Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 2

 

[Here’s Part 2 of the transcription of my travel journal from my 1982 visit to Israel and Egypt.  This will actually conclude the chronicle I wrote during the trip; starting with Part 3 (to be posted on 17 July), I’ll be posting my recollections of the trip, aided by the itineraries from the tour companies. 

[As I said at the end of Part 1, I plan to post the entire journal in segments at three-day intervals (though I reserve the option of interrupting the series if I deem it useful).  I can’t say at present how long the whole series will be, but I know it won’t finish until sometime in August.

[As I’ve said before with multi-part posts on Rick On Theater, I recommend going back to the beginning (11 July) if you haven’t read the first installment as much of what follows won’t make a lot of sense out of order.]

Haifa – Monday, 13 December

Up early to drive to [Mediterranean] port city of Haifa.  Stops in Megiddo, Tiberias, and Capernaum on the way.

Drove the mountain pass of Megiddo along route of ancient Via Maris [“way of the sea”; ancient trade route along the Mediterranean coast, dating from the early Bronze Age (ca. 3300-1200 BCE), linking Egypt with the northern empires of Syria, Mesopotamia (area of present-day Iraq, and parts of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Kuwait), and Anatolia (Asia Minor, majority of modern-day Turkey)] into Plain of Jezreel (Armageddon) to Tel Megiddo on which [novelist James A.] Michener [1907-97] based The Source [1965]. 

[An explanation for the connection of the Plain of Jezreel with Armageddon, the biblical battle between good and evil, is that the Via Maris crosses the plain and became a crossroads for peoples of the whole known world, bringing with them their contradictory and sometimes inimical beliefs, faiths, and gods. 

[The plain lies at the foot of the hills of Megiddo, known in Hebrew as Har (‘mountain’ or ‘range of hills’) Megiddo—transliterated into Greek as Harmagedon.  The prediction was that the great battle would take place there because it was a gathering place for a multitude of forces (Megiddo means ‘place of crowds’).

[From the Hebrew word for ‘hill,’ a tel (or ‘tell’) is an artificial mound created over centuries through the accumulation of successive layers of civilization built one over the other.  The name Tel Aviv comes from the Hebrew for “the hill of spring,” referring to the seasonal renewal of the earth and symbolizing the rebirth of the ancient Jewish homeland.

[The Source is a historical novel that recapitulates the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from pre-monotheistic days to the birth of the modern State of Israel.  It uses for its central device a fictional tel in northern Israel where archeologists uncover artifacts from each layer, which then serve as the basis for a chapter exploring the lives of the people involved with that artifact.  The book follows the same family from the Stone Age to present-day (i.e., 1960s) Israel.] 

Walked around the ruins and through water-access tunnel to spring (dug under city in [King] Solomon’s time [reigned ca. 970 to 931 BCE] to protect women getting water from enemies besieging town). 

[Tel Megiddo was first excavated in 1903 and was periodically the site of archeological exploration until 1971.  Digging was resumed in 1994.]

On to Capernaum (Kfar Nahum), home of [Saint] Peter on [the Sea of] Galilee – Monastery occupies site of old city; some ruins excavated, including large biblical-era synagogue where Jesus taught on visits to Peter.  [The village was inhabited from the 2nd century BCE to the 11th century CE, when it was abandoned; re-established after 749 CE.  The Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Apostles was built in 1931.]  Some artifacts of interest: [Roman-era] grape and olive presses.

Tiberias on Galilee – lunch overlooking sea (Lake Kinneret [modern Hebrew name]).  St. Peter’s fish [Redbelly tilapia] for lunch – specialty and unique indigenous fish. 

[Everyone ate St. Peter’s fish, so the waiters brought trays piled with the fried fish into the dining room from the kitchen.  The dining area was a large, glassed-in porch overlooking the sea.  As they circulated among the lunch-eaters, they lifted the whole fish off the tray with a pair of tongs and placed it on our plates. 

[Then they asked each of us whether we wanted the fish head on or off.  If we asked for the head to be removed, the waiter simply took the tongs and broke off the head from the fish on the plate, and dropped it back onto the tray.  Not a lot of finesse or ceremony!

[One further note about Tiberias: The restaurant where we ate the St. Peter’s fish was right on the shore of Galilee and members of the Unitours group wandered down to the water.  As I mentioned in the introduction of this post, my birthday is on Christmas Day, so I had the idea to get someone to take a photo of me “walking” on the water of the Sea of Galilee. 

[On such short notice, none of us could come up with a way to make it look like I was walking on the surface of the water, so I settled for a picture of me standing in the shallows near the beach.  It wasn’t a very convincing illusion in the end, but it was the best we could come up with without special effects at hand.]

Visit to tombs of [Moses] Maimonides [Moshe ben Maimon (1138-1204), commonly referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam; medieval Sephardic philosopher, astronomer, and physician] and Yohanan ben Zakkai [sometimes acronymed as Ribaz; important Jewish sage and rabbi, ca. 30 BCE-90 CE (120 years!)] and saw [Rabbi] Akiva’s [Akiva ben Yosef (ca. 50-135 CE), leading Jewish scholar and sage] tomb from afar.

[Many Hebrew names—especially iconic historical rabbis—and phrases are abbreviated as acronyms.  A practice dating back to ancient times, it’s easy to make a pronounceable word from the initial letters or elements of a name or a phrase in Hebrew because the Hebrew alphabet contains only consonants.  Speakers insert vowel sounds at will (guided by tradition) within any string of letters. 

[Though a system of diacritical marks was devised in ancient times to indicate vowel sounds, modern Hebrew is generally written without them.  So initials such as, say, RMBM (for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon) or TzHL (for Tzavah Hahaganah L’Yisrael – Israel Defense Force [IDF], the Israeli military) can be read as Rambam or Tzahal.  (In acronyms, the most commonly inserted vowel is a.)

[Famous rabbis and sages aren’t the only people whose names are acronymed.  Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970), the only person to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature (1966) for works written in Hebrew (Isaac Bashevis Singer [1903-91], a Nobel Prize-winner in 1978, wrote in Yiddish), is known in Hebrew as Shai Agnon.  (In English, he’s published as S. Y. Agnon.)]

Passed Nazareth from below – not enough time for real visit, but stopped at Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation [built in 1769; not to be confused with the Catholic church of the same name] and the [underground] spring of Nazareth where Saint James (in the Apocrypha) says Mary was getting water when Gabriel announced birth to her.  Only historical site in Nazareth – other 32 churches are on traditional (but historically unsupported) sites.

[The Catholic church, also called the Basilica of the Annunciation, built in 1966, was built over the traditional site of the house of the Virgin Mary, where Catholic tradition holds the Annunciation occurred.  As for the Greek church’s claim to historicity, in the New Testament, the Book of Luke doesn’t say more than that the Angel Gabriel makes the annunciation of the birth of Jesus, but doesn’t say where the Annunciation took place.

[The Apocrypha says, however, that Gabriel first appeared to Mary as she was drawing water, but he didn’t complete the Annunciation there.  Then she returned home with the jug of water and the archangel came to her again there and gave her the tidings.  So the Greek church’s claim regarding the Annunciation itself is traditional, but the spring, if not Mary’s house, is real—and still runs into the apse of the church.]

Arrived Haifa after dark.  Check-in [at the Nof Hotel] and dinner (nicer than Tel Aviv) and cable [funicular] subway “Carmelit” down to main drag, Herzl Street for quick visit.  Nof Hotel on top of Mount Carmel with gorgeous view of Haifa and harbor.

On the way to Haifa, passed through Afula, “Chelm” of modern Israel: Chinese immigrants (boat people) would not stay there; factories that succeed elsewhere go bust in Afula.

[Chelm is a city in Poland known in Jewish/Yiddish stories as “a legendary town inhabited by befuddled, stupid, foolish, but endearing people,” says Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish (McGraw-Hill, 1968).  “[I]n Jewish folklore [Chelm] has become the archetypal home of simpletons, an incubator of amiable fools . . . .”]

Haifa – Tuesday, 14 December

Tour of city, including Technion (solar disc and energy project; sewerage reclamation for irrigation; mechanical engineering building painting boondoggle), Baha’i Shrine and Gardens – very pretty but sort of soulless in a strange way.  Sort of clean Moonies.

[Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a research university in Haifa.  Founded in 1912 (as Technikum), it’s the oldest university in the country (predating the State of Israel by more than 35 years).  It has degree programs in science and engineering, and related fields such as architecture, medicine, industrial management, and education.

[The Baha’i Faith, or, less commonly, Bahaʼism, is a monotheistic Abrahamic religion founded in Persia in the mid-19th century.  (Abrahamic religions are those in which the adherents worship the God of Abraham; they are all directly or indirectly descendants, therefore, of Judaism.  The three largest branches of Abrahamism are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.) 

[The origins of the Baha’i Faith are too complex to outline here, but it was born in 1863 in Baghdad, when its founder, Bahaʼu’llah (1817-92), declared himself a Manifestation of God, a prophet on the same plane as Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.  The basic tenet of the religion is the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people. 

[The World Centre of the Baha’i Faith was established in Haifa for several reasons.  First, Bahaʼu’llah was exiled from Persia by the shah and then from Iraq by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and settled in Akko (Acre) in what is now Israel.  Akko is only 16 miles north of Haifa along the Mediterranean coast, and at his death, Bahaʼu’llah instructed his son and successor, ’Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), to build a tomb for the Bab (Sayyed ’Alí Muḥammad Shirazi, 1819-50), considered the inspiration for the founding of Baha’i Faith, on Mount Carmel in Haifa.  (Bab is an Arabic word that means ‘gate’ or ‘door.’)

[ʻAbdu’l-Bahá had the tomb built, completed in 1909, and it’s become the Shrine of the Bab.  The landscape surrounding the shrine was purchased over time by the Baha’i community and since 1982, the buildings of the World Centre have been constructed; the Terraces of the Bahaʼí Faith, also known as the Hanging Gardens of Haifa, have also been created on the grounds, opened to the public in 2001.

[The gardens we saw were in Akko, on the grounds of Bahaʼu’llah’s Mansion of Bahji (‘mansion of delight’), where he lived from 1879 to his death in 1892 at 74.  His shrine is located next to the mansion and the gardens surround the property.  These are among the most sacred spots on earth for Bahaʼis.]

Paid a visit to a Druze village – visited home of Arab Christian women – second floor of two-family building (the parents may live below) – seven children, but spacious and modern home clean and well furnished for the culture (2 TV’s) – very gracious person. 

Then Druze man across the street – young man just about to marry and put his two returning brothers (from Canada) up.  Also very new and clean – and expanding.

Druzes are interesting sect – very secretive – even they don’t know all the secrets (only elders know; others follow blindly).  Very loyal Israelis.

[The Druzes are Arabic-speaking, but they may or may not be ethnically Arabs (or even predominantly Arab).  Druzes are adamant that their religion is not a sect of Islam and do not identify as Muslims.  But their ethnicity is unclear.

[One reason for their resistance to a definitive identification is that Druzes, who live primarily in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, tend to be loyal to the countries within which they live.  So in Lebanon and Syria, they may say they are Arabs, while in Israel, they may insist that they aren’t.  It’s a matter of politics more than genetics.

[The Druze religion, which first appeared in the late 10th century, is monotheistic and Abrahamic.  It incorporates elements of Isma’ilism—a branch of Shia Islam—Gnosticism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism, and Judaism.  Its teachings are drawn from those of Islamic theologians and Ancient Greek philosophers.

[The Druze religion is esoteric in that its adherents believe there are meanings reserved for those of intellect.  Many Druze religious practices are kept secret even from the community as a whole.  Only an elite of initiates participate fully in their religious services and have access to the secret teachings of the scriptures.]

On to Akko (Acre), ancient port and headquarters of crusaders in 11th-13th centuries.  Passed through “old city” of Turks and defense gates.  Under old city is crusader city currently being excavated.  Story of crusaders – Knights Hospitaler dormitory and great crypt of Saint John.  Through secret underground tunnel beneath crusader [city].

Trip to Rosh Hanikra, the grottoes carved out of the chalk cliffs by the Mediterranean practically at the Lebanese border.  Very pretty.

[Rosh Hanikra is about 82 miles north of Tel Aviv along the Mediterranean coast, a 1¾ -hour drive, but only 26½ miles from Haifa and 11 miles from Akko.  (If it were possible to go directly, it would be about 57 miles from Beirut, Lebanon, and 67 miles from Damascus, Syria.)]

Story of Eli Avivi [1930-2018] and Achzivland!  [This is the only note I made on this subject, but it intrigued me so much that a few years after I got home, I got in touch with my friend Helen Eleasari, who had emigrated to Tel Aviv after my visit to Israel and wrote for the Jerusalem Post, and asked her to help me research the story. 

[Years after that—maybe as much as 20—having started Rick On Theater by then, I posted the results on 24 December 2010 as “Achzivland” (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/12/akhzivland.html).]

Haifa – Wednesday, 15 December

Early departure for Safed and Golan Heights.  Passed through valley between Upper and Lower Galilee [Beit Hakerem Valley] with many Arab villages and their tiny plots of farmland (inheritance problem).  17-year-old industrial village of Karmiel with average age of population at 21.

[The Golan Heights, a western section of Syria that borders northern Israel, was used by Syria and pro-Palestinian organizations like Fatah and Hezbollah backed by Syria, as a strategic position from which to shell Israeli towns, villages, and kibbutzim in the mid-1960s.  Israel retaliated, and when the Six-Day War (5-10 June 1967) broke out between the Arab League and Israel, Israel seized the Golan. 

[Israel has occupied and administered the Golan Heights since then and in 1981, began allowing settlements in the region to much international opposition (including the United Nations).  The criticism insists that Israel’s actions in the Golan amounts to an annexation of territory acquired by war, which is prohibited by international law.

[The issue with Arab-owned farmland in Israel is a matter of the inheritance practices of the Israeli Arabs.  An Israeli Jew (or, I presume, Christian) who owns land will generally pass it on to one heir in order to keep the land intact.  It’s the custom of the Arabs, however, to divide up the inheritance among all the male heirs in equal portions.  Over a generation or two, the land each heir receives gets too small to farm (and is practically even smaller if the parcels are not contiguous after a couple of generations).  This makes eking a living off the land virtually impossible.

[Karmiel, a town 15 miles east of Akko, was established in 1964 on land confiscated from surrounding Arab villages.  Its population in 1983 was 16,500 (it was granted city status in 1986; 2019 population: 46,250) and its relative youth was the result of express policies in the 1980s to lure young immigrants, especially those from Arab nations and the Soviet Union, to settle in the town. 

[Today, the city maintains a campaign to recruit young workers for its factories and plants.  Karmiel’s industries include light metalworking and the manufacture of textiles (shirts and blouses), building materials, aerospace products and parts, and plastic and rubber products.

[Safed, also spelled, among several other variations, Safad or Tsfat, has two significant identities of interest to visitors.  The city became a center of Kabbalism (Jewish mysticism) during the 16th century.  After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, numerous prominent rabbis found their way to Safed, many Kabbalists among them. The influx of Sephardi Jews (Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, as distinguished from Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe) made Safed a global center for Jewish learning.

[In the 1950s and ’60s, Safed became known as Israel’s art capital because the mountainous Upper Galilee attracted painters and other artists.  (At an elevation of 2,953 feet above sea level, Safed is the highest city in Israel.)  An artists’ colony established in the old Arab quarter, abandoned in 1948 when the city fell to the Haganah (the clandestine Jewish paramilitary force in British Mandatory Palestine), was a hub of creativity that drew artists from around the country.

[The Glicenstein (aka: Glitzenstein) Museum opened in 1953 (it became the Israel Bible Museum in 1985, which moved to Be’er Sheva in 2006), and there are several museums and galleries that function in the historical homes of major Israeli artists.  Today the area contains a large number of galleries and studios run by individual artists and art vendors.

[While we were visiting Safed, after seeing the General Exhibition of Safed (a sort of colony showroom), I became interested in the work of one local artist, sculptor Haim Azuz (b. Turkey, 1932).  I went to his studio in the Artists’ Quarter only to find he wasn’t there.  His wife, who was also his business manager, was, however, and she showed me his current works.

[I made the group wait while I made my choice, paid, and arranged for the shipment of the piece back home.  I used the excuse that I was about to spend what for me was a lot of money to leave behind in Israel, so they could be a little patient.

[I bought a small bronze sculpture called The Pair, an abstract casting of two standing arcs of patinated bronze—Azuz also made the piece in polished metal—valued in July 1983 at $900.  It remains one of my favorite pieces of art in my small collection.  Sometime around 1986 or so, I got a notice from Azuz that he’d be exhibiting at Art Expo at the newly-opened Jacob K. Javits Center.  I went to the exhibition and finally met the artist.]

[This was the last entry in my journal for this trip.  As I explained in my introduction to this installment, Part 3 will be the beginning of the recovered portion of the journal.  There’s still a lot of the Israeli portion of the journey to go, and then the ten days in Egypt (which includes a cruise down the Nile), so I hope readers will stick with this long account.

[I’ve written the whole post, but I’ve only prepared the Israeli portion for posting so far.  I know that it’s six installments, which will take until 26 July to publish on the current schedule.  I haven’t sectioned the Egyptian part of the journey yet, so I don’t know how it’ll divide up, but I’d guess it’ll be at least the same length as (if not a little longer than) the Israeli part.]

Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 1

 

[In my recent post recounting my time in Switzerland for my last two years in high school (“Going to a Swiss International School,” six parts: 29 April and 2, 5, 8, 11. and 14 May), I wrote about a school trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in Part 5.  I said that I drew on a travel journal I kept on that trip and promised I’d publish the journal, as well as two others I kept from foreign trips, on Rick On Theater at some future time.

[I’m going to post the journals in reverse chronological order, starting here with my 1982 trip to Israel and Egypt.  (At later dates, which I’ve yet to determine, I’ll be posting the 1980 journal of my trip to the People’s Republic of China and the 1965 journal of that trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.)

[Let me say a word or two about this travel journal first.  It’s incomplete, I’m ashamed to say.  I don’t know why anymore, but I stopped writing before I left Israel; I seem to have gotten distracted and flaked out.

[I still have the trip itineraries, which I’m planning to use for the dates and places where my diaries aren’t specific, so I’ll try to fill in the missing portion of the trip based on that.  (The other two chronicles are complete, so my inattentiveness won’t be an issue.)

[The trip, booked with Unitours, a travel service with offices in Tel Aviv and New York City that specialized in travel to Israel, was over the Christmas holiday and took advantage of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that was signed on 26 March 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords. 

[The treaty provided for, in addition to the cessation of the state of war that had existed between the two countries since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the withdrawal by Israel from its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured during the Six-Day War in 1967, mutual recognition and the normalization of relations between the two nations.

[It was the last provisions that made it possible for the first time since 1948 that travelers could cross from Israel to Egypt (or vice versa) without having to go to some other country in between.  Previously, no Arab nation would allow a traveler to cross its border from Israel, or with an Israeli entry stamp in her or his passport. 

[If requested, Israeli customs officers would omit the stamp, but the traveler would still have to go to another country that permitted entry from Israel and from there, go to an Arab state.  After the 1979 treaty, however, visitors to Israel could go directly to Egypt without all the folderol, even with an entry stamp in their passports.

[As a company that did business in Israel, Unitours couldn’t have an office in Egypt before the treaty was signed.  After 1979, however, they hooked up with Egyptian Express Travel in Cairo and began booking trips to Israel and Egypt together. 

[Tourists could book for a tour in just one country or the combined tour of both (and Unitours would take care of the travel and transfer arrangements from Israel to Egypt, though Egyptian Express would serve as the guides for the Egyptian portion of the trip.

[I took the combined trip, obviously.  I arrived in Israel on Friday, 10 December, and stayed until Thursday, 22 December, when I departed for Cairo.  I was in Egypt from 22 to 31 December.  I was in Cairo on Christmas Day, my 36th birthday.

[As for the journal itself: I’m not going to censor my 36-year-old self—though I may explain or comment on my reportage and I will clarify facts where I think it’s necessary.  I will expand abbreviations and correct misspellings and other writing errors, and I will also probably break up long paragraphs in the journal to make reading easier on the blog.  Otherwise, I plan to leave what I wrote 39 years ago as it was, come what may.

[An explanation of my commentary format: Insertions I’ve made since the writing of the journal in ’82 are enclosed in square brackets.  If the comment is also italicized, then it’s based on information that dates from after 1982—information I couldn’t have known at the time.  (I make an exception for life dates that I’ve added; I think it’s self-evident that if someone’s died after 1982, I wouldn’t have known it at the time of my trip.)]

EN ROUTE & ARRIVAL

New York – Thursday, 9 December 1982

Departure by Alitalia – Reported to Kennedy by East Side [Airline] Terminal [closed in 1984] and bus at 3:15 for 6 p.m. flight.  Easy check-in – Very small group apparently.  One family with two small children.  Oy vey!  Long wait at Kennedy for 6 p.m. flight to Rome.  Killed time by watching TV!  [The waiting areas of the departure terminals at John F. Kennedy International Airport used to have seats with coin-operated televisions that received most New York City broadcast channels.]

Arrived Rome [Friday, 10 December] at 8 a.m. local [2 a.m. in New York] – five-hour lay-over!  Pretty bad flight over, too.  Bad crew and a seat by the galley where everyone congregated all night!  (I think I recognized the A/D [assistant director] from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America [a movie on which I did background work, released in 1984 but filmed on locations in New York City from June 1982 to April 1983].)

[My notes don’t say, but I assume I landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, the city’s main international airport which handles Alitalia and flights to and from New York and Tel Aviv.]

Rome/Tel Aviv – Friday, 10 December

Longest flight I can recall enduring.  Last leg, Rome-Tel Aviv not bad, but the wait!  [I spent the entire lay-over in the airport waiting area with all the shops and restaurants closed for the most part until later in the morning.  Since it was 2 a.m. according to my body, I tried to sleep on the rows of molded plastic seats—a very uncomfortable . . . uuuhhh, “rack.”]

Arrived Tel Aviv [Ben Gurion Airport; a 3¼-hour flight] in reasonably good shape at  5 p.m. local [4 p.m. in Rome; 10 a.m. in New York].  Met by tour reps and sent to our hotel, Basel, for rest-up and dinner.  No roommate yet (here, but out).  [I had signed up to room with another single traveler to cut down the cost.]  

Dinner with two older men on tour – they’re neighbors in New York – 14th [Street] and 6th [Avenue].  [I lived at 15th and 5th—a block south and a long block east—at the time of this trip.]  Dinner not interesting, but okay (just as I heard).  [Israeli cuisine was reputed to be bland and undistinguished—and it was.]  Hotel small, but clean and serviceable.

Everything is closed, of course – Sabbath eve – and will be so till tomorrow p.m.  [Jewish sabbath starts on Friday at sundown and runs through Saturday at sundown.]  Kind of lost days.

Finally met Jeff Gold, my share in Israel.  Nice young man living in Jersey – Computer engineer.  Has family in Israel he’s locating and contacting.

ISRAEL

Tel Aviv – Saturday, 11 December

Sabbath a.m. – Met by our guide/tour manager, Simon Segali.  [Described by a friend as “an excellent scholar of Israeli history and cultural history, . . . an actor, singer, comedian, philosopher and comedian.” Simon (1933-2018) was born in Budapest as László Schlesinger.  His family Hungarianized Schlesinger to Székely, and when he came to Israel in 1949, he changed it again to Segali; an Israeli immigration officer gave him the name Simon (Shimon in Hebrew).  A Holocaust survivor (incarcerated in Theresienstadt concentration camp in May 1944), Simon worked on a kibbutz when he first arrived in Israel and then sang opera; he switched to guiding tours in the ’60s.  At the 2014 annual Wanderlust World Guide Awards, Simon received a commendation.]

Walk through hotel environs, including [Israeli Founding Father and first Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s [1886-1973] house and the Dizengoff Street area (closed off to traffic for pedestrian promenade).  [Once the city’s main shopping street, filled with coffeehouses and cafés, Dizengoff Street was called “the Champs-Élysées of Tel Aviv.”]

[One of the group quipped that what she found astonishing was that almost everyone she saw around her on the streets was a Jew.  (Though Unitours does journeys to the Holy Land specifically for Christians, the make-up of our group, an ordinary tourism trip, was largely Jewish.)  The policemen were Jewish, the shop-owners were Jewish, the maintenance guys were Jewish, the janitors were Jewish, the waiters and cooks in the restaurants were Jewish, the soldiers we saw around were Jewish.  Out in the countryside beyond Tel Aviv, the farmers were Jewish.  Who’da thunk it!]

Nothing open but nosheries [pl. of ‘noshery,’ Yiddish-English for a place to get a snack; nosh is Yiddish for ‘snack’ (both verb and noun)], but lots of people out.  Few soldiers, but I’m told they are a common sight with their weapons. 

Tel Aviv seems very drab and monochromatic.  New city – only 73 years since it was founded [1909].  No real style  or charm.  Largest city in Israel, best night-life.  [In the 1980s, Tel Aviv’s population was a little over 300,000 inhabitants; today it’s 460,000.]

Lunch at hotel (same fare as dinner) and brief rest.  Then Dizengoff at night – Now full of young people – including very young teenagers – out walking and café-sitting.  Not wild, but animated and obviously enjoying themselves.

Simon is an amusing little fellow – Hungarian refugee from the ’40s (after statehood [1948]).  Used to be an actor.  Should be fun as guide.  Gave an extensive briefing in a.m. – Some of our group don’t seem to listen – could be problem on tour (older couples from Connecticut).

Tel Aviv – Sunday, 12 December

City tour after breakfast, including Old Jaffa, old [Mediterranean] port of Palestine from biblical days.  [Jaffa is famous for its association with the biblical stories of Jonah, Solomon, and Saint Peter.  Now it’s known for its oranges.]  Rebuilt as artist colony from old Turkish ruins.  (Rest is Arab town.)  Charming overlook of Jaffa, lighthouse (near which was house of Simon the Fisherman [Saint Peter] traditionally). 

On to Tel Aviv suburbs and residential areas.  Housing – all condo – is quite expensive.  Most is brand-new.  Went to Kfar Sava Absorption Center – for young immigrants [now shut down].  Jeff has a friend there, a new immigrant of four months. 

Very interesting system of integrating new Israelis into society and teaching the language.  Stays run from six months for most, but can be longer for some, especially East Bloc immigrants.

[One thing I didn’t record in my journal is the description our Absorption Center escort told us regarding the new arrivals from the Soviet countries—one reason, perhaps, that their stays were often longer than that of immigrants from other parts of the world. 

[In the communist world, which was officially atheistic, religion of any kind was suppressed.  Jews in the Soviet countries didn’t know how to be Jews.  Boys weren’t bar mitzvahed; they weren’t even allowed to be circumcised, a tenet of the faith.  Hebrew wasn’t legally taught, and the study of Torah was forbidden.

[From the earliest days of the USSR, and especially once the Cold War began, emigration for ethnic or religious reasons was restricted,  Soviet Jews who applied for permission to emigrate to Israel were almost universally denied; they and others prevented from leaving the Soviet Union were known as refuseniks.

[The restrictive emigration laws were eased in the 1970s and the exodus of Soviet Jews increased with the installment of Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) as Soviet leader in 1985.  His policies of glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’) in 1986 led to a brief flood of Jewish emigrants to both the U.S. and Israel.

[New immigrants to Israel who wanted to participate in the religion had to learn from the beginning what Judaism is.  (In Israel, the only approved form of Judaism is Orthodox; there are no Conservative or Reform rabbis or synagogues in Israel.)

[Then, on the non-religious side, the refugees from Eastern Europe, who’d been living under a repressive and controlled society, had to learn to live in a free one.  A teacher had to take them, for instance, to a department store and a supermarket and show them how to select their own purchases. 

[Some new immigrants were so stunned by the bright lighting and the abundance of choices, they literally froze when they crossed the store threshold.  The guides had to explain to them that they could buy whatever they wanted or needed, as much or as little as they wished.  This was an alien concept to Soviet Bloc citizens.]

British lady (with husband and two teen sons) was our “guide” – Very enthusiastic about program and aliya – Somewhat over-earnest, but engaging.  [Aliya is the Hebrew word meaning ‘ascent’ or ‘the act of going up.’  It’s the word Zionists use for immigration to the Land of Israel (which today means the State of Israel); ‘making aliya’ is the term for immigrating from the Jewish diaspora to Israel and is one of the most basic tenets of Zionism.]

Saw dorm-like double room – like Hun School new dorm [the prep school I attended in Princeton, New Jersey, for my first two years of high school, 1961-63; in my sophomore year, I lived in the “new” dorm, ca. late ’50s]: obviously working concept.  Very positive atmosphere and supportive.

What would it be like?  Most Americans (90%) drop out and go home.  Understandable.

Tel Aviv University and Diaspora Museum.  Really an exhibit of diaspora life – no real artifacts – all copies and reproductions – photos and drawings.  Very well displayed and laid out.  Impressive display of Jewish life away from Middle East. 

Study area has computer with read-out of any Jewish community in world.  Can get print-out of data.  Tried Uman ([my paternal grandfather] Jack K*****’s birthplace [in Ukraine]).  Interesting – not destroyed as I thought and not only Jewish town (about 90% at height).  Got copy for Dad.

[My father always told me, prior to this discovery, that Uman, the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), was a shtetel, a small town in Central and Eastern Europe with a largely Jewish population which existed before the Holocaust, and that it was wiped out by the Germans in World War II. 

[Out of curiosity, I looked the town up on the computer, which was programmed with the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and found that Uman was a small city with a population of about 30,000 in 1897, when my grandfather was 7.  Uman, 130 miles south of Kiev, had a large Jewish community of about 17,000—57%, not 90%—until 1941, when Germany captured the city and slaughtered or transported all the Jews.  My grandfather’s family had emigrated to the United States between 1897 and 1901.

[After my father’s death in 1996, my mother found a box in which he’d stashed a number of disparate items: letters from my brother and me going back to the early ’60s, papers I’d written in college, clippings from my short career in the theater, and so on.  One of Dad’s keepsakes was the print-out of the Encyclopaedia Judaica article on Uman from the Diaspora Museum that I’d given him on my return from Israel and Egypt.]

Home for dinner, then Jaffa by night.  Jeff off to meet cousins – but they never showed!  Jaffa art galleries very disappointing – Most are starkly modern, but with very little style.  Not to my taste.  Other shops are “antiques.”  Area very charming, but artificial.

[The transcription-plus-recovery of this chronicle turned out to be much longer than I anticipated.  I’ve had to divide it up and the Israeli part of the trip alone is six installments.  At present, I’m figuring on posting the whole thing together, with sections coming three days apart. 

[After this first part, then, Part 2 will be published on 14 July.  The installment to be posted on 17 July will be the start of the recovered journal; when I run that section, I’ll provide an explanation of the differences with the straight transcription-with-commentary like Part 1 above.

[I hope you will follow along and return to Rick On Theater through all the sections.  I did a lot of traveling in my younger days, and this trip was one of the most interesting I took.  Maybe you’ll see why.]

The Real-Time Event

 

[I’ve written a number of articles based on the theater ideas of Leonardo Shapiro, whom readers of Rick On Theater will probably know by now was a “downtown” experimental theater director whom I knew at the end of his life in the late ’80s and early ’90s.  One of the central ideas of Leo’s theater, put into practice in his productions with the company he started and ran, The Shaliko Company, was the Real-Time Event.  

[One of the two or three most important notions of Leo’s theatrical technique, it was present in almost all his Shaliko productions.  I hope my discussion makes clear what Leo meant by this term because the principal reason I was so interested in his work after I saw his production of The Yellow House in Baltimore at the Theatre of Nations in 1986, was that he had these ideas about which he’d thought for years that he was trying to make practical on a stage.  He wasn’t just putting on a show.  He had things he really wanted to accomplish. 

[That really impressed me.]

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), widely recognized as one of the major figures of 20th-century theater and the European avant-garde, disparaged “storytelling psychology [which] has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other.”

Each spectacle will by its very nature become a kind of event.  The spectator must have the sense that what is being performed in front of him is a scene from his own life, and an important scene at that.

In short, we ask of our audience an intimate and profound involvement. . . .  With each spectacle we put on, we are playing a serious game.  Unless we are determined to follow our principle wherever they may lead us, we do not feel the game is worth playing.

These statements are an excellent introduction to the “real-time event,” one of the central aspects of the theater of Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), the avant-garde director on whom I’ve written many times now on Rick On Theater.  Artaud was an important influence on Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), the Polish theater director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, actor training, and theatrical production were a significant influence on Shapiro.

Shapiro founded his experimental theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, in 1972.  Their first production was Children of the Gods, a composite of Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) Agamemnon and Euripides’ (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE) Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis which premiered in 1973. 

With Children of the Gods, Shaliko began exploring what Shapiro would call the “real-time event”—what actually happens at a performance while the audience is in the room—a concept obviously heavily dependent on the audience-performer relationship.  If the actors present themselves as people like the spectators, doing actual things in real time, then, Shapiro hoped, the audience would become part of the event by making connections between actions that previously appeared unrelated. 

Even before he formed his New York City company, the young director was quoting Grotowski: “The theatre is an act carried on HERE AND NOW in the actors organism, in front of other men . . . . ”  The rest of Grotowski’s statement asserts that “theatrical reality is instantaneous, not an illustration of life,” linking the audience and the performers in one actual experience.

To bring the spectators and the actors into closer contact was the goal Shapiro had for Shaliko’s work.  In many of Shapiro’s productions, he placed actors in or near the audience, turned the auditorium lights on during the performance, had actors address the spectators directly, and enlisted the audience’s participation in aspects of the performances.

Let me back up a little.  After finishing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in directing at New York University’s School of the Arts, he took off for the West Coast.  He stopped for lunch one day in Taos, New Mexico . . . and stayed for over a year-and-a-half.  He formed a guerrilla theater troupe that roamed the Four Corners.

He returned to New York City in March 1971 and started forming Shaliko.  He sought out the actors he had known at NYU and put Shaliko together in January 1972.  The troupe spent time “developing skills” through exercises and games.  Actor Christopher McCann (b. 1952), an early member of the ensemble, recalled that exercises heightened his sensitivity to the space in which they were working, and to the other actors.  It taught the actors that “there was more at work than just what you see.”

This echoes NYU circus-arts teacher Hovey Burgess’s belief that “[t]he actor has to be aware of the reality of what he is doing without knowing the result.”  Circus work had been a long-time interest of Shapiro’s and it was visible in much of his work with Shaliko till the end.

Circus performance is an immediate form: what the observer sees, as Burgess (b. 1940) pointed out, is what’s happening at that moment.  While conventional theater artists create illusions, Burgess believed, “Circus is more real.”

“The audience in the theatre must imagine objects and relationships,” said Burgess, referring to conventional Western performances.  “In the circus, there are real relationships to people and objects . . . .”  These ideas of immediacy and reality, which Burgess called “authentic,” played significant roles in Shaliko performance goals.

After a year, however, the demand to produce became “pretty intense.”  They explored several different potential pieces and settled on the Greeks.  It isn’t surprising that these Greek plays would attract Shapiro’s attention. 

“[T]he story of the House of Atreus spoke directly to us,” averred Shapiro; “it was amazingly credible, especially at its most extreme moments.  Our war [in Vietnam] was ending and our half million Orestes and Electra[s], ready for action, were coming home.”  (The Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973, one week before Children opened.)

Shapiro’s main goal was “to use the devices of the theater to heighten the experience of the present moment” in which the spectators and actors share in some immediate way the live performance event.  His aim was to make what was happening on stage as “authentic” as the life the audience was living off stage.

In rehearsals for Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (see my post on 11 and 14 May 2020), his last show in New York (1992), for example, Shapiro told the cast, “The play is set a year ago, but the production is happening now.  We here in this room are doing this now.”  

“[D]eveloping a piece with the audience,” Shapiro declared as if responding to the contention of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), the Russian actor, director, and theorist who’s probably the godfather of Western avant-garde theater, that the spectator is “a fourth creator” in the production, “is as important as developing a piece for the audience.”  

“We intend the audience not merely to observe,” said Meyerhold, “but to participate in a corporate creative act.”  (Meyerhold used “corporate” here, of course, to mean “collective”; it had nothing to do with business enterprises.)

According to Shapiro, the work with Shaliko

redefined the roles of the actors and the audience, vis à vis each other as well as vis à vis themselves: it not only changes how one actor relates to another actor, but how either of them might relate to the audience; it also changes how the members of the audience might relate to each other, so it creates a very different kind of dynamic. 

Indeed, the playwright Mac Wellman (b. 1945) posits a “Lockean-Rousseauian contract” between the performers and the spectators that Shapiro recognized as precisely analogous to the social contract which he understood to exist between a government and the governed (see my profile of Wellman, 4 February 2017).  In fact, the company clearly stated so in a promotional brochure a few years after its founding:

The Company sees itself as representing both the author and the audience.  In our work, we become the meeting ground for the challenge/response transaction between the text and our peers, and fashion this transaction into a structured dramatic form which invites participation.

The company maintained that their consideration of the connection between the performer and the spectator came from an “absolute respect for the intellectual and emotional maturity of the audience” and, in the terms of the implied contract, each party bears part of the responsibility for creating the performance and Shapiro was determined that the actors would not break this contract as he had seen that the state had broken that other social agreement with him. 

If the audience abides by the terms, together they and the actors will interact to produce a theatrical experience unique to that particular time and place.  Ideally, Shapiro explained to the young cast of his last show, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in Albuquerque in 1996, the process works as a kind of “transaction.” 

The actor speaks to the audience through the character, “establishing the basic relationship of performances, [the] human-human relationship” as opposed to a character-character or performer-performer connection, the director clarified. 

The actor, Shapiro continued, thus “teaches” the audience how to see the circumstances—then the audience reacts and that teaches the actor what’s working and on what level.  When the actor responds to the audience’s reaction by perhaps playing differently than he did at other performances before other spectators, the cycle starts again.

As Rose Mary Mechem, a journalist for Sports Illustrated and former theater student, attested in The Nation, Shaliko could be very successful at this tactic, however daunting it might have been:

For many people it is a threatening experience.  You go to the theatre, a paying guest, expecting a little diversion, and suddenly you’re asked to look alive, to participate, to commit yourself.  You are no longer in a sanctuary, safe and alone with your own thoughts.  Your brain has been mugged.  Your sense of individual freedom and privacy has been rudely assaulted.  But that, it turns out, is exactly what the evening is all about: you are asked to sit in judgment over the case . . . . 

It’s daunting from the performer’s perspective, too.  As actress Robbie McCauley (b. 1942), who had no trouble with the open-ended explorations into which Shapiro led his casts, experienced it, “That’s the part that’s scary. . . . .  It’s like being on a tightrope . . . because you’re with the audience and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Having reached out and transformed the mass of individual spectators, each with separate concerns and distractions, into an audience, it was Shaliko’s goal to make that audience part of the ensemble.  This technique takes time, of course; it can’t happen until the actors confront their audience and forge the contract.  Since that didn’t occur in the Shaliko process until after rehearsals, Shapiro demanded previews. 

Circumstances didn’t always permit that to happen as planned.  The actor-spectator interplay in the 1992 revival of Kafka: Father and Son by Russian playwright-director Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937) didn’t develop, for instance, until the second week of performances (report posted on 5 and 8 November 2015).  The psychical distance between the performers and the audience was closed later in the run, and audiences at the last performances were visibly affected by the experience. 

Shapiro’s concern with connecting The Shaliko Company’s performances with its audiences was not only a function of his connection with Grotowski, Brecht, Artaud, Meyerhold, and circus.  Shapiro also named among his influences French filmmaker-psychologist Guy Debord (1931-94) and the Situationists, a revolutionary art and political movement active between 1957 and 1972 (see my post on 3 February 2012). 

Application of a number of Situationist notions could be found in Shaliko work.  In terms of connecting performers with spectators, the Situationist parallel was very strong.  It went to the heart of Situationist philosophy, indeed to the very origins of the name.

In “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,” a 1957 essay, Debord described the life of the ordinary citizen as dull and predictable, dictated for him by a society which has become reduced to what he called a “Spectacle”: little more than a sham dressed in the trappings of living. 

To change this world, Debord and the Situationists proposed organizing “situations,” which he defined as “the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality,” a kind of installation-cum-Happening.  Debord’s idea was to get people involved in their own lives again. 

In popular culture, Debord alleged, the passive spectators are led to identify with the hero so that they will live through the fictional figure and not themselves become active.  Getting the spectators to take an active role in their own lives defeats this societal control mechanism, leading eventually, the Situationists hoped, to revolution and the downfall of the “Society of the Spectacle.” 

Theatrical performances which draw their audiences into a communal act in the hope that something transformative, even revolutionary, will result, rather than separate passive audience from active performer, are surely as Situationist as anything Debord had conceived.  As Shapiro stated it:

I’m actively trying to subvert the official view of reality and help people make different connections which would lead them to construct a different reality. . . . .  What I want to do is make people understand some of the connections between events that they don’t ordinarily understand—that are hidden from them by the official reality . . . .

“The work of the theatre,” wrote Julian Beck (1925-85), founder with his wife Judith Malina (1926-2015) of the Living Theatre—which introduced Shapiro to theater when he was a teenager—“has to do with activating the people by restoring the ability to think and feel freely . . . .” 

Artaud cautioned, however, that we must ask ourselves “whether we will be able to find an audience capable of giving us the necessary minimum of confidence and trust, capable, in short, of joining forces with us.  For, unlike writers or painters, we cannot do without an audience; indeed, the audience becomes an integral part of our undertaking.” 

The audience may not always cooperate, insisting on being emotionally manipulated or even dismissing the whole experience because it doesn’t conform to the way they presume a work of theater should affect them.  Audiences, Shapiro acknowledged,

may insist on imposing familiar fictions to prevent themselves from having to actually encounter these people or enter into a direct, immediate dialogue with them.  I can’t make them not do that.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t try.

This was Shaliko’s on-going challenge and is almost precisely echoed in Mac Wellman’s notion of the “real-event.”  In contrast to the “non-event” of the conventional theater, Wellman defined this in terms analogous to the way Hovey Burgess described circus performances: “events proper, more or less intriguing, more or less revelatory of the human condition, more or less engrossing.” 

Wellman also connected this idea to Brecht when he wrote that the principal aim of theater is “to make something happen, show forth for what it is, in a given space.”  For Shapiro, as he explained to the young cast of Seagull, “the gel of performance . . . is a transaction . . . between you and the audience.”

The real-time technique is related, too, to Grotowskian theory, which posits that for the actor, who, in contrast to Meyerhold, is the “direct creator” of the performance analogous to the poet or the painter, “the immediate act . . . must exist during the performance.”  

As Grotowski explained to Shapiro and his classmates in a 1967 NYU workshop, the fundamental requirement of acting is responding honestly to the impulses the actors feel while they are performing.  “That is,” Shapiro interpreted Grotowski’s principle, “the theatre does not represent an event, it is an event of consciousness.” 

Shaliko actress Mary Zakrzewski, who played the Chief Commissioner who questioned the audience in Shaliko’s second production, Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1974-75), confirmed the director’s assertion: “You start to develop a relationship with the audience.  They are very personal, real relationships,” she specified in language that echoes Burgess’s, “that are only there for an hour.”

The explorations of the real-time experience, the theater as thought-provoker, and the involvement of the audience in the performance event all had their most undiluted expression in the production of The Measures Taken, one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke (‘teaching plays’). 

To see if the work was clear, Shapiro decided to have the Chief Commissioner interrupt the action five times “within carefully specified slots during the production” to ask the spectators if the Young Comrade’s actions were right. 

“Since this is a learning play,” the Commissioner told the audience, “we are asking you to represent students, and from time to time during the production we will ask you questions about what you have seen.”  This procedure followed Brecht’s own instruction that “[w]herever he feels he can,” the Epic actor “breaks off” the performance “in order to give explanations.”

These sessions became a posing of “questions about ends and means,” alluding indirectly to issues like the then-current Patty Hearst (b. 1954) kidnapping (4 February 1974-18 September 1975) and the radical political activities of the Weather Underground. 

(For those who are too young to be familiar with these historical references to the ’60s and ’70s, Patricia “Patty” Hearst was taken from her Berkeley, California, apartment on 4 February 1974.  The Symbionese Liberation Army demanded her father, publisher Randolph A. Hearst [1915-2000], give millions to the poor.  

(Hearst was identified by the FBI as taking part in a San Francisco bank holdup on 15 April; on 18 September 1975, the FBI captured her and others in San Francisco and they were indicted on various charges.  She was convicted of bank robbery on 20 March 1976 but she was released from prison under executive clemency by President Jimmy Carter [b. 1924; in office: 1977-81] on 1 February 1979. 

(A radical group who had broken with the Students for a Democratic Society and called themselves the Weathermen changed their name in 1969 to the Weather Underground.  [The original name came from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which contains the words, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”]  The Weather Underground planted bombs to protest the continuing war in Vietnam.)

As one might imagine, some discussions worked better than others, but Rose Mary Mechem noted that the production did what Shapiro wanted:

The message in The Measures Taken is enigmatic.  The individual, viewing it, is at the mercy of his own subjective impressions.  The audience, as a collective, provides a kaleidoscope of insights, finding freshness in dogma, ambivalences hidden in rote, passion beneath rhetoric and humanity in revolution.  The didactic becomes the dialectic.

What the audience experienced depended, Shapiro noted, on the amount of responsibility they took “for making connections and doing something about them.”    “[T]here were nights when the discussions were so hot,” Shapiro recalled, “that there’d be as much time spent on the discussion as the performance.”

Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn (b. 1943, a longtime friend of Shapiro’s and supporter of Shaliko, deemed the presentation “a very powerful, very clear, lucid presentation of a very political play . . . which was certainly very clarifying.”  Papp, himself, praised Shaliko’s work on “Brecht’s difficult piece” for its “insight, artistry and commitment.”

Unrehearsed and unregulated, the real-time event could vary the length of the performance by as much as an hour either way, but without changing what Shapiro called its “score.”  The real-time event in this variable and aleatory way added an aspect of the Happening, a component of Shaliko’s performances that would remain, however subtle.

Because The Measures Taken was deliberately different at every performance, the cast confronted “the problems of spontaneity and form” every night.  “They had to learn to go back and forth instantly from rehearsed, choreographed sections to the completely unrehearsed, improvised sections in every performance,” the director explained.

Shaliko toured Pennsylvania with Measures, including several union halls and prisons.  “The audience discussions were totally different in the prisons than at the Public,” recalled Shapiro.  “They’re [i.e., the prisoners] really concerned with these issues in a very immediate way.  The questions of ends and means and radical activity and who got the gun: these are all questions they’re familiar with.  It isn’t theory to them.” 

The prisoners, Shapiro saw, understood that they had to find answers for themselves in order to survive.  “The show provided fable, catechism and forum to a population denied all access to reality. . . . .  Every night the audience went out arguing with each other.”

Though Shapiro’s use of real time eventually got more subtle than the direct address to the audience, and in later work he never returned to the overt use of it that appeared in early Shaliko productions, it was still a practice to which Shapiro came back again and again in his work and in discussions. 

Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) Ghosts (1975) was Shaliko’s first show in which the actors didn’t play directly to the audience (report posted on 6 September 2014).  In Children and Measures, the spectators were acknowledged presences for the actors—they were the gods to the actors’ Greeks in Children and students being indoctrinated in party practice in Measures—but in Ghosts, there was no substantive contact between the spectators and the actors. 

This form of audience-performer interaction became the norm for Shaliko productions, a direct parallel to Grotowski’s practice, though sometimes the spectators of both Grotowski’s performances and Shapiro’s didn’t recognize their roles. 

In The Yellow House (1985), for instance, Shaliko’s play about painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), the audience was supposed to stand in for Theo van Gogh (1857-91), the painter’s brother, but the relationship was never acknowledged (report posted on 9 February 2018).  (In the first version, in fact, an actor portrayed Theo from a microphone behind the audience, who never saw him.  “I was very much after the idea of making the audience identify with Theo,” Shapiro said.) 

In Ghosts, the spectators were the unacknowledged spirits of the Alving house, and Shapiro saw the play as a séance, which helps explain his emphasis on scenes which were not so much seen as overheard, a tactic that disturbed some critics.

In a statement of the company’s purpose and goals, which alluded to his circus influence, he wrote: “Shaliko’s actors focus on the present, they improvise, they react to the moment with the concentration of a tight-rope walker, living the emotion of the present, not of a past evoked with artifice.”

Former Living Theatre actor George Bartenieff (b. 1933), who was a member of the cast of Blue Heaven and played Hermann Kafka, the father, in the 1992 revival, compared the experience to the Living’s production of The Brig (1963), in which he had appeared: “It’s like living the experience, not just pretending.” 

Shapiro stipulated, however, that while he’d still striven to make the “transaction between the actor and the audience a real event,” he’d no longer allowed the actors all the time they wanted; it had to happen “in the equivalent of dramatic time.”  He was fascinated by the difference between real and theatrical time, he said, and kept looking for ways “to make something a real event in the theatre.”

Also starting with Children, Shapiro, invoking the actor-audience contract, made “the audience the active participant that connects the dots,” his application of great Russian stage and film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898-1948) Theory of Attractions as Shapiro understood it from Meyerhold (see my article on 31 January 2010). 

As New Leader critic Albert Bermel (1927-2013) noted, “Around and above the playing area . . . stretches a rectangle of scaffolding with plushy mattresses.  Loafing on them, spectators unavoidably become the gods looking down on their would-be worshipers,” with, as Shapiro put it, “the actors . . . always doing everything for the audience hoping the audience would love them and give them favor.” 

It is also another tenet of Mac Wellman’s poetic theater, paralleling Shaliko, that the performance contract draws the spectator and the performer together in an experience that “recapitulates . . . the actual creative moment” because it highlights choices and the “audience is always involved with choice per se; is always confronted with a delectiary of potential choices, aesthetic, ethical, and ultimately political.” 

In what Shapiro called “a wrestling match with the passivity of the audience,” Shaliko strove to “enter into a relationship” with its audience “and try to get them to play their parts.”  This precept can also be traced back to Grotowski and Shapiro’s earliest contacts with him.  At the time of the Theater Laboratory’s first New York visit (October-December 1969), Grotowski pointedly invoked Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa (1885-1947), his only acknowledged antecedent, who he said “treated acting as a human experience that exists not for the public, but vis-à-vis the public.”

Actors On Their Work

[The backstory of “Brief But Spectacular,” a weekly series that premièred on NewsHour in 2015, begins with creator Steve Goldbloom, the creator and host of the original comedy news show for PBS, “Everything But the News,” and his longtime producing partner Zach Land-Miller who conduct every interview off-camera and off-screen.  (The segments are all two to four minutes long and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.)  Each Thursday, “Brief But Spectacular” introduces NewsHour viewers to original profiles; these short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  These have included household names like actors Alec Baldwin and Carl Reiner, artist Marina Abramović,  and activist Bryan Stevenson.  Topics have included comedian, writer, and director Jill Soloway (Amazon’s original series Transparent) on gatekeepers in Hollywood, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates on police reform in America, Abramović on the art of performance, author Michael Lewis on finding disruptive characters, performers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the rise of their hit Comedy Central series Broad City, engineer Jason Dunn on creating the first 3-D printer in space, and many more.]

“BRYAN CRANSTON ON BEING READY FOR LUCK”
by Bryan Cranston

[Actor Bryan Cranston delivered this “Brief But Spectacular” essay on the PBS NewsHour on 1 November 2018.]

Oscar-nominated actor Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as Walter White in “Breaking Bad” [2008-13 on American Movie Classics (AMC)], didn’t get his big break until age 40, when he was cast in the family TV sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” [2000-06 on the Fox Network] Now, he’ll be playing the role of Howard Beale in the upcoming Broadway production of “Network” [Belasco Theatre, 6 December 2018-8 June 2019, for a limited run; 2019 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play]. He shares his brief but spectacular take on an unusual career trajectory and the role of luck.

Judy Woodruff: Oscar-nominated [2016, for playing Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo] actor Bryan Cranston is best known for his Emmy-winning role as Walter White in the TV series “Breaking Bad.”

But, as he explains in tonight’s Brief But Spectacular episode, it took him some luck to get there.

Starting next Saturday, Cranston will be playing the role of Howard Beale in the Broadway production of “Network,” based on the famous [1976] film.

Bryan Cranston: The first thing I look for when I read a script is, does the story move me?

What I truly love about this, and when I talk to audiences about anything I have done or any other movie or stage piece, is that the audience is always right. However you felt, however you reacted to something is always right. That’s how you felt.

And it’s remarkable how you can sit next to someone and watch a movie. I could be weeping, and they’re like, eh. It’s like, really? They say, yes, it missed me.

The only failure is if you move an audience to nothing, to boredom. If they are indifferent about what they just experienced, whether it’s a painting or a recital or a singer or a dancer or a play, if they are, I feel nothing throughout, then we failed. Then we failed.

Actors come to town, to New York or Los Angeles or London, and they say, you know, I’m going to give it a shot. I’m going to give it a year and see if I can become successful.

And to those, I want to say, I can save you a year of your time. If you think that this is something that you can carve out some arbitrary amount of time to achieve certain things, this is not for you. This is a lifetime.

When you first start out as an actor, your answer to any question is yes. Do you want to? Yes, I want to do that.

I started out in 1979 doing background work as an extra. Angry mob. Drunken frat boy. Reckless driver. And then, when you first get that break where you actually have a name, Steve, wow, I actually have a name, I’m Steve, you feel like you have progressed to some degree.

There’s no career that has ever been achieved in entertainment — I truly believe this — without a healthy dose of luck. Someone said, OK, kid, I will read your script, or, all right, you want to audition? Come in. Do it right now.

And then you got to be ready. Celebrity is a byproduct of what I do and what I like to do. It’s not what I was after. I was a working actor. Things were fine. I was paying my bills, leading a very middle-class economic life. And then I got a lucky break at age 40 and was cast in “Malcolm in the Middle.”

At 50, I got an even bigger break when I was cast as Walter White on “Breaking Bad.”

That was my trajectory. It came when it was supposed to come. And that’s the interesting thing about luck. It doesn’t work on your timetable. It works on its own.

My name is Bryan Cranston, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on being an actor.

[After appearing in this “Brief But Spectacular” segment, Bryan Cranston starred in the TV miniseries Your Honor in 2020-21 on the Showtime cable network.  For his performance, he received a 2021 Golden Globes nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television.  Cranston also starred as President Lyndon Johnson in All The Way on Broadway from 6 March to 29 June 2014.  He later performed the play on HBO as a TV movie in 2016.]

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“ADRIENNE C. MOORE’S BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR TAKE ON THE CHARACTERS IN HER LIFE”
by Adrienne C. Moore 

[Actress Adrienne C. Moore’s “Brief But Spectacular” appearance on the PBS NewsHour was on 27 November 2019.] 

Adrienne C. Moore is an actress best known for her role in the Netflix TV series “Orange is the New Black.” [The series streamed on Netflix from 2013 to 2019.] During her first theater performance, she immediately noticed the way the show affected the audience emotionally. Moore opens up about drawing inspiration from her upbringing in Atlanta, the impact her father had on her and her Brief But Spectacular take on the characters of her life.

Judy Woodruff:  Tonight’s Brief But Spectacular features performer Adrienne C. Moore, an actress best known for her role in “Orange Is the New Black.”

She opens up here about pulling characters from her upbringing in Atlanta and the impact her father had on her.

This is part of Canvas, our continuing covering of arts and culture.

Adrienne C. Moore:  What I love about acting and being in front of people is, honestly, seeing their expressions.

My first production that I can remember was “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” in Nashville, Tennessee. [Moore is referring to a stage adaption by the author of Barbara Robinson’s 1971 novel of the same title.  Moore was six when she appeared in the production.]  I had no lines, just the little chorus parts. But that gave me a chance to look at every single person in the audience during the show and seeing them smile, and laugh, and have feelings and emotions.

And from that moment on, I said, I want to do this for the rest of my life.

“Orange Is the New Black” came about just like any other audition. They called me in for Black Cindy. Immediately, when I read it, I said, oh, my gosh, I know this girl. To me, she represented a lot of girls that I had run across when I’d moved to Atlanta, just very fiery and speak their minds, and pop their fingers, and roll their eyes, and roll their heads, and just tell their truth.

And so, when I read her, I said, I think I could embody her pretty well.

[A scene from the show:] Of course she ain’t smiling. She got screwed by me, by — by everybody. Suzanne, everything is broken and life is unfair. When are you going to learn that?

The play that I did in Shakespeare in the Park was called “Taming of the Shrew.” [The Public Theater production, in which Moore played Tranio, was in June-July 2016.] I got to work with Phyllida Lloyd, who is a phenomenal director. And I was always afraid of Shakespeare, iambic pentameter, and just going up on a line and all that kind of stuff.

But she really taught me how to own the language and, in that ownership, how to own the character. And once I got past that fear, I had the most amazing time.

What was so revolutionary about that experience was that I lost my dad literally in the same time that I was doing that show. And so I was experiencing incredible highs and incredible lows at the same time.

But one of the things that my dad taught me and told me before he passed was happiness. And so that’s the thing that I always try to embody in my work and in my life and in who I am.

I feel like, when I’m in the pocket with something, I will sometimes hear this little chime or this a little ding somewhere off in the distance, and I feel like it’s my dad being like, you got it. You’re on the point, girl.

My dad was very proud of me, of his children, because one of the things he always said was, do what makes you happy. And a lot of times, when I get in very confusing places in my life, and I don’t know what choice to make, I always think about what he said, which is, do what makes you happy.

And so that’s how I make my decisions. I don’t question. I just go inside of myself. And I say, well, what will make me happy in this moment? Because that’s what my dad taught me.

My name is Adrienne C. Moore, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on all the characters of my life.

Judy Woodruff:  And you can watch additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web site, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/brief/.

[Adrienne C. Moore appeared in Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf at the Public Theater in October-December 2019, which won the 2020 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival, Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play, and Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.]