Eve Shapiro
Evelyn L. Shapiro (13 August 1930—1 December 2022) was a South Africa–born drama teacher and theatre director, who had a profound influence on generations of acting and opera-singing students in the UK and the USA.
Eve Shapiro was born on 13 August 1930 in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa[1] into a musical family in the city's small Jewish community.
She had an ambition to be an actor but, shortly after leaving school, in 1949 she was asked to direct a one–act play,[4] and, as she confessed in an interview towards the end of her life, at her then age "ignorance was bliss", and she agreed.
Fernald had three student-performed plays lined up to tour to Basel, Switzerland, and offered Shapiro one of them to direct, which was Village Wooing, by George Bernard Shaw.
[2][4] At the same time, Shapiro, openly lesbian,[8] began to share her life and an apartment in Park Crescent in Marylebone, London with her earlier stage management tutor at the academy, Dorothy Tenham.
[9] It was there that Shapiro first began her lifelong habit of inviting students to her home for coaching, to read and discuss passages from drama, particularly William Shakespeare, "dispense wisdom over tea and bake scones together".
Well over 2,000 aspiring actors applied for the two–year RADA acting course every year, but the academy had the capacity for an intake of only 20 or so every other term, resulting in 80 students under instruction at any one time.
During her time on the staff Shapiro was invited to return regularly to the works of Shakespeare, directing Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear among others of his plays.
Playwrights of the European continent were not forgotten, with works by, for instance, Luigi Pirandello (Henry IV and Six Characters in Search of an Author), Friedrich Schiller (Mary Stuart), Jean Anouilh (Antigone), Henrik Ibsen (The Lady from the Sea), Ivan Turgenev (A Month in the Country), Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and her Children) and Federico García Lorca (The House of Bernarda Alba).
Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha appeared under her direction, as well as more straight fair, like Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, William Inge's Picnic, and Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story.
Tennessee Williams was a perennial favourite, with productions of A Streetcar named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and The Night of the Iguana, and plays by Arthur Miller, such as The Crucible and Death of a Salesman.
[1] When Shapiro was due to return to London Schneider asked her to step in to direct final year students in Athol Fugard's South African play Boesman and Lena whose director had had to leave the production after only one week.
[18] Shapiro's work with the Juilliard Drama Division, similar to her experience at RADA, involved teaching, mentoring and directing acting students, the two dozen or so chosen each year from any of up to 2,000 applicants for a four–year course.
[19] Among the many students who came under her influence at Juilliard and who have since become familiar faces on stage, film and television were Viola Davis, Greg Jbara, Val Kilmer (at the time the youngest person to be admitted to the Drama Division),[20] Kevin Spacey (though he did not graduate)[21] Jessica Chastain, and Kelly McGillis who, struggling with her key role in the 1985 film Witness, "in the deep of the night ... calls her old acting teacher, Eve Shapiro, who says, "Trust yourself, Kelly.
"[22] In her time at Juilliard Shapiro directed more than 20 major drama productions with third and final year acting students, among them several plays by George Bernard Shaw (You Never Can Tell, Getting Married, Heartbreak House, Man and Superman, Misalliance, and Major Barbara), three by Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and Three Sisters), some classical fare like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, Henrik Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea and Hedda Gabler, Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, The Winter's Tale and Richard II by William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.
There was a sprinkling of more modern works, including Another Part of the Forest by Lillian Hellman, C. P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang, Artaud at Rodez by Charles Marowitz, and - a favourite of Shapiro's - Caryl Churchill's Top Girls.
Of her production of Top Girls, "a richly complex study of bourgeois feminism",[23] Shapiro relished "the intense positive atmosphere of rehearsals due to the deep connection the women have with the work".
The work chosen for the Juilliard Opera Center production was The Crucible by Robert Ward (based on Arthur Miller's 1953 play of the same name), its first New York presentation for 20 years.
Over the ensuing 30 years Shapiro directed numerous operas for the Vocal Arts Division including, notably, Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Susannah by Carlisle Floyd, Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola, Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Rape of Lucretia.
As well as directing, Shapiro continued as an acting teacher in the Vocal Arts Department,[25] but now working with students of opera rather than drama and helping them to integrate dramatic and musical ideas.
Among the many students in the Vocal Arts Division whose acting benefitted from Shapiro's teaching were Paul Appleby, Julia Bullock, Catherine Hancock, Isabel Leonard, Mariateresa Magisano, Erin Morley, Makiko Narumi, Takaoki Onishi, and Susanna Phillips.
"[32] Shapiro also worked regularly with the Bard College Conservatory of Music in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which launched a graduate program in Vocal Arts in 2006 under the leadership of American soprano Dawn Upshaw.
With a second home at Rhinebeck, conveniently close to Bard College, Shapiro joined the Vocal Arts faculty, teaching in the acting workshop and also conducting director's master classes.
In 2001 as a graduate and former academic staff member she was formally elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London[4] and in 2017 she was presented with the Juilliard President's Medal.
