA SCHUMANN, 85, ANTICAPITALIST MATRIARCH
OF THE BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER”
by Annabelle Williams 

[Elka Leigh Schumann, Peter’s wife of 62 years and the co-founder of Bread and Puppet, died at 85 on 1 August 2021.  Her New York Times obituary ran in section B (“Business”/”Sports”) on 12 August 2021 (updated online 3 September 2021).]

She and her husband ran a Vermont-based troupe that has taken on social and political issues in productions featuring enormous puppets.

Elka Schumann, who with her husband, Peter, ran the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, known for its countercultural messaging through avant-garde puppeteering, died on Aug. 1 in a hospital in Newport, Vt. She was 85.

The cause was a stroke, her son Max Schumann said.

As its name suggests, the Bread and Puppet Theater is dedicated to two types of art: baking and puppetry. Fresh sourdough bread, milled and baked by Mr. Schumann, was distributed to troupe members and the audience while monstrous papier-mâché puppets, propelled by actors inside them, told stories that took on social and political causes like housing inequality and antiwar and anti-draft activism.

Among the recurring characters was the troupe’s first antagonist, Uncle Fatso, whose roles included a slumlord and allegorical representations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. The troupe’s productions included renditions of plays by the leftist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and shows based on the diaries of the anarchist Emma Goldman.

The critic Holland Cotter of The New York Times described a visit to Bread and Puppet Theater in 2007 as surreal, “an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle experience.”

The Schumanns ran their operation out of a farm in Glover, Vt., in the northeast part of the state, and toured the country in a sky-blue school bus with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun painted on it. The company made a point of putting on shows in underserved communities and involving children from there in making costumes and sometimes performing.

But the troupe was best known for its annual festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, a puppet-dense two-day Woodstock-like affair with a pageant, a parade and politically bent skits about climate change, global consumerism and nuclear annihilation. For many years the event, “a countercultural spectacle,” drew crowds of nearly 40,000 and was the troupe’s main source of funding, John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, wrote in a paper.

The Resurrection Circus started in 1970 but abruptly ended in 1998 after a fight broke out on the grounds resulting in a man’s death.

Ms. Schumann was an avowed anticapitalist, and the farm in Glover, complete with livestock and a maple-sugaring operation, became her own quasi-society operating on socialist principles. As the troupe matriarch she kept the books and managed the finances and sometimes performed in shows.

She also managed the Bread and Puppet Press, which distributed pamphlets, broadsheets and posters delivering political and cultural commentary. In a manifesto titled “Why Cheap Art,” which Ms. Schumann printed on posters, her husband wrote: “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you.”

It continued: “Art is like good bread! Art is like green trees! Art is like white clouds in blue sky! Art is cheap! Hurrah!”

Elka Leigh Scott was born on Aug. 29, 1935, one of two girls, in Magnitogorsk, a city in Russia about 1,000 miles east of Moscow. Her mother, Maria Ivanova (Dikareva) Scott, was a teacher. Her father, John Scott, was an American who worked as a journalist in the Soviet Union. Her parents had supported the Russian Revolution.

When Elka was young, as German forces invaded, the family fled the country, taking a train to Japan and an ocean liner to Hawaii before continuing on to San Francisco. They lived for a time in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City and spent four years in Berlin after the war before returning to the United States in 1949, settling in Ridgefield, Conn.

Elka attended Ridgefield High School for three years before transferring to the private Putney School in Vermont, where her grandfather Scott Nearing, a prominent left-wing economist, was a lecturer. She went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, graduating with a degree in art history in 1958.

In a 2016 oral history with the Vermont Historical Society, Ms. Schumann said that her first years at Bryn Mawr were somewhat disappointing: Her classmates spent more time darning socks for their boyfriends than anything else.

In her junior year she studied abroad in Munich, where she met Peter Schumann. They married in 1959 and had five children while living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they started the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963. The heated political climate of the ’60s made the couple’s work more urgent.

Some of the company’s first performances were street parades and protests supporting rent strikes and the labor movement. One protest involved Mr. Schumann parading a puppet of Jesus in Manhattan holding a sign that simply said, “Vietnam.”

The family moved to Plainfield, Vt., in 1970, and lived on a farm there, owned by Goddard College, for four years until Ms. Schumann’s father purchased the Glover farm that became Bread and Puppet’s home, complete with a museum.

In addition to her son Max, Ms. Schumann is survived by her husband; another son, Salih; three daughters, Solvieg, Tamar and Tjasa Maria Schumann; five grandchildren; and her sister, Elena Scott Whiteside.

In 2001, Tamar Schumann and the activist DeeDee Halleck made a documentary film titled “AH! The Hopeful Pageantry of Bread and Puppet.”

Ms. Schumann was buried in a pine grove on the farm.

[Anabelle Willams was an obituaries fellow at the New York Times from June 2021 to June 2022,  She’s currently publishing editor at the Wall Street Journal.]

*  *  *  *
“DRAMATURGY AND THE THEATER OF MASKS AND PUPPETS”
by John Bell 

[This essay by the dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater was originally published in volume I, number 3 (Winter 1988-89) of the LMDA Review, the journal of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas).]

If defining the job of the dramaturg in our present American theater is sometimes difficult because so many people in the theater have little understanding of the need for or function of that occupation, it should be apparent that explaining the function of dramaturgy in theaters of masks and puppets is that much more difficult because those theatrical techniques are in general so little analyzed and thus so little understood.  But there is an important role for dramaturgy in theaters that use masks, puppets, and other performing objects, and I would like to attempt an explanation of that role by exploring the formal necessities of mask and puppet theater, and then specifically focusing on the dramaturgy of one example of this performance style, the Bread and Puppet Theater.

There is an implicit difference of approach between the theater of masks and puppets and the theater of actors, and that difference can be clarified by considering the possible meanings of dramaturgy.  In relation to the theater of actors and dramatic literature, dramaturgy exists as liaison between dramatic text (the primary source) and that text’s transfer to the stage.  But another aspect of dramaturgy is possible, one that includes a more general concern with the art of theatrical representation that in the theater of masks and puppets is based on the movement of those performing objects.  The first rehearsal of a production of dramatic literature is a reading of the script by actors, while the first rehearsal of a mask or puppet production is probably one of movement of particular objects by performers in a particular space.  While a dramaturgy of images and a dramaturgy of language are essential to productions of both theatrical forms, these two dramaturgies appear with opposite emphasis in each.  But an understanding of both is essential, not only in order to work with today’s theaters of objects and images, but to understand where these various stage languages had their precedents.

Text and the Theater of Objects

Although the various theaters of masks and puppets around the world, which we shall categorize (with the possibility of including other theaters) as theaters of performing objects, generally utilize language they do so in ways often essentially different from the manner in which dramatic text tends to be used today on most American stages.  While language in the theater of dramatic literature is based on the playwright’s script, language in the theater of objects by tradition often involves the following features: narration or a narrator as opposed to dialogue or actors in conversation; epic as opposed to Aristotelian form; improvisation as opposed to fidelity to a certain text; poetry in preference to prose; and oral rather than written transmission of text.

As popular theaters often falling under the quasi-scientific purview of folklore and anthropological study, traditional theaters of objects are (rightfully) seen in relation to the storytellers of community history.  That is to say, the content of traditional mask and puppet productions often has to do with the legacy, cultural history, and the origin of the community in which the theater belongs.  Consequently, individual productions of (for example) Javanese theater, Indian puppet and mask theaters or Sicilian marionette theater have to do with episodes in the mythological or idealized history of the Javanese, Indian, or Italian people, much in the same manner that Greek tragedies and comedies (mask theaters) referred to stories of Greek epic history, the Ordo prophetorum [sic] of European medieval theater certified the historical rectitude of Christianity, and Shakespeare’s history plays explained England’s past to the Elizabethans.

[The Ordo Prophetarum, or Procession of the Prophets, was a drama that was part of the 12th-century rituals celebrated during the festival of Christmas Eve.  In this liturgical representation the arrival of the Messiah is narrated by the characters carved in the temple of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, accompanied by the instruments that appear sculpted in the Portico of Glory.]

In the traditional theaters of performing objects an episode of the epic is presented, improvised upon and made to comment on present-day occurrences.  In south Indian Andhra Pradesh shadow theater, for example, a typical performance presents one episode from the Mahabharata [a major Sanskrit epic of ancient India, principally compiled in the 3rd century BCE-4th century CE, revered in Hinduism].  The audience judges the performance according to the skill the performers show in presenting variations or improvisations on the theme of the particular episode.  Comic characters having little to do with the main story are utilized to comment on current events in the community.  The basic language of the performance is the poetry of some orally received version of the Mahabharata memorized with the aid of regular verse and rhyme patterns.

We should compare this to the very different technique through which that same epic was interpreted by Peter Brook in his version of the Mahabharata [1985; Brooklyn, NY: 13 October 1987-3 January 1988] which, Brook’s innovative performance methods (often involving performing objects) aside, inevitably depends on fidelity to Jean-Claude Carriere’s script.  In both versions language is at the center of the work, but in quite different forms according to the different functions each theater performs for the communities in which the works are staged—in one case the story of a community in and for that community, in the other a work of modern art for the specific community of modern culture consumers.

Not all theaters of objects. of course, are constructed on the epic form.  Japanese Noh [a heavily formalized masked theater form] and Bunraku [puppet theater employing doll puppets] theaters depend quite clearly on the exact transmission of a written play script but the way in which they do shows another different function of text in the theater of performing objects, the separation of theatrical elements.  This separation, one of the clearest examples of what Brecht termed verfremdungseffekt, is an essential aspect of the theater of objects in which movement, sound (spoken or sung text and music) and light are all presented separately to the audience, which then performs the active receptive function of combining those elements during the performance.  Thus, in Bunraku theater, one can variously choose to watch the puppets themselves, the operators, or the chanter and samisen player who present a musicalized version of the text.

An emphasis on oral tradition as opposed to written text in some theaters of objects has three aspects relevant to our discussion of dramaturgy.  First, the fact of oral transmission in non-literate cultures obviously negates the power of written text (although certainly not at all the power of the language of the poetry itself, the memory of which is of the utmost importance), and full written texts often first appear, as was the case with Commedia dell’Arte or the French Guignol theater, as the after-the-fact remembrances of the performers or folklorist observations by writers uninvolved with the productions.  Secondly, the element of improvisations circumvents the need for a script as the performers become on-the-spot playwrights (although we do know that improvisations have their own rules and forms).  Third, as we might infer from the preceding elements, there is a corresponding necessity of a dramaturg of images at work in the theater of objects that involves the understanding of mask and puppet languages of movement (various lazzi of the Commedia theater, for example) and are traditionally handed down orally, sometimes along with the texts, from one generation of performers to the next, but which now, especially in modern western theaters, tends to be created anew with new techniques.  It is that modern and postmodern re-discovery of the theaters of masks, puppets, and performing objects, from the avant-garde of the beginning of this [the twentieth] century (Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists in particular) to the recent works of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Squat Theater, Theodora Skipitares, Lee Breuer, and the Bread and Puppet Theater that makes an understanding of the dramaturgy of performing objects necessary.

A Contemporary Dramaturgy of Performing Objects

One of these theaters that bases its work on the dramaturgy of performing objects is Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, now entering its twenty-fifth year of existence [as of 1988; it’s now in its sixtieth year].  I would like to explain how this theater uses dramaturgy of text and dramaturgy of image in its productions, and begin by looking at the process of the initial choices necessary to begin work on any particular production.  In the case of Bread and Puppet, these choices, following the initial selection of theme, involve space and performing objects in that space.  The theater space, whether it is a proscenium stage (from a hand-puppet booth to a full-size theater), a circus ring, a 25-acre outdoor space, or a street site for procession implies certain restrictions for effective theater having to do with scale and design—giant figures might not work inside a small theater, and small two-dimensional figures will not be effective in a large-scale space with a surrounding audience.  More important are questions about the make-up of the ensemble of performing objects—i.e., masks alone, masks with puppets, puppets, puppets alone and the relative size and scale of each.  In the visually-strong theater of objects, color is also of immense importance.  The introduction of red, for example, in a show with a basically black and white color scheme (e.g., Bread and Puppet’s recent Life and Death of a Fireman [1987]) has an immense effect as important to this theater as the recitation of a strong soliloquy is to a Shakespeare play.  Finally, the design of the performing objects will determine their use and range of possible movements in any particular production, a factor the same for a theater like Bread and Puppet as it was for the classic Greek drama, which fact an Italian director discovered when mounting a production of Menander’s fourth century B.C. comedy Samìa [The girl from Samos/La Donna di Samo; dir. Mario Prosperi, 1979, 1981] with masks based on recently discovered [1973] originals.  “Each mask,” the director realized, “wants to be ‘animated’ in its own way . . . [.]  The actor must conform to the authority of a code [of movement for each mask].”  (Mario Prosperi, “The Masks of Lipari,” TDR 26:4 [Winter 1982] T96, p. 35).

The function of text in Bread and Puppet Theater generally falls into one of two categories.  At times, a prewritten text will serve as a structural element in a Bread and Puppet production, oftentimes as a libretto in a music-based piece as in recent theatrical productions of Mozart’s Requiem or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.  On rare occasions, a script is utilized from the beginning, as was the case with a 1981 production of Büchner’s Woyzeck.  But generally texts are selected and utilized as part of the production’s process, and finalized as scripts (if ever) after the show has been constructed.  Text in these productions is often the result of a type of collective dramaturgy the likes of which was attempted in Berlin by the Piscator-Bühne in the late [nineteen-] twenties and used more successfully by the Federal Theatre’s “Living Newspaper” in New York in the late thirties.  An aspect of Bread and Puppet’s two-day-long annual Domestic Resurrection Circus is an intensive period of research by various participants in the event on the Circus’s particular (and usually political) topic: the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution (1987), the Politics of Hunger (1986), Bach and Nicaragua (1985), etc.  In other production situations—workshop/productions, for example—Bread and Puppet employs a similar approach to collective playwriting based on the participants’ experiences.  In the spring of 1987 the texts for The Passion of San José de Masatepe, created and performed at Easter time in the Nicaraguan village of the show’s title, were written as collaborative reflections of the workshop participants (members of the campesino [farmworker] cultural organization MECATE) as a contemporary biblical exegesis based on Liberation Theology.

More often than, or in combination with, specifically written text the Bread and Puppet Theater utilizes “found” text as an element of a production.  Thus for the 1987 Domestic Resurrection Circus sections of the U.S. Constitution were juxtaposed with an earlier American constitution, the Iroquois Nation’s Kaianerokova [sic; Kaianerekowa, the Iroquois Great Law of Peace; thought to date from the late 12th century (ca. 1190)].  For The Story of Ben Linder [1959-1987], a political street show on the life and death of the young American engineer killed by the contras [a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U.S. government] in Nicaragua, a combination of newspaper accounts, Congressional testimony, Linder’s letters, original dialogue and rhymed couplets, and an Appalachian folk song were all employed as textual means to tell Linder’s story as a Dance of Death.  Finally, in addition to texts spoken or sung, by narrators, in dialogue, or in choruses, Bread and Puppet employs the visual effect of written text, as signs identifying characters, or in the case of longer texts, as the physical presence of a comment on a particular scene.

This brief effort has, I hope, served to outline the general nature of dramaturgy (of image and of text) in what night be the most widespread style of live theater in the world—the theater of masks, puppets, and performing objects, and to assert that although texts (and therefore the nature of that theater’s dramaturgy) are employed differently there than in theaters of dramatic literature, dramaturgy itself (and hence someone performing a dramaturgical function) is an essential element of that theater.

[I direct readers to my two-part post “A History of Dramaturgy,” published on Rick On Theater on 31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023.

[John Bell, a puppeteer and theater historian, is the Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and an Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts, both at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, and was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company from 1971 to 1985, where he was, among other positions, the company’s dramaturg.  

[Bell received his doctoral degree in theater from New York City’s Columbia University and is the author of many books and articles about puppet theater, an editor of Puppetry International, a founding member of the Brooklyn-based theater collective Great Small Works, one of the creators of the Honk! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a member of the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band of Somerville and Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

Two Theater Personages of Note: Ralph Lee (1935-2023)

 

[When I read of the death of Ralph Lee, the mask- and puppet-maker who also created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, I wanted to post something in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I’m starting with Ralph Lee and the homage to James de Jongh will be posted on Monday, 12 June.] 

“RALPH LEE, FATHER OF PUPPETS AND A NEW YORK PARADE, IS DEAD AT 87”
by Neil Genzlinger 

[Niel Genzlinger’s obituary of Ralph Lee, designer of costumes, puppets, masks, and stage sets, and the creator of the iconic Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, ran in the New York Times on 18 May 2023.  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater with a history of the Parade from its producing organization’s own website and a review of an exhibit of Lee’s theater artistry at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. which I visited back in 1998.]

In 1974 he decided it would be fun to parade through Greenwich Village with some of his creations on Halloween. A tradition was born.

Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses as well as one enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died on Friday [12 May 2023] at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been declining for several months.

Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival [now the Public Theater], New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies.

His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years. [Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws was released on 20 June 1975.]

Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical.

“There is something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was given over to an exhibition of his work [see Mel Gussow’s review of this show below], “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011.]

Mr. Lee brought all his skills and interests to bear in creating the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, which he first staged in 1974 with production help from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.

“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade was to be “a transient entertainment” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession. [TNC eventually moved to 1st Avenue in the East Village.]

It was not an instant success.

“There were not many people around besides us — maybe bums,” Mr. Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all holding sparklers, kind of looking at each other.”

But the next year the parade grew, and so did the audience, earning Mr. Lee an Obie Award [1975]. Soon it was a flamboyant fixture of the city’s October calendar, so big that in 1985 it had to be moved off the narrow side streets of the Village and onto the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Lee stepped aside from running the show around that time, but it has continued across the decades.

“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he said in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”

Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935, in Middlebury, Vt. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.

He grew up in Middlebury, getting his first few years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat policeman, he said in a 2016 interview for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and he particularly remembered delivering one line, catlike: “I have neeews.”

“The news was that I was going to be in the theater,” he recalled, “because I was really hooked.”

Puppetry was also an early interest.

“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets, and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in an oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”

He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying his hand at theater in New York.

He had small parts in three Broadway shows, starting with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe [founded by Joseph Chaikin]. After that group disbanded in 1973, he made his way back to Vermont, taking a teaching job at Bennington College.

It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole,” which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece which confronts the audience with a variety of levels of reality and illusion.” Its scenes, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.

“I’d never done anything like that before in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time that I had actually seen any of my puppets outdoors, and it seemed like they took on a kind of life outdoors that they just didn’t have inside.”

From there it was a short leap to the Halloween parade, and for decades Mr. Lee continued to stage theater productions outdoors as well as in. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was formed by some Bennington theater graduates (including Ms. Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in all sorts of places over the ensuing decades — Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.

[The Mettawee River Theatre Company, founded in 1975, is based in Salem, New York, a town in Washington County 200 miles north of New York City in eastern New York State on the border with Vermont.  Bennington College is in Bennington, Vermont, 30 miles south-southeast of Salem.]

Those works and others Mr. Lee presented often drew on traditions and mythologies from a diverse range of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a writers’ group that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theater work with the group each time he visited.

[Sna Jtz’ibajom is headquartered in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas. The name means ‘the house of the writer’ in Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the region.]

“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they operate and how they clash with each other, and how things become resolved.”

In February [2023], he and Ms. Compton received a lifetime achievement Obie Award for their work with Mettawee.

Mr. Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Ms. Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Mr. Lee’s puppets were generally carefully made works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But the Lee creature that might have been seen by more people than any, the “S.N.L.” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, cloth and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.

“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many people, it is my claim to fame.”

“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would get used once and shucked.”

In his 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more.

“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.] 

*  *  *  *
“HISTORY OF THE PARADE” 

[Lee founded the now-perennial—and iconic—Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in 1974.  The “modest announcement in The Times” (“GOING OUT Guide” by Howard Thompson, 31 October 1974 on page 50) to which the obituary above refers read as follows:

AWAY THEY GO Starting at 5 P.M., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square. The parade, sponsored by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, produced by the theater and designed by Ralph Lee, will be a transient entertainment with its own musical score, singers, giant puppet figures and floats, apples and candy for children, who are invited to wear costumes and join the procession along the way.

Among the participants will be Tammy Grimes, John Guare, Joel Oppenheimer and Barbara Carson, the Active Trading Company, the Margot Colbert Dancers, the Open Eye Musicians and the Renaissance Street Singers. Procession stops en route to the Washington Square dance are at Abingdon and Sheridan Squares, the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Judson Church.

[A few pages earlier, among a collection of Halloween-themed articles, nary a word was written about the soon-to-be beloved annual event.

[The following history of the parade is from the Village Halloween Parade website (http://halloween-nyc.com/about.php), posted on 27 July 2014; I updated some of the details to 2023.]

Started by Greenwich Village mask maker and puppeteer Ralph Lee in 1974, the Parade began as a walk from house to house in his neighborhood for his children and their friends. After the second year of this local promenade, Theater for the New City [then located in the West Village] stepped in and produced the event on a larger scale as part of their City in the Streets program. That year the Parade went through many more streets in Greenwich Village and attracted larger participation because of the involvement of the Theater. After the third year, the Parade formed itself into a not-for-profit organization, discontinued its association with Theater for the New City and produced the Parade on its own.

Today the Parade is the largest celebration of its kind in the world and has been picked by Festivals International as “The Best Event in the World” for October 31.

After the 8th year [1981], when the crowd had reached the size of 100,000 Celebration Artist and Producer Jeanne Fleming, a long-time participant in the Parade took over the event. She began working closely with the local Community Board, residents, merchants, schools, community centers and the Police to ensure a grass-roots, small “Village” aspect of the event, while at the same time preparing for its future growth. Now, 30 years later [2013], the Parade draws more than 60,000 costumed participants and spectators estimated at 2 million. [Another 1 million watch the Parade on local television in New York City.]

[In 1985, Lee withdrew as producer of the Parade.  “In its early years,” he told the New York Times (“Neighborhood Report: greenwich village: The Parade: Too, too? Or Too Much?” by Andrew Jacobs, 29 October 1995 in “The City” section), “the parade had a wonderful spontaneity between onlookers and marchers, and there was no firm line between the two. But the number of onlookers began to overwhelm the participants, and that's what killed it for me.”

[Jeanne Fleming, Lee’s assistant, took over and the Parade continued.  In 2016, however, the puppeteer asserted in the New York Post (“He's TRICKEd OFF Father of Village Halloween Parade disowns creation” by Raquel Laneri, 30 October 2016): “What had started out as a community event had become a city event. The spectators were standing six or seven deep — it just seemed like they had become total onlookers.”]

Originally drawing only a postage stamp sized article in the New York Times [see above], now the Parade is covered by all media—local, national and worldwide. [WPIX television (channel 11) in New York City has broadcast the Parade live.]

The Parade has won an Obie Award [1975] and been recognized by the Municipal Arts Society [1985] and [inducted into the] City Lore [People’s Hall of Fame in 1993] for making a major contribution to the life and culture of New York City. In 1993 the Parade was awarded a major NEA Grant for Lifetime Achievement and in 1993 and 1997—it’s 20th and 25th Anniversary Years— it was awarded Tourism Grants from both the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in recognition of its economic and cultural contribution to New York City. Additionally, the Parade has been the subject of many books, scholarly dissertations, independent films and documentaries due to its position as an authentic “cultural event.”

In 1994 The Mayor of the City of New York [Rudolf Giuliani] issued a Proclamation honoring the Village Halloween Parade for 20 years of bringing everyone in the City together in a joyful and creative way and being a boon to the economic life of the City. The Proclamation concludes: “New York is the world’s capital of creativity and entertainment. The Village Halloween Parade presents the single greatest opportunity for all New Yorkers to exhibit their creativity in an event that is one-of-a-kind, unique and memorable every year. New Yorkers of all ages love Halloween, and this delightful event enables them to enjoy it every year and join in with their own special contributions. The Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village is a true cultural treasure.” In that same statement, the Mayor declared the week of October 24-31 to “HALLOWEEK in NYC in perpetuity.”

Perhaps our greatest honor came only 7 weeks after the tragic events of 9/11, when Mayor Rudolf Giuliani insisted that the Parade take place stating that it would be a healing event for New York. With the eyes of the world looking at us, we created a giant Phoenix puppet rising out of the ashes.

Hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide watched as the Parade provided tangible evidence that NYC was enduring, safe, surviving, and spirited in the face of great tragedy and hardship.

In 2005 we paid tribute to New Orleans and invited all Katrina evacuees to join us in a Funeral Procession Tribute to the stricken city. Over 8,000 evacuees showed up for the Parade and Benefit. [On 29 August 2005, Katrina’s storm surge breached various flood protection structures in and around the greater New Orleans area, inundating 80% of the city.]

In 2010 the Parade commissioned Haitian Karnaval Artist Didier Civil to make traditional Haitian Carnival figures in a themed element entitled “Memento Mori!” [Latin for ‘remember you must die’] in support of his efforts to rebuild the Art School in Jacmel, Haiti’s center for Carnival. Again, thousands of Haitians participated in the Parade to mourn and remember all those lost in the [12 January 2010] earthquake.

In 2012 Super Storm Sandy [which hit New York City on 29 October] forced an unprecedented cancellation of the Parade, prompting us to call for public support to save the Parade after it suffered serious financial losses.

[Less than four hours after eight people were killed six blocks west of the parade route in the 2017 New York City truck attack, the parade proceeded as scheduled. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo marched in the parade.

[(On 31 October at 3:05 p.m., Sayfullo Saipov swerved a rented pick-up truck into the Hudson River Greenway, a protected bike lane, at Houston Street. He killed eight and injured seven others. Saipov was sentenced on 17 May 2023 to eight consecutive life terms without parole and two concurrent life terms plus 260 years and is currently incarcerated)

[In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was canceled for the second time. The parade organizers cited concerns that social distancing would be impossible with the high crowds that the parade typically saw.]

[Unlike most parades in New York City, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is unique.  It’s semi-organized, unlike, say, the famous Easter Parade, which is really just an open promenade along the stretch of 5th Avenue that runs in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Participants flaunt their spring finery, especially the vaunted Easter bonnets, which are often elaborate and fanciful.

[Second, unlike, say, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, anyone may join the march up 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—as long as she or he wears a costume.  There are a few other rules (no alcohol, for instance, and marchers must follow the Parade’s designated route), but it’s free (both to march and to watch) and there are no other qualifications.

[Third, it’s a nighttime procession—the nation’s only night parade.  After all, it is Halloween!  What self-respecting goblin comes out in the daytime?

[The costumes can be simple and are often homemade, but they can also get quite elaborate—remember, Lee was also a costume and mask designer, so his confreres are drawn to the Parade.  So are the LGBTQ+ community, whose garb can be quite outrageous—and entertaining.  There’s also often a little (or even a lot) of politics on view—mostly of the lampooning variety.

[The usual Parade path goes up 6th Avenue—the place of congregation before the march used to be Washington Square, but the Parade has grown too big to be accommodated in the short distance from the park to the mid-teens, so it’s been extended down to Canal Street—and then turns east onto my street as the procession breaks up, and participants walk back down to the Village via 5th Avenue.  They pass right under my apartment windows as they make the turn from eastward bound to southward.  Of course, the raucous noise accompanies the marchers in their get-ups.] 

*  *  *  *
“FLEETING BEASTS COLLECTED IN A FANTASY HEAVEN”
by Mel Gussow 

[From 4 February to 2 May 1998, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center was the site of Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs, an exhibit of Lee’s multifarious design work.  Mel Gussow’s review of the show ran in the New York Times of 13 March 1998.]

“Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs,” an exhibition that includes whimsical and scary images from theatrical productions created by Mr. Lee.

Fiery dragons and horny-toed demons, a mountainous boulder that turns into a giant, lords of death and destruction and a gigantic spider that for many Halloweens danced merrily on the facade of the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village as the arachnidan version of King Kong – these and other fantastical creatures fill the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This phantasmagoric cavalcade, which runs through May 2, is the invention of Ralph Lee, for more than 35 years a master mask maker in the American theater.

Tomorrow at 12:30 P.M., Mr. Lee will lead a tour of the exhibition, one of a series of tours free and open to the public.

In his creations for theater and dance companies, pageants and parades, Mr. Lee also acts as puppeteer, designer and director, dramatizing folk tales and legends from diverse native cultures. In the past, his work has often been seen fleetingly in shows that offer a limited number of performances at places that range from La Mama (masks in the 1986 revival of “The Emperor and the Architect” by Fernando Arrabal) to the New York City Opera (a dancing rooster for the 1977 production of “Ashmedai”).

Collected under one roof, the mystical and metaphorical beasts seem to raise that roof, ready to fly into some outer space of Mr. Lee’s vivid imagination. Those who visit the Lincoln Center show may feel as if they have entered a world of dreams and nightmares. Standing in the middle of the exhibition, with his sculptured white hair and beard, the 62-year-old mask maker could himself have posed for a portrait of a mythological figure, somewhere between Pan and Neptune.

Although he has created towering totemic creatures like those that march for social progress for the Bread and Puppet Theater, his work is not overtly political. With its emphasis on the folkloric, it is closer to the puppetry of Julie Taymor. In common with Ms. Taymor, Mr. Lee draws inspiration from Indonesian, Japanese and Latin American sources. Most of his work begins with his Mettawee River Company, a traveling troupe whose home base is in Salem in upstate New York. His latest play, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” based on an Iroquois story, will be performed in May at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and in September in the garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Because his work is often supplementary to dance or drama, it can easily be undervalued. In Mr. Lee’s hands, masks become embodiments of character, emotion and motion. “There is something mysterious about masks,” he said, “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” referenced above.]

In demonstration, he stopped at an exhibit of his production of “The Tempest,” which Mettawee presented on tour in 1996, and put Caliban’s mask over his head, swimming his arms and transforming himself into a scaly amphibian emerging from the sea. Then he switched to the face of Stefano and, lolling his head, became a drunken sailor. His production used a cast of seven actors, doubling and tripling in roles, rushing on and off stage to change masks and characters.

Across the room are characters from “The North Wind,” a Yupik Eskimo story in which a Lee puppet played the title role, manipulated in performance by three puppeteers, two of whom billowed the wind’s sky-sweeping train. High over the exhibition is a 30-foot snake, inspired by an 18th-century cartoon depicting the American Colonies as a snake divided into 13 pieces with the slogan “Join or Die.”

As he moved among the displays, Mr. Lee talked about the mystique of mask-making: “When you’re wearing a mask, you have to find the way that mask would move -- the rhythm, the shape and the dynamic behind the movement.” Just as myths inspire him to expand the world of living creatures, “masks allow the performer to explore realms that he couldn’t reach by using his own face.” At the same time, he acknowledges that especially expressive actors like the late Zero Mostel can, in effect, turn their own faces into the equivalent of masks.

Necessarily, some performers are more adept than others at performing behind masks. When Mr. Lee was doing “Popol Vuh,” a Maya creation story, for his Mettawee company, he held auditions in which actors were asked to improvise with a toadlike mask, a “totally gruesome and despicable character.” One man put the mask on and the effect was “incredible – marriage at first mask.” Actors can feel possessed by masks or they can feel robbed of their own personality.

The boundary between masks and puppets is narrow. Generally masks “are inhabited by the performers and puppets are not,” but many of Mr. Lee’s most fanciful puppets are manipulated by shadowy puppeteers in the style of Bunraku or become costumes to be worn by actors. Similarly, masks are related to makeup, especially so with Chinese opera. For Mr. Lee, makeup means “painting a mask on your face.”

Several years ago when Mr. Lee had a smaller exhibition in a gallery at the City University of New York, he was stopped by an admiring student who said, “You have voodoo in you.” He took that statement as an affirmation of the magic in his art.

Ever since his childhood in Middlebury, Vt., Mr. Lee has been involved in theater. On exhibit at Lincoln Center is his first puppet stage, built when he was 14. After majoring in theater at Amherst College, he briefly studied dance and mime while continuing his interest in puppetry. In 1960, he shifted to masks, designing them for productions at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., and the New York Shakespeare Festival. He also worked as an actor and designer with the Open Theater and other experimental companies.

In 1974, in collaboration with Theater for [the] New City, he created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a friendly neighborhood pageant that filled narrow downtown streets and brownstone balconies with a vast theatrical panoply. A dozen years later, he stopped working on the parade as it became more of a citywide tourist attraction than a community celebration. Still, he is known more for the Halloween parade than for any individual production. Many of his colorful figures have been recycled into other roles and have become members of Mr. Lee’s extended family. They return to life at the Lincoln Center exhibition.

His most intensely creative artistic relationship was with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. With his “wonderfully bare-bones approach” to choreography and design, Hawkins was, he said, a primary influence on his work and a constant spur to Mr. Lee to challenge himself. At the Hawkins display, he put on a raccoon mask from the dance “Plains Daybreak,” a facial fringe with a halo of feathers. With a quick shift of his body, he mimed the movement of a dancing raccoon. During the exhibition, Hawkins dances (with masks by Mr. Lee) are shown on video monitors.

Under the supervision of Barbara Stratyner as curator, this is a comprehensive retrospective. But it can offer only a sampling of the mask maker's work, much of which still inhabits his Westbeth studio and home as well as his farmhouse in Salem. In their home, he and his wife (Casey Compton, who is also his collaborator) are surrounded by a menagerie of realized figments of Mr. Lee's imagination. ''They start to take over,'' he said.

[Westbeth is a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets in Greenwich Village.  It was also TNC’s first home, so the theater and Lee were neighbors.  (TNC moved to another nearby venue in the West Village by the time the Halloween Parade started.  Later it moved to the East Village, working in several different spaces before settling into the 1st Avenue location it currently occupies.)]

Hanging on a wall is a lobster the size of an octopus, jettisoned from a production of Sam Shepard's ''Cowboy Mouth,'' and perched atop a bookcase is a squat, bulbous puppet of Hadrian VII. Hidden in crannies and corners are other small and large lurking creatures. Mr. Lee's studio has enough bamboo to feed a giant panda. Bamboo, papier-mâché, clay and wood are his raw materials, along with objects he finds on the street, in hardware stores and in fields and forests.

Most of all, he likes to work with wood. Carving masks and puppets, he acts as a sculptor. Although he knows that by nature his work is ephemeral, he aims for solidity and durability. ''The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,'' he said. ''I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.'' As the Lincoln Center exhibition proves, Mr. Lee's chimerical visions can have a longer life than the theater and dance pieces in which they first appeared.

[Mel Gussow (1933-2005) was a theater and movie reviewer, and author who wrote for the New York Times for 35 years.  He joined the Times in 1969 and over his 3½-decade career wrote more than 4,000 reviews and articles.  In 2008, Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame (see my post on Rick On Theater on 10 February 2020).

[Long associated with Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, the traditional home of experimental writers, Gussow championed the writing of many of the major playwrights of the theater of the post-World War II period, and was among the first to take the young, emerging playwrights seriously. 

[A native of New York City, Gussow grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Middlebury College (where Ralph Lee’s father was dean and the future mask- and puppet-maker grew up), and in 1955, he earned a bachelor’s degree in American literature and a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.]

'Punch!' (Shaliko Company, 1987)

[I’ve written about a number of performances directed by Leonardo Shapiro, founder and artistic director of New York City’s Shaliko Company, since I started Rick On Theater—too many now to enumerate here.  I knew Leo for just about a decade before his death at just over 51—though our relationship was mostly professional.  

[I ended up publishing a profile of Leo and his company in TDR in 1993 (“Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony”), in preparation for which I shadowed him for a couple of months and interviewed him six times (plus two other times before that and one more afterwards).

[In 1987, Leo and Shaliko staged a very adult version of an original Punch-and-Judy puppet play.  It was only the second Shaliko production I saw, coming less than a year after I first met the director.  That happened at the 1986 Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore.  Leo had brought his production of The Yellow House, a play drawn from the letters of artist Vincent van Gogh, and I was covering the festival for Directors Notes, a stage directors’ newsletter, and TDR.  Leo was one of the artists I interviewed for the articles.

[I had loved Yellow House and began following Shaliko’s work.  Punch! was the company’s next show.  I was still impressed with Leo’s directing and the techniques of Shaliko.  I took a year’s teaching job in upstate New York after that, but as soon as I got back to the city in 1990, I contacted Leo.  He was just starting work on what he hoped would be his definitive production of Strangers, which had only been workshopped up to then, and he asked me to be his dramaturg; I said yes, of course. 

[That project aborted because Leo couldn’t find the funding, but I helped him in a minor capacity on his anti-Gulf War protest piece, Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars).  That project, staged at La MaMa in June 1991, featured a number of well-known downtown artists, both writers and performers, as contributors—plus Vanessa Redgrave. 

[Then Richard Schechner, the editor of TDR, who’d been one of my teachers at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies, called me and asked me to write the profile of Leo and Shaliko.  Leo, it seems, had recommended me and since I’d written for Richard and TDR before—most recently that 1986 TON report—Richard agreed. 

[I hung around Leo in the Shaliko office, at his classes for the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program he ran for Hartford, Connecticut’s Trinity College, and at rehearsals for two shows, the third mounting of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son and the première of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (which was retitled Going to Iraq after that production).

[Soon after the TDR article came out, Leo retired from New York theater and moved to New Mexico, where he’d spent 1969-71 doing guerilla theater, in 1993.  He wrote and then collaborated with a young Albuquerque company to produce Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play that meant a great deal to him both personally and artistically. 

[In July 1993, Leo was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer.  The Seagull premièred in Albuquerque in September 1996 and then traveled to Baltimore, where Shaliko first performed 23 years earlier, in November.  Leo couldn’t come east with his young cast; he was too ill, but he kept in contact with them by fax and e-mail.

[Leo Shapiro died on 22 January 1997, two weeks after his 51st birthday, at the home he built with his son, Spartacus, in Vallecito, New Mexico—up in the Sangre de Christo Mountains, sacred to the Taos Pueblo Indians whom he’d come to admire a quarter of a century earlier. 

[A memorial service was held at the La MaMa Annex on 1 April; I was invited to give the précis of Leo’s career.  Judy Dworin, chair of the Dance and Theater Department of Trinity College when Leo ran the Trinity/La MaMa Program (1986-92), established the Leo Shapiro Memorial Fund at the college.]

PUNCH!
The Shaliko Company (New York)
La MaMa E.T.C.
2-31 May 1987 

Political statements were in The Shaliko Company’s stars in 1987.  So were performances in mask.  Concurrent with Mystery History Bouffe Goof (see “Speaking Truth To Power” on Rick On Theater, posted on 17 August 2018), Leonardo Shapiro’s experimental theater company, based in New York City’s East Village, was mounting Punch!, adapted from an anonymous 1827 Punch-and-Judy puppet play. 

(John Payne Collier [1789-1883] published the text of a Punch-and-Judy show from 1827, illustrated by George Cruikshank [1792-1878] and transcribed largely from the performance of an Italian punchman called Giovanni Piccini [1745-1835; his first name was anglicized to George when he came to London in 1779].  It’s the earliest known script of a Punch-and-Judy puppet play in English.)

Created in rehearsal by production director Shapiro (1946-97) in collaboration with choreographer Nina Martin and actors Elena Nicholas (the professional name of Elena Prischepenko), Cristobal Carambo, and Michael Preston, the performance was “a physical theater piece created as an investigation of violence and escapism.”  

In Shapiro’s production, the play opened with ”The Star Spangled Banner” playing before the show (and the violence) starts.  Sometimes, a spectator stood for the anthem.

To demonstrate the theme “deconstruct[ing] the romance of violence, to make murder seem ugly and hard and not at all fun,” the Punch! company passed out realistic-looking toy pistols before the show’s opening.  The spectators accepted the guns “gleefully” (as one of the Edinburgh reviewers characterized it).  Once armed, these grown-ups delighted in shooting indiscriminately at one another. 

Shapiro described this sequence in an interview:

So, Michael [Preston] would change the cowboy-and-Indian play [in the original version] to “Kill the Niggers,” and he would get his whole half of the audience shouting “Kill the nigger” while they were shooting at Punch in the other half.  And one time in Scotland, we had this group of white South Africans that really got into it.  It was very disturbing.  I mean, there were times when we were unleashing forces that were a little beyond what we were able deal with. 

Revealed behind a screen made of current newspaper clippings of stories of violence and mayhem (at Edinburgh, Shapiro used coverage of the Hungerford massacre, which occurred about two weeks prior to the Punch! performances), the set, representing contemporary urban locales, was a human-sized puppet theater designed by Shapiro and painted in primary colors by Goro Fujii, a Japanese artist, installationist, and costume and set designer, and the actors wore brightly colored Commedia-like half-masks.  (Costumes for Punch! were designed by Debra Tennenbaum.)

(The Hungerford massacre was a series of random shootings in Hungerford, Berkshire, in England on 19 August 1987, when Michael Robert Ryan, an unemployed part-time antique dealer and handyman, fatally shot 16 people, including his own mother, and wounding 15 others, before committing suicide.  The shootings remain one of the worst firearms atrocities in UK history.)

The scenario of Shaliko’s adaptation of the Punch-and-Judy script, which ran a half an hour in performance (contrary to a remark by Shapiro quoted below, which was actually made when the production was still in development), was traditional: in a series of short scenes, Punch throws his baby out the window, beats Judy to death, does the same to other characters, assaults a policeman, tricks the executioner into hanging himself, and finally defeats the devil (who turns out to be a nuclear bomb).

The cast was made up of the three actors who switch characters (which include Punch, Judy, Scaramouch, and Polly, among other recognizable figures) randomly from scene to scene.  Lawrence R. Harris of Stages labeled the production “a pint-size theatre of cruelty,” citing “the high-pitched voices, the cartoon like [sic] sets, the loud costumes, the repetitive dialogue, and the exaggerated violence.”

The violence wasn’t cartoon-like or dance-like, but “sickeningly” realistic.  It was, though, accompanied by circus music from a calliope.  (The music was designed by Phil Benson with help from Michael Sansonia and Daniel Schreier, who also created the soundscape.) 

Harris described the wife-beating scenes as leaving Judy “moaning on the floor spitting blood and possibly teeth.”  In The Nation, Thomas M. Disch reported it as “an assault presented at great length and with all the veristic detail that Nina Martin’s fight choreography could bring to bear.”

The scenes were often reenacted, sometimes multiple times.  The one in which Punch beats his wife to death was first performed by Punch as a puppeteer using two dolls—with the identical dialogue as the later version. 

In the puppet shows within the performance, as the puppet-theater picture frame descended, Carambo as Punch picked up the Punch and Judy dolls to perform the episode when he “dropped [the baby] out at window.”  The doll Punch was GI Joe in a sleeveless olive-drab ‘T’ and fatigue pants and Judy was Barbie with Farrah Fawcett tresses and a pink mini.

After each scene was presented, Shapiro had the actors stand staring coldly at the audience from behind their Commedia half-masks as if silently indicting us for some terrible crime—the crime of complicity by our silence and inaction about the violence. 

Finally, Punch broke into a demonic giggle and the play continued with the next scene.

Masks, which the director included on a list of artistic and personal influences he typed up for me in 1992, had been an interest of Shapiro’s from very early—not least, to be sure, because of the Zuni shalakos, the Native American gods and their ceremonial representations (see “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010; I also have a post on “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011). 

Masked performance was part of the theatrical philosophies of many of Shapiro’s influences such as Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Arden (1930-2012), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and, of course, Peter Schumann (b. 1934) and the Bread and Puppet Theater.  Furthermore, one of Shapiro’s earliest training influences, Carlo Mazzone-Clementi (1920-2000), was a mask expert as well as a teacher and director of Commedia dell’Arte. 

Aside from the transformative nature of masks, to which both anthropologists and theater people testify, masks and puppets remove performance from the realm of the ordinary and raise it to the level of myth and ritual.  Masks remind us, theater critic Edwin Wilson asserts, “that we are in a theater, that the act going on before our eyes is not real in a literal sense, but is rather a symbolic or an artistic presentation.”  

Then there are the Brechtian aspects of masks—that they distance the actor from the character and the spectator from the actor—and their inherent magic, a subject that had fascinated Shapiro from his childhood.  (Frequent readers of ROT will recall that Brecht was one of Shapiro’s two principal inspirations; the other was Jerzy Grotowski.) 

Aside from the almost mystical effects masks are said to have on the wearer, a phenomenon to which many maskers such as Nobel laureate Dario Fo (1926-2016) have attested, there’s the very magical fact that masks are dead things, inanimate objects that take on the appearance of life.  Furthermore, as Fo affirmed, masks require actors to tell the truth, one of Shapiro’s most fiercely-followed principles.  Fo, whom Shapiro had consulted for Punch!—and whom he even asked to play the title role—explained:

Because the mask cancels the prime element—the face, with all the expressions we formulate and employ with such ease—used to give expression to any form of mystification.  When the face is removed from the equation, people are compelled to speak in a language free of formulas and of fixed stereotypes—in the language of the hands, of the arms and of the fingers.  No one is accustomed to lying with their body.  We never bother to check the gestures we make while speaking.

All these attributes of masked acting were certainly important to Shapiro, but possibly as important was the fact that from the audience’s standpoint, as philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) writes, “The mask is not so much pictorial as participatory.”  A former professor of religion and culture, Ronald L. Grimes (b. 1943) observes that “audiences may, in fact, be the real animator of masks and maskers.” 

As in puppetry, a closely allied art, we see that the audience must imbue the mask with life in order for there to be a show.  Psychoanalyst Eric Neutzel (b. 1950) maintains, “The audience projects something onto the object,” which, he declares, “doesn’t exist alone.”  “The audience is complicit,” responded master puppeteer Roman Paska (b. 1951), and Sears A. Eldredge (b. 1936), a writer on masks, explains, “The audience’s imaginations must be engaged to complete the transformation” from inanimate object to living character.  In Shapiro’s practice of making theater with the audience, not just for it, requiring the spectators themselves thus to vivify the performance doubtlessly attracted him. 

Other attributes of masks that align with Shapiro’s artistic interests include the fact that masks are works of visual art incorporated into the art of theater, an implication of the director’s efforts to amalgamate many arts into his performances, and the freedom masks allow for actors to engage in “testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/09/acting-testimony-role-vs-character.html) while the masks provide the necessary character expression. 

If masks immediately communicate character information to the audience, as J. L. Styan (1923-2002), an English writer on literature and theater, posits, actors are freer to express their own ideas or comment on the characters’ actions in the way that Shapiro—and Brecht—wanted: to speak to the audience directly “about what matters to them both in that moment” (emphasis original).  This phenomenon functions along the lines of what playwright, actor, teacher, and theater writer Michael Kirby (1931-97) calls “nonmatrixed representation” where the mask “represents something or someone” while the performer does not act or actively depict a character. 

In Punch!, for instance, with the actor’s Commedia half-mask and costume identifying Punch by an iconography familiar to Western audiences for over two centuries, Cristobal Carambo didn’t have to develop the character for the audience.  They already knew what to expect, so the actor could focus on making the statements he and the director wanted to make through the play—that is, play his “role” (see the second part of the above-referenced “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character”)—without losing the duality Shapiro aimed for and which masks provide.

Except for a few interpolations (“Shoot the nigger!”—Carambo is Afro-Cuban—and “You look all right.  Here’s another!”—the latter an alleged quotation of Bernhard Goetz, the so-called Subway Vigilante who shot four black youths he thought were about to attack him on a New York City subway less than three years before Punch! was produced), the text of Punch! was taken verbatim from the pre-Victorian puppet play that delighted children for generations.  

Shaliko’s Punch!, however, was no children’s amusement.  As premièred at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where I saw it, from 2-31 May 1987 (and later presented at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, in August, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Scotland, in September), it was loud and aggressive, assaulting the audience’s senses and, sometimes, their sensibilities (but never their persons). 

According to cast member Michael Preston, who later toured as one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers from 1991 until 2000, the production was “relentless on our bodies”: “There was no let-up,” he said, and recounted that he’d injured his knee and that the repeated sharp gunshots had damaged Carambo’s hearing.  

Co-developer Nina Martin recounted that Shapiro had taken the cast and staff to Madison Square Garden “to witness professional wrestling” as preparation for the work. 

The Nation reviewer observed that “Elena Nichols as Judy is put through more onstage punishment than anyone since the Marine prisoners in The Brig back in 1963.”  Preston and Carambo “are also knocked about, slammed to the floor and put through a wide variety of wringers.”

A telling reaction was that of Marilyn Zalkan, whose introduction to Shaliko’s work had been Punch! months before she became a student in Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and about a year before she became Shaliko’s administrator.  

A music student with no experience in any kind of theater, much less the bold, physical, political work of an avant-garde company like Shaliko, Zalkan at first hated the show.  “It was just really shocking and scary,” she confessed, “and I was afraid that everyone was going to come up and talk to me—you know, the actors; the whole audience-participation thing scared me.” 

Then, after pondering the experience and learning something of the theatrical world out of which Shaliko and Shapiro arose, she revised her opinion:  “Months later, I sort of decided it was the best thing that I had ever seen.  I had never seen anything like it.”

In part, Zalkan was expressing what Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the art philosopher, means when she defines “beauty” as “expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some way.  “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes. 

This interpretation, which may owe something to Heraclitus’ view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.  

Upon seeing Punch!, Zalkan experienced a revelation:

That’s the first time that I really realized what theater’s supposed to do to an audience.  It’s supposed to convey some kind of idea and shock . . . .  I don’t know whether it’s shock value so much, but it’s supposed to really make people aware of something and create some kind of reaction.

Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness.”  One friend of artist Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful” (ellipses original), and Zalkan’s bifurcated response to Punch! indicates that recognition may come sometime after seeing the work, something for which Punch!’s critics may not have allowed.

Punch! was panned by the Village Voice and ignored by the New York Times (and all other New York City dailies), but got 22 “raves” elsewhere in the U.S. and Scotland.  Shapiro openly acknowledged that Punch! was “not likeable” and, describing it as the company’s “nastiest, ugliest” play, understood that some spectators wouldn’t appreciate it.  But, the director insisted, “That is beside the point.”  According to Langer, whom Shapiro read and occasionally quoted, works like Shaliko’s Punch!, among others, draw their strength from those elements which makes them “alive and therefore beautiful.” 

Punch!, for all its violence, obscene language, and confrontational tone, was just as powerful and moving as, say, The Yellow House (1986; see my post on 9 February 2018), a piece about van Gogh and Shaliko’s most aesthetically attractive production.  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” writes Langer in words that might easily have described Punch!, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal.”

Zalkan, who admitted to having actually been scared when she saw this play, put it very succinctly: “I think about Punch!, and Punch! is like real.  Punch! is about what life is about.”

It is noteworthy that McLuhan calls “good taste” “the first refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most obvious resource of the insecure” and notes, “It leaves out direct awareness of forms and situations.”  Richard Kostelanetz (b. 1940) also submits in his 1968 book, The Theatre of Mixed Means, that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful” and supporters of Shaliko contended that most critics and the site reporters from the National Endowment of the Arts did not apprehend this.

By extending the Commedia and puppetry of the original into television situation comedies and popular films, Shaliko’s Punch! exploited the “images of violence [that] become part of our imagination” by making the audiences reflect on the use of violence as escapist entertainment.  One of Shaliko’s recurring themes was the deconstruction of the romanticization of violence—which in popular entertainment is shown to have no real consequences and can even be seen as funny.

Shapiro saw violence—domestic, racial, sexual, class—as a ubiquitous presence in American life, from popular movies and television programs including Batman, shoot-’em-up Westerns, and police shows, where it’s used for escapism and entertainment, to military operations like the U.S. invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and the 1990-91 war against Iraq, where it had political, territorial, and commercial ends.  In an essay he wrote shortly after the Persian Gulf war, he states:

Twenty years ago, we stopped the Vietnam War by mobilizing America’s sensitivities against the stupid and futile waste of life.  In the last two years, we have, ourselves, murdered as many Americans on the streets and in our homes with handguns as were killed in Vietnam.  Our society has become a blind juggernaut (“a pitiful giant”) compulsively acting out oppression and abuse we refuse to acknowledge.  Instead of creating vital cultural forums to deal with our tsouris—the forums that created Euripides, the Kabuki, and Ibsen—we hide our pain under the puerile displays of violence [and] arrested sexuality of Terminator II or Thelma and Louise.

(Tsouris, more commonly spelled tsuris, is Yiddish for ‘troubles,’ ‘suffering,’ or ‘problems.’)

This is close to the sentiment expressed by poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) in “On Virgil” (1822) when he observes that “a Warlike State never can produce Art.  It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make.”  (Blake was on Shapiro’s list of influences.  I discuss Blake’s use of words and images together in his art in the section on him in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014.)

Of Punch!, Shapiro explained: “I was trying to subvert the easy identification with the hero that makes the other characters less real—which is . . . basically a revenge fantasy.” It’s, in part, another vision Shapiro shared with Blake, who saw both war and the execution of criminals as societally-sanctioned forms of murder. 

There’s more than a hint here, too, of Shapiro’s Situationist influence (see “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3 February 2012): the drive to prevent the audience from allowing an active hero, a Rambo or a Batman, or Thelma and Louise—or even a Hamlet or a Nora Helmer for that matter—to do their living for them. 

Furthermore, Shapiro said when he was planning the show, “It’s about . . . the way that we identify with violence and why it is that somebody can beat seven people to death in an hour and everybody thinks it’s a scream.”  This phenomenon’s a result, he thought, of the remoteness of theater, which he saw as the original art form, from film and television, which are “copies.”  The farther the copy gets from the original, the more cartoon-like and outrageous the action is, the less consequential it seems to the spectator. 

Audiences have become inured to violence because it’s become “dehumanized,” as illustrated by Michael Preston’s report that his film-oriented friends, looking for experiences “up on a screen that really didn’t touch them,” were uneasy with Shaliko productions because “[t]hey don’t like the hotness” of the encounter. 

Langer speaks of the “degrees of intensity” of the artwork, which directly corresponds to what both playwright Karen Malpede, who had worked with Shapiro on several projects, and Preston said was so disturbing in Shaliko’s work to some spectators, and we shall see that Shapiro referred to this aspect of the content as “depth of intention.” 

Theater, because it’s a more intimate experience, is more emotionally demanding and intellectually rigorous, but it has gotten out of the reach of most audiences not just financially, but psychologically because of its demands in contrast to the electronic media. 

“[T]his seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle so that audiences are less and less able to deal with any kind of emotional complexity, relational content, in fact with any of the great themes and subjects of art and literature,” Shapiro lamented; “instead [popular entertainment] focuses more and more narrowly on pseudo-paedomorphic revenge fantasies, with infinite and infinitesimal masturbatory variations.”  

In the director’s opinion, this desensitization and alienation is no accident; the makers of films and television programs know that their product is addictive and, just as the manufacturers of cigarettes manipulate the nicotine content, the Hollywood establishment manipulates the disconnect between action and its consequences. 

The effect of this is that spectators are no longer able to see themselves as “among [the] many real characters dealing with real communal problems.”  Unhappily, Shapiro had little hope that new audiences would have “the sophistication or tools to deal with” the manipulation: young people, he feared, “are less armed against it every year.”

But it was not only Rambo images with which Shapiro contended in Punch!.  Among other violent acts, Punch threw his baby out his apartment window, a vivid, grotesque evocation of the sacrifice of children which Shapiro saw as universal in our society and emblematic of much that is wrong with it. 

The director saw that this was a theme he had pursued since the start of Shaliko (1972), but it is, in reality, a theme that harks all the way back to “Song in the Blood,” the Jacques Prévert poem the Appleseed Circus dramatized at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1970, and even to 1967’s Brother, You’re Next, in which the young draftee is encouraged by his father to go off to fight in Vietnam so the father will not “lose my position in the community” (see “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009, and “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010). 

The theme even appeared in the plays in which Shapiro participated while at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he directed workshop productions of Jean Anouilh’s Medea (in which he also appeared as Creon) in November 1964 and The Drapes Come by Charles Dizenzo in May 1965.  (Medea’s murder of her children as punishment for their father, Jason, is well known; the latter play is an absurdist appraisal of the consequences of the alienating relationship of a mother and daughter.) 

With Shaliko, Shapiro evoked this theme in their very first production, Children of the Gods (1973), when Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia in order to get a favorable wind from the gods; and since the director saw that “issues about creativity and repression . . . often are symbolized as the sacrifice of children by parents,” it appeared in Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974) when the Party sacrifices the Young Comrade on the altar of political necessity, and again in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975; see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?” 6 September 2014) when Mrs. Alving sacrifices Oswald to preserve the secrets that eventually destroy her. 

(After his production of Ghosts, Shapiro expressed particular interest in staging Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, a play in which the sacrifice of a child is at the very center.  Shapiro never had the opportunity to direct the play.) 

He evoked the theme, too, in Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1976; see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020), The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar (1983), Mark Roszovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son (1985, 1990, 1992; see “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8 November 2015), and The Yellow House.  Literally, as in Children; psychologically, as in Kafka; or metaphorically, as in The Yellow House, the killing of children had been a common thread in Shaliko’s work and would form the central theme of 1990’s Strangers (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014). 

It also formed a theme in Shapiro’s life, from the alienation he felt from his own father, who left Shapiro’s mother with insufficient income to care for Leo and his older brother, Gary, while living well himself, to his disillusionment with New York Shakespeare Festival (now The Public Theater) founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), a man he regarded as his surrogate father, when the producer fired him in 1977.  (Shapiro’s relationship with Papp is touched on in “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021.)

There are clear echoes of his own background, too, in his admiration for such figures as van Gogh, artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-97), Vsevolod Meyerhold, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), and Tennessee Williams (1911-83), all of whom had difficult and even abusive relationships with their fathers that could be seen as resulting in loss-of-love issues. 

In 1988, largely because of Punch!, Shaliko lost its NEA Theater Program funding, followed by the loss or reduction of its grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and most of its support from corporations, foundations, and private sources. 

As Shapiro put it, “[W]hat the NEA panelists so deeply objected to is that we choose not to make theater as entertaining fiction, or to develop the skills for doing that, but are pursuing this independent line of inquiry.”  He could have been referring directly to Punch! 

As Peter Brook (b. 1925), renowned British stage director, noted, Shapiro’s kind of theater, “where a living confrontation can take place,” generates a kind of “dangerous electricity” that governments, even in societies in which other forms of expression like the press and the cinema are free, instinctively fear.

Shapiro, however, saw the matter of form versus content in simpler terms:

The notion that Shaliko was de-funded for lack of “professionalism” or “quality” can only be sustained by the argument that “quality” is an attribute of packaging—like  the thick glossy paper in an expensive art magazine.  If, however, quality has to do with depth of intention, craft . . ., originality, accuracy, or imagination—in short, if quality has to do with the artistic function of telling the truth and the “qualities” necessary to communicate it, rather than with the intention to sell a product and the “quality” necessary to trick the consumer—then the quality of Shaliko’s work must be recognized.

It’s because he and his company were finding “new and effective formulations” to investigate issues of society, violence, race, and sex in ways that turned out to be “personal and viscerally felt” by his audiences, Shapiro believed, that “the ruling class” became scared and responded with censorship and suppression. 

Though Shapiro believed the rejection was based on “the content and (political) nature of the work,” associates felt it was mostly due to the site reporters’ misunderstanding of the principles of Shaliko work, misinterpreting intentionally rough theater stressing process over product—what Bonnie Marranca (b. 1947), co-founder and editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, describes in her 1977 book, The Theatre of Images, as a “seams-showing quality of a work”—as ill-prepared and unprofessional. 

Richard Kostelanetz further observes that both critics and audiences are more willing to “acknowledge” familiar art than to consider something they don’t understand.  While Shaliko was operating under Langer’s precept of beauty, these critics, its supporters felt, were applying a more superficial criterion. 

Some suggestion that Shapiro and his supporters were at least in part correct may be gleaned from the contrast between the NEA evaluation of Shaliko’s work and the critical reception of Punch!, the show on which the Endowment had partly based its last decision.  The Nation’s Disch, for instance, described the production, clearly labeled a “work in progress” in the program, as “a remarkable spectacle that ranges from chucklesome to breathtaking, and from thought-provoking to off-putting” and predicted that it “has every chance of becoming a classic of the New Vaudeville.”  

On WBAI radio, a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station in New York City, Rick Harris pronounced himself “very impressed” with Shapiro and his company for a “very, very fine piece of work” which he declared “theatrically inventive.”  At the Edinburgh Festival in August 1987, The Scotsman reported that Shaliko and Punch!

connect the events of the old legend with unvarnished, day-to-day truths, but also reveal its deep roots in the subconscious and in popular culture. . . .  This is a harrowing brutal, sometimes gruesome piece, definitely not children’s entertainment, but always performed with awesome skill and always thoughtful and arresting.

After describing the production at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in September as “most skilful [sic]” and the cast as “brilliant, acrobatic and paradoxically charming,” the Glasgow Herald warned, “You won’t—if you ever have done so—watch a Punch and Judy show again with amusement after experiencing this production by La MaMa ETC and the Shaliko Company from New York.” 

Indeed, despite minor cavils about the occasional lag in timing or energy, the reviewers of Punch! both in New York (save the Voice) and in Edinburgh and Glasgow seemed to understand exactly what they were seeing—they all noted that the presentation was still in development—appreciate its point, and remark universally on the professionalism, skill, and inventiveness of Shapiro’s troupe. 

(Robert Massa wrote in the Village Voice’s brief notice:

Only Goro Fujii’s inventive life-size puppet set and the sculptural sound design by Daniel Schreier make the production bearable.  Shapiro has taken the traditional Punch and Judy plot . . . and given it to three live actors who arbitrarily switch roles over and over and reenact these events countless times through over-cute dialogue . . ., in grating nasal voices at a pitch that splits eardrums, leaping off-stage to growl in our faces.

(It likely wouldn’t have made any difference to Massa’s estimation, but I’m bound to point out that the dialogue—the review-writer quoted some lines—was directly from the 1827 text transcribed by Collier and the “nasal” voice was an approximation of the traditional squawking puppet voice, created in part by a device called a swazzle or swatchel which made Punch sound as if he were talking through a kazoo.)

Furthermore, a response to a charge that Shaliko was stuck back in the 1960s can be found in Rick Harris’s anecdote about his step-daughter.  Thinking Punch! was a children’s play, he brought the ten-year-old girl with him.  After Shapiro cautioned him about the violence—the press release had bluntly warned that Punch! was not for children—Harris sent her out.  After the performance, he, his wife, and her daughter went to the subway at Sheridan Square where they encountered “an ugly, violent, bloody scene of confrontation.” 

Harris pointed out the irony of this coincidence—sparing his step-daughter theatrical violence only to witness it live in the station—but it also demonstrates that Shaliko’s Punch!, far from dealing with “left-over sixties” issues, was confronting immediate and actual societal problems which ordinary citizens experience every day. 

Peter Wynn of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record, who found Punch! “dazzlingly performed,” reported: “I found myself very nearly sickened by the violence of the show.”  In the Voice, Massa observed: “Puppets can get away with a level of cruelty live actors shouldn’t attempt,” and felt that the play “was assaulting” the audience.

Several critics on both sides of the Atlantic reported that some spectators fled the theater after early scenes of violence, though Shapiro undoubtedly recognized this action as commensurate with his intent.  He reported, “We lost half of the audience some nights when Punch beat Judy.” 

As one Edinburgh reviewer observed, however, “Those who walked out during the performance were not only rejecting an excellent production, they were turning away from the cruel reality of this world.”

Is it possible that the critics were, ironically, less “monoliterate,” to use Richard Kostelanetz’s term for culturally, artistically, and especially theatrically “illiterate,” than were the site-reporters and evaluators of the National Endowment for the Arts? 

Or, perhaps, the Endowment officials really didn’t like what Shaliko was telling them about American society—or were just afraid to support it in the face of the right-wing onslaught of the culture-warriors Shapiro called “Helms and Co.” 

(“Helms and Co.” was a label Shapiro borrowed from philosophy teacher Paul Mattick, Jr., who used it in his 1990 essay “Arts and the State” in The Nation which Shapiro read and quoted.  

(Shapiro used it to refer to late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms [1921-2008], former California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher [b. 1947], conservative columnist and commentator—and sometime presidential candidate—Patrick J. Buchanan [b. 1938], the American Family Association’s Reverend Donald Wildmon (b. 1938), Reverend Jerry Falwell [1933-2007] of the Liberty Foundation, Reverend Pat Robertson [b. 1930] of the Christian Coalition, and others who were campaigning against governmental arts support. 

(Mattick, at least by implication, also includes in this cabal the critics and writers who supported the efforts to curtail government arts support or on whom the activists drew for authority in their judgments and evaluations: conservative art critic Hilton Kramer [1928-2012], publisher of New Criterion and conservative political commentator Samuel Lipman [1934-94], then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato [b. 1937], former Illinois Congressman Philip M. Crane [1930-2014], columnist William Safire [1929-2009], and others, including organizations like Morality in Media [transformed into the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2015], a watchdog organization; the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank; and the John M. Olin Foundation [dissolved in 2005] which provided funding and sinecures.)

The loss of the NEA Theater Program funding after Punch! hurt Shaliko financially, of course, but it enraged Shapiro morally.  “Isn’t the function of the artist supposed to be to tell the truth?” he pleaded, echoing Congress’s very admonition to the nascent NEA.  “How can you blame him when he does?”

In part because of the funding loss, but for reasons of scheduling and space availability as well, neither The Yellow House nor Mystery History Bouffe Goof, Shaliko pieces that Shapiro felt were still works in progress, was remounted at La MaMa after the production of Punch! had returned from Scotland. 

(I was working with the director on Strangers, which had previously only been staged at the Pennsylvania artists’ residency establishment, the Yellow Springs Institute, as a work in development and in a workshop production at the Washington Square Church in New York City, but the production, planned for La MaMa, was cancelled because the funding couldn’t be raised.)

As a response to Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro, published at least seven articles or interviews—some of them quite vehement—between April 1990 and January 1992 focusing, at least in part, on the NEA and the issue of arts funding and support.

In a letter to Robert Marx (b. 1950), a theater administrator who was serving as director of NEA Theater Program at the time of Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro argued:

[Punch!] is a controversial, densely layered, difficult and hopefully liberating work of theatrical art.  It is exactly the kind of dangerous experimental, labor[-]intensive, non-commercial work that needs and deserves to be subsidized in order to preserve and advance the integrity of theater as an art form in America.

[If I may, I’d like to make one personal comment here. 

[In his review in The Nation, Thomas M. Disch made a final acknowledgment to one of the crew members of the Shaliko production of Punch!.  He wrote that “credit should also be given in a department usually taken for granted: the stage manager Dana Rappaport and his [sic] assistants deal with a profusion of props and cues at a tempo that keeps them hopping as fast as the actors.”

[Dana was a student of mine in middle school, some ten years or so before Punch! when I taught theater at a Brooklyn private school.  I hadn’t seen her or heard from her (Disch got her gender wrong) since that time—until I saw her name in the program the night I saw the show at La MaMa.  I stuck around a few minutes after the performance ended and I reintroduced myself to Dana and said hello. 

[I guess we caught up a little—she was still on the job, of course—but it didn’t lead to anything more.  I didn’t see her again and I have no idea what she went on to.  Such is life!]