SEEP Vol. 11 No.1 Spring 1991

Volume eleven no.
1
spring 1991
soviet
and
east european
performance
drama
theatre
film 7
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Con-
temporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre under the auspices
of the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA), Graduate
Center, City University of New York. The Institute Office is Room
1206A, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New
York, NY 1 0036. All subscription requests and submissions should
be addressed to the Editors of SEEP: Daniel Gerould and Alma Law,
CASTA, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West
42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
I
EDITORS
Daniel Gerould
Alma law
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Edward Dee
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chairman
Marvin Car1son
Leo Hecht
Martha W. Coigney
CASTA EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Richard Brad Medoff
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the
Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University
of New York.
Copyright 1991 CAST A
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsl etters
which desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials
which have appeared in SEEP may do so, as long as the following
provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact.
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint.
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editor of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy ...................... ................................................................. 4
From the Editors .................................................................................... 5
Events .................................................................................................... 6
"Tadeusz Kantor: A Brief Chronolgy" ................................................. 10
"Memory"
Tadeusz Kantor
translated by Michal' Kobiafka ............................................................. 18
"Tadeusz Kantor's labyrinths of Memory"
Michat'Kobiafka ................................................................................... 29
"There Was No Choice"
Zygmunt Hubner
translated by Jadwiga Koslcka ........................................................... 42
on the Stages of Ukraine 1990:
From Sholom Aleichem to Mykola Kulish"
L.arrissa M.L Zaleska Onyshkevych ................................................... 48
"Soviet Film"
Nicholas Rzhevsky ..................... ........................... ......... ..................... 58
"Glasnost on the the Cuyahoga:
The First Oeveland FHm Conference"
James H. Krukones .................................................... .. ....................... 61
REVIEWS
"A Light From the Easr
Melinda Jo Guttman .............................................................. 66
"Cerceau at the Arena
Leo Hecht. .............................................................................. 69
"Tango, by Slawomir Mrozek
Manticore Theatre, New York"
Joel Berkowitz ........................................................................ 72
3
Contributors ......................................................................................... 74
Playscripts in Translation Series ........................................... .............. 77
Subscription Polley ........... ............... ................. ......................... ......... 79
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no more
than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies. Please bear in
mind that all of submissions must concern themselves either with contemporary
materials on Soviet and East European theatre, drama and film, or with new
approaches to older materials in recently published works, or new performances of
older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions reviewing innovative perform-
ances of Gogol but we cannot use original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from foreign
publications, we do require copyright release statements.
We will also gladly publi sh announcements of special events and anything
else which may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully proofread.
The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Transliterations should follow the
Library of Congress system. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be
notified after approximately four weeks.
4
FROM THE EDITORS
We are devoting a major section of this issue of Soviet and
East European Performance to Tadeusz Kantor, who died in Decem-
ber 1990 as he was completing rehearsals of his new production,
Tomorrow is My Birthday. Kantor, whose career covers more than
fifty years, was one of the greatest twentieth-century theatre artists.
Anyone who has seen The Dead Class; Wielopole, Wielopole; Let
the Artists Die; or I Shall Never Return will always remember and
treasure the deeply moving images of a world in turmoil that evoked
not only Kantor's Eastern European heritage, but our entire age.
Kantor's Company will be coming to La MaMa in June with The Dead
Class and Tomorrow is My Birthday.
In addition to a chronology of Kantor's life and works and his
poem "Memory," we have also Included an excerpt from MichaY
Kobiatka's forthcoming book on Kantor, as well as a selection of
photographs from his theatre productions.
This Issue we welcome several new contributors to our ranks
including James H. Krukones reporting on last fall's Soviet-American
film conference in Cleveland, Ohio and Larrissa Onyshekevych, who
brings to our readers the latest news from the Ukrainian theatre.,
Daniel Gerould and Alma Law
5
EVENTS
CURRENT AND UPCOMING PRODUCTIONS
An American play, A Chekhov Concert, created by Sharon
Gans and Jordan Charney with Anatoly Smellansky of the Moscow
Art Theatre will be performed later this spring at the Moscow Art
Theatre, as well as the "Sovremennik," and Chekhov State Theatre,
also in Moscow; the St. Petersburg Salon Theatre in Leningrad; the
Georgian Film Actors' Studio Theatre In Tblisi; and at a conference of
cultural ministers in Cracow next June.
The play explores the relationships of Chekhov's characters
by blending scenes from The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three
Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.
The New York State Theatre Institute in Albany will present
Vasillsa, the Fair with book by Sofia Prokofleva and Irina Tokrnakova;
translated by Sabina Modzhalevskaya and Harlow Robinson;
adapted by Adrian Mitchell; music by Alia Lander, and directed by
Patricia Snyder from May 6 to 26.
A.s part of the New York International Festival of the Arts, the
State Theatre of Uthuanla wlll perform Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the
Joyce Theatre In Chelsea from June 8 to June 23.
According to La MaMa E.T.C . Tadeusz Kantor's company Is
scheduled to perform in New York City from June 11 to the 23 with
Dead Class the first week and Tomorrow Is My Birthday the second
week. The performances will run from Tuesday through Sunday.
The Phoenix Ensemble in New York will perform a collection
of short plays by Joe Plntauro at GITIS In Moscow in mid-June. In
return, a troupe from GITIS under the direction of Sergellssyev will
perform three one-act plays under the heading "Funny and Sad
Stories" from the end of September through the beginning of
October. The plays are based on three stories from Russian litera-
ture, The Barber by Chekhov, The Twelve Chairs, based on llf and
Petrov's story, and The Dragon, based on a story by Shukshin. The
performances will be held at the theatre of Hunter College in Manhat-
tan.
NOTES OF PAST PRODUCTIONS
The Moscow Studio Theatre, a repertory ensemble led by
Oleg Tabakov, recently completed a six-week tour In the United
States. The tour began February 1 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and
6 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 11, No. 1
included Philadelphia; St. Louis; Tuscan and Scottsdale, Arizona;
Fort Collins, Boulder and Colorado Springs, Colorado; Carbondale,
Illinois; West Lafayette, Indiana; and Purchase, Poughkeepsie and
Manhattan in New York.
The ensemble presented two works in repertory: Aleksandr
Galich's My Big Land and Aleksandr Buravsky's Teacher of Russian.
Both works were performed in Russian with simultaneous English
translation.
An English adaptation of Buravsky's play entitled, The Rus-
sian Teacher, adapted by Keith Reddin, was performed at the South
Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California from March 12 to
April14.
The Metropolitan Opera had its debut performance of Leos
Janacek's 1921 piece, Katya Kabanova, based on Ostrovsky's
The Storm, in February. The leading women characters were
portrayed by Gabriela Benackova and Leonie Rysanek. The produc-
tion was directed by Jonathan Miller and conducted by Charles
Mackerras, who conducted the London premiere 40 years ago.
The Magic Theatre of San Francisco presented Vaclav
Havel's The Temptation from February 12 to March 17. It was
directed by Harvey Seitter.
The BACA Downtown Theatre in New York presented The
Almond Seller by Oana-Maria Hock during March. The author, a
recent Romanian emigre, has written about the aftermath of the
December 1989 Romanian Revolution.
The Film Actors' Studio Theatre of Tbilisi had its American
premiere at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., from November
11 through November 14. The Georgian troupe performed Moliere's
Don Juan and a traditional Georgian tale, Bakula's Pig. The plays
were performed in Georgian, with synopses in English.
FILM
The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film presented a
series entitled "Czechoslovakia at a Crossroad" in December 1990.
This series of documentaries, shorts and features offered a rare
glimpse into life In Czechoslovakia during the tumultuous years just
before and after the invasion of that country by Warsaw Pact troops
in 1968. The feature films presented were Ucho (The Ear), a 1970
film by Karel Kachyl'la; Sprizneni Volbou (Elective Affinities) , Karel
Vachek's 1968 film, and Smutecni Slavnost (Funeral Ceremonies) by
7
Zdendk SlroyY from 1969. The short films were Ticho (Silence) by
Milan Peer from 1969; Jan vankmajer's 1965 film J.S. Bach-Fantasia
C-Mo/1 (J.S. Bach-Fantasy in C-Minor), and three films by Duan
Hanak, Prisiel k nam Old Shatterhand (Old Shatterhand Has Come to
See Us) from 1966,0sma (The Mass) from 1967, and a slightly longer
film from 1972, Obrazy Starebo Sveta (Pictures of the Old World).
In mid February, the Film Forum in New York presented a
double bill of Czech director Jiri Menzel 's long banned film, Larks on
a String, and Jan 10 minute animated satire, The Death
of Stalinism in Bohemia.
The Hungarian House in New York City will present a film
retrospect ive "Hungarian Cinema Classics: a selection from 1960-
1990, Part I" from April 20 through May 11. The films to be presented
are: Zoltan Huszarik's 1970 film, Sinbad; My Way Home, a 1964 film
by Mild6s Jancs6; Istvan Szab6's Confidence from 1979, and Time
Stands Still, Peter Gothar's 1982 film.
In a disturbing note from this year's Berlin Film Festival, the
number of entries from Eastern European countries dropped
dramatically. Of the 26 films shown, only three were from Eastern
Europe, down from six last year. The forum for younger film makers
drew five entries this year, compared to twelve last year, and all but
one of these, a Polish film, came from the Soviet Union.
CONFERENCES, LECTURES AND EXHIBITIONS
From February 13 to 16 a symposium entitled "Russian
Emigre Theatre" was presented at the Harvard Theatre Collection in
Cambridge by The U.S.-U.S.S.R. Commission on Theatre and Dance
Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Union
of Theatre Workers of the U.S.S.R. The Symposium was sponored
by !REX. Among the speakers were: Aleksei Bartoshevich, Kalman
Burnim, Sharon Carnicke, Alma Law, Elena Poliakova, Anatoly
Smeliansky, and Laurence Senelick.
Washington University in St. Louis held a "Symposium on
Contemporary Soviet Theatre" from February 15 to 24. Oleg
Tabakov's Moscow Studio-Theatre performed two plays as part of
their American tour. (see above) Besides The Teacher of Russian
and My Big Land, the participants were able to see the English lan-
guage premiere of Olga Pavlova-Kuchkina's The Passion According
to Varvara, translated by Alma Law and directed by Ann Marie Costa.
8
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 11, No. 1
From February 7 to March 24, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York presented a showing of the work of Russian artist
Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), including his work as scene and
costume designer for the 1913 "first Futurist opera," Victory Over The
Sun.
NEWS
Two Latvian filmmakers died while filming the attack on the
Latvian Ministry of Internal Affairs by the Black Berets on January 20.
Andris Slapins, whose documentaries were recently shown at the
"Crossroads of the Continents exhibit at the American Museum of
Natural History died during the attack. Cameraman Gvido Zvaignze
died on February 5. He was best known for his documentary film
The Soviets. They were among the six victims of the attack.
Andre Serban accepted the directorship if the National
Theatre of Romania in Bucharest. His first production was
Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. It premiered in Fall
1990.
In the September 1990 issue of the Soviet journal Teatr, The
Jeweler's Shop by Karol WojtyH! (Pope John Paul II) appears in a
Russian translation by Kseniya Staroselskaya.
CORRECTION
Due to an editing error in our last issue, the final paragraph in the arti-
cle "The Mrozek Festival: Cracow, Summer 1990" was garbled. It
should have read:
A rationalist and a moralist, Mrozek defends the individual
against the state and takes aim at social norms and cultural
stereotypes. Rejecting the notion of total theatre and theatre of
cruelty as subjugation by paroxysm, he has created a drama
addressed to the mind and cognitive in function, which enables spec-
tators to draw conclusions and make decisions. Perhaps such a
theatre is needed now more than ever in Eastern Europe.
prepared by Edward Dee
9
Tadeusz Kantor
TADEUSZ KANTOR: A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
1915
Born April 6 In Wielopole, a small town near Cracow.
1934-1939
Attends the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, where he studies painting
and stage design with Karol Frycz, a friend and disciple of Gordon
Craig.
1938
Stages his first play, Maeter1inck's Death of Tintagiles, at his own
Little Marionette Theatre.
1942
Organizes the underground Independent Theatre In Cracow during
the German occoupatlon; clandestine performances are held in pri-
vate homes.
Directs and designs Juliusz Stowacki's romantic tragedy Balladyna
(1834) at the Independent Theatre.
1944
Directs and designs Stanislaw Wysplanski's dark symbolist drama,
The Return of Odysseus (1905), at the Independent Theatre.
1945
Repeats The Return of Odysseus as a student production at the
Stary Theatre in Cracow.
1945-1963
Active career as a stage designer for theatre and opera, doing sets
and costumes for 50 productions throughout Poland. Major work
Includes Corneille's The Cid, Calder6n's The Mayor of Zalamea,
Measure for Measure, Lorca's The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife,
Shaw' s Saint Joan, Hamlet, Anouilh's Antigone, lonesco's
Rhinoceros, Massenet's Don Quichotte, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.
1947
Travels to France.
1948
Appointed professor at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts.
1949
Professorship revoked.
11
1955-56
Establishes his own theatre, Cricot 2, named after Cricot, an avant-
garde artists theatre in Cracow between the wars. Poets, painters,
and actors, both professional and amateur, work at Cricot 2, located
In the basement art gallery Krzysztofory. Crlcot 2 Is not state-
subsidized.
1956
Originally given by Cricot 1 In 1933, Witklewlcz's Cuttlefish (1922) Is
the opening production of Crlcot 2. The painter and sculptor Marla
Jarema (from Crlcot 1) designs the costumes and plays one of the
roles.
For the next 20 years Cricot 2 will "play" with Witkiewicz's texts.
On the' same program is a surrealistic pantomime, The Well, or Depth
of Thought by Kazlmierz Mikulski, painter and stage designer for the
puppet theatre Groteska.
1957
Crlcot 2 presents Circus by Mikulski, revealing a fascination with
umbrellas and displaying the first elements of emballage ("packing)
and of happenings.
1958
Travels to Switzerland and France. One-man show In Sweden. Does
illustrations for an edition of Gombrowicz's play, lvona, Princess of
Burgundia.
1959
Exhibits in Paris and Dusseldorf. Throughout his career exhibits
paintings, drawings, constructions, and installations in major cities of
the world.
1960
Publishes "Manifesto of the Informer Theatre." declaring that the
process and stages of creation, and the resistance of matter and the
artist's struggle with it, are more Important than the finished work of
art.
1961
Inaugurates the Informer Theatre at Crlcot 2 with Witklewicz's In a
Small Country House. Travels to Italy, France, Sweden, and
Germany. VIsiting Professor at the Akademle der Kunste In Ham-
burg.
12
1962
Issues "Emballages Manifesto, stating the value of tying and wrap-
ping packages as autonomous, functionless activities and offering
sacks and bags as a means of descent to the lowest, neglected
region of the despised, scorned, and ridiculed.
1963
Wltklewlcz's Madman and the Nun presented at Cricot 2 as Theatre
Zero, In which the play Itself is not performed, but the text Is quoted
and commented upon. A central position Is given to objects and the
refuse of life: "wandering people" outside society wrapped In multiple
layers of clothing, bags, blankets, strings, and straps
1964
Creates compositions with umbrellas attached to canvas. Travels to
Sweden and Germany.
1965
Travels to the United States. Creates first "Happenlng-Crlcotage" at
the Hall of the Society of the Friends of the Fine Arts in Warsaw; the
participants are the artist-members of the society. A "Cricotage" Is a
small theatrical event drawing upon the experiences of Crlcot 2.
1966
The Happening "Une of Division" at the Association of Art Historians
In Cracow; the participants are painters and art historians.
Saarbrucken TV makes a film, The Journey, about Kantor's art,
which abounds In Images of travel and "Eternal Wanderers." Stages
The Wardrobe (based on Witkiewicz's In a Small Country House) In
Baden-Baden.
1967
Panoramic Sea-Happening at Osieki on the Baltic coast, making use
of the beach and sea, with 16 artists participating and an audience of
1600. Gerlcault's The Raft of the Medusa Is the basis of one of the
sections.
1968
Travels to Italy, France, and West Germany. At Nuremberg creates
the happening, "The Anatomy Lesson" (based on Rembrandt's paint-
Ing).
Wltklewlcz's Water Hen Is presented at Crlcot 2; the Wanderers and
their luggage become part of the "Human Reserve" that will reappear
In later works. Appointed professor at the Cracow Academy of Fine
Arts.
13
14
TJ<e
-/:.. ,L\ p /( 1-\
I) C\
c> 2' c 7. L' y
Drawing by Kantor for Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes
1969
Professorship at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts revoked a second
time.
Formulates the Impossible Theatre and in Bled, Yugoslavia assem-
bles a group of actors of different nationalities to realize the new
program.
1970
Publishes "Manifesto 1970" and issues the "Multipart Manifesto.
1971
The Water Hen presented at the International Theatre Festival in
Nancy, France.
1972
Takes The Water Hen to the Edinburgh Festival. Presents Wit-
kiewicz's Shoemakers in Paris, using French actors.
1973
Creates Witkiewicz's Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes (also known as
Lovelies and Dowdies) at Cricot 2, taking the production to Edin-
burgh the same year. The 40 Mandelbaums (in the text) are
costumed as Hasidic Jews and played by members of the audience.
1974
Shows Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes in France, Italy, Germany, and
Iran.
1975
At Cricot 2 creates The Dead Class, "A Dramatic Seance," and pub-
lishes the Theatre of Death Manifesto. The production is based on
Witkiewicz's Tumor Brainiowicz, Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and
Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles and drawings of life in the
Jewish town of Drohobycz.
1976
Presents The Dead Class at the Edinburgh Festival , and in London
and Amsterdam. It is filmed by both Andrzej Wajda and Denis
Bablet.
1977
The Dead Class is presented at the International Festival in Nancy
and at the Autumn Festival in Paris, as well as in Holland, Germany,
Belgium, and Iran. Theatre de Ia Mort, a collection of manifestos and
documents, is published in France.
15
1978
The Dead Class is presented in Florence, Milan, Zurich, Geneva,
caracas, and Australia.
1979
Presents The Dead Class in Mexico and the United States (La
MaMa) . The Cricotage, Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? (after
Fran<;ois Villon's poetry) is created in Rome. The Regional Theatre
of Tuscany and the City of Florence provide Cricot with a home and
funding.
1980
Wielopole, Wielopole Is created and first presented in the church of
Santa Maria in Florence. It is financed by the City of Florence and
uses Italian actors in minor roles. No longer based on pre-existing
texts, Wielopole explores the artist's memories to trace the social
and cultural history of his family. Establishment of archival centers
called Cricoteques in Florence and Cracow.
1981
Wielopole is presented In Italy, Switzerland, Venezuela, Germany,
Spain, and Poland.
1982
The Dead Class and Wielopole are presented in Japan, England,
Mexico, the United States, and France.
1985
Let the Artists Die, "A Revue, is first presented in Nuremberg with
financing by a wealthy German patron. The production is inspired by
Wit Stwosz, the late medieval wood and stone carver from Nurem-
berg who spent twelve years in Cracow creating the great altar for
Saint Mary's Church. Let the Artists Die also draws upon Zbigniew
Unil'owski's novel, The Shared Room (1932) and its artist-hero,
lucjan.
1986
The Cricotage, The Marriage, is presented at the Piccolo Theatre of
Milan.
1987
The Cricotage, The Machine of Love and Death, is given in Kassel,
Germany, at Documenta 8, then shown in Milan and Sicily. Using
both puppets and actors, the first part of the Cricotage is a recreation
of Maeter1inck's The Death of Tintagiles, first staged by Kantor 50
years ear1ier.
16
1988
I Shall Never Return is created in Milan. A retrospective of the artist's
life in the theatre, I Shall Never Return recalls characters and scenes
from earlier productions, going back to The Return of Odysseus. For
the first time Kantor himself appears as a character in the drama,
whereas previously he has functioned only as a director of seances
conducting the proceedings from the sidelines.
1989
The Cricotage, Oh, Sweet Night, is presented at the Festival
d'Avignon.
1990
Kantor dies of a heart attack in Cracow at 4:00 AM on December 8
after rehearsing his new creation, Tomorrow is My Birthday. The fun-
eral takes place on December 15.
1991
Tomorrow Is My Birthday Is premiered in Toulouse in January, then
moves to the Pompldou Center in Paris from January 21 to February
4 before returning to Toulouse.
DCG
17
.,
Drawing by Kantor for In a Small Country House
18 Soviet and East European Performance Vol . 11, No. 1
MEMORY
MEMORY,
memory of the past,
(has always been] held in contempt
by the S 0 BER-M IN DE D--(and thus]
highly valued members of human kind
(I have always suspected them of being slow minded)--
and by those "gluttons of the everyday
devouring voraciously the present
to reach speedily the future and its promises.
MEMORY
[has always been] ruthlessly pushed aside
by those troupes marching
f o r w a r d, toward the f u t u r e ...
MEMORY ...
[is] worth thinking about!
I was discover i ng it[s attributes)
gradually, with enthusiasm, and often with despair.
I felt THEATRE was the right place for it.
I was not mistaken!
19
THE STAGE
became its
ALTAR!
Now, I feel as if
I committed a theft,
a theft of a sacred relic
(this is an imprint from my childhood spent In "the shadows of the
Church").
Later, [I was possessed] by a profound and blasphemous idea that
ART was a threshold between HEAVEN AND EARTH,
between a TEMPLE and (excusez le mot) a BROTHEL,
between a TEMPLE and a PRISON.
After this secular explanation,
let us approach the ALTAR again.
[Altar] is the only appropriate word,
because all the activities of this "MASS," which has just started,
parallel another u n--r e a I, almost mystical
process.
T I M E was u n--r e a I.
TIMEPAST
and everything that was real in life
were bereft of their life's function and life's effectiveness
in this un-real TIME.
(The past and everything that was real] were P U R I F I E D;
purified artistically.
All that Is good and all that Is bad [was purified].
It was my DISCOVERY.
It was mine.
I did not treat MEMORY as a well-known device
used to describe the past or travel back in the depths of time.
I DISCOVERED ITS TRUTH!
In order to make this momentous (at least for me) discovery, two
things were needed:
child's naivete
and the ability to see unique spatial possibilities on the stage
I had both of them.
Let one of my commentaries to Wielopole, Wielopole
speak for my "DISCOVERY:"
It is difficult to define the spatial dimension of memory.
Here, this is a room of my childhood,
which I keep reconstructing over and over again
and which is destroyed over and over again.
It is destroyed with all its inhabitants.
21
Drawing by Kantor for The Dead Class
22
Soviet and East European Pertormance Vol. 11, No. 1
Its Inhabitants are the members of my family.
They continuously repeat all their movements and activities
as if they were recorded on a film negative shown interminably.
They will keep repeating those banal,
elementary, and aimless activities
with the same expression on their faces;
with the concentration on the same gesture
until boredom strikes.
Those trivial activities,
which stubbornly and oppressively preoccupy us,
fill up our lives ... .
These D E A D FA C A D E S
come to life, become real and important
through this stubborn R E P E T I T I 0 N of actions.
Maybe this pulsating rhythm,
which ends in
NOTHINGNESS
which is FUTILE
is an inherent part of M E M 0 R Y .. . .
My "DISCOVERY" (made already in The Dead Class)
introduces new psychological elements into stage acting
and a new type of "SPACE," a non-physical space.
23
The CONDITION OF DEATH--of the DEAD,
(was] RE-CREATED IN THE LIVING,
TIMEPAST MYSTERIOUSLY SLIPPED INTO
TIMEPRESENT.
Past exists in
memory.
DEAD!
Its inhabitants are
DEAD, too.
They are dead, but, at the same time,
alive,
that is, they can
move, and they can even
talk. These p o o r
symptoms of life have, however, no
purpose or
c o n s e q u e n c e.
Pulled out of a three-dimensional,
surprisingly flat
practice of life,
they fall into the hole,
allow me to say this word,
ETERNITY.
They lose their life's functions
and all their privileges
acquired during their earthly passage
(one should not, however, belittle the value of this passage).
to become E T E R N A L.
Let me make this ominous sounding word
more human
and say:
they become a r t.
Theybecomea WORK OF ART.
Having reached familiar grounds,
it is worth, and even necessary,
to record--
for the sake of historical memory--
those important devices of expression,
almost "commandments,"
that accompanied [me]
during this "D I S C 0 V E R Y."
Here they are:
Memory,
25
The Dead Class, 1975
makes us of [film-] NEGATIVES
which are still-frozen--
almost like metaphors.
but unlike narratives--
which pulsate,
which appear and disappear.
which appear and disappear again
until the image fades away;
until ... the tears fill the eyes.
And one more word--commandment:
R E P E T I T I 0 N,
almost like a prayer,
or like a litany,
is a signal of S H R I N K I N G
Tl ME.
Having and knowing how to use
these devices/means of expression,
which are so precisely defined,
27
I could create
a METH 00,
a SCHOOL ...
But,
why should I?
translated by MicharKobiall<a
28
TADEUSZ KANTOR'S LABYRINTHS OF MEMORY
1
Michat KobiaH<a
'Thus from Hegel to Marx and Spengler we find the develop-
ing theme of thought which ( ... ] curves over upon itself, illuminates
its own plenitude, brings its circle to completion, recognizes itself in
all the strange figures of its odyssey, and accepts its disappearance
into the same ocean from which it sprang."
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
"The space of life, and everything that is contained in this
phrase, exists parallel to this other space, the space of art. The two
of them converge, overlap, and coalesce sharing their fate and
destiny.
Tadeusz Kantor, Milano Lessons
As early as the 1960s, Kantor rejected the idea of theatre as
a "mirror [held] up to nature" and concentrated on the intimate
process of creating Art. This rejection of a representational ideology
governing theatrical work forced the artistic process to move in the
direction of an autonomous process for creating art. Lesson 3 of
Kantor's 1986 Milano Lessons described this shift:
"I am fascinated by a mystical or utopian idea that, in every
art work, independently from an artist, there exists the ur-matter
which is continuously shaping itself and in which are embedded all
possible, infinite variants of life."2
"This ur-matter is space. I can feel its pulse. Space which
does not have an exit or a boundary; (a space] which is receding or
approaching omni-directionally with changing velocity; it is dispersed
in all directions: to the sides, to the middle; it ascends, caves in,
spins on the vertical, horizontal, diagonal axis .... It is not afraid to
burst into an enclosed shape, defuse it with its sudden jerking move-
ment, and re-shape it. Figures and objects become the function of
space and its mutability. Space is not a passive receptacle in which
objects and forms are posited. Space itself is an object [of creation].
and the main one. Space is energy. Space shrinks and expands.
And these motions mould forms and objects. It is space which gives
birth to forms. It is space which conditions the network of relations
and tensions between the objects. Tension is the principle actor of
space--a hyperspace .... "3
29
The Dead Class, 1975
30
These concepts of the ur-matter, space, and hyperspace
found their stage metaphor in Wielopole, Wielopole (1980) where
they were transformed into memory. Kantor's theory of the "Room of
Memory" illustrates this point. The "Room of Memory" is not an
extension of the auditorium or a stage filled with props; rather, the
Room exists in a different dimension which forces the audience to
abandon logical analysis and rational thinking. In this room, memory
is alive in the form of the "dead," the members of Kantor's family, who
come to live and populate the "real" world through a repetition of
events and actions, and through acting. The "Room of Memory," is
an autonomous space. Both Kantor and the audience are standing
in front of a door or a threshold beyond which a creative process
begins:
"We are standing in front of the door giving a long farewell to
our childhood; we are standing helpless at the threshold of eternity
and death. In front of us, in this poor and dusky room, behind the
door, a storm and an inferno rage, and the waters of the flood rise.
The weak walls of our ROOM, of our everyday or linear time, will not
save us. . . . Important events stand behind the door; it is enough to
open it. ... "
4
Once the doors are opened, important events and people
enter the room and disperse in all directions in the process of con-
stituting and, later, reconstituting its shape. As Kantor observed,
memory can be equated with the interior of a room, that is, space.
Space is energy. Memory is, thus, energy in a different universe
which is sensed through art. Wielopole, Wielopole was an attempt to
visualize memory, that is energy, in a three-dimensional theatrical
space. Kantor, as the originator of discourse, was watching the
process of materialization of the most intimate aspects of the Self in
the form of the Other(s). This will explain why the room is destroyed
and reconstructed in the opening sequence by Uncle Karol and
Uncle Olek. During this sequence, the uncles are trying to set up the
boundaries of the room by placing within it obj ects such as a
suitcase, a chair, a wardrobe, a bed, a table, a window; or human
beings, such as Grandfather, Grandmother, Aunt Jozka, and Aunt
Manka. The room, however, can never be fully organized, because
such a process would signify a closure contrary to Kantor's belief
that, behind the doors a storm and inferno rage, and the waters of
the flood rise. [ ... ] [l]t is enough to open it."
Kantor discusses this aspect of his concept of memory in the
"Theory of Negatives," an extension of the "Room of Memory," which
was presented in Let the Artists Die. Here, events onstage bring
forth and join "memories, that is characters, from different past
events. These "memories" cannot be presented in a linear or
31
32
Soviet and East Europe an Performance Vol. 11 , No. 1
chronological order because such a representation would not cor-
respond to the "real" process taking place in the mind. Rather, the
memories onstage are interimposed as if they were the frames of a
film-negative stacked one atop another. Since the negatives are
transparent, the audience sees only one frame; but this one frame
contains all the elements of all the other frames. As a result, the
image onstage is the image of characters undergoing constant
transformation in a space that is alternately expanding or shrinking.
This space, referred to by Kantor as a room of memory ;cemetery
storeroom, Is the place where images recorded by our
senses, meaningless details and fragments, as well as historical,
moral, and ethical codes are stored. Once memory is put into
motion, "it curves over upon itselr and generates the waves that swirl
up only to crash into one another or into any boundary encountered
on the way. In Let the Artists Die, for example, one of the recog-
nizable characters on stage is Veit Stoss, a fifteenth-century sculptor,
born in Nurnberg, who was the author of a famous altar piece in one
of Cracow's churches. As various historical records indicate, a nail
was driven through Stoss's cheeks on his return to Nurnberg as a
punishment for his debts. Kantor uses this story as a metaphor for
the artist in society. In the "Room of Memory" presented in Let the
Artists Die, Kantor creates for Veit Stoss, a guest from the other
side, an asylum for beggars, Bohemian artists, and cutthroats,
where Stoss will build the Altar that resembles his masterpiece in
Cracow. But here, in a world governed by the "Theory of the Nega-
tives," the altar is transformed into a prison cell and the characters in
the asylum become convicts in an apocalyptic theatre of death.
Although Let the Artists Die contained all the elements of
Kantor's theories of theatre, emphasis was on the perception of
theatre as an autonomous space wherein the Self acknowledges the
power of and the desire to be with the image(s) in the mirror. The
mirror surface was a site of convergence of two simultaneous dimen-
sions: the dimension of the mind (Kantor's memory) and the dimen-
sion of a theatre space (Kantor's memory enacted). Even though
Kantor was always present onstage during every performance to cor-
rect or erase the actors' work, he broke the pattern of reflective
space by rejecting any deterministic, reproductive mirroring of real
space. His "room of memory" was a spacetime which was ready to
be transformed in any direction by space/energy from behind the
doors of the room. "[l]t is enough to open the doors ... ."
In Kantor's theatre, the characters are the shadows which
have been made invisible when they were first conceived in and gen-
erated by Kantor's memory. During the performance, however, the
shadows leapt aside, that is, they were transferred from real space
through an impassable barrier into the space "on the other side" not
bound by linear temporal progressions. As illustrated in Let the
33
Artists Die, the characters who unfold themselves in the "Room of
Memory" weave three-dimensional pictures by using frequently
repeated gestures from everyday reality. The relationship between
Kantor's space and the space of his characters is in a constant
process of transformation which is bereft of logical, causal, or
continuous patterns. During this process, the invisible traces of
memory are made visible because of the forces that exist behind the
doors and the laws of reversibility functioning in that space. Con-
sequently, as Kantor asserts in his essay, "Reflection": "if we take a
further step along this road it might happen that a smile will turn into
a grimace, virtue to crime, and a whore will become a virgin."5
In Wielopole, Wielopole and Let the Artists Die, the spectator
was bereft of the narcissistic pleasure of being reflected in the actors'
gaze by Kantor's presence onstage. The spectator witnessed a new
relationship: a relationship between the observing subject function-
ing in a three-dimensional space and the object positioned in a multi-
dimensional space "on the other side. This relationship was
expressed by a clash between the Self (Kantor) and the Other (his
memories), where the Self never went beyond the virtual space of the
boundary to meet the Other. In Wielopole, Wielopole, this space
was referred to as a room which was reconstructed over and over
again. In Let the Artists Die, it was a room/cemetery storeroom
which was transformed into various different shapes by energy burst-
ing in from another dimension and revealing what had been rendered
invisible. The actors were put into motion, corrected, or erased by
Kantor, the Self in front of the mirror. He made the invisible visible.
What we, the spectators, saw was the decomposition and
recomposition of parts of his life. The image on the other side of the
mirror in the multi-dimensional space, was a duplicate of the "real"
space of Kantor's memory.
The desire of the Self to retain the memory traces in order to
be saved for a moment from dying justified the game of subjugation
between the Self and the Other(s) in Kantor's Wielopole, Wielopole
and Let the Artists Die. While working on I Shall Never Return,
Kantor observed however that:
"Everything I have done in art so far has been the reflection
of my attitude toward the events that surrounded me, toward situa-
tions I lived through. . . . When I wanted to die, someone else was
dying for me. He was playing the part of me dying ... When with per-
sistence and stubborness, I kept returning to the memories of my
school days, it was not I but the others (actors) who returned to the
classroom desks. o6
"And the moment did arrive when I decided to go over the
threshold. Going through this unknown passage, I tried to keep the
memory of the shape of a human body. And then, everything was
but MOTION and MATIER. INFERNUM. It was my INTERIOR. ...
My journey acquired dimensions which were less and less material.
The final frontier of the space started to recede and embraced new,
unknown dimensions: imagination. Pure imagination."7
Rite of passage over the threshold into the other dimension
had far reaching consequences for Kantor's creative process. It
marked a departure from the traditional universe of absolute time and
absolute space and from the interplay of domination and subjugation
between the Self and the Other(s) as exemplified in earlier produc-
tions. In his notes to I Shall Never Return (1988) Kantor described
this process:
"Ladies and gentlemen! Where did I come from? I have
always stood by the door and ... waited. . . . In a moment I shall
enter with my 'luggage' a shabby and suspicious INN. I am here to
attend a meeting with apparitions or people. To say that I have been
CREATING them for many, many years would be an overstatement. I
gave them life, but they also gave me theirs. They kept wandering
with me for a long time and gradually left me at various crossroads
and rest stops. Now we are to meet here. Perhaps for the last time ..
. . They will come to this INN as for the LAST JUDGMENT to give
evidence of our fate and our hopes at the ruins of our Inferno and
Heaven, our end of the century."8
The space of the inn, which exists "on the other side, that is,
"beyond all time and beyond all rules, 9 is occupied by the inn-
keeper, a dish washer, and a priest. The almost empty space is sud-
denly altered by the entrance of the actors from past productions.
They "act out" fragments from their "plays." Kantor, wearing a black
suit and carrying a coffin, enters the inn, and sits down at one of the
tables. Once recognized by the actors, he announces his desire to
create the last "emballage, but the "apparitions from the past" keep
Interrupting him because they do not understand his monologue;
they can only live the lives of characters from his room of memory.
Scenes from the Water-Hen, Wielopole, Wielopole, Let the Artists Die
and The Dead Class are interimposed upon one another. The
boundaries between them ultimately cease to exist. "Everything is
but MOTION and MATIER." Kantor returns. His personal history
unfolds in front of the audience. The Bride and the Bridegroom
appear. The Bridegroom, however, unlike the bridegroom from
Wielopole, Wlelopo/e, is a mannequin resembling Kantor. The Bride
is a coffin. Until the end of the performance, all scenes will flow
between a "real" Kantor, who is at the front of the stage, and the
Other Kantor, who stands at the doors. When the apparitions from
35
36
the past go away, only a military uniform is left onstage: "I recognize
Odysseus's uniform; that memorable night of January 24th, 1944,
during the war, he returned to Cracow--his Ithaca--the hero of our
theatre, Odysseus."10 The wandering actors return, and, without
Kantor's consent, enact parts of The Dead Class. The Innkeeper
who throws the actors out is transformed into Odysseus and the
story of his return is shown in a collage of scenes from Wielopole,
Wielopole and The Dead Class. Odysseus and Kantor, the Self, sit
at the table. Odysseus shows him where to read in a script written
by Kantor in 1944: "In my own homeland, I have uncovered hell. I
walked into a graveyard; I am alive. I killed everything. The past' s
false happiness has fled. There is nothing before me ... I had my
homeland in my heart. Now she is in my desires. I yearn for her
alone. A shadow. I yearn for a shadow."
11
The apparitions return
and beg Kantor to embark on yet another journey with them, but
grave-diggers come onstage and cover all the props of the grand
theatre with white dust sheets. Kantor, the Self, approaches Kantor,
the Other: . they leave together.
By entering and participating in the events unfolding in the
inn, that is, the virtual space of I Shall Never Return, Kantor altered
the relationships existing on both sides of the mirror. The "room of
his memory was no longer conceived in "real" space and then
materialized in the space "on the other side" where the rules of "real"
space ceased to be binding; the "room of memory" became an
autonomous universe of which Kantor no longer served as the
creator. The space, which Kantor entered having gone through the
threshold, was not only the space which was visible to us, but also
the space which existed in a different dimension accessible to the
mind only. Whereas Kantor's presence suggested the existence in a
physical and visible, three-dimensional universe constituted by the
gaze of the Self, the presence of the apparitions implied the exist-
ence of a mental, multi-dimensional universe created by the gaze of
the Other. This multi-dimensional universe could not be shaped by
the certainties of absolute time and absolute space, but was
Informed by structures having no correspondence in the wor1d of the
body. Thus the space in which Kantor found himself, that is, the inn,
was a site where two universes converged in their simultaneous,
albeit, autonomous existence. As I Shall Never Return made clear,
the new space in between these universes changed with each ran-
dom entrance or exit of characters from different dimensions: from
the dimension of a memory machine in The Dead Class, a room In
Wielopole, Wielopole, or from a room/cemetery storeroom/
asylumjprison in Let the Artists Die.
Kantor stated in his essay, "lnfernum," that having entered
the space of the manifold, he encountered the ever-changing "mat-
ter" and "pure imagination." He, the Self, encountered the image of
37
38
the Other, whom he had frozen in the silver surface of the mirror. In I
Shall Never Return, both of them, Self and Other, watch "memories"
onstage folding back upon themselves. Even though they will always
exist in autonomous universes, the Self and the Other are at last
united. The final scene, in which Kantor and his mannequin leave
the stage, epitomizes this relationship: the Self embraces the Other
and the coalescence of the conscious and the unconscious, the
organic and the inorganic, known and unknown, thought and
unthought, real and unreal, Eros and Thanatos Is complete.
Having crossed the threshold, Kantor could never return to
the binary opposition created by spacetime and spacejenergy. He
could only show us what exists in his "lnfernum." He discussed this
idea further in his 1990 collection of essays, Silent Night, written to
accompany his final production:
Since the beginning of my artistic life,
this image [of the Apocalypse]
has always lived in me,
deep inside of me.
All the images from my room of memory
have been, and are still grounded in it.
Now I want to pull it out,
the way one pulls out an image from one's childhood.
One must not be ashamed of its naive features.
Throughout the whole of my life, I have ignored its presence
down there, in the dark depth. ( ... ]
Today, I want to show it unadorned,
without stylistic ornamentations. ( ... )
Imprints.
I have recently discovered their existence.
I have suddenly noticed that
certain events,
people, phenomena
return to me
as if drawn to me by some unknown force in me.
They keep returning,
even though I keep throwing them away;
I was ashamed of their "unsatisfactory quality." [ ... ]
From the dim recesses,
as if from the abyss of Hell,
there started to emerge
people, who died a long time ago,
and memories of events,
which, as if in a dream, had
no explanation,
no beginning, no end,
39
no cause, and no effect.
They would emerge
and would keep returning stubbornly
as if waiting for my permission to enter.
I gave them my consent.
I understood their nature.
I understood where they were coming from.
The i m p r i n t s
impressed deeply
in the immemorial past. 12
With Kantor's death, the opening epigraph acquires a dif-
ferent dimension. Having crossed the threshold, memory curved
back upon itself, recognized itself in all the strange figures of its
odyssey, and accepted its disappearance into the same ocean from
which it had sprung. We, however, are left in front of the impassable
barrier. Finally, we master t he courage to go across. We walk
around the stage, as if we were walking through the labyrinth of
Kantor's mind, trying to find the traces of his memories that had
moved us a split second ago.
40
NOTES
1
This essay is an abbreviated chapter from my book about Tadeusz
Kantor and his Cricot 2 Theatre to be published by University of
California Press In 1992.
Zfadeusz Kantor, "Lekcja 3. 27. 06. 1986," Lekcje medlolanskie
(unpublished), p. 11. (Translation mine)
3radeusz Kantor, "Lekcja 3," p. 12.
4
Tadeusz Kantor, "The Room. Maybe a New Phase, The Drama
Review T111 (Fall1986) : 171.
5Tadeusz Kantor, "Reflection, The Drama Review T111 (Fall 1986):
176.
6'fadeusz Kantor, "Program Notes to I Shall Never Return. (Transla-
tion mine)
7
Tadeusz Kantor, "lnfernum, in "Teksty o moim malarstwie.
Komentarze intymne" (unpublished). (Translation mine)
8Tadeusz Kantor, "Program Notes." (Translation mine)
9Jbld.
10Jbld.
11
1bld.
1
2fadeusz Kantor, Cicha Noc (unpublished), parts II & Ill passim.
(Translation mine)
41
THERE WAS NO CHOICE
Zygmunt Hubner
I've noticed that theatre people seem reluctant to utter the
word "boycott" when they reminisce about the events of 1982. I don't
understand why. Could it be that a boycott is usually associated with
political action, whereas artists would prefer a term from the field of
ethics? Well, they're wrong.
Anyone who remembers (and who could forget!) Warsaw in
the first days of martial law must admit that the refusal to cross the
heavily guarded entrance to the television compound--which meant
submitting to the humiliating procedure of waiting in the freezing cold
for a pass and then being subjected to further checks and controls--
was such an obvious and natural response that those who said "no"
were truly worthy of admiration. It was not even a matter of political
choice, but simply a rudimentary feeling of one's dignity as a Pole
and a citizen who had overnight been stripped of all his rights in his
own country. It brings back all the worst memories. The television
boycott--1 'II stick to this term--was an inevitable and spontaneous
reaction to the humiliation of an entire society and it is now fruitless
to speculate whether it was the right choice to make. Only after
several weeks had elapsed did it become a matter of conscious
political decision that one had to make on one's own, given the
proliferation of invitations, enticements and intimidations employed
by the television officials on the one hand, and the moral pressures
exerted by the artistic community on the other.
Having written "on one's own, I immediately bit my tongue.
More often than not the theatre had to take responsibility. Individual
refusals to cooperate with Polish TV (nota bene, rarely motivated
solely by ideological reasons, but rather by lack of time, travel, sick-
ness, or artistic considerations) frequently had to be handled by the
secretary of the theatre: "Think up something. sweetie, tell them I
can't. But then, to shatter the resistance of the theatre community--
for that was the objective, not, as was claimed, the preservation of
the repertory while all the theatres were closed--Polish television
came up with the diabolically tempting offer of "transferring" the
theatrical productions already in production to TV. The idea was
truly cunning: acceptance or refusal of the offer now theoretically
depended on the theatre manager, who was a government -
appointed civil servant in charge of a state institution. An actor is not
obliged to appear on television, but a theatre manager's freedom to
maneuver is much more limited. It was the manager who had to dis-
play real presence of mind and invent a system of subtle evasions,
knowing perfectly well that if, contrary to the dictates of his con-
science, he were to submit to pressure and agree, the company
42 Soviet and East European Performance Vol . 11, No. 1
would refuse to participate anyway. Yet, for the good of the com-
pany, he could not acknowledge it openly. The managers' fears
were not unwarranted, as the fate of the National Theatre and the
Dramatic Theatre soon demonstrated. The former managers were
dismissed and replaced by more compliant ones, leading to an
exodus of the best actors and a loss of audiences. Then came the
liquidation of the Actors' Union (ZASP) in the fall of 1982. It was an
easy task to break up even the most obstinate companies--the
theatre managers knew this well enough. But the leaders of the
opposition in the artistic community did not even want to take into
account that such a danger might exist. Nor should they be blamed
for it--at that time the naivete of the entire opposition was boundless.
The pose of the hero standing "unbroken and unbowed" has tradi-
tionally been valued most highly in Poland, even though It has very
little in common with political thinking.
To my mind political thinking was strikingly absent, absent
from the beginning of Solidarity, a lack which brought with it a
serious danger of infecting the theatre with pseudo-democracy. I
shall never forget those demagogues (some of whom are now active
in the regime's reorganized Actors' Union ) shooting off their mouths
at the convention of the theatre chapter of Solidarity in Gdansk, and
the idiotic "postulates" put forward by the third-rate actors known as
"halberd-bearers", which had to be addressed seriously because they
were presented as "the postulates of the company.
It was obvious that the theatre community was losing politi-
cally while gaining morally. But was there any other choice? Though
I am not an uncritical admirer of the boycott, and even today when
the boycott's less favorable consequences have become apparent, I
think that there was no other choice but to join the boycott. Never in
history have artists excelled at political games although they have
always loved to take part in them. And they have been the losers
because they have always been crippled by a sense of moral obliga-
tion. An artist who declines to take a moral stand in the public arena
(in private he can be the worst scoundrel) and instead goes over to
the side of the oppressors loses his authority and is finished as an
artist. By upholding the moral principles he wins public respect.
And that was precisely the effect of the boycott. Public respect
ultimately does have a political value--and here the vice closes tight.
Unfortunately public respect can be calculatingly translated into
material rewards: financially attractive guest appearances at home
and abroad, grants and awards, gifts, health benefits. And we know
that such benefits have not always been showered on those who
most deserved them.
Let's reconsider unemotionally: join the boycott? Yes. Even
at the price that had to be paid? A moment of reflection and again:
yes, perhaps less firm, but still a yes.
43
Yet we should remember that the boycott did not unite the
theatre community in the way that it was hoped it would. On the
contrary. The divisions which soon racked the theatre have left many
people with a bad after-taste even today. First there was the split into
"Solidarity people" and "collaborators. I find both terms
unsatisfactory, but use them ail the same since I cannot come up
with anything better. The fighting between these two opposed
camps was far more acrimonious that we have been willing to admit.
The "collaborators do not have too many arguments in their favor.
Even if the decision to start the boycott was a wrong one, the major-
ity of theatre people supported it and therefore it was binding on all.
To declare oneself on the side of repression against the forces of
freedom is a choice unworthy of an artist (see above) . To revile
one's own colleagues in the official press is not an act of political
courage, but a sign of baseness. It would be one thing if those
attacks had been motivated by genuine political convictions, but that,
alas, was far from the easel Those attacks were as sincere as the
sudden religious conversions of venal cynics and atheists. What the
"collaborators" had in common was sheer stupidity, cowardice, and a
desire to advance their careers in easier circumstances without any
real competitors to reckon with. And that Is why so few of them
have been able to preserve any dignity or self-respect, although
honesty compels me to admit that there were some. The "Solidarity"
camp counterattacked in the underground press which had limited
circulation but was much more important as an opinion-setter. The
wounds were painful on both sides. It should not be forgotten that
the word "collaborator, because of its use in the Second World War,
means nothing less than infamy. It was applied somewhat too reck-
lessly in this changed context. And what made things even worse
was that innocent people were branded as "collaborators" without
any solid evidence. Those who were fighting for tolerance often
lacked it themselves.
Another split that further weakened the effectiveness of the
boycott was the division into "the capital" and "the provinces." The
boycott was an action initiated by the artistic elite in Warsaw and to a
lesser extent In Cracow. Actors in provincial theatres in places like
Gorz6w, Bielsko, Jelenia G6ra, and Legnica or even in Olsztyn and
T orun, could not have joined the boycott even if they had wanted to,
since no one had ever asked them to work for Polish Television or
radio. They felt alienated from the action undertaken by the elite in
the name of ail. Worse still: it was only during the boycott that Polish
Television began to pay attention to their work, opening for many the
sole chance they would ever have to appear on the "small" screen. A
chance never to be repeated. Theatre people in Warsaw cannot and
do not want to understand why their colleagues from Lublin
accepted the "transfer" to TV so readily, failing to take into account
44
that this "transfer" had been arranged by the theatre manager, the
lord and master who could fire actors for refusing to cooperate--
which in Lublin meant unemployment. Actors from the provinces
think that their collegues from Warsaw are so well off financially that
they can afford to turn up their noses at TV offers,whereas they can
barely make ends meet and have nothing to look forward to.
Then too it has to be said in all honesty that society at large
did not support the boycott. We dwellers in the capital city have a
warped sense of proportion because we bask in the glory showered
on us by friends and professional yea-sayers. But a teacher from
Wtoof'awek, a retired lady from Stargard or a physician from Busko
look at things differently. The TV theatre was for them their most
cherished form of entertainment, a distraction from everyday gray-
ness, their only means of contact with good theatre and with their
favorite actors who now suddenly spurned them. Why? They, the
viewers, are far from being enthusiastic about martial law and that is
precisely why they would like to see their friends on the television
screen in order to maintain a more lasting bond than temporary
political adversity. For the overwhelming majority of television
viewers, Polish TV theatre and Polish TV news programs are two dis-
tinct things. They have no idea how film can be used to deceive.
They have to be told that this is precisely what the actor fears most:
to see himself excerpted from the theatre program and put on the
news show without his knowledge or consent. And that has hap-
pened quite a few times. I have had a good many conversations
about such occurrences.
The results of the boycott were twofold. On the one hand,
there was a "Week of Solidarity with the Theatre" organized by
underground Solidarity. It actually lasted for several months. During
all that time audiences showed their support and sympathy in various
ways: standing ovations, flowers with attached letters of apprecia-
tion. I will always remember those weeks. Throughout an entire
lifetime one can only dream about such unity between the stage and
the audience and such mutual confidence. And I would like to
believe that from this experience the theatre gained many new
friends, admirers and supporters.
There were some comic episodes too. At a performance of
Andrzej Strzelecki's anti-authoritarian play, The Clowns, which had
been completely sold out to the members of the illegal Solidarity
chapter of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the deputy premier,
Rakowski, with his entourage unexpectedly put in an appearance.
After an initial moment of consternation, the spectators began to take
off their then forbidden Solidarity buttons so as not to compromise
the theatre which could be punished for organizing an illegal public
demonstration. After the performance the audience rose to their feet
applauding, attaching bouquets of white and red flowers to the cage-
45
like grille surrounding the playing area and the clowns within it. Only
the deputy premier and his entourage remained seated. But they did
applaud. And although the deputy premier did not rise to his feet,
he did rise to the occasion: the theatre was not punished. At least
not for that performance.
On the other hand, the boycott resulted In a feverish
increase In "supplementary theatrical activity," which could not
preciesly called "hack work," since it was not always of that quality.
Deprived of their additional source of income from television, the
actors inspired public sympathy and compassion-one should help
out artists in need, of course. Throughout the length and breadth of
Poland special "meetings with the actor," recitals, and shows were
organized in churches and parish halls. For the general public such
performances were a compensation for the absence of well-known
and popular actors on the TV screens. But with the passage of time
this activity, so noble In intent, degenerated, lost its ideological
character, and, having grown to monstrous proportions, began to
interfere with the work of the theatres. For actors the patronage of
the Church ceased to be an important factor, money began to be the
only thing that counted, especially the "hard currency" that could be
earned by appearing before Polonia audiences from Sydney to
Toronto. Theatre that pays poorly soon drops out of competition.
And the theatre now pays poorly because--ever since martial law--the
intelligentsia, which Is the source of cultural creativity, Is growing pro-
gressively poorer. Is this a form of punishment for disobedience, for
insufficient enthusiasm shown for General Jaruzelski's aims, for join-
ing the boycott? I wouldn't be surprised if it were so. For daring to
say no in the referendum that gave the communist regime a sem-
blance of legality in 1947, the city of Cracow was punished by having
the mamoth steelworks Nowa Huta erected in its suburbs. The
patron is generous to those who do his bidding; the disobedient are
not coddled.
Many actors have learned how to thrive in the new circum-
stances. But far from all . The majority simply tries to survive,
desperately seeking additional sources of income, now more and
more frequently outside the profession. Such a situation bodes no
good for the theatre. As a result the theatre is undergoing a
profound Internal crisis.
It Is with a tinge of nostalgia that I return in memory to those
first days under martial law. For those times brought to the theatre a
spirit of unity making It the only place for meetings, discussions and
work that made any sense and gave life a purpose. Now those days
are so distant that they seem unreal.
Translated by Jadwiga Kosicka
The text appears in The Comedians or the Boycott. Edited by
Andrzej Roman in cooperation with Marian Sabata. Warszawa :
Agencja Omnipress, 1990, pp. 110-114. It was first published in Paris
by Libella in 1989.
47
Tevve-Tevel, The Ivan Franko Theatre, Kiev
48
ON THE STAGES OF UKRAINE 1990:
FROM SHOLOM ALEICHEM TO MYKOLA KULISH
Larissa M.L. Zaleska Onyshkevych
Has perestroika reached theatres outside of Moscow and
Leningrad? Ukraine, for example? Most definitely so, and this
manifestation and its impact is very significant not only in terms of
Ukrainian theatre itself, but also in terms of its various sociological
and political implications. Ukrainian theatres are no longer obliged to
stage only scenes from village life; they can at last choose works that
are relevant to their audiences today.
Suddenly the Ukrainian theatre again seems to have a future.
Two years ago a fledgling group of dedicated actors at the Lviv
Ukrainian Young Theatre Studio captivated me with their very
imaginative and moving production of a drama by Una Kostenko.
Today, one may well add other theatres to the list, and even two
large state theatres, suggesting that all had not been completely lost
for the Soviet Ukrainian theatre in both its centers during the last
forty-five years {for Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine) or sixty to
seventy years (for Kiev, the capital of Ukraine).
A two-week visit in 1990 allowed me to see twelve perform-
ances in Kiev and Lviv; after seeing more productions on a sub-
sequent visit I am able to conclude that there is a definite renais-
sance in the Ukrainian theatre. The productions in just two major
Ukrainian theatres and one smaller on attest to this.
In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, besides Ukrainian theatres
there are also Russian and Yiddish ones. The Ivan Franko State
Theatre in Kiev is the leading Ukrainian theatre. Its artistic director is
Serhiy Danchenko {he is also the President of the Union of Theatre
Workers in Ukraine). When he came to this theatre in 1978 from Lviv,
he brought with him one of the leading male actors, Bohdan Stupka.
Apparently Stupka had always wanted to perform someday in a work
by Shalom Aleichem. This dream came true on December 23, 1989,
with the premiere of Tevye-Tevel by Grigorii Gorin, translated by
Mykola Zarudnyi. While Danchenko claims that in this production he
wanted to stress universal human elements, one can see that he also
had a distinct desire to depict accurately national and ethnic tradi-
tions; for example, he sent researchers to the Zhytomyr area to
check on Jewish wedding and other rituals.
Tevye-Tevel opens with the stage displaying a huge sky full
of moving stars; a line of actors, with their arms raised, seems to
accompany this universal semi-circular motion of moving objects.
The spiraling line ends with a row of gradually diminishing lighted
candles. The people and the stars blend as if they were all
participants in the Milky Way.
49
50
Q)
.s:::;
1-
With stage setting by Daniil (Danylo) Lider and lighting effects by B.
Liashchynskyi, a gentle fairy-like mood is achieved.
The plot is close to that of Fiddler on the Roof, also based on
the same stories by Sholom Aleichem. And just as the success of
the American staging of Fiddler depends largely on who plays Tevye,
so does the Kiev performance. Bohdan Stupka in the title role does
not merely play Tevye; he lives Tevye. He sings the role with his
eyes and his face; he becomes Tevye, as if to prove, that it was worth
waiting many years for such a role. After being fascinated by this
unique performance, several weeks later my assessment was sup-
ported by a poll undertaken by Kultura i Zhyttia, the leading Ukrainian
newspaper on cultural affairs. Nine major theatre experts were asked
to choose "a most memorable production" as well as the best per-
formance by an actor in any of Ukraine's theatres (including non-
Ukrainian ones). Of the nine critics (who saw from 25 to 120 plays
each), seven chose Tevye-Tevel, and for best actor four picked
Stupka in the role of Tevye.
Although the setting of this play appears to be in Ukraine,
Tevye identifies himself as a Russian of Jewish descent and faith.
Whether the Jewish minority wanted to blend into the Russian
society or not, it did not matter since they were not allowed to.
Instead they were forced to leave Russia and live behind the Pale of
Settlement in other parts of the tsarist empire; the pogroms, there-
fore, took place there. And as in most empires, local ethnic groups
were manipulated against one another. This performance of Tevye-
Tevel charges that anti-minority policies are always set in the capital,
be it in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg or in today's Moscow. In his
stories, Sholom Aleichem (who in 1906 fled from the pogroms to
Western Ukraine) pointed an accusing finger at tsarist government
policies and initiatives in these acts. Similarly, in this production of
Tevye- Tevel, when the pogrom is to take place, the announcer calls
on all "true patriots of Russia" to participate; and lo and behold, the
person who encourages the pogrom is a blond female, made up to
look like the woman many recognize as an anti-Semetic Leningrad
activist in Pamyat.
New hopes, new sources of inspiration, and new interpreta-
tions are evident in other outstanding Ukrainian theatrical perform-
ances of the past season. The same Ivan Franko Theatre in Kiev also
staged The Sanatorium Zone by Yuriy Mykhailyk, based on several
works by a leading Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvyliovyi who in 1933
committed suicide as an act of political protest against the
government for the starvation of ten million Ukrainian farmers.
In The Sanatorium Zone, Khyvyliovyi employs the allegory of
the state actually becoming a madhouse. Events from this novel are
intertwined with those from his novel, I, as well as from his short story
"Mother." In these works, all of which take place in the early years of
51
52
the Soviet state, several characters have split personalities. By com-
bining like characters from the three above works, this point is poig-
nantly emphasized still further, thus adding another argument for the
title of the play. For example, the protagonist from the novel/ serves
in a revolutionary tribunal sentencing people to death, including his
own mother (who is completely innocent of any political transgres-
sions), whom he then executes. He also takes on the role of the poet
from The Sanatorium Zone, as well as that of the son In the story
"Mother. All these characters fuse into one another, suggesting that
the protagonists are not exceptions in such situations. On the con-
trary, their existence as types only stresses the effect on individuals
of the new communist ideology, which in the 1930s kept demanding
high personal sacrifices often resulting in the loss of people's
integrity, sanity, or even their lives, as this play well demonstrates.
These events are portrayed within an atmosphere of constant
suspicion and fear. The music by Alfred Schnitke reinforces the
agitated and charged mood, while the dark stage conveys an atmos-
phere of hellish doom. For decades in the Soviet Union Khyvyllovyl
was a non-person then a "bad" person, and now he has finally been
returned to Ukrainian literature. His works are being reprinted and
his Ideas again provide Intellectual stimulation and excitement, just
as the author wished to indicate over a half century ago when he
chose his nom de plume, Khyvyliovyi (from khvyliwaty--to excite; his
real name was Fitiiiov).
In the western Ukrainian capital city of Lviv there are two
theatres one should not miss. One of them is the leading Maria
Zankovetska Lviv State Theatre. Last year its most outstanding and
memorable production was Mykola Kulish's The People's Malachi,
directed by the theatre's Artistic Director, Fedir Stryhun. Written In
1928, Kulish's play was banned following a very short run in Kiev.
The play was reprinted in Ukraine only in 1988, and now it has
received quite a daring interpretation. The protagonist, callling him-
self The People's Malachi (capitalizing on the terms "the people's
commissar" and the Biblical prophet Malachi), preaches a utopian
humanism mixed with socialism. While ignoring reality to the point of
absurdity, he causes unpleasantries to some and death to others,
including his daughter. Malachi is partly a naive romantic revolution-
ary dreamer-madman who wants to inspire and lead people to "the
blue yonder of socialism; and partly a cynical commentator on the
fruits of communist preachings. After being committed by his
daughter to a sanatorium, he escapes from it and both of them wind
up in a brothel--hinting in 1928 at what the Soviet society was turning
Hn
An outstanding stage design by Myron Kyprlan provides not
only a haunting setting, but also a metaphor for the protagonist's
dreams of reforms and the means for achieving them. The designer
53
54
also aims at the various senses. For example, the fall of tsarism and
the subsequent emergence of an independent Ukrainian state are
represented by music of the period and by the hoisting of a blue and
yellow Ukrainian national flag. The flag and icons are soon torn
down by beggar-like people who then raise a huge red flag, all in tat-
ters. It dominates the entire stage. In front of it is a two-story
wooden deck; on the deck's upper level is a ladder, leaning on
something Invisible--as though leading nowhere. Soviet audiences
can immediately identify this as a reference to the well-known
propaganda slogan calling on the people to follow "the glorious path
to socialism. A hangman' s noose is next to the ladder.
Accompanying sounds from a rusty horn and an untuned second
bass complete the commentary. A Brechtian atmosphere and a sar-
castic parody of the promises of the recent past are conveyed by the
appearance of a 15-foot high copy of an article from Pravda listing
three declarations stemming from the October Revolution: 1) equal-
ity and sovereignity of all the nations in the Russian Empire; 2) the
right to self-determination (including separation); and 3) no national
or religious favoritism nor discrimination. While the proclamation is
from 1917, the reading in 1990 is quite obvious.
Malachi fails to convert anyone to his utopian dreams and in
the process he loses his daughter. When, at the end of the play, he
cradles her dead body, the parallel to the image of the Pieta is
unmistakable. And when it is followed by the Ukrainian song, "0 why
do I love you, my Ukrainian land?" the historical significance and
sacrifice become quite poignant, as a national dimension is added to
that of individual human tragedy.
Malachi is played by the Artistic Director, Fedir Stryhun. His
interpretation is bold, original, and relevant. The production has a
special frantic and frenzied rhythm. It reflects not only the rhythm of
daily life in Ukraine during the early Soviet period, but also the
rhythm of the historic events and changes that took place at that time
in that region. In all, The People's Malachi at the Zankovetska
Theatre is a striking production of an extraordinary play by an out-
standing playwright.
The Lviv Ukrainian Young Theatre-Studio Is one of the
smallest theatres. The actors and its director Volodymyr Kuchynski,
all under 35, are devoted to the theatre as well as to Ukrainian litera-
ture. Seeing them for the first time in 1988, my feeling was of discov-
ering a rare gem. In 1990, this observation was further confirmed. In
the small theatre with seating for about 100 people, the productions
have an air of chamber performances or intimate discussions. The
staging of two verse dramas by Lesia Ukrayinka (1871-1913) Is given
contemporary relevance in terms of human values and choices. The
plays are On a Blood Stained Field and Johanna, the Wife of Khus.
In the first work, a pilgrim meets Judas after he has betrayed Christ.
55
Johanna, the Wife of Khus, The lviv Ukrainian Young Theatre-Studio, Lviv
Judas is portrayed as a jealous and unstable man who had sold out
because he craved atttention and revenge. In the second play,
Johanna returns to her husband, Khus, after spending her fortune on
providing for Christ's followers before His crucifixion. Khus wants his
wife' s Christian association to be kept a secret since he is interested
in climbing higher In the Roman bureaucracy. Eager to please his
masters he is willing to sacrifice anything. The director portrays this
by having Khus offer his own sexual favors as well as those of his
wife to his Roman superior. The message Is very clear: some
people have principles and live by them; others do not. The latter are
willing to sell their conscience, their family, and their country,
whether at the time of Christ or two millenia later. The costumes and
characters are ancient, but the overall impression conveys the recent
Soviet past. Supported by an ingenious stage design, this produc-
tion is a superb rendering of two Ukrainian classical verse plays by a
most gifted studio and group of actors.
While there are also numerous experimental theatre com-
panies in both Kiev and Lviv, these three leading theatres in Ukraine
demonstrate that the Ukrainian theatre is undergoing a rejuvenation.
It is bringing contemporary relevance to today's Soviet audiences at
a time when society and the nation are beginning their own process
of rebirth.
57
SOVIET FILM
Nicholas Rzhevsky
Glasnost and perestroika have been well served by the
movies. The U.S.S.R. Union of Cinematographers, the first profes-
sional organization in the arts to declare its independence from
government bureaucrats and party functionaries, continues to battle
for post-Socialist Realist films. The once all-powerful U.S.S.R. Com-
mittee of Cinematography still controls government funds, but the
major studios such as Lenfilm, Mosfilm, and Gorky are nurturing new
subsidiary companies who answer only to their own sense of
creativity and to profit margins. Short of outright sedition, and at
times not at all short in terms of the more irritating ideological shib-
boleths, filmmakers working without government subsidies have dis-
covered the exhilarating conditions of self-initiative and potential
bankruptcy.
The peculiar charm of Soviet cinema today Is that an
entertainment-starved audience in the millions makes It hard for
anyone with the slightest commercial and creative sense to go
bankrupt. The result is a large number of slap-dash thrillers and sex-
ually explicit, exploitative melodramas such as Inter-Girl. The chal-
lenge for talented directors has largely shifted from dealing
simultaneously with political and creative interests, to the perennial
Western goal of reconciling commercial and creative Imperatives. A
good opportunity to observe current directions and to note the
efforts of studios and young directors who have something in addi-
tion to a fast ruble in mind was provided by a film festival titled
"Debut" inaugurated in Moscow last summer.
It was Immediately noticeable that jaded European buyers
looking to fill air-time on new cable systems showed particular inter-
est In animated features. Soviet animations, because of a lack of
computers, still depend heavily on hand drawings; as a result, they
avoid electronic fakery and retain the charm of the early Disney era.
Cartoons, moreover, are easy to dub into foreign languages and the
quality of images created by such talented animators as Aleksandr
Petrov (The Cow, Pilot Studios, 1989, "First Prize for Art Work") car-
ries a universal appeal. Unfortunately, the major strength of Russian
animators Is In the genre of adult cartoons (adult in the sense of
moral and social issues rat her than sexual ones), a genre largely
ignored by Western audiences accustomed to Roger Rabbit.
Among the submitted feature films and short subjects a large
number dealt with prison camps. As with the Holocaust, the use of
Soviet prison history in cinema is made problematic by potential trivi-
allzation, particularly after the aesthetic standard established in
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's majestic documentary-tragedy, The Gulag
58
Soviet and East European Performance Vol . 11, No. 1
Archipelago (Arkhipelag Gulag) just published in Moscow. Two
entries from Lenfilm Studio, Coma and Hell, or a Dossier on Oneself
(1989), demonstrated model ways in which the pain and horror of
history can be made banal. Both provided variants on Candide. In
Hell a young, idealistic film director is sent to the Gulag because of
his love for the daughter of a K.G.B. officer. In Coma a young
idealistic poetess is also sent to a prison camp. Scenes of lesbian
attack, rape, and sodomy reminiscent of the multiple outrages Terry
Southern's Candy suffered back in the Sixties end only when the
heroine freezes to death.
A positive sign was the absence in the festival of Wor1d War II
films. Among those that were included and managed to overcome
the boredom they automatically elicit in the Soviet Union was Michael
Katz's Forever-19 (Odessa, 1988) filmed from the perspective of a
young soldier caught in the terror and carnage of the battlefield.
More promising soldier stories (reminiscent of the Vietnam War's film
legacy in America) are now provided by the war in Afghanistan and
its aftermath. A Soldier's Tale ("Best Short Feature Film," Kazakhfilm,
1989) uses tonalities of humor and tragedy to depict recruits gone
AWOL for an evening of drinking, ethnic bashing, and accidental
death. The Last Stop ("Best Feature Film," Kazakhfilm, 1989) relates
the return of a demobilized soldier to his native village and the sloth,
casual promiscuity, and primitive conditions of civilian life there. lvin
A. ("Best Actor Award" to Aleksandr Beskov, Dovzhenko, 1990) takes
its cue from Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin but undresses Its saintly
hero in a display of frontal nudity previously unknown this side of the
Volga. A young soldier who discovers he is unable to shoot at
anyone is taken to a military tribunal. On the way he and his guards
stop to swim, cavort and philosophize. The contrast of gloriously
healthy male and female bodies in opposition to military inhumanity
and rigor is carried off with a naive exuberance. Nevertheless, Bes-
kov lost his job in the Moscow Art Theatre soon after the festival,
suggesting that neither well-proportioned nudity nor exuberance is
sufficient for some members of the artistic establishment.
As in The Last Stop, ethnic issues were strongly felt in a
number of entries. Three ("Grand Prize," Kazakhfilm, 1988) the story
of three itinerant workers whose friendship is strengthened by vari-
ous comic and serious tribulations was enthusiastically received by
the jury because it suggests a vision of human accord across ethnic
boundaries. The Eve (Mosfilm, 1989) takes an opposite tack both in
its resolution and in the sense of ethnic foreboding and menace it
creates. A young man from one of the minorities comes to the city in
search of his fiancee. She happens to have a date with a Russian;
her betrothed kills her and rides off with a small gang of armed men
apparently contemplating further mayhem of a political nature.
The Russian tradition of religious-moral explorations was
59
suggested In Olga Zhukova's Forgive Me, Whoever I Am (Gorky,
1989), a powerful adaptation of Chekhov's story "The Encounter"; In
Armen Doblatlan's Kole (Armenfilm, 1988), the story of a workman
who follows orders In sawing off the cross from a church cupola; and
In Nazare's Last Prayer (Gruzia-Film, 1988), based on a debate
between a condemned priest and the commissar who orders his
execution. Such somber entries were balanced by the exuberant
Comrade Tchkalov's Crossing of the North Pole ("Best Film for Chil-
dren and Youth," Lenfilm, 1990) which presents a Mad-magazine
approach to the debunking of Socialist Realist heroics.
Two directors, Alexander Karpov, Jr. In Homunculus
(Belarusfllm, 1989) and Valery T odorovsky in catafalque (Yalta, 1989)
grappled with moral Issues In the light of psychological observation.
The first film deals with a psychotic young girl In a home for
abandoned children who organizes a rebellion against the adults.
Olga Yanushkevlch won the Best Actress Award for a sensitive and
poignant portrayal of the heroine far beyond the range suggested by
her age and experience. Catafalque takes Flannery O'Connor's
magnificent tonalities of Southern Gothic and turns her story of a
mentally deficient woman, her strong-willed mother, and an itinerant
young man who betrays them both Into a subtle and powerful
exploration of faith and cynicism. A third debut promising the
healthy evolution of post-glasnost cinema was offered by Dmitry
Meshlev under the title of Gambrinus (Odessa, 1990). Based on
Alexander Kuprln's short story, the film merges music and history by
combining the Inspired playing of a fiddler in a sailor's tavern with the
Intrusions of war, civil unrest, revolution, and communist dictatorship.
The fiddler dies In a pogrom, but his music survives in the powerful
last scene of his funeral. The ceremony brings together friends and
enemies commemorating the human losses and the betrayal of art in
the onrush of twentieth century history.
60
GLASNOST ON THE CUYAHOGA:
THE FIRST CLEVELAND FILM CONFERENCE
James H. Krukones
"Nowadays, observed Andrei Smirnov, "every Soviet film
has either a naked woman or Stalin." The director was assessing the
state of his country's cinema for an American audience at a remark-
able gathering that took place in October 1989. The First Cleveland
Film Conference, entitled "Soviet Cinema Today: Literary and
Cultural Aspects, was the largest Soviet-American meeting on film
held in the United States to that time. It brought together about
twenty Soviet visitors and more than fifty Americans--most of them
from the worlds of film, media, and academe--for five days of discus-
sions and screenings. As Smirnov put it, we want to give our
American colleagues a fuller and more personal view of develop-
ments in Soviet cinema. Those developments could be summed up
in one well known word: glasnost.
The idea for the conference, and most of its funding, came
from Cleveland financier and philanthropist George Gund Ill. His
love of film had led to the founding, in 1985, of the Cleveland
Cinematheque, which programs a wide variety of avant-garde and
foreign-language movies. Gund also wanted to make the
Cinematheque home to an annual film conference; his special inter-
est in Eastern European film made that a fitting topic for the initial
meeting. Most of the detailed planning fell to Gund's friend Ron Hol-
loway, a correspondent for Variety and The Hollywood Reporter who
has covered Eastern Bloc cinema from Berlin for the past twenty
years. Holloway spent months developing a roster of Soviet guests,
confirming their participation, and arranging their travel to the United
States. In addition, he secured the cooperation of the International
Studies Center at Cleveland's John Carroll University. The facilities
and central location of this Jesuit institution made it ideal for the
panel discussions preceding nighttime screenings at the Cinemathe-
que.
Soviet participants discussed several aspects of cinematic
glasnost, which had its official premiere in May 1986, when the Union
of Filmmakers was taken over by a reformist leadership at its historic
Fifth Congress. One of the most fundamental and welcome changes
has been the removal of state censorship, freeing directors to deal
directly and honestly with subjects they previously had to approach
in oblique and timid fashion, If at all. Ales Adamovich, head of the
Scientific Research Center of Cinema Art in Moscow, put it this way:
"The censorship net now is falling apart, so most fish get through.
Recent "fish" include Little Vera (1988), with its unvarnished depiction
of lower-class squalor and promiscuity among Soviet youth, and The
61
Needle (1989), an unblinking look at drug addiction. Glasnost also
has made possible the resurrection of films produced during the
"period of stagnation" (the current designation for the Brezhnev
years) but suppressed till now. This task has been taken up by t he
Conflict Commission, which was founded in the wake of the Fifth
Congress. The Commission's head, film critic Andrei Plakhov, spoke
about its rehabilitation of 150 films from the mid-1960s through the
ear1y 1980s, some of which have gone on to public release, including
Commissar (1967 /1988) and Repentance (1984/1987). In addition,
the Commission has tried to revive the careers of directors who
found themselves artistically stymied under the Brezhnev regime. As
the Commission fills in blank pages from Soviet cinema's recent past,
film historian Naum Kleiman lovingly restores earlier screen treas-
ures. His program of "Unknown Soviet Cinema, featuring movies
primarily from the 1920s and 1930s, was as much a highlight at the
Cleveland meeting as it was at the 1989 Moscow Film Festival, where
he Introduced it.
If film censorship is all but gone, Soviet filmmakers still run
the risk of offending powerful interest groups and government agen-
cies. Anatoly Fedorin, Director of Programs and Programming at the
state film ministry Gosklno, recalled how the State Atomic Commis-
sion tried to prevent the release of Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult
Weeks, the first documentary about the 1986 nuclear disaster. In a
move that would have been unthinkable prior to its 1986 shakeup,
Goskino took a strong stand on behalf of the film and--even more
unthinkable--emerged victorious, enabling the film to see the light of
day. Filmmakers also must contend with the Soviet audience, a large
part of which adheres to rigidly Victorian standards. Andrei Plakhov
cited letters from irate viewers as a particular problem. "Some of
these letters are very aggressive, he said, "demanding, for example,
that the director be executed. Correspondents are hypersensitive to
sex, violence, and foul language. "They use this language them-
selves, Plakhov observed, "but they fear its influence on the general
public." While these letters represent a minority opinion, some offi-
cial organs, Including the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, claim that the views articulated In them express the will of the
people and use them to demand restrictions on artistic license.
Filmmakers face still another obstacle to free expression in
the form of self-censorship. They have not yet been able to shed the
''totalitarian mindset" that several panelists identified as a Soviet char-
acteristic. "Even the intelligentsia is somewhat totalitarian, lamented
Andrei Smirnov. Vitaly Korotich, the editor-in-chief of Ogonek and a
tireless advocate of reform, said that both the creators and the con-
sumers of Soviet culture have become set in their ways. They long
to take advantage of the new openness but hold back, fearing that it
will end as suddenly as It began. "It's not so much a problem of
62
Soviet and East European Performance Vol . 11, No. 1
glasnost being limited from without, " said Plakhov, "as from within."
Prior to Gorbachev, Soviet filmmakers, like other artists, had become
accustomed to working within certain clearly defined boundaries.
Readjusting to different circumstances, even artistically favorable
ones, is bound to be difficult, especially for the older generation.
Soviet filmmakers may also have to answer to the great-god
Box Office. Perestroika has introduced the concept of cost account-
ing to the film industry, and several studios already have gone belly
up. The Soviet cinema has been profit-minded from the outset, but
the pressure to make money is greater now than ever before. Uttle
wonder, then, that the topic of commercialization came up more
often than any other. Soviet panelists disagreed about the
marketability of their films in the West. Andrei Smirnov, for one,
believes that Soviet films could successfully challenge Hollywood's
viselike grip on the international market. By contrast, director Stanis-
lav Govorukhin compared the competition between the Soviet and
American commercial cinemas to a race between a Volga and a Un-
coln Continental. "We have wonderful films for the intelligentsia, but
no successful commercial cinema," he claimed. "Even in the internal
market, Soviet commercial films cannot compete." Andrei Plakhov
agreed, noting the great success of third-rate potboilers from the
West whose cheap rental fees make them attractive to Soviet
importers.
Smirnov's confidence in the drawing power of Soviet films
was put to the test at a screening of Alexander Sokurov's latest film
Save and Protect {1989) . Sokurov, a former protege of the late
Andrei Tarkovsky, comes from the avant-garde "Leningrad school, "
which several conferees held up as one of the most vital creative
forces in Soviet cinema today. Save and Protect, in its American
premiere, set an attendance record at the Cleveland Cinematheque.
Moreover, the director himself was present to answer questions. But
his film, a highly idiosyncratic rendering of Flaubert 's Madame
Bovary that ran nearly three hours, seemed interminable. After the
first hour, many patrons began to leave--a telling reaction on the part
of the devotees who frequent the Cinematheque. When Sokurov
appeared (to applause) at the end of the movie, he scolded the
remaining viewers for the bad manners of those who had walked out.
"I thought I was in a village club," he said through an obviously
embarrassed interpreter, and then, refusing to take questions, he
departed. This minor scandal antagonized those audience members
who had stayed on for the question and answer session and left
some of them wondering just what a village club is; it also raised
new doubts about the box-office potential of Soviet films in the West,
especially those aspiring to high art.
Not that Sokurov's reaction typified Soviet behavior. On the
contrary, the visitors clearly wanted help and advice. "For a long
63
time we had only answers," Korotlch remarked. "Today we are
beginning to ask questions and to get answers from others." The
Soviets used an entire session to set forth proposals for joint projects
with the Americans. Andrei Smirnov advocated a restructuring of
cinema studies, creating ties between Soviet film schools and the film
departments of American universities. Exchange students, as well as
professors, critics, and directors, would participate In month-long
workshops or summer programs, along the lines of Robert Redford's
Sundance Institute. A Soviet film academy currently Is being built,
and Smirnov hoped It would have the support of American educa-
tional institutions and fi lm companies, "because such undertakings
often face huge bureaucratic obstacles. He also spoke of the
Soviets' need for producing expertise. Until now, the film industry in
the U.S.S.R. has lacked a body of movie producers because state
agencies such as Goskino have performed in that capacity. With
cutbacks in official control and the liberation of the studios, that is no
longer the case. The film academy will house a managerial school; It
could use the assistance of a country like the United States, where
producers continue to package deals and keep film projects on
track. In addition, Smirnov envisioned a Soviet-American firm that
would publish the work of film scholars in both countries. The Soviet
proposals received the endorsement of the American panelists and
elicited suggestions for their implementation. Later, however, It was
rumored that the Soviet filmmakers were disappointed by their lack
of success In working out more concrete arrangements. They also
let it be known that they would have preferred meeting and negotiat-
Ing directly with Hollywood movers and shakers rather than exchang-
Ing ideas with academics and critics.
In addition to providing Soviet filmmakers an opportunity to
solicit foreign aid, the conference gave them a platform for exhibiting
their wares. Newer feature films, such as Sokurov's Save and Pro-
tect and Rashid Nugmanov's The Needle, were overshadowed by
the older films showcased by Kleiman, including several from the
"period of stagnation," such as The Beginning of an Unknown Era
(1967) and Smirnov's Autumn (1974). Equally noteworthy were the
contemporary documentaries, including Sokurov's A Soviet Elegy
(1989), a profile of Boris Yeltsin; The Personal File of Anna
Akhmatova (1989), Semyon Aranovich's tribute to the great poetess;
and Sonata for Viola: Dmitry Shostakovich (1981) , Sokurov and
Aranovlch's biography of the Soviet composer that had been banned
for six years. To Aranovich also belonged I Was Stalin's Bodyguard
(1989) . In this "experiment In documentary mythology," a former
member of Stalin's security detail personally recalls the dictator with
an affection that chillingly underscores the current neo-Stallnist
nostalgia In the Soviet Union. Also commanding attention were the
videos produced by Korotlch's publication Ogonek. Each of these
"video magazines, whose format resembles the Investigative journal-
ism of 60 Minutes, candidly deals with topics ranging from Tsar
Nicholas II to the Armenian earthquake of 1988. The popularity of
documentaries among Soviet filmmakers today is easy to
understand, as they provide opportunities to examine issues that
were off limits only a few years ago. To paraphrase Smirnov, direc-
tors are more enthusiastic about putting Stalin on the screen than
filming naked women. This, however, has left feature filmmaking
relatively neglected. Conferees agreed that the Soviet cinema of the
Gorbachev era had not yet produced any great works. The
uncertainty and Incompleteness of glasnost, said Korotich, "makes it
difficult to create art nowadays.
At the beginning of the Cleveland Film Conference, Ales
Adamovich compared Soviet artists to young dogs who have broken
free of their chains and now stand around confused. They don't
know quite what to do with their freedom. Of one thing, though, they
are certain: they will not return to the doghouse. Like everything
else in Soviet society since the advent of Gorbachev, the cinema has
traveled too far down the path of glasnost to accept a reattachment
of its leash. Cinema's makers may stand around confused, unsure of
which direction to take--art or commerce, avant-garde experi-
mentalism or big-budget coproductions with the West, the socially
conscious documentary or the personal feature film. In the process,
they may feel frustrated by a lack of resources, the opposition of
powerful Interest groups, the resistance of the audience, and even
their own reluctance to break With the habits of the past. But none of
the signs point back toward the doghouse. "Soviet cinema today." a
Cleveland audience heard Andrei Smirnov declare, "is an
extraordinary living organism." Whether Its legacy proves slmllar1y
extraordinary remains to be seen.
(The author wishes to thank Professors Robert Sweeney and Max
Keck, former directors of the International Studies Center at John
Carroll University, and Ms. Ruth Bower, special projects assistant at
the Center, for their cooperation in preparing this article.)
65
66
AUGHT FROM THE EAST
Melinda Jo Guttman
A Light From the East, performed at La MaMa, is the first pro-
duction of the Yara Arts Group which was founded in 1990 to explore
new works from Eastern Europe, and to create an aesthetic dialogue
between East and West. This collective creation, directed by Vir1ana
Tkacz, is a landmark in theatre history as a performance about the
experimental theatre movement in the Ukraine.
A Light From the East is a "docudream" in which the New
York actors' lives and art are interwoven with the lives and art of the
avante-garde actors of Les Kurbas' troupe in the Ukraine in the
1920s. Les Kurbas, founder of the Soviet Ukrainian Theatre has been
compared to the greatest directors of his era: Stanislavsky, Meyer-
hold, Craig and Reinhardt. His vision of a "theatre of transfiguration"
is an ideal to which the Yara Arts group also aspires.
The form of A Light From the East is both complex and lucid.
It moves between the poles of history and dream. The set is a series
of patterned screens reminiscent of Matisse's decoupage, which are
constantly shifted to suggest shifting environments, and which are
used to show archival slides of both troupes, news articles from the
New York Times, and artistic statements. The lighting gives a unify-
ing rhythmic pattern to the work. Covering the light spectrum from
red to blue, the screens are back lit like a scrim, front lit for slides and
side lit for multi-focus.
The form is almost Pirandellian. Seven avante-garde actors
are in search of their artistic ancestors. The old avante-garde is
merged with the new. Tkacz has created several interwoven frames
of reference. The outer frame is the present, post-revolutionary
milieu in Eastern Europe. Within this frame is an actor-lecturer who
presents the plight of Kurbas' troupe in the war zone in post-
Revolutionary Russia. The third frame is the Kiev restaurant in New
York, focusing on the dreams and psycho-histories of the perform-
ers. The fourth frame concerns the actors grafting on the personae
of Kurbas' actors from their memoirs.
The texts of the piece are from Kurbas' diaries, but he is not
dramatized; his presence is paradoxically felt through his absence.
The other texts are documents, memoirs, personal statements of
contemporary actors, and in the center, the poetry of Taras Shev-
chenko and Pavlo Tychna performed bi-lingually in English and
Ukrainian. The movement of the actors reifies their movement
through time, spanning silent movies, still life, dance-theatre, and
post -modernist performance.
There are many deeply moving sections in this production
piece. We are shown, for example, Kurbas' starving actors trying to
67
bring culture to the provinces and chopping down trees to provide
light for their theatre when there is no money for electricity. In the
end, we are told that, under Stalin, Kurbas was shot along with other
political prisoners and thrown into the sea. This is juxtaposed with
the terror of a contemporary scuba diver who finds a "forest of
bones as testimony. These horrors are further juxtaposed by one of
the actors presenting his own comic, ironic struggle in playing
Romeo without a balcony, and separated from Juliet by a pit.
However, the reaching of hands toward each other over the pit
creates a spatial tension like the space between Michelangelo' s
God's hand to Adam's finger,and the absurd obstacle is trans-
cended.
Kurbas was influenced by the Ukrainian philosopher,
Skovoroda, in finding vocal and physical exercises that would open
up the spiritual "bliss" of the actor. His precise work is unknown but
is obviously related to Grotowski's search for the "sacral life of the
human spirit."
The final projection is that of Kurbas' Berezll Artistic Associa-
tion in 1922, with the caption, "I had a dream that I saw us In the
future." The members of the Yara Arts Group are competent per-
formers, but not technically or affectlvely startling or Innovative.
Their Intensity, and poetic authenticity, however, do give us light from
the east: the power of the artistic and political dream In history, and
the history of the theatrical dream.
68
CERCEAU AT THE ARENA
Leo Hecht
This season marks a milestone in the history of Washington
D.C.'s Arena Stage. Not only is it the fortieth anniversary of its crea-
tion, but it is also the final year for its founder and producing director
Zelda Fichandler. During her long and distinguished leadership of
one of the leading regional theatres in this country, she has intro-
duced many Soviet and East European plays, both old and new, to
the American public. In fact, this season at the Arena will close with
Chekhov's Seagull, which will be directed by Ms Fichandler herself
(May 17-June 23, 1991). But, the play which concerns us now is Cer-
ceau, the season's opening production at the Kreeger Theatre, the
proscenium stage at the Arena (October 12--December 3, 1990).
Viktor Slavkin, the author of Cerceau, began his theatrical
career as a member of "Our House, a theatre studio at Moscow
State University founded by Mark Rozovsky in the 1960s. (It, inciden-
tally, claims to be the oldest theatre studio in Moscow.) While there,
Slavkin wrote his first one-act play, The Bad Apartment, for the
group. He attained national reputation in 1979, when his full-length
play, The Grown-Up Daughter of a Young Man, was staged by
Anatoly Vasilyev at the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow. Other plays
Slavkin has written include the full-length Smoking Room, and two
other one-act plays, Frost and Chattanooga Choochoo. In 1984 he
completed Cerceau, which had phenomenal success in 1985 when it
was first produced at Moscow's Taganka Theatre, also under the
direction of Anatoly Vasilyev. The production subsequently toured to
Holland, Germany, and finally to the 1987 International Festival of the
Arts in London where it created a sensation.
Arena's production of Cerceau marks its English language
debut. (Its translators are Fritz Brun, internationally known as an
actor, director, translator and theatre pedagogue, and Laurence
Maslon, Arena's Literary Manager and Dramaturg.) Liviu Ciulei, a
major figure in the pantheon of international theatre and no stranger
to Arena Stage, directed and designed the set for the production.
Apparently Ciulei studied the video tapes of the original Vasilyev pro-
duction, was greatly impressed by it, but did not attempt to
reproduce it for the Arena. Overall, the production had a very suc-
cessful run despite mixed reviews which were more the result of a
failure to understand the Soviet reality Slavkin depicts, than any
weaknesses In the production.
Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 brought to an end a highly
restrictive period for all the arts, but did not yet adequately loosen the
reins. Little changed when Yuri Andropov took over on an interim
basis. In 1984, when Yurt Chernenko assumed leadership, everyone
69
was again certain that his tenure would be very short. This Is the
atmosphere during which Slavkin wrote his play. It was a t ime of
uncertainty and pessimism about what the future would bring, and a
desperate desire to escape from the trials and tribulations of every-
day life. This becomes the main t heme of the play. Although the
play was written well before glasnost and perestroika, In many
respects it is still as relevant today. The feeling of hopelessness and
expectancy of further upheaval are at least as pervasive now as they
were then.
The title of Slavkln's play, Cerceau (Serso In Russian), Is
taken from the name of a game Imported from France, which
became quite a craze in nineteenth and early twentieth century Rus-
sia. Like the game of croquet, it exemplified a carefree existence, a
time when families of property and stable financial position could
enjoy themselves on their lawns by engaging in the rather meaning-
less activity of tossing hoops and catching them on sticks, free from
any worries about the problems of the real world. Yet, when the
game Is over, all the problems return.
The play, which is set in an old country house, or dacha,
covers less than 24 hours--from a Saturday evening until late Sunday
afternoon. It Is divided into three acts: I. Saturday evening; II. Later
that night; Ill. The following afternoon. We are Introduced to the
characters as they arrive at the dacha and begin to interact with each
other. The group consists of Petushok (nicknamed Rooster), the
new owner of the dacha; Vladimir lvanovich, his immediate superior;
Valyusha, his former mistress, who bemoans her age; Nadya, his
young Moscow neighbor, who seems flighty, playful and vivacious;
Pasha, who has a degree in history but is now upholstering doors
and playing the black market; and Lars, a stranger, who first claims
to be a Bait and then a Swede. What they all share is an inability to
find a reason for their existence. They express themselves rather
superficially, but their deeply rooted emotional plight is clearly trans-
mitted to the audience as they try to communicate their feelings to
one another. They come together in an attempt to escape their
loneliness and create an idealized, sharing community. They flirt,
dance to jazz music, play a game of cerceau.
Their effort to forget the present Is realized with the arrival of
an old man, Koka, who was once the lover of the deceased great
aunt. He is the catalyst for reminiscences and the re-creation of a
seemingly perfect pre-revolutionary society. In Act II, at the dinner
table, after having donned items of old clothing they have found in a
trunk, they read old love letters, and seem to be transported back to
the turn of the century. There is even a conspicuous change in their
behavior and in their selection of archaic Russian expressions. The
group tries in vain to find momentary happiness by duplicating a by-
gone era. The mood is only slightly affected by the discovery in one
of the documents that Koka is the real owner of the dacha, and by
his agreement to sell it to Pasha. At times, some of the scenes quite
clearly recreate the atmosphere of Chekhov's theatre. Although it
may seem that Slavkin is parodying Chekhov, there is no doubt that
he owes him a great debt.
But everything must end. As they prepare to leave the dacha
In Act Ill, the group realizes that the time has come to confront the
drab, hopeless reality of their lives again. Their language changes,
and there is a note of resignation in their voices and their behavior.
They have already severed their ties to this "Brigadoon" and, more
importantly, to each other. The "sharing community" is no more.
The play ends on this pessimistic note.
Of the actors portraying the seven characters, four, Richard
Bauer (Koka), David Marks (Pasha), Pamela Nyberg (Nadya), and
John Leonard Thompson (Lars), are members of the Arena ensem-
ble: and three, Randy Danson (Valyusha), Char1es Geyer (Petushok),
and Jed Diamond (Vladimir lvanovich), guest artists with impressive
credits. As usual at the Arena, the quality of the acting is the highest.
In the best Stanislavsky tradition, under Ciulei's direction the actors
work as an ensemble without upstaging each other or playing to the
audience. All are eminently, vividly believable in this portrayal of a
microcosm of Soviet society.
Liviu Ciulei's direction of Cerceau reveals the fine touch
necessary for a Chekhovian play. His actors effectively underplay
their roles in accord with the director's sensitivity to nuances. As
anyone who has worked with him will verify, he is a director who
insists on controlling all details of a production. This is most certainly
true for Cerceau. And it is quite apparent that Ciulei spent a great
deal of time and effort in the staging (he also designed the set).
There appears nothing unexpected, overlooked or improvised in the
production. Everything is meticulously worked out.
See also the review of Cerceau at the Amandiers Theatre,
Paris, November, 1990, and an interview with t he director, Claude
Regy, in the Spring, 1991 issue of Western European Stages.
71
TANGO, BY StAWOMIR MROZEK.
THE MANTICORE THEATRE, NEW YORK.
Joel Berkowitz
What would Mroiek think of this: a New Yorker goes to Los
Angeles, wins a great deal of money on a television game show, and
with part of his winnings returns to New York to help found an Off Off
Broadway theatre? After winning the Tournament of Champions on
Jeopardy!, Bob Verinl co-founded the Manticore Theatre, two of
whose stated objectives are "to produce entertaining, challenging
plays, new and old, that explore frontiers of language and human
relations" and "to enrich the cultural life of our community." To this
end, the Manticore recently staged a respectful revival of Mrozek's
Tango, under the direction of Kevin Barry.
Tango has acquired a new layer of connotations since Its
first production In 1965, as the so-called ''twentysomething" gener-
ation, like Mrozek's Arthur, seems to be floundering In the wake of
the sexual, political, and artistic revolutions carried out by its elders.
The production does not go out of its way to emphasize this parallel,
except for a couple of telltale lines in the program:
Place: Poland, but under no circumstances the United
States of America.
Time: 1963, but under no circumstances 1990
Thus, the audience is teased into recognizing that the his-
torical cycle of a bohemian period followed by an era of neo-
conservatism has already played itself out again in the mere twenty-
five years since Mrozek first depicted this progression In Tango.
Mantlcore's production benefited from several strong sup-
porting performances. Verlnl was engagingly slovenly as Stomil, the
middle-aged avant-garde artist run amok. Near the end of Act I,
Verini seizes the spotlight with Stomil' s puppet show, giving a scat
rendition of Mrozek's verse and using Muppet-like creatures to
represent Adam and Eve. David Kener, although physically unlike
the plump Eddie described by Mroiek, possessed an eerie power
that crescendoed, appropriately, as the play progressed. George
Cambus beautifully captured the effeteness of Uncle Eugene, and the
final tango, choreographed by Dona Lee Kelly, almost managed to
realize Mrozek's coup de theatre. Unfortunately, much of the play's
power, as well as its humor, was undermined by James Raftery's per-
formance as Arthur; the actor lacked the craftsmanship necessary to
convey the emotional upheavals the role demands.
Nonetheless, the Manticore company staged a worthwhile,
72 Soviet and East European Performanoe Vol. 11, No. 1
intelligently conceived production. The company chose a timely
moment to revive a play that continues to take on new meanings as
each generation struggles to find a moral center In a world whose
norms, in the eyes of many, seem to be eroding.
73
CONTRIBUTORS
JOEL BERKOWITZ is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. program in
theatre at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
He is also the Assistant Editor of The Journal of American Drama and
Theatre.
MELINDA JO GUTIMAN is Associate Professor of Theatre at John
Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is an actress as well as a critic
and writer on t heatre. She has recently edited L 'imaginaire du
nucleaire for Les Cahiers du Grit.
LEO HECHT is on the Advisory Board of SEEP, and a Professor in
the Department of Foriegn Languages and Literatures at George
Mason University.
ZYGMUNT HUBNER died January 12, 1989. An actor, director,
manager, teacher, and writer, he was one of the most important fig-
ures In postwar Polish theatre. From 1974 until his death he was
manager and artistic director of the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw,
which has been renamed the Zygmunt Hubner Theatre. Hubner lec-
tured on Polish theatre at the CASTA-NEH Institute held at the Grad-
uate Center of the City University of New York, June 15-July 26,
1980.
MICHAL KOBIAI.KA Is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the
University of Minnesota. His articles and reviews have been pub-
lished In Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre History
Studies, Medieval Perspectives, The Drama Review, Theatre Journal,
Stages, Theatre Annual, Theatre Nordic Studies, and Slavic and
East European Journal. He has just completed a book on Tadeusz
Kantor and his Cricot 2 Theatre to be published by the University of
California Press in 1992.
JAMES H. KRUKONES received his Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison in 1983 and has done research in the Soviet
Union. A member of the History Department at John Carroll
University in Cleveland since 1988, he teaches courses on Russia,
Eastern Europe, and film.
LARRISA ZALESKA ONYSHKEVYCH i s a scholar of Ukrainian
drama. She is the literary editor of the Ukrainian monthly journal
Suchansnlst and director of the Editing Division of Princeton
Research Forum. The first volume of her Anthology of Ukrainian
Drama is now being published in Canada.
NICHOLAS RZHEVSKY is a professor of Slavic languages and litera-
ture at SUNY Stony Brook. He is currently on leave and living in
Moscow.
PHOTO CREDITS
A Light From the East
Yara Arts Group
75
THE EUROPEAN THEATRE QUARTERLY
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Published in English, quarterl y , on 96 color pages, EUROMASKE covers all
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Read what the leading theatre experts have to say about new prouductions,
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In its Fall 1990 issue, EUROMASKE featured: Eastern Europe in Turmoil,
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Howard Barker, Izabella Czywinska, Istvan Eorsi , Jean Duvignaud, Heinz
Klunker, i ~ a Svidkoi * Roberto Ciulli's Theater a. d. Ruhr * Welsh
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EUROMASKE brings in its Winter 1990 issue: Glasgow, Cultural Capital of
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Fire in the USA .

Read in EUROMASKE, Spring 1991 issue: Is There a Future for National
Theatres: Reports from Several Capitals of Europe * An Interview with the
Director George Tabori * Ritsaert ten Cate on the Malaise of the Festival
Culture * Transfer of Theatre Management Know-how Needed in Eastern
Europe * Guided Theatre Walks Around London * Budapest's Katona Jozsef
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Performing Arts * Ronconi , Mnouchkine, Bausch * Bold Theatre in Siberia

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SUBSCRIPTION POLICY
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PLA YSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA) :
No. 1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.2 /,Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated
by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No. 3 An Altar to Himself, by lreneusz lredynski. Translated by
Michar KobiaH<a. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No. 4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski.
Stage adaptation by Zygmunt HUbner; English version by
Ear1 Ostroff and Daniel Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No. 5 The Outsider, by lgnatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No. 6 The Ambassador, by Sfawomir Mrozek. Translated by
Slttwomir Mrozek and Ralph Manheim. $5.00 ($6.00
foreign)
No.7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the
Kitchen, Nets and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No. 8 The Trap, by Tadeusz R6zewicz. Translated by Adam
Czerniawski. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated Bibliography. Compiled
and edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00
($6.00 foreign)
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated Bibliography. Compiled
and edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Taborski, Michal'
Kobialka, and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by
Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and
Catalog by Daniel C. Gerouid and Alma H. Law. $5.00
77
($6.00 foreign)
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A Symposium
with Janusz Gl'owacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by
Daniel C. Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign)
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or
money order payable to CAST A to:
78
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