SEEP-Vol.20. No.1 Spring 2000

volume 20, no.
1
Spring 2000
....__

SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4307. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East
European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Theatre Program,
The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th A venue, New
York, NY 10016-4307.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Jennifer Parker Starbuck
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Lars Myers
EDITORIAL ASSIST ANT
Lara Shalson
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Susan T enneriello
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGERS
Patricia Herrera Melissa Gaspar
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
Allen J. Kuharski
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous
grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn
Chair in Theatre in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University
of New York.
Copyright 2000 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that
desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared
in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article 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 Editors of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 20, N o.l
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
TABLE OF CONfENfS
In Memoriam: George Gibian
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
"Petr Ubi: May 1965-December 1999"
] arka Burian
"Chekhov and the Young Spectators' Theatre"
Elisabeth T. Rich
"Chekhov at Moscow's Theatre of the South-West:
the Twentieth Anniversary"
Michael Long
"Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising"
Wieslaw Gorski
"Memoirs in Iowa"
Cynthia Goatley
5
6
7
8
14
16
24
38
42
48
"Croatian Theatre at the Close of the Nineties: 52
From Political Queries to Aesthetic Challenges"
Dubravka Vrgoc
Frakcija-Magazine for the Performing Arts 61
Dubravka Vrgoc
"Kauno Valstybinis Akademinis Dramas Teatras 63
(The Kaunas State Academic Drama Theatre, Kaunas, Lithuania)"
] eff Johnson
3
REVIEWS
"The Crazy Locomotive"
Joseph Roach
"The Czechosl ovak-American Marionette
Theatre's, Twelve Iron Sandals"
Molly Parker
"The Swan: a Lyrical Song For a Dying Culture"
Joshua Abrams
Contributors
Publications
69
75
79
83
86
4
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
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 submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic 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 performances of Gogel but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogo) as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish 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. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should
be submitted on computer disk as either Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS or
Wordperfect 6.0 for Windows documents (ASCII or Text Files will be
accepted as well) and a hard copy of the article should be included.
Photographs are recommended for all reviews. All articles should be sent
to the attention of Slavic and East European Performance, c/o Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center, The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365
5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4307. Submissions will be evaluated,
and authors will be notified after approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The Spring issue 2000-our first of the new millennium-is
unusually inclusive, featuring articles on the theatre of six countries and
national traditions. Elisabeth Rich talks with the St. Petersburg director
Henrietta Y anovskaya, Wieslaw Gorski and Cynthia Goatley discuss
dramatizations of Miron Bialoszewski's Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising
from different perspectives, Dubravka r g o ~ introduces a new Croatian
journal about performance and surveys recent the work Croatian
playwrights, Michael Long follows Chekhov in Moscow, and Jeff Johnson
interviews a Lithuanian director; in our reviews, Joseph Roach watches a
Polish Crazy Locomotive, Molly Parker looks at Czech puppets in America,
and Joshua Abrams hears a Hungarian Swan song.
All of this activity is good news. The issue, however, opens on a
somber note with the sudden death of George Gibian, a leading Slavic
scholar and a friend, and the tragic suicide of Petr Ubl, a young Czech
director who stood on the threshold of a major career. Jarka Burian pays
tribute to Ubi and discusses the circumstances of his death.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Performance by visiting our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc
6
In Memoriam: George Gibian 1924-1999
George Gibian died unexpectedly on October 24, 1999 at his home
in Ithaca, New York. Born in Prague on January 29, 1924, he attended
schools in Czechoslovakia until 1939 when, after the Munich Agreement
with Hitler, he left for England, and a year later the United States. He had
been a professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Cornell
University since 1961. George wrote extensively on Russian literature,
editing and annotating numerous nineteenth-century classics, and he
translated theN obel prize winning Czech poet, J aroslav Seifert. In the field
of theatre, George is best known for his pioneering edition of Russia's Lost
Literature of the Absurd in 1971, which first introduced Daniil Kharms and
Aleksandr Vvedensky to English-speaking readers. This frequently reprinted
volume includes the stories and plays of Kharms and Vvedensky, a long
introduction by the editor, and the "Oberiu Manifesto" in which the
Russian absurdists proclaim their anti-socialist-realist doctrine.
7
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
The Present Company Theatorium presented Elena Penga's play,
Gorky's Wife, in which a young woman meets Maxim Gorky's wife in the
parking-lot of a Los Angeles shopping center and invites her to a saloon
where the ghost of Maxim tends bar. The production, directed by ] ulia
Barclay, ran from November 26 to December 19.
The Tribeca Playhouse presented Uncle jack, an adaptation of
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that sets the play in present-day West Virginia. The
production, adapted and directed by Jeff Cohen, ran from December 2 to 8.
New York Art Theatre presented an adaptation of Fyodor
Dostoevsky's The Idiot at Theatre for the New City. The production,
directed by Anatole Fourmantchouk, ran from December 28 to January 23.
A production of Yevgeny Shvarts's An Ordinary Miracle, directed
by Barbara Vann, was presented at Medicine Show from January 7 to 30.
John Houseman Studio Theatre presented Bob Rogers's Small
Potatoes, an original comedy inspired by Nikolai Gogol's The Government
Inspector. The production, directed by Martha Pinson, ran from january 27
to February 20.
Creative Artists Laboratory presented "Chekhov's Look at Love
and Marriage," five one-act plays by Chekhov at Theater 22. Included in the
program were The Bear, The Marriage Proposal, Anniversary, The Chorus Girl
(adapted from a short story), and A Tragic Rote. The productions, directed
by Tanya Klein and David Burgos, ran from January 12 to January 29.
Double Helix Productions presented Anton Chekhov' s Three Sisters
at the Thirtieth Street Theater on February 17 to 27.
NaCL (North American Cultural Laboratory) Theatre, Bond Street
Theatre and Dah Teatar of Belgrade presented an evening of performance
and artistic exchange at La Mama on February 7. Maja Mitic ofDah Teatar
8 Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 20, No. I
presented The Flame at the Bottom of the Sea and Tannis Kowalchuk of N aCL
Theatre presented The Passion, based on the novel by Brazilian writer
Clarice Lispector and directed by Brad Krumholz. All three companies
exchanged ideas on performance styles after the performances.
Teatr Provisorium and Kompania "Teatr" of Lublin, Poland,
performed Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz, at Raw Space from March
8 to 12, alternating performances between English and Polish.
Theatre de Complicite and the Emerson String Quartet presented
The Noise of Time, a piece about Dmitri Shostakovich. The production,
directed by Simon McBurney, ran from March 1 to 5 at John Jay College.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Regional U.S.
Tadeusz R6i.ewicz's The W1Jite Wedding was presented at the City
Garage of Santa Monica, California, on November 12 to 14. The
production was part of the Edge of the World Festival, a showcase of
alternative theatre in Los Angeles.
The Odyssey Theater Ensemble of Los Angeles presented Vaclav
Havel's The Memorandum, directed by Jessica Kubzansky, from December
1 to 12.
Trap Door Theatre of Chicago presented The Crazy Locomotive by
Stanishw Ignacy Witkiewicz, directed by Andrew Krukowski, from January
13 to February 12.
The Pacific Resident Theatre of Venice, California presented The
Swan by Ferenc Molnar, translated by Benjamin Glazer and directed by
Howard Shangraw, from October 9 to February 13 (See review, page 77).
The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA presented
Anton Chekhov's Ivanov, directed by Yuri Yeremin, Artistic Director of
the Pushkin Theatre of Moscow, from November 26 to January 23.
Running concurrently from December 10 to January 16, was The Idiots
Karamazov, by Christopher Durang and Albert lnnaurato, directed by
Karin Coonrod.
9
TinFish Theatre (Chicago) presented Milan Kundera's Jacques and
His Master, based on Denis D iderot' s novel Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.
The production, directed by Dejan Avramovich, ran from January 2 to
February 26.
Gilles Segal's Holocaust drama, The Puppetmaster ofL6d.i(translated
from the German by Sarah O'Connor), about a Polish-] ewish puppeteer
who stubbornly refuses to believe that WWII has ended, was presented at
the Marin Theatre Company (Mill Valley, CA). The production, directed
by Lee Sankowich, and with puppets designed by Nick Barone, ran from
January 14 to February 14.
San Francisco Bay Area puppetmaster Lewis Mahlmann, in
collaboration with The Puppet Company's Randal Metz and the San
Fran cisco Chamber Orchestra, presented a live puppet performance of Igor
Stravinsky's L 'histoireduSoldat (The History ofaSoldier)onJanuary 28 at St.
John's Presbyterian (Berkeley) and on January 30 at the Martin Myer
Sanctuary (San Francisco). The show was a Lilliputian Players Production,
directed by Mahlmann and with puppets designed by William Stewart Jones.
Mahlmann performed the soldier and Randal Metz performed the Devil.
Shattered Globe Theatre presented Maxim Gorky's The Lower
Depths, directed by Louis Contey, at Victory Gardens Theatre (Chicago)
from February 10 to April2.
Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters(translated by Lanford Wilson)
was presented at the University of Washington School of Drama Studio
Theater ~ Meany Hall. Directed by Jude Domski, it featured students from
the Professional Actor Training Program, and ran from March 1 to 12.
Sacred Fools Theatre Company (Los Angeles) presented Simon
Callow's translation of Kundera'sJacques and His Master, directed by John
Sylvian, from February 10 to March 11.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Europe
Iztok Kovac and his company En Knap of Ljubljana presented the
multimedia piece Far from Sleeping Dogs, with music by Vinko Globokar,
10 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
at Berlin's Hebbel Theater from February 2 to 4. Also presented at the
Hebbel was Olga Pautova's The Seven Brothers, a scenic rendition of two
levels of sensory experience with seven dancers, from February 25 to 27, and
Lukas Hemleb's molodec/Le Gars, based on a melodrama by Marina
Zvatekeva, from March 11 to 15.
DANCE
New York City
Dance Theatre Workshop presented the Eighth Annual
Improvisation Festival New York, featuring Daniel Lep,koff and members of
the Austrian/Russian group Lux Flux, on December 8.
Katja Pylshenko Kocio presented Bread With Honey, an evening of
dance and music played on traditional Slavic instruments by Julian and Alex
Kytasty, at Bridge for Dance on January 28.
The Budapest Dance Ensemble presented Csardds: The Tango of the
East, choreographed and directed by Zoltan Zsurafszki, at the Lehman
Center for the Performing Arts on January 16.
Susan Osberg previewed part of her full-length work, Voice of a
Seer, based on the life of the Russian seer, Madame Blavatsky, at St. Mark's
Church on February 12.
FILM
New York City
New York University Cantor Film Center presented "After the
Velvet Revolution," a screening of Czech and Slovak films released after the
1989 Velvet Revolution, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of
Czechoslovak independence, from November 6 to 7. Included in the
program were Elementary School (1991), directed by Jan Sverak; All That I
Like (1992), directed by Martin Sulik; Angel of Mercy (1993), directed by
Miroslav Luther; Words, Words, Words (1993), directed by Michaela
Pavlatova; Faust (1994), directed by Jan Svankmajer; The Garden (1994),
directed by Martin Sulik; I Thank You for Each New Morning (1994), directed
by Milan Steindler; Kolya (1996), directed by Jan Sverak; Paper Heads (1996),
directed by Dusan Hanak; Orbis Pictus (1996), directed by Martin Sulik; A
11
Forgotten Light (1997), directed by Vladimir Michalek; Rivers of Babylon
(1997), directed by Vladimir Balco; and Sekal Has to Die (1998), directed by
Vladimir Michalek.
Anthology Film Archives, Director's Guild Movie Theatre, and
Quad Cinema hosted the "New York Festival of Russian Films" from
Decemberl 0 to 12. The program included, Vozhdi/ Great Leaders (1998), by
Galina Yevtushenko; Genuine Talent (1999), by Ludmila Tsvetkova; The
Great Chaliapin (1999), by Yuri Aldokhin; Molokh (1999), by Alexander
Sokurov; Ivan Mosjoukine (1998), by Galin a Dolmatovskaya; Day of Bread
(1998), by Sergei Dvorsevoi; Pharon (1998), by Sergei Ovcharov; and Eight
and a Half Dollars (1999), by Grigory Konstantinopolsky.
The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video
presented "FilmFest," the third installment of a biennial series highlighting
recent film from the independent states of the former Soviet Union, from
December 3 to 19, 1999. Included in the program were Khroustalyov,
mashinu! /Kroustalyov, My Car!, (Russia, 1998), directed by Alexei Gherman;
S dnjom rozhdenya/ Happy Birthday (Russia, 1998), directed by Larisa
Sadilova; Obiknovenniy President! An Ordinary President (Belarus, 1998),
directed by Yuri Khashchavatski; Parvozi Anbur!The Flight of the Bee
(Tajikistan, 1998), directed by Jamshed Usmonov and Min Biong Hun;
Okraina!Outskirts (Russia, 1998), directed by Petr Lutsik; Aksuat
(Kazakhstan, 1998), directed by Serik Aprymov; Checking Out (Latvia,
1997), directed by Carl Biorsmark; V toj Stranel In That Land (Russia, 1997),
directed by Lydia Boborova; Blokpostl Checkpoint (Russia, 1998), directed by
Alexander Rogozhkin; Serebrjannye Golovy!Silver Heads (Russia, 1998),
directed by Yevgeny Yufit and Vladimir Maslov; Pavel i Lyalya/Pavel and
Lyalya (Russia, 1999), directed by Viktor Kossakovsky); Odnal Alone
(Russia, 1998) ,directed by Dmitri Kabakov; and Sreda 19.0 7.1961 I Wednesday,
19.07.1961 (Russia/Germany/Great Britain/Finland, 1997), directed by
Viktor Kossakovsky; and Letters Not About Love (USA, 1998), a film
directed by Jacki Ochs about the correspondence between American poet
Lyn Hejinian and Ukrainian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. Also
included in the program was Roman Balayan's Hrani Menya Moy
Talisman/Guard Me, My Talisman (USSR, 1986), a film built around events
from Aleksandr Pushkin' s life, as a commemoration of his 200 <h anniversary.
ARTS, CULTURE, NEWS
12
Harvest: Ukrainian Folk Song Today, wasp resented by the Yara Arts
Group, the New York Bandura Ensemble, and the Ukrainian Institute of
America on November 13-14, 1999 at the Ukrainian Institute of America.
The two-day event included a workshop on Ukrainian folk singing and a
concert of contemporary bandura from New York and Kiev, including
Julian Kytasty, Roman Hrynkivand the Experimental Bandura Trio.
An exhibition of Czech photographer Bohdan work
was held at Leica Gallery from January 21 to February 26.
An exhibition of photomontages by Czech avant-garde artist
Frantisek Vobecky was held at Ubu Gallery from January 8 to February 26.
Propaganda and Dreams, an exhibit of photographs promoting
Stalin's Five-Year Plan and Roosevelt's New Deal, was held at the
International Center of Photography. The exhibition, which included the
work of Alexander Rodchenko, was held from October 20 to February 13.
The Body of the Line: Eisenstein's Drawings, an exhibition of
drawings by the Russian filmmaker, on loan from the Russian State
Archives for Literature and Art in Moscow, was held at the Drawing Center
from January 22 to March 18.
An adapted form of Sergei Bugaev's Afrika installation Mir: Made
in the Twentieth Century, which was first shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale,
was on exhibit at I-20 Gallery from January 1 to March 11.
Y ara Arts Group and the Ukrainian Institute of America presented
GOGOL/HOHOL: Contemporary Artists, Writers and Performers React to the
Master, on February 4 to 6. Artists were invited to create works in theatre,
dance, music, and other media inspired by the short stories of Nikolai
Gogo!. Featured were Yara actors performing poetry by Christine Turczyn,
Maryana and Julian Kytasty singing the folk songs mentioned in Gogel's
stories, and Katja Kolcio of Kola Dancers presenting an installation/ dance
piece. The art exhibit component of the event was curated by Isabelle
Dupuis and Virlana Tkacz and included work by Petro Hrytsyk, Alexandra
Isaievych, Yuri Lev, and Olga Maryschuk.
-Compiled by Lars Myers and Lara Shalson
13
BOOKS RECEIVED
J akimowicz, Irena. Wok61 Ma/4rstwo Witkacego (About Witkacy' s Painting).
Wrodaw: Wiedza o Kulturze, 1995. 179 pages. Includes 171 reproductions
ofWitkacy's painting and drawing as well as a series of essays by the late art
historian, Irena J akimowicz, a bibliographical notes, an index of people, and
a list of the illustrations. Although the date of publication is 1995, the book
only appeared in 1999 in a small printing, and the press is no longer in
business.
Jasieri.ski, Bruno. The Mannequins' Ball, translated and with an introduction
by Daniel Gerould. TheN etherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.
68 pages. Volume 6 of the Polish Theatre Archives, the book includes a
Chronology of Jasieri.ski's life and works, a list of sources, an essay by
Anatolii Lunacharsky, two portraits of J asieri.ski (one in color), eight
woodcuts by Dmitri Moor, and many photographs and illustrations.
Kowalewicz, Kazimierz, ed. Living in the Performers' Village.
Anthropology / Sociology /Theatre Series. L6di: University of L6di, Chair
of Sociology, 1999. The International School of Theatre Anthropolgy
(ISTA), The 10'h Session, May 1996. 117 pages. Contains thirteen articles,
all in English, plus a name index.
MadJch TragedidjaA ViUg Nyelvein es a Sz{npadon/Ma&ch: The Tragedy of
Man in the Languages of the World and on Stage. Bibliogd.fia/Bibliography.
Budapest: Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute. Two brochures. 16
pages and 31 pages.
Sebesta, Juraj . Contemporary Slovak Drama 1, edited and with an
introduction by Juraj Sebesta. Bratislava: Divadelny Ustav (The Theatre
Institute), 1999. 190 pages. Contains English translation of four plays:
Martin Citvak, Frankie is ok, Peggy is fine and the house is cool!; La co Kerata,
Dinner about a City, Viliam Klimatek's Beach Boredom, and the Stoka
Theatre's Bottom, plus a selected bibliography.
Steiner, Evgeny. Stories for Little Comrades. Revolutionary Artists and the
Making of Early Soviet Children's Books. Translated by Jane Ann Miller.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. 214 pages. Includes many
illustrations and twelve color plates, biographical notes on artists and
authors, notes, and index.
Szinr6l Szinre/Scene by scene. Utvanytervek Madd.ch: Az ember
tragedidjahoz/Set designs for Madd.ch: The Tragedy of Man. Exhibition
catalogue for the Prague Quadrennial '99. Budapest: Hungarian Theatre
Museum and Institute, 1999. 132 pages. Essays in Hungarian and English:
Maria Istvan, "Visual Aspects of The Tragedy of Man"; Nina Kiraly,"Was
it a dream or am I dreaming now?"; Gyorgy Szekely,
"Myth-Charm-Nightmares: The Tragedy of Man on stage." 144 pictures
of stage designs, mostly in color, for productions, 1905-1998.
Witkacy i przyjaciele w fotografii Wladyslawa fana Grabskiego ( Witkacy and
friends in the photography of Wladyslaw jan Grabskt). Catalogue for the
exhibition at the Slupsk Museum, 12 September to 28 November 1999.
Slupsk: Muzeum Pomorza Srodkowego, 1999. 90 pages. Includes a preface
by Jan Grabski, an introduction to the exhibition and a note on new
Witkacy items in Museum collection by Beata Zgodzi Iiska, 55 black-and-
white reproductions, and a program of the symposium held 13-14 September
1999.
15
PETR LEBL : MAY 1965-DECEMBER 1999
J arka Burian
In the hours bridging December 11th and 12th, 1999, after having
written farewell notes to his family and colleagues, Petr Lebl, the richly
talented, often controversial artistic director of Prague's Balustrade Theatre
(Divadlo na ZabradlQ, took his life by hanging himself in the backstage space
of his own theatre. The tragic, totally unforeseen action stunned the Czech
theatre world.
Lebl was only thirty-four years old. In his brief six years as artistic
head of the Balustrade theatre (in which Vaclav Havel's earliest successes
were staged in the 1960s), Lebl had built a reputation as probably the
brightest, most audacious young theatre talent in the new, post-Communist
Czech Republic. Lebl's gifts and skills as a director overllowing with fresh
theatrical imagination were also evident in his stage designs for most of his
own productions, as well as in his graphic designs for his theatre's programs.
After succeeding Jan Grossman (Havel's chief collaborator in the 1960s) as
head of the Balustrade in 1993, Lebl staged more than a dozen productions
that delighted, often irritated, but rarely failed to seize the attention of
audiences.
1
His work might fairly be described as postmodern but with
greater finesse and discipline than that overused term usually implies. Two
of his productions were voted best Czech productions of the year
(Chekhov's The SeaGull, 1994 and Ivanov, 1997), and the Balustrade Theatre
under his leadership was twice voted theatre of the year.
Having opened Uncle Vanyalast October (1999) to typically mixed
revues, Lebl was apparently drained, both physically and emotionally, but
he nevertheless began rehearsing American playwright William
Mastrosirnone's Like Totally Weird for a January 2000 opening. The choice
of the Mastrosirnone play-a contemporary thriller with a strong
sociocultural motif critical of our media-driven culture-was an indication
of Lebl's eclectic taste.
2
He had also directed his own adaptations of Kurt
Vonnegut's Slapstick and Kafka's Metamorphosis as an amateur, and,
professionally, works as varied as Genet's 7he Maids, Gogol's Revizor,
Masteroff, Kander, and Ebb's Cabaret, and Synge's Playboy of the Western
World at the Balustrade Theatre, as well as Smetana's opera The
Brandenburgs in Bohemia for Prague's National Theatre. Further evidence
of Lebl's most recent ongoing and projected activity were his work on two
film scripts and his agreement to direct Cyrano de Bergerac in Prague's
17
National Theatre in 2001, a play he had previously directed in 1996 for the
National Theatre in Tel Aviv.
Chekhov was his favorite playwright. As already noted, prior to
Uncle Vanya, he had directed Ivanov, and before that-his first major
success-The Sea Gull. In retrospect, it is eerie to recall that both Ivanov and
The Sea Gull culminate in the last-act suicides of their male protagonists, and
that Ubi's own Ivanov was the last play he saw performed, a few hours
before taking his life. But it would be a mistake to regard his witnessing that
performance as a prompt for an impulsive decision and act.
During his final hours, Lebl gave no hint of his fatal decision. His
downstairs neighbor in a small apartment building (about a mile behind
Prague Castle) spoke to him briefly and casually on that Saturday afternoon
as he was leaving for the theatre. Nothing in their chat seemed out of the
ordinary, she later said. Yet it is clear that although Ubi's behavior didn't
reveal it, he had prepared his exit as carefully and with as keen a sense for
the dramatic and theatrical as he had previously devoted to his production
scenarios. After the Ivanov performance that Saturday evening, December
11, he stayed in the theatre after everyone else had left; it was something he
often did, at times spending the night there. On this night, however, in his
corner office on the second floor, he composed farewell notes to family and
colleagues, as well as suggestions for his funeral service-who should speak,
and who should sing, for example. Leaving these final statements in his
office, he locked the door and put a note on it saying he would be on stage.
He proceeded down to the small stage, and then up to its fly gallery. There
he had already prepared a red plastic chair and a climber's rope with a snap
hook. He secured the rope over one of the transverse beams and then, in the
early hours of Sunday the 12th, he hanged himself.
He had also known that a performance was scheduled for the
theatre that same Sunday evening, and also that the play being done by a
guest ensemble did not require the use of the fly space. It was Werner
Schwab's Women Presidents. That performance, which culminates in the
killing of a woman by two others, went on to its completion with Ubi's
body suspended above it. Not until the theatre was being closed, perhaps
twenty hours after Ubi's death, did a technician climb up to the fly gallery
to make sure everything was in order before leaving. Only then was Ubi's
body discovered. Had it been another play, or any day other than Sunday,
he probably would have been found much sooner. Police investigation
determined that the event was neither an accident nor a crime, but a
volitional act.
18
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 20, No. I
The first cast reading of William Mastrosimone's Like Totally Weird at the
Balustrade Theatre, October 21, 1999. Lebl is seated at center, in white.
Present is what seems to be the total production staff
0'.
...-<
As this is being written (early February 2000), the situation at the
Balustrade Theatre is unclear regarding who may replace Ubl or exactly
what will happen with the Mastrosimone play, although the present
intention is to have it redirected from scratch for an opening next season.
(The scheduled December 18 opening of the final 1999 Balustrade
production (Cyril T ourneur' s The Revenger's Tragedy), by another director,
was postponed until the second week of January.)
Whatever additional information and insights may yet emerge
regarding Ubi's tragic action, it seems likely that his whole career will be
reassessed and that his directorial eccentricities and indulgences will be seen
as incidental to his undeniable creative fantasy and his solid achievements as
artistic head of the Balustrade Theatre. In the meantime, one critic's
observations shortly after the poignant event seem representative:
Truly, Petr Ubl was not only an exceptional
directorial figure, creator of an autonomous theatrical
style and the artistic head ... of one of the most original
Czech stages; he was something more. In Czech theatre he
was a true child of this age: a sovereign portrayer of its
emotionality and its superficiality, its chaos and its hidden
longing for order . ... When the history of the Czech
theatre of the last ten years is written, it will deal with
Petr Ubl first of all.
6
On another level, it is also likely that for Czech theatre he will
now-like A. E. Houseman's athlete dying young-acquire the dimension
of legend and myth. I believe that would have appealed to his sense of the
dramatic.
NOTES
1. For a brief account of his first full season at the Balustrade Theatre see J arka
Burian, "Cloudy Forecast for New Prague Spring," American Theatre, December
1994, pp. 76-77; a fuller account of his career may be found in Burian, "Three Young
Czech Directors," Slavic and East European Peiformance 19, no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp.
14-31.
2. He was initially drawn to the play on the basis of reading a Czech review of its
premiere production at the Humana Festival in Louisville in 1998.
3. See Burian, "The Dark Era of Modern Czech Theatre: 1948-1958," Theatre History
Studies XV (1995), pp. 44-53, for a more detailed account ofFrejka's career.
22
4. In addition to Ubi's invitation to direct Cyrano in Tel Aviv, his Balustrade
production of The Sea Gull was invited to perform at a Moscow theatre festival in
1996.
5. Initial details of the suicide and the reactions to it may be found in Lidove noviny,
14 December 1999, pp. 1, 20; and in Blesk 8, no. 291 (14 December 1999), p. 1.
6. Jan Kolif, "A Child of This Age [Dite teto doby]," Divadeln noviny 8. no. 22
(December 28, 1999): 1.
23
CHEK.HOV AND THE YOUNG SPECfATORS' THEATRE
Elisabeth T. Rich
During my recent trip to Moscow, I met with Henrietta
Yanovskaya at the Young Spectators' Theatre,
1
where she has been artistic
director since 1987. She is a woman who is indisputably at the top of her
profession-a statement corroborated by various professional "ratings" (a
new buzz word for Russians) which consistently place her in the top five
stage directors in Russia. In fact, only days after I first met her, in June
1998, a biography of Yanovskaya was featured on Russian television in a
series titled The Lives of Remarkable People. The Moscow weekly Extra
described the program: "[Yanovskaya] began her artistic life in St.
Petersburg, where she, together with her husband Kama Ginkas, after
terrible skirmishes with the authorities about art, won the right to stage
critical and bold plays. When she became head of the Young Spectators'
Theatre in Moscow, she produced Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog,
which marked the beginning of a new period in the life of this theatre. Later
this play was followed by Chekhov' s Ivanov, Marshak's Good-bye, America!,
and Ostrovsky's The Storm." When I met Yanovskaya, I quickly saw the
qualities that enabled her to accomplish these feats; not only was she
extremely direct and outspoken in voicing her opinions, but there was
unmistakable indomitability and self-determination in her manner. She did
not particularly conform to my preconception of what the director of a
youth theatre would look like; with a Davidoff cigarette constantly dangling
from her lips, the bespectacled fifty-nine-year-old Y anovskaya was dressed
entirely in black_
Located on Mamonovsky Lane (a quiet, nondescript side street that
seems vaguely reminiscent of the provincial setting of a Chekhov play), the
theatre features in its front window a preview-poster of one of its long-
running hit plays, Yanovskaya's production of Ivanov i drugie (Ivanov and
the Others), which is based on Anton Chekhov's first completed full-length
play Ivanov (1887).
2
But if people strolling by should find all this boring
and dull, and seek the excitement of Moscow's bustling city life, much as the
characters do in Chekhov's celebrated Three Sisters, they do not have to go
far. Around the corner is Tverskaya Street, formerly Gorky Street, with
stores like Trinity Motors, a post-Communist car dealership selling
everything from Cadillacsto Chevrolets; Marlboro Classics, a clothing store
that offers discounts up to twenty-five percent on men's sportswear
24
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25
(discounts are still a relatively new phenomenon for Russian society); and
pricy boutiques and indoor malls. The street is also teeming with elegant
restaurants and cafes, including the Stanislavsky cafe, which is named for the
legendary Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky and is located next to the
Stanislavsky Theatre. On its outdoor menu, it advertises, among other
things, such mouth-watering dishes as "spaghetti Lambordino" with bacon
and cream sauce, and grilled chicken breast with tequila lemon sauce and
Mexican rice-certainly a far cry from the already-distant pre-perestroika
days when Russian citizens commonly used the phrase "nichego net" ("there
is nothing") to refer to bare, empty shelves in grocery stores.
Sitting in Yanovskaya's office, I could not help but notice the
portraits covering her walls-portraits of the late Joseph Brodsky, 1987
Nobel Prize-winner for Literature and 1991-1992 U.S. Poet Laureate
(Brodsky had been an acquaintance ofYanovskaya' sin Leningrad, where she
grew up); Stanislavsky, who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre, in 1898
with the director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, (this portrait,
Yanovskaya subsequently told me, had been hanging in the theatre well
before she came to work there); Mikhail Bulgakov, whose plays are among
the most frequently performed in Russia and the former Eastern bloc; and
Kama Ginkas, a Lithuanian who is Yanovskaya's husband and one of the
most respected theatre directors in Moscow today.
3
There were also
playbills of international theatre festivals, including the 1997 International
Theatre Festival in Avignon, France, which featured Ginkas's K.I. iz
"Prestupleniya" (K.I from "Crime'') , an adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment. The following year it was Yanovskaya' s production
of The Storm, Aleksandr Ostrovsky's gloomy study of life in the Russian
provinces, that was invited to the Avignon Festival. For this show
Yanovskaya was a warded the Crystal Turandot; she also received the Seagull
award as the best stage director of the season. In 1998 The Storm was also
nominated for the prestigious State Prize of Russia, and for the top national
theatre award, the Golden Mask, in four categories.
As Yanovskaya and I chatted about modern Russian theatre and
drama, the sound of loud voices periodically drifted into the office; Ginkas
was rehearsing Pushkin's Zolotoi petushok (The Golden a skazka
(fairy tale) touted as having appeal not only for children, but also for adults
of all ages.
The road to becoming a director was not a particularly easy one for
Y anovskaya. Born in Leningrad, she graduated in 1967 from Georgy
T ovstonogov' s directing class at the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre,
Music, and Cinema as the only woman in a group of nine. "They didn't
26
usually accept women into departments for drama directors," she explained,
"because this is not traditionally considered a woman's profession." In fact,
in the mid-1980s, when she was asked by the foreign press to explain what
perestroika was, she would quip, "I am a woman; I am not a member of the
Party; I am a Jew; and now I am the main director of a theatre. This
combination was impossible before perestroika, so that's what perestroika
. "
IS.
Opposed to "any kind of ghetto" (a bias she attributes to her Jewish
heritage), Yanovskaya is averse to the audience in a theatre being of the same
age; this also explains why she dislikes the name "the Young Spectators'
Theatre," which seemingly excludes all spectators except for children and
teenagers. "It's a big, wide world," she declared, "and the entire spectrum
of this world should be represented in the audience. Therefore, in our
theatre, you will find people of different ages, genders, and nationalities."
In Ivanov and the Others, which was first staged during the 1993-
1994 theatrical season, Yanovskaya offers the Russian audience one of most
compelling and innovative interpretations of Chekhov's somewhat
melodramatic play Ivanov. As suggested by its very title-Ivanov and the
Others-Yanovskaya's production does not focus exclusively on the original
play, which was written when Chekhov was a young playwright and still
technically immature; instead, it introduces several minor characters from
Chekhov's major plays, including Yepikhodov (a clerk on t he Ranevsky
estate), Charlotta (a governess), and Sem yonov-Pishchik (a landowner) from
The Cherry Orchard, as well as Masha, who is curious blend of Masha (Marya
Prozorov, one of the three sisters) in Three Sisters and Masha (Shamraev's
daughter) in The Seagull. "Since Ivanov was the first play written by
Chekhov," Yanovskaya explained, "it seemed to me that the dramatic
techniques of Chekhov-as we have come to know and love them-were still
not very daring in this play; in fact, the second act of this play really
reminds me of an Ostrovsky play in its construction. In rehearsals, this was
the most difficult thing of all for me. Suddenly, in the second act, when
Ivanov visits the home of his creditors, the Lebedevs, for their daughter
Sasha's birthday celebration, the play turns largely into Ostrovsky's
dramaturgy.
4
By this I mean that while Chekhov uses atmospheric
association in his writing, jumping from subplot to subplot in strange,
submarine-like currents, everything in an Ostrovsky play is far more meshed
in details of everyday life." In order to "fill in the lines," Yanovskaya set
about restructuring the play by populating it with characters who came to
define the mature Chekhov, but yet who still lived, in varying degrees, with
the same insoluble problems of life (self-absorption, disillusionment, and
27
28
isolation) as Ivanov. Yanovskaya was extremely successful in her endeavor.
After its premiere, a feuilleton called "Slezy Sharlotty" ("The Tears of
Charlotta") appeared in the newspaper Sovetskaya kul'tura (Soviet Culture)
that proffered the opinion, loosely paraphrased by Yanovskaya, that the
"tears of Charlotta in [Ivanov and the Others] were no less important than
the monologues of Ivanov; that they were equivalents in this production."
It is hardly surprising, then, that Yanovskaya should applaud
Chekhov as "[Russia's] greatest dramatist," or that she should extol him as
a writer who was concerned, above all, with the human condition and the
secret of death. Approaching Chekhov's plays from the perspective of
"time" and the coming millennium, she commented during our interview:
"Ivanov was written at the end of the nineteenth century, and now I am
staging it at the end of the twentieth century. I have the feeling that this
century is actually expiring before its end; languor, the agony of human
existence-this is time expiring before it takes a new breath. The beginning
of a century is always marked by a splash, a storminess of life; conversely,
the end of a century is defined by tedium, fatigue, and human tension ...
Ivanov lived in his own time and in the painful expiration of time; he toiled
in the expiration of time ... Time is one of the most important subjects of
a Chekhov play; the feeling of mortality and the flowing away of time.
People drink tea, while at the same time life is slipping away." For
Y anovska ya, Chekhov' splays are also the" cruelest plays" she has ever read.
"I don't know a crueler scene in world drama than the brutal exchange in
Act Three between Ivanov and his tubercular wife, Anna Petrovna [before
her marriage, Sarah Abramson], when [she confronts him with his rumored
affair with Sasha] and he screams, 'Shut up, you Jewish bitch!' or when he
informs her that 'you'll soon be dead. The doctor told me you can't last
long.' I have never read anything more horrifying ... " Indeed, it was
Yanovskaya's empathy with Anna-a woman who gives up her Jewish faith,
her family, her wealth, and even her Jewish name to marry the Russian
landowner Nikolai Ivanov-that compelled Yanovskaya to stage the play in
the first place. For Yanovskaya, Anna's tragedy stems not only from the
"loss of her husband's love," but also from her betrayal of her religious faith,
which she sacrificed for the sake of this love. "To betray or be unfaithful to
someone who is strong," she explained, "that is one thing. But to betray
one's own people, the Jewish faith-especially when Jews in the late 1880s
found themselves in a most tenuous position in Russia, facing pogroms and
being forced to live within the Pale of Settlement-that is quite another.
And suddenly Chekhov's Anna betrays her faith. Perhaps Anna thinks that
her tragedy [her consumption and loss of her husband's love] is payment for
29
her treason." It is worth noting that Anna's ill-fated life stands in direct
contrast to what was probably her real-life prototype. In 1886, when
Chekhov was twenty-six, he wrote to Viktor Bilibin, the editorial secretary
of the St. Petersburg-based humor magazine Fragments, that he had found
a prospective bride-"a rich young J ewess" whom !llany commentators on
Chekhov believe to have been Y evdokia (Dunya) Efros, a school friend of
his sister Maria.
5
However, unlike her fictional counterpart, Dunya Efros
did not marry the Russian Chekhov, thereby remaining faithful to her
religion and obedient to her parents' wishes.
6
Nor did she <!ie from
consumption at a young age. According to one source, Dunya Efros left
Russia after the Revolution, settled in Paris, and died in a Nazi
concentration camp in 1943, when she was in her eighties.
7
Curiously, Yanovskaya admits that her production of Ivanov does
not pack the theatre's auditorium, which has over six hundred seats,
because the ordinary Russian spectator "doesn't like going to a play by
Chekhov ... I know that the entire theatrical intelligentsia came running to
see my production. But this is only a thin layer of the intelligentsia; it is far
from everyone." Yanovskaya also attributes the small turnout to the fact
that she does not sell tickets to school groups on field trips. Unlike other
Moscow rivals of the company, such as the famed Moscow Art Theatre,
which fills its rows with students and their teachers at its productions of
Chekhov's plays,
8
Yanovskaya is adamantly opposed to a "collective
viewing" because the dynamics of a group lead to a completely different
relationship with the theatre. "The theatre addresses the individual and not
the group," she explained, "Therefore, it is difficult for a group to watch a
play together. A group has its own dynamics, its own mutual relationships,
its own internal laws. But a person should be free in the theatre."
Yanovskaya concedes that even if she were to suddenly admit a school group
into the theatre, she would "try to seat them at different ends of the hall, so
that they weren't together."
How then do we explain Chekhovas an international phenomenon
when, by Yanovskaya's own admission, his appeal in Moscow is limited?
What is it about Chekhov's works that accounts for his popularity in other
cultures? The first reason is pragmatic: It is simply easier to translate
Chekhovthan, say, Ostrovskyor AleksandrPushkin. "Why isPushkinnot
nearly as popular in other countries as he is in Russia?" Yanovskaya
demanded. "Because he is very hard to translate. Ostrovsky, a very
profound author with extremely interesting and complex characters, is also
difficult to translate." The second reason given by Yanovskaya is more
spiritual: People throughout the world come flocking to see a touring
30
production of a Chekhov play because they "all live happily" and need
something to disturb and torment their soul. "You need Dostoevsky and
Chekhov," she told me, "because it is essential for you that someone touch
your soul." Russians, on the other hand, want something of a different ilk,
since they have "enough suffering in their daily lives." Every time Ginkas,
Yanovskaya's husband, prepares to stage one of his adaptations of a
Dostoevsky novel, which already include such productions as Zapiski iz
podpol'ya (Notes from the Underground) and K.l. from "Crime", "[her] heart
contracts," and it is difficult for her. "I foresee that I will have to come and
watch it, but I am worn out and tired and I don't want to ... Chekhov also
tortures the soul; and many Russians who experience this suffering in day-
to-day life simply do not care to experience it one more time in the theatre."
Paradoxically, then, the fact that Chekhov' splays are staged in almost every
Moscow theatre "does not necessarily mean that the spectator buys a ticket
to a Chekhov production."
9
There are also commercial theatres to
consider-theatres such as Lenkom, which always has sell-out crowds, but
very rarely stages The Seagull.
In the final analysis, though, a box-office draw is not Yanovskaya' s
primary objective. "A theatre," she declared, "is not a prostitute who waits
for everyone to buy her; this is not that kind of girl who wants everyone to
have sex with her. No; theatre has the right to choose, it has its own
individual strength." In fact, argues Yanovskaya, if theatre is placed in those
conditions when an artist must earn money, this will serve as the "beginning
of the end of theatre. If society does not subsidize the arts, which offers the
possibility of touching the human soul , then society will change into
something that only wants to be entertained and that will not develop
spiritually."
In Moscow, Chekhov has competition from Tennessee Williams,
whose plays also reveal a world of human frustration and who is a favorite
among Russian theatrical directors.
10
According to Yanovskaya, who staged
Williams's The Glass Menagerie at the Leningrad Maly Dramatic Theatre in
the early 1970s, Russian directors love producing a Williams play, "because
there is always a melodramatic story at its core, and because he also speaks
about individuals, their suffering and their pain. In his plays there is always
a good twist to the plot." Other rivals of Chekhov vying for the Russian
stage include, most notably, Ostrovsky and Shakespeare; in fact,
Yanovskaya, who has never staged a Shakespeare play, plans to begin
rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream as soon as possible.
11
But undoubtedly it was Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's famed national
poet, who proved to be Chekhov's most serious contender in 1999-the year
31
that marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of the poet, who died in a
duel in 1837 over the honor of his beautiful wife. Against a backdrop of
"Pushkinmania," which included general festivities and lavish celebrations,
theatres put on countless productions of Pushkin's works
12
or of updated
interpretations of his life. TheY oung Spectators' Theatre also did its part
in the celebration by staging Ginkas' s script Puskhin. Duel'. Smert'. (Push kin.
Duel. Death.), which he wrote almost two decades ago. The play is based on
documentary materials, and its plotline was neatly summed up by The New
York Times: "In [Ginkas's] play, Pushkin. Duel. Death., a gathering of
Pushkin' s friends, acquaintances and hangers-on grasp in vain at explanations
for the duel that led to his death as they sit around a table with the poet's
death mask as centerpiece. At the end of the play, the table rises up to the
ceiling and, struggling to cling to it, they fall off one by one."
13
For this
play, which bears Ginkas's bold and typically unorthodox directorial
signature, Ginkas was awarded the prize for best director at the Pushkin-
Goethe Festival, held recently in Moscow to observe both poets' birthdays.
Less than enthusiastic about the young generation of Russian
dramatists, whom she chides for their "flagrant use of the concept of
freedom," Yanovskaya does not include modern Russian drama in her
theatrical repertoire.
14
"I don't like the plays of the young dramatists," she
emphatically declared. "What am I suppose to do about this? In my
opinion, they lack a position in their writing; there is a deliberate flirting
with the spectator, which exists at a level ofleading a naked woman onto the
stage and forcing her to 'fornicate,' or to use vulgarity; this kind of thing is
now called a play. None of this is interesting for me; I don't see anything
pulsating in it-no muscle, no air, nothing at all ... They are foreign to me,
uninteresting, and simply bad." Under Communism, however, a dramatist
had to "work at every word," lending credence to the argument (as perverse
as it may sound) that government-imposed constraints actually facilitated the
development of an artist and that a repressive regime is arguably a greater
muse than freedom and democracy.
"Under censorship's strictures," Yanovskaya recalled, "we were
forced to draw ourselves up, to crawl out from under its shackles and to do
something." Now, in the absence of all this, "all kinds of shallowness has
emerged ... a stream of it." In fact, Yanovskaya, who complains of having
to force herself to read these plays, admits to casting them aside by the tenth
page, "with their sickening sensations and jumble of words." Still, she
concedes to the possibility that she does not understand this language. "It's
possible that another generation of directors will come forward and grasp
it, and it will turn out that everything is wonderful there. But for me this
32
33
is alien and incomprehensible . . . Of course, I would love to find a
contemporary play that excites me, but it hasn't happened." When pressed,
though, Yanovskaya declined to provide specific names. "These are young
people, and I don't want to scold them," she told me. "Besides, they still
may change."
For Y anovskaya, the last playwright to "turn things upside down"
was Lyudrnila Petrushevskaya, who without a doubt radically altered
dramaturgy in her heroes (usually impoverished women), her methods of
composition, and her artistic language. "Has anyone come after
Petrushevskaya?" Yanovskaya asked. "Has anyone of her stature appeared
on the scene? No; in my opinion, no." However, Yanovskaya does
recognize the fact that dramatists are not born every year or, for that matter,
even every decade. "Great talents," she admits, "are not born all the time."
Still, she insists, it would be erroneous and unfair to say that the younger
generation is not being staged. "Nadezhda Ptushkina is being staged; Olga
Mukhina is being staged.
1
s The young dramatists are not at all
downtrodden."
As for Stanislavsky, the man whose name is so closely identified
with Chekhov's, his legacy remains a dominant force in modern Russian
theatre. Despite competition from more recent, postmodernist and
nonnaturalistic approaches to acting and staging, such as focusing on formal
elements like movement and space, his theories emphasizing psychological
realism in actor training (better known as Method acting) are still espoused
by many prominent Moscow theatre directors, including Yanovskaya. "The
role of the Stanislavsky Method," she told me, "consists of it being a base
system for the study of professionalism in actor training. He created a
system that helped bad artists perform decently, respectable artists perform
well, and good artists perform remarkably."
However, the historic Moscow Art Theatre (the theatre made
famous by Stanislavsky's productions of Chekhov' splays a century ago) has
not fared as welP
6
Indeed, there are many, including Yanovskaya, who
argue that it has suffered a loss of prestige and reputation in the post-Soviet
era. "This theatre," Y anovska ya explained, "is, to a large extent, popular for
people who come to Moscow and must go to the world-renowned Moscow
Art Theatre. Its premise is like a museum under the management of Oleg
Efremov, the theatre's artistic director since 1970. Efremov is a remarkable
artist and a very decent theatrical manager, but the Moscow Art Theatre
fails to realize any artistic goals, except in the case of a few invited directors."
Before the onset of perestroika in the mid-1980s, the Moscow Art Theatre
"alone was the wisest," intimidating all the other theatres, while today,
34
claims Yanovskaya, it exists solely as a "museum relic." "It exists now in
that capacity; it does not exert any influence on the present-day anistic
theatrical life of Moscow or the country."
17
Still, as Yanovskaya is quick to admit, the Moscow An Theatre, at
the time of its foundation a hundred years ago, revolutionized Russian
theatre. "Now Russian theatre constitutes one of the most influential
theatres in the world today, and it is an honor for every director to stage
plays in Moscow," Yanovskaya concluded with justifiable pride.
NOTES
1. One of the oldertheatres in Moscow, the Young Spectators' Theatre was founded
in 1918.
2. Interestingly, there has been increased worldwide interest in this rarely performed
1887 tragi-comic play. Not only was it staged at the Lincoln Center Theatre in 1997,
with Kevin Kline starring in the title role, but it was also recently staged in London,
with Ralph Fiennes in the male lead.
3. Ginkas was awarded with the Crystal Tourandot as the best director in 1995 for
K.I. iz "Prestup/eniya" (K.I. from "Crime'}. He was nominated for the National
Golden Mask in 1995 for K.I. from "Crime" and 1996 for his own Kazn 'dekabristov
(The Execution of the Decembrists).
4. In the second act, the local gentry, among them Ivanov, gather at the home of
Pavel and Zinaida Lebedev, where they carp about one another's card-playing and
their hostess's miserly, kopeck-pinching ways. The act ends on a un-Chekhovian
melodramatic note when Anna finds Ivanov and Sasha kissing.
5. Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, ed. Simon
Karlinsky, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1973), 45-
48.
6. Dunya Efroslater married Chekhov' s friend and correspondent, theJ ewish lawyer
and publisher Efim Konovitser.
7. Amon Chekhov's Life & Thought: Selected Letters & Commentary, 48.
8. In 1976, Oleg Y efremov, artistic director of the Moscow Art Theatre, started his
Chekhov cycle with Ivanov, followed by The Seagull (1980), Uncle Vanya (1985) and
Three Sisters (1997).
35
9. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Platonov was staged at the Moscow
Chekhov Art Theatre, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard at the Moscow Gorky
Art Theatre, The Seagull at Lenkom, The Wedding Anniversary at the Ermolova
Theatre, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull at the Maly Theatre, Three Sister.f at the
Theatre na Pokrovke, The Seagull at the Contemporary Play School, Rukovodstvo
dlya zhelajushshikh zhenit'sya (For the Information of Husbands) at the Et Cetera
Theatre, Ivanov at the Taganka Theatre, and Uncle Vanya at Mark Rozovsky's
Nikita Gates Theatre.
10. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo and
The Milk Train; based on Williams's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore was
staged at the Moscow Chekhov Art Theatre, Small Craft Warnings at the
Sovremennik Theatre, and Clothes for a Summer Hotel at the Gogo! Theatre.
11. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Ostrovsky's The Forest; was staged at the
Maly Theatre, Easy Money; at the Maly Theatre and the Satire Theatre, Wolves and
Sheep; at the Maly Theatre and the Fomenko Theatre Workshop, The Storm; at the
Moscow Chekhov Art Theatre, The Diary of a Scoundrel; and A Profitable Post; at
the Moscow Gorky Art Theatre, Guilty Without Guilt; at the Vakhtangov Theatre,
Fiancee Without Fortune; at the Gogo! Theatre, and The Final Sacrifice; at the Moscow
Theatrical Center, V ernisazh.
During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Shakespeare's As You Like It was
staged at the Mayakovsky Theatre; T welfih Night at the Stanislavsky Theatre and the
Fomenko Theatre Workshop; Hamlet at A. Raikin's Satirikon Theatre, Theatrena
Pokrovke, and the Yugo-Zapad Theatre; Romeo and juliet at Mark Rozovsky's
Nikita Gates Theatre and the Yugo-Zapad Theatre; A Midsummer Night's Dream at
the Yugo-Zapad Theatre, the Moscow Chekhov Art Theatre, and the Pushkin
Theatre; and Macbeth at the Yugo-Zapad Theatre.
12. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Pushkin's Queen of Spades; was staged
at the Vakhtangov Theatre, Little Tragedies; at the Moscow Chekhov Art Theatre,
The Tales of Belkin; at the Pushkin Theatre, Boris Godunov at the Taganka Theatre,
A Feast During the Plague at Mark Rozovsky's Mikita Gates Theatre, and Mozart and
Salieri at the Moscow Theatrical Center, Vemisazh.
13. Sophia Kishkovsky, "For Everyone, Non-Russians, Too, There's a Personal
Pushkin," The New York Times (5 June 1999), B 9.
14. At the Moscow Young Spectators' Theatre, Y anovskaya has staged and produced
Bulgakov's 7he Heart of a Dog (1987), Nedzvetsky's and Marshak's Goodbye,
America! (1989),Ivanovand the Others (1993),] acques Offenbach's]acques Offenbach,
Love and Tralala; 1995, and Ostrovsky's The Storm (1997). Her productions for
children include Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale and Tamara Gabbe's
comedy-fairytale Olovyannye kol'tsa (The Tin Rings).
36
15. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Prushkina's play Rozhdestvenskie grezy
(Christmas Dreams} was staged at the Moscow Chekhov An Theatre, while her
Pizanskaya bashnya (The Tower of Pisa) was produced at the Pushkin Theatre and
the Stanislavsky Theatre. During the 1998-1999 theatrical season, Mukhina's play
Ljubov' Karlovny (Karlovna's Love} was staged at the Contemporary Play School
and her Tanya-Tanya at the Fomenko Theatre Workshop.
16. In its program, the 1998 Third International Chekhov Theatre Festival offers this
description of the Moscow Art Theatre: "The theatre was established on the
threshold of the twentieth century as an expression of protest against the routine
which had been reigning on both the imperial and provincial Russian stage. There
were quite a number of great talented actors but the life of the theatre was limited by
its own work and this led to the cliches of acting as well as to the unchanging
response of the audience ... It is not an exaggeration that the 20th century in the
Russian and world theatre has been dominated by the activities of the [Moscow An
Theatre]." In 1998, the Moscow Art Theatre celebrated its 100th anniversary.
17. The New York Times, in its review of Oleg Efremov's Three Sisters, performed at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1998, offers some substantiation ofY anovskaya' s
opinion by calling the company's new production of Three Sisters "a big, competently
acted, elaborately designed production that is far more interesting to talk about than
to sit through." The review also refers to other shortcomings in the production, such
as "aimlessness" and the seeming "confusion of the artists." See Vincent Canby's" A
Three Sisters With a Poignant Russian Forecast," The New York Times (15 February
1998} 5.
37
CHEKHOV AT MOSCOW'S THEATRE OF THE SOUIH-WEST:
THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY
Michael Long
"We want the audience to laugh and to think."
1
So says Valerii
Beliakovich, Director of the Theatre of the South-West (Teatr na Iugo-
Zapade)with reference to the reprise of Starye grekhi (Old Sins') a stage
adaptation by Beliakovich himself, culled from some of Chekhov's letters
and early stories, which was originally performed twenty years ago. It is no
coincidence that this reprise comes on the theatre's twentieth anniversary.
Though located in a Moscow suburb, at least a ten-minute walk
from the last metro station "lugozapadnaia" on the red line, or almost an
hour's drive (depending on the skill and daring of your driver) from the city
center and other prestigious theatres, the Theatre of the South-West
continues to sparkle as one of the jewels in the Moscow theatre scene,
drawing capacity crowds. Founded as an amateur theatre for "enthusiasts,"
the Theatre of the South-West has evolved into anything but an amateur
establishment under the leadership of Beliakovich, its founding director.
Indeed, this "unique, creative collective," as Beliakovich describes
his theatre, has developed an impressive repertoire of more than thirty plays
that run the gamut of styles, periods, and national literatures, including
Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Gogo!' s The Inspector General,
Mikhail Bulgakov' s Master and Margarita, Evgenii Shvarts' s The Dragon, and
Vaclav Havel' s Memorandum.
In June 1999, when I attended a performance at the Theatre of the
South-West, it was to see Beliakovich's adaptation of Old Sins, which
premiered in this very theatre in January of 1979. Basing a production on
Chekhov' s stories and letters occurred to Beliakovich when he was a student
at Moscow's Lunacharsky Institute of Theatrical Arts. In Beliakovich's
opinion, the fourteen stories that provide the basis for the play are
"genuinely stageable material, full of movement and lively and memorable
personalities ... At the same time, Chekhov's stories are real intellectual
theatre, in which alllevels are represented-social, psychological, arid civic."
Beliakovich gives the familiar raisonneur device a twist, writing the
character of the young Chekhov into the play. Chekhov's letters to his
publisher not only provide commentary to the stories, but the stories also
provide commentary on the personality of the beginning writer who,
Beliakovich observes, "unifies the plots and becomes the center and main
38
Vlad.imir Koppalov and Valerii Beliakovich in the scene "Vodevil"
from the play Old Sins. Theatre of the South-West, 1999
39
character in the show." Chekhov' s stories provide a rich vein of material to
mine for the stage. "Gogol's phrase 'laughter through tears' is completely
applicable to our show," says Beliakovich. "Chekhov paints a horrible
picture of national abasement, people in bondage, be it social or some other
kind, but he does this subtly, ironical! y, with life-giving humor that frees the
best feelings and defeats fear. This is what the actors try to achieve."
Beliakovich's assessment of Chekhov is borne out in Old Sins. In
the opening scene, the clerk Mitya Kuldarov, a character from Chekhov's
story Joy, is so overjoyed to read his name in a local newspaper, that he
boasts to his family, "After all, now all of Russia knows me." The article,
however, turns out to be nothing more than a police report, describing how
the drunken Mitya had suffered minor injuries after falling under a horse-
drawn sled. In another scene, the attempts of Colonel Aristarkh Piskarev
from Chekhov's The Diplomat to break the news to his best friend about t he
death of the latter's estranged wife are both comic and tragic. In the staging
of Surgery, the audience laughs through its tears as a medical assistant
submits his patients to his highly unorthodox bedside manner.
Beliakovich utilizes contemporary design in all his productions, and
Old Sins is no exception. He prefers to remain unburdened by cumbersome
sets, usually employing only a few chairs and perhaps a table. Creative
lighting, music, costumes, and staging complement the minimalist set. Props
are reduced to the essential elements required to delineate character: a pair
of eye-glasses, crutches, or a hat, and for any staging based on Russian
themes, the ubiquitous vodka bottle and glasses.
In Old Sins, as in all their productions, "the actor is the center of
the show," according to Beliakovich. The actors, each playing numerous
roles, maintain an energetic pace, while keeping close contact with the
audience and never allowing the audience to divert its attention from the
action. The actors demonstrate remarkable control of the comic nature of
Chekhov's material, resisting the temptation of slapstick.
Beliakovich maintains that it is the close collaboration between the
actors and himself and the production team which distinguishes the Theatre
of the South-West from other, older Moscow stages. In Belikovich's view,
his company "clearly defines itself as an actor's theatre. This means that it
is distinguished by a unified creative direction, by the unity of goals and
aims." In his opinion, success "depends on the team-work of the ensemble,
in which each actor has an individual theme and the chance to perform it."
In the twenty years since its founding, perhaps the single most
important event in the history of the Theatre of the South-West was the
40 Slavic and Ease European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent change in power. Like all
formerly state-owned institutions, it has had to face many challenges, but at
the same time has enjoyed the fruits of political and economic change.
Beliakovich is now completely free in selecting the company's repertoire and
in making his conceptions a reality. With the freedom to set its own ticket
prices and to take advantage of advertising, the theatre has expanded its
facility by adding new workshops and enlarging the stage and auditorium.
These structural changes have in turn allowed Beliakovich to accommodate
a growing audience and to enjoy the benefits of popularity.
On the down side, the theatre feels the impact of the roller-coaster
ride of the Russian economy, which necessitates the preparation and
performance of a greater number of shows each year. In any case, if the
recent performance of Old Sins is any indication, it is not obvious that the
quality of the productions of the Theatre of the South-West has suffered
under the new economic pressures. The new politics has also allowed the
company to expand its talent base. The theatre is able to enhance its troop
by recruiting gifted young actors, graduates of the theatre schools, not only
of Moscow, but also St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, and "the new
productions rely on their strengths," adds Beliakovich.
The new season features five premieres, including Chekhov' s Three
Sisters and The Seagull, which can only strengthen the repertoire, since as
Beliakovich says, "we are true to our main artistic principles and with each
new show, we strive to develop them." Beliakovich and his company have
proven their skill at interpreting Chekhov for Moscow and international
audiences. The addition of Three Sisters and The Seagull to the repertoire will
no doubt force comparisons with the performances of Chekhov on the
playbills of the older, more traditional Moscow Art Theatre. Finally, box
office and critics will determine whether Beliakovich' s style and the original
Chekhov material are a good match.
Twenty years of experience and new-found artistic and economic
freedom have taken the Theatre of the South-West a long way from its
humble origins. With continued commitment to their artistic goals, there
is no doubt that Beliakovich, the production team, and the actors' ensemble
will lead the Theatre of the South-West into a successful future.
NOTES
1. All quotations attributed to Valerii Beliakovich within are taken from
correspondence between the author and Beliakovich, July through September, 1999.
41
MEMOIRS OF THE WARSAW UPRISING
Wieslaw G6rski
I.
As far as I remember I read Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising by
Miron Bialoszewski in 1975. I was then a student of Warsaw Theatre School
and also a resident director at Teatr Polski in Wrodaw, where Jerzy
Grotowski's Teatr Laboratorium made its home. Two theatres; two worlds.
One stagnate, servile, traditional, the other vibrant, free, revolutionary-one
run by bureaucrats; the other by a great reformer. After seeing Apocalypsis
cum Figuris I have always tried to walk my path Towards a Poor Theatre
working as a director with Polish repertory companies where book-keepers,
managers, secretaries, prompters, stage-hands, dressers, porters, box-office
clerks, barmaids and others outnumber actors three to four times. I chose
to be "poor" when they were rich. Now they are literally poor but
desperately struggle to keep the old splendor-wasting a great chance to be
"poor."
Reading Memoirs, I was drawn in by the detailed, matter-of-fact ,
day-to-day account of events from Bialoszewski's life underground while
overhead insurgents fought, desperately and hopelessly, for freedom; this
tragic spectacle was passively watched by the Soviets from the other bank
of the River Vistula. "We simply wanted to be conquered," says Miron in
Memoirs when this fight soon became genocide and where civilians were
continuously bombed and burned in their cellars and other hide-outs,
executed or run in front of German tanks as living targets. The Uprising
lasted for sixty-two days, until October 2, 1944; 200,000 people died in it,
mosdy civilians. Those who survived were forced to leave the city, given no
time to pack-almost one million people expelled from their homes in a
huge exodus. The Soviet Army crossed the river on January 17, 1945. One
conqueror replaced another.
Miron Bialoszewski was an extraordinary poet of ordinary people.
He was twenty-two in the time of the Uprising. "For twenty years I could
not write about this. I would talk. About the uprising. To so many
people. So many times. And I didn't even know that those twenty years of
talking 0 have been talking about it for twenty years, because it is the
greatest experience of my life), precisely that endless talking, was the only
suitable way to describe the uprising."
42
Slavic and EaJt European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
The mid 70s in Poland was a time of yet another moment of mock-
freedom given a chilling nick-name of "thaw"; one of those presents from
the regime like ham and oranges sold at stores three times a year: Christmas,
Easter, and May 1. It was then that Memoirs was published, followed by the
publication of Conversations with the Executioner by Kazimierz Moczarski;
a memoir by a hero of the Warsaw Uprising arrested after the war by the
regime as the enemy of the people and jailed in the same cell as the Nazi war
criminal, General Stroop, who was responsible for burning down the
Warsaw Ghetto. Andrzej Wajda, famous Polish film and theatre director,
staged the adaptation of The Conversations between the hero and the war
criminal in T eatr Powszechny in Warsaw managed bravely and intelligent! y
by Zygmunt Hubner, who in that performance acted the part ofMoczarski.
It was to be presented at the Festival of Polish Contemporary Theatre held
every year in Wrodaw. I met with the management of my theatre and
expressed to them my desire to adapt and stage Memoirs while the "thaw"
was on, stressing the importance of the subject in the context of Wajda's
production and its presence at the festival. They agreed, their faces drawn.
I sat down to write a script about Miron's odyssey that begins with hope
and enthusiasm as the Uprising breaks out, then his descent into hell when
he leaves Wola (a Warsaw suburb) for the Old Town believed to be a
fortress never to be captured, and after the fall of the Old Town on
September 1, through the sewers, emerging at Sr6dmiescie (Midtown) where
life is almost normal, oblivious of the tragedy of the Old Town that is
taking place two miles away, and of its own destruction that is drawing near.
When the adaptation was ready, I took it to the censor. I had to.
In those days nothing could be staged without the censor's agreement; even
Hamlet or say, The Mousetrap (even the title could be thought to be an
allusion to the system). In Wrodaw the censor's office was in a huge,
ghostly building which during the war was the Gestapo headquarters and
was now occupied by the Regional Committee of the Polish United
Workers Party. Permission to stage a play could always be withdrawn as the
censor closely watched-also through his informers in the theatre-the
rehearsals and then the performances, and especially, of course, the reactions
of the audience.
My censor's face was very tense and grave; the grave for Memoirs.
I tried to argue that it was about ordinary people who only wanted to live
and survive, no heroes, but he did not like my ordinary people praying so
much and so often. I said, without even thinking about it, that they really
did pray, however obscure it seemed to be to his progressive mind. I
43
defended those, as he called them, backward people by saying that despite
the permanent threat of death they helped each other ("when things got
worse, people got better"). I spoke of their solidarity; in those cellars,
underground, survival depended on it. People warned each other against all
sorts of dangers, exchanged valuable information, helped each other by
digging up those buried alive under bombed houses, by putting out fires
started by fire bombs, by getting food or simply by playing with children
or consoling those in mourning. I did not know that those very arguments
buried my chances of staging Memoirs. Solidarity of the people as the main
subject of my performance was dangerous to the totalitarian system which
had been doing exactly the opposite: setting the people against each other,
workers against students, Poles against Jews. Divide et impera. So no
Memoirs on stage. Not yet. No solidarity. Not yet.
II.
In the 50s Miron Bialoszewski would invite his friends and
acquaintances to his apartment in Tarczyri.ska Street in Warsaw where he
staged his own plays and also acted in them. The other actors were his
friends too: poets, painters, writers. They often collaborated in writing the
scripts, in making sets and props and costumes, out of such objects as paper,
table cloths, sheets, brooms, pots, toilet paper, chairs. Those plays he later
published under the title A Separate Theatre (T eatr Osobny) which in his
laconic language-or rather the language of ordinary people which he never
deserted in his art and in his life-meant, "an independent theatre."
When I thought how to show on stage all those cellars, canals,
streets, ruins, I decided on a table and a few chairs, a tablecloth and second-
hand contemporary clothes for costumes. At the beginning the actors
gathered round the table neatly covered with a tablecloth in anxious
expectation of the Uprising. When the fighting broke out, the table and
chairs were moved about to become barricades, cellars, canals. From then
on a table laid with a cloth is something longed for; the desire to return it
to its proper place and sit at it is overwhelming; this means home again.
Table and chairs and tablecloth.
III.
Almost twenty years after my conversation with the censor I
reached for my script of Memoirs again. I looked through its yellowed
44 Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 20, No. 1
pages, read my manifesto of solidarity attached to it, and then looked
around me. Poland was free, both the conquerors were home now. Censors
went to other jobs. Solidarity was in demand no longer. Money was. I
returned home in 1994 after living in New York City for six years. I was
like Rip Van Winkle: markets where before I could buy only bread and
vodka and vinegar now looked likeN ew York food stores, huge shopping
malls were under construction, McDonald's was everywhere. People wore
Western clothes and drove Western cars. But they were the same as before:
angry, distrustful, suspicious, jumping at one another at the first
opportunity. Was it, I thought, because communism, the Poor Eden, made
them slaves and only now they felt the weight of the chains? Few of us
never wore them, some of us managed to shake them off, but many of us
have still clung to them: poor as it was, it was still Eden.
Miron Bialoszewski said of the experience of the Uprising: "history
rolled over us, and hard!" It really kept rolling over us for forty-five years
after the uprising, but gently over our souls.
On October 2, 1944, when the survivors emerged from their cellars,
dug-outs, holes, hide-outs, they saw their city as if it had experienced a
powerful earthquake; in 1989 our spiritual life looked equally devastated.
Twice within that period of our history a spontaneous outburst of solidarity
took place-in the cellars of Warsaw in 1944 and in Gdansk in 1980. Is that
perhaps why you will not hear the rattle of chains as often there as
elsewhere in Poland?
So I decided to stage Memoirs at Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz, where
I had just become artistic director, in order to raise the banner of solidarity
again. The year was 1994, in October.
IV.
It is October 7, 1999, the opening night of Memoirs of the Warsaw
Uprising at Strayer-Wood Theater, University of Northern Iowa. Strayer-
Wood is a building perched on a knoll and is very sharp-edged as opposed
to the Donie, a giant sport's center on a neighboring hill; David and
Goliath, I thought of them when I arrived here earlier in july to consult and
correct my translation of the script with Cynthia Goatley, the director of
the American premiere of Memoirs. Years ago my censor argued: "Why do
you want to stage it here in Wrodaw, after all it happened in Warsaw?" "In
Iowa, USA?!" I kept wondering when I had learned that Cynthia, then a
visiting professor at Gdansk University, saw my production of Memoirs in
45
Gdansk and decided to direct it here.
Cynthia's direction is very rhythmically punctuated, wisely relying
on the young actors' individuality and creativity. The physicality of the
performance, crucial in showing Miron and his group running for life, is
underlined often by freezing the action or by simply breaking it as the
actors have to take on new characters and to get ready for yet another
emotional challenge within another dramatic, often tragic event. Those
moments in-between characters or events are also interesting to watch as
they reflect on the fragility of the acting profession when I see them
"disarmed," thrilled by what has just happened as if it had almost happened
to them personally. Only Michael Giese stays within one character
throughout, that of Young Miron, but his Miron is also overwhelmed,
almost breaking apart, by the tragedy of the people around him. This is
contrasted by strongly voiced, commanding narration by Matthew Downs
McAdon in the part of Older Miron who, nevertheless, takes on other
characters, several of them. So do the remaining five actors: Brooke Harker,
Chad Kolbe, Ramsey Lampkin, Jessica Reeves, Andrea Rose T onsfeldt-and
all of them stay on stage the whole time of the performance.
The overall impression is of a group of people in the hands of Fate,
their endurance and faith continually put to the test. At the same time I get
the feeling that Fate plays with them as the wind does with fallen leaves on
an autumn day. Whenever they freeze or stop in their run for life, I see fear
in their eyes so they get moving again and again-away from death. I say
Fate because they are so helpless, but I should say History, of which they
are no makers.
v.
I am watching the American actors performing the Polish tragedy
of the Warsaw Uprising. The time is now, and Warsaw is here in Iowa.
Again Miron, Zbyszek, Swen and his mother, Halinka, Celinka and many
others are on their odyssey. It comes to me that once it happened in reality:
an elderly man who decided to walk across Miodowa Street under heavy
fire, braving dangers and neglecting warnings, was shot, now his begging for
help is heard by the others safe in the cellar where Miron and Swen are just
making their new bed from wood planks (beds or a coffin for that man), in
helpless silence; in that same cellar a woman is moaning loudly (she is
burned) and everybody, including her family, thinks she is overdoing it until
after one bombing they see that she is quiet because she is dead; Miron
getting up from his plank bed to look for some cups at Swen' s mother's
request (her dream of the table laid) and a minute later a shell falls in, right
where his back was ... these and many other events and people rose up out
of oblivion, their shadows crowding the stage, to tell us of their stories, so
far away from where it really happened. Watching this performance I am
being taught an important lesson of empathy.
It is customary in Poland to place an extra plate on the Christmas
Eve table laid with a white cloth underneath which, in the center of the
table, some hay is put to symbolize Christ's poor first cradle. This extra
plate is placed on the table in case a lonely, hungry stranger comes. These
American actors sheltered and hugged the refugees from 1944 Warsaw. The
power of empathy.
47
MEMOIRS IN IOWA
Cynthia Goatley
In the fall semester of 1999, I directed a production of Miron Bialoszewski's
Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising at the University of Northern Iowa. W'hat
follows is an account of my experiences with this piece.
November 1998
I was exhausted that evening. I often am during my all-too-short
visits to Poland, running workshops, seeing friends, planning projects, trying
so desperately to remember what little Polish I had acquired during my two-
year life there. I am in a state of mental siege adapting to my other world, my
other life. The small theatre at Teatr Wybrzeze where I have been working
with a group of Polish students on Dogg's Hamlet is full; center stage is a table
with a tablecloth, white, I believe, and there are chairs. A table. Chairs. A
small intimate space. A poor theatre. My Polish is only good enough to pick
up phrases here and there, but this is not a play of words only, but a play of
movement: running, stumbling, hiding, holding, pulling apart, dying, living,
surviving. So I follow: into the cellar, through the Stare Miasto, into
another cellar, up to the cathedral, snaking through the sewers, arriving above
ground, running below again, re-emerging in sixty-two days ... to
devastation. A table, chairs, tablecloths, seven performers.
October 1999
i e ~ a w Gorski, adapter and translator of Memoirs, and I are sitting
in the South Lobby of the Strayer-Wood Theatre, being interviewed for an
article on Memoirs for the local paper. Wieslaw would prefer not to be called
an adapter, as it is the word for" record player" in Polish. I often refer to him
as such. My mind is drifting as the interviewer converses with Wieslaw; I'm
thinking of the production, but not necessarily her questions, until one
comes to me: "Do you think people in Iowa will be able to understand this
play?" She isn't referring to its style, though that is certainly demanding for
us, but her thought is of its distance from us. It seems so very far from our
experience here in Iowa, in the U.S.A. War? Siege? Uprising? Exodus?
Honestly, I do not remember my answer because I was haunted by the
question: Can we in the U.S.A. relate? And I am astounded by the notion
Memoin of the W ar.raw Uprising, adapted and ttanslated by Wieslaw Gorski,
directed by Cynthia Goadey
<7'
v
that we couldn't or that we wouldn't. This sticks with me for some time.
I wonder: Have we become so inured to the mediated image on our nightly
boxes that they cannot touch us? Are a people and a tragedy in Poland so
very far from our lives? Have we used up our empathy? Do we have none
to embrace that which is not our own story? I leave this profoundly
disturbing thought and continue our work on the play.
August 1999
Our first rehearsal. I am terrified. We have four weeks until the
technical rehearsals and I have seven young performers with which to create
the Warsaw Uprising for an Iowa audience. What was I thinking?
September-October 199.9
1. We work collaboratively, the performers taking the lead in how
to show and tell this story. I step in as part of the solution, sometimes part
of the problem, but they just politely ignore me and keep on task. We are
exhausted at the end of rehearsal. My stage manager reminds me that we have
only gotten through two pages.
2. Our staging is roughed in. We continue research on people and
places, gathering as many images as possible. Some of the performers find
bombing sound effects. We go to the small Acting Practice Room, turn up
the sound equipment and listen. I arb overwhelmed. We all are.
3. We need to simplify. Again; we question how to tell this story.
It seems that we have developed an urgent need to tell this story. We have
to get it right. We worry that it is not right. We feel distant. More pictures,
more reading, more talking. Honesty. That's the key. We must tell this
story in our own way; we embrace it. No more apologies.
4. Crew view. I ask my colleagues where they are confused. Where
they lose interest. I am told that there are only a few confusing points. And
that they are not bored. Hooray! We work to clarify. I am reminded,
however, that these responses are from friends.
5. Wieslaw has arrived. We are terrified! Will he like us? Like our
work? Are we too cocky Gust like Americans) thinking we can do justice to
this story? Wieslaw puts us all at ease with his amazing generosity and
support. Joining us as a collaborator, Wieslaw adds his energy to our work.
His presence propels us closer to Poland.
6. Opening night. I watch the audience. So does Wieslaw. They
50 Slavic and EaJt European Performance Y ol. 20, No. 1
are involved, moved; they are with us. Yes. An audience in Iowa draws close
to Warsaw, feeling a tragedy that is not their own, a tragedy of those who
people the stage and those who are only memories. The theatre is full of
spirits.
7. We begin each performance with a dedication. Singly, each of us
identifies for whom we play that night. The specters of the dead hover over
these proceedings. Our work is infused with passion, with commitment-a
rare occurrence in university theatre, in any theatre. The one night we think
of ourselves is the night we lose our connectedness; we lose the play; we
become self-indulgent.
8. Our closing is emotional. All of us are torn by our commitment
to this story and our pull to move onward. By the end of strike, our table,
chairs, and tablecloths are lost somewhere in furniture and prop storage.
9. Sometimes I have bad dreams. I am still haunted: "Oh, Warsaw,
you are a bloody city ... 200,000 people lie beneath those ruins. Together
with Warsaw."
February 2000
There is a videotape, but I have not viewed it. Only yesterday, I saw
the photographs from the performance. Frozen actions on paper, they seem
another world, another time. The residue of the experience is not in the
photographs, nor if I were to come upon one of our chairs-and I would
know that it was one of our chairs would it be in that bit of wood; instead,
it is in all of us. I know now why I wanted to do this play in Iowa. Many
people have asked me that. Is it such an unusual choice? Solidarity.
Survival. Humanity. Are these really such strange and exotic words? Never
mind. My reason began seven years ago, when I lived in Gdansk teaching at
the University: Poland changed my life. Perhaps if I brought a little bit of
Poland to Iowa, other lives could be changed as well. Thank you, Poland.
A Final Thought
Many, many thanks to Wieslaw Gorski who so courageously took
a chance with his "baby" in a stranger's hands. I am deeply grateful for the
opportunity.
51
CROATIAN THEATRE AT THE CLOSE OF THE NINETIES:
FROM POLffiCAL QUERIES TO AESTIIETIC CHALLENGES
Dubravka Vrgoi\
In the early nineties a new generation of playwrights and directors
emerged in the Croatian theatre, phasing out the collective political
obsession of the theatre and paving a way for the development of new
motives, symbols, meanings, figures, textual structures, and myths. These
young dramatists departed from a long tradition lasting from the mid
nineteen fifties to eighties, in which politics was a central theme of the
Croatian theatre, derived from the conflict between individuals and the
political system, and out of the genuine political bitterness of the
playwrights. As a result, the plays written and performed in Croatian
theatres in the first half of the nineties were free from ideology, dramatic
aggression, indictment-burdened dialogues, polemical tones, all standard
patterns of political theatre within a space in which the face of the enemy
was dearly identifiable. Those were the days which had foreboded and
subsequently brought to life the collapse of ideological systems and the
breakdown of high-sounding declarations, the days of fear, war threats and
tragedies in which everybody felt vulnerable when faced by reality.
The plays of young authors Asja Srnec Todorovic, Lada Ka.Stelan,
Ivan Vidic and Pavo Marinkovic conveyed the news of death and presented
dead characters. Croatian drama wiped out the borderlines between life and
death, focusing its attention on losses and the inability to avoid reality or to
run away from it. The playwrights expressed their own weakness through
obsessive images of blood, water, rot, mud, darkness, and cold; their
disorientated heroes were not able to identify historical solutions or
promises of a way out. The plays-Dead Wedding, Someone Else, Glorietta,
Fever, and Retreat-are a witness to the need for a generation dramatically
changed by the war, a generation not directly involved in war problems but
to which the war, on another crucial level, writes out the pages of their
scripts.
With the termination of the war, under traumatic circumstances of
the post-war period, the Croatian theatre ceased to lean toward a uniform
expression of recognizable stylistic features. The scripts from the early
nineties that had changed the perspectives of the written word of Croatian
drama, by the end of the nineties became once more concerned with trends
of theatrical investigation. Contemporary Croatian theatre originates
52
53
from different poetic qualities, genres and styles, from the playwrights' and
director's endeavors to write out on the stage an experiment with the
present time, to consume the world or, at least, to outline its framework.
On its way from the comeback of a politically engaged theatre, i.e. a theatre
which enters into an open conflict with reality, to iconoclastic theatrical
drafts, to a harbor from politics, to aesthetics, the Croatian theatre has tried
to conquer the space of diversity, keeping its ears on the raptures, failures,
and doubts of its time.
The Brick, a play based on the script of a thirty-year-old playwright
Filip Sovagovic, which had its first run in the production of the Croatian
National Theatre in Split in early December last year, is an example of a
direct political theatre which calls to account the people in power and
addresses our everyday life of uncertain political trends in the most direct
way. With short and sentences which conceal nothing and
with fragmentary scenes, Sovagovic presents both his personal and collective
reality in a time that has changed us all. His play is about the traveling of
seven characters, accidental losers and alienated protagonists of their own
fates through the war years. Four brothers, their girlfriends and neighbors
experience war traumas in different ways as they grow up overnight and face
questions to which they cannot find the answers. The play ends with the
suicide of one brother and the funeral ceremony at which the family
members are reunited.
In The Brick, Sovagovic does not accept any compromise, but
opposes the drama of the immediate past to the time in which we live now.
Therefore, The Brick offers the audience a picture of the world viewed from
the perspective of the generation born in the sixties and seventies, the
generation which has gone through the war experiencing without any
catharsis a different, or maybe even a worse reality. The director, Paolo
Magelli, reverts to a theatre which is not satisfied with the tempting flight
into the illusions of imaginary spectacles. The protagonists of The Brick set
a scenario for the individual who, both on the stage and in life, does not
manage to find shelter. This is emphasized by the expressionistic
presentation-acting which is not detached from reality-and a performance
that requires direct identification from the audience. Following the trends
of a life compressed in the cry of a lost generation, Magelli leads both the
actors and the audience to the edges where, under the pressure of political
tensions, theatrical borderlines between fiction and reality disappear. With
their energy, the actors of the Split Theatre, in a devastated hall of the
former Ambassador hotel which before the war belonged to the Yugoslav
54 Slavic and Ea>t European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
55
National Army, unrestrainedly depict a world in which the spectators easily
recognize themselves.
"One war is not enough to become grown-up" -says Pyla des in the
play, Pylades, by the Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini,
which was staged by lvica Buljan and had its premiere at Teatar ITD in
Zagreb in summer 1998. Through historical formulas, Pasolini speaks about
the present, speaking actually about irretrievably lost myths, subjectivity
that annuls certainty, historical powerlessness which always brings us back
to where we started, and personal tragedies which always get drained into
universal solitude. Where the Greek tragedy ends, the Pasolini drama
begins-with Orestes andPylades's return to the town. The weakness of the
sons is derived from the sins of the fathers, and a world of worn-out
revolutions continues to hope for a new Utopia.
Orestes is fair, Pylades is dark. Orestes is a conformist, Pylades is
a revolutionary. The main scenes are Athena's appearances to Orestes and
Pylades. The former belong to Pasolini's dream world, the later to the real
world. And while Pasolini trusts "the words that offer an exchange of views
and ideas," the director Ivica Buljan trusts Pasolini. She knows that the
political theatre after 1989, at least in this part of Europe, cannot substitute
a rostrum for a stage and does not bear manifestos. Therefore Buljan chooses
Pasolini's poetry which conquers t he spectators with the structure of its
expression and extends the limits of objective reality by establishing ideas.
In Pylades, after the great wars, the exiled prince Orestes comes
back to Argos with his friend Pyla des where, with the assistance of goddess
Athena, he wishes to introduce democracy to his country instead of the
historical cult. However, very soon Orestes becomes a ruler and the
disappointed Pylades starts a revolution. On the psychological and family
level, Pasolini's drama blames the heritage inherent to an individual, but
does not manage to name it. At the same time, it points at collective doubts
which remain etched in the innermost feelings and determine the fate of
each community member. This obvious direction of development is made
even more evident by the stage design which is extremely minirnalistic,
composed of a combination of straight and sloped surfaces. In an abstract
manner, such scenography reconstructs the shape of a Greek theatre and
allows the scenes to develop in a geometrically clean environment and with
a crystal-pure presentation. Speech is here the only reality-to hear becomes
more important than to see. The sights here illustrate the words, because the
main objective is to get an idea and not a picture. In such a structure, the
stage resounds with Pasolini's poetry and the body language which
56
Quay West, by Bernard Maria Koltes, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski
57
autonomously puts across the messages of a dramatic event. The Zagreb
performance of Pylades, with its denuded stage design, opposes the theatre
of visual attractions, inclined to the dictate of images which blur the reality
and say nothing more to the audience.
In the play An Uncertain Story, an author project ofBobo e l ~ i c and
Natah Rajakovic which had its first run in Teatar lTD last November,
politics enters the theatre accidentally, through a shared everyday life. Here
the individuals are not viewed through socio-political situations, but
through The Other, through the people they live with and those they meet
on a daily basis. It is these meetings that determine the direction of everyday
life as the problems of a family move from the street into the living room
and are transferred into each of our realities. An Uncertain Story develops
within a family, in one evening hour when the time stops in fragments of
the scenes involving the life spaces of the protagonists from the
neighborhood. A mother, a daughter, two sons and one son's girlfriend
retell on the stage everything that happened to them that day and, in a
correlation with a family member, determine their place in the family.
The documentary approach of the director Bobo e l ~ i c refers to
peculiarity which originates from the silent presence of reality in a place
where it is not normally expected-in the theatre. By chance, the fragments
of the events are interconnected, not into a story but into a free-form which
is only a candidate for a drama. Voyeuristic peeps into other people's lives,
offered to the spectators, are recognized as acute signs of our present-day
reality and the dispersiveness of the director's handwriting aims both at
disintegration and realization, similarly to the methods used in the literature
of the last decade. The actors and the authors of An Uncertain Story are not
interested in the result but in the process-the investigation of the capacity
of the theatre to hold up a moment of everyday life. What determines the
developments on stage is neither the story nor the action, but the dramatic
situation, founded rather in tension than in twists and turns of the plot. In
An Uncertain Story there are no characters, only actors who, on the stage,
are entitled to their privacy and who do not hide themselves behind
predetermined roles. This shift brings us closer to their "story." The gap
between what was experienced and what was told, a casual gesture, the
silence ... indicates the cracks between us and the world, the abyss that
always keeps us from being completely on the other side. In its consistency,
providing a true picture of the everyday life in which we continue to
recognize ourselves in The Other, An Uncertain Story, in the final
consequences, offers a way out from the givens of the political reality.
In Quay West, a play written by the French playwright Bernard
Maria Koltes and performed, under direction of a young Polish director
Krzysztof Warlikowski, at the Zagreb theatre Gavella in early 1998, all
values are questionable. The world of a loyal, politically acceptable citizen
will suddenly fall apart when he finds himself on Quay West where people
live who have experienced life in a more direct manner-stealing to survive.
Their world offers some other values; they believe in a new day, in a better
reality. The citizen who went out of his way and got lost on the Quay West,
faces new, unknown values through this disaster, suggesting the relativity of
the system he came from. In this context, Koltes's thoughts are not only
political, but also anthropological; this is not only a drama about
disintegrating principles, but also a drama about different individuals in
different worlds.
On the stage traversed by railway tracks, recycled scenes of the
civilization dump follow one after another, sterilized to provide evidence of
the pressures of life. In this dark stylization, the audience is called as the
third character, a witness and protagonist of Koltes's world. The director
Krzysztof Warlikowski compresses the images into a line on the horizon,
making all people equally vulnerable in this dismemberment without a
center. Frustrated, damaged, weakened or failed motives, by which Koltes
invites us to reexamine ourselves on the Quay West, articulate the questions
about what actually makes sense. Unrealized desire and the loss of one's
own self due to the loss of The Other are the prime movers of the story
which put everyone in the position of a stranger. Loneliness is here the
imperative of the social power, the desire for a change proves to be vain,
there is no way out, only the silence or a torrent of words in the speech that
will consume all life opportunities. The confessions of the spellbound losers
sound like monologues in the performance that reveals the anxious
attractiveness of rejected reality.
Red Magic, a stage piece which had its first run in June last year,
directed by Mislav Breeic and performed by a freelance theatrical company
from Zagreb, is composed of fragments taken from the plays of a Belgian
playwright Michel de Ghelderode. It renounces any direct cause-and-effect
relationship and gets accomplished in the spaces of aesthetic explorations.
Red Magic appeals to the irrational in the spectator, singles out social events
and offers a surrogate of our lives, scenes which have passed through life and
which prove that life hurts no more. And, as we bear witness to our dreams,
this performance, within the theatrical space, bears witness to a displaced,
strange reality which still speaks about us. Here each scene calls forth
59
another one, each scene has a touch of something that integrates it into a
whole, something that cannot be expressed in words since as soon as we try
to define it, it turns into a picture. Stripped of psychology, Red Magic offers
a dream of reality in which the magic function of the theatre is revealed.
The Croatian theatre today does not accept any predetermined
trends, finished stories, articulated answers, or given developments. By
accepting diversity, it accepts constant changes and new and different
perspectives. Its curiosity is recognized in the diversity of its approaches to
politics and aesthetics, in an exploration that knows no given directions or
predetermined goals, in listening attentively to the time, in its desire to
either change itself or to dream of the reality.
60
FRAKCIJA-MAGAZINE FOR 1HE PERFORMING ARTS
Dubravka r g o ~
The appearance of the first issue of Frakcija: Magazine for the
Performing Arts, published by the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts and
the Center for Dramatic Arts in April 1996, filled a void in Croatia which
for many years had been left to an absent and never fully accomplished
search for a systematic coverage of recent theoretical records, stage events,
and current obsessions of national and international theatre. In the eighties,
a dramatic art review, Prolog, and subsequently Novi Prolog, successfully
presented the Croatian theatrical scene, offering information on
international theatrical developments that had changed the look of the
theatre in the era of post-modern reinterpretations. The nineties started with
the East-European breakdown of old ideological systems and the collapse of
grandiloquent statements, with the announcement of war disasters in our
region, and with a theatre that was losing the fulcrum of a firm political
prefix. These might be the reasons that for some time there were no drafts
of the theoretical records about it.
In the very first issue, the editorial board of Frakcija made it clear
to their readers that "an interesting theatre is not where one may expect it
or where it 'should' be. A theatre that wants to develop itself runs away
from the space of expectations and enters the space of the inexperienced,
virtual and different." The first issue was dedicated to Croatian dramatic
artists who took a chance and in 1995 departed from institutions, outlining
and bringing a different and new Croatian theatre to life. Unwilling to
continue traditional theatrical expressions, Frakcija took sides with
alternative theatrical events and performance art, being the first to
introduce this term into theatrical practice in Croatia. On its pages Frakcija
published interviews with the U.S. directors Robert Wilson and Peter
Sellars, professor Marvin Carlson, French choreographer Phillipe Decoufle,
Belgian director and visual artist Jan Fabre, Bulgarian-German director Ivan
Stanev, French director Stanislas Nordey, the selector of the Kassel's
Documenta 10 show Catherine David, art director of the Belgian
Needcompany Jan Lauwers, British choreographer Lloyd Newson, Polish
director KrzysztofWarlikowski, German director Robert Ciulli, and Italian
historian of philosophy Paolo Rossi. Frakcija published the texts of Gilles
Deleuze, J.F. Lyotard, Dietmar Kamper, Ilya Kabakov, Heiner Muller,
Michel Vinaver, Jose Monleon, Rustom Bharucha, Judith Butler, Elin
61
Diamond, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, Sue-Ellen Case, and Andrei Kovalev.
Frakcija also addressed the work of one of the greatest theatrical
visionaries, Antonin Artaud. It explored his reconsiderations within the
context of representation and performativeness, and the phenomenon of a
script in the theatre (what we can do with words?). Others showcases were
Bertolt Brecht on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of his
birth, the political engagement of the Croatian theatre in the nineties, an
assortment of festivals, possible qualifications and alternatives within the
traditional festival programs, "ideal festivals", marginal and new ones, the
iconoclastic theatre, and the last theme approach (issues 12/13, June 1999)
was dedicated to sexuality.
Two issues of Frakcija were published in English. The issue entitled
"Utopia/Dystopia" (issue 9, winter 1998) was a result of the cooperation
with lntercult (an independent production unit for performing arts founded
in Stockholm in 1991) and Stockholm, Cultural Capital of Europe 1998.
This issue investigated the place of a subject in the modern world. "The way
from no place (ou-topos), through finding a place in the international cultural
context, continues in this new displacement (dys-topia) of Frakcija in a
different context which is not only national, generation, artistic." The last
English edition of Frakcija bears the title "Disorientation: Eastern-Europe"
and addresses terms such as memory, dislocation, body, violence, difference,
retrogardism, training, and disappearance within the context of the cultural
reality in the East European region, directly inspired by the war in Kosovo.
The following excerpt, from the editorial of the last issue of
Frakcija, (issue 14, July 1999) demonstrates the diversity and difference of
this new Croatian magazine for performing arts:
62
From the material discussed, suggested, selected, rejected and
reprinted, we have chosen the authors and texts representing
different views on the topicality of Eastern Europe, on the traces
of its recent theatrical past, on possible sources of individual
theatrical ideas, and on the suggestions for the discussion of abiding
prejudices. This issue will neither organize nor catalogue anybody' s
knowledge of Eastern Europe, making a point, we hope, of the
necessity of differing, that no world can reduce to a common
denominator.
Slavic and EaJl European Performance Vol. 20, No. 1
KAUNO V ALSTYBINIS AKADEMINIS DRAMAS TEA TRAS
(THE KAUNAS STATE ACADEMIC DRAMA THEATRE,
KAUNAS, LITHUANIA)
Jeff Johnson
The story of Kauno Valstybinis Akademinis Dramas Teatras, the
oldest and one of the most prestigious theatre companies in the country,
encompasses the history of theatre in Lithuania. Beginning with Juozas
Vaickus, who invited his Flying Theatre to relocate from Petrograd to
Kaunas in 1918, the company has been home to the most famous names in
Lithuanian theatre, including Konstantinas Glinkis, Borisas Dnuguvietis,
and Antanas Sutkus.
In 1928, Andrius Olekazilinskas, from the Moscow Art Theatre,
joined the group to implement reforms based on the teachings of
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. To accelerate the process he
invited Michael Chekhov, Anton' s cousin-a famous actor, director and
teacher in his own right-to establish an actor's training school on the site.
Vehemently opposed to Stalinism, and told he would be arrested, Chekhov
fled the Soviets by moving to Berlin, Paris and Prague, but, dissatisfied with
the Western theatre' s emphasis on commercialism, he returned to the
Baltics, settling in Kaunas until the Nazis forced him into exile again, this
time to America. During his time with the company, however, he changed
the direction of Lithuanian theatre, shifting its focus away from historical
dramas to productions more aesthetically attuned to the sensibilities of
modern drama.
Plagued first by Nazi manipulation, then again by the postwar
renewal under strict socialist ideology, the theatre struggled to maintain its
creative integrity. After Stalin's death, however, the situation became more
favorable for artistic productions. In 1954, Henrikas Vancevicius, in order
to promote Lithuanian playwrights, united the Young Spectator Theatre
with the Drama Theatre and moved to its present location on Laisves aleja,
the main pedestrian promenade in central Kaunas.
From 1967 until1990, the theatre endured a difficult period during
which time theatre throughout Lithuania was highly politicized, and many
performances, especially of Western plays, took the form of political
demonstrations. JonasJurasas, directorfrom 1967 to 1972, championed this
theatre of resistance, encouraging defiance of the Soviet authorities while
seeking more autonomy for his productions, a position which eventually
63
forced him from the country. In 1977, under Jonas Vaitkus, the theatre
continued its resistance, but with a more subtle approach which allowed it
to maintain its political stance without jeopardizing its viability as a theatre.
Out of this hotbed of subversive activism, the current director,
Gytis Padegimas, became a transitional figure, overseeing the theatre's
change from a politicized theatre of resistance during the Soviet era to a free
theatre of aesthetics after independence. Padegimas, who became the head
in 1993, has been active in Lithuanian drama since the 1970s, when theatre
was the major stage for political demonstrations against the Soviet rule and
a director's livelihood, no less his freedom, was precarious: it was a time
when everything having to do with art and culture was by design intensely
politicized.
I met Padegimas in late February, 1999 between rehearsals over a
beer in the downstairs cafeteria at the theatre. He is a thin man, loose in his
clothes, his hair long and frazzled, his wispy mustache drawing out his face,
but for all his wiriness he is extremely animated, punctuating his comments
with deliberate gestures, his eyes wide with enthusiasm and a love of his
subject. He recalled how, under the Soviet system, when he wanted to
produce Western plays which the authorities deemed subversive, he found
himself trying to convince them that the plays represented the isolation of
the individual under a corrupt capitalist system, when, in truth, to
Padegimas and his knowing audience the plays depicted "simple people
living without ideology, without propaganda" and a "celebration of
individuality." He also revels in telling the story of how, in the 1980s, he
staged Pinter's Old Times on six occasions without any trouble from the
Minister of Culture. But when Pinter, in a British newspaper, wrote that
he did not believe in Gorbachev's perestroika, and the news hit the Russian
press, the Minister canceled the show. "It was a time," he says, "when the
theatre was a place where you could really challenge totalitarianism."
But not without a price. Because of his activism, and his refusal to
stage any "propaganda revering Lenin and promising a bright socialist
future," he was never allowed to head a theatre and was denied permission
to travel abroad. But since independence, Padegimas, who has staged over
sixty productions on both stage and television and who trained as a director
at the Moscow Theatre Art Institute, travels frequently, coordinating joint
productions in various countries, lecturing on drama theory (for instance,
at the third annual Michael Chekhov International Workshop "Acting on
the Threshold" in 1994 in England), and currently lectures at both the
Conservatory in Vilnius and Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas.
64 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 20, No. I
Padegimas is quick to point out that theatre as a genre in Lithuania
is roughly a hundred years old. The first plays were created for amateur
theatre companies at the turn of the last century. "Even then," he says, "the
Czarist regime forbade literature in the Lithuanian language." This is one
of the main reasons for the late emergence of a Lithuanian national
dramaturgy. The situation changed only when Kauno Valstybinis
Akademinis Dramas Teatras, the first professional theatre to play in
Lithuanian, was established. Padegimas explained how the Academic
Theatre was instrumental in developing the talent of what he considers the
"classic" Lithuanian playwrights-Maironis (1862-1932), Vincas Kreve-
Mickevicius (1882-1954), Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas (1893-1967), and Balys
Sruga (1896-1947)-who mainly wrote tragedies and dramas in the twenties
and thirties based on national history. He also cites Petras Vaiciunas (1890-
1959), an author of well-made plays based on actual events, as the most
popular playwright of this period. In the fifteen years after World War II
the most interesting Lithuanian dramas were written by Antana Skema
(1911-1961), Algirdas Landsbergis (b. 1924) and Kazys Ostrauskas (b. 1926),
who were all in exile in the U.S.A. These three very different playwrights
had studied modern western drama, and were able to mix this experience
with what Padegimas calls "the painful experience of exile" to create what
he considers the first truly modernist plays in Lithuanian.
Conceding that Lithuanian theatre has always been a theatre of
resistance, geared to the soul of a country defined by wrenching historical
events, Padegimas suggests that the renaissance of Lithuanian drama started
in the Khrushchev era when Juozas Grusas (1901-1986) wrote his historical
play Herkus Mantas about the Prusssian struggle against the Teutons.
Written in 1957, it broke many Soviet taboos. From that time on
Lithuanian drama became more influenced by a spiritual resistance against
the totalitarian regime.
But if the plays are traditionally historical, they are not always
traditional-that is, naturalistic in structure. Padegimas points out that
while traditionalists like Grusas and Justinas Marcinkevicius (b. 1930) used
conventional techniques in their plays, while experimenting with some
innovative elements, Kazys Saja (b. 1932) was the first to use the modern
dramatic techniques of the time in his plays, mixing allegorical subjects with
sarcastic barbs, and was, according to Padegimas, considered one of the new
Lithuanian writers able "to express the wounds in the human soul." A little
later,Juozas Glinskis (b. 1933) combined Artaud's "theatre of cruelty" with
his own brand of nonconformism to create plays that provoked the Soviet
65
censors to prohibit some of his pieces. In the sixties and seventies, Saulius
Saltenis (b. 1945) wrote a very special kind of drama by presenting on stage
an array of simple small village people, whom he described with lyricism,
irony, tenderness and nostalgia, and whose non-heroic leading characters had
great care for simple values and real feelings in an epoch of total untruth.
These playwrights, says Padegimas, were "poets with the fists of boxers."
Asked if, because Lithuanian theatre has always been so political,
after "liberation" there was a sense of a loss of relevancy, Padegimas,
typically, was pessimistically optimistic. In the thirty years from about 1957
to 1988, he says, Lithuanian drama developed rapidly, mastering both
contemporary subjects and techniques. Lithuanian playwrights strongly
influenced their readers and especially their audiences, and they played a pre-
eminent role in preparing the renewal of independence in the year 1988.
Because of the political nature of theatre at that time, it was only natural
that the most interesting of them (Saulius Saltenis, Kazys Saka, Juozas
Glinskis and Vidmante J asukaityte) became members of parliament, editors
of big newspapers or ministers, and ceased writing plays. Then between
1988 and 1993, the most important and most interesting dramas in Lithuania
were not staged in the theatre because the favorite works of critics were
adapted to reflect dramatically every period of crisis. Therefore, during this
period, many Lithuanian theatres suddenly had free access to Western
dramas. This influx of Western influence and the playwrights' silence were
the main reasons why very few Lithuanian plays have appeared on stage in
the past few seasons.
There is, however, some hope that the situati')n will soon improve.
Two years ago, The Ministry of Culture organized a competition of
performances of Lithuanian plays. The winning theatres got money
earmarked for staging Lithuanian pieces. Also, Padegimas cites two new
writers as showing promise: Sigitas Parulskis (b. 1965), a young poet who
made his debut with a mixture of Lithuanian folklore and absurdist drama
in a play called From the Life of the Dead Soul, and Mark Zingeris (b. 1947),
a poet and essayist whose play Around the Fountain, or Little Paris,
Padegimas staged in 1996. But he also lists a healthy number of female
writers, including Ema Mikulenaite (b. 1935), Grazina Mareckaite (b. 1939),
Vidmante Jasukaityte (b. 1948), andJurga Ivanauskaite (b. 1961), who, he
says, brought an impressionistic line of writing to Lithuanian playwriting
along with a progressive focus on feminist issues.
One thing is certain: Padegimas, through his work at Kauno
Valstybinis Akademinis Dramas T eatras is determined to discover, sustain,
0
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67
and promote new talent as well as new venues. Besides the main hall, which
seats over 500, the theatre has six performance spaces housed in a recently
renovated adjacent factory. One room, seating only two dozen, consists of
a resplendent table in what appears to be an actual dining room: the
permanent set for Thornton Wilder's, A Long Christmas Dinner, which has
run twice a week for eight years. Another space provides a shallow, oblong
stage with bleacher seating for over 100, where innovative plays can be
developed; for instance, a bizarre version of Hedda Gabler plays across a
maze of interconnected cage-like metal bars. The courtyard-similar to a
college quad-is also utilized for experimental performances, concerts,
dances and performances pieces. Other spaces include a studio, a black box,
galleries and rooms for installations. Padegimas also runs an actors training
course, a traveling theatre group which visits prisons and small towns, and
a program designed to bring in visiting international directors and teachers
for performances and workshops.
Padegimas admits that a major problem with developing new
writing within the Lithuanian theatre stems from the fact that the writers
are acutely aware of working in a little-known, highly localized language.
He says it is sometimes frustrating for fledgling writers because they can
only be read, or performed by and for Lithuanian audiences, and their
works are seldom translated. As a result, mai1y writers are concentrating on
non-verbal performances, or they are moving away from their native
language, many into English. Add to the isolation felt by the artists
working in Lithuanian the difficulty competing for an audience against the
ubiquitous din of Western entertainment-music, cinema and
television-and the task of stimulating theatre as both a vehicle for cultural
ideas and a venue for entertainment seems daunting.
Nevertheless, Padegimas maintains his cautious, ironic optimism for
the future of Lithuanian theatre. With a palms-up gesture of both faith and
futility, he says, "It is very difficult to create fiction when everyday life in
Lithuania is so much like theatre."
68
THE UTILE ENGINE THAT COULD
Joseph Roach
The Futurists loved speed. They also hated women. Annie
Dorsen's taut, high-tech production of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's anti-
Futurist satire at the Yale School of Drama (November 1999) staged
precisely this love-hate relationship. What the playwright didn't like about
the future, including its relentless mechanization and cinemafication of
human life, came through clearly in Dorsen' s direction and in
complementary designs byTedPierce (sets), Tammy E. McBride (costumes),
Paul Whitaker Qighting), Fitz Patton (sound), and Kate Howard (video).
What Dorsen and company seemed to think Witkiewiczliked about women
also came through in unscripted pornographic flashes and simulated sex acts.
"A woman is only a symbol," his most talkative character says, "visible
proof of the fleeting moment." The greater the speed, the more fleeting the
moment-and the women in this show were nothing if not fast.
On a stage dominated by a very expensive-looking replica of a
1920s-vintage steam locomotive but backed by an electrified drop of poison-
green cyber-circuits, The Crazy Locomotive, which was written in 1923,
retells a stark tale, at least as ominous now in the age of fibre optics as it
must have seemed in the age of steam, about men with one-track minds.
Witkiewicz puts two incognito hero-villains in the driver's seat of his
surrealistic predecessor to "Speed" and "Speed Two": the aristocratic arch-
criminal Prince Trefaldi, disguised as the philosopher-engineer Siegfried
Tensor, here sinuously played by Remy Auberjonois, and his working-class
sidekick, the aptly-named Travaillac, disguised as the shovel-wielding
fireman Nicolas Slobok, cogently embodied by Edward O'Blenis.
A single catastrophe unifies the plot. The journey begins as Tensor
and Slobok climb aboard-it is clear from the outset that like spoiled boys
bored with a toy, they are going to make this life-sized train jump the
tracks. That project takes them two acts, ending in a horrendous collision;
then a brief Epilogue assesses the damage. As they gain momentum
suicidally, the two intellectuals debate the" Absolute" with a sophistry that
builds up its own head of steam. Hand to the throttle, shovel to the fire-
box, their action, like their talk, anticipates the male-bonding rites of the
69
'.J
0
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's The Cm:ry Loromotive, directed by Annie Doxsen
Stanislaw Ignacy Wit:kiewicz's The CmiJI Locomotive, directed by Annie Dorsen
with Lael Logan, Edward O'Blenis, Remy Auberjonois
.......
I'..
now formulaic "buddy-film" -adolescently homosocial, if not homoerotic,
and inevitably catastrophic: "Just think of it," Travaillac-Slobok exults, "at
the very same moment in history, Existence in all its infinity and the two
of us, alone, on this galloping monster adrift from all mankind."
Adrift perhaps, but certainly not alone. The men are loyally
accompanied on their death-ride by the Symbols who love them: Julia (Lael
Logan), the fireman's fiancee, "blonde, very pretty, but with an animalistic
kind of beauty," and Sophia (Kate Nowlin), the engineer's wife, "brunette,
very pretty and demonic." As if that additional sacrifice were not enough,
they also drag along a flaky assortment of intellectual noncombatants who
innocently board the passenger car of this doomed express. These
vernacular grotesques were poignantly fleshed out in a few deft
improvisations by Regina Bain, Robert Devaney, Mark Mattek, and
Kathryn Hahn. To complete the ensemble, the stationmaster's wife
(Geraldine Guo) and an aerialist (Tim Acito) made a late appearance in the
Epilogue to solemnify the smoking debris of the train wreck: he hanging by
his feet, swinging silently back and forth across the spectacularly up-ended
locomotive like a giant pendulum, reiterating the inexorable laws of physics;
she lustily going down on Julia, or on whatever relevant parts of her were
left after the disaster, pointing to a different kind of moral, in the way that
only sexualized symbols can do.
On one level Dorsen's staging suggested that Witkiewicz was
satirizing not technology per se or even the twentieth-century's costly love
affair with it, but rather technocracy-the concentration of apparently
limitless power in the hands of a few social engineers. This suggestion was
powerfully reinforced by an interpolated passage from Frederick Winslow
Taylor's Principles ofScientific Management (1911), in which a demoralized
worker (Mark Mattek) was humiliated by a time-and-motion interrogator
as Travaillac-Slobok (O'Blenis) parodied the Taylorist ergonomics of
shoveling coal. On a deeper level, Dorsen's vivid exploitation of skilled
actresses as sexual signifiers-in Kate Nowlin's added torchsong cum
striptease, for instance, or Lael Logan's spread-eagle-arched-back embrace of
an onrushing train-seemed rather to point the satirical finger at pornocracy,
or government by male fantasy. Pursuing this interpretation, the video
design, which played throughout the show across a line of eight television
screens facing the audience at eye-level, might have featured explicitly
pornographic images, demonstrating a practical ergonomics for symbolic
72
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's The Cm'{J Locomotive, directed by Annie Dorsen
with M:uk Mattek, Regina Hilliard Bain, and Robert L. Devaney
("<)
r--.
sex-workers. As it turned out in actuality, however, loop tapes of the
passing countryside accelerated with the runaway train, showing t he effect
of frantic speed from a passenger's perspective, until the climax, when the
video cut to the engineer's eye-view of the crazy locomotive plunging into
a tunnel. Point taken.
Dramaturg Kate Spencer's program notes for The Crazy Locomotive
(translated by Daniel Gerould and C. S. Durer) drew attention to
Witkiewicz's formative journey to the South Seas in the company of the
celebrated anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. This was apposite.
Anthropologists, like dramatists, are likely to interpret a culture by asking
what it is most willing and even anxious to sacrifice. The producers of The
Crazy Locomotive succeeded best when, like self-reflexive ethnographers,
they turned our privileged gaze back on ourselves, critically focusing on the
sacrificial object at hand-women as symbols in the runaway technoculture
of modernity-even as they implicated us as desiring subjects within its
spectatorial regime. Not that any one person, however, had to feel singled
out as the bug-eyed phallocrat. Predictable questions arose about the
producers' own position, including their market-savvy predisposition to toss
random sex bombs in the direction of the subscribers. In his "Futurist
Manifesto" of 1909, F. T. Marinetti exalted war and rape as well as
speed-"the beautiful ideas that kiJI, and the hatred of women." Like the
little engine in the popular children's story, he did it because he thought he
could. The Yale production ofWitkiewicz's still timely protest play posed
disturbing questions about the consequences of going along for the ride.
74
THE CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETfE
THEATRE'S, TWELVE IRON SANDALS
Molly Parker
"The Magic of Czech Puppetry," a recent NYC-based festival, was
the occasion for the premiere of Twelve Iron Sandals, the newest work by
Vit Hotejs and his Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater (CAM'!').
CAMT, whose previous productions include Hamlet, johannes Dokchtor
Faust, and Go/em, have expanded upon their tradition of presenting
traditional Czech marionettes in interpretations of classic stories and folk
tales to create an ambitious and innovative new work of puppet theatre.
Twelve Iron Sandals is a site-specific, ambulatory, musical play, with the
haunting images and touches of whimsy that have come to characterize the
work of Hotejs and CAMT.
The story, written by Hofejs and based upon a Czech folk tale,
involves an arduous test of strength and commitment designed to change an
immature and impetuous princess into a mature and steadfast woman. The
"young, pretty, immature" princess has wed a "handsome, wise, enormously
rich" prince with a spell cast upon him by an evil queen, turning him into
a lizard at night for the first year of their marriage. Impatient to
consummate the marriage, the Princess acts hastily and exacerbates the spell,
and the Prince is cast off to the Queen's distant palace. To release her
husband from the spell, the Princess is required to embark on a voyage to
find him, and in the process must wear out twelve iron sandals, break twelve
iron staffs, and eat twelve iron loaves of bread. In an effective and inventive
device, the audience literally accompanies the Princess on her journey,
traveling from room to chilly room, ascending from floor to floor
throughout the massive, haunted space of the Bohemian National Hall,
located at 321 East 73rd Street in Manhattan.
In the program, along with an account of the tradition of
Czechoslovak puppetry, is a notice alerting the audience to "please be
advised that no part of our performance has been made with the assistance
of spirits, devils, witches, or any other unclean powers." This reassuring
message is a reference to a troupe of Czech puppeteers in the eighteenth
century who were accused of employing "dark magic" in the manipulation
of their puppets. Hotejs makes no attempts to conceal the fact that the
magic here is being created by the puppeteers. Rather than preventing the
audience from viewing them, the puppeteers remain visible throughout the
75
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76
performance. Horejs calls attention to their presence, often humorously.
When it is suggested that "the villagers" should be invited to the wedding,
the idea is rejected, for there are "not enough puppeteers for villagers."
Each principal puppet is skillfully operated and given voice by a
team of two actor/puppeteers, jointly manipulating the puppets and often
speaking simultaneously or layering their voices. This approach of
operation allows for a more extensive range of movement and expression,
as when the Evil Queen puppet is passed from one puppeteer on a balcony
to her partner (Deborah Beshaw and Michelle Beshaw) on the ground via a
wire rigging, creating a dramatic swoop to the floor. The six
performer/puppeteers also play a variety of additional characters-Ron
Jones & Michael Kelly as the Prince and Theresa Linnihan & Alissa Mello
as the Princess. There is consistently a high level of interaction between the
performers and the puppets, and the symbiotic connection between
puppeteers and their puppets is acknowledged. When the princess is dressed
for her wedding, each of her puppeteers is adorned with a bridal accessory
as well; when she dons the sandals of the title, each puppeteer straps on her
own pair of iron shoes.
The Czech marionettes used, some antique and others more
recently constructed by Czech puppet makers, visually complement the
story with their strong faces and noble features. As has become one of his
trademarks, Horejs again employs a variety of puppets, traditional Czech
rod-style marionettes of all sizes, as well as shadow puppets. The size
differences between the puppets often work to enhance the fanciful,
whimsical aspects of the story, as when the princess encounters a tiny army
of marching soldiers a quarter of her size, or when a chess board comes alive,
small puppets acting as the larger puppets' game pieces.
The lovely puppets are not, however, the only notable objects in
Twelve Iron Sandals. The site of performance itself has a most impressive
presence, threatening to dwarf the puppets in its enormity. The Bohemian
National Hall, a former home to Manhattan Theatre Club, had been lying
vacant and neglected for more than ten years prior to the staging of Twelve
Iron Sandals. The once-grand building, with its five stories of rooms now
filled with crumbling plaster, peeling wallpaper, and the occasional gaping
hole in a wall, provides an appropriately unsettling setting for the princess's
strange journey. The space radiates an atmosphere of unexplored and
perilous territory, making the performance an adventure for the audience as
well. In a theatre of performing objects, this site of performance becomes
almost alive, adding greatly to the overall theatrical experience and the mood
77
of the piece. Only Hoi'ejs's strong staging and inventive use of the space
prevents the puppets and performers from being overwhelmed.
Guided by performers in huge, fanciful animal masks, the audience
is led through the massive hall, glimpsing moments of the Princess's journey
throughout the space. On one floor, the Princess makes her way across a
wilderness of bed frames, rungs like ribs half-concealed by white sheets. On
another floor, a sideshow barker invites the travelling audience to pause at
"The Museum of the Adventures of the Princess." Peering through
peepholes into crumbling rooms, stepping on fallen plaster, theatregoers
pause to observe an installation of puppets, creatures, messages representing
the sights and sounds the princess encountered upon her journey.
The walking performance culminates at the final sit e, a huge
crumbling ballroom, filled with an Escher-inspired set (designed by Michael
Kelly). As the audience is led into the cavernous space, the Princess walks
on the banister of the balcony high above. The puppets cast shadows on the
ruined walls, the performers voices echo ominously. It is here that the last
moments of the journey are played out, and the Princess finds her husband,
lying in a deep sleep, pierced through with needles from head to foot.
Despite the dire predicaments of the characters, humorous
moments persist, punctuated with songs (written by Elise Morris and Doug
Katsaros), like the Evil Queen's "I Like Needles," which leaves no doubts as
to how evil she is! When the princess finally succeeds in her quest, the royal
marriage is consummated while theE vii Queen is taken to be" re-educated,"
and the audience is left with the feeling of having taken an actual journey,
rich with images and well worth the effort. Hoi'ejs and the Czechoslovak-
American Marionette Theatre have created an original and highly enjoyable
new work of puppet theatre.
THE SWAN: A LYRICAL SONG FOR A DYING CULTURE
Joshua Abrams
Entering the space for Pacific Resident Theatre's recent production
of Ferenc Molnar's 1920 play, The Swan (a 1922 English translation by
Benjamin Glazer), I was taken by the set, a belle epoque rococo
confectionery( designed by Victoria Profitt and lit elegantly by Keith En do.)
Set atop a round platform built into the audience, this is perhaps the
wedding cake Princess Beatrice (Marilyn Fox) hopes to serve in her plans to
regain the family position by marrying daughter Alexandra (Shiva Rose) off
to Albert (Robert Lee Jacobs) , Crown Prince of an unnamed European
country. Forgettably pleasant classical strains lull the audience into a
comfortable state of relaxation, recalling a place and an era when aristocracy
was understood and nobility clear-cut.
Viewed all too often (if viewed at all) as artifacts of a simpler time,
Molnar's plays are all but ignored today except in adaptations by better-
known artists-Liliom provided the story for Rodgers and Hammerstein's
Carousel, Tom Stop pard's Rough Crossing is taken from The Play's the Thing.
Of his works, only Liliom is currently in print in the United States. The
Swanihas been made into three movies, the latest (1956) a delightful film
starring two actors soon to become actual European nobility-Alec
Guinness and Grace Kelly.
The PRT's production opens with the highly choreographed but
unscripted servants' hurried preparation of the estate for the Prince's arrival.
This scene ends with the world-weary butler Cesar's painstaking
examination of the maids' fingernails, bringing the audience in on the
importance of appearances in this sham world. William Lithgow turns in
one of the evening's strongest performances in the role of Cesar, the
Chekhovian servant, continually failing in his now single-handed attempts
to stage-manage the running of the large but now underfunded estate.
Director Howard Shangraw excels at exposing the truths underlying this
play through tiny detailed actions such as the examination of the fingernails,
revealing Molnar's exploration of a society in the midst of denying
inescapable change. Although grounded in turn-of-the-century misogyny,
the play's attempt to explore the overturning of rigid class structures
remains extremely playable.
Frustrated by Albert's apparent lack of interest in her daughter
Alexandra (the latest in his whirlwind world tour of would-be wives),
79
The Swan, by Ferenc Molnar, with Shiva Rose and Robert Lee] acobs
Princess Beatrice ignores the advice of her brother, the worldly-wise monk,
Father Hyacinth (Orson Bean). Bean's portrayal of Hyacinth as a
benevolent and all-knowingpatriarch who is able to see the consequences of
every action before they've occurred and thus to extricate the family from
the complex situations is delightful. Seeing the Prince's respect for her
children's tutor Hans Agi (Alexander Enberg, in a portrayal which seemed
to have been borrowed wholesale from Robert Sean Leonard's Septimus
Hodge in Stoppard'sArcadia}, Beatrice plots to present him as a potential
rival for Alexandra, although clearly one of a different station, thus enraging
the Prince's jealousy and causing him to fall in love with Alexandra. (The
effect of the play's innocently anti-feminist rhetoric, most obvious in respect
to Beatrice's constant plotting, is minimized by this production, but perhaps
a new translation is needed.) However, Albert has already fallen for
Alexandra and, in his shyness, has summoned his mother, Princess Maria
Domenica Qudith Montgomery, a very capable last-minute substitution for
Diane Hurley) to the estate in order to plan the marriage. Agi, unaware of
his position within the plotting and having already fallen for the beautiful
Alexandra, is taken in by her attentions and, overstepping his bounds within
the estate as servant, he follows the charade through to its necessarily
unpleasant ending. Along the way, Alexandra falls for him, and each
character comes to understand her/his position within the overdetermined
social structure. The arrival of the Prince's mother in the aftermath of all
this necessitates the concoction of a ludicrous explanation by Father
Hyacinth so that the nobility can continue to live its fairy-tale life. Albert
and Alexandra come to an understanding that they marry not for love, but
in a desperate attempt to maintain some vestiges of the status quo in a
society which is clearly undergoing major change. This cynical, post-
romantic view of the world clearly resonated with the contemporary
audience at the PRT.
The confectionery fairy-tale surface of this play-in addition to the
set, Audrey Eisner's costumes, although clearly constructed with adherence
to strict budgetary concerns, add to the overall stage picture-allows
Shangraw and his able cast to explore the subtexts of this world, a house of
cards clinging to its bygone prime. The tension between the family and Agi
is reflected in their differing understandings of Napoleon's conquest, now
nearly two hundred years prior but brought into focus as a metaphor for the
rise of class-consciousness. Albert and Alexandra come together as a couple
through the machinations of a clearly changing world; they face but do not
confront the ideological constructedness of an oligarchic world-view,
81
tutored by the humanity of the "lower classes." The cast skillfully sketches
upper crust characters all-too-a ware of the volcanic underpinnings of human
society, frantically buying into one unbelievable story after another as they
seek to maintain a semblance of control.
In the Pacific Resident Theatre's production, the period details
provide an affective distancing, allowing the audience to meditate on the
not-so-clear-cut class issues, still a major concern within today' s new world
order of internet millionaires and the explicitly capitalist global marketplace.
As we enter the twenty-first century, between our backward looking
nostalgia for a simpler time and our forward-looking dreams of a classless
society, the time is ripe for new translations, adaptations, productions, and
deconstructions of Molnar's adept and incisive social commentaries.
CONTRIBUTORS
JOSHUA ABRAMS, a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is Managing
Editor of Western European Stages.
JARKA BURIAN is Professor Emeritus of the Theatre Department of the
University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of
The Scenography of]osefSvoboda and other studies of Svoboda, Czech theatre,
and international scenography. His Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and
Conscience ofa Nation is to be published by the University of Iowa Press in
2000.
CYNTHIA GOATLEY is Associate Professor in the Department of
Theatre at the University ofNorthern Iowa. A director and playwright, she
was Fulbright Professor in American Drama and Woman's Studies at the
University of Gdansk in 1993-5. Butterflies, her play about attention deficit
disorder commissioned by Teatr Wybrzeie, Gdansk, will premiere April15.
WIESLA W GORSKI has been a freelance theatre director throughout
Poland for almost thirty years. For five years he lived part time in New
York City, resulting in a Polish/ South Bronx theatre collaboration, U.B. U
/I'Ll be me, based on Ubu Enchained by Alfred Jarry. (See SEEP, Vol. 18,
no.3).
JEFF JOHNSON has received numerous awards including two Fulbright
teaching assignments, the Florida Governor's Screen writing Award, and a
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This spring he
will be the guest director at Arden School of Theatre, Manchester, England.
MICHAEL LONG is Assistant Professor of Russian and Director of Slavic
and East European Studies at Baylor University.
MOLLY PARKER, a student at Mt. Holyoke College, is a puppeteer.
ELISABETH T. RICH is Associate Professor of Russian Language and
Literature at Texas A&M University. Her articles and reviews have
appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, and Civilization/The Magazine
of the Library of Congress. She has also published extensively on
83
contemporary Russian literature in both American and Russian scholarly
journals.
JOSEPH ROACH, Professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale, is the
author of Cities of the Dead: Circumatlantic Performance (Columbia, 1996)
and The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting(Michigan, 1993). He
has chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University
in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre at Northwestern
University, and the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.
DUBRA VKA VRGOC is a theatre critic for Vjesnik, the main daily
newspaper in Zagreb, Croatia, where she writes about contemporary
European and Croatian theatre and culture. She works as a dramaturg and
translator.
Photo Credits
Petr Ubi in the fall of 1999
Bohdan courtesy of Balustrade Theatre
William Mastrosimone' s Like Totally Weird
Courtesy of Balustrade Theatre
Henrietta Yanovskaya
Courtesy of Henrietta Y anovskaya
Ivanov and The Storm
Victor Baznenov
Old Sins
Courtesy of Michael Long and Theatre of the South-West
Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising
Courtesy of Lattin Photography
Pylades
Courtesy Of Dubravka
84
An Uncertain Story
Demirel Pasalic
Quay West
Courtesy Of Dubravka Vrgol:
Hedda Gabler
D. Mataejeous
The Crazy Locomotive
T. Charles Erickson
Twelve Iron Sandals
Jonathan Slaff
The Swan
Gar Campbell
85
PUBLICATIONS
The following is a list of publications available through the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center:
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, BolestawTaborski, 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. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending aU .S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
MAR TIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
THEATRE PROGRAM
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK GRADUATE CENTER
365 FIFTH A VENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10016-4307
86
Slavic and East European Performance VoL 20, No. 1

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