SEEP Vol.17 No.1 Spring 1997

volume 17, no.
1
Spring 1997
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A), Graduate Center, City
Universit y of New York. The Institute is Room 1206A, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Slavic and
East European Performance: CAST A, Theatre Program, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Jennifer Starbuck
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Susan T enneriello
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Susan T enneriello
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Denise Hurd
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
CASTA 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 1997 CASTA
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. 17, No. 1
Editorial Policy
From the Editors
Events
In Memoriam
Books Received
ARTICLES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5
6
7
13
14
"Recovering the Theatre's Memory" 17
Laurence Senelick
"South Bohemian Jewels: Two Faces of Theatre in Cesky Krumlov" 19
Joe Brandesky
"Moscow is Watching" 28
Spencer Golub
"Latvian Theatre in the 90s: Trends, Repertoire, Personalities" 37
Guna ZeltiQa
"The Post-Soviet Politician as Clown: Notes on Joseph 49
Brodsky's Democracy"
Joel Schechter
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Jasieriski, Lunacharsky, Moor, and The Mannequin's Ball" 54
Daniel Gerould
"Chronology of the Life and Work of Bruno Jasienski" 72
Daniel Gerould
" Introduction to the 1931 Moscow Edition of 76
The Mannequins' Ball"
Anatolii Lunacharsky
3
REVIEWS
"Underground'' 78
Leonard Quart
"Shakhnazarov's American Daughter: Maintaining Balance 82
in a Split World"
Marc Robinson
"A Festival of Polish Theatre at La Mama: 88
Kazimierz Braun's Helena-The Emigrant Queen"
Susan T enneriello
"Jerzy Jarocki's Grzebanie, Based on the Life of 92
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. At the Stary Teatr,
Cracow"
Helena M. White
"A Contemporary, Russian-Language Three Sisters on 102
Broadway. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre"
Jane House
"The Moscow Theatre Sovremennik's Into the Whirlwind. 106
At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre"
Jennifer Starbuck
Contributors 103
Playscripts in Translation Series 107
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 Gogo! 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 6.0 for DOS or Wordperfect 6.1 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 CASTA, CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY 10036. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors
will be notified after approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The Winter 1997 issue contains features on Czech, Russian, and
Latvian theatre. Joe Brandesky's essay creates vivid images of two Czech
theatre buildings, one old and one new, while Spencer Golub paints an
evocative picture of postcommunist Moscow through an associative
montage of his impressions of onstage performances juxtaposed to the
outside world of illusions. Guna ZeltiQa provides an insider's survey of
Latvian theatre in the transitional 90s, while Joel Schechter conjures up the
late Joseph Brodsky's circus visions of post-Soviet "democracy."
In PAGES FROM THE PAST I examine the history of Bruno
Jasienski's play, 1he Mannequins' Ball, and present Anatolii Lunacharsky's
introduction to the play. Thanks to a new book by Krzysztof Jaworski, it
is finally possible to know exactly what happened to the Polish poet.
Included in this section are Dmitri Moor's eight illustrations to the first
edition of 1he Mannequins' Ball.
BOOKS RECEIVED is supplemented by Laurence Senelick's
eloquent plea for support of new Russian works filling the lacunae left by
Soviet scholarship. A full complement of reviews of plays and films by
Leonard Quart, Marc Robinson, Susan Tenneriello, Helena M. White, Jane
House, and Jennifer Starbuck rounds out the issue.
The Spring issue will contain a special section on Croatian theatre.
-Daniel Gerould
EVENTS
CHEKHOV
This Winter Chekhov enjoyed wide popularity throughout the United
States. The following is a sampling of some of the interesting Chekhov
productions and adaptations produced during the season.
The Bear and The Proposal, directed by Augustine Ripa, were
presented at the Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from
December 4 to 28, 1996.
The Proposal, The Bear, and Smoking is Bad for You were presented
by the Creative Artists Lab as part of a rotating marathon of one-acts in
tribute to Strindberg and Chekhov at Trilogy Theatre, New York, from
December 26, 1996 to February 23.
East Coast Artists presented The Three Sisters, directed by Richard
Schechner, in a new translation by Michelle Minnick, at La Mama from
January 16 to February 2.
On Broadway, The Three Sisters, translated by Lanford Wilson and
directed by Scott Elliot, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre
Company from January 22 to April 6. The production featured Amy Irving,
Eric Stoltz, Lili Taylor, and Jeanne Tripplehorn.
Uncle Vanya was presented by The Play's the Thing Theatre
Company at the Producer's Club in New York from January 28 to
February 16.
Damyan Popchristov adapted and directed the short novel Ward
Number Six and . .. at La Mama from February 6 to 16.
The Seagull was produced at T. Schreiber Studio in New York from
February 12 to March 9.
David Mamet's adaptation of Uncle Vanya, directed by Todd
Salovey, was performed at the San Diego Repertory Theatre from March 14
to April13.
7
Uncle Vanya, directed by Kevin Lawler, was presented by the
Omaha Theatre Company for Young People in Omaha from April12 to 27.
fSee Jane House's review of Moscow Theatre Sovremennik's
production of The Three Sisters at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York,
in this issue of SEEP.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York
Boguslaw Schaeffer's HereThere, directed by Eddie Furs and
translated by Maria Hagadus, was produced by the Players Forum at The
Salon on December 4, 1996. The performance was the first English-language
production of Schaeffer's work. Schaeffer, a well-known Polish composer
and music theoretician as well as playwright, has been produced in Poland,
Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France.
Moon over Alabama, a cabaret performance from Croatia based on
songs composed by Kurt Weill for Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera,
directed by Peter Selem, was presented in English by Edita Majic, Bozidar
Alic, and Dusko Zubalj at La Mama from December 5 to 8, 1996.
Croatian playwright Radovan Ivsic's King Gordogan, adapted by
Alan Graubard and directed by Andrew Frank, received its American
premiere by the Rorschach Theatre Company at the Ohio Theatre from
February 8 to March 1.
The Czechoslovak American Marionette Theatre performed The
Go/em, directed by Frank London, at La Mama from March 13 to 23.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Regional
Nikolai Gogol's The Diary of a Madman, directed by Bain Boehlke,
was presented at Jungle Theater, Minneapolis, in November.
The Polish Theatre institute in the USA presented Staropolski Kulig
Swiqteczny (An Old Fashioned Polish Sleigh-ride) , directed by Nina Polan
with choreography by Ewa Piernik, at the Fleisher Art Memorial in
Philadelphia on December 8, 1996 and at the Consulate General of the
8 Slavic and East European Performance VoL 17, No. I
Republic of Poland in New York on December 21, 1996. Performers
included Adam Borys, Izabela Kobus, Nina Polan, and Aneta Sakowska
with piano accompaniment by Mieszko Gorski.
David Fishelson's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, directed
by John de Lancie, was presented at L.A. Theatre Works in Venice,
California, from February 26 to March 1.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Europe
Russian clown Salva Polunin and partner Angela de Castro
presented Slava Snowshow, a theatrical experience through mime, at the
Peacock Theatre, London, in January.
Chekhov's Ivanov was performed at the Almeida Theatre, London,
in February. The production featured Ralph Fiennes, Olivier Ford Davies,
and Bill Paterson.
FILM
Commonwealth of Independent States: FilmFest, featuring recent
work by veteran and new filmmakers from the former Soviet Republic was
presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from December 13
to 23, 1996. The series screened Vladimir Khotinenko's The Muslim (1995),
Semyon Aranovitz's Year of the Dog (1993), Alexandr Rogozkin's The
Particulars of the National Hunt (1995), Alexandr Sokurov's Quiet Pages (also
known as Whispering Pages, 1993), Sergei Ovcharov's Drumroll (1993), and,
from Latvia, Aivars Freimanis' Ligzda (The Nest, 1995).
Jan Sverak's Kolya, written by and staring the Czech filmmaker's
father, Zdenek Sverak, received the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign-
language film in January and has been nominated for an Academy Award.
In 1996 Kolya won Best Picture at the Tokyo International Film Festival.
The film relates the growing relationship between a Russian boy, played by
five yea.r old Andrej Chalimon, and his Czech stepfather.
Russian filmmaker Andrei Ujica's Out of the Present (1995) was
shown at Anthology Film Archives in January.
9
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971), directed by American
filmmaker Jonas Mekas, was screened at Anthology Film Archives in
January.
Soviet director Andrei Tarkovski's films were featured at
Anthology Film Archives in February. The program included My Name is
Ivan (1962), Andrei Roublev {1966), Safaris (1972), Stalker (1972), 7be Mirror
(1974), and Nostalghia (1983). The works of Sergei Eisenstein were also on
the schedule and featured Battleship Potemkin (1925), Strike (1924), October
(1928), Old and New (1929), Romance Sentimentale (1930, with Alexandrov),
Que Viva Mexico {1932), Bezhin Meadow (1936), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and
Ivan the Terrible: Part I & II (1944/46).
Czech director Vera Chytilova was given a two-week retrospective
at Anthology Film Archives in February. The retrospective included her
award winning documentary Flea Bag {1962), along with 7be Ceiling (1961),
7be Apple Game (1976), Panel Story {1979), 7be Clown {1981), Prague (1987),
Wolfs Cabin (1987), and Horsing Around (1989).
Russian filmmaker Y evgeni Yufit was the subject of "Cineprobe:
An evening with Y evgeni Yufit" at the Museum of Modern Art on February
24. The director was present to discuss his work after the screenings of two
films made with Vladimir Maslov, Daddy Father Frost is Dead (1991) and 7be
Wooden Room (1995).
Featuring . .. Cavalcade of Russian Cinema presented two films by
Soviet filmmakers, Dziga Vertov's 7bree Songs of Lenin (1934) and
Alexander Medvedkin's Happiness (1934), at the Donnell Library Media
Center in New York on February 26.
ARTS, CULTURE, NEWS
Polish filmmaker Janusz Zaorski was on the streets of Brooklyn in
December filming scenes from his new work Happy New York, a light-
hearted comedy about six Polish immigrants chasing the American dream.
The movie was inspired by the works of Polish author Edward Redli.flski,
who lived in Greenpoint Brooklyn during the 80s and collaborated with
Zaorski on the script. Greenpoint was chosen as a central location to start
filming because it is home to more than forty-thousand Polish immigrants.
10 SLwicand m European Performance Vol. 17, No. 1
Czech president and playwright Vaclav Havel married the popular
Czech actress Dagmar Veskrnova on 4 January. The marriage is Havel's
second. His first wife, Olga, died of cancer last year. According to the New
York Times, 6 January, during the President's regular radio address the day
after the wedding, Havel declared that "he had given up smoking and
drinking after surgeons removed a malignant tumor and half of his lung last
month." "Not only have I become a non-smoker," Havel was quoted as
saying, "I have even had to become a teetotaller. I hope that it will not be
forever."
Polish theatre director Piotr Cieslak, artistic head of Warsaw's
Dramatyczny Theatre, was featured in a New York Times article, 12 January,
by Alan Riding, on five European directors, "Breathing New Life into
European Theater." Cie8lak discusses some of the challenges the Polish
theatre community has encountered during the transition from producing
theatre under Communism to an enivronment that allows for "artistic
freedom." Audiences are a major problem. Cieslak relates that Polish theatre
entered a crisis in 1980 with the emergence of the Solidarity labor
movement: "Suddenly the streets were freer that the theatres. We were still
putting on plays with political, visual allusions and society was far ahead of
us. The theatres were empty." Cieslak maintains that today most Polish
theatres "live in the shadow of bankruptcy," even though they continue to
receive goverment subsidies. But Cieslak sees a definite sign of
encouragement in the return of young people to the theatres.
Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines in conversation with Mel Gussow
(reported in the New York Times, 10 February) mentioned that he was
planning to base his next work on the life of Meyerhold. He explained his
interest in Meyerhold as "a classic example of a man murdered for his
esthetics."
Joe Brandesky and Maria Ignatieva of Ohio State University co-
curated an international exhibit of theatre designs by Russian emigre Boris
Israelivich Anisfeld (1879-1973) . The exhibit, Boris Anisfeld and the Theatre,
featured seventy sketches and three costumes from productions designed by
Anisfeld in Russia and the United States: Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes
(Sadko), Anna Pavlova's Dance Company (Seven Daughters of the Mountain
King), and the Metropolitan Opera (The Snow Maiden and The Blue Bird).
The exhibit was shown at the Memorial Hall Gallery in Lima, Ohio, from
January 18 to 31, the Canzani Gallery at Columbus College of Art and
11
Design in Columbus, Ohio, from February 6 to March 6 and will be shown
at The University of Kansas in Lawrence Kansas from April 12 to May 25.
It is the first time Anisfeld's Russian designs have been seen in the United
States.
In late December 1996 Jerzy Grotowski returned to Poland to give
demonstrations and show films about his research at the Workcenter of
Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. The
presentations took place in the second half of February 1997 at the
Ossolineum Foundation in Wroclaw. This was Grotowski's second visit to
Poland since 1982 when he left permanently for the US; he first returned in
April1991 to receive an honorary degree from the University of Wrodaw.
-Compiled by Susan T enneriello
In Memoriam
GrzegorzDubowski (1934-1996) andJanusz Warmiriski (1922-1996)
Last year saw the death of two outstanding figures in the Polish arts
who have done much to make their country's theatre known in the West.
They were good friends to many of us, and they are dearly missed.
Grzegorz Dubowski was a journalist, script writer, and filmmaker,
author of more than 200 documentaries on the arts for Polish television.
For theatre lovers he is best known and appreciated for his pioneering films
about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). In 1968 Dubowski made the
documentary, Portrait ofWitkacy, based on photographs and texts by and
about the playwright. In 1981 he created his second documentary film on
the subject, The Many Faces ofWitkacy, and in 1985, with Alain van Crugten,
made a feature film, Witkacy's Tumor, about the playwright's life in
Zakopane, featuring a production of his play Tumor. In 1988 Dubowski
made another documentary, this time about Witkacy's paintings in the
private Swrzyski collection in Zakopane. Finally, in 1990 he created two
films about the huge Witkiewicz exhibit at the National Museum in Warsaw
in December of that year, Witkacy's Paintings and Witkacy's Portraits.
Dubowski was a superb filmmaker whose work on Witkacy has been shown
in America, Europe, and Japan.
Janusz Warmiri.ski was an actor, playwright, and director. He
became managing director of Warsaw's Ateneum in 1952 and held that
position for over forty years (with only a brief interruption) until his death.
In 1970 he became head of the Polish International Theatre Institute, and in
1979 he was chosen head of the world-wide ITI, a post he held for three
terms. At the Ateneum Warminski was known for his direction of
contemporary plays with social, political, and moral dimensions. His great
successes include Williams's Streetcar Named Desire, Sartre's Condemned of
Altona, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Incident at Vichy, and The Price,
Dostoevsky-Camus's The Devils, and Wesker's The Kitchen. He also staged
important Polish works from the inter-war years, such as Trzebinski's To
Pick Up the Rose, Witkiewicz's musical, Miss Tutli-Putli, and Beelzebub
Sonata, and Jasienski's Mannequins' Ball (see PAGES FROM THE PAST).
Warmiri.ski was a consumate theatre artist and manager.
13
BOOKS RECEIVED
Clayton, J. Douglas, ed. Chekhov Then and Now: The Reception ofChekhov
in World Culture. Selected contributions from a scholarly symposium on
the reception of Chekhov in world culture at the University of Ottawa,
May, 1994. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. (Middlebury Studies in Russian
Language and Literature, Vol. 7). 330 pp. Contains the following: Laurence
Senelick, "Chekhov and the bubble reputation;" Sharon Marie Carnicke,
"Stanislavsky's production of The Cherry Orchard in the US;" Daniel
Gerould, "The Pitoeffs' Chekhov;" Clara Hollosi, "The importance of being
earnest (or funny) in adapting Chekhov: The case of Platonov;" Ronald D.
Leblanc, "Liberating Chekhov or destroying him? Joel Gersmann's farcical
production of The Cherry Orchard;" John Tulloch, Tom Burvill and Andrew
Hood, "Transformations and transcodifications: The Cherry Orchard in
production and criticism;" Nick Worrall, "Robert Sturua's interpretation of
Chekhov's The Three Sisters: An experiment in post-modern theatre;"
Richard C. Borden, "The comic Chekhov on the Russian stage, 1993-94;"
Peter G. Christensen, "Edward Bond as a Chekhovian playwright;"
Vladimir Zviniatskovsky, "Two ladies with Two Dogs and Two Gentlemen
Qoyce Carol Oates and Chekhov);" Serafima Roll, "The theatre of feeble
discourse: From Chekhov's tenuous meaning to Nina Sadur's failure of
speech;" J. Douglas Clayton, "Chekhov in Canada, 1926-1980;" Lian Shu Li,
"Chekhov Studies in China;" Evgeny Steiner, "The reception of Chekhov
in Japan;" Christine Hamon, "Les Traductions frans;aises des pieces de
Tchekhov;" Vera Adamantova and Rodney Williamson, "Chekhovian irony
and satire and the translator's art;" Alexander Sadetsky, "Polysemy:
homonymy;" Emma Polotskaia, "Chekhov in the language of ballet: The
Seagull at the Bolshoi Theatre;" Elena Siemens, "A tempest in a tea cup:
Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes and Chekhov's 'The Lady with the Dog;'" Alevtina
Kuzicheva, "'Breaking the rules': Chekhov and his contemporaries;" Julie
W. De Sherbinin," "Chekhov and Christianity;" Peta Tait, "The proposal
reconsidered: A biography of love." Includes an index.
"Eastern-European Transitions," Theatre journal, ed. John Rouse, Vol.48,
No. 4 (December 1996), pp. 407-494. Contains the following essays:
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 17, No. 1
14
Dubravka Knezevic, "Marked with Red Ink;" Dennis C. Beck, "Divaldo
Husa na Provazku and the 'Absence' of Czech Community;" Halina
Filipowicz, "Textualizing Trauma: From Valesa to Kosciuszko in Polish
Theatre of the 1980s;" Elzbieta Baniewicz, "Theatre's Lean Years in Free
Poland;" and Alaina Lemon, "Hot Blood and Black Pearls: Socialism,
Society, and Authenticity at the Moscow Teatr Romen." The Performance
Review section, edited by Allen J. Kuharski, is devoted almost exclusively
to Eastern-European plays and productions. The issue includes many
photographs.
Milne, Lesley, ed. Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright. The Netherlands:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. Volume 5 in the Russian Theatre
Archives, edited by John Freedman, Leon Gitelman, and Anatoly
Smeliansky. 250 pp. Contains 21 chapters by different scholars on aspects
of the author's life and career, including the following on Bulgakov's plays
and performances of his works: Maria Popovich, "The Days of the Turbins in
the Light of the Russian-Ukrainian Literary Discussion;" Barbara Henry,
"Reality and Illusion: Duality in Bulgakov's Theatre Plays;" Phyllis W.
Powell, "The Fatal Eggs and Adam and Eve: Disruption and Restoration of
the Natural Order;"and Nathalie Mahieu Talbot, "Giving the Devil His
Due: The Register of Voices in The Master and Margarita and in York
Holler's Operatic Adaptation of the Novel." Includes seventeen
photographs and indexes of names and of works by Bulgakov.
Morawiec, Elzbieta. Seans pami(Xi (Seance of memory) . Cracow:
Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyri.ski, 1996. 351 pp. Articles previously
published in Tygodnik Powszechny, primarily from 1982 (after martial law)
to 1995, although some pieces go back to 1979. The essays, reviews, and
interviews deal with playwrights Gombrowicz, Mrozek, and R6zewicz;
alternative theatres like the Theatre of the Eighth Day; religious stagings of
Mickiewicz's Forefathers' Eve, and directors and theatre artists such as
Konrad Swinarski, Zygmunt Hubner, Tadeusz Kantor, Tadeusz Lomnicki,
Jerzy Jarocki, Krystian Lupa, and Jerzy Grzegorzewski.
Nurczyri.ska-Fidelska, Ewelina and Zbigniew Batko, eds. Polish Cinema in
Ten Takes. Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences et des Lettres de L6dz, Vol.
XLV, Serie: Recherches sur les Arts, Vol. VI. L6dz: L6dzkie Towarzystwo
Naukowe, 1995. 149 pp. Articles in English. Contains the following:
Ewelina Nurczyri.ska-Fidelska, "Romanticism and History. A Sketch of the
Creative Output of Andrzej Wajda;" Bronislawa Stolarska, "In Search for
15
Hope. On the Films of Andrzej Munk;" Maria Kornatowska, "'Yet We Do
Not Know What Will Become of Us.' On the Artistic Output of Wojciech
Jerzy Has;" Alicja Helman, "Jerzy Kawalerowicz-a Virtuoso of the
Camera;" Magdalena Malisz, "Tradition and Nostalgia. On the Cinematic
Works of Tadeusz Konwicki;" Elzbieta Ostrowska, "Silesian Landscapes of
Kazimierz Kutz;" Tomasz Klys, "The Intellectual Cinema of Krzysztof
Zanussi;" Andrzej Zalewski, "Grzegorz Kr6likiewicz: the Dilemmas of
Unrestrained Passion," Tadeusz Sobolewski, "Peace and Rebellion. Some
Remarks on the Creative Output of Krzysztof Kieslowski;" Ryszard W.
Kluszczynski, "The Realization of a Utopia. The Video of Zbigniew
Rybczynski." Each article includes a short biography of the filmmaker and
a filmography.
Schuler, Catherine A. Women in Russian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver
Age. London: Routledge, 1996. 260 pp. Includes chapters on Mariia Savina,
Glikeriia Fedotova and Mariia Ermolova, Polina Streptova, Anna Brenk,
Lidia Iavorskaia, and Vera Kommissarzhevskaia. Contains extensive notes,
a select bibliography, an index, and 7 photographs.
Stephan, Halina. Mrotek. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996.
Contains the following sections: Chronology of the author's life and work;
Literary Profile; Early Years during socialist realism; Satirist of People's
Poland; Early Dramaturgy: from The Police to Tango; Playwright Abroad;
and Emigre Prose. Includes a bibliography of Mrozek's works, a list of the
first publication and first performance of his plays, a bibliography of his
films, personal essays and interviews, and an extensive bibliography of
secondary sources, an index, and twenty-four photographs.
16
RECOVERING THE THEATRE'S MEMORY
Laurence Senelick
Anyone interested in modernist Russian performance is
undoubtedly familiar with Vladislav Ivanov, a luminary of the Moscow
literary scene, whose essays are among the most thoughtful and perceptive
of current theatre scholarship. American Slavicists may have read his acute
analysis of Tairov's Phaedra, which came out in Navy Mir in 1986, or his
psychoanalytic examination of Michael Chekhov, available in English
translation in Wandering Stars: Russian Emigre Theatre, 1905-1940. For years
Ivanov promoted the idea of publishing inaccessible documents of early
twentieth-century Russian theatre, accompanied with contemporary
research, on a regular basis. In the face of money difficulties, paper
shortages and the like, his project was regarded by many of his colleagues as
chimerical. Persistence has carried the day, however, and what promises to
be the first volume of an excellent series has now appeared.
Mnemozina. Dokumenty i fakty iz istorii russkogo teatra XX veka
(Mnemosyne. Documents and data from the history of 20th century Russian
theatre) was issued in 1996 under the auspices of the Russian Academy of
Sciences and the Ministry of Culture; its official publisher is "GITIS,"
Moscow's foremost theatre school. That this chrestomathy is named after
the goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses is no mere rhetorical
flourish. It advertises the need to retrieve a neglected or hidden history in
order to establish a kind of truth on which to build a future. The collapse
of the Soviet Union and t he concomitant throwing open of the archives Qess
uninhibited than the West assumes) has tasked a generation of scholars with
recovering and rehabilitating a past that had been systematically suppressed
and distorted. Ivanov explicitly declares his aim to fill in the "blank spaces"
and "black holes" of the bygone Russian theatre.
The first part of the volume consists of a number of materials
hitherto unpublished or never reprinted from their original and inaccessible
sources. They include snippets from a futurist "Theatre of Radiants"
[sic,-luchisty}; "Theatre and Scaffold," Nikolai Evreinov's monograph on
capital punishment as spectacle; manifestos of Nikolai Foregger; a series of
documents from Aleksei Gripich's Petrograd Theatre of New Drama (1921-
24); and excerpts from the notebooks of Daniil Kharms, lent by a private
collector.
As if this impressive garner were not enough, the second part
contains essays by contemporary scholars on subjects of varying interest.
17
Vera Griner and Maria Trofimova write about Dalcroze eurhythmics and
free-form dance in Russia in the 1920s and Elena Strutinskaya discusses the
theatrical experiments of the "Union of Youth." Some take an intercultural
tack, among them Katarzyna Osinska writing about Poles in Russia from
1915 to 1918, Nataliya Nusinova on the American pop cultural elements in
a production of FEKS, and Vladimir Koliazin on the Kamerny Theatre's
German tour of 1923. Yet others attempt to rescue certain overlooked
figures from obscurity: Boris Ferdinandov and his experimental "analytical
theatre" are explored by Ivanov himself, while Yury Rakitin, a Moscow Art
Theatre actor who spent much of career as an emigre in Europe, is recalled
by Natalia Vagapova.
Ivanov envisages Mnemosyne as a continuation of the excellent series
Voprosy teatra (Theatrical Issues), published in Soviet times by V. V. Frolov
and Konstantin Rudnitsky. Whether this volume is itself the first of a series
or is to remain a unique sample depends to some extent on its reception by
libraries and academics outside of Russia. I strongly recommend anyone
interested in Russian theatre of the early twentieth century to place an order
for this fascinating collection.
SOUTH BOHEMIAN JEWELS: TWO FACES OF THEATRE IN
CESKY KRUMLOV
Joe Brandesky
Last summer the results of a census in the Czech Republic included
the fact that over 42,000 Americans were living in Prague. This number was
adjusted upwards for the 1995 Prague Quadrennial of Theatre Design and
Architecture (PQ). The exhibition was enormous and featured contributions
from forty-five nations in professional and student categories. A special
exhibit, "In Search of Light," commemorated the works of Josef Svoboda,
who attended the opening and heard comments from Vaclav Havel,
President of the Czech Republic. The city was ablaze with activity, but
several hours away in the bucolic setting of South Bohemia two
contradictory faces of Czech theatre were in evidence: the Baroque Theatre
and the open air Revolving Auditorium Theatre in Cesky Krumlov.
1
A
production of Beauty and the Beast directed by Miroslav Krobot and designed
by J aroslav Malina provided the key to the resolution of the seeming
contradictions.
2
The majestic towers and walls of Cesky Krumlov rise above a series
of sharp bends, for which the city is named, in the Vltava River. The
imposing structures are a legacy of centuries of development by wealthy
families such as Vitkovitz (thirteenth century), Rozmberk (fourteenth to
early seventeenth centuries), Eggenberk (seventeenth to early eighteenth
centuries) and Schwarzenberg (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).
Theatrical activity had been a part of social life at the Eggenberk family
mansion since the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Subsequent
owners made numerous additions and improvements, but the final result
(1765-68), an excellent example of a late baroque stage "was arranged
according to a plan by Johann Schwarzenberg, the Duke's son.''
3
More recently, the Baroque Theatre at Cesky Krumlov has been
restored and the majority of its stage machinery is original and intact. The
auditorium includes parterre, gallery, Duke's box and orchestra pit with
side-hung chandeliers and ceiling paintings inspired by Greek myths. Three
scenes can be hung and simultaneously moved (borders are moved
separately) by an immense wooden shaft with levers from which lines lead
to the scenery. The giant shaft, located under the stage, is an exact copy of
the original, which is on display, but no longer functions. Amazing
examples of baroque theatre technology abound. The footlight system,
which could be raised or lowered to "fade" a scene in or out, is operational
19
with replicas of the original clay oil lamps in place. The theatre provides a
wealth of authentic devices and residua which bear concrete witness to
descriptions of eighteenth century Continental staging practices. Perhaps
the most impressive items in this theatre collection are the seven complete
sets of scenes that were built and painted between 1766-68.
Two artists from Vienna, Johann Wetschel and Leo Merkel, were
paid 2,000 guilders to design the stage curtain and seven sets of perspective
scenery: a forest, garden, study, street, prison, seaport, and military camp.
Little is known about the artists besides the fact that both attended the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. But the curator of the Baroque Theatre, Jii'l
Hilmera, places the artists in the midst of the finest designer/painters of
their time:
Even a cursory glance at the Krumlov stage decorations
makes it clear that their creators were painters with close
connections with the famous tradition of Viennese stage design
of the first half of the eighteenth century, specifically the work
of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena, whose creations served as direct
models in certain cases.
4
Hilmera further remarks that the Krumlov artists' work was not on the
same level as Galli-Bibiena's, but rather that they produced good quality
work that matched the standards of their time. Nevertheless, the
importance of this theatre and its collections should not be underestimated:
In a modern context ... the Krumlov set designs are some of
the most valuable monuments of this cultural history, together
with the castle theatre itself, and may be compared only with
the chateau theatre in Drottningholm which was built and
completed in 1766 as the summer seat of the Swedish King.
5
It is easy to hyperbolize in the midst of this jewel of Czech theatre.
But an unavoidable historical contradiction becomes evident particularly
when each breath indicates the slightly acrid scent of insect spray.
Overzealous curators from the previous Czech government permeated the
dry timbers of the theatre structure to such an extent that years later current
caretakers weigh the dangers of opening windows to the fresh, but
potentially damaging hilltop air against prolonged exposure to the noxious
vapors. A second "gift" of the previous regime to the theatre was the
removal of the original floor of the auditorium and its replacement with
terra cotta tiles: a practical, if incongruous, solution to floor replacement
in this otherwise meticulously restored building.
Neither of these contradictions totally obscure the beauty and
grandeur of the Baroque Theatre, but they anticipate a larger predicament
20 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 17, No. I
which exists just beyond the theatre, up the hill past the mansion and its
gardens. Here one passes carefully sculpted baroque garden arrangements
with a pool and fountains; larger trees beyond hint at a forest-like
environment. In the midst of this natural beauty two imposing structures
rise into view. The first is the summer palace known as "Bellarie," built in
1706 and remodeled in 1754; the building has been called "the most priceless
object of garden architecture in Bohemia."
6
It is located in the middle of the
garden at the high point of the hill, some distance from the town and
surrounding properties, an attribute which aided the structure's rumored
purpose as a site for courtly assignations. Immediately in front of and below
Bellarie, the second theatrical jewel of Cesky Krumlov, the Revolving
Auditorium Theatre, breaks the harmony of the baroque garden landscape.
A gleaming metal plate raised on a circular base provides a
disturbingly modern diversion from the carefully laid out gardens. The
theatre was the brainchild of architect and scenographer Joan Brehms (1907-
1995). In 1945 Brehms began a thirty-two year association with the South
Bohemian National Theatre in Ceske Budejovice, twenty-two kilometers
from Cesky Krumlov. A summer theatre festival originated at the garden
in Cesky Krumlov during 1947, and in 1958 the first in a series of Brehms-
designed Revolving Auditoriums opened. There were only sixty seats
revolved by stagehands in the first incarnation, but by 1993 a definitive
machine-powered turntable seating 658 was completed.
7
Empty during daylight hours, the auditorium has a cafe built under
the seating which rewards sightseers who brave the afternoon heat in search
of the Baroque garden and Bellarie. In the bright afternoon light, modern
and baroque architecture face off as contradictory aspects of divertissement.
Bellarie, the summer mansion favored for its secluded placement in the
garden, now plays an integral part in public performances throughout each
season. The only current assignations in this building are those arranged by
the actors who occupy dressing rooms built into the lowest level of the
mansion. The bright summer light gently washes the delicate pastel-colored
stuccowork and winding staircases of Bellarie while simultaneously
highlighting the unflattering glass, plastic, and aluminum auditorium
structure. Sunset mercifully lessens the seeming contradictions between the
two buildings, and a new spatial relationship develops.
The occasion of a final dress rehearsal for a production of Beauty
and the Beast (Kraska a Zvife) provided an opportunity to see how the
Revolving Auditorium worked in its surroundings. Frantisek Hrubln
penned this version of the tale, which was designed by Jaroslav Malina and
directed by Miroslav Krobot for summer evening performances at Cesky
21
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Bellarie as used by Jaroslav Malina to depict the Beast's
mansion in Beauty and the Beast (Kraska a Zviie).
Krumlov.
8
The rehearsal could not begin until after dark, but coordination
between the turntable and numerous sound cues gave rise to several
observations. First, the turntable could turn clockwise or counter-clockwise
and at variable speeds. Speakers and lighting towers were hidden among the
trees and bushes around Bellarie. As the auditorium turned, the sound
panned from speaker to speaker; music and cues "followed" the perspective
of the audience member as lighting illuminated each new vista. Brehm's
vision of a revolving auditorium provoked associations with other bold
attempts to redefine actor/audience relationships. Max Reinhardt's famous
revolving forest for A Midsummer Night 's Dream came to mind along with
its designer Ernst Stern; Brehm designed a "reverse Stern". In place of a
passive, enclosed audience with a kinetic stage (the Reinhardt/Stern model),
Brehm's open air conceit established an equally kinetic relationship between
actor, scene, and audience. The vibrations of the turntable coupled with the
constantly changing vistas and sounds heightened the senses and stimulated
an extraordinarily strong sense of atmosphere.
A run-through of the production verified Krobot and Malina's
meticulous efforts to tie the myriad theatrical and structural elements
together; the result was a series of vividly poetic images. Three scenes
illustrated the way inherent contradictions were overcome: scenes in
Beauty's (Kraska) house; scenes in the Beast's (Zvi.fe) mansion; and the
cinematic passage of time during Beauty's confinement.
J aroslav Malina's scenographic tendencies include a penchant for
playfulness and the reconciliation of seemingly contradictory elements. The
production begins with the auditorium facing Bellarie; it then turns three
quarters around until Beauty's rough-hewn hut comes into view. The
opulence of Bellarie is immediately contrasted with a hut on wooden stilts;
the outline of the wall and roof are traced with stretched canvas on a frame.
The hut is located in the midst of trees and bushes. Within the scene suitors
arrive to court Beauty and her sisters (Gabinka and Malinka) including two
fellows pushed on in a wheeled chair. The frame of the dual chair is
aluminum and the back and sides are covered with the same stretched canvas
used on the hut. Real structures and their scenic opposite, old and new
construction materials, intersect in this once garden, now theatrical space.
The lightness of the fabric in the costumes and the scenic pieces set against
the verdant garden environment draw the eye and remind one of the light
pastel facade of Bellarie. No sooner does that thought occur than the
auditorium turns to face the Beast's home.
Beauty's father is lost in a storm wandering throughout the garden;
as we rotate and watch him seek shelter, the building comes into view. The
23
three-story-tall Bellarie is transformed by light into a dark, brooding lair.
The shutters in the two windows on either side of the third floor balcony
entrance are open and dimly lit from inside. The balcony has steeply
curving staircases on both sides which terminate on either side of an inner
entrance, also dimly lit, to the second floor balcony. Another set of stairs
leads directly off right and left to the ground-floor level. The beast's voice
is heard from inside the building at first, but we can "see" him: the interior-
lit windows and doorway create the illusion of a giant skull. Bellarie has
been transformed into a personification of the beast or his shadow. This
concept is reinforced when the Beast argues with himself: the building
becomes his alternate self. The sheer size of the structure in relation to the
actor playing the Beast helps the audience feel the enormity of the bestial
will as it opposes his awakening love for Beauty. Subsequent scenes in
Bellarie are more brightly lit, but the presence of the imposing face of the
beast in the structure is never lost. Beauty's father confronts this shadow
beast and flees, feari ng it is a demon. He escapes through the Beast's rose
garden (after plucking a rose for Beauty), which Malina uses to create
another contradiction. This "garden" Qocated on the lowest level of the
Beast's mansion) is a burgundy-colored drop which has roses of various sizes
sewn into the fabric. Within the very real garden of Bellarie we see a
deliberately theatrical representation of roses which rises into view through
the use of clearly visible ropes. This is not the magic of the Baroque Theatre
down the hill, but rather a more open and flexible stagecraft that embraces
all available means, including the surrounding baroque environment, and
thereby encourages multiple interpretations. Malina provides another
playful nod at contradiction in Bellarie when the Beast attempts to entice
Beauty to dine. A table and chair (again covered with stretched fabri c)
magically rolls onto the veranda, a small wink at the stagecraft that keeps the
audience moving from scene to scene as well as another placement of an
obvious set piece within a real structure.
Krobot and Malina's cinemat ic sensibility definitely helped resolve
the seeming contradictions presented by the Revolving Auditorium in the
baroque garden at Cesky Krumlov. When Beauty impulsively decides to
replace her father at the Beast's mansion, she jumps on her father's mount
and rides off through the surrounding forest and garden. The auditorium
simultaneously "follows" her by rotating until she reaches her destination.
The visceral sense of our movement as we follow the action is absorbing and
satisfying. It heightens our sense of identification and empathy with Beauty.
This technique reaches its apex as we watch Beauty adj ust to her
confinement with the Beast. She has become curious about her unseen
24
captor and we see her walking around Bellarie accompanied by a song which
describes the passage of the seasons. The auditorium turns counter-clockwise
during the song, leaving Beauty behind. Then, another image of Beauty
comes into view in the garden; this one treads on a large white cloth,
strewing rose petals as she goes. Suddenly the actor gathers the large white
cloth around her and winds it luxuriantly around her body. She turns at the
same tempo as the auditorium moves away from her, in subtle cadence with
the music. But as the circle is completed and the Beast's mansion comes into
view, we see the original Beauty dressed in an evening gown. The effect of
the continuous song, auditorium rotation, languorous cloth movement, and
deft use of actor doubling is provocative and memorable. It is as if the
audience is seamlessly transported to each of the actual sites portrayed in a
cinematic montage.
The contradictions posed by the theatrical jewels of Cesky Krumlov
(Baroque locale and modern stagecraft) were carefully reconciled by
Miroslav Krobot and J aroslav Malina. Their job, simplified to some extent
by the beauty of South Bohemian nights, is nonetheless notable for their
playful and intellectually stimulating solutions.
NOTES
1. Although "revolving auditorium" is a direct translation (od.cive hlediste), the seating area
has no walls or roof. Audiences have an unobstructed view of their surroundings.
2. Miroslav Krobot and Jaroslav Malina are two of the best known Czech theatre artists in their
fields. At the National Theatre in Prague Krobot adapted and directed a production entitled A
Year in the Country which was awarded the 1993 Alfred Radok Prize. Two responses to this
production can be found in SEEP 15 (Spring 1995): 14-15 and SEEP 16 (Winter 1996): 43.
Malina's prolific career is marked by his international reputation as a proponent of "action
design." He currently serves as Rector for DAMU, the Academy for Theatre and Music in
Prague. Malina and Krobot collaborate often both in and out of Prague.
3. Jifl Hilmera, "The Chateau Theatre in Ceskf Krumlov," Czech Theatre 7 (May, 1994), 12-26.
The article contains the definitive history of the development of the Baroque Theatre at Cesky
Krumlov. This edition of Czech Theatre includes essays about other "lost" theatres in Bohemia
and Moravia as well as an article about the costume collection from Cesky Krumlov's Baroque
Theatre by Katefina Cichrova.
4. Hilmera, 17.
5. Hilmera, 17.
6. Zaloha, ]ifi, Slavko, Pavel and Hak, Martin. Cesk-j Krumlov: A Guide to the Town and
Mansion. UNIOS CB Co. Ltd., Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, 1995, p. 47.
7. Dvorak, Jan. Joan Brehm. Divadelni Ustav, Praha: 1987. This book is the source for
information concerning Brehm's life and career including the Revolving Auditorium Theatre
at Cesky Krumlov. The book has no pagination but feat ures 40 pages of text and 120 pages of
photos.
8. Technical support and much of the cast was supplied by the South Bohemia National
Theatre Gihoceske Divadl o) from nearby Ceske Budejovice.
27
MOSCOW IS WATCHING
Spencer Golub
On the weekends, late-night Russian television features, on four
separate channels, a sort of video pin-up magazine-glossy, filtered
advertisements for the new sexuality, an air-brushed semblance of the real
thing. The series of images is periodically interrupted by the provocative
rhetorical exchange, "Are You Watching?-You Know That You Are,"
which is a sly invitation not only to self-arousal but to self-surveillance. The
one-way mirror of the past may now be long gone, but as the three mirrors
in my hotel suite and the mirror in every cloak room and hotel elevator
attest, people here continue to spend a fair amount of time looking at
themselves, even if no one else is watching. The Orwellian portraits of
grim-faced Party chiefs on city streets have been replaced by billboards
instructing the public to "Watch the Capital's Movie Screens." Feel free to
picture yourselves in the movie that the mirrors contained. My trip to
Moscow consists of a great many underground passages, where eyeglasses are
sold-the better to see in the dark, I suppose. On the first night, I absent-
mindedly, perhaps reflexively, re-open the window curtains in my hotel and
see the silhouette of a woman staring vaguely in my direction. Is it she who
phones my room anonymously on the last night asking if I want company
to help relax me into my dreams? But isn't this movie, aren't these mirrors
the dream?
At the Moscow Art Theatre, Nikolay Sheyko's production of
Lermontov's Masquerade was spiritually communing with Golovin's
ghost-like double portrait of Meyerhold as revolutionary (and) magician.
Bare-breasted Salomes and Scheherezades of Lev Bakst design performed like
whirling dervishes in the vortex of Arbenin's fever dream. Their nudity ap-
peared to be prosthetic. Were they automata designed by E. T. A.
Hoffmann to steal the eyes of the viewer? I shifted my seat several times, in
order to see better or perhaps so as not to be seen. There was a stage upon
the stage, where, in Marienbad-like recall (the film Last Year at Marienbttd)
the artifice of sexual relations was being demonstrated by charismatically
enhanced, unreliable witnesses projected within the "hero's" mad state of
mind. As the chastely white and wholely innocent Nina (Arbenin's wife)
succumbed to the poison her miserable mate served up in an ice-cream
flambe, a fly was caught in the shaft of light emitted by the beam projector
mounted on the front of the balcony in the theatre auditorium. Was the
ephemeros searching for the retangular mirror, which hung from the flies
above the stage, reflecting only a truncated and oblique sliver of the unreal
life below as it disappeared out-of-frame? A possible real-life symbol in
search of its theatrical representation was made more fluid and transitory by
gossamer curtains which everywhere danced, glided, concealed, and revealed
anthropomorphized death on the stage. The familiar prompter's box
appeared to be missing from the MAT stage on this particular night. Still,
I noticed that whenever an actor crossed the stage where the box should
have been, there was the restless murmur of a bell, as if the stage were calling
out its dead in plague-time. Was Pushkin, killed before his time by the
society Lermontov here eviscerated, bearing witness to their crime? Was I
hearing in involuntary sympathy with Arbenin's seductive delusion, or was
this aural hyper-subjectivity designed to ward off delusion via an act of
sympathetic magic? The aural effect was probably unintentional, but on
this night, all things seemed to conspire to frame the perishability of the
stage event. There were the flames lit in this same downstage space to
consume a secret missive and to kindle Arbenin's cold heart that would not
melt. The audience's applause at the threshold of the actors' final vanishing
seemed to die out prematurely. On the way out of the auditorium, I caught
sight of myself in a hallway mirror.
Across the street from MAT, an "Arbenin" was mock-strangling his
"Nina." "Acting out," I thought. In the underground, I saw a gaggle of
peroxide blondes courting "love" in the guise of "Courtney Love" and
perhaps awaiting Arbenins of their own. But while the women were turned
around to do their make-up, Moscow had lost its physical shame and done
its face and body up anew. Old women and their grown-up daughters now
sold "men's magazines" in the underground passages. On the subway train,
a woman was collecting alms beneath an ad for "Lolita" cigarettes, not a
Russian brand but appropriately reminiscent of a former Russian' s rueful
sexing of memory. Women seemed to be selling the bulk of the cigarettes
here as well.
There is a new-model Russian body on the street, stream-lined and
sophisticated. Capitalism has made a virtue of leanness, born of Russian
desire and hunger. Young women's silhouettes are now closer to Pushkin's
and Lermontov's world than to Gorky's. They again seem dangerous and
unfiltered in the thick haze of men's ubiquitous cigarettes. All the better to
smoke while reading those men's magazines and dreaming of oneself as
James Bond in pursuit of a Russian sexual counter-agent. Passing through
the smoke to the mirrors, I wonder whether this widely advertised female
pulchritude is somewhat of a shrill shill, a new Russian some sort
of masquerade.
29
In Queen of Spades, Pushkin, a former "gentleman of the
bedchamber," showed how fate makes strange bedfellows of ambition and
desire. To arrive at the Vakhtangov Theatre, where the show was going on,
I passed along the Old Arbat. There I saw a monkey, who was past
performing, swaddled in an infant's snowsuit and cradled by a master who
seemed to have foregone his patrimony for love as much as commerce.
Shilling for a Theatre of the Panoptican great leaders' exhibit, "Lenin" and
"Nikolay II" were trying to ward off a post-cold war chill on the street.
Lenin had the wire from a portable cassette player, which was hidden inside
his greatcoat, plugged into his ear. No talk between the old adversaries, just
waiting for the tourists buying "The Party's Over" t-shins to grab a photo
opp(}rtunity with them.
At the Vakhtangov, Pushkin's Herman (in Pyotr Fomenko's
production of Queen of Spades) discovers that the large, walk-through mirror
in the home of the sly old "Queen" is really empty. He passes through it
into madness, having trusted in appearance and been blind to the "secret
ill-will" at work in society, as was once said about Lermontov's
contemporaneous world depicted in the Meyerhold-Golovin Masquerade.
Did Herman "see" Arbenin and not himself on the other side of the mirror,
and did he imagine that by exposing the unreality of a prop he could elude
the vigilant surveillance of the stage? Fomenko's stage immediately reveals
itself to be a giant gaming table, only apparently open to chance, really
activated by fate-the "Queen's" three fatal numbers making a mockery of
chronology.
The Taganka's stage now models a historical celebrity, having
out-lived its life-and-death struggles with the state. The quasi-sacral ("quasi"
because in theatrical employ) choral music, of which Yury Lyubimov is
inordinately fond, belatedly reveals his theatre's orthodoxy. This is a place
for patron saints. The famous portraits of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold,
Vakhtangov, and Brecht still hang in the theatre lobby, and Pasternak is
back on the stage in the person of his literary creation Doctor Zhivago, a
production which is almost entirely sung. Dostoyevsky, who is represented
by a staging of his A Raw Youth, is suspended from the theatre-lobby
ceiling-a mobile likeness of a life that once hung by a thread. Lyubimov
turns him with a hockey stick prior to the start of the play. Lyubimov's
production splits Dostoyevsky's "raw youth" into two actors of contrasting
charm and earnestness. The stage curtain alternately sags and sulks, while
Lyubimov's familiar silhouettes dance like flames and it rains up through the
floor lights. The old Taganka Theatre building's wooden stage has always
enacted the Dostoyevskian romance of the saintly whore, turning scenic
30
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 17, No.1
tricks and mounting sudden conversions that come sometimes from the
wings but mainly out of the floor. The older he gets, the more ardently
Lyubimov struggles to transform space into light, the stage's visual agent of
time. The famous light curtain, still on abundant display, conspires with
poetry and choral chant to bring this transformation to light, but an
inevitable heaviness and redundancy has set in. As in a former staging of
Dostoyevsky, his Crime and Punishment, Lyubimov has his actors
addressing giant shadows belonging to them but as much to their stage.
There are big shadows to fill. Valery Zolotukhin, who appears as
"Zhivago," seems to me to be a Taganka ghost, a Horatio lacking a Hamlet.
The late Vladimir Vysotsky, who once was the Taganka as Hamlet, now has
his memory mass-marketed with "Lenin" downtown. A Raw Youth, which
was the final performance I saw in Moscow, advertised the brevity and
in/substantiality of time. The show began with a stage technician spray
painting the play's Russian title, "Podrostok," on the mobile curtain. Later,
when someone asked the time, it was spray painted on the curtain as well,
soaking through from behind like an apparition where the title had been
before. After both stage-time signatures were gone, "The End" crossed my
mind, this time in a real-time signature. I again thought of the Taganka
Hamlet of the 1970s, in which a tracking curtain formerly swept the stage
clean of corpses. Without the spectacle of Shakespearian mock-carnage, I
felt again that the stage was doing its apparitional work, the task of taking
up the bodies into the invisible folds of time.
In Russian theatre, only Khlestakov, imbued with the improviser's
orthodoxy, is freer than the dead who haunt the stage. Vladimir Mirzoev
has staged a purposely self-indulgent "generation X" Xlestakov at the
Stanislavsky Theatre, with a bald succubus rather than merely a bare-faced
liar at its core. "X," as he is called in the person of the ravenous performer
Sukhanov, is Robin Williams's genie as an "X-files" (alien) agent. When "X"
grossly fingers and sucks the fruit (a melon, literally) of the Mayor's wife
and daughter, the stage erupts in sweaty paroxysms, and many audience
members lean forward like guests at an orgy, applauding their host's manual
and labial dexterity. In the tongue-in-cheek newspaper The Truth about
Xlestakov, sold at the performance, the director acknowledges that an
American audience which experienced an earlier version of this staging (in
Michigan) were uncertain whether what they were seeing was a Russian
play. Small wonder.
In the beginning, the Mayor wakes up in bed (the production' s
central scenic prop) next to women resembling Macbeth's weird sisters and
tries to whip an imaginary fly to death. Mirrors drawn from the play's
31
famous epigraph show themselves in spades. The Mayor's wife and daughter
carry mirrors in their opening scenes to reflect the missing window at which
the author directed them to stand in anticipation of news of the incognito's
arrival. He seems to arrive almost internally, to creep down their bodies
inside their clothing and into their systems, like some new topping for
Arbenin's ice cream surprise. The mirrors reappear at play's end as irregular
shards broken off of some missing (w)hole (something like this production's
relation to Gogol's text). They are in the hands of the company which has
assembled before a panoramic (paranoic?) backdrop in homage to
Meyerhold's celebrated final tableau. Whereas spectators at the Meyerhold
event reportedly wondered whether the figures posed on-stage were as real
as before, those at the Stanislavsky pondered whether they ever were real.
The maid who had earlier partnered "X" now wheeled out a large round
mirror which bounced light beams all over the auditorium. After the show,
the nearest metro stop features a tableau of women of various ages and forms
"blocked" by some unseen hand. Approaching from behind, I can see that
they are holding before them a series of no-longer-hard-to-find
items-cigarettes, eggs, hot dogs, and bread. Their presence now seems as
needlessly self-reflective as stage mirrors, especially in a stage play like The
Inspector General, even disguised as Xlestakov. Standing on the wrong side
of the mirror, as I was on this occasion, I considered that perhaps these
figures had been put in place in the darkness to show me where "X" marked
the underground passage. There were no "Lolitas" though.
The passage is where you might find "Mack the Knife." In fact you
need two subway transfers and a bus to locate him at the former movie
house that is now called Theatre "Satirikon." Its production of Threepenny
Opera seeks Broadway approbation rather than Brechtian alienation. Instead
of employing scenic analogues from its local underground passages, the
show's creators give us a moveable London bridge, bobbies bearing Uzis and
a skyline resembling New York. "Le Miz" meets the Vegas showroom,
where Sinatra (as impersonated by Joe Piscopo) and his "Rat Pack" think
that they're recreating Robin and the Seven Hoods-the "Pack's" cinematic
modern-musical retelling of the brigand's legend set in Chicago. The actors
do not so much dance as dodge bullets in time to the music, all of which is
prerecorded. The score is wall-to-wall Euro-pop-goes-the- (Kurt) Weill, and
Pirate Jennie never gets to sing. Everything looks and sounds paid for
up-front, which the glossy advertising hand-out accompanying the theatre
program tells us it is. They say that this is the most expensive theatre
production in the history of the Russian theatre, the claim formerly attached
to the Meyerhold-Golovin Masquerade. Kostya Raikin, who is no stranger
to the variety stage, is literally hung in the air by director Vladimir Mashkov
at the curtain call, in order to slow down the actor's hyperactive charm long
enough for his audience to pay it idolatrous tribute. It is an empty spectacle,
which to the monied Russian audience tells them how far they've come.
Xlestakov could not have done it any better.
This same sense of emptiness bred of illusion has attached itself to
the Lenkom Theatre's once balleyhooed Juno and Avos, which no less an
avant-gardist than Richard Foreman once blurbed (during the production's
New York visit) as being "one of the best of the 80s." This romance of a
Russian count, a Hispanic-American and a large boat that literally rocks
when they make love once bore the stamp of glasnost and perestroika. Now
its theme of suffering set free seems strangely unbecoming. From its
over-miked anthems to its rush-to-the-bottom-of-the-rake staging, everything
is designed for maximum overdrive and overkill. Even the on-stage musical
conductor is shot "dead" twice, presumably for comic effect. I think of this
as being like born-again Christians doing rock-and-roll in a culture where
Christianity has been born again. But the hollow sound and iconic imagery
ironically and unintentionally recall a time when Soviet orthodoxy was still
in fashion.
Medea embodies the real madness of rock-and-roll. However, the
sandbags that are piled high atop the stage in the Taganka's production of
Euripides's play speak more of muffled voices than of unbridled expression.
The spectator is left almost gasping for breath, like the messenger who
reports the madwoman's murder of her children and immediately falls
backward through one of the stage's few scenic openings. Only the female
chorus, which largely performs on the apron of the stage, is not literally
sandbagged into silence by the stage set. However the chorus is artificially
prompted by the pulsing beam of Lyubimov's infamous tri-color flashlight,
which advertises a patriarchal authority extending from the back of the
auditorium to the stage. He doesn't interfere with Medea (played by
Selyutina), who despite being covered almost from head to toe in a dark
military greatcoat, generates enough sexual heat to keep anyone but the
deadbeat Jason's home fires burning. In the metro there are other nighttime
creatures asking for a light and maybe for "the Knife." Or perhaps they are
just "Lolitas" in search of a smoke. There appear to be so many
(in)significant intersections to be drawn from these ubiquitous underground
passages in a city where pedestrians almost never have the right of way.
In this mock-consumerist culture and its theatrically dead time,
Revolutionary Square is (again) under reconstruction. Strolling past the
booths selling holy relics to tourists (an oddly counter-revolutionary
33
construction), one runs into the consumer shrine that is still known by its
Soviet dressed-down name, "The State Department Store," or "GUM."
Historically, Moscow is a merchant's town, but when did the giant Reebok
sneaker become more ominous than the iron boot? When was bratstvo
(brotherhood) replaced by the United Colors of Betterton? When did the
Kremlin align itself with the Copacabana Cafe? And when did Moscow find
itself caught between a "Rambo" and a "Hard Rock," both a "Planet
Hollywood" and a "Hard Rock Cafe"? Wasn't this a needless self-mirroring?
The Potemkin Village being erected in Red Square for the American Circus
on its European tour suggested that history too is destined to repeat itself as
performance. Nearby the "Lenins" pose for tourist photos like so many
department-store Santas. And why not? Hasn't Russian society the right
to use its icons to turn a profit? Why can't they build a "McDonald's" across
Tverskaya Street from MAT? (They did.) The resurrection of Russia as a
free-market economy is, of course, not yet a success story and likely never
will be. But as I passed through the arcade exit which abutted the shop of
Christian Dior, I know that I heard the church bells ring.
Overlooking the Potemkin Village called "Miracle Town" in the
heart of Gor.ky Park, the animatronic talking dragon boasts to me and
scattered others. "I have flown to France, Germany, England, and
America," he intones. Does he imagine that we are all travel-deprived?
Even for those Russians who have not traveled abroad, the sheer weight of
western-style advertising has created a travel experience that is virtually real.
Looking away from "Miracle Town," there is a mock-up of the Eiffel
Tower, not far from the statue of Gorky, which is a monument to
(self-)exile itself. The (Vladimir) Tatlinesque construction crane across the
way is named "Tarzan" and oversees the planned urban jungle of Gorky
Park. Might "Tarzan" one day be used to unseat "Gorky," as was Gogol's
unheroic statue from the boulevard that still bears his name? That statue
had no place in a "Miracle Town," the dragon might insist. There are young
acting students at the Vakhtangov Theatre's Shchukin Institute
impersonating underground beggars for new student arrivals. Unlike the
mothers holding up their swaddled children, many ill or feigning sickness
and the grandmothers with their signs reading "WORK," the theatre
students display the institute identification cards they were awarded earlier
that evening. "WORK" or the absence of it. Does the dragon know
whether "Miracle Town" will admit their dreams? And will they know the
dragon (to borrow Stalin-era playwright Yevgeny Shvarts's image) when he
descends next time?
There are soldiers armed with machine guns in the Central
Telegraph Agency on Tverskaya (formerly Gorky) Street, where money is
changed, stamps are purchased and cards and letters mailed. They resemble
extras from the Satirikon's Threepenny Opera. Unarmed guards just inside
the neighboring "Pizza Hut" seem to have been put in place in order to keep
people out. They are as effective at this task as is the blind man's vicious
seeing-eye dog on the same street, who prevents people from giving his
master money. It is a strange entrepreneurial ploy whose logic is lost on me.
Is "Pizza Hut" really that crowded, or is management only trying to create
the illusion of exclusivity? It's like living in a future world which idolizes
the detritus of past civilizations (its fast-food outlets, for example), because
these remnants appear to them to have been preserved rather than merely
discarded. Moscow is still giving pride of place to our superficial, easily
satisfied desires and mistaking them for their needs.
Moscow is Ostrovsky's kind of town, rife with a mercantile ethos
that sometimes obviates good taste. Mark Zakharov's Lenkom Theatre
production of Wise Man: A Scenic Fantasia in Two Acts, adapted from
Ostrovsky's Enough Stupidity for Every Wise Man, rages against the very
commercial machine that brought Muscovites their "Pizza Hut." An iron
fire curtain, within which the protagonist Glumov literally lights fires,
demarcates his apartment and serves as a giant sounding board for his anger.
The iron wall tracks back to reveal the interior of a splendid haute-bourgeois
household with fairy-tale size chandeliers and a formal dining alcove in
depth of field. Arbenin's society would have felt comfortable here. The
presence of former Efros actor Leonid Bronevoy (he of the Jack Benny
deadpan take) anchors the Gogolian acting of the ensemble. It is Bronevoy's
character General Krutitsky who in the end suggests that the insular,
money-mad social circle, which has been breached by Glumov and exposed
in his diary, welcome him back into the fold following a brief, punitive
banishing. Returning to the big table, Glumov eats the soup offered him (as
the others vacate their places) and begins to choke, either because the food
is too rich or because it is otherwise poisoned. (Maybe Arbenin is in the
house.) Glumov, who has stripped naked on two earlier occasions in the
presence of his female hosts, now tears off his clothes and bangs on the metal
wall with uncontrolled rage. As the set, which has periodically showered
the characters with metal objects, begins to rumble and shake (repeating its
action from the opening of the play), the chandeliers crash down upon the
dining table. The act curtain (a lithograph depicting nineteenth-century
Moscow) drops precipitously to the floor. Glumov, who is sometimes
played as a Khlestakov-manque (a moron's oxymoron), is here no fool. As
the fallout from Glumov's actions rains down upon the heads of the living
35
dead, my mind wanders back to the theatre lobby and to the giant photo of
Anatoly Efros (1925-1987) hanging amid other Lenkom Theatre "family"
members. In 1967, the state, casting Efros in the role of the unwelcome
guest and social critic Glumov, had removed him from his post as the
theatre's artistic director. Now he is (an) untouchable, and my sense of
melancholy can work up at least a little anger in response. The actors are
now re-entering the stage at the curtain call for Wise Man, but
uncharacteristically, not a single flower is proffered them by the audience.
There are no mirrors here either. Perhaps none are needed.
LATVIAN THEATRE IN THE 90s:
TRENDS, REPERTOIRE, PERSONALITIES
Guna ZeltiQa
Since the days of the pagan ritual, theatre has been one of the most
permanent passions of the characteristically reserved, Northern-tempered
Latvian people. In its 128 professional years, the Latvian theatre has
experienced high peaks and low ebbs and endured painful transformations.
The last of these occurred relatively recently when Latvia regained its
independence in 1991. Until then, the theatre had played an important
intellectual and spiritual role in Latvian society and was a major factor in the
cultural policies of the state. Latvia, with its 2.5 million inhabitants,
provided subsidies and a stable existence for ten professional repertory
companies, of which seven were located in the capital, Riga.
The 1990s brought major political and economic restructuring, an
arduous transition from a deformed version of Socialism to a market-
oriented society. The new Latvian government was soon mired in economic
problems. Due to a spiraling inflation, theatre subsidies now managed to
cover only a portion of each theatre company's budget. They were forced
to engage in a desperate battle for survival in their search for private
sponsorship.
Caught up in political events and struggling for existence
themselves, theatre audiences turned to other media (radio, TV, video) to
satisfy their current interests. Ticket sales declined. The theatre, whose
veiled protests against the former regime were instrumental in bringing
about the new era of independence, felt betrayed, cheated, and forgotten.
These developments changed the course of the theatre, its
repertoire, and the mental state of the theatre artists. National awakening
and independence euphoria were soon followed by disappointment in the
new order. For the theatre, the result was a complete rejection of ideology.
Many a theatre artist suffered a loss of purpose; low salaries forced them to
seek additional employment; others went into private business. The gateway
to the West was now open, and, in a frantic attempt to attract audiences,
theatres grasped for the "forbidden fruit": plays by Western and Latvian
emigre authors that had been unavailable for years. The once productive co-
operation with Latvia's own playwrights withered; new Latvian drama failed
to reflect the current tensions in the society or contribute anything
memorable. The number of new productions increased: twelve or thirteen
37
38
per season instead of the usual six or seven. In most cases, artistry and
experimentation were superseded by commercially-safe ventures.
A few years ago, the leading theatre company, the National Theatre
(founded in 1919), seemed to have every opportunity of becoming a local
"Broadway house" (in a stereotypical sense of the word) with a diverse
international repertoire of sumptuous musicals, traditionally-interpreted
world classics, comedies, and melodramas, all featuring a star-powered acting
company and presented with first-class, though torpid, professionalism.
Devoid of a national image or national soul of its own.
But the "old," time-honoured psychological realism, still the
dominant style in Latvian theatre, proved to be both vital and versatile, as
exemplified in the 1994 staging by Edmunds Freibergs (born 1948), artistic
director of the National theatre, of the Latvian comedy classic Skroderdienas
Silmaeos (The Tailor's Days In Silmachz) by Riidolfs Blaumanis. Here we saw
a fresh and diverse rendering of the Latvian national character. The play is
set on Midsummer Night's Eve, the celebration of which has always had a
magical importance in Latvian customs and beliefs. The production is full
of witty characters and scenes where the archetypal element meets the
modern. It is an affirmation of age-old morals and values that befit a reborn
audience's desire for a kind of unity, community, and contiguity that only
the theatre can offer.
The despondent spectator began returning to the theatre as a
spiritual mass media that not only reflects and universalizes reality, but also
offers a unique and vital exchange of energy. Will the Latvian theatre ever
regain its distinctive missionary role as the voice of the nation's innermost
longings and its hidden yearning for freedom that it held true during the
1980s? Probably not. Today its mission is more modest, yet utterly realistic:
to broaden the aesthetic horizons of society, to strengthen its ethics, and to
dispel social pessimism and rampant negation. The theatre is striving to find
the balance between entertainment and seriousness, between commercialism
and experimentation.
New Latvian plays are once again becoming a part of the repertoire;
foreign works are selected with more scrutiny. In this regard Latvian
director Peteris Petersons (1923) recently commented that "the Latvian
theatre has invested provincial percentages in bankrupt foreign trends."
Petersons, the first Latvian director to stage Bertolt Brecht and Bernard-
Marie Koltes, may be overly self-critical, although the plays of Samuel
Beckett, for instance, did not appear in Latvia until several decades after
their world premieres. Of course, crucial in all cases is the talent and
professional experience of the director.
39
40
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from the novel by
Cholderlos de Laclos, at the Daile Theatre, 1996.
Directed by Karlis Auskaps
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 17, No. I
National Theatre director Ojgerts Kroders (born 1921), for
instance, employs psychoanalysis as an effective tool to unveil our dramatic
inner world. This older gentleman, whose biography includes exile to
Siberia, has made his reputation with novel, ingenious interpretations of
drama classics and was entitled the Best Director of 1995. Because of his
uncanny power to penetrate to the very depths of the actor's soul, releasing
the innermost passions and finest spiritual movements, Kroders is deservedly
nicknamed "the old theatre wizard." His staging of Dostoyevsky's Crime
And Punishment (National Theatre, 1994) and Lorca's The House Of
Bemarda Alba (National Theatre, 199 5) were collective psychological studies
that oozed like open wounds of frustration. Pirandello's Six Characters In
Search Of An Author (Valmiera Theatre, 1995) combined the form of
psychological theatre with a sort of intellectual harlequinade. In the
chamber-drama performance of the Ibsen's Wild Duck (National Theatre,
1994) and Arthur Miller's large-scale The Crucible (National Theatre, 1995),
the innocent are sacrificed to cleanse and purify the egotistical world
possessed by evil. In the latter, John and Elizabeth Proctors' (Ivars Puga and
Dace Bonate) psychological hypertension brings the Latvian theatre's crucial
ethical element to striking cathartic heights.
The National Theatre's knack for expert characterization is used to
good advantage by the director Mihails Kublinskis (1939) in new Latvian
stage works as well as in Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond (1995) and
Abe Burrow's Cactus Flower (1996). Juicy irony and elegant self-mockery are
his means of expression in the 1995 stage version of Ceplis (The Brick-kiln),
a 1920s Latvian novel by Pavils Rozitis. Here we see a model of the
contemporary transition-period society: the "new Latvia" and its offspring,
a successful yet totally immoral businessman. This vivid and colorful
panorama, dominated by satirically drawn and grotesque characters, belongs
to the tendency of the Latvian theatre in the early 1990s to use "theatre-of-
the-absurd" stylistics that culminated in Peteris Krilov's production of
Dostoyevsky's The Possessed at the Daugavpils Theatre (founded in 1988) in
1993, which stressed the tragic tomfoolery and absurd pageantry of human
life.
Latvia's other leading theatre company, the Daile Theatre
(established in 1920), has attempted to remain true to its founding principles
of theatricalism, dynamism, rhythm, and action that are often compared to
the theories of Meyer hold and Tairov. The most convincing example of this
in the 1990s was the 1995 production by Arnolds Lini.Q.s'(born 1930) of
Corneille's classic Le Cid. This production also marked a new post-romantic
41
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Neviena pasa viirda (Not a Single Wora), New Riga Theatre, 1996.
Written and Directed by Peteris Petersons.
With Regina Razuma and Agnese e l t ~ a
trend in the Latvian theatre. Taking into account the shortcomings of the
world and its inhabitants, this trend signals a desire to return to a world
based on love and eternity instead of the mundane and transient. The scenic
designer of this production, Andris Freibergs, presented the sombre Spanish
court in surprisingly luminous, stylized forms. The stage was gradually filled
with the density and heaviness of human passion, highlighted by an
expressive synthesis of classic and modern dance for the courtiers; this
overpowering gloom was dissipated by the emotional explosion between the
Latvian theatre's romantic star couple of the 1990s, Rezija KalniQa
(Chimene) and Valdis LiepiQS (Rodrique).
The relationship between the transient and the eternal is explored
in other Daile productions, such as the resplendent musical parable The Wild
Swans (by the Latvian poet Mara Zalite on motifs from Hans Christian
Andersen's fairy tale, directed by Arnis Ozols, 1995); Karlis Auskaps' 1993
staging of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, a marriage of philosophical
theatre and emotional confession; the alienated Brechtian and intellectual
dispute Oedipus and Antigone, based on the works of Sophocles and directed
by Karlis Auskaps, 1993; the psychologically saturated performance theatre,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses on the novel of Cholderlos de Laclos, staged by
Karlis Auskaps, 1996.
In his parable-play Neviena pasa varda (Not a Single Word at the
New Riga Theatre, 1996), playwright and director Peteris Petersons, one of
Latvia's leading intellectuals and the originator of the poetic theatre of the
1970s, reflects upon the absurd developments in the consciousness and
existence of a transition-period society. Intellectual irony, theatre-of-the-
absurd aesthetics, and elements of a "living newspaper" here converge with
the vocabulary of the poetic theatre. The play's central figure, symbolizing
both Love and Death, contributes to the production's compressed
emotionality and intellectual gamut and broadens the Latvian theatre's
artistic horizons in the direction of poetic and philosophical generalization.
A neo-romantic world view is offered by Liepaja Theatre's (1907)
saga-like production of Max Frisch's Santa Cruz (director Herberts
Lauksteins, 1995). Neo-romantic undertones have even penetrated the only
Latvian stronghold of postmodernism, the austere New Riga Theatre
(established in 1992). Juris Rijnieks's production of Wedekind's Spring's
Awakening successfully combines romantic elements with an expressionist
vocabulary. The flower-trimmed swings, where the young protagonists lose
their virginity in a poetic ritual, turn into the grave of the twisted and
deformed adult world. The carnally-driven children, perched like unripe
fruit in a colorful "tree of life," are to become an open target for an assault
43
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at the National Theatre of Latvia, 1996. Directed by Mara
f5,:imele, with Furis Rudzitis and Daiga Gaismil}a
by harsh reality. For many a spectator, this visually impressive image was
a metaphor for the present time.
After the surreal and existentialist visions of Michael White's mono-
opera Diary Of A Madwoman (after Nikolay Gogol's story, 1995) and the
baroque splendour of Henry Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen (1995), New
Riga Theatre director Mara I}imele (1943) comes back to the romantic with
her two new productions of 1996. In her chamber program of Shakespeare's
sonnets, Mani mil Sekspirs (I Am Loved by Shakespeare), she uses the poetic
material for highly refined and delicate philosophical improvisations, but
her version of the Latvian classic tragedy, Rainis's Mila stipraka par niivi
(Love is Stronger than Death), is a timeless mystery of love and hate and
stands as a perceptive metaphor for an actual episode from the times of the
Swedo-Polish War in Latvia. I}imele's romantic focussing on the play's
heroine Maija, once an abandoned child on the battlefield whose later life
was to become a national symbol of human dignity and moral purity, is
expressive, in a sort of restrained and subdued pathos, of some deeply
implicit need for artistic manifestation.
The initial productions of New Riga Theatre director Alvis
Hermanis (1965) were marked by a postmodernist propensity for the
destruction of time-honored canons. Strikingly unlike the traditional
Latvian literary and psychological theatre, his debut productions made some
critics praise him as the new Messiah of our theatre, while others, in turn,
charged him with satanic heresy. Hermanis's background includes acting
experience, independent study in the United States and meticulous research
on world art and the aesthetics of theatre. An analysis of his audio-visual
collages would ultimately lead to Antonin Artaud and Robert Wilson. But
Hermanis does not create with foreign fragments or ruins, his combinations
of diverse aesthetical principles and different images and symbols from
various periods in the history and culture of the world are based on his own
ingenious concept, his inner vision, and fantasy.
His stage version of Yukio Mishima's Marquise de Sade is an original
marriage of rococo stylization and magic beauty of colors and costumes with
elements of the Japanese No theatre, Butoh dance and a symbolic execution
of the harakiri ritual. Thereby Hermanis has evoked a mysterious world of
beauty and destruction, jammed with startling lines, condensed and
slackened movement, sighs and whispers, muted cries, monotone utterances,
gushing cascades of sound and myriads of images. In Hermanis's production
of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1994) beauty is interpreted as
aboriginal femininity. Thus the roles of Gray and Lord Henry are portrayed
by women actors. The over-refined aestheticism and painterly, picturesque
45
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The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, New
Riga Theatre, 1994. Directed by Alvis Hermanis,
with Elita K.lavi.Q.a and Girts Kriimi.Q.S.
sophistication of the performance is counterbalanced by the emotional
emanation and sincerity of two Latvian old-generation ballet stars in the
roles of lovers in excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Here
the destructive power of Beauty and Death in the "era of the lost innocence"
(Umberto Eco) is contrasted with the concept of eternal and selfless love.
In Antonio Buero-Vallejo's The Burning Darkness, 1995, Hermanis has
developed an unusual cinematic, minimalist acting style that is based on a
very fine interplay of energy between actors and audience, generating a kind
of friction between these fields of energy. This coincides with the methods
of Mara I}:imele and the guest director Michail Gruzdov from St. Petersburg.
Gruzdov's 1996 production of Zola's Therese Raquin (adaptation by
Ludmila Razumovskaya) on the large, roomy stage of Daile Theatre is an
impressive model of stagecraft. Condemned to a life of sin and suffering, the
play's protagonists wander through a grandiose space in their search for the
road to Salvation.
Due to severe economic pressure, the first generation of alternative
theatre professionals that emerged in Riga in the late 1980s has virtually died
out by now. The independent KABAT A Theatre (established 1987), located
in a renovated Old Town cellar, is operating in a limited capacity. The new
leader of the alternative movement is the experimental theatre-studio
SKA TUVE, opened in a defunct cinema by the director and acting teacher
Anna Eizverti-Qa in 1994. Operating in dire financial straits, with no
government subsidy and minimal sponsor money, EizvertiQa and her
company found their key to survival in fanatical enthusiasm. SKA TUVE's
creed is to introduce lesser-known and therefore unproduced world classics
to Latvian audiences. Their artistic spectrum includes Moliere's Amphitrion,
performed as a comedy-masque, Christian Dietrich Grabbe's ironic tragedy
Don Juan and Faust, as well as Henry James's Daisy Miller, Tadeusz
R6zewicz's W1?ite Marriage and T.S.Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Along with
the New Riga Theatre, SKA TUVE is one of the two creative workshops in
Latvian theatre to experiment with different acting styles, making "pictures"
of seemingly isolated images and exploiting elements of performance art.
The "Unbearable Theatre Artel'' has recently been funded by three
young directors, who want, in their own words, "to intrude on the
unbearable theatre scene and to revive or at least embellish the dead corpse
of the theatre" with their unconventional interpretations of Shakespeare,
Beckett and other authors.
The Latvian theatre is striving to overcome its long-term isolation
from the contemporary developments in the world theatre and, instead of
47
paying "provincial rates for foreign trends," to crystallize a style and
direction of its own.
THE POST-SOVIET POLITICIAN AS CLOWN:
NOTES ON JOSEPH BRODSKY'S DEMOCRACY
Joel Schechter
Baltic eels
Portrait of Lenin drinking Classic Coke
Russian bear (stuffed)
Grouse in caviar gravy
Handcuffs made in U.S.A.
Cuban cigars
These properties grace the stage of Joseph Brodsky's play,
Democracy, which opens with leaders of an unnamed Eastern European
country seated in the office of their Communist Party's General
Secretary-the man they call "Gensec." Comfortably enjoying the privileges
of their high positions, which entitle them to imported melon, grouse,
Cuban cigars, jazz, and (when needed) American handcuffs, they savor their
repast until one more savory import, namely democracy, arrives rather
unexpected! y.
A telephone call from Moscow informs the Gensec, Basil
Modestovich, that his small Soviet satellite has been declared a democracy.
Panic erupts. The Gensec and his ministers know about French perfume,
they appreciate handcuffs manufactured in Pittsburgh and jazz by Sidney
Bechet, but they have no understanding of the democratic process. How
could they, when their democracy is initiated from above, by another
government, without the consent of the governed? The ministers have one
choice: comply before Russian tanks force democracy upon them.
The situation is a comic variation on independence declarations and
the bizarre politics that accompanied them across Eastern Europe in 1989
and 1990, when Joseph Brodsky wrote his satiric play. The late poet's
comic portrait of a collapsing empire has proven all too accurate, even
prophetic, as Russia itself now rivals that satellite invented in the play, and
the folly of post-Communist governments across Eastern Europe imitates
(or lives up to) his satire. It is unfortunate that the play has yet to be
published in book form. (It was serialized in several journals before
Brodsky's death-and remains relatively unavailable to readers and stage
directors.) I co-directed a production of the play with Chris Hampton at
San Francisco State University in 1995 and now offer a few observations on
49
Democracy in the hope that its superb humor and poetry will be more
widely appreciated in the future.
The huge stuffed bear that hovers near the ministers of state in
Democracy suggests their offices are never far from the watchful gaze (not to
mention the brute force) of the Kremlin, which this creature represents. But
the animal is also a comic representative of Moscow-it could be a former
circus performer-a fitting attribute, since the room is filled with clowns.
Basil Modestovich and the ministers of justice, finance, and culture
who dine with him display characteristics of clowns, as they comically
debate whether their unexpected democracy is Athenian, Socialist, People's,
or a "new kind." The patter of their conversation recalls Abbott and
Costello's vaudevillian discussion of who's on first, or the absurd circus
dialogues of the Russian clowns Bim and Born.
Brodsky never refers to his characters as clowns. And yet, besides
their comic verbal exchanges, the text sets up a sequence of slapstick acts that
deserve the masterful timing and comic body language of clowns like Geoff
Hoyle and Bill Irwin (Americans), or Yuri Nikulin and Leonid Yengebarov
(Russians). Lazzi about gourmet food fill the play, along with opportunities
for song and dance; in San Francisco our actors performed these gags in the
manner of circus clowns.
Despite all their fancy footwork on new forms of government, Basil
and the ministers are prepared to continue with more or less the same power
and privileges for as long as the new democratic system they devise will
permit. When the four vote on the "transfer to a democratic form of rule
and economic reform," twenty-two other ministers are missing; but that is
much better, according to Basil, who must have studied American poll
returns to know how often the right to vote is ultimately exercised by a
minority of those eligible to cast a ballot.
In the second act of Brodsky's play, the ministers and President
Basil discuss the prospects for computerized governance of the state. (Their
computer programs are all provided by the West, naturally.) They look
forward to a new administration freed from the failings of human error.
Their greatest fear is that Luddites will destroy their central computer. To
prevent this, Basil and his associates order a new atomic bomb, set to go off
and destroy Luddites (and everyone else nearby) who try to dismantle the
coveted computer.
In the face of these prospects for a mechanized post-Soviet future,
where Western technology transforms past Communist control into an even
more centralized and inhuman government, Brodsky's satire itself is a sort
of Luddite protest. The physical and verbal comedy with which he
50
undermines an imaginary government's authority is an early advance
against the predicted technocracy. His weapons-mainly words-are to be
launched by gifted actors against the increasingly inhuman state machinery.
In the San Francisco State production of Democracy, scenery
depicting the comic side of post-Communist government was inspired by
the satiric paintings of the Russian emigre artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex
Melamid. (The two artists portrayed Brodsky himself in one of their pop art
canvases. His face appears as that of the poet Cicero in the 1984-85 collage,
Eggs, Coitus, and Cicero.) As founders of the SOTS art (Soviet pop art)
movement, Komar and Melamid frequently parodied Soviet socialist realism
by adding surreal, erotic, and anachronistic details to official-looking
portraits of Communist leaders. Their New Yorker magazine cover featured
Lenin hailing a yellow cab in Manhattan, with one arm stretched out as it
was in many orations; the red banner behind him displayed not the hammer
and sickle, but the yellow "M" of the McDonald's hamburger logo. Since
Brodsky's stage directions call for portraits of the "founding fathers" to be
displayed in the office of the leader of the small socialist state, on our stage
large circus-like canvas portraits of Stalin, Lenin and Castro covered the
back wall. Initially Lenin's outstretched arm held a bottle of Stolichnaya
vodka; later, after the official change to a democratic form of government,
the vodka was replaced by a large can of Classic Coke, and (with apologies
to Komar and Melamid) the red banner behind Lenin acquired the yellow
logo of McDonald's. A little later, the portrait of Castro playing a guitar was
replaced by one of Elvis playing guitar, and Stalin (blonde-haired in our
grotesque canvas) was replaced by Marilyn Monroe. Basil's secretary
changed clothes to look like a cross between Marilyn and Madonna,
complete with motorcycle jacket, blonde wig, and a life-size cardboard
motorcycle. The transition to Western democracy-and to popular images
associated with it-was nearly complete.
But it would be inaccurate to say that a complete transition to
Western forms takes place in Democracy. The play carries its Eastern
European characters into situations so bizarre that they rival the outrageous
reality of post-Soviet life in Russia and its former satellites. The bear which
behaves like a stuffed animal in Act I "emerges with a handgun in his paw"
in Act II and prevents the Minister of Justice from absconding with a
briefcase full of money. "Simply a highly-trained bear," but also a
"multipurpose robot," the animal embodies the best of Russian and gypsy
circus life as well as technology. In fact, an actor in a bear suit is needed to
portray the animal, in all probability, so even here some human element
retards the technocracy predicted within the play.
51
The rescued briefcase contains two-million marks in loans that the
Minister of Finance secured abroad to finance a new industry: bottled soda
water-to replace the failed eel canning industry of the past. But Basil and
his ministers would rather spend the funds on personal needs. "Best to buy
some land, or a house. Real estate, in a word," counsels President Basil.
The plot verges on parody of a Humphrey Bogart film in which the bandits
feud over stolen loot. Is this the future of post-Soviet governments?
Brodsky offers no answers, only comic takes on the new corruption
and nuclear terrors that may arise under the next generation of Eastern
European leaders, as their freedom from Communism leads to self-serving
elections and self-destruction under primitive capitalism. Basil Modestovich
and his ministers accept foreign loans, knowing their country is inviting a
new, post-Soviet form of foreign occupation by banks and the countries that
uphold banking interests. "To drive a nation into debt is a far more secure
form of occupation than invasion," notes one of the ministers. From this
perspective, democracy and elections are merely part of the banking
process-a theatrical exercise that qualifies the country for Western loans.
Gustav, the Finance Minister, knows that "without free elections, no foreign
investment."
The most cheerful and most optimistic moment in the San
Francisco production of Democracy arose when the actors, cued by the
Minister of Culture, Cecilia, began to sing and dance to Sidney Bechet's jazz
tune, Petite Fleur. Their new national anthem included the lyrics, "Dear
land, I'll never part from you." Brodsky introduced it as a parody of
nationalism, but the tune became a joyous and comic, if slightly sentimental,
moment, as the actors waltzed through the theatre aisles and turned the
entire space into their ballroom. (This scene is far more of a celebration
than their cynical signing of the transfer of power requires.) The dance,
followed by the smoking of rare Cuban cigars, represented a movement
toward art and friendship, before the descent into the atomic-bomb
computerized governance of Act II.
So far, no Eastern European nation has adapted Sidney Bechet's jazz
for its anthem. In the former Soviet Union, the feuds over national identity
and power mimicked by Brodsky have counterparts that are far from comic.
The clowning, song, dance, and feast within Democracy contain elements of
a utopian future which will not to be found in Eastern European
governments-outside their representation in the theatre-for some time to
come.
NOTES
Quotations from Brodsky's Democracy are taken from Alan Myers's translation, which was
published serially in Performing Arts Journal (#3T), Granta (Winter, 1990), and Partisan Review
(#2, 1993). Brodsky assigned no specific lines of dialogue to his characters, leaving the choices
to directors and actors. The line assignments I quote were determined through collaboration
with my co-director, Chris Hampton, and the cast of the play, which was performed at San
Francisco State University's Studio Theatre in March, 1995. Although written in Russian, t he
play has yet to be published or staged in Russia, as far as I know.
53
PAGES FROM THE PAST
JASIENSKI, LUNACHARSKY, MOOR, AND THE
MANNEQUINS' BALL
Daniel Gerould
The Polish poet Bruno Jasienski was thirty-one when in 1931 he
published his play The Mannequins' Ball in Moscow in Russian translation.
J asieriski was then at the height of his power and prestige as an international
Communist celebrity. He had arrived in the USSR two years earlier to
much acclaim as a victim of political persecution in the capitalist West,
having first been hounded by the Polish police and then deported from both
France and Germany. At first a hero in the land of Lenin, Jasienski was
made editor-in-chief of both the Polish-language Culture of the Masses and the
new international Literature of the World Revolution, where The Mannequins'
Ball appeared in the English, French, and German editions. He immediately
became involved in the literary and cultural ideological wars that made the
Soviet Union in the 1930s a very dangerous place, especially for true
believers in Communism from abroad. Stalin ruthlessly eliminated these
foreign Marxists who had sought refuge in what they imagined would be a
socialist utopia.
Jasienski was by nature an enfant terrible who thrived on scandal
and controversy. Arrogant and self-possessed, he had always known how
to defend himself by going on the attack. His initial inspiration came from
the Russian Cubo-Futurists and Mayakovsky. As an adolescent, he had
spent the war years with his family in Moscow before returning to Poland
in 1918.
A handsome brunet with a thin, nervous face, Jasieriski began his
career in Warsaw as a brash young Futurist poet with a fondness for elegant
clothes. He wore a monocle in his right eye, knotted a bright red scarf
around his neck, and carried a cane with a silver handle. The impression he
created was studiedly theatrical.
In the early 1920s J asienski traveled about Poland, reading his
poetry and organizing evenings devoted to avant-garde art that often
involved the participation of local actors. The poet's nonchalant
manner-hands in pocket and monotone delivery-served as a deliberate
provocation, drawing down the wrath of t he public, the critics, and the local
authorities. His conversion to Communism made Jasienski even less
acceptable to the Polish state, already veering to the right. He moved to
Paris, where he started a Polish workers' theatre. Booted out of France as
Portrait of Bruno Jasienski by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,
1921
55
a subversive alien, Jasienski eventually made his way to Russia in 1929,
bringing with him the text of his play about rebellious Parisian fashion
mannequms.
In 1931 when his "Introduction" to 1he Mannequins' Ball was
published with the play, Anatolii Lunacharsky was only fifty eight but
already seemed to be an old man. He had aged prematurely and was in poor
health. Balding, with a short, straggly beard, sloping shoulders, pince-nez,
and shapeless brown suits, the People's Commissar for Education looked
more like a professor than a politician. Eased out of his position of
authority in 1929, Lunacharsky was now a ghost of the past. As an old
Bolshevik from the cultured intelligentsia, his influence was fading fast in
the new age of Stalinism. In the early and mid-1920s as cultural commissar,
Lunacharsky sought to retain the best of Western bourgeois culture,
encouraged variety and experimentation in the theatre, and tolerantly
worked for a balance between the old and new. By 1931 much of what he
stood for in the arts was in the process of being swept away. Once Stalin
had fully consolidated power, Lunacharsky became a figurehead,
honorifically shunted aside with an appointment as Ambassador to Spain in
1932. He died in the south of France on the way to his assignment.
To understand why the former Commissar came to the defense of
the former Futurist poet, we must to look more closely at the polemics that
dominated the cultural scene in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the years
1928 to 1932 acrimonious controversy raged as to the future direction of
Soviet art, literature, and theatre. The Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers, known by its acronym RAPP, was an organization of fanatical
communist writers mainly of non-proletarian origin, who in the name of
ideological orthodoxy, fought among themselves and terrorized their
literary adversaries, denouncing them as class enemies. Writers were
increasingly obliged to conform to the strict party line. Both Mayakovsky
and Jasienski joined RAPP. The RAPP theoreticians, aggressive younger
writers and bureaucrats in quest of power, sought a monopoly in all cultural
spheres, including theatre. Their technique was to vilify their enemies, who
included other members of the organization. The RAPP ideologues
theorized endlessly, arguing that dialectical materialism was the sole basis of
proletarian theatre and insisting that actors perform dialectically.
They denounced the Soviet avant-garde of the early 1920s as
bourgeois elitism, rejecting a priori the social satire and poster aesthetics of
Meyer hold and Eisenstein. They attacked Mayakovsky mercilessly and were
delighted with the failure of his Bathhouse, thus contributing to the pressures
that drove the poet to his suicide on April14, 1930. Finally, in 1932, fearing
Drawing by Antonin Heythum for the set of The
Mannequins' Ball, world premiere at E. F. Burian's
theatre collective D34. Prague, 21 September, 1933
"
1.1"\
any ideological position other than abject submission to his will, Stalin
abolished RAPP, along with all other literary organizations, and established
a single Union of Soviet Writers in order to have total personal domination.
At the first congress of the Writers Union in 1934 socialist realism was
declared to be the sole acceptable artistic method.
When Lunacharsky came to Jasienski's defense in 1931 and argued
for the poet's freedom to write his play according to fantastic postulates and
poster-like stylization, it was as though the former commissar clearly saw
the dangers that were threatening the Polish poet. In his introduction to
The Mannequins' Ball, Lunacharsky refers specifically to the RAPP dogmas
about the method of dialectical materialism (without ever naming the
organization), and he allies himself with Jasieriski as a proponent of
imaginative freedom.
At first Jasieriski himself did not realize the gravity of his situation.
He had proved adept at outmaneuvering the Polish, French, and German
police; the worst that they could do was to ban his books and expel him
beyond their borders. The Polish poet soon discovered that, on the
contrary, in the Soviet Union the problem for the nonconformist writer
was the impossibility of ever getting out. Jasienski knew of the arrest in
1934 of Witold Wandurski, a Polish playwright and theatre worker, and of
his execution the following year, as well as of the subsequent liquidation of
almost all the leading Polish Communists living in the USSR.
In order to save himself, Jasieriski tried everything-admission of
errors, denunciation of others (including his Russian second wife), letters to
Stalin, recantations, and confessions to crimes he had not committed.
Nothing could save him. Conflicting reports have long circulated about the
date and place of Jasieriski's death, the most frequent being that he died of
typhus on the way to a labor camp in Kolyma above the Arctic Circle in
Siberia. Eyewitnesses reported seeing the emaciated poet in various Far
Eastern prisons. Recently accessible documents show that Jasienski never
left Moscow. He was arrested on July 31, 1937, imprisoned in Moscow, and
tried, convicted, sentenced and shot on a single day, September 17, 1938.
Jasieriski's Mannequin-Leader, trapped in the world of capitalist intrigue,
almost fell a victim to the duel he unwittingly provoked; at the last minute
he leapt out the window. His creator had no such means of escape.
The eight woodcuts that accompanied both the Russian and the
foreign language editions of The Mannequins' Ball are by Dmitri Stakhievich
Orlov (1883-1946), a graphic artist and caricaturist who used the pseudonym
Moor (after Karl Moor in Schiller's The Robbers). Moor was one of the
principal creators of satirical political posters in the USSR and an important
Polish premiere of The Mannequins' Ball, directed
by Jerzy Jarecki, stage design by Wieslaw Lange,
Teatr Slljski, Katowice, 21 July 1957
a-
ll"'\
illustrator for Soviet books and magazines (including advertisements).
The son and grandson of Cossacks, Moor--a big, heavy-set-jovial
man with intense light-blue eyes-sometimes wore the high-pointed hat and
colorful costume of his ancestors, or dressed casually in a simple belted
blouse and peasant coat. Unconcerned with worldly trappings, he loved
animals and birds and turned part of his apartment into an aviary where he
kept hundred of pigeons and a raven named Vanka to whom he talked.
Largely self-taught, Moor, who had wanted to be an opera singer,
turned to political cartooning after taking part in the Revolution of 1905.
He studied briefly at the studio of P. I. Kelin (1910), worked for the
magazine Budilnik (Alarm Clock), created the designs for the first agit-trains
and a few ROST A windows, and provided illustrations for lzvestiya,
Pravda, Krasnoarmeets, and Krokodil. He was the art director of the anti-
religious magazines Bezbozhnik (The Atheist) and Bezboznik u Stanka (The
Atheist at the Workbench), a member of the Group October, and a teacher
at VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN (Higher Artistic and Technical
Studios/Institute) in Moscow, where he became a leading figure in the
world of Soviet art education. He also designed the decorations for mass
spectacles and political festivals and exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and Danzig.
Moor's eight woodcuts tell the story of the play in a visual idiom,
revealing clearly the work's underlying emphasis on design and formal
patterning. The intertwined t hemes of The Mannequins' Ball are fashion and
dance. Craving the movement and freedom denied them in their servitude
to humans, the headless tailors' mannequins stage their annual ball in the
salon of a Parisian fashion house while the employees are out on strike.
When the Leader of the socialist workers party chances upon the
mannequins' ball (as he lustfully pursues a female mannequin, thinking she
is a woman), he is condemned by a court composed of tailors' dummies to
have his head cut off by means of a giant pair of scissors struck with an iron.
The mannequin who found the scissors claims the head, puts it on his
shoulders, and dashes off to a human ball at the mansion of the tycoon and
car manufacturer Arnaux. Regarded as the socialist labor leader by all the
humans, the innocent and naive mannequin accepts bribes in the form of
money and prostituted wives and daughters offered by the competing
capitalists attempting to avert a strike. Involved in a duel with one of the
gentlemen over a point of honor involving his wife, the mannequin hero
leaps out the window, leaving the humans to finish the shooting among
themselves.
Beneath the overt narrative of class warfare leading to Marxist
revolution is Jasienski's hidden theme of the reign of fashion and the
Warsaw premiere of The Mannequins' Ball,
directed by Janusz Warmmski, stage design by
Krzysztof Pankiewicz, 16 November 1974
-
-.D
interchangeability of man and mannequin. Humankind is malleable, subject
to remodeling, and prone to replication. "They're all only worthless copies
made in our image!" the Mannequins declare, convinced that humans are
their clones. In a society in which copies are made of copies, image
triumphs over substance.
The method of dialectical materialism favored by RAPP would be
of less use to actors playing Jasienski's mannequins and t heir human replicas
than a knowledge of art history. The puppet-human relationship was a
popular motif in early twentieth-century European art. Mannequins entered
the vocabulary of avant-garde imagery with Chirico, Carra, and the
metaphysical painters who sought a mysterious reality beyond the visible in
the iconography of the tailor's dummy. Chirico's metaphysical mannequins
gave intimations of the ontological mystery of human existence. The
imagery of the tailor's dummies served as a metaphor for the isolation,
loneliness, and anxiety of the human condition.
In Germany, under the influence of the Italian Pittura Metafisica,
Grosz, Scholz, Schlichter, and the Neue Sachlichkeit painters, using the
techniques of verism, gave Chirico's and Carra's mannequins a social and
historical context. The result was powerful social satire on the world of the
Weimar Republic, with its the cold, calculating capitalist predators, buying
and selling sex, and their poor crippled, limbless, or dismembered victims.
Jasienski's Mannequins' Ball has analogues with both t he Italian metaphysical
painting and the German new objectivity inspired by it. Jasienski's headless
fashion-salon mannequins suffer from their own inanimateness and long for
"human" movement and freedom, whereas his capitalists and industrialists
are soulless, mechanized mannequins manipulating other puppets, including
their own wives and daughters, in order to gain economic and political
power. If Grosz had illustrated The Mannequins' Ball, his angry, sensual, and
grotesque caricatures would have revealed other dimensions of Jasienski's
play than are to be seen in Moor's cool, severe, and almost abstract figures.
Antecedents and analogues for Jasienski's mannequins can also be
found in the rebellious robots in Karel Capek's R. U.R., Oskar Schlemmer's
Triadic Ballet and the Theatre of the Bauhaus, and the Italian Futurist
mechanical dances of Fortunato Depero and Ivo Pannaggi. Behind all of
these lie Craig's Ubermarionettes, E.T.A Hoffmann and Uo Delibes's
Coppelia, and Kleist's essay, "On the Marionette Theatre." Two Polish
artists continued Jasienski's experiment with tailors' dummies: Bruno Schulz
with the "Treatise on Mannequins" in The Street of Crocodiles (1934) and
T adeusz Kantor with the "Theatre of Death" manifesto and The Dead Class
(1975).
62
The Mannequins' Ball could never be performed in the Soviet
Union of the 1930s. Its brand of high-spirited theatricalist satire, reveling in
the glamor of rot ten capitalist luxury, had long since been denounced as
"Foxtrot communism." In 1923 Meyerhold's production of Alexei Faiko's
Lake Lyul was condemned for presenting an appealing picture of the
decadent West through its cosmopolitan imagery of "high life": hotels,
bright lights, advertisements, and fancy evening clothes. Nouveau riche
NEPmen, their overdressed wives and mistresses attended the performances
as if they were going to the latest Parisian fashion show. It is not surprising
that Meyerhold hoped to stage Jasieriski's play, or that he was never able
to do so; it was stylistically and ideologically out of step with the new era
in Soviet culture.
The Mannequins' Ball was first performed in 1933 in Czech at E.F.
Burian's experimental theatre collective D34 in Prague where it found a
proper home for its grotesque playful fantasy. In Poland Jasieriski had to
wait until the thaw of 1956 to be rediscovered. The Mannequins' Ball was
translated into Polish by Jasieriski's fellow Futurist Anatol Stern and
published in the theatre journal, Dialog, in 1957, the year of its Polish
premiere in Katowice, directed by Jerzy Jarocki, who twenty years later
staged the first Russian production in the USSR. In 1974 at the Ateneum in
Warsaw Janusz Warmiriski directed an extremely successful production of
The Mannequins' Ball that went on tour to both Eastern and Western
Europe, including Moscow and Leningrad. Jasieriski's "mannequins" finally
triumphed over their persecutors.
SOURCES
Complete documentary evidence about Jasieriski's arrest, imprisonment and
execution (based on KGB archives recently made available) appears in
Krzysztof Jaworski, Bruno ]asieiiski w Sowieckim W i ~ i e n i u A resztowanie,
wyrok, $mierc (Kielce: Wyzsza Szkola Pedagogiczna im. J ana
Kochanowskiego, 1995). Other accounts of Jasieriski 's life and career that
I have drawn upon include Anatol Stern, Bruno ]asieriski (Warsaw: Wiedza
Powszechna, 1969); Zbigniew Jarosiriski, ed., Antologia Polskiego Futuryzmu
i Nowej Sztuki (W rodaw: Ossolineum, 1978); Janina Dziarnowska, Slowo o
Brunonie ]asieriskim (Warsaw: Ksilli.ka i Wiedza, 1978); Nina Kolesnikoff,
Bruno ]asieriski: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism (Waterloo,
Ontario: Wilfrit Laurier University Press, 1982). Jasieriski's play and its
context are discussed in Harold B. Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny: Puppets,
Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant Garde Drama
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995). Information about Dmitri Moor appears
in Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven: Yale, 1990).
63
64
Dmitri Moor: illustrations for Bruno Jasienski's Mannequins' Ball.
1. Act I, Scene 1
Mannequins in a Parisian Fashion House give a ball.
2. Act I, Scene 8
Deputy Paul Ribandel, Leader of the Socialists Workers
Party, intrudes and is sentenced to death.
65
66
3. Act I, Scene 8
Deputy Ribandel has his head cut off with a pair of giant
scissors struck with an iron.
4. Act II, Scene 1
Devignard, a financier, attends a ball at the mansion of car
manufacturer Arnaux and discusses the threatened strike.
67
68
5. Act II, Scene 3
The Manneqiun Leader, who has put on Ribandel's head and
assumed his place, checks his appearence before arriving at
Arnaux's ball.
6. Act II, Scene 16
The police protect Arnaux and his guests from the strikers in
the street.
69
70
7. Act ill, Scene 4
The duel between the Mannequin Leader and manufacturer
Levasin is arranged among the seconds.
8. Act III, Scene 8
The seconds measure the duelling ground.
71
CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF BRUNO
JASIENSKI
1901 Born July 19, in K.limont6w, a small town near Sandomierz (in the
Russian sector of occupied Poland), where his father, Jakub Zysman, is a
country doctor. Jakub changes the family name to Jasienski to conceal their
Jewish origins.
1914-18 Spends the war years with his family in Moscow. Discovers
Mayakovsky and the Russian Futurists, while completing his secondary
education at a Polish gymnasium.
1918 Returns to Poland and enrolls as a student 10 the philosophy
department at Jagellonian University in Cracow.
1919 Establishes an amateur theatrical company in Klimont6w, where he
stages his own reworking ofWyspianski's 1he Wedding. With Anatol Stern,
Aleksander Wat, Tytus Czyzewski, and Stanislaw Mlodozeniec founds
Polish Futurism and organizes the Futurist club "Katarynka."
1921 Issues "Manifesto to the Polish People about the Immediate
Futurization of Life" and "Manifesto about Futurist Poetry" and gives
poetry readings with the Cracow and Warsaw Futurists including Stern and
Wat. Publishes his first book of poetry, A Boot in the Buttonhole, in which
he strikes the pose of a Futurist dandy.
1922 Publishes the long poem, A Song of Hunger, strongly influenced by
Mayakovsky, which marks his commitment to engaged literature.
1923 Announces his closure on Futurism and refers to himself as a "former
Futurist." Deeply affected by workers uprising in Cracow. Publishes the
grotesque tale, 1he Legs of Izolda Morgan.
1924 Moves to L wow and becomes literary editor of the Communist
newspaper, The Workers Tribune. Works with a leftist theatre. Co-authors
with Anatol Stern Earth Leftward, a collection of revolutionary poetry
dedicated to "mass man," the hidden hero of history.
1925 Hampered by censorship and harassed by the police, leaves in the
Spring for France as a correspondent for a local Polish newspaper. In Paris
works with the French Communist Party in the Polish emigre community.
1926 Publishes in Paris The Lay of ]akub Szela, about the Szela rebellion of
1848, combining avant-garde technique and folk poetry in a celebration of
social revolution.
1927-28 Establishes an agit-prop theatre group in Paris, The Workers Stage,
for which he adapts The Lay of ]akub Szela. Denounced by the Polish
Embassy and persecuted by the French police, the production is given at
several workers centers. Serves as a model for French agit theatre.
1928 Writes the radical novel, I Burn Paris, as a response to Paul Morand's
]e brule Moscou, an anti-Soviet novel. It is published in installments in the
French communist newspaper L 'Humanite.
1929 I Burn Paris is published as a book by Flammarion; it also appears in
Russia and Poland. The French authorities order Jasietiski deported to
Germany. Forty French intellectuals including Barbusse and Rolland sign
a petition asking the government to revoke its decision. J asienski re-enters
France illegally, is arrested and sent under escort to the German border.
Unwelcome in Germany, takes ship to USSR. May 21, arrives in Leningrad,
greeted by a large crowd including many reporters and writers. The next
day arrives by train in Moscow. Adopts Russian citizenship. Paris is
Burning, an adaptation of I Burn Paris, is played briefly in Russia in a
production by the touring theatre Akvarium.
1929-30 Joins the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers);
elected to the Secretariat of the Moscow section of the RAPP) and becomes
editor-in-chief of the newly established Polish-language magazine, The
Culture of the Masses, whose aim was to involve the Polish minority living
in the USSR in the creation of the new proletarian literature.
1930 Gives up the editorship of The Culture of the Masses (attacked for
"nationalistic Bolshevism") and devotes his energies to work in the
International Section of the RAPP called MORP (the International
Association of Proletarian Writers) which at the time had seven sections:
German, Hungarian, Austrian, Czech, American, Polish and Japanese.
Serves as one of the organizers of the International Congress of
Revolutionary Writers (held in Kharkov). Becomes editor-in-chief of the
new periodical, Literature of the World Revolution, published in Russian,
73
German, English, and French. Sayoku Gekijyo, a left-wing theatre in
Tokyo, plans to stage Paris is Burning, a Japanese adaptation of I Burn Paris,
but the production is banned by the police.
1931 Publishes The Mannequins' Ball, with an introduction by Anatolii
Lunacharsky. The play also appears in all the foreign-language editions of
Literature of the World Revolution.
1933 September 21, world premiere in Prague of The Mannequins' Ball at
E. F. Burian's theatre collective, D34, with stage design by Antonin
Heythum, Czech constructivist artist. The second production of the
theatre, given only a limited number of performances because of threats of
censorship. In November Meyerhold declares his intention of staging The
Mannequins' Ball (project never realized). Witold Wandurski, playwright and
director active in the Polish workers theatre in the USSR, arrested.
1934 Publishes Man Changes his Skin, a socialist-realist novel about the
construction of an irrigation canal in Soviet Tadzhikistan. Written in
Russian and cast in the form of a detective story, the novel goes through
nine editions in the next two years. Wandurski executed.
1937 Starts the novel The Conspiracy of the Indifferent, which remains
unfinished. July 31, arrested on charges of deviation from the party line,
nationalism, and treasonous contacts with enemies. Imprisoned in the
Butyrki prison in Moscow for the next thirteen and a half months.
1938 September 17, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed all on
the same day in Moscow.
1955 Posthumously cleared of false charges and rehabilitated in the USSR.
1957 July 21, Polish premiere of The Mannequins' Ball in Katowice at the
Teatr directed by Jerzy Jarocki with stage design by Wieslaw Lange.
1974 November 16, Warsaw premiere of The Mannequins' Ball at the
Ateneum, directed by Warminski with stage design by Krzysztof
Pankiewicz.
1975 The Ateneum takes The Mannequins' Ball on tour to Hanover, West
Germany.
1976 Russian premiere of The Mannequins' Ball in Chelabinsk, USSR,
directed by J erzy J arocki.
1977 The Ateneum takes The Mannequins' Ball on tour to Moscow and
Leningrad.
- Daniel Gerould
75
UNDERGROUND
Leonard Quart
Emil Kusturica's chaotic, repetitive, ambitious Underground, won
a Palme d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, aroused intense debate
among French intellectuals, and has had a hard time finding a distributor in
the United States. It is a self-indulgent, stylistically derivative (one can see
touches of Fellini, Terry Gilliam, and Vigo in the film), sometimes
visionary work better known for the political controversy it has aroused
than for its artistic merits.
Underground begins with the film's two larger than life
protagonists, Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) and Marko (shrewdly played by Miki
Manojlovic) indulging in an all night bacchanal. These two small-time
gangsters and Communist party members engage in drunken, cacophonous
revelry, accompanied by a marching band. Kusturica clearly views their
criminality and commitment to the Party as morally equivalent activities.
All of the high-spirited celebrating is abruptly terminated by a strikingly
conceived bombing attack that levels buildings and destroys all the animals
in the local zoo. WWII has begun, and the opening scene sets the tone of
a film which manically and fabulistically traces Yugoslav history from the
Nazi invasion through the Tito years to the murderous quagmire of the
present.
The more than fifty years of Yugoslav history are uproariously
evoked by Kusturica with a mixture of black comedy, whimsy, and horror.
Marko and Blacky heroically struggle, in slapstick and cartoon-like fashion,
against the Nazis, and also feverishly pursue a beautiful, amoral actress, Vera
(Mirjana Karanovic). Their desire for Vera (though opportunistic, alcoholic
Vera has no real existence in the film beyond being a sexual object)
ultimately divides the two friends. It leads the insidious Marko to trick the
dim, earthy, indestructible Blacky into living underground in an immense,
stadium size cellar with other partisans and with even a pet chimpanzee
thrown in to make the whole idea of it seem even more bizarre.
Marko's grand deception is the film's prime narrative device. With
Blacky out of the way, he wins Vera all to himself and becomes an
important, platitude-spouting Communist bureaucrat-appearing at
functions with Tito (some of the scenes are Zelig-like, digitally manipulated
newsreels). All the while he keeps his utterly naive friends underground by
pretending that Tito has ordered them to hide out there manufacturing
munitions until WWII is over. It's a sham and moral betrayal, which he
successfully sustains for over twenty-five years with the aid of recordings of
air raid sirens, until Blacky finally emerges into the daylight to become a
leader in the Serb militia in the present-day Bosnian charnel house.
Underground's final half hour sees Kusturica at his most inspired,
constructing a series of powerful, desolate images of a landscape riven by
war, littered with dead bodies, and an aged Marko and Vera (the first time
they've aged in the film) operating as wealthy, capitalist gun-runners amidst
the tribal bloodletting. It is a harrowing portrait that leads to the film's
imaginative denouement. In that scene Kusturica changes gears and
resurrects all the film's characters for another wedding on a promontory on
the banks of the Danube. It is a warm, communal ceremony, until the
promontory splits off from the river bank and becomes an island in the
Danube. In Underground even Kusturica's moment of optimism is touched
with the sense how difficult it is to create a feeling of community and unity
amid the carnage. For Kusturica, according to a title card just before the
film's final credits, it is a story without an end. He still has some hope for
the former Yugoslavia, but is not particularly sanguine about the future.
Kusturica's close to three hour sprawling narrative is punctuated
with a turbulent, elongated wedding ceremony held underground for
Blacky's son and a great deal of drinking, gypsy music, sexual role playing,
macho posturing, and violence. It is all frenetic, often monotonous and
shapeless, and desperately needing editing. The film's perspective on
Yugoslav history is also not particularly subtle, but it can be trenchant. It
is a carnival-like evocation of a society where brother betrays brother and
corruption is the rule. And it is filled with people who, living underground
in the darkness, and cut off from the light by their blind commitment to
Tito and the Party, are unable to distinguish between illusion and reality.
Kusturica extends that metaphor beyond these Communist partisans and the
cellar they inhabit to suggest that there is an immense network of tunnels
running beneath all of Europe. The image resonates emotionally, but one
can't be sure what Kusturica is suggesting. Is he saying that much of
European life is still entrapped in the ideological commitments of the past
and that its foundation is enveloped in darkness? The film provides no
ready answer.
The Sarajevo-born Kusturica calls himself a Yugoslav instead of a
Bosnian or Serb, though he has been accused by some critics of making a
pro-Serbian film. It is true that the film does not condemn Serb genocidal
expansionism-Kusturica publicly holding that the Bosnian Serbs weren't
interested in creating a Greater Serbia, but were merely opposed to leaving
their own homes. He also inserts, early in the film, some documentary
79
80
footage of the Nazis being welcomed by the Croats and Slovenes while
being resisted by the Serbs. Still, the film's political perspective is much less
coherent than Kusturica's detractors assert.
Kusturica does not like the Croats whose leadership he views as ex-
Nazi, but within the body of the film he also does not choose sides in the
Bosnian conflict. In fact, Kusturica is too involved constructing deafening,
inflated set pieces in Underground to make a sustained, politically
reverberant film. Kusturica is a talented director who needs somebody to
control and reshape his overly antic imagination.
81
SHAKHNAZAROV'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER:
MAINTAINING BALANCE IN A SPLIT WORLD
Marc Robinson
Karen Shakhnazarov's films have generally fallen into two
categories: those films, such as jazzmen (My iz dzhaza, 1983) and The
Messenger Boy (Kur'er, 1986), that tell a fairly simple story with humor, and
films, like City Zero, (Gorod Zero, 1989) and Dreams, (Sny, 1993), that use
biting black humor to tell a story satirizing society. Even those films that
fall in the first category have as a dominant feature social commentary, if
one looks at the subtexts. Karen Shakhnazarov's newest film, American
Daughter (Amerikanskaja doch', 1995) seems to be a film of the first type.
The plot involves a Russian father coming to America to be reunited with
his daughter, who was taken out of Russia by her mother. While sharing
the light character of jazzmen, this film seems to be at odds with both
Jazzmen and The Messenger Boy in that it appears to be lacking the social
commentary so prevalent in the other films. Indeed, the film purposefully
seems to be shunning any real attachment to Russian society in that even the
plot is removed completely from Russia. The film is shot entirely in the
United States, in the San Fran cisco area over the course of just a few weeks.
1
Such a reading of the film seems reasonable and indeed expected. If a closer
eye is turned to the details of the film, however, it becomes apparent that
while Shakhnazarov and his screenwriter, Aleksandr Borodyansky, have
taken pains to remove the film from Russia proper, the film itself can be
seen as treating the very serious question of where Russia's future lies.
The film utilizes an almost fairy tale structure to tell a simple story.
A young girl runs out of an American mansion to a helicopter and pretends
to fly back to see her father. Her mother, a Russian woman speaking only
in English-and calling her daughter only Ann or Annie, rather than the
Russian Anya or Anyuta-comes out to get her to come back to bed. Inside
the bedroom, the mother reminds the daughter that her father is dead.
Soon, however, her father shows up, speaking only Russian, seeking to
re-establish contact with his daughter. At the same time he hopes to
re-establish contact, the mother and her husband try to buy him off in
order to to limit severely the amount of time he can have with his daughter.
Ann, in response to her mother's refusal to allow her adequate contact with
her father, runs away to him and the two, speaking different languages,
head off across America to be together. Along the way they have many
humorous and touching encounters. They are fugitives from the law since
82
the father is soon charged with kidnaping, and their picaresque adventures
end when Ann becomes sick and her father gives himself up in order to save
his daughter's life. The final sequence is of the father in the "work
house" -almost a stereotypical image-as Ann flies the helicopter into the
middle of the prison yard to rescue him and fly him away to freedom.
On the surface the film is sweet and cute. At first glance there
seems to be little within the film that would point to the social commentary
that is normally a staple of Shakhnazarov's films. From the very beginning,
however, one is struck by the images presented. The mansion with which
the film opens is as alien to most Americans as it is to Russians watching the
film. The image of the mansion is taken less from life than from the
musings of those living through the late Soviet period. When America was
thought of, it was often imagined as a land of milk and honey where
everyone lived in a mansion, had servants and money to satisfy every whim.
It was in many ways a continuation of the Russian fascination/loathing of
the West. The introductory image of the film is one that encapsulates both
aspects. The mansion is fascinating in its size and structure (reminiscent in
fact, of a small White House!), and at the same time, one loathes the
pretentiousness of this conspicuous wealth. These attitudes are simply
compounded when the family's personal helicopter is shown. The image
is an unrealistic one-and I would argue that it is intentionally unrealistic.
It is meant to depict a dichotomous view of the West. The film means to
use this illusory image, a holdover from Soviet times, as a jumping-off point.
With this unrealistic image the stage is set for deliberation on the familiar
question of Russia's understanding of and relationship to the West.
The mother in the film, Helen, as played by Marina Shukshina, is
a thoroughly unsympathetic character. Our first encounter with her shows
us a woman who seems to be a perfect mother, full of concern for her
daughter. Dressed in white, hair flowing, she tucks Ann into bed and then
tells her, in a seemingly loving and truthful manner, that Ann's father is
dead and that she needs to come to grips with the fact. The next morning
the mother sends Ann off with a chauffeur in the family Ford Explorer.
When the father, played by Vladimir Mashkov, actually does show up, the
audience's perception of the mother is changed immediately. Now we
perceive a mother who, theoretically out of love for her daughter, has lied
to her and taken her from her father and homeland.
These images can be seen to parallel closely a constant struggle in
Russian society-between the Slavophiles and the Westerners. The mother
is symbolic of those who are willing to abandon Russia for the materialism
of the West. The initial image of the mansion, corresponding to standard
83
images of the West, becomes a symbol of the mother's "selling-out." In
addition, the chauffeur-driven Explorer also comments on her position. The
expected image would be either of a sports car or a limousine. The choice
of the Ford Explorer seems well chosen for a Russian audience. At the time
this film was made, the Explorer, Jeep Cherokee and similar vehicles had a
reputation in Russia as the cars-of-choice for the mafia. A Russian watching
this film would see the car and draw inferences about the social status of the
mother and her "connections."
The father, however, typifies a different stratum of Russian society.
When we first see him, he appears in a Soviet-style suit, looking very
uncomfortable in his new surroundings. He is in many ways symbolic of
the simple-hearted Russian man, a later incarnation of the feckless heroes of
the NEP period. He is good-hearted and trying to find his way in a new
society. His approach to everything that is new to him is to use the now
ineffectual means that once enabled him to survive in the old society. When
he is in prison in the U.S., he assumes a bribe will get him out without any
problem. He cannot fully function in this new society. His good nature
and naivete are both a blessing and a curse. They are his greatest strength
and also his greatest weakness in the new world.
The film primarily focusses attention on the relationships between
the three characters. The mother and daughter's relationship is spelled out
clearly at the beginning and does not expand throughout the course of the
movie. The relationship between the mother and father is depicted quite
vividly in a restaurant scene. The mother and father are at an expensive
restaurant with the mother's new husband, David. The scene clearly shows
the animosity and lack of common ground between the two Russians. The
mother first tries to buy the father off by purchasing him a new pair of jeans
at Saks Fifth Avenue, revealing how far out of touch she now is with
Russian society. By the time the film was released, the jeans-as-currency era
was definitely a thing of the past. The mother, though Russian by birth,
has completely turned her back on Russia and has no ties left.
After the failure of the offer of jeans, David comes through with a
much more insidious contract to buy off the father's influence on his
daughter, offering him money to have very limited contact with his
daughter. This too is rejected by the father. This whole scene also has the
flavor of a "mafia" proposal that cannot safely be refused. The elegant
restaurant and verbal contract over glasses of Chivas Regal combine to show
the tainted nature of the mother's position in her adopted land. The father
is clearly in the right, but he has been rendered impotent by the power of
his ex-wife and her husband and his inability to adapt to his new
surroundings. The most telling aspect of this scene, however, is the
interaction between the father and mother. The conversation between the
two quickly degenerates into a swearing match creating a scene in the
restaurant. It is obvious that any reconciliation between the two will be
extremely difficult to arrange. The argument is an effective means of both
showing the depth of their anger and revealing their essential characteristics.
Within minutes the two are arguing across the restaurant table as if it were
the kitchen table in their Russian flat. The mother's elegant, cold facade
quickly vanishes as her Russian sinks to the vernacular. Aleksei, unwilling
to be bought off, simply refuses the offer by leaving the restaurant in silence.
He retains the moral upper hand in the question of Ann's guardianship.
Beneath the surface plot of the film, there is textual evidence to
suggest a larger sociological significance to the events. The meeting at the
restaurant is preceded by a scene showing the mother walking through the
mansion. She is surrounded by elegance and wealth. At the end of the
walk she is confronted by Ann asking her why she lied and told her that her
father was dead. The mother can justify her actions only on the grounds of
material possessions: the house and the toys. This scene is immediately
followed by the restaurant scene, in which mother and father discuss the
chaotic nature of the CIS, the legal system of both countries and their
effectiveness, and the material possibilities. She completely rejects anything
from the "god-forsaken CIS" and rejects any legal court orders from Russia.
He is unaware that his court order has no real validity in the U.S. The most
balanced, though naive, discussion comes from the American, David, who
talks about the instability and crisis in Russia and reminds the father how
much better it is for Ann to be safe in America where she can have
everything she needs rather than in the midst of Russia in turmoil. This
view is seen as the well-meaning, yet ultimately patronizing attitude that the
West has often employed with Russia.
Ann becomes the crucible in which all three personalities merge.
At the beginning of the film, Ann is a small clone of her mother. She is first
seen wearing a nightgown very similar to her mother's. Both are white and
flowing. When she is home, her clothes closely match her mother's. Her
hair is long like her mother's; the two share a classic beauty. Regardless of
her ties to her mother, Ann is close to her father. She is able to sense his
presence whenever he is around. She recognizes him immediately after four
years of separation. When they run away, Ann cuts her hair to look like a
boy, and the two dress similarly in second-hand clothes. In effect, Ann
decides to follow her Russian father rather than her Russian/ American
mother. Her transformation is gradual, but over the course of the movie,
85
Ann re-encounters Russia. First, she changes her appearance to come closer
to her Russian father, and then there is a long scene on a beach where the
two try to communicate, as she re-learns Russian. In her exposure to Russia
through her father, Ann witnesses both positive and negative national
characteristics. The only Russian words she remembers with almost no
prompting are the names of alcoholic beverages. Toward the end of their
travels, he drinks too much in a bar and begins flirting with the bartender.
As the two are dancing, Ann leaves the bar and walks away. Aleksei finally
notices she's missing (a recurrent theme in the film and one of their earliest
shared memories: he went to get a beer at the zoo and came back to find
Ann gone) and starts to look for her. The scene shows another side of the
"Russian" character. The pursuit of pleasure and alcohol at the expense of
responsibilities is definitely a biting stereotype, but as presented in the film,
there is no sense of malicious intent. Ann and her father come back
together after she makes fun of the way he flirted with the bartender.
There is little said between them, just a common recognition of Aleksei's
weaknesses.
The American Daughter, then, can be seen as a struggle between the
two parents for the soul of Ann. Will she be Russian or American? Both
national characters have positive and negative features. The Americans
come off worse at the beginning of the movie, as portrayed by Ann's
step-father, David, and the mother. As Ann and her father hit the road,
however, they come in contact with more and more "typical" Americans.
By the end of their journey, the Americans (even police officers!) show their
compassion and help the father and daughter. By the bar scene, the national
characteristics seem to have merged. They all sing Russian songs and Elvis
Presley's "Love Me Tender."
When Aleksei lands in jail for the final time, Helen comes with one
last contract to claim final rights on Ann. If he will sign the contract, he
will be freed and sent home. After re-establishing ties with his daughter,
however, he cannot sign and accepts years of imprisonment in order to
retain legal access to his daughter. The mother drives away from the prison
with David in a black car with darkened windows. She has lost. Aleksei
may face imprisonment in the U.S., but he has regained moral access to his
daughter-she has not been sold to American materialism.
The end of the film, takes this notion even a step further. The
questions up to this point have been rather philosophical in nature; in a
dichotomous world Ann must be either Russian or American, as has been
long debated in Russia between Slavophiles and Westerners. The film ends
with Ann flying the helicopter from the very first scene of the film. She
86
sweeps down from the sky as a deus ex machine to rescue her father and head
back to Russia. This ending is completely fantastic, like a Hollywood happy
ending. Not only does Aleksei get rescued from the prison work yard, but
his friend, a black prisoner, comes along for the ride back to Russia. The
conclusion is deliberate kitsch; the wheel has come full circle in its playing
upon the expectations of the audience. The mansion at the beginning of the
film portrayed one stereotype of Americans, and the happy ending conveys
another. In the middle of the film the stereotypes are systematically broken
down in order to reveal Russian and American characteristics that are more
truthful than the stereotypes. Once this has been done, the film ends with
a replay of the stereotypes of the beginning, but now they are backed by
more realistic understandings of the characters. Shakhnazarov's point that
a synthesis of the best traits of Russians and Americans may be the way out
of the present situation allows the film to end on a hopeful note, albeit a
rather unrealistic one.
In The American Daughter Shakhnazarov has created a fairy tale in
which Russian national characteristics, both positive and negative, struggle
for control over Russia's future. This argument has most often been stated
in the context of the Slavophiles versus the Westernizers. At the end of the
film, it seems that Ann, the offspring of both Helen and Aleksei, is the only
hope for Russia. She has learned from the West, but retains her great love
for Russia. Through her own initiative, she is theoretically able to return
home to Russia with her father and she even has left room for someone else
to join them. The ending of the film maintains a fantastic tone. The
helicopter ride back home to Russia is implied, even though it is an
unrealistic outcome. There is no way that a helicopter would be able to
travel that distance, and there is no chance that they could escape without
being caught. But for Ann and all the characters, the important point is not
the flight itself, but the hope in the possibility of that flight. In a country
in such turmoil, hope for a better future can be a very precious commodity,
even if it is almost as unrealistic as another era's hopeful vision of
Communism looming on the horizon.
NOTES
1. An interview with Karen Shakhnazarov at Kur'er Studio, Moscow, April 24, 1995.
87
A FESTIVAL OF POLISH THEATRE AT LA MAMA:
KAZIMIERZ BRAUN'S HELENA-THE EMIGRANT QUEEN
Susan Tenneriello
A performance of Kazimierz Braun's Helena-The Emigrant Queen,
based on the life of the Polish-American actress Helena Modjeska
(Modrzejewska), was featured as part of a Festival of Polish Theatre
produced in October by the Polish Theatre Institute in the USA in
association with La Mama.
1
The play was presented on separate evenings in
Polish and English, making this production the first English-language
performance in New York. As directed by Joseph Kutrzeba, the tight
ensemble work of Nina Polan (Modjeska), Beata Fido (Young Helena), and
George McGath (The Men in Helena's Life), created an intimate journey
through aspects of Modjeska's life as Polish immigrant and American star.
Helena Modjeska (1840-1909), considered today Poland's greatest
actress, emigrated to America at the age of thirty-six, at the height of her
fame on the Warsaw stage, to embark on an international career that would
rival Sarah Bernhardt's. She settled in Anaheim, California with her husband
Karol Chlapowski, struggling to learn English and to break onto the
American stage, which she did in 1877 after auditioning for the management
team of John McCollough and Barton Hill at San Francisco's California
Theatre. Sensational critical acclaim followed her debut in Scribe's Adrienne
Lecouvreur, which became one of her signature roles.
2
In America, Modjeska is best remembered as an interpreter of
Shakespeare's women; her repertory included sixteen Shakespearean roles,
four of which she performed with Edwin Booth on an eight-week tour
during the 1889-1890 season. Her career in America brought her celebrity
status: streets, mountain peaks, waterfalls, and mineral springs were named
after her. Modjeska also appeared in controversial contemporary plays by
Dumas fils, Sudermann, d'Annunzio and presented the American premiere
of Ibsen's A Doll's House (retitled Thora) in Louisville on 7 December 1883,
which received such negative reviews she immediately withdrew the play
from her repertory.
3
Modjeska introduced to American audiences a more
natural acting style that lent sympathy and compassion to her women. In
her memoirs, Modjeska discusses the "art" of acting in terms of crafting
one's instincts and inclinations for their expressive value. The performer, she
argued, must make an emotional connection to the role as "something
which ought to lie in the very depth of the actor's soul, the suggestion of
which has much more value than even the most laborious study."
4
She
created a deeply moving Lady Macbeth that stressed not her criminality, but
the circumstances surrounding her love for her husband and the pull of
conscience.
5
Braun's Helena begins at the end of Modjeska's life as she is
preparing to leave her horne (a legendary four-hundred acre estate she named
Arden) in Anaheim, California, which she was forced to sell. Her impending
departure sets in motion a restless revisitation of personal losses and
professional successes. As Modjeska bids good-bye, the flood of her
reflections serves as a catalyst for reliving moments in her life that ultimately
constitute a self-performance. Late in the play Modjeska asks, "Why is it so
hard to leave the stage, to leave this house? Why is it so hard to part with
life?" These questions resonate throughout a detailed self-examination,
which becomes the action of the play as Modjeska struggles to piece together
her history. The past emerges in the figures of Young Helena and The Men
in Helena's Life, whose appearance and disappearance merge past and
present in an ongoing dialogue.
Andrzej Walczak' s open set deftly suggested a drawing room. The
semi-circular arrangement of a settee, desk, and chair created an atmosphere
that drew the audience into the performance space. The room, specified by
these few "props," became both Modjeska's pending farewell and
everywhere. Only a piano covered in black cloth set to the side of the spare
furnishings indicated the journey's end. Costumes by J6zef Grabowski
followed the productions overall simplicity of suggestion: a change of
colored shawl, a hat, or the addition of a jacket specified change of character,
place, or time. Dramatic intensity was cued into the lighting design of Kris
Wawrzyniak, as when Modjeska described her audition for McCollough: a
spotlight slowly carne up on the actress as she recalled looking out into the
auditorium and imagining herself in Poland saying good-bye to her all her
friends and her Polish audience. The triumphant monologue concluded the
first half of the play.
The first half of the play recounts Modjeska's personal history,
including her friendship with the pianist Ignacy Paderewski and her
relationship with novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz (Noble Prize winning author
of Quo Vadis). The second half of the play shows how the partition of
89
Poland and Russian occupation in Warsaw affected Modjeska, her
international visibility turning her into a "political figure." On Modjeska's
return to the Warsaw stage in 1879, a student, lgnacy Neufeld, committed
suicide after being expelled from school along with several friends for
presenting the actress with a bouquet of flowers tied with red and white
ribbons and a note written in Polish. (At the time, the public use of the
Polish language was banned in Warsaw except on stage.) Modjeska never got
over her sense of responsibility for the student's death. Later, Modjeska's
speech at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair on behalf of Polish women,
"Women in the True Drama," was reported throughout Poland, making her
a national hero. Her outspoken advocacy of Polish rights, especially
women's rights, and her criticism of Russian policies resulted in her being
barred from performing in Warsaw and St. Petersburg during her last visit
to Poland in 1895.
The division of the action into two segments is reinforced by the
doubling of Modjeska into two women, a device that revealed how
Modjeska's ambition to become an international star seemed to threaten her
national identity. Beata Fido played the Young Helena, an intensely
ambitious Polish actress; Nina Polan played Modjeska, whose fragile
worldliness stood in eloquent contrast to Fido's unquenchable vitality and
confidence. The two parts were in search of one another. The dialogic
quality of their "shared narrative" revealed the multiple sides of Modjeska's
fractured personality. Joseph Kutrzeba's crisp choreography shaped the dual
voices coming from Modjeska by counterpoint or overlapping lines, moving
the pieces of narrative through a restless river of comment, reflection, and
transformation.
Modjeska's life straddled two experiences as American and as Pole.
The points of division in the action between self, love, country, and
especially language continually distort and blend her history until she can
no longer recognize herself and full of self-doubt, she turns critical. It is
only when Modjeska rediscovers her native voice, reciting two Polish
poems, that she begins the journey back to herself: "It was language that
binds me closest to Poland." Language becomes the seam that unites
Modjeska, but hearing the piay in English with only a brief recitation in
Polish leaves one without experiencing Modjeska's "true" voice; one is left
without a sense of completion to either the woman or the artist.
The final scene between Modjeska and a former Polish friend, a
90 Slavic arui East European Performance Vol. 17, No. 1
painter who had renounced art and become a monk, returned the action to
her personal odyssey. Here Modjeska examines her soul: "Each new success
I achieved wasn't enough. The more success I had the more I wanted." As
she searches for spiritual reconciliation, the dialogue turns into a conflict
between faith and art. Accounts of Modjeska's life (including her memoirs)
do not refer to such an encounter or crisis in her life. In fact, an unwavering
Catholic faith was a strong source of courage and inspiration to her. "Look
for God in your art not in yourself," the monk advises, advancing an
argument, which is perhaps Braun's attempt to reconcile an exile's
experience. The outcome rejoins Modjeska with her younger self as though
with her soul. As a glass breaks, Modjeska responds, "I have finally come
to myself." Now one, the two figures complete the transformation of the
artist as they depart from her past, from the stage, from life.
NOTES
1. The Polish Theatre Institute in the USA is a not for profit corporation dedicated to
presenting Polish literature, drama, music, and related arts to Polish-American and general
audiences through stage productions, readings, concerts, and multi-media events. Its stated goal
"is to share what is best in Polish cultural, dramatic, and musical heritage with the rest of
America."
2. See Marion Moore Coleman, Fair Rosalind: The American Career of Helena Modjeska
(Connecticut: Cherry Hill Books, 1969), 75-83.
3. Ibid, 313-15.
4. Helena Modjeska, Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska (New York and London:
Benjamin Blom, (1910) 1969), 551.
5. See Daniel Gerould, "Helena Modjeska," in International Dictionary of Theatre, Vol. 3,
Directors, Actors, and Designers, (London: St. James Press, 1995) 530-35.
91
JERZY JAROCKI'S GRZEBANIE, BASED ON THE LIFE OF
STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ. AT THE STARY TEATR,
CRACOW, 9 OCTOBER, 1996.
Helena M. White
There is no single meaning that can be attached to the Polish word
grzebanie (pronounced: ge-zhe-ba-nye), the title of Jerzy Jarocki's remarkable
production. The most immediate is "burying the dead;" however, depending
on the context, the word can also mean "burrowing into," "digging into,"
or "searching through." All of those meanings apply to Jarocki's
production, which he created as a result of many years of "burrowing"
through materials having to do with life and work of the Polish twentieth-
century avant-garde artist, playwright, and philosopher, Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz, better known as Witkacy. The concept for this montage-like
play has its origins in an earlier Warsaw production entitled Stas(short for
Stanislaw); however, it is Jarocki's work with the acting students at the
Cracow Theatre School that brought Grzebanie to its final shape. The same
production was then duplicated by Jarocki with the cast of the Stary Teatr.
From the vast body of writing by and about Witkacy, Jarocki
selects bits and pieces of text which he sometimes paraphrases or elaborates.
He uses letters, excerpts from novels and plays, philosophical observations,
memoirs, historical records, reflections and quotations, and with fourteen
actors playing multiple roles, conjures up on stage a theatrical composition
for which no better title could have been found. In witnessing this
performance we look at different "images" of Witkacy, wondering each time
if this is his true face or just another mask with which the playwright was
always eager to fool the world. We listen to the voices of those who were
close to him, as well as those who stood ready to condemn him, to judge
him, or to try to reach his impenetrable souL We discover Witkacy, the man
talking through the characters of his plays, and finally we get a glimpse of
Witkacy's tragic struggle with his fear of impending doom, real and
imaginary, the fear which he finally decides to stop by taking his own life.
This end has its unexpected and bizarre aftermath-the infamous 1988
second interment of Witkacy's remains which were brought from former
Polish, now Belarussian, territory to rest in his native Zakopane.
Digging up the bodies of famous sons who died in exile and
bringing them back to their native Poland has a long and proud tradition in
Polish culture. In Grzebanie Jarocki makes several, very humorous and
meaningful references to some of those historical exhumations, and, by
92 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 17, No.1
doing so, he creates a thematically connecting link culminating in Witkacy's
burial in Zakopane. This last event has, however, its tragic underpinning. It
was no coincidence that Witkacy, prophetically fearful of an invasion from
the East, committed suicide on the day following Russia's treacherous attack
on Poland on September 17, 1939, a date soon after erased from Polish
history books and forbidden to be mentioned under the Communist regime.
Witkacy's "return" to Poland in 1988 was, therefore, not only an honor
long overdue given to this controversial artist, but also a milestone intended
to improve Polish-Russian relations at the onset of perestroika. Witkacy
seems, however, to have played his own game from behind the grave: the
body which the government officials mistakenly brought back from Russia
was not, as it was later disclosed, that of Witkacy but of an unknown
Ukrainian peasant woman who, to this day, shares the grave site with
Witkacy's mother in Zakopane.
1
Opening graves can be a risky business, and perhaps Shakespeare
knew best how to protect himself from such invasions. The two grave
diggers, who appear on a bare stage in the opening scene of Jarecki's play,
signal this risk by their hesitation in lifting the trap door which indicates the
grave. "Should we or shouldn't we go ahead with it," they seem to be saying,
which may very well parallel the apprehension of uncovering Witkacy's
mysteries-the subject of this performance. The ensuing scene, kept in the
comic mood by the grave diggers, makes reference to the postmortem
history of the most famous Polish Renaissance poet, Jan Kochanowski,
whose earthly remains have been moved several times over the centuries,
until under modern scrutiny, they turned out to belong to an unknown
woman. By establishing this link to Kochanowski, Jarocki not only reveals
the ageless proximity between the comic and the profound and places
Witkacy in good company, but he also prepares us for further use of the
historical references, allusions, and metaphors that are an important part his
production.
The role of Witkiewicz/Witkacy is played by two actors (a third
actor briefly takes a role as Wikacy's double), an ingenious choice by
J arocki, to embody the idea that Witkacy was an artistic persona created by
the young Stanislaw Ignacy. Witkacy was his mask for public use, which
later became his only recognizable face. The staging of Stanislaw Ignacy's
first appearance emphasizes his awkwardness, childishness and the absurdity
of his situation. Standing on the wooden floor of the empty stage, he is in
full skiing gear. Together with his female companion, he actually attempts
to slide downstage and eventually falls. A chorus of women immediately
encircles him reciting invocations condemning every self-centered, loveless
93
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Grzebanie, by Jerzy Jarocki, Stary Teatr, 1996. From left: (foreground) Malgorzata Hajewska-
Krzysztofik, Krzysztof Globisz, Szymon Kusmider, Dorota Segda. From left: (background) Beata
Fudalej, Danuta Maksymowicz, ZygmuntJ6zefczak, Katarzyna Gniewkowska
soul (presumably also his) to perpetual immaturity. This scene is followed
by the entrance of Witkacy's father, his first art teacher and critic, a
commanding, dignified figure, clad in black, who appears several times
throughout the performance to spotlight the dominant role he played in his
son's life. "I always trail behind you" are his father's memorable words
which Witkacy imagines he hears, even as he prepares for his suicide in one
of the later scenes.
J arocki translates all of the pressures experienced by the young
Stanislaw Ignacy-the overblown praises for his precocious talent and his
father's unrealistic expectations concerning his son's artiStiC
achievements-into a stage picture of the actor being physically hoisted up
and hanging pitifully with his skis dangling in the air. He seems quite jolly,
though utterly confused, like a child who is given too many things to choose
from. The groups of angels and devils who appear on both sides of the stage
compete for the artist's soul, signaling Witkacy's predilection toward the
black and white division within himself. "To take a divorce from oneself
... to move to a white side of one's soul" is Witkacy's wish in one of the
later scenes. His black side appears sometimes, embodied by his double as
someone who exists outside of himself and who acts in order to mask all
that is real inside the artist. The role of Witkacy's double might be clearer
for those in the audience who are familiar with Witkacy's first novel, The
622 Downfalls of Bungo; or the Demonic Woman, in which, among other
things, the author analyses and recreates his sexual passion for the famous
Polish actress, Irena Solska.
The erotic temptations that bring Stanislaw Ignacy back to earth
(he is let down), along with his visions of composing extraordinary music
with only sixteen measures, one motif and three sounds, (as a grand piano
is lowered from the flies and hangs overhead,) seem silly in contrast to
subsequent serious developments. The early flights of fancy are contrasted
with Witkacy's hypochondriac moans and morbid premonitions of his own
death, which sound childish and overly theatrical. What stops us from
laughing, though, is the presence of Nina, Witkacy's wife (played with the
great depth of feeling by Beata Fudalej), whose silent pain and resignation
put her husband's self-absorption into sharp relief.
There are three other women who played important roles in
Witkacy's life: the previously mentioned Irena Solska; his fiancee, Jadwiga,
who committed suicide (an act for which Witkacy was in part responsible);
and his last love, Czesia, who accompanies him in his final days. The
women's short confessional monologues, which Jarocki "sprinkles"
throughout the action, express their fascination with Witkacy but also give
95
96
an overwhelming feeling that they have allowed their lives to be destroyed
by him while he was never able to love them. His emotional isolation was,
J arocki suggests, one of his tragedies. The only channel that Witkacy
believed personal truth can and should flow through is art. "To be sincere
one needs to be an artist," he says to his father in their last scene together.
The fragmented excerpts from Witkacy's The Shoemakers (a play
never produced during the author's lifetime, but now assigned reading for
high school students in Poland) that Jarocki includes in Grzebanie, express
Witkacy's real fears rather than his personal phobias: a premonition of a
"new era" which, when it comes, will leave no room for individual thought,
while the world, devoid of any metaphysical longing, will be ruled by
brutes. The scene that follows of another exhumation, this time of the
nineteen-century Polish comedy writer, Count Aleksander Fredro, is so
hilarious that it is easy to overlook its content which suggests that the brutes
might not be just a playwright's invention. The dug up body of Fredro (a
life-size dummy) is missing its legs, and the familiar two grave diggers-this
time conversing in a language strongly resembling Russian-enlighten us as
to what happened: someone in a hurry needed the dead count's boots. He
was scalped too-through no one's fault, we are told, since it was an order.
Overlapping this scene is another play excerpt, this time from
Witkacy's The Madman and the Nun in which the same actor who plays
Witkacy (an outstanding performance by Jan Frycz) takes on the part of
Walpurg, the madman. This choice of casting identifies the playwright with
his character and brings Witkacy's fear of losing individual freedom into
even sharper focus. A similar decision is made in casting the same actress
(the charming and talented Dorota Segda) in the roles of Sister Anna,
Walpurg's nurse turned lover, and Czesia, Witkacy's last love. They have
much in common: they are both much younger than their idol and totally
submissive. On her lover's final day, Czesia agrees to die with him, although
she fails in her attempted suicide.
Jarocki creates several vivid scenes to give us his impression of what
this final day in August might have been like for Witkacy, the day when his
premonition of catastrophe became reality. The tranquil stage picture of the
hay stack and a branch of a tree, hanging upstage, laden with ripe fruit,
contrasts with the desperation ofWitkacy's last hours and the distant sounds
of war. His arguments with Czesia, as they stop exhausted on their long trek
through the woods, seem trivial in the face of the Russian radio broadcast
coming from a small military unit, absurdly out of place in a middle of
nowhere, promising death to the Polish capitalists. Witkacy's long dead
parents cross the stage for the last time, distant and dignified, symbolic of
97
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everything that the Russian radio announcements promise to destroy.
There follows one of the truly unforgettable scenes in Grzebanie
in which Jarocki reminds us of how those threats we have just heard have
been carried out in the past. The scene is a dramatization of the murder of
Tadeusz Miciriski, a Polish poet and novelist, whom Witkacy greatly
admired. Mitas, as he is called in the program, tries to cross the border from
Russia into Poland, trusting his two guides who speak with heavy Russian
accents; they not only cheat Mitas and rob him, but, in their abysmal
ignorance, they also mock and destroy his books which he carries in a
suitcase. They tear off his clothing and his boots (a reminder of Fredro's
abused corpse), senselessly shoot him in the back, and finish him off with
the final blow of an oar. It is not the war that frightens us, but the
mentality of those who are likely to rule in the "new era." At this point,
even without a deeper knowledge of history, it is not difficult to identify
with Witkacy's fear and view his final act (which, incidentally, is not shown)
as a rebellion rather than cowardice. Those last scenes of Act I are deeply
moving, although Jarocki is far from sentimental. On the contrary, the
director maintains a detached, nearly surreal view of events, almost as if
recreating a dream-his own, or Witkacy's.
There is still some "digging" to be done in Act II, metaphorically
into memories, and physically into real dirt. The grave diggers, who, by
now seem like old friends, start by exhuming another great Pole, this time
the romantic poet, Juliusz Slowacki, who died as an exile in France. His
exhumation soon blends into Witkacy's burial, suggesting an image of the
two writers shaking hands together, a proposition that Witkacy's
contemporaries would have considered blasphemous. The grave diggers help
us to keep the locations straight by changing their language from French to
Polish. Witkacy stays on the sidelines of the 1988 tragicomic "burial affair."
He appears removed from everybody, including the not-too-smart Polish
government officials who are frantically trying to cover up the dreadful
mistake. Others meander on and off, remembering Witkacy or quoting his
amazingly contemporary texts. We get an impression that we are glancing
through pages of books, photo albums, and letters. Irena Solska, who
outlived Witkacy by some twenty years, sits at his grave side and tells of her
own physical deterioration that he so detested and her difficult life in the
system that he so feared. We are left to wonder what his life would have
become had he lived.
As the grave diggers prepare Witkacy's grave, there is a ceremony
in an offstage chapel. There is much concern about what can be broadcast
outside the chapel (communist censorship is still in place), but through
99
some oversight and inefficiency, fragments of the final words manage to
reach us: "[for his] ... rebellion against any enslavement we are grateful to
him ... on this most tragic day, the day of betrayal, tremendous strength
was required to continue on living." The words die away, followed by a
simple incantation and then the only sound is the grave diggers' shovels
shaping a simple earth mound as the lights go down.
Jarocki's legendary care in working with actors is reflected in the
discipline of the whole ensemble and the clarity of the individual portrayals,
all of which put Grzebanie in the highest ranks of the Stary Teatr's
outstanding performances.
Music is used in this performance as an organic part of a whole, and
the costumes are modeled on the collection of Witkacy's photographs.
There are other "hidden treasures" reserved for those familiar with past
performances at the Stary T eatr in the form of humorous references to those
past stagings and their creators. Some critics might argue that previous
knowledge of Witkacy's life and work is necessary to appreciate Grzebanie,
making it into a performance for the elite. It might have been helpful to
include additional program notes for the uninformed, but as with a difficult
piece of music or a poem, which this performance resembles, it is worth a
hundred times over to go the extra mile to see a magnificent sight.
NOTES
1. See SEEP volume 15, no. 2, Summer 1995, page 10, and SEEP volume 14, no. 3, page SO for
more information regarding this fact.
101
A CONTEMPORARY, RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE THREE SISTERS
ON BROADWAY: AT THE LUNT-FONTANNE THEATRE,
NOVEMBER 7 - 16, 1996.
Jane House
"K Moskvu," "K Moskvu," calls Irena at the end of Act IT of Three
Sisters. How her final "ooooo" haunted the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre! How
much more moving was the sound than the fi nal "ooooh" or "ooow"
(whichever pronunciation of "Moscow" is chosen) of an American
production. How much easier for the actress to say, I imagine, because it
hits closer to t he pain of yearning for a time and place when life was
happier.
Hearing the language as Chekhov must have heard it in his head
while he wrote was one of a number of pleasures provided by this Russian
production. Among other pleasures were a costume design that had a very
limited palate in terms of color (Vyacheslav Zaitsev), an unrealistic set
(Pyotr Kirillov and Vyacheslav Zaitsev), a vigorous pace with lively changes
of rhythm, and a unity of style. This new vision of the Russian classic (first
given in Moscow in 1982 with essentially the same cast) belongs to Galina
Volchek, the Artistic Director of this company, the Sovremennik
(Contemporary) Theater of Moscow.
This was a far-cry from the realistic Moscow Art Theatre
production that Chekhov saw. While the less refined Natasha (Y elena
Yakovleva) wore a pale pink dress, which was graced with a rose in Act II,
Masha (Marina Neyolova) was in black, Irena (Y ekaterina Semyonova)
white, and the others in light shades of copper, green, cream, and grey,
including all the soldiers who remained undifferentiated, even Vershinin
(Valentin Gaft) and the Baron (Valery Shalnykh), in their pale green military
uniforms. The women seemed uncorseted; their dresses, which were
elegant, fell in loose, flowing folds.
The set, while denying the sensory realities of place, created an
overall impression of white coolness, as if expressing how the imaginations
of the three Prozorov girls were frozen in time and space in this small town
in northern Russia, where life can seem tedious and bleak. Drapes of rich
velvet in a sap-green color thickly mixed with white hung from high up in
the flies and surrounded the stage; sometimes when the light fell in a certain
way on these hangings, one could imagine t hem to be gigantic, snow-covered
evergreens. The acting area beneath them was a raked, circular wooden stage
that was painted white; the inner section rotated, for the most part between
the acts, when months pass by. Changes in furniture indicated changes in
setting: a long white dining table, white wicker and wooden chairs, a small,
round, white table (Olga's workplace), piano, for the living/ dining room of
Acts I and II; two cots partially hidden behind two battered white wooden
screens, some white chairs, for the Act III bedroom shared by Olga (Galina
Petrova) and Irena; and a few benches and a rocker for Act IV's garden
scene.
Arching over this circular acting space was a beautiful ironwork
bridge, the sort belonging to fairytales and romantic love stories. It served
as pathway between the Acts. As Andrey (Boris Ovcharenko) declared his
love to Natasha at the end of Act I, the lights darkened, a white light was
swung back and forth by hand from the wings, and the procession of
carnival masqueraders paraded noisily over the bridge, presaging a night
when many social masks fall in the Prozorov household. At the end of Act
III, there was a swirl of activity: the Stage rotated, the sisters ran to the top
of the bridge, we heard the sound of a fierce wind blowing and marching
music, the departing soldiers crossed over the bridge, and Masha was left
standing alone to watch for Vershinin.
The bridge represented a place where dreams could be acted out,
where love and an escape from humdrum experience became possible. It
was a bridge that few crossed. When they did, the crossing had special
meaning. At the top of Act II, Masha and Vershinin meandered over the
bridge, dawdling there as they begin to openly admit their love. Irena
followed the Baron over the bridge in Act IV, but the Baron was in flight
towards death and they could not stay; theirs was a parting, not a coming
together. Andrey and Natasha never ventured there. It was the three sisters
who claimed the space most often. At the opening of the play, we saw them
there, arms encircling each other's waists. This was also the final image. As
the military music plays, Masha and Irena draw together around Olga,
gaining strength from each other, as they did at the beginning. They will
endure their misfortunes together.
There was an appealing physicality to the acting, a palpable energy
to the movements. The actors' bodies stood out against the white
uncluttered stage. Since there were no doors to enter through, actors just
appeared. Vershinin was suddenly there, without preparation, in Act I.
Chebutykin (Igor Kvasha) strode in proudly with the large silver samovar
and placed his gift to Irena directly on the white wooden floor, center stage.
Screens were knocked over in the Act III bedroom; later in that act, Masha
lay on her back on the floor during her hysterical outburst.
These actors had obviously worked together for some time.
103
Unspoken interactions, the subtexts of relationship, were apparent. Soliony
(Mikhail Zhigalov) and Irena had many silent exchanges of attraction and
repulsion. The incompatibility of Andrey and Natasha was made
abundantly clear at the top of Act II. Andrey, once so full of intellectual and
artistic promise, now turned petty government official and gambler,
remains remote and cold as the hot-blooded Natasha rubs his legs
seductively; frustrated, she twists away to a nearby chair and, in an act of
rebellion against his social decorum, raises her skirts to her knees. When he
still does not look, she is overcome with shame and quickly covers up. It
was an action that illuminated their relationship. No wonder she runs to
Protopopov.
There -y.rere things that I missed. The tragedy of the Baron's
relationship to Irena was not manifest, especially in Act IV when he bids her
farewell. The Baron should know that these are his final moments on earth,
and we should sense that he wants to die because he knows Irena can never
love him. And Irena must be tormented by her own inability to love
anyone and puzzled by the Baron's behavior. Perhaps this scene would have
come more to life with acting more rooted in psychological realism. Their
situation needs to be deeply felt.
However, Galina Volchek obviously possesses spatial intelligence
and succeeded in making the production flow in a theatrically pleasing
manner. She was also able to keep the actors tightly disciplined so that the
style of performance was cohesive: not an easy task. We need more
directors who can communicate a sense of style in the United States.
THE MOSCOW THEATRE SOVREMENNIK'S INTO THE
WHIRL WIND AT THE LUNT-FONTANNE THEATRE
Jennifer Starbuck
Eugenia Ginzburg's compelling autobiography, Journey Into the
Whirlwind, is the source for the haunting stage production that ran at the
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway for three performances beginning on
November 15, 1996. Both book and play tell the story of Ginzburg's
eighteen-year-long imprisonment in a Stalinist Gulag, starting in 1937. A
tale encompassing many miles and years, Journey Into the Whirlwind, is a
challenge to adapt for the stage, but the Sovremennik managed to synthesize
the material into a powerful, humorous, and provocative production.
As a non Russian-speaking American citizen, I certainly felt as
though I might be at a disadvantage listening to a monotone simultaneous
translation through headphones. However, I found myself too caught up
by the action and voices on stage to feel in any way deprived.
The play traces Ginzburg's journey from prison to prison,
alternating with scenes of her interrogations. Ginzburg shows two faces:
one as a woman standing alone against the abuses of a corrupt system, and
the other, as a guide in a sort of travelogue, chronicling the individual lives
she encounters along the way. The character of Ginzburg, powerfully
played by Marina Neyolova, is the central focus around whom the events
revolve.
Supporting Neyolova in this production was a particularly strong
ensemble cast whose familiarity with one another made the audience feel
the sense of forced intimacy that must have exisred during these
imprisonments.
1
It was in the scenes among the inmates that the humor and
humanity of the story were found. We could sympathize with the tales told
while at the same time finding amusement (mixed with horror) at the
absurdity of the individual situations.
Much of the dialogue centered on the ridiculous reasons for which
these women were sent to prison. One young woman told the tale of being
a carefree adolescent at a party, eagerly kissing her boyfriend instead of
reporting to the authorities that there were "enemies of the people" present.
She was arrested the following day for her "crime." Later, a joke is made
when an innocent working woman asks earnestly if anyone else was a
"tractorite" (her take on "Trotskyite"); she explains that in all her years of
work she never even went near the tractor! Warmth and humor emanate
from the stage as we realize how innocent many of these women were.
105
106
Marina Neyolova as Eugenia Ginzburg in Into the Whirlwind
at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 1996.
These spontaneous feelings are powerfully juxtaposed with the scenes of
torture they must undergo.
One inmate, Milda (Liliya Tolmacheva), related t he painful
memory of a friend who, under physical coercion signed certain papers and
was then used as a pawn. At first the friend was allowed to sleep
comfortably on a couch and eat well, until the authorities suddenly
announced that she was no longer needed and would be shot; her signat ure
made possible the death of thirty others. This friend then slit her wrists.
Later, after her own interrogations, Milda is returned to the cell , confesses
to signing whatever they wanted, and, in an act that directly echoes the
story that she told, quietly hangs herself. A single line from the play speaks
volumes: "What kind of system is it when meanness becomes a virtue, that
is the question."
Ginzburg's story becomes most affecting when we realize how
much she has left behind. She is first able to bear torture for her
convictions, as she makes clear in her memoirs, "I must say in all honesty
that, had I ordered to die for the Party-not once but three times- that very
night, in that snowy winter dawn, I would have obeyed without the
slightest hesitation. "
2
She confesses that instinctively she doubted Stalin, but
kept quiet. Once she realized that her husband had been arrested too and
that her children were left alone, her situation became unbearable.
Neyolova as Ginzburg made clear her conflict and pain and we too felt the
sense of futile helplessness of her plight. The severed connection between
the women and their families was vividly illustrated by a scene in which a
nursing mother, futilely trying to squeeze milk from her breasts to send to
her absent child, has the milk taken by the guards and thrown away.
The simple, yet effective visual design enhanced the emotionality
of the story. Large rusted bars, grids, and screens filling the darkened space,
which was cut by beams of light. A lone soldier stood above the stage, on
the upper level of the set, always half-lit, symbolizing t he omnipresence of
the state. The lighting effects during Ginzburg's interrogations-blinding
beams shining directly in her eyes-were at times directed at the audience,
jolting us out of our cozy, darkened viewing experience. The visual effects
were often symbolic. For example, during Ginzburg's confinement in a
solitary punishment cell, the walls move as she hallucinates, and the once tall
ceiling descends, rendering palpable the attempt to crush her spirit. Finally,
one haunting effect remains with me. Lit by a green spotlight,
Ginzburg/Neyolova stands boldly down center, while her giant shadow is
thrown against the stark back wall-a visual representation of her
indomitable spirit.
107
Ginzburg, unlike many others, lived to return to her family and to
chronicle her story for others to read. journey Into the Whirlwind was
published in 1967, but not in Russia. "The extermination of the
intellegentsia cannot be of use to the state" is an apt line from the
play-Ginzburg died in 1977 never having seen the book published in her
own country. Director Galina Volchek has stated that the time has come
to oresent Into the Whirlwind in the United States because "there is a realistic
th;eat that communism may return to Russia." Seeing the Sovremennik's
production made me pause to think, during this election year, about the
differences between Ginzburg's world, where politics was a fatally
dangerous pursuit, whether one chose to participate or not, and our own,
where the abuses of freedom exact no such a drastic payment.
NOTES
I. Because the large cast functioned primarily as an ensemble, I shall list all their names here:
Marina Neyolova, Y elena Y akovleva, Gal ina Sokol ova, Lyudmila Krylova, Galina Petrova,
Tatyana Biziaeva, lnna Timofeeva, Tatyana Ryasnyaskaya, Liya Akhedzhakova, Maria Sitko,
Olga Drozdova, Liliya Tolmacheva, Marina Khazova, Tamara Degtyariova, Marina
Feoktistova, Natalia Katasheva, Tatyana Koretskaya, Alia Pokrovskaya, Elena Kozelkova, Nina
Doroshina, Elena Millioti, Paulina Myasnikova, Ekaterina Semenova, Alexey Kutuzov,
Gennady Frolov, Mikhail Zhigalov, Alexander Kakhun, Vasily Mishchenko, Vladimir
Zemlyanikin, Vladislav Fedchenko, Alexander Berda, Maxim Razuvaev, Viktor Tulchinsky,
Sergei Garmash, Ruslan Kovalevsky.
2. Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, journey Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max
Hayward (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967).
CONTRIBUTORS
JOE BRANDESKY is Associate Professor of Theatre at Ohio State
University, Lima Campus. He is currently co-directing, with Dr. Maria
Ignatieva, a production of Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro. See EVENTS
for his curating exhibit of theatre designs by Anisfeld. He is also working
with the St. Petersburg State Museum for Theatre and Music on another
exhibit of designs and costumes to be shown at several American sites in late
1999, early 2000.
SPENCER GOLUB is Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at
Brown University. He is the author of Tbe Recurrence of Fate: Tbeatre and
Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia, which won NYU's Joe A. Callaway
Prize for Best Book on Drama and Theatre, 1994-95, and of Evreinov: The
Tbeatre of Paradox and Transformation. His new book on apparitional mise-
en-scene and performance anxiety in theatre, film, and narrative fiction is
currently being considered for publication.
JANE HOUSE has edited an anthology of Italian Drama for Columbia
University Press as well as Political1beatre Today and Sacred Tbeatre. She is
a professional actress. Last year she toured nationally in An Inspector Calls
and acted at Geva Theatre in Rochester, NY.
LEONARD QUART is a professor of Cinema Studies at the College of
Staten Island and CUNY Graduate Center. He is an editor of Cineaste and
is currently co-authoring a book on Mike Leigh to be published in the Fall.
MARC ROBINSON teaches Russian language, literature, and film at St.
Olaf Collage in Northfield, MN. He received his Ph.D. in Russian
Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana.
LAURENCE SENELICK is the Fletcher Professor of drama at Tufts
University. He is the author of numerous books on Russian and East-
European theatre.
JOEL SCHECHTER is Chair and Professor of Theatre Arts at San
Francisco State University. He is the author of several books on political
109
satire, and will coordinate the 1997 California State University Summer Arts
workshop on Russian theatre.
JENNIFER STARBUCK is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
SUSAN TENNIERELLO is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
HELENA M. WHITE holds advanced degrees in theatre from the Warsaw
State Drama School and Temple University. She has worked as an actor and
a director and has taught at the University of Denver, the University of
Texas at Austin, and Villanova University. She currently teaches in the
English Department at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
GUNA E L ~ is the Department Head of the department of Theatre,
Music, and Cinema at the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art, Latvian
Academy of Sciences. She has been widely published on Latvian and foreign
theatre since 1973.
Beauty and the Beast, Bellarie and Cesky Krumlov
Joe Brandesky
The Revolving Auditorium at Cesky Krumlov
Joe Brandesky
Le Cid, Daile Theatre
Janis Deinats
Les Liasons Dangereuses, Daile Theatre
Janis Deinats
Not a Single Word, New Riga Theatre
Janis Deinats
Love is Stranger Than Death, The National Theatre of Latvia
Laimonis Stlpnicks
110
The Picture of Dorian Gray, New Riga Theatre
Janis Deinats
Portrait of Bruno J asienski by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Museum of the History of the Revolutionary Movement, Warsaw
The Mannequins' Ball, Drawing by Antonin Heythum
J arka Burian .
Polish premiere of The Mannequins' Ball
Teatr, No.2, February 1992
Warsaw premiere of The Mannequins' Ball
Almanach Sceny Polskiej 1974/75, Vol. XVI (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa
Artystyczne: Filmowe, 1976)
The Mannequins' Ball, Woodcuts
David Goldfarb, graphic reproduction
Underground
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Grzebanie, The Stary T eatr
Stefan Okolowicz
Into the Whirlwind, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
Courtesy of the Sovremennik Theater of Moscow
111
PLA YSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):
No. 1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.2 /,Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .
No. 3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredyriski. Translated by Michal
Kobialka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski. Stage
Adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English verstion by Earl Ostroff
and Daniel C. Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 5 The Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.6 The Ambassador, by Slawomir Mrozek. Translated by Slawomir
Mrozek and Ralph Mannheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets
and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00
($6.00 foreign).
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw T oborski, 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) .
112 SLavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No.3
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April 30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
CASTA-THEATRE PROGRAM
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
33 WEST 42nd STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10036
113
Now in its 15th year, this journal, edited by Daniel Gerould,
brings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and
111m in Russia and Eastern Europe. Includes feaLUres on important
new plays in performance, archival documents, innovative
productions, significant revivals, emerging artists, the latest in
film. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Published three
times per year - $10 per annum ($15.00 foreign).
Please send me the following
CASTA publication:
S/(ll 'ic and l:'t1Jiern /:'11rvpean
/'ci.JfnJIIWWl' _ _ tn\ S I 0.00 per yc<Jr
Sl5.<XJ
Toto!
Send order with enclosed check to:
CASTA. CUNY Graduate Center
33 West 42nd Street
New Y<>rk. NY 100:16

, .. , .:, .,, ,..ot r: l\ < .. - 1\ t ' "lf>
An indispensable resource in keeping abreast of the latest theatre
developments in Western Europe. Issued three times a year- Spring,
Winter, and Fall -and edited by Marvin Carlson, each issue contains
a wealth of information about recent European festivals and
productions, including reviews, interviews, and reports. Winter
issues focus on the theatre in individual countries or on special
themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artistic
directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances,
and directorial interpretations. - $15 per annum ($20.00 foreign).
,
Please send me the following CASTA publlcatl:>n:
W<'stern Europ<'an Stag<'s
_@ $15.00 per year
(Foreign) _@ S20.00 per year
Total
Send order with enclosed check to:
CASTA, CUNY Graduate Center
42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre
in the USA- past and present. Provocative, thoughtful articles by
the leading scholars of our time providing invaluable insight and
information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its
continuing contribution to world literature and the performing
arts. Edited by Vera Mowry Roberts and Jane Bowers. Published
three times per year- $12 per annum ($18.00 foreign).
Please send me tile rollowlng
CASTA publication:
Journal of American Drama
and TheaJre _ @ Sl2.00 per year
(Foreign)_@ $18.00
Total
Send order wltll enclosed check to:
CAST A, CUNY Graduate Center
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
PhD Program in Theatre
at the Graduate School and University Center
of the City University of New York
Offers graduate training in Theatre Studies
Certificate program in Film Studies
Recent Seminars include
Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
The Current New York Season Feminist Theory and Performance Melodrama
The History Play Dramaturgy Simulations Film Aesthetics
African-American Theatre of the 60s and 70s
Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance
Theatre History Dramat ic Structure Theatre Criticism
Strindberg and Modernism American Film Comedy Kabuki
Films and Theatre of Ingmar Bergman Minstrelsy 1865-Present
Italian Theatre Latino Theatre in the U.S. Women and the Avant-Garde
Interdisciplinary Options
with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields
and through a consortia! arrangement with
New York University and Columbia University
Affiliated with Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts and
Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Western European Stages
Slavic and Eastern European Performance
Theatre faculty include:
Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Dan Gerould, Judith Milhous
and James Hatch, Jonathan Kalb, Miriam D'Aponte, Harry Carlson, Jane Bowers
Rosette Lamont, Samuel Leiter, Gloria Waldman, Ralph Allen, Albert Bermel,
Mira Felner, Morris Dickstein, Stephen Langley, Benito Ortolani, David Willinger
Film faculty include:
Stuart Liebman, William Boddy, George Custen, Tony Pipolo,
Leonard Quart, Joyce Rheuban, and Ella Shohat
Theatre Program
CUNY Graduate Center
33 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-8099
(212) 642-2231
tht@mina.gc.cuny .edu

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