Unlikely Human Beings

This spring A.R.T. is presenting the world premiere production of Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard’s When the World was Green (A Chef’s Fable), as part of its A.R.T. New Stages series. The production, which is also directed by Chaikin and features veteran A.R.T. actor Alvin Epstein, was first seen at the Atlanta Olympic Arts Festival last summer and later ran at The Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York in association with Signature Theatre Company.

It is difficult to imagine a less likely pair of collaborators than Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard. One an erudite, experimental New York director, the other a reclusive playwright-cum-film star, their sustained theatrical partnership has produced some of the boldest dramatic texts of the late twentieth century.

Chaikin and Shepard first met in 1964, not long after Chaikin had founded the Open Theatre, one of New York’s most influential avant-garde performance groups. Shepard had recently come to New York from California and was waiting tables to support his playwriting habit.

The drama critic Gordon Rogoff was working with the Open Theatre when Shepard first appeared at a rehearsal. “He was gauche and charming,” recalls Rogoff, “without a trace of attitude. I asked him what he did, and he said he was a playwright. I think he said he’d already written around seventy plays.” Shepard was twenty-one at the time.

Although Shepard never served as one of the Open Theatre’s resident playwrights, he often attended rehearsals as an observer, and the plays he wrote at the time were clearly influenced by the group’s improvisational performance techniques. It was at the Open Theatre that Alvin Epstein first met Shepard and Chaikin. “I never participated, but several of my friends were members of the Open Theatre, and I watched as many rehearsals as I could,” he remembers.

Epstein had himself recently returned from Paris, where he had lived, trained, and worked for many years. “When I arrived in New York I was instantly very lucky,” he says. “I immediately had a career. The Open Theatre was not a way to make a living, and although I had a lot of sympathy for what they were doing and really wished I could take part, I was always engaged in commercial work. To perform with them you needed to be there every day, and that was just impossible.”

When the Open Theatre disbanded in 1973, Chaikin formed a workshop, the Winter Project, and asked Shepard to submit texts for his actors to explore. After some hesitation, Shepard provided a speech and a song, and his collaboration with Chaikin was born.

Two dramatic compositions quickly followed, Tongues in 1978 and Savage/Lovein 1979. Though developed separately, the pieces were produced together at The New York Public Theatre in November 1979, and they are now generally regarded as complementary works. The scripts are texts for performance rather than formal plays. They both grew from a series of improvisation exercises on abstract themes (“speaking in the voices of the tortured” for Tongues, and “love and lovers” in the case of Savage/Love). Each of the texts required Chaikin to recite a sequence of elliptical poems and speeches, to which Shepard improvised a percussion accompaniment.

Much of the work of these early collaborative projects is essentially an extension of techniques pioneered by Chaikin and the Open Theatre a decade before. In performance pieces such as Terminal andThe Serpent: a ceremony, the actors of the Open Theatre had sought to investigate the relationship between speech, speaker, and listener, “to tell words or sing words and to listen to each other. To see what could be heard in words spoken or sung,” as Chaikin wrote Shepard in 1977.

Shepard, too, had become fascinated with the fundamental nature of the speech act, in which the physical sensation of articulating language is divorced from the meaning of words. “I’m still obsessed with this idea that words are pictures,” he told Chaikin, “and that even momentarily they can wrap the listener up in a visual world without having to commit themselves to revealing any other meaning. The sounds and rhythms seem to support these images and bring feeling into it.”

Both Tongues and Savage/Lovewere met with considerable critical acclaim wherever they were produced, but by the early 1980s the constraints placed on Shepard by his twin careers, playwriting and acting, required him to withdraw from the project. Chaikin, too, found himself increasingly in demand as both an actor and a director, and it was four years before their schedules enabled them to work together again.

In 1984, A.R.T.’s Artistic Director, Robert Brustein, invited Shepard and Chaikin to come to Cambridge. They spent four weeks in the Dance Studio of the Loeb Drama Center, developing material that would eventually find a place in their third formal collaboration, The War in Heaven, but the visit was not a happy one. Shepard’s recent marriage to the actress Jessica Lange had made him the target of intense media scrutiny. Fans and students surrounded him every time he ventured into Harvard Square, and camera crews swarmed outside the Beacon Hill house where the couple was rumored to be lodging.

Finally, the strain became too great. Threatening to shoot one of the more persistent paparazzi, Shepard resigned from the project, threw his bags and hunting rifles into his waiting pickup truck (ever since a horrific plane journey in 1965 he has refused to fly), and disappeared.

Only weeks after the aborted project in Cambridge, Chaikin’s health, never robust, began to deteriorate rapidly, and in May 1984, his heart failed. During the surgery that followed, he suffered a stroke that left him severely aphasic.

It was ten years before Chaikin sufficiently recovered the use of his speech to begin directing again. His production of When the World was Greenmarks a full return to form, both as a director and a collaborative playwright. According to Alvin Epstein, Chaikin’s powers of communication within the rehearsal hall are remarkable, despite the disruption to his speech patterns caused by aphasia. “There were times when we had to use guesswork, but not often,” he says. “It seems from observing him that Joe tends to find words through concepts. Often he’ll say the opposite of what he means, because he’s grabbing hold of the concept, not the word. If he wants you to move to the left or to the right, the concept is one of direction, so he’ll say ‘right’ when he means ‘left.’ As soon as it comes out of his mouth he’ll realize the mistake, and he’ll stop and reconnect, and say ‘left.’ Once you get the hang of it, it’s very easily understood.”

Although Shepard was present throughout the rehearsal process, it was Chaikin who communicated most directly with the actors. “Joe did all the speaking, and when Sam wanted to say something he would talk to Joe first. He was very careful not to appear to be directing the play or taking over in any sense.

“I think Sam is in awe of Joe,” says Epstein. “He isn’t in any way shy but he admires Joe’s mind, his talent. They certainly seem like unlikely collaborators, indeed they’re unlikely human beings to have become such good friends. They’re so entirely different from each other. And yet there’s a real sense of oneness about them.”

For Epstein, rehearsing When the World was Greenwas an enormously rewarding process, thanks in part to Shepard’s willingness to collaborate not only with Chaikin but with the actors. “In his own way, Sam Shepard is as much of a collaborator as a playwright can be,” he says. “The first time I had something to say to Sam about the text, something I thought wasn’t clear or should be changed, or whatever, I felt apologetic about approaching him. But he immediately made it clear that that was the way he liked to work. There was basically nothing you couldn’t say or suggest to him. He is anxious to listen, probably because he is also an actor, and he has a great respect for what an actor might think or feel about a role.”

As is the case in Shepard and Chaikin’s three other projects, live music plays an important part in the staging of When the World was Green. “We worked with two different pianists, one in Atlanta, and one in New York,” says Epstein. “In Atlanta the pianist improvised a score during rehearsal which stayed loose even during performances. He used to play a sort of suggestive underscoring, and the piano almost became another character. In New York the original pianist wasn’t available, so they found another — Woody Regan. This time, Sam worked very closely with him and developed the score that he wanted. Sam has very definite musical ideas, and the new score will actually be published with the text of the play.”

When the World was Greenhas only two characters, an old man who was once a superb chef, Epstein’s part, and a young reporter, played by Amie Quigley, who comes to interview him in the prison where he has been locked up for many years after poisoning a man he mistook for his cousin. Their eight conversations are interspersed with a sequence of monologues in which both characters recall incidents from their childhoods, linking together to form a tender narrative of regret and loss.

Epstein admires the play greatly and feels a tremendous affinity with the part of the Old Man. “When I read it for the very first time,” he says, “there didn’t seem to be a loose end in it. I immediately believed that I understood everything that was happening in this man’s world, and I found myself crying. It was as if I understood his life absolutely. He has a great passion, the passion of a master chef, which has been constantly distorted and distracted, until at the end of his life he has an epiphany, when suddenly he realizes that he no longer has to compromise. It’s the greatest thing that could happen to anyone, the happiest ending possible, almost as if the skies were opening up, like a benediction.”

When the World was Green marks the return of Shepard and Chaikin to American theatre and to Cambridge. The A.R.T. is delighted to be hosting the world premiere production, which opens on March 26 at the Hasty Pudding Theatre and plays for only fifteen performances.

Gideon Lester is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.