A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 2

 

[My biography of Leonardo Shapiro, avant-garde theater director and auteur, continues below with the teenager’s transfer from schools in Miami Beach and Dade County, Florida, in his sophomore year of high school to a private, progressive prep school in Massachusetts, the Windsor Mountain School.

[You’ll hear about the immense influence the school and its people had on the incipient artist, and where it led him both in the short term and in the long term.  Part 2 of the bio will also cover Shapiro’s exposure to the theater of Greenwich Village’s Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, his introduction to Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and the General Strike for Peace, his first stops along the college road that ultimately led him to New York University and his meeting with Jerzy Grotowski, one of his two main theater models (covered in the upcoming Part 3).

[I admonish readers just coming upon this multi-part post to go back to Part 1 (posted on 16 April) first.  I will be identifying people and explaining important ideas as they arise, and later sections of the bio will make more sense if you’ve read the foregoing parts.]

After years of struggling and hopping from one school to another, Shapiro’s parents transferred him in September 1960 to the Windsor Mountain School, a progressive private school in Lenox, Massachusetts, that, in the words of one former student, specialized in educating “kids who were the black sheeps of their family” in an atmosphere free of rules and administrative repression. 

Shapiro’s Windsor Mountain classmate, Jeffrey Horowitz (b. 1946), who’s the founder of New York’s Theater for a New City, observed that the student body included “a number” of “misfits” and that the school encouraged and supported them. 

Here, Shapiro came under the sway of Gertrud Bondy (1889-1977), the director, and her son Heinz (1924-2014), the headmaster.  It was to be a big change for the young man.  (For the story of the Bondys and Windsor Mountain, see “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” 12 October 2011.)

The young rebel, as unsettled from his unstable home life as he was resistant to his previous educational environments, fell “immediately in love with Lenox”—the cultured “Old New England” resort town; the woods, where, he remarked, jazz musician Charlie Mingus used to stay and where the new student took long walks; the old lighthouse tower; the Music Inn, Jacob’s Pillow, and the nearby Tanglewood Music Center; and especially the town’s old library with its “big wing chairs, lots of books, old books, old smells.”

Indeed, after his disheartening experiences under the tutelage of the Miami-Dade public school system and the Admiral Farragut Academy, Shapiro felt free and at home at Windsor Mountain.  To the teen activist, starting at Windsor Mountain “was like entering the United States of America, that mythical participatory land I had read about in civics textbooks at Biscayne Elementary School, at Nautilus Junior High School” but which he felt was as unreal as the Ozzie and Harriet world of 1950s television. 

He arrived in Lenox at the end of the 1960 presidential campaign and watched on 8 November as “the young and dynamic Jack Kennedy” defeated Richard M. Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74), the would-be successor to “the old general,” Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61).  The old regime “was on [its] way out” and “it was time for a New Frontier”—and so was young Shapiro, “fourteen and ready for a new life.” 

(The New Frontier was the name given to the brief administration of John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63].  He was immensely popular with young people in the U.S. and abroad.)

Windsor Mountain offered a great deal in this vein: students as young as 13 or 14 were already reading Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek; 1883-1957) and William Golding (British; 1911-93)—Shapiro gained some renown on the campus for his essay on The Lord of the Flies—the school theater program was staging European drama like Max Frisch’s (Swiss; 1911-1991) Biedermann and the Firebugs, Jean Giraudoux’s (French; 1882-1944) The Enchanted, and others; and many of the 200 Windsor Mountain students “seemed already to be professional artists” in poetry, painting, and theater.  Classmate Horowitz believed it was probably at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro first encountered serious theater. 

Indeed, Shapiro called Windsor Mountain “the key to everything, any education I ever got,” both from the college-level texts the school used and from his extramural adventures, for it was at Windsor Mountain that Shapiro began hitchhiking to New York City to participate in political demonstrations, see theater, and meet some of the people he would later claim as influences and inspirations. 

At school, the newly-minted student artist took to calling himself “Leonardo da Vinci Shapiro” because he saw himself as a great artist—a practice he gave up when he came to New York because he realized the braggadocio raised expectations he wouldn’t be able to satisfy.   

In his second year at Windsor Mountain (his junior year), before he got involved in campus theater himself, Shapiro lived in a basement room near a staircase in the garage building, a room which shared a wall with the theater’s green room, a backstage room used as a meeting space or common room by members of the company. 

He could hear the actors rehearsing and he said he could tell when they were just talking and when they were saying lines “by the tone, pitch and rhythm of their words, even though I couldn’t make out the words themselves, I never forgot the difference in the sound.”  The latter, he declared, was the more “interesting” and “meaningful”: “It was, in many ways, better than real.  I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” 

Indeed, he didn’t: Shapiro recorded that when he came to direct Jean Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (November 1964; Leo directed and played Creon), and concentrated on the “light and music and rhythm and timing” and other aspects of the staging, “it just came so easy, it was so natural.” 

(Readers may well recognize the similarity between this anecdote about Shapiro’s introduction to theater, and one I related earlier about Shapiro’s year at the Farragut Academy four years before.  I don’t know if there were two similar incidents or if Shapiro’s memory was faulty, erroneously placing the same incident in two different places. 

(I knew about the Farragut anecdote earlier, but didn’t learn of the Windsor Mountain story until Rosalía Triana sent me the uncompleted memoir on which Shapiro’d been working at his death.  It was too late to ask him about the apparent coincidence.)

The Windsor Mountain theater group, under the “ambitious” direction of drama teacher Frances Benn (“Franny”) Hall (1918-2014), was always busy, with plays constantly in rehearsal, and soon Shapiro became involved as an actor.  He remembered auditioning first for the role of Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s (French; 1868-1918) classic, which he recalled the school troupe ultimately didn’t stage.

Then Shapiro remembered doing a reading of Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and being impressed with the play’s “notion of far off America” and the way Ibsen (Norwegian; 1828-1906) delved into the characters’ pasts so that, just as in Ghosts, which Shapiro would direct for Shaliko some 14 years later, they saw their “long buried secrets coming to life.”  It was “[m]y first taste of Ibsen!” Shapiro exclaimed, speaking of a playwright who came to mean a great deal to the nascent theater artist.

The young actor’s first full-fledged production was Maurice Maeterlinck’s (Belgian; 1862-1949) Pélléas and Mélisande in the school’s outdoor amphitheater—a performance for graduation in June 1962.  He began listening to the recordings of plays and poetry—Dylan Thomas (Welsh; 1914-53), whose “Lament” he used to recite in the school’s smoking room; William Butler Yeats (Irish; 1865-1939) reading “The Second Coming”; and Samuel Becket’s (Irish; 1906-89) Endgame. 

Shapiro would stage a street-musical adaptation of Yeats’s poem in 1969 (see “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009) and he’d direct the Beckett play in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, in 1993. 

Poetry, an important focus of English teacher E. James (“Jim”) Hall (d. 1982), was still “really the thing” for Shapiro; he wanted to be a poet, not an actor, “but somehow they seemed similar to me,” and he went on to other roles in Edward Albee’s (1928-2016) The Sandbox, Frisch’s Biedermann, Giraudoux’s Enchanted, and Yeats’s Purgatory. 

Shapiro recorded that he liked Purgatory for its poetry, of course, and “because it was dark and tragic in that wind-swept gothic way, all that!”—qualities that presaged many of his later focuses.  It’s probably no coincidence, however, that Purgatory recounts the story of an Old Man (the role Shapiro played) who returns with his son to the burnt-out remains of the house where he had been born and which is haunted by the spirit of his mother, who died giving him birth. 

On the night that his drunken father, who neglected the Old Man’s mother while squandering and gambling away her possessions, had set the fire, the Old Man had stabbed him and fled, and he there stabs his son, in whom the Old Man sees the reflection of his own feckless father, to stop the cycle and put his mother’s soul at rest.  

Yeats intended the 1938 play as an allegory of modern Ireland, but Shapiro certainly saw a macabre reflection of his own autobiography in it.  The very macabre character of the echo is certainly part of the equation, especially if we note that Shapiro was about 16 at the time, not only a teenager—to whom such a vision might naturally appeal anyway—but the exact age of the Boy in Purgatory and the age the Old Man had been when he stabbed his father.

A remarkable number of the plays and playwrights whom Shapiro would later admire, produce, and emulate were introduced to him at the Windsor Mountain School, either in his classes, such as Jean Anouilh (French; 1910-87), or in the school theater, like Ibsen, Yeats, and Beckett.  Others, of course, he experienced on his visits to New York City—which he might well have seen as an adjunct to his Windsor Mountain education in a way. 

Shapiro frequently left Windsor Mountain’s campus to attend political rallies and protests, including the General Strike for Peace in New York City in January and February 1962 and a March 1962 anti-nuclear rally in Times Square. 

There were, in fact, two peace marches in 1962 sponsored by the General Strike and organized by Julian Beck (1925-85) and Judith Malina (1926-2015), founders of the Living Theatre.  One took place on Monday, 29 January, at the end of which Beck called for a “non-violent work stoppage” which never materialized.  This is the one Shapiro spoke of often.

When Shapiro arrived in New York City to participate in this General Strike, the 16-year-old was unfamiliar with the Living Theatre.  It was the political activism of the Becks and their friends, the principal organizers of the strike, that drew the young would-be poet and he didn’t discover the Becks’ other life until they offhandedly remarked, “You know, by the way, we have this theater downstairs.” 

In fact, Shapiro’s arrival in New York City in January 1962 for the General Strike for Peace began his involvement with the Becks and the Living Theatre at the same time that they were rehearsing their production of Man Is Man by Bertolt Brecht (German; 1898-1956), which premièred the following September and which Shapiro recorded that he saw in his early, heady days exploring New York’s Greenwich Village theater scene.

The 16-year-old aspiring poet had previously kept art and political activism separate: “I kept thinking it was sort of one or the other: One was either . . . in the movement and trying to work to change things, or one was an artist.”  The Becks showed Shapiro that art and political action not only were not mutually exclusive endeavors, but were integrally linked.

Working on the strike every day with the Becks and others in the movement and the theater, the teenager saw them “break new artistic ground and work out political concerns” and discovered he “loved that world a lot.”

When Shapiro began to make theater on his own, he used the Becks and the Living Theatre as models for much of his work and principles.  To be sure, of a list of personalities, movements, and works of art that Shapiro said had influenced him, at least a third have a substantial Living Theatre connection as well. 

The second strike occurred on Monday, 5 November, and launched a week of demonstrations and protests.  Performances of the Living Theatre’s Man Is Man were suspended from 4 to 13 November to free its cast and crew to participate in the “general strike for peace week.”  Though he never mentioned it, it’s certainly possible, even likely, that Shapiro hitchhiked to New York again to participate in the second strike as well.

The anti-nuke protest occurred on Saturday, 3 March 1962.  It was in opposition to the United States’ resumption of atmospheric testing and Shapiro had a vivid memory of the demonstration:

It was a peaceful demonstration in Times Square—where the TKTS booth is now. . . . .  There were 500 of us demonstrating, and the riot squad came in on horseback and mowed us down.  It was just like that scene in Doctor Zhivago—it was out of nowhere, for no reason.  Times Square was red with blood.  I had never seen anything like this: I got hit on the head by a billy club; Judith Malina was pregnant—I saw her trampled by a horse; I saw Julian Beck get his skull cracked.  I was hit twice—they rode over me and hit me and . . . the cop turned around and rode back over me.  I mean, fucking Times Square was red with blood. . . . . 

It was just like the story that my family told me about the Cossacks.  It was exactly the same as the pogroms—or it felt that way when you were under the horses.  And it was not acknowledged.  It could happen right there in Times Square in broad daylight, and not be acknowledged.  I was just shocked.  I’ve never gotten over that; I’m still shocked.

(The TKTS booth, opened by the Theatre Development Fund in 1973, sells half-price tickets for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows on the day of performance.  It’s in Duffy Square, a small triangle of land at the northernmost end of Times Square. 

(Beck was seriously hurt and was briefly hospitalized with injured ribs and a punctured lung.  An account of this incident, from Beck’s perspective, is in John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage [New York: Grove Press, 1995], 170-74, or in Beck’s own “Report from Times Square,” Evergreen Review 6.24 [May-June 1962]: 121-25.)

Far from suppressing such political engagement by its students, Windsor Mountain encouraged it, but Shapiro was a standout.  Sporting “an Afro, but before Afros” and customarily dressed all in black with colorful Mexican vests, “Leo was out there” even among the many at the school who exhibited, even flaunted, an individualism both of intellect and of temperament.  As Horowitz characterized him:

Leo was not afraid of being very, very different from everyone else.  He was genuinely different.  He was seeing the inadequacy of the social structure for him at a very early age.  He wasn’t just angry with it or rebelling, he could understand that . . . .

Gertrud and Heinz Bondy had established an atmosphere in Lenox where adolescents were encouraged to “find their own voice” and engage in “radical political thought” as well as “self-motivated artistic endeavors.”  It wasn’t long before Shapiro was reveling in that political thought, as his account of a “one man demonstration” he conducted shows: 

I remember walking the streets of Lenox, Massachusetts with a homemade sign and leaflets on this day [i.e., 6 August, Hiroshima Day—the day on which the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945] in 1961, age 15.  I had a letter from the A.C.L.U. explaining in detail, with citations, my constitutional right to free expression, and being told (as the cops dragged me away to the two cell station upstairs . . .) that the town of Lenox was founded some 12 or 20 years before the adoption of the United States Constitution, and that therefore their laws took precedence.  And they had a law against RED signs, against signs on Sunday, against handing out leaflets and against me.  I think it was my first jail time up north—a surprise that it was as bad as the South—the ignorance and Zombie slavish hostile stupidity hurt me and shook me as it still does.

(The town of Lenox, Massachusetts, was settled in 1750 and incorporated in 1767.  The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and took effect in 1789.)

While in New York for those rallies and protests, Shapiro further indulged his growing curiosity about theater.  As I briefly noted earlier, one of the most significant experiences of his nascent theatrical education was seeing the Living’s Man Is Man in the fall of 1962.  (Directed and designed by Julian Beck, the production starred Judith Malina and Joseph Chaikin [1935-2003], who won an Obie Award for his performance.)  The anti-war and anti-military play, first written in 1925, but revised many times over the rest of Brecht’s lifetime, came to mean a great deal to Shapiro.

There were, in fact, two simultaneous productions of Brecht’s Mann ist Mann on the New York stage then; the other one, billed as A Man’s a Man, was produced by the New Repertory Theatre Company.  There was considerable debate in the New York press over these dueling Brechts (see my two-part post, 24 and 27 January 2014). 

As a mark of the influence of this theater experience, Shapiro’s first non-student production in New York, the 1967 anti-war street musical he co-authored, Brother, You’re Next, was an adaptation of Man Is Man set during the Vietnam war.  Shapiro considered Man Is Man as one of his main influences and “basically stole” Brother, You’re Next from the Brecht play (see my post on 26 January 2010). 

Beside the Living’s Man Is Man and its productions of Jack Gelber’s (1932-2003) The Connection and Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities, the young student saw Jean Genet’s (French; 1910-86) The Blacks, directed by Gene Frankel (1919-2005) at the St. Mark’s Playhouse on Second Avenue; a double bill of Becket’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Edward Albee’s Zoo Story at the Provincetown Playhouse off Washington Square; William Snyder’s (1929-2008) popular Off-Broadway drama Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker directed by Ulu Grosbard (Belgian-born American; 1929-2012) at the Sheridan Square Theatre, Eugène Ionesco’s (Romanian-French; 1909-94) Bald Soprano at the Gate Theatre at Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place; and the month-long Theater of the Absurd series at the Cherry Lane where he saw Kenneth Koch’s (1925-2002) Bertha and Jack Richardson’s (1934-2012) Gallows Humor.

All these productions were part of the incipient Greenwich Village/East Village Off-Off-Broadway movement (see my posts, “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018). 

Later, he “hung around” Ralph Cook’s (1928-2013) Theatre Genesis, a playwrights’ theater that focused on new American writers, and discovered Joe Cino’s (1931-67) Caffe Cino, to which he’d been drawn by the poetry—he heard readings of Dylan Thomas there, he recalled—and the politics.  He also saw folksingers Bob Dylan (b. 1941), who was Shapiro’s cousin, and Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) and a performance of William Saroyan’s (1908-81) Hello Out There—a production to which he would refer again later. 

(Theatre Genesis, founded by Cook in 1964, produced, among others, the early plays of Sam Shepard [1943-2017]; Charles L. Mee, Jr. [b. 1938]; Leonard Melfi [1935-2001]; and Adrienne Kennedy [b. 1931].  Shapiro first saw Charles Dizenzo’s (b. 1938) The Drapes Come, which he directed at Antioch College in May 1965, at Theatre Genesis, where it had premièred on 12 February 1965.  The theater was located in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery at East 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, one block north of the East Village apartment where Shapiro later established the office of the Shaliko Company.

(Joe Cino’s coffeehouse, the progenitor of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, opened at 31 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1958 and closed soon after Cino’s suicide in 1967.  By the early 1960s, playwrights began reading their scripts there, and eventually staging them. 

(This performance of Hello Out There occurred in March or April 1963—some chronologies put it in 1962—and starred Al Pacino [b. 1940] as the Young Man, his début before a paying audience, according to several Pacino biographies. 

(Pacino also spent time at the Living Theatre in the early 1960s, working as an occasional stagehand—on, among other productions, The Connection.  These were some of the same years that Shapiro was spending time there.  It is speculation, of course, but it may very well be that Shapiro went to see that particular show at the Caffe Cino because a young actor he’d met at the Living was in it.

(Irving Shapiro and Beatrice “Beatty” Zimmerman [1915-2000], Bob Dylan’s mother, were first cousins; the Zimmermans and the Shapiros lived in Hibbing, Minnesota, at the same time, though the boys only saw each other at occasional family events. 

(Shapiro, of course, left Minnesota as a very young child when he, his mother, and his elder brother moved to Florida in 1951.  Dylan, who was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and moved to Hibbing in 1947, was also closer in age to Shapiro’s brother, Gary, than he was to the stage director. 

(Shapiro tried to enlist Dylan’s support for Shaliko in the early days of the company, but the most Dylan did was respond to one of Shapiro’s letters.  If there was any resentment over the singer’s lack of support, however, Shapiro still considered Dylan one of his inspirations and influences.)

Upon graduating from Windsor Mountain in 1963, Shapiro joined the Pen Players, a summer theater group at Miami-Dade Junior College (since 2003, the four-year Miami-Dade College), where he continued to act in productions such as Eugene O’Neill’s (1888-1953) Desire Under the Elms and Man on the Rocks, an original play by the troupe’s director, Richard Paul Janaro (1927-2017), and to direct Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

In Man, Shapiro played a “doomed intellectual,” his friend Jeffrey Horowitz reported.  Horowitz, whom Shapiro brought into the group, said the play was “terrible,” but Shapiro reveled in his role because, Horowitz observed, “it gave Leo the license to be depressed, intense and smart”—a description that sounds a great deal like the characteristics Shapiro said appealed to him in Yeats’s Purgatory.

Shapiro first “started to identify myself with theater” at MDJC and Janaro may have been his first acting instructor.  Shapiro said he enrolled at MDJC, where he stayed for only one semester in 1964, because his father had disowned him. 

When Irving Shapiro “re-owned” his son, Shapiro recorded, the nascent director transferred to Antioch College (1964-65), a small, progressive school in Yellow Springs, Ohio, dedicated to the kind of cooperative education that Shapiro had seen at the Windsor Mountain School; he left without graduating, however.  

While he was enrolled there, though, Shapiro took a job as actor-in-residence at Lake Erie College, a women’s school in Painesville, Ohio, 225 miles northeast of Antioch.  There he appeared in productions of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and O’Neill’s Hughie and Marco Millions.  Despite this work, it was at Antioch that Shapiro lost interest in acting. 

In November 1965, Shapiro directed Anouilh’s Medea at Antioch, a play he’d selected for himself perhaps because of echoes of his own family situation (Medea takes revenge on Jason for leaving her and their children and marrying a younger woman) and it makes a socio-political statement which he supported (Medea, despite her horrific acts, is the heroine of the play because she’s true to her nature, however violent and destructive; Jason remains the man of compromise, the sell-out).

Medea was probably Shapiro’s first directing undertaking after the introduction of the idea that art and politics could be combined.  At Antioch, he turned to directing full time. 

[The biographical sketch of Leonardo Shapiro continues with Part 3 on Saturday, 22 April.  I hope readers will come back then to pick up Shapiro’s story when he enters NYU’s School of the Arts and studies with Jerzy Grotowski, the world-renowned Polish theater theorist and experimenter.  ROTters will see how that experience turns out to be the start of one of Shapiro’s most transformative periods.] 

 

A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 1

 

[I met Leonardo Shapiro on 28 June 1986 in Baltimore when I interviewed him at the Theatre of Nations international theater festival, sponsored biennially at that time by the International Theatre Institute, an arm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 

[Shapiro’d brought his theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, to present their current production, The Yellow House, at the first TON to be held in North America.  (It’s still the only time TON has been hosted on this continent.)  The avant-garde director was one of the artists I spoke to formally for my coverage of the festival for my newsletter, Directors Notes, the house organ of the American Directors Institute, a service organization for artistic and stage directors (now defunct).  I was also writing an article on the festival for The Drama Review.

[(My report was published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986; “Theatre of Nations” ran in TDR in the spring issue of 1987.  I republished my longer TDR version of the report on Rick On Theater as “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986” on 10 November 2014.)

[I’d been so impressed with Yellow House that I began to keep tabs on Shapiro’s and Shaliko’s work.  I saw a number of their shows until, in 1992, Richard Schechner, who’d been one of my professors in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies and was at the time also the editor of The Drama Review, asked me to write a profile of Shapiro and his company for the journal.

[For the rest of that year, I shadowed Shapiro, dug through his files; collected articles by and about him; interviewed him several times; watched videos of past productions; and interviewed his colleagues, company and cast members, Shaliko board members, and others who knew him, his work, and aspects of his life. 

[The immediate result, of course, was the TDR profile, "Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," which was published in The Drama Review winter issue of 1993 (37.4 – T140).  Beyond that, I had collected hundreds of documents, video and audio tapes, notes, and random pieces of information on Shapiro’s past, Shaliko, and most of his activities before and after the New York company.

[Since I started ROT, I’ve posted many articles about Shapiro and his theater.  I realized, however, that I’ve never written much about his biography.  I decided to remedy that oversight, and below is the beginning of the outcome.  There’s a caveat, however.  I really only knew Leonardo Shapiro as a maker of theater, so there’s little content about love affairs, friendships, his marriage and son, and the like.

[There is, though, quite a lot about his theater work.  Now, while I do cover his productions, there are many of the most important ones for which I give only the briefest description.  That’s because those particular shows have been the subjects of detailed posts of their own.  I’ve cross-referenced those posts and interested readers should go to them separately if they want more information.  (I’ve also cross-referenced other past posts that relate to Shapiro, such as some of his theater techniques that I’ve discussed on ROT.)

[The Shapiro bio turned out to be longer than I anticipated when I started out.  Leonardo Shapiro led a life that was short, but crowded with incident.  Therefore, I’ll be posting this piece in sections.  “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will run in eight parts, one every three days, starting today, 16 April, and continuing through Sunday, 7 May.  Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, 19 April.

[One last point: I’ve kept an annotated copy of the bio with all my sources recorded.  I’ll be glad to share this information with anyone who wants it, but you should be aware that most of the sources I used are primary—interviews, notes of conversations, e-mails, letters, and so on.  The only extant copies of these sources are in my personal files. 

[Other sources are rare, such as documents from Shapiro’s records for Shaliko and the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, and aren’t easily accessible anywhere but my files.  Still others are just hard to find, such as clippings from small-town newspapers, obscure publications, or various archives around the country.

[One resource even I didn’t have is now available—if you can come to New York City to consult it, however.  The Leonardo Shapiro papers are now in the Billy Rose Theatre Division archives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.  The call number for the collection is *T-Mss 1998-019 (go to archives.nypl.org -- Leonardo Shapiro papers).

[Because of the prominence of New York City, especially its borough of Manhattan, in this history, a brief overview of the city for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with its layout would be helpful.  First, as most know, New York City is made up of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx.  Of these, only Manhattan and, briefly, Brooklyn and Queens figure in this discussion. 

[Brooklyn, which used to be a separate city and is the most populous borough, was the site of Shapiro’s residence.  It lies at the western tip of Long Island, west of Queens and across the East River from lower Manhattan. 

[Queens, New York’s largest borough, also lies east of Manhattan across the East River on Long Island between Brooklyn to the south and west and Nassau County to the north and east.  The area known as Hunters Point, where a Shaliko production of Mystery History Bouffe Goof was presented, is part of the neighborhood of Long Island City, on the East River where the Newtown Creek divides Queens from Brooklyn, directly across from mid-town Manhattan at 34th Street (south of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel). 

[New York is also a city of distinct neighborhoods.  In Manhattan, those named in this post, the borough’s principal art and performance venues, are as follows:

•  East Village, The Shaliko Company’s home territory: from East 14th Street south to Houston and Fifth Avenue east to the East River (including the section now known as NoHo at the southern end)

•  Greenwich Village (sometimes called the West Village or, simply, the Village): on the island’s west side between 14th Street on the north and Houston Street on the south, from Fifth Avenue on the east to the Hudson River on the west

•  SoHo (which stands for South of Houston) stretches from Houston Street south to Canal Street and from the Bowery west to the Hudson River

•  Chelsea: from West 14th Street on the south to 30th on the north and from Sixth Avenue on the east to the Hudson

•  Theatre District: centering on Times Square, extending north from West 40th to 53rd Street and west from Sixth to Ninth Avenue; Theatre Row, home to many Off-Broadway theaters and companies, is West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues (officially; unofficially it now extends to 11th Avenue)

•  Times Square (not geometrically a square; closer to two triangles emanating north and south from West 45th Street, where north-south Seventh Avenue intersects northwest-southeast Broadway): formed by the intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and West 42nd Street; with adjacent Duffy Square, Times Square is a bowtie-shaped space five blocks long between 42nd and 47th Streets; Duffy Square is the northern triangle of Times Square, bounded by 45th and 47th Streets, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue (known for the TKTS reduced-price theater tickets booth)

•  Lower East Side (also often called Loisaida because of the predominantly Spanish-speaking population): formerly including what is now the East Village and NoHo, now running from the Bowery on the west to the East River and south from East Houston Street to Canal (on the southwest) and the East River (on the southeast).]

Leo Richard Shapiro was born on 7 January 1946 in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  (He would adopt his professional name, Leonardo, many years later.)  His mother, Florence (1913-94), recalled that he was an active and inquisitive child—walking and talking before he was a year old, spending a great deal of time outdoors, and demanding attention from visitors to his parents’ home.  

Florence and Leo’s father, Irving (1912-74), separated in 1949 and subsequently divorced in 1951.  Florence noted that Leo became difficult and hard to handle after her divorce.  Where he’d been “full of the devil” but “warm and loving” before, Florence Shapiro said, after the separation, the boy’s antics became “more malicious.” 

Shapiro’s childhood in Saint Paul and, especially, Miami, where his mother moved with Leo and his older brother, Gary (b. 1941), was clearly stressful and difficult and in it lie many clues to his subsequent behavior, both personal and professional. 

According to his recollections and those of his mother, the fault lay largely with Irving, whom Florence married in 1935.  When the young couple became engaged, Leon Gleckman (1894-1941), Florence’s father, hired Irving at the Republic Finance Company, the loan company Gleckman had started with the money he’d made as a bootlegger. 

(The accounts of the years of Florence Shapiro’s marriage to Irving and of Leo Shapiro’s childhood, especially in regard to his father, are almost entirely from their perspective as recalled decades later.  Other members of the Shapiro family, notably Florence and Irving’s eldest son, Gary, remember this family history differently and recount it with a variant interpretation.)

Gleckman, known as “the Al Capone of Saint Paul” because he controlled the illegal liquor business in Minnesota’s capital city, was a notorious—and, apparently, beloved—figure in the Prohibition-era Saint Paul underworld of the 1920s and ’30s.  (See my post on Rick On Theater, “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018.)

(Gleckman’s criminal history is largely recounted in Paul Maccabee’s John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936 [Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995].  A musical play, Last Hooch at the Hollyhocks by Lance Belville [1935-2020], was performed at the Saint Paul Arts and Science Center in 1990.  It featured Leon Gleckman as a character, and one of Florence’s younger sisters attended a performance.  The Hollyhocks Club was a saloon owned by Jack Peifer [1898-1936], Gleckman’s rival and friend from Minneapolis.)

Something of a dandy and a man-about-town, Gleckman ran several legitimate businesses—such as a tire store, a wallpaper store, a Cord-Auburn dealership, and the loan company (which was certainly a money-laundering operation)—as well as a political machine which put selected politicians in local offices. 

After Gleckman’s death in 1941, Irving Shapiro ran the loan company and started a number of other enterprises.  He was, in fact, quite prosperous, despite the straits in which Florence and their children lived after she and her husband divorced.  “He cried poor and lived rich,” Florence protested.

(Irving Shapiro’s business interests included ownership of the historic Hamm Building at 408 St. Peter Street in Saint Paul, in which Republic Finance, an automobile loan firm, was located; a chain of used car lots called Kennedy Motors; a Hudson automobile agency in Saint Paul; and the Gale (for his sons, Gary and Leo) Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Fargo, North Dakota.  

(Details of Gleckman’s death in an automobile accident on 14 July 1941—and more of his criminal record—are related in “Gleckman, Ex-City Boss, Dies in Crash,” Saint Paul Dispatch 14 July 1941.  It’s very likely that Gleckman’s single-car accident—he ran into a bridge abutment—was suicide. 

(Shapiro once confided to me that Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] Death of a Salesman held special meaning for him; it may have been significant to Shapiro that Willy Loman’s death in the play, also a suicide, was nearly identical to Gleckman’s.)

When Gleckman went to prison on tax charges, he’d transferred his stock to his daughter.  Officially, Irving Shapiro was just an employee of Republic Finance; he and Gleckman had had an oral agreement about his earnings participation but he had no ownership rights.

(Leon Gleckman had been convicted of federal charges stemming from his illegal liquor business, and sent to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, twice, once in 1927 for six months of an 18-month sentence on charges of liquor conspiracy and again in 1934 for 18 months for tax evasion. 

(Gleckman was facing a potential third term in prison at the time of his death.  There’d also been state and local charges of bribery of a juror for which Gleckman had served six months in Minneapolis in 1938.  In January 1940, Gleckman had also been convicted in New York in a Brooklyn bank fraud case and sentenced to six months in jail.)

After his father-in-law’s death, Irving couldn’t use Gleckman’s assets to secure loans so he insisted his wife sign everything over to him “so we can make money.”  When Florence resisted, he flew into a terrifying rage and assaulted her. 

Florence fled the house, but when she returned home, she made a decision she later came to regret: at her husband’s suggestion, she signed her holdings over to their elder son, Gary, less than a year old at the time.  Thus, she lost de facto control of the family businesses and income to her husband; when he reached the age of 21, Gary signed everything over to his father and Florence lost de jure control.  In later years, Leonardo Shapiro would deem that his father had stolen the family’s money.

Both Leonardo and Florence Shapiro asserted that after Irving started making money, he became “self-important” and “domineering.”  He’d always had a quick and sometimes violent temper, and Florence affirmed that he’d never really wanted children.  Despite this, she added, once his sons were born, he focused on them. 

He wasn’t good at taking the boys out to play catch, she said, “but the sun rose and set on you two kids.”  Although Shapiro insisted that he had no recollection of having lived with his father, he does have vivid images of his father’s physical and emotional abuse.  Florence averred, Irving did whatever he wanted “no matter what” and he began taking business trips and vacations without his family. 

On one trip to Hawaii in probably 1949 (according to Gary Shapiro’s reckoning), he met Lee Hoffman (1929-2002), a younger woman—Florence Shapiro thought Hoffman was only 17 at the time, though she was actually 19 or 20—with whom he began an affair.  In 1949, when Florence and Irving Shapiro separated, she recorded that her husband told her he didn’t love her and realized he never had.   

(Hoffman—who was related to actor Dustin Hoffman [b. 1937] through her mother's second marriage—and Irving Shapiro, then 36 or 37, met on a cruise ship to the island territory.  Hoffman, accompanied by her mother, had been a student at a post-high school finishing school at the time.  The couple divorced around 1966, Gary Shapiro reported, and Irving remarried again around 1970.  He was a widower at the time of his death in 1974.)

The Shapiros were divorced in June 1951, and Florence moved with her children to Miami.  Irving and Florence had been married for 15 years, and Leo was 5½ years old.  In July, Irving Shapiro married Hoffman.           

In Florida, Florence and the two young brothers were pretty much isolated—except, at various times, for Blackie, Leo’s cocker spaniel; two parakeets; two turtles; and a goldfish—because Irving had forbidden his family to visit. 

Even Florence’s family found reasons not to come to her support and she couldn’t stand up to her former husband, who, she said, “could be very charming, a lot of fun, but he could turn it on and off like night and day.”  If she brought home something decent to wear, she recorded, she’d have to return it while Irving always had tailor‑made suits. 

With her loss of control of the family income Florence had financial problems and she and Irving constantly argued over money.  Irving Shapiro became more impressed with himself: when, for instance, he decided that the socks Leo wore weren’t good enough, he bought his son cashmere ones—and then deducted the cost from his child-support payments.  To pay expenses her allowance didn’t cover, Florence sold the diamond ring that her mother had given her.

(Florence Shapiro reported that at the same time that Irving was gaining control of her assets, her mother, Leon Gleckman’s widow, sold her shares of her husband’s businesses to her son-in-law for $2,000.  It became Florence’s responsibility to make the monthly maintenance payments to her mother which had previously come from Mrs. Gleckman’s own holdings.  Rose Gleckman died on 8 May 1962.)

Leo’d never had emotional problems before the divorce and Irving’s remarriage, according to Florence, but afterwards, tension in the family increased and the boy began to show its effect. 

When Leo was little, his mother affirmed, he was very affectionate, forever laughing and smiling—though he was constantly “into things.”  He had been very active, always climbing up poles or over the furniture; he had to be watched all the time for fear he would hurt himself.  The boy was wild and mischievous—his mother compared him to the comic-strip character Dennis the Menace (whom Shapiro insisted he never found funny)—and Florence didn’t know how to handle him. 

Florence related one episode from her son’s infancy in which he pulled out the drawers of a chest and started climbing them like steps until the chest fell over.  She described how her son would climb up on the bathroom sink and shave with his father’s razor and, later, in Florida, how he would disappear into the men’s room at Wolfie’s, the famous delicatessen restaurant in Miami Beach, only to be discovered washing his hair so he could dry it under the hand dryer.  At a Lincoln Road travel agency in Miami, there was a window display of an airplane circling the globe; Leo would ride the plane.

Unfailingly sweet and nice, little Leo really liked people and frequently wanted to give gifts to his parents’ friends.  Until he was three, everything had been fairly normal, Florence said, but after his parents’ separation and divorce, he started taking his unhappiness out on others.  “Apparently the separation was hurting you,” Shapiro’s mother observed, “and it was coming out in other ways.” 

Leo’s behavior deteriorated, and he became hard to manage.  He’d regularly come home with little presents for his mother—then she found out he was shoplifting.  He fought viciously with his brother over inconsequentialities like a ping-pong game and his mother recalled that one time Leo took the framed wedding picture of his father and Lee Hoffman and broke it.

Other incidents that Florence recounted include Leo’s throwing an egg at a neighbor's house out of jealousy “because they were a family.”  He also cut the flowers out of the living room draperies with scissors and drew pictures with crayons on his bedroom lampshade. 

When a babysitter wanted Leo to do something he didn’t want to do, he picked up a baseball bat and, later, he was expelled from Cub Scouts for hitting the Pack Leader on the head with a rock.  We’ll see later that this behavior may have been in part symptoms of hyperactivity/attention-deficit disorder, a childhood condition that wasn’t well known when Shapiro was a child.

There were also constant problems at school.  When a teacher failed Leo in reading and Florence went to see what was wrong, the teacher complained that the boy had read a whole book the first day it was assigned instead of one page a day as she’d specified and that he kept his homework uncol­lected in his desk. 

At another school, a teacher complained that he would continually tell her she was wrong.  (Florence recorded that the teacher was wrong, but added that that didn’t help the situation.)  At a private school, one teacher reported Leo sat looking out of the window not paying attention, while another said he was a leader.  On a different occasion, a schoolmate had Leo’s report card and wouldn’t give it to him and Leo tore the child’s shirt.  He was suspended from another school for hitting a teacher with a ruler. 

In another incident, Leo stayed home from school with a virus but didn’t seem to be getting better.  When the truant officer came to see why the boy hadn’t returned, Florence discovered that Leo’d been dumping his medication in the closet.  He was afraid to go back, he protested, because a schoolmate was threatening him with a knife.

Part of this problem may have been that, as one psychologist determined, though Leo was still emotionally a child, he was functioning intellectually at a college level.

Between 1951 and 1960, Shapiro attended eight different schools—including the Windsor Mountain School, to which he transferred in 1960 as a sophomore.  (He went to one school twice, separated by a year at another school.)  He never went to the same school for more than two years and most he attended for one year or even less. 

In 1956, in an attempt to impart some order to their son’s schooling, Florence and Irving transferred Leo to the Admiral Farragut Academy, a military school in St. Petersburg, Florida, for sixth grade.  It was an expensive decision, but Leo resisted the regimentation and, though he made good grades at Farragut, kept threatening to run away. 

Though he returned to the public schools the next year, Shapiro remembered that he was introduced to theater while he was at Farragut, recounting that for punishment he was sent to a room in the basement of the main building that was beneath the theater. 

He could hear the student actors rehearsing above him, and found himself drawn to this new form of expression.  (Shapiro told a similar story of hearing rehearsals at the Windsor Mountain School, the prep school in Massachusetts where he finished high school—this time through the wall of his dorm room.) 

It was at Farragut, too, that Leo became aware of his religious roots, discovering his Judaism and joining a synagogue.  Shapiro said that he was one of only two Jews at Farragut, and this sense of isolation, of being an outsider, may have turned his attention to the faith of his family.

As early as second grade, one headmaster noted that Leo’s behavior changed markedly when his father was in town—the boy would throw chairs and act out in school—and suggested Leo get psychiatric treatment.  The suggestion angered Irving Shapiro who insisted his son leave the school. 

By seventh grade, the boy began getting physically ill, the bouts of illness invariably coming after Leo’d spent time with his father.  On one occasion that Shapiro recalled specifically, he spent a day with his father at the Thunderbird Motel in Miami Beach.  He was sick in bed all day while his father was at the pool and when Irving came back to the room, his son remembered, he hit the boy for being ill. 

The stress was pervasive: the night before Gary graduated from high school in 1959, Leo threw up.  Florence learned that Leo had developed an ulcer.  He was not yet 14.

Florence had thought Leo was suffering from hyperthyroidism, or Graves’ disease, which results in elevated metabolism and activity.  At first, doctors tried a mild sedative, but that made the boy worse.  Then a big change came over Leo when another doctor started giving him Dexedrine, a stimulant prescribed today for attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity. 

It should be noted, however, that potential ADHD—one of the most common childhood behavior problems—wasn’t the only psychological difficulty with which Shapiro would be associated.  Later in life, he would take Prozac, an anti-depressant, and Rosalía Triana (b. 1946), his last romantic partner, reported that Shapiro’d been “diagnosed” with borderline personality disorder (BPD) with narcissistic tendencies.    

As children, most people with BPD are emotionally unstable, impulsive, and often bitter or angry, although their chaotic impulsiveness and intense emotions may make them popular at school.  At first, they may impress people as stimulating and exciting, but their relationships tend to be unstable and explosive.

Common aspects of the narcissistic tendencies also line up with Shapiro’s behavior: “a grandiose sense of self-importance”; “seek[ing] excessive admiration from others and fantasiz[ing] about unlimited success or power”; a belief of being “special, unique, or superior to others”; an “often . . . fragile self-esteem.” 

(I have no confirmation of a medical determination of BPD for Shapiro, though it’s certain that Shapiro, himself, provided Triana this revelation; neither Shapiro nor his mother mentioned the condition and Shapiro was already dead when I learned of this, so I couldn’t ask him. 

(Even though the symptoms seem to match Shapiro’s behavior, I have no expertise in the fields of psychology or psychoanalysis, so this suggestion is speculative despite Triana’s assertion.  The diagnosis of ADHD, however—though that name wasn’t used at the time of Shapiro’s childhood—and the prescriptions for Dexedrine and Prozac are all confirmed by either Shapiro‘s or his mother’s reports.) 

As soon as he started using Dexedrine, Leo calmed down and despite all his problems, his mother said Leo seemed a happy child.  In his “up mood,” everybody loved Leo: he was attractive and charming, hardworking and energetic, winning prizes and generally aston­ishing people with his accomplishments. 

Leo tirelessly played cowboys-and-Indians with another child—Florence didn’t record whether her son was more often the cowboy or, given his life-long fascination, the Indian—and rode his bicycle all over the neighborhood with Blackie, the spaniel puppy that Irving Shapiro’s business partner had given him for his first birthday back in Saint Paul, chasing behind.

The boy’s interest in Native Americans began, he asserted, when he attended Camp Thunderbird in Bimidji, Minnesota (“home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox”), in the summers of 1954 through 1957.  There he learned “Navajo riding songs, wood craft, quillwork, the hoop dance, and campfire etiquette.”

“For three years, I wanted to be an Indian,” Shapiro wrote later.  “I made ceremonial regalia, did beadwork, danced, carried a tomahawk to school, scalped the principal, took back the country, drove out the white man, restored the buffalo, and lived happily ever after.”  The childhood fantasies matured into lifelong adult focus and artistic and philosophic application.

The Navajo healing sings the youngster learned about at camp became Shapiro’s “clearest model . . . for healing theatre,” Shapiro affirmed.  (I posted an article on this blog about the chants called “‘My Mind Restore For Me’: Navajo Healing Ceremonies,” on 15 May 2013.)  His affinity for the rituals, arts, and beliefs of America’s native peoples permeated all of his work with Shaliko; indeed, it was at the base of his principal philosophy: that theater is transformative and that art is and should be integral to our whole culture. 

Leo regularly took three buses to the public library in Bayfront Park on Biscayne Bay in downtown Miami, where he exhausted the library’s collection of books on Indians, and also took piano lessons, composing a song for Florence on the piano she had rented for him. 

As a result of shifting from one school to another, Leo had few close friends.  He had strong interests, however—Indians, science fiction, magic—and focused intently on them.  When the boy wanted to learn a card trick, for instance, he would practice and practice: nothing would stop him.

For 12-year-old Leo Shapiro, magic became a refuge from a world he found ugly and inhospitable.  As his mother recalled, when her son was in seventh or eighth grade, he met a retired magician named Al Cohn on the bus to the public library.  Shapiro described the man as “bald, old, smoked a cigar, and [had] 20 fingers; I was in love.”  

Cohn (1891-1988), known as the “Sponge Ball King” for a famous trick he invented and sold, had retired to Miami in 1951 after owning the Magic Centre on Eighth Avenue near Times Square in New York City for many years.  Given the boy’s response to him, Cohn may have been Leonardo Shapiro’s first surrogate father in a line that continued well into adulthood.

He taught the boy some sleight-of-hand tricks and soon Leo started taking daily lessons from him; attended Saturday-morning meetings of the Magic Roundtable, a magician’s group, at the MacArthur Hotel in South Beach; and even performed at bar mitzvot and children’s parties in Miami Beach:

I gradually moved up from guinea pig to stooge to accomplice, to junior magician.  I started to create my own routines.  I acquired a stage name, a hand-me-down tuxedo, a bright red cummerbund, and actually made some money performing at children’s parties.

Leo’s devotion to magic lasted several years, Florence remembered, and like his other pursuits, it was a total commitment.  It also, like many of his other childhood pursuits, found expression in his stage productions.

Miami Beach in the 1950s was a “concrete fake Art Deco landfill,” in Shapiro’s view, and his Dade County public school was a restrictive and confining environment.  Performing magic tricks surely gave young Leo at least the feeling of control over his surroundings, his “violent peers, their bullying parents,” and “the Cuban Revolution’s . . . angry exiles,” perhaps in the same way that Indian shamans, in whom Shapiro would later take an interest, took control of the nature around them through magic. 

The science fiction books were clearly an escape, too: “I used them like drugs,” he said.  Shapiro disclosed that he read a novel or two every day, including Isaac Asimov’s multi-generational Foundation Trilogy with its theme of social evolution in a universe of many diverse worlds—an obvious appeal for young Shapiro. 

We’ll see that both science fiction, which he said gave him “a Utopian imagination,” and magic would continue to be an interest for Shapiro well into his professional adulthood.

[Part 2 of “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” will be posted on Wednesday.  I’ll pick up with Shapiro’s transfer to the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, for 10th grade.  This move marked a great change in the young man’s life and was a major influence on his path toward becoming a theater artist.  Be sure to return to Rick On Theater on the 19th to continue this story of Leonardo Shapiro’s life and work.]

Noh Theater of Japan

 

[I’ve posted a number of pieces about Kabuki, the dynamic traditional theater form of Japan, on Rick On Theater.  (See, for example, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” [1 November 2010]; “Grand Kabuki (July 1985)” [6 November 2010]; “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” [20 January 2018]; “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim [1 May 2020]; “‘The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation’” by Micheline Maynard in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021].)   

[I’ve even posted one article on the ancient performance form Gigaku (26 July 2011); but I haven’t run anything on Noh (14th century), which is older than Kabuki (17th century) and younger than Gigaku (7th century).

[On a recent Sunday, the New York Times published an interesting piece on a new movement in Japan concerning the making of Noh masks in the paper’s T Magazine, its periodic style publication.  The report, Hannah Kirshner’s “A New Face,” is short, and it doesn’t say anything about the theater form itself, so I decided an introduction to Noh was in order.

[The name Noh (sometimes written ‘Nō’) is probably familiar with most readers, but I suspect most Westerners are unfamiliar with the theater form itself.  So, before I present Kirshner’s report on the modern-day take on Noh masks, here’s a brief history and description of this classic drama.]

Noh is a Japanese classic theater form involving music, dance, and drama, originating in the 14th century.  It was developed together with Kyogen, which are comical pieces performed during interludes of the main Noh performance.  The dual art of Noh and Kyogen is known as Nohgaku, and has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Noh, as we know it today, was popularized and formalized by a dramatist named Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1444) during the Muromachi Period (1333-1573).  Of the known 240 Noh plays in the current repertoire, Zeami wrote 100, and he codified the acting and production techniques in use today (1400-33; On the Art of the No Drama [Princeton University Press, 1984]).

It was Zeami's work that attracted the government's patronage of the art form.  Zeami later fell out of favor with the government and was banished to Sado Island.  Four main Noh troupes were subsequently established, receiving sponsorship from shrines and temples.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867), the shogunate, the administration of the supreme military commander (shogun) of feudal Japan, made Noh its official ceremonial art and issued regulations for its governance.  Noh thus became increasingly standardized, with an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation.  A fifth troupe was added during this time, making five main Noh troupes which survive and perform till this day.

Noh theater is structured around song and dance.  The movement is slow and stately, the language is poetic (and spoken in a highly stylized form of 14th-century lyric Japanese that few modern spectators can understand), and it’s sung in a monotone.  

The name ‘Noh’ means ‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘to accomplish something.’  Zeami used the term ‘elegant imitation.’  When executed with excellence, the result is the experience of yugen, or ‘supreme beauty.’  This is the ultimate goal of the Noh performer. 

The rich, elaborate, and heavy costumes consist of multiple layers and textures that create an effect of resplendent elegance but also a bulky, massive figure.  Expressiveness is enhanced by props, most notably a folding fan.  Closed, partly closed, or open, the fan may represent any object as suggested by its shape and handling, for example a dagger or a lantern.

Plots are usually drawn from legend, history, literature (primarily Japanese or Chinese classical poetry and Zen Buddhist verses), and contemporary events of the era.  Themes often relate to dreams, supernatural worlds, ghosts, and spirits.

Noh plots are essentially dance-dramas, not concerned with dramatic action.  The plays seek to explore the essence of a situation or emotion in lyrical form.  All Noh plays reach fulfillment in dance.

Noh is performed on a square stage with a roof which is supported at its four corners by pillars.  The stage, made of planks, is hollow and resounds like a drum which the actors can use for sound effects.  All sides of the stage are open except for the back which consists of a wall with a painted image of a pine tree; in addition to no walls, there’s also no curtain to separate the audience from the performance space.  (All Noh stages are virtually identical.  Even the dimensions are standardized.) 

A bridgeway (hashigakari) runs at an oblique angle off the rear left corner (i.e., “up right” in western theater jargon) of the stage (to a small structure that serves as the “wings” of a western theater) for performers to enter and exit.  Noh used to be typically staged outdoors, but modern indoor theaters have also now become a common venue.

All performers in Noh are traditionally male (though that tradition is being successfully challenged more and more).  The roles are traditional and codified:

•   shite – the leading player.  Depending on the play, the shite (pronounced shi-TAY) may act as a holy old man, a deity, a demon, a spirit, or a living man or woman.  His movements express various moods.  (The shite is the only performer who wears a mask.)

•   waki – the supporting actor.  The waki plays roles such as a priest, monk, or samurai.  In contrast to the shite, the waki always portrays living people.

•   jiutai – the chorus.  The chorus of eight to ten people, including the chorus leader, sits stage left (i.e., the right of the stage from the perspective of the spectator) and assists the shite in the narration of the story.  (Unlike the chorus of a Greek classic play, the jiutai doesn’t enter the action on stage.)

•   hayashi – the orchestra.  Four musicians provide accompaniment for the performance with a flute (fue), shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi) and stick drum (taiko).  They sit upstage, at the rear of the platform.

•   koken – stage attendants.  Dressed in black (to indicate they are unseen), the stage attendants are not part of the play but assist the performers in various ways, such as handing them props or adjusting their costumes.

The cast of a Noh play is a minimum of two (the shite and the waki), which is the usual, to up to six, plus the chorus and musicians. 

The roles each actor may play are rigidly conventional, unlike in western theater.  A waki one night can’t play a shite’s part the next, and a shite wouldn’t play a waki’s role in another production.  Training starts at around age three and it takes decades for a Noh actor to move up the ranks.

A Noh play generally runs around 60-90 minutes, some divided into two acts, and a Kyogen play lasts for around 15-30 minutes.  Traditionally, a Noh program includes three to five plays, one from each of several different categories of styles.  

Each play is separated from the next by a Kyogen, usually a comic version or parody of the main Noh play, making a total performance of between 3:45 and 10:00 hours (though probably more like 4-5 hours; spectators would come and go and bring food and drink).  Modern Noh performances, with fewer plays, are considerably shorter.

The lines of the play preceding the climactic dance establish the circumstances which motivate it.  The jiutai sings the narration of the shite’s dance-story; the hayashi furnishes a musical setting and establishes the timing of the shite’s gestures.  The dancer’s every movement of his hands and feet follows set rules.

Each gesture, each pose, each movement, each vocal inflection, each musical sequence has a specific meaning.  (These codified performance techniques, passed on from generation to generation, are called kata.)  The actors and musicians must learn these and execute them precisely, and devoted Noh fans understand them as if they were speech.

One key element of Noh are the masks which the shite wears.  They tell the audience what kind of character is being portrayed.  Some masks are general characters who may appear in many plays, while others are specific and are used in only one or two plays.  Frequently used masks represent demons and spirits, as well as women and men of various ages.  

The masks, which cover only the actor’s face, are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress.  Their three-dimensional properties allow skilled actors to evince a variety of expressions with changes in head orientation.  Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. 

The masks are as codified as the actor’s kata.  The traditional mask-maker (unlike the ones in the article that follows), who’s an artist as well as a craftsman, can make only the subtlest modifications to the face, but master mask-makers have more leeway to do so than an apprentice.  Like the actors and the musicians, mask-makers have their traditions that are passed on to the next generations.

                     

— Pat Byrnes, New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001 

 “A NEW FACE”
by Hannah Kirshner

[Below is Kirshner’s New York Times report on the recent development in Noh mask-making (T Magazine 26 March 2023).  It’s also available online as “MAKING IT: The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks” (The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).  There are several nice photo illustrations by Bon Duke, which I didn’t reproduce for ROT.]

Both honoring and departing from the tradition of Japanese Noh masks making, women are expanding its possibilities.

One of the world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.

But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.

Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue -- with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow -- was a craft largely handed down from father to son.

That’s changed somewhat in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.

For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.

In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.

For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”

While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story -- which appears in both folk tales and Noh -- of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.

[Ubasute (‘abandoning an old woman’) is a mythical practice whereby an infirm or elderly relative is carried to some remote, desolate place, and left there to die.  It appears to be the subject of legend and doesn’t seem ever to have been a common custom.]

Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”

[A little more than a dozen years ago, I published a post on Rick On Theater on “The Magic of Masks” (17 September 2011; Rick On Theater: The Magic of Masks).  I looked at masking in a number of different circumstances, including various performance forms—Noh theater among them—and from several different perspectives.

[The interested ROTter might want to have a look at this post (which also touches on puppetry, an allied art form, in passing).  If anyone wants further information on masks and masking, the afterword of “The Magic of Masks” is a list of the people whom I referenced in the post and some of the sources I consulted. 

[(A few words of caution: the mask post, and therefore the list, is 12 years old.  Some of the life-dates included in the list of names are out of date and the person named has since died.  Some of the sources, too, are old and may no longer be readily available.)

[Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist.  Her reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, and on the Proof podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.  She’s the author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021).  

[Kirshner’s the winner of an International Gourmand “Best In The World” award for writing on Japan.  She grew up on a small farm outside Seattle, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Ishikawa, Japan.]