[I’ve
written about a number of performances directed by Leonardo Shapiro, founder
and artistic director of New York City’s Shaliko Company, since I started Rick On Theater—too many
now to enumerate here. I knew Leo for
just about a decade before his death at just over 51—though our relationship
was mostly professional.
[I
ended up publishing a profile of Leo and his company in TDR in 1993 (“Shapiro and
Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony”), in preparation for which I shadowed him for
a couple of months and interviewed him six times (plus two other times before
that and one more afterwards).
[In
1987, Leo and Shaliko staged a very adult version of an original Punch-and-Judy
puppet play. It was only the second
Shaliko production I saw, coming less than a year after I first met the
director. That happened at the 1986
Theatre of Nations international theater festival in Baltimore. Leo had brought his production of The Yellow House, a play
drawn from the letters of artist Vincent van Gogh, and I was covering the
festival for Directors Notes, a stage directors’ newsletter, and TDR. Leo was one of the artists I interviewed for
the articles.
[I
had loved Yellow
House and began following Shaliko’s work.
Punch! was the company’s next show. I was still impressed with Leo’s directing
and the techniques of Shaliko. I took a
year’s teaching job in upstate New York after that, but as soon as I got back
to the city in 1990, I contacted Leo. He
was just starting work on what he hoped would be his definitive production of Strangers,
which had only been workshopped up to then, and he asked me to be his
dramaturg; I said yes, of course.
[That
project aborted because Leo couldn’t find the funding, but I helped him in a
minor capacity on his anti-Gulf War protest piece, Collateral Damage: The
Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars). That project, staged at La MaMa in June 1991,
featured a number of well-known downtown artists, both writers and performers,
as contributors—plus Vanessa Redgrave.
[Then
Richard Schechner, the editor of TDR, who’d been one of my teachers at NYU’s
Department of Performance Studies, called me and asked me to write the profile
of Leo and Shaliko. Leo, it seems, had
recommended me and since I’d written for Richard and TDR before—most
recently that 1986 TON report—Richard agreed.
[I
hung around Leo in the Shaliko office, at his classes for the Trinity/La MaMa
Performing Arts Program he ran for Hartford, Connecticut’s Trinity College, and
at rehearsals for two shows, the third mounting of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son and
the première of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven (which was retitled Going
to Iraq after that production).
[Soon
after the TDR
article came out, Leo retired from New York theater and moved to New Mexico,
where he’d spent 1969-71 doing guerilla theater, in 1993. He wrote and then collaborated with a young
Albuquerque company to produce Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play that
meant a great deal to him both personally and artistically.
[In
July 1993, Leo was diagnosed with inoperable bladder cancer. The Seagull premièred in Albuquerque in September
1996 and then traveled to Baltimore, where Shaliko first performed 23 years
earlier, in November. Leo couldn’t come
east with his young cast; he was too ill, but he kept in contact with them by
fax and e-mail.
[Leo
Shapiro died on 22 January 1997, two weeks after his 51st birthday, at the home
he built with his son, Spartacus, in Vallecito, New Mexico—up in the Sangre de Christo
Mountains, sacred to the Taos Pueblo Indians whom he’d come to admire a quarter
of a century earlier.
[A
memorial service was held at the La MaMa Annex on 1 April; I was invited to
give the précis of Leo’s career. Judy
Dworin, chair of the Dance and Theater Department of Trinity College when Leo ran
the Trinity/La MaMa Program (1986-92), established the Leo Shapiro Memorial
Fund at the college.]
PUNCH!
The Shaliko Company
(New York)
La MaMa E.T.C.
2-31 May 1987
Political statements were in The Shaliko Company’s stars in
1987. So were performances in mask. Concurrent with Mystery History Bouffe
Goof (see “Speaking Truth To Power” on Rick On Theater, posted on 17
August 2018), Leonardo Shapiro’s experimental theater company, based in New
York City’s East Village, was mounting Punch!, adapted from an anonymous
1827 Punch-and-Judy puppet play.
(John Payne Collier [1789-1883] published the text of a Punch-and-Judy
show from 1827, illustrated by George Cruikshank [1792-1878] and transcribed
largely from the performance of an Italian punchman called Giovanni Piccini [1745-1835;
his first name was anglicized to George when he came to London in 1779]. It’s the earliest known script of a Punch-and-Judy
puppet play in English.)
Created in rehearsal by production director Shapiro (1946-97)
in collaboration with choreographer Nina Martin and actors Elena Nicholas (the
professional name of Elena Prischepenko), Cristobal Carambo, and Michael
Preston, the performance was “a physical theater piece created as an
investigation of violence and escapism.”
In Shapiro’s production, the play opened with ”The Star
Spangled Banner” playing before the show (and the violence) starts. Sometimes, a spectator stood for the anthem.
To demonstrate the theme “deconstruct[ing] the romance of
violence, to make murder seem ugly and hard and not at all fun,” the Punch!
company passed out realistic-looking toy pistols before the show’s
opening. The spectators accepted the guns
“gleefully” (as one of the Edinburgh reviewers characterized it). Once armed, these grown-ups delighted in
shooting indiscriminately at one another.
Shapiro described this sequence in an interview:
So, Michael [Preston] would change
the cowboy-and-Indian play [in the original version] to “Kill the Niggers,” and
he would get his whole half of the audience shouting “Kill the nigger” while
they were shooting at Punch in the other half.
And one time in Scotland, we had this group of white South Africans that
really got into it. It was very
disturbing. I mean, there were times
when we were unleashing forces that were a little beyond what we were able deal
with.
Revealed behind a screen made of current newspaper clippings
of stories of violence and mayhem (at Edinburgh, Shapiro used coverage of the
Hungerford massacre, which occurred about two weeks prior to the Punch! performances),
the set, representing contemporary urban locales, was a human-sized puppet
theater designed by Shapiro and painted in primary colors by Goro Fujii, a
Japanese artist, installationist, and costume and set designer, and the actors
wore brightly colored Commedia-like half-masks.
(Costumes for Punch! were designed by Debra Tennenbaum.)
(The Hungerford massacre was a series of random shootings in
Hungerford, Berkshire, in England on 19 August 1987, when Michael Robert Ryan,
an unemployed part-time antique dealer and handyman, fatally shot 16 people,
including his own mother, and wounding 15 others, before committing suicide. The shootings remain one of the worst firearms
atrocities in UK history.)
The scenario of Shaliko’s adaptation of the Punch-and-Judy
script, which ran a half an hour in performance (contrary to a remark by
Shapiro quoted below, which was actually made when the production was still in
development), was traditional: in a series of short scenes, Punch throws his
baby out the window, beats Judy to death, does the same to other characters, assaults
a policeman, tricks the executioner into hanging himself, and finally defeats
the devil (who turns out to be a nuclear bomb).
The cast was made up of the three actors who switch characters
(which include Punch, Judy, Scaramouch, and Polly, among other recognizable
figures) randomly from scene to scene. Lawrence
R. Harris of Stages labeled the production “a pint-size theatre of
cruelty,” citing “the high-pitched voices, the cartoon like [sic] sets,
the loud costumes, the repetitive dialogue, and the exaggerated violence.”
The violence wasn’t cartoon-like or dance-like, but
“sickeningly” realistic. It was, though,
accompanied by circus music from a calliope.
(The music was designed by Phil Benson with help from Michael Sansonia and
Daniel Schreier, who also created the soundscape.)
Harris described
the wife-beating scenes as leaving Judy “moaning on the floor spitting blood
and possibly teeth.” In The Nation,
Thomas M. Disch reported it as “an assault presented at great length and with
all the veristic detail that Nina Martin’s fight choreography could bring to
bear.”
The scenes were often reenacted, sometimes multiple
times. The one in which Punch beats his
wife to death was first performed by Punch as a puppeteer using two dolls—with
the identical dialogue as the later version.
In the puppet shows within the performance, as the
puppet-theater picture frame descended, Carambo as Punch picked up the Punch
and Judy dolls to perform the episode when he “dropped [the baby] out at window.” The doll Punch was GI Joe in a sleeveless olive-drab
‘T’ and fatigue pants and Judy was Barbie with Farrah Fawcett tresses and a
pink mini.
After each scene was presented, Shapiro had the actors stand
staring coldly at the audience from behind their Commedia half-masks as if
silently indicting us for some terrible crime—the crime of complicity by our
silence and inaction about the violence.
Finally, Punch broke into a demonic giggle and the play
continued with the next scene.
Masks, which the director included on a list of artistic and
personal influences he typed up for me in 1992, had been an interest of
Shapiro’s from very early—not least, to be sure, because of the Zuni shalakos,
the Native American gods and their ceremonial representations (see “‘May You Be
Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010; I also have a
post on “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011).
Masked performance was part of the theatrical philosophies
of many of Shapiro’s influences such as Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1893-1930), William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Arden (1930-2012),
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and, of course, Peter Schumann (b. 1934) and the
Bread and Puppet Theater. Furthermore, one
of Shapiro’s earliest training influences, Carlo Mazzone-Clementi (1920-2000), was
a mask expert as well as a teacher and director of Commedia dell’Arte.
Aside from the transformative nature of masks, to which both
anthropologists and theater people testify, masks and puppets remove performance
from the realm of the ordinary and raise it to the level of myth and
ritual. Masks remind us, theater critic Edwin
Wilson asserts, “that we are in a theater, that the act going on before our
eyes is not real in a literal sense, but is rather a symbolic or an artistic
presentation.”
Then there are the Brechtian aspects of masks—that they
distance the actor from the character and the spectator from the actor—and
their inherent magic, a subject that had fascinated Shapiro from his
childhood. (Frequent readers of ROT will
recall that Brecht was one of Shapiro’s two principal inspirations; the other
was Jerzy Grotowski.)
Aside from the almost mystical effects masks are said to
have on the wearer, a phenomenon to which many maskers such as Nobel laureate
Dario Fo (1926-2016) have attested, there’s the very magical fact that masks
are dead things, inanimate objects that take on the appearance of life. Furthermore, as Fo affirmed, masks require
actors to tell the truth, one of Shapiro’s most fiercely-followed
principles. Fo, whom Shapiro had
consulted for Punch!—and whom he even asked to play the title
role—explained:
Because the mask cancels the prime
element—the face, with all the expressions we formulate and employ with such
ease—used to give expression to any form of mystification. When the face is removed from the equation,
people are compelled to speak in a language free of formulas and of fixed
stereotypes—in the language of the hands, of the arms and of the fingers. No one is accustomed to lying with their
body. We never bother to check the
gestures we make while speaking.
All these attributes of masked acting were certainly
important to Shapiro, but possibly as important was the fact that from the
audience’s standpoint, as philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)
writes, “The mask is not so much pictorial as participatory.” A former professor of religion and culture, Ronald
L. Grimes (b. 1943) observes that “audiences may, in fact, be the real animator
of masks and maskers.”
As in puppetry, a closely allied art, we see that the
audience must imbue the mask with life in order for there to be a show. Psychoanalyst Eric Neutzel (b. 1950) maintains,
“The audience projects something onto the object,” which, he declares, “doesn’t
exist alone.” “The audience is
complicit,” responded master puppeteer Roman Paska (b. 1951), and Sears A.
Eldredge (b. 1936), a writer on masks, explains, “The audience’s imaginations
must be engaged to complete the transformation” from inanimate object to living
character. In Shapiro’s practice of
making theater with the audience, not just for it, requiring the spectators
themselves thus to vivify the performance doubtlessly attracted him.
Other attributes of masks that align with Shapiro’s artistic
interests include the fact that masks are works of visual art incorporated into
the art of theater, an implication of the director’s efforts to amalgamate many
arts into his performances, and the freedom masks allow for actors to engage in
“testimony” (see “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September
2013; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/09/acting-testimony-role-vs-character.html)
while the masks provide the necessary character expression.
If masks immediately communicate character information to
the audience, as J. L. Styan (1923-2002), an English writer on literature and
theater, posits, actors are freer to express their own ideas or comment on the
characters’ actions in the way that Shapiro—and Brecht—wanted: to speak to the
audience directly “about what matters to them both in that moment” (emphasis
original). This phenomenon functions
along the lines of what playwright, actor, teacher, and theater writer Michael Kirby
(1931-97) calls “nonmatrixed representation” where the mask “represents
something or someone” while the performer does not act or actively depict a
character.
In Punch!, for instance, with the actor’s Commedia
half-mask and costume identifying Punch by an iconography familiar to Western
audiences for over two centuries, Cristobal Carambo didn’t have to develop the
character for the audience. They already
knew what to expect, so the actor could focus on making the statements he and
the director wanted to make through the play—that is, play his “role” (see the
second part of the above-referenced “Acting: Testimony & Role vs.
Character”)—without losing the duality Shapiro aimed for and which masks
provide.
Except for a few interpolations (“Shoot the nigger!”—Carambo
is Afro-Cuban—and “You look all right.
Here’s another!”—the latter an alleged quotation of Bernhard Goetz, the
so-called Subway Vigilante
who shot four black youths he thought were about to attack him on a New York
City subway less than three years before Punch! was produced), the text
of Punch! was taken verbatim from the pre-Victorian puppet play that
delighted children for generations.
Shaliko’s Punch!, however, was no children’s
amusement. As premièred at La MaMa
Experimental Theatre Club, where I saw it, from 2-31 May 1987 (and later
presented at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, in August, and the Tron Theatre,
Glasgow, Scotland, in September), it was loud and aggressive, assaulting the
audience’s senses and, sometimes, their sensibilities (but never their persons).
According to cast member Michael Preston, who later toured as one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers from 1991 until 2000, the production was
“relentless on our bodies”: “There was no let-up,” he said, and recounted that
he’d injured his knee and that the repeated sharp gunshots had damaged
Carambo’s hearing.
Co-developer Nina
Martin recounted that Shapiro had taken the cast and staff to Madison Square
Garden “to witness professional wrestling” as preparation for the work.
The Nation reviewer observed that “Elena Nichols as
Judy is put through more onstage punishment than anyone since the Marine
prisoners in The Brig back in 1963.”
Preston and Carambo “are also knocked about, slammed to the floor and put
through a wide variety of wringers.”
A telling reaction was that of Marilyn Zalkan, whose
introduction to Shaliko’s work had been Punch! months before she became
a student in Shapiro’s Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program and about a year
before she became Shaliko’s administrator.
A music student with no experience in any kind of theater, much less the
bold, physical, political work of an avant-garde company like Shaliko, Zalkan
at first hated the show. “It was just
really shocking and scary,” she confessed, “and I was afraid that everyone was
going to come up and talk to me—you know, the actors; the whole audience-participation
thing scared me.”
Then, after pondering the experience and learning something
of the theatrical world out of which Shaliko and Shapiro arose, she revised her
opinion: “Months later, I sort of
decided it was the best thing that I had ever seen. I had never seen anything like it.”
In part, Zalkan was expressing what Susanne Langer
(1895-1985), the art philosopher, means when she defines “beauty” as
“expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some
way. “Beautiful works may contain
elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes.
This interpretation, which may owe something to Heraclitus’
view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be
seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama
even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality
because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.
Upon
seeing Punch!, Zalkan experienced a revelation:
That’s the first time that I
really realized what theater’s supposed to do to an audience. It’s supposed to convey some kind of idea and
shock . . . . I don’t know whether it’s
shock value so much, but it’s supposed to really make people aware of something
and create some kind of reaction.
Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize
as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its
expressiveness.” One friend of artist Vincent
van Gogh (1853-90), for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was
so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and
unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or
beautiful” (ellipses original), and Zalkan’s bifurcated response to Punch!
indicates that recognition may come sometime after seeing the work, something
for which Punch!’s critics may not have allowed.
Punch! was panned by the Village Voice and ignored
by the New York Times (and all other New York City dailies), but
got 22 “raves” elsewhere in the U.S. and Scotland. Shapiro openly acknowledged that Punch! was
“not likeable” and, describing it as the company’s “nastiest, ugliest” play,
understood that some spectators wouldn’t appreciate it. But, the director insisted, “That is beside
the point.” According to Langer, whom
Shapiro read and occasionally quoted, works like Shaliko’s Punch!, among
others, draw their strength from those elements which makes them “alive and
therefore beautiful.”
Punch!, for all its violence, obscene language, and
confrontational tone, was just as powerful and moving as, say, The Yellow
House (1986; see my post on 9 February 2018), a piece about van Gogh and Shaliko’s
most aesthetically attractive production.
“Beauty is not identical with the normal,” writes Langer in words that
might easily have described Punch!, “and certainly not with charm and
sense appeal.”
Zalkan, who admitted to having actually been scared when she
saw this play, put it very succinctly: “I think about Punch!, and Punch!
is like real. Punch! is about
what life is about.”
It is noteworthy that McLuhan calls “good taste” “the first
refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most
obvious resource of the insecure” and notes, “It leaves out direct awareness of
forms and situations.” Richard
Kostelanetz (b. 1940) also submits in his 1968 book, The Theatre of Mixed
Means, that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at
first, be accepted as beautiful” and supporters of Shaliko contended that most
critics and the site reporters from the National Endowment of the Arts did not
apprehend this.
By extending the Commedia and puppetry of the original into
television situation comedies and popular films, Shaliko’s Punch!
exploited the “images of violence [that] become part of our imagination” by
making the audiences reflect on the use of violence as escapist entertainment. One of Shaliko’s recurring themes was the
deconstruction of the romanticization of violence—which in popular
entertainment is shown to have no real consequences and can even be seen as
funny.
Shapiro saw violence—domestic, racial, sexual, class—as a
ubiquitous presence in American life, from popular movies and television
programs including Batman, shoot-’em-up Westerns, and police shows,
where it’s used for escapism and entertainment, to military operations like the
U.S. invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and the 1990-91 war
against Iraq, where it had political, territorial, and commercial ends. In an essay he wrote shortly after the
Persian Gulf war, he states:
Twenty years ago, we stopped the
Vietnam War by mobilizing America’s sensitivities against the stupid and futile
waste of life. In the last two years, we
have, ourselves, murdered as many Americans on the streets and in our homes
with handguns as were killed in Vietnam.
Our society has become a blind juggernaut (“a pitiful giant”)
compulsively acting out oppression and abuse we refuse to acknowledge. Instead of creating vital cultural forums to
deal with our tsouris—the forums that created Euripides, the Kabuki, and
Ibsen—we hide our pain under the puerile displays of violence [and] arrested
sexuality of Terminator II or Thelma and Louise.
(Tsouris, more commonly spelled tsuris, is
Yiddish for ‘troubles,’ ‘suffering,’ or ‘problems.’)
This is close to the sentiment expressed by poet and artist William
Blake (1757-1827) in “On Virgil” (1822) when he observes that “a Warlike State
never can produce Art. It will Rob &
Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy
& Sell & Criticize, but not Make.” (Blake was on Shapiro’s list of influences. I discuss Blake’s use of words and images
together in his art in the section on him in “Words with Pictures / Pictures
with Words,” 16 September 2014.)
Of Punch!, Shapiro explained: “I was trying to
subvert the easy identification with the hero that makes the other characters
less real—which is . . . basically a revenge fantasy.” It’s, in part, another
vision Shapiro shared with Blake, who saw both war and the execution of
criminals as societally-sanctioned forms of murder.
There’s more than a hint here, too, of Shapiro’s
Situationist influence (see “Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3 February
2012): the drive to prevent the audience from allowing an active hero, a Rambo
or a Batman, or Thelma and Louise—or even a Hamlet or a Nora Helmer for that
matter—to do their living for them.
Furthermore, Shapiro said when he was planning the show,
“It’s about . . . the way that we identify with violence and why it is that
somebody can beat seven people to death in an hour and everybody thinks it’s a
scream.” This phenomenon’s a result, he
thought, of the remoteness of theater, which he saw as the original art form,
from film and television, which are “copies.” The farther the copy gets from the original,
the more cartoon-like and outrageous the action is, the less consequential it
seems to the spectator.
Audiences have become inured to violence because it’s become
“dehumanized,” as illustrated by Michael Preston’s report that his
film-oriented friends, looking for experiences “up on a screen that really
didn’t touch them,” were uneasy with Shaliko productions because “[t]hey don’t
like the hotness” of the encounter.
Langer speaks of the “degrees of intensity” of the artwork,
which directly corresponds to what both playwright Karen Malpede, who had
worked with Shapiro on several projects, and Preston said was so disturbing in
Shaliko’s work to some spectators, and we shall see that Shapiro referred to
this aspect of the content as “depth of intention.”
Theater, because it’s a more intimate experience, is more
emotionally demanding and intellectually rigorous, but it has gotten out of the
reach of most audiences not just financially, but psychologically because of
its demands in contrast to the electronic media.
“[T]his seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle so that
audiences are less and less able to deal with any kind of emotional complexity,
relational content, in fact with any of the great themes and subjects of art
and literature,” Shapiro lamented; “instead [popular entertainment] focuses
more and more narrowly on pseudo-paedomorphic revenge fantasies, with infinite
and infinitesimal masturbatory variations.”
In the director’s opinion, this desensitization and
alienation is no accident; the makers of films and television programs know
that their product is addictive and, just as the manufacturers of cigarettes
manipulate the nicotine content, the Hollywood establishment manipulates the
disconnect between action and its consequences.
The effect of this is that spectators are no longer able to
see themselves as “among [the] many real characters dealing with real communal
problems.” Unhappily, Shapiro had little
hope that new audiences would have “the sophistication or tools to deal with”
the manipulation: young people, he feared, “are less armed against it every
year.”
But it was not only Rambo images with which Shapiro
contended in Punch!. Among other
violent acts, Punch threw his baby out his apartment window, a vivid, grotesque
evocation of the sacrifice of children which Shapiro saw as universal in our
society and emblematic of much that is wrong with it.
The director saw that this was a theme he had pursued since
the start of Shaliko (1972), but it is, in reality, a theme that harks all the
way back to “Song in the Blood,” the Jacques Prévert poem the Appleseed Circus dramatized
at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1970, and even to 1967’s Brother, You’re Next,
in which the young draftee is encouraged by his father to go off to fight in
Vietnam so the father will not “lose my position in the community” (see “Song
in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009, and “Brother, You’re
Next,” 26 January 2010).
The theme even appeared in the plays in which Shapiro
participated while at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he
directed workshop productions of Jean Anouilh’s Medea (in which he also
appeared as Creon) in November 1964 and The Drapes Come by Charles
Dizenzo in May 1965. (Medea’s murder of
her children as punishment for their father, Jason, is well known; the latter
play is an absurdist appraisal of the consequences of the alienating
relationship of a mother and daughter.)
With Shaliko, Shapiro evoked this theme in their very first
production, Children of the Gods (1973), when Agamemnon sacrifices
Iphigenia in order to get a favorable wind from the gods; and since the
director saw that “issues about creativity and repression . . . often are
symbolized as the sacrifice of children by parents,” it appeared in Brecht’s The
Measures Taken (1974) when the Party sacrifices the Young Comrade on the
altar of political necessity, and again in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975; see “Staging
Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental?” 6 September 2014) when Mrs. Alving
sacrifices Oswald to preserve the secrets that eventually destroy her.
(After his production of Ghosts, Shapiro expressed
particular interest in staging Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, a play in which the
sacrifice of a child is at the very center.
Shapiro never had the opportunity to direct the play.)
He evoked the theme, too, in Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck
(1976; see “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 and 14 July 2020), The
Arbor by Andrea Dunbar (1983), Mark Roszovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son
(1985, 1990, 1992; see “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8
November 2015), and The Yellow House.
Literally, as in Children; psychologically, as in Kafka;
or metaphorically, as in The Yellow House, the killing of children had
been a common thread in Shaliko’s work and would form the central theme of
1990’s Strangers (see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014).
It also formed a theme in Shapiro’s life, from the
alienation he felt from his own father, who left Shapiro’s mother with
insufficient income to care for Leo and his older brother, Gary, while living
well himself, to his disillusionment with New York Shakespeare Festival (now The
Public Theater) founder Joseph Papp (1921-91), a man he regarded as his
surrogate father, when the producer fired him in 1977. (Shapiro’s relationship with Papp is touched
on in “The Misanthrope – The Musical,” 21 June 2021.)
There are clear echoes of his own background, too, in his
admiration for such figures as van Gogh, artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), Beat
poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-97), Vsevolod Meyerhold, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906),
and Tennessee Williams (1911-83), all of whom had difficult and even abusive
relationships with their fathers that could be seen as resulting in
loss-of-love issues.
In 1988, largely because of Punch!, Shaliko lost its
NEA Theater Program funding, followed by the loss or reduction of its grant
from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and most of its support
from corporations, foundations, and private sources.
As Shapiro put it, “[W]hat the NEA panelists so deeply
objected to is that we choose not to make theater as entertaining fiction, or
to develop the skills for doing that, but are pursuing this independent line of
inquiry.” He could have been referring
directly to Punch!
As Peter Brook (b. 1925), renowned British stage director, noted,
Shapiro’s kind of theater, “where a living confrontation can take place,”
generates a kind of “dangerous electricity” that governments, even in societies
in which other forms of expression like the press and the cinema are free,
instinctively fear.
Shapiro, however, saw the matter of form versus
content in simpler terms:
The notion that Shaliko was
de-funded for lack of “professionalism” or “quality” can only be sustained by
the argument that “quality” is an attribute of packaging—like the thick glossy paper in an expensive art
magazine. If, however, quality has to do
with depth of intention, craft . . ., originality, accuracy, or imagination—in
short, if quality has to do with the artistic function of telling the truth and
the “qualities” necessary to communicate it, rather than with the intention to
sell a product and the “quality” necessary to trick the consumer—then the
quality of Shaliko’s work must be recognized.
It’s because he and his company were finding “new and
effective formulations” to investigate issues of society, violence, race, and
sex in ways that turned out to be “personal and viscerally felt” by his
audiences, Shapiro believed, that “the ruling class” became scared and
responded with censorship and suppression.
Though Shapiro believed the rejection was based on “the
content and (political) nature of the work,” associates felt it was mostly due
to the site reporters’ misunderstanding of the principles of Shaliko work,
misinterpreting intentionally rough theater stressing process over product—what
Bonnie Marranca (b. 1947), co-founder and editor of PAJ: A Journal of
Performance and Art, describes in her 1977 book, The Theatre of Images,
as a “seams-showing quality of a work”—as ill-prepared and unprofessional.
Richard Kostelanetz further observes that both critics and
audiences are more willing to “acknowledge” familiar art than to consider
something they don’t understand. While
Shaliko was operating under Langer’s precept of beauty, these critics, its
supporters felt, were applying a more superficial criterion.
Some suggestion that Shapiro and his supporters were at
least in part correct may be gleaned from the contrast between the NEA
evaluation of Shaliko’s work and the critical reception of Punch!, the
show on which the Endowment had partly based its last decision. The Nation’s Disch, for instance,
described the production, clearly labeled a “work in progress” in the program,
as “a remarkable spectacle that ranges from chucklesome to breathtaking, and
from thought-provoking to off-putting” and predicted that it “has every chance
of becoming a classic of the New Vaudeville.”
On WBAI radio, a non-commercial, listener-supported radio
station in New York City, Rick Harris pronounced himself “very impressed” with
Shapiro and his company for a “very, very fine piece of work” which he declared
“theatrically inventive.” At the
Edinburgh Festival in August 1987, The Scotsman reported that Shaliko
and Punch!
connect the events of the old
legend with unvarnished, day-to-day truths, but also reveal its deep roots in
the subconscious and in popular culture. . . .
This is a harrowing brutal, sometimes gruesome piece, definitely not
children’s entertainment, but always performed with awesome skill and always
thoughtful and arresting.
After describing the production at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in
September as “most skilful [sic]” and the cast as “brilliant, acrobatic
and paradoxically charming,” the Glasgow Herald warned, “You won’t—if
you ever have done so—watch a Punch and Judy show again with amusement after
experiencing this production by La MaMa ETC and the Shaliko Company from New
York.”
Indeed, despite minor cavils about the occasional lag in
timing or energy, the reviewers of Punch! both in New York (save the Voice)
and in Edinburgh and Glasgow seemed to understand exactly what they were
seeing—they all noted that the presentation was still in development—appreciate
its point, and remark universally on the professionalism, skill, and
inventiveness of Shapiro’s troupe.
(Robert Massa wrote in the Village Voice’s brief
notice:
Only Goro Fujii’s inventive
life-size puppet set and the sculptural sound design by Daniel Schreier make
the production bearable. Shapiro has
taken the traditional Punch and Judy plot . . . and given it to three live
actors who arbitrarily switch roles over and over and reenact these events
countless times through over-cute dialogue . . ., in grating nasal voices at a
pitch that splits eardrums, leaping off-stage to growl in our faces.
(It likely wouldn’t have made any difference to Massa’s
estimation, but I’m bound to point out that the dialogue—the review-writer
quoted some lines—was directly from the 1827 text transcribed by Collier and
the “nasal” voice was an approximation of the traditional squawking puppet
voice, created in part by a device called a swazzle or swatchel which made
Punch sound as if he were talking through a kazoo.)
Furthermore, a response to a charge that Shaliko was stuck
back in the 1960s can be found in Rick Harris’s anecdote about his
step-daughter. Thinking Punch!
was a children’s play, he brought the ten-year-old girl with him. After Shapiro cautioned him about the
violence—the press release had bluntly warned that Punch! was not for
children—Harris sent her out. After the
performance, he, his wife, and her daughter went to the subway at Sheridan
Square where they encountered “an ugly, violent, bloody scene of confrontation.”
Harris pointed out the irony of this coincidence—sparing his
step-daughter theatrical violence only to witness it live in the station—but it
also demonstrates that Shaliko’s Punch!, far from dealing with
“left-over sixties” issues, was confronting immediate and actual societal
problems which ordinary citizens experience every day.
Peter Wynn of the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record,
who found Punch! “dazzlingly performed,” reported: “I found myself very
nearly sickened by the violence of the show.”
In the Voice, Massa observed: “Puppets can get away with a level
of cruelty live actors shouldn’t attempt,” and felt that the play “was
assaulting” the audience.
Several critics on both sides of the Atlantic reported that
some spectators fled the theater after early scenes of violence, though Shapiro
undoubtedly recognized this action as commensurate with his intent. He reported, “We lost half of the audience some nights when Punch beat Judy.”
As one Edinburgh reviewer observed, however, “Those who
walked out during the performance were not only rejecting an excellent
production, they were turning away from the cruel reality of this world.”
Is it possible that the critics were, ironically, less
“monoliterate,” to use Richard Kostelanetz’s term for culturally, artistically,
and especially theatrically “illiterate,” than were the site-reporters and
evaluators of the National Endowment for the Arts?
Or, perhaps, the Endowment officials really didn’t like what
Shaliko was telling them about American society—or were just afraid to support
it in the face of the right-wing onslaught of the culture-warriors Shapiro
called “Helms and Co.”
(“Helms and Co.” was a label Shapiro borrowed from
philosophy teacher Paul Mattick, Jr., who used it in his 1990 essay “Arts and
the State” in The Nation which Shapiro read and quoted.
(Shapiro used it to refer to late North Carolina Senator
Jesse Helms [1921-2008], former California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher [b.
1947], conservative columnist and commentator—and sometime presidential
candidate—Patrick J. Buchanan [b. 1938], the American Family Association’s
Reverend Donald Wildmon (b. 1938), Reverend Jerry Falwell [1933-2007] of the
Liberty Foundation, Reverend Pat Robertson [b. 1930] of the Christian
Coalition, and others who were campaigning against governmental arts support.
(Mattick, at least by implication, also includes in this
cabal the critics and writers who supported the efforts to curtail government
arts support or on whom the activists drew for authority in their judgments and
evaluations: conservative art critic Hilton Kramer [1928-2012], publisher of New
Criterion and conservative political commentator Samuel Lipman [1934-94],
then-New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato [b. 1937], former Illinois Congressman
Philip M. Crane [1930-2014], columnist William Safire [1929-2009], and others,
including organizations like Morality in Media [transformed into the National
Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2015], a watchdog organization; the Heritage
Foundation, a conservative think tank; and the John M. Olin Foundation [dissolved
in 2005] which provided funding and sinecures.)
The loss of the NEA Theater Program funding after Punch!
hurt Shaliko financially, of course, but it enraged Shapiro morally. “Isn’t the function of the artist supposed to
be to tell the truth?” he pleaded, echoing Congress’s very admonition to the
nascent NEA. “How can you blame him when
he does?”
In part because of the funding loss, but for reasons of
scheduling and space availability as well, neither The Yellow House nor Mystery
History Bouffe Goof, Shaliko pieces that Shapiro felt were still works in
progress, was remounted at La MaMa after the production of Punch! had
returned from Scotland.
(I was working with the director on Strangers, which
had previously only been staged at the Pennsylvania artists’ residency establishment,
the Yellow Springs Institute, as a work in development and in a workshop
production at the Washington Square Church in New York City, but the
production, planned for La MaMa, was cancelled because the funding couldn’t be
raised.)
As a response to Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro, published at
least seven articles or interviews—some of them quite vehement—between April
1990 and January 1992 focusing, at least in part, on the NEA and the issue of
arts funding and support.
In a letter to Robert Marx (b. 1950), a theater
administrator who was serving as director of NEA Theater Program at the time of
Shaliko’s defunding, Shapiro argued:
[Punch!] is a
controversial, densely layered, difficult and hopefully liberating work of
theatrical art. It is exactly the kind
of dangerous experimental, labor[-]intensive, non-commercial work that needs
and deserves to be subsidized in order to preserve and advance the integrity of
theater as an art form in America.
[If
I may, I’d like to make one personal comment here.
[In
his review in The
Nation, Thomas M. Disch made a final acknowledgment to one of the crew
members of the Shaliko production of Punch!. He wrote that “credit should also be given in
a department usually taken for granted: the stage manager Dana Rappaport and
his [sic] assistants deal with a profusion of props and cues at a tempo
that keeps them hopping as fast as the actors.”
[Dana
was a student of mine in middle school, some ten years or so before Punch! when I taught
theater at a Brooklyn private school. I
hadn’t seen her or heard from her (Disch got her gender wrong) since that
time—until I saw her name in the program the night I saw the show at La
MaMa. I stuck around a few minutes after
the performance ended and I reintroduced myself to Dana and said hello.
[I
guess we caught up a little—she was still on the job, of course—but it didn’t
lead to anything more. I didn’t see her
again and I have no idea what she went on to.
Such is life!]
