SEEP Vol.14 No.1 Spring 1994

volume 14, no.
1
spring 1994
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 University 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 Editors of SEEP: Daniel Gerould and Alma Law, CAST A, Theatre
Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New
York, NY 10036.
EDITORS
Daniel Gerould
Alma Law
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Patrick Hennedy
Jay Plum
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson
Leo Hecht
Martha W. Coigney
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies
in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 1994 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.
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 14, No. 1
2
Editorial Policy
From the Editors
Events
Books Received
"Orchestics: A Direction
in Hungarian Movement Theatre"
An Interview with Maria Tatai and Eszter Szalczer
"Theatre Scholars Tour the Baltic States"
Marvin Carlson
"The Rise and Fall of the
Youth Movement in Moscow:
The Fomenko Studio and Others"
John Freedman
"Arthur Miller at the Theatre-on-Podol:
A Crucible and a Coup"
Suzanne Trauth
"International Conference on
Jewish Theatre Held in Poland"
Michael Steinlauf
"Polish Theatre in the Nineties:
Catastrophe and Hope"
Juliusz Tyszka
PAGES FROM THE PAST
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6
7
11
12
24
27
36
40
44
"Frolov on Tragicomedy" 49
Daniel Gerould
"Vladimir Frolov: Tragicomedy" 53
Translated by Leonid Chechelnitsky and Roberta Reader
REVIEWS
"How Are Things in Bratislava?:
The Slovak National Theatre Visits Ohio"
Scott T. Cummings
70
3
"Nikolai Gogol's 7be Government Inspector 76
at the National Actors Theatre, New York"
David Callaghan
"Ukrainka's Forest Song at La Mama, New York" 79
Roxana Stuart
"On Viewing a Production 86
of Vladimir Gubaryev's Sarcophagus"
Charlotte J. Headrick with contributions by Vreneli Farber
Contributors 91
Playscripts in Translation Series 93
Subscription Policy 95
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 14, No. I
4
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 Gogol but we cannot use original articles discussing
Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly 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.
Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system. We
encourage submissions on computer disk. Submissions will be evaluated,
and authors will be notified after approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITORS
The Spring issue, our longest ever, bears witness to the vitality
of theatrical activity in Eastern Europe and Russia and to the growing
number of contributors to SEEP responding to these events. We are
delighted to have new authors providing information about the revival of
Orchestics in Hungary and the Conference on Jewish Theatre in Poland.
The occasional feature, "Pages from the Past,'' makes a re-appearance with
Vladimir Frolov's study of tragicomedy. We hope to continue this feature
on a more regular basis and welcome suggestions for future issues.
--Alma Law and Daniel Gerould
6
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
7be Seven Beggars, "a story of virtues based on the eighteenth-
century tale by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav," was presented in New York
by La Mama E.T.C., December 8 through 19. The one-man show was
conceived and performed by Victor Attar.
The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble of Los Angeles presented Gogol's
7be Inspector General. The production opened in January runs through
March.
Carol Rocamora's translation of Uncle Vanya was performed at
the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, January 19-30.
From January 21 to February 27, 7be Cherry Orchard was
presented by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
David Fishelson's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's 7be Brothers
Karamazov opened on January 21 at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New
York. The production will run though May.
The Players Forum in New York presented a series of three
staged readings of East European plays: Simon Zlotnikov's A Man Who
Came to See a Woman (February 16); Daniela Fischerova's 7be Massage
Table and Lumir Tucek's Who's Afraid Can't Make It (March 16); and
Jaroslaw Abramow-Newerly's Maestro (March 30).
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya was staged in New York by the Juilliard
Drama Division, March 2-6. Eve Shapiro directed.
New York's Time and Space Limited produced Arkadin
Overruled, Linda Mussmann's multi-media adaptation of Chekhov's 7be
Seagull, March 4-26.
Petrashevsky Circle Productions presented Dostoevsky's Crime
and Punishment, adapted for the stage by Robert Hein, at the Perry Street
Theatre in New York, March 5 to April 2.
7
The New York-based Threshold Theatre Company will perform
a program of several contemporary Hungarian one-act plays on April 23
as part of the nineteenth annual conference of the American-Hungarian
Educators' Association, sponsored by Rutgers Universiy in New
Brunswick, New Jersey. The Threshold troupe recently returned from
Hungary, where it toured with Geza Paskandi's No Conductor, a
production that originated in New York City (SEEP vol. 13, no. 1). The
upcomming program will include a new translation of Ferenc Karinthy's
comedy, Bosendorfer (a.k.a. Steinway Grand). Tickets will be available to
the general public at $15. For precise location and directions, please call
the Threshold office: (212) 724-9129.
With the support of the Association d'Action
Artistique, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and
three Parisian theatres..:.the Maison de Ia Culture 93 de Bobigny, the
Odeon, and the Theatre de Nanterre-Amandiers-are sponsoring a Russian
season of eight different productions representative of the contemporary
repertory emerging under the new conditions of freedom. There is also
a series of lectures and play readings.
January 18 to February 6: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre of Saint
Petersburg presented a new production, Claustrophobia (Bobigny).
February 16-25: Leb Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1990
production, Gaudeamus (Bobigny).
March 3-6: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1985
production, Brothers and Sisters (Odeon).
March 7-April 8: Anastasia Vertinskaya and Aleksandr Kaliagin of the
Moscow Art Theatre presented in French with French actors, Chekhov
Act III--the third acts of Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry
Orchard-(N an terre-Amandiers).
March 9-12: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1986
production of Aleksandr Galin's Stars of the Morning Sky (Odeon).
March 23-27: Lluls Pasqua!, using Dodin's actors, directed a Russian
translation of Bernard-Marie Koltes's Roberto Zucco (Odeon).
April 5-10: Dodin and the Maly Theatre are presenting a new production
of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (Odeon).
May 3-14: Ivan Popovsky and the actors of the Pyotr Fomenko Studio
of Moscow will present a new production of three lyrical plays by
Aleksandr Blok, The Fairground Booth, The Unknown Woman, and The
King on the Square (Odeon).
Slavic arul East European Performance Vol. 14, No. 1
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FILM
The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film (New York)
screened Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Stalin's Funeral, December 21, 1993.
According to Y evtushenko: "The film is based on the tragic events of
March 1953, during Stalin's funeral, when many people were crushed by
the crowds. Not long before Stalin's death, his physicians were accused
of an attempt to poison him; they were arrested and tortured. When the
film was first shown in the Soviet Union, the movie theatres were
attacked by Stalinists."
Stalin's Funeral was also presented at Baruch College in New
York, February 24.
The Last Bolshevik, Chris Marker's television film about Aleksandr
Medvedkin, who was once described as "a pure communist in a land
where all communists faked being communists,"was also screened at the
Museum of Modern Art, January 7.
Mikail Bogin's A Train to Happiness was presented at the Museum
of Modern Art, February 24. Bogin opens this documentary film about
the contemporary Russian Yiddish theatre Sholom with footage taken at
the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in the 1930s. We see the stately
opening of Solomon Mikhoel's internationally-celebrated King Lear, next
we watch the famous actor in his dressing room applying his make-up,
and then we witness Lear's tragic finale as he dies beside Cordelia. The
narration explains how the triumphs of Jewish culture in the USSR
turned to persecution and extermination after World War II. Stalin
appears at a meeting in a theatre before an applauding audience of officers;
the dictator holds a rifle which he manipulates as though to take aim.
His target proves to be Mikhoels, who is killed in 1948 in a staged
automobile accident. Many of those attending his funeral are hunted
down and eliminated; the State Jewish Theatre is closed.
The film now switches to the present. In 1988, six survivors of
Mikhoels's troup founded the Sholom Theatre which has since played in
Yiddish and Rusian to more than 150,000 spectators throughout the
country. Bogin juxtaposes scenes of the twenty-member company touring
by train and appearing before enthusiastic audiences in the provinces with
interviews exploring the dimensions of anti-Semitism in the present
political crisis. Leaders of extremists groups like Pamyat express their
determination to rid the country of Jews and punish them for causing all
the troubles that Russians now face. In emphasizing song and dance, the
Sholom Theatre directly confronts these fascist threats and inculcates pride
and a sense of solidarity in Jewish racial identity. Other scenes show
9
tearful farewells in airports as Russian Jews fearing pogroms go into exile.
Particularly moving is a festive good-bye party given by the theatre for
one of its actresses who is leaving for America; she is convulsed with
sobbing at the prospect of leaving her friends and homeland. The image
of railroad travel dominates the film, which includes a delightful glimpse
of two performers in a compartment rehearsing a dramatization of an
Isaac Bashevis Singer story that takes place aboard a train.
The contemporary part of the documentary concludes with the
entire company on stage aboard The Train to Happiness, the Sholom
Theatre's recent production celebratingJewishness. Then as a coda Bogin
switches back to Mikhoels singing and dancing joyously with his full
company at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in Sholom Aleichem's
200,000. The message of continuity is reinforced by Mikhoels's words
about weddings and births guaranteeing survival that are printed on the
screen before the credits and the long list of sponsors and contributors.
-Daniel Gerould
CONFERENCES
The Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures of the
University of Ottawa is hosting an international symposium on the
reception of Chekhov in world culture, May 5-7, 1994. For information,
contact J. Douglas Clayton, Chair of the Organizing Committee (25
University, P.O. Box 450 STN A, Ottawa, ON KlN 6N5 Canada; [613]
564-2305).
The American University in Washington, D.C. will host the fifty-
second annual meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, June
3-4, 1994. This year's conference theme will be: "Poland and Eastern
Europe and the New World Order."
LECTURES
Anatoly Smelyansky of the Moscow Art Theatre lectured on
Stanislavsky at Barnard College, February 28 and March 1.
10
BOOKS RECEIVED
Blazina, Dalibor. Katastrofizam i Dramska Struktura. 0 Stanislawu
Ignacyju Witkiewiczu. Zagreb: Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo
bibliotekaknjirevnasmotra, 1993. pp. 282.
Blazina studies the structure of Witkiewicz's plays in relation to
his theory of catastrophism.
Osinski, Zbigniew. Grotowski wytycza trasy-studia i szkice. Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo Pusty Oblok, 1993. pp. 363.
Osinski examines Grotowski's career from its beginnings to 1992.
Includes thirty pages of photographs and drawings.
Tyszka, Juliusz. Widowiska Nowojorskie. Poznan: Ars Nova, 1994. pp.
227.
A collection of essays about Tyszka's theatre experiences in New
York as a visiting Fulbright scholar during the 1992-1993 season.
Ewa. Micdzy Sztukq. a Filozo[14: 0 teorii krytyki artysrycznej
Stanisiawa Ignacego Witkiewicza. Katowice: Uniwersytet
1992. pp. 111.
Between Art and Philosophy is a study of Witkiewicz's theory of
artistic criticism.
11
ORCHESTICS: A DIRECTION
IN HUNGARIAN MOVEMENT THEATRE
An interview with Maria Tatai by Eszter Szalczer
Orchestics is a systematic theory of movement created by Valeria
Dienes (1879-1978), which became the basis of a movement theatre genre
created in Hungary around 1910 and developed throughout the twentieth
century. This interview took place in August 1993 in Budapest with
Maria Tatai, choreographer, teacher of Orchestics, and leader of the
Orchestics Group.
ES: Where does the term "Orchestics" come from?
MT: It was derived from the Greek word orcheomai (to dance) by
Valeria Dienes who applied it to the art of movement as well as the study
or science of movement.
ES: What do you mean by science of movement?
MT: Valeria Dienes was inspired by dance as an art form, but
later she started to elaborate on her experiences in a systematic manner.
She experimented with the possibilities of the natural movement of the
human body and created a system of coordinates along which movement
can be described. Even though she considered Orchestics an art form, her
basic approach to it was "scientific" in this sense.
ES: She is known in Hungary chiefly as a philosopher. How did
her involvement with dance and movement begin?
MT: Dienes was one of the first women to attend a university in
Hungary. She studied mathematics and philosophy in Budapest and
continued her studies in Paris as a student of Henri Bergson between 1908
and 1912. There she saw Isadora Duncan perform, and she was so deeply
moved that she immediately joined Raymond Duncan's school to study
dance and movement. This was not an ordinary dance school, but a
community for which dance was an integral part of a simple and natural
way of life.
When Valeria Dienes came home in 1912, she opened her Greek
Gymnastics School, which she soon renamed the Orchestics School. At
first she taught what she had learned from Raymond Duncan. It is dif-
12
Antique Feast, Hungarian Museum of Fine Ans
13
ficult to know what the movements were actually like, but we do know
that Raymond and Isadora Duncan were inspired by Greek art and
especially by the representations of movement on ancient Greek vases.
We know also that , as opposed to Isadora, Raymond preferred linear,
profile movements.
ES: What do you mean by linear movement?
MT: He did not move in space, so to speak. He did not move
back and forth, but to the side, on a plane. Valeria Dienes also taught
these profile movements at the beginning, but then she tried other kinds
of movement: the so-called frontal movement, for example. Eventually,
she created a rectangular system of coordinates which she called the
trihedron system. This geometrical framework made it possible for her to
describe all kinds of movements in any direction. This part of the theory
of Orchestics is called Plastics, and it describes the geometry of
movement.
ES: You mentioned the frontal movement which is sometimes
referred to as the "Egyptian" style as opposed to the profile "Greek"
style of movement. Did Valeria Dienes use these terms?
MT: Her approach was purely analytical, it had nothing to do
with historicism or nostalgia. Frontal movement is when the line of the
pelvis stays parallel with the shoulder-line while the body moves, whereas
in profile movement these two lines turn horizontally away from each
other. She did not assign any culturally or historically specific names to
these movements. She simply realized that one can see representations of
frontal movements in the art of ancient societies such as Egyptian and
Indian, while the representation of profile movement is more common in
classical Greek art.
As far as I know, there is no other analytical system of
movement except for Rudolf Laban's. The two of them worked
independently of each other at about the same time, but Valeria Dienes's
work has not become known because it happened here in Hungary.
These studies of movement were pursued at the Orchestics
School, along with the teaching of Orchestics for pedagogical purposes
and as a performing art form. Performances included etudes and
movement pieces created for poems and contemporary music. In the
1940s Valeria Dienes wrote mystery plays, which were performed to the
music of Lajos Bardos.
14
15
After World War II, Orchestics was officially declared a decadent
bourgeois genre, and it was banned along with many other movement
schools. In the realm of dance and movement arts in Hungary only
Russian classical ballet and folk dance were allowed during the socialist
regime. Orchestics was totally suppressed. Then in 1975, during a TV
interview with Valeria Dienes about her work in semiotics, with which
she was involved at that time, she mentioned the important role
Orchestics had played in her life. She explained that even her research in
semiotics had its roots in Orchestics.
After the interview Valeria Dienes was visited by two young
women who wanted to learn Orchestics from her. Since she was ninety-
seven, she recommended a former student of hers as a teacher, Maria
Mirkovszky, who was only seventy-nine. That is how Orchestics,
however illegally, started again.
ES: How did you, an architect by profession, get involved with
Orchestics?
MT: During my student years I trained and performed with the
Domino Mime Group. I was one of those people who always sought to
do something different from what was allowed. Pantomime was also in
the banned category, but it very gradually became tolerated. Modern
dance and jazz dance also started to be accepted during the late seventies.
But I was still searching for the "real thing" for me. In 1980 I attended
a private demonstration performance of Orchestics by Maria Mirkovszky's
two students, and I immediately started to study with her.
ES: What was it that captivated you?
MT: First of all, I was attracted by the freedom of the performer.
One is not forced to assume a specific style. Instead movement and
gesture are rooted in one's own personality. On the other hand, I have
a tendency to systematize things, so I liked the fact that Orchestics had
a system. It is, however, not a prescriptive system, it does not bind, but
rather aids the performer. It describes the possibilities of human
movement in space. Every movement happens in space and time, expends
energy, and is meaningful, even if it is not meant to be expressive. These
aspects of movement are treated in the four main sections of the theory
of Orchestics. Plastics, as I mentioned, describes the spatial aspects of
movement, Rhythmics the temporal aspects, Dynamics the ways of
expending energy by movement, and Symbolics t he possibilities of
expresswn.
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Forms of Motion, The Orchestics Group
17
ES: What happened after you Orchestics?
MT: A former student of Maria Mirkovszky, who taught in a
ballet school, let us use a room there illegally, during lunch hours and on
Saturday afternoons.
ES: But this was already in the 1980s.
MT: Yes, in 1980.
ES: Was it still illegal then? Were you harassed by the police?
MT: Not like in the fifties, when the secret police came to Maria
Mirkovszky's apartment when she tried to give lessons at home. But in
1980 self-censorship within the dance community still worked very
strongly. For example, when one of Maria Mirkovszky's students applied
for permission to work as a teacher and performer of Orchestics, they said
that they could not grant it because such a genre did not exist. Thus
there was no need for direct political interference, since Orchestics was
prevented from even existing. Even in 1987, when I was already teaching,
and we did a performance, I asked several dancer friends who sympathized
with Orchestics to write an article about it. But nobody dared to, they
were afraid that it would harm their careers. Even though Orchestics
could be a great asset to Hungarian dance, it has not received any
professional support to this day.
ES: How did you start teaching Orchestics?
MT: Maria Mirkovszky taught until 1986; she died in 1987. I
started teaching in 1984 hoping to keep Orchestics alive. I met Anik6
Bognar, a jazz dancer, who was very enthusiastic about Orchestics, and
wanted to help me. She suggested that we work together, which we did
in 1984. In 1985 we opened a studio managed by Anik6. There were
many different movement and dance classes; I taught Orchestics. We had
public demonstration performances at the end of each semester, so that a
wider circle of people started to know about Orchestics. In 1987 we
received a grant from the Soros Foundation to create a performance. At
the time of the production we founded the Orchestics Group. We
performed Antique Feast at the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts. In 1988
we created our production of Forms of Motion, which we also performed
at the First Meeting of Hungarian Movement Theatres.
Slavic and East European Pe-rformance Vol. 14, No. 1
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Four Elements, The Orchestics Group
19
However, at the end of 1988 Anik6 moved to the United States,
and the Studio closed. We no longer had a space, and we struggled with
financial problems. Finally we were able to get a rehearsal room in the
students' resident hall at the University of Economics. I was teaching
again, and we worked on a new production, Four Elements. But after that
we could not produce a full scale performance because of the constant
struggle for a place and money. I was about to give up, when in 1991
Nora Kesmarky, program manager at the Downtown House of Culture,
invited me to give Orchestics courses there.
In the meantime I was also invited to teach at the College of
Applied Arts in Budapest. Orchestics became an optional class in the first
year. While my other courses have been more dance oriented, at the
college we exploited the visual interests and talents of the students.
Orchestics thus evolved into a physical-visual theatre in which
environment, space, form, color, and movement played an equally
important role. Here, too, we showed the results of our experiments at
demonstration performances. We also created productions of which the
last one, Colour Play, was also performed at the International Colour
Congress in 1993 in Budapest at the Szkene Theatre.
ES: Indeed, this production seems to me very much different
from the work you did in the eighties. Earlier you focused on the
exploration of body-space relationships, while what I saw now is rather
three-dimensional poetry of unfolding images on stage. To what extent
do you think it is still Orchestics?
MT: Those who saw Orchestics performances before World War
II might not find much relationship between their recollections and our
latest production. In the beginning, my work was also very much
influenced by the particular style of movement that I learned from Maria
Mirkovszky, which was still apparent in Antique Feast. But as I said,
Orchestics is not a style or a fixed set of rules, and its ability to change
shows that it is a living art. As far as the theory of Orchestics is
concerned, I think it is a kind of "compass" that aids one in ever further
explorations.
ES: How do you see the future of Orchestics?
MT: It is hard to tell what direction Orchestics will take.
Although we still work under difficult circumstances, the interest in
Orchestics is growing with each of our productions. There is an
increasing demand for courses, and some of my students have already
Slavic arui East European Performance Vol. 14, No. 1
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started teaching, too. On the other hand, though Orchestics has quite a
stormy history, it is still a young performing art form whose potentialities
can now be realized since today it is possible to pursue it without facing
any internal or external constraint.
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THEATRE SCHOLARS TOUR BALTIC COUNTRIES
Marvin Carlson
The International Federation for Theatre Research met in August
last year in Helsinki. Following the sessions of the Federation, Professor
Pirkko Koski of the University of Helsinki, which hosted the meetings,
organized a theatre tour of the Baltic states for Federation delegates
wishing to add this experience to their visit. Twenty-one persons from
seven countries joined in the excursion.
Their first stop was in western Estonia, in the old university
town of Tartu, where the group toured the state theatre and attended a
reception at the university, which is in the process of establishing a
program of theatre studies. The next day they returned to Estonia's east
coast, to the resort town of Parnu, on the way stopping in Viljandi,
where they visited another state theatre, this one serving much of the
southern region of the country.
In Parnu the delegates attended their first Baltic performance, on
the small "Endla" stage upstairs in the national theatre. The production,
Epp Pillarpart's Punjaba Pottery, was an amusing folk narrative by Priit
Pedajas based on the short stories and a play by the popular Estonian
author, Peet Vallak. This tale of love and rivalry in a bustling pottery
shop was charmingly done. After the show the delighted audience was
treated to an auction of pottery actually made during the play. Following
the performance, the delegates had an opportunity to talk with the
director and actors in the theatre cafe. The group spent the night in Riga,
Latvia, and went on the next day to Vilnius, Lithuania.
After lunch in the old town of Vilnius, the group attended a
production of There to be There, based on the writings of Russian
experimental author Daniil Kharms. It was a stunning piece of theatre so
beautifully mimed by the Oskaras Korsunovas Group at the Academic
Drama Theatre that the simultaneous English translation provided by
headphones was scarcely necessary. After the performance, the company
treated the group to supper at the theatre cafe, followed by a lively
discussion of their work and the play. Perhaps most strikingly, director
Oskaras Korsunovas and his actors insisted that there was no political
dimension to this production, although it seemed to a number of the
delegates that the Estonians' interest in the techniques of Meyerhold and
the writings of Kharms and his circle, all of them victims of artistic purges
by the Soviet promoters of Socialist Realism, must surely have political
resonance in Lithuania at this time, literally before the departure of the
24
last Russian troops. In fact, it gradually became clear that for these artists
theatre with a "political" dimension meant the narrow social realist
tradition, which they were at some pains to put behind them.
The following day the group returned to Riga where they visited
the Eduards Smilgis Theatre Museum. Established in 1976 in the former
home of this noted founder of Latvia's leading experimental theatre of the
1920s, it is devoted to the history of Latvian theatre. After this visit, the
group had lunch at the Riga Arts Club, followed by a discussion with
Latvian critics and journalists interested in the theatre. A reception at the
Finnish Embassy concluded the afternoon, and in the evening the group
again attended the theatre, to see a staging of Dostoevsky's The Possessed
on tour to Riga from the state theatre in Daugavpils, Latvia's second
theatre city, in the southeast corner of the country.
For the final day of the trip the group returned to Tallinn,
Estonia, where after a tour of the old town they attended a production of
Romeo and juliet by the company that had been organized under Soviet
administration as the Tallinn Youth Theatre, but which was changing its
name to the City Theatre. Although the company is a young one, it was
called a "youth theatre" because the Soviet authorities would allow only
one professional "adult" theatre in the city. The mainstage of the new
City Theatre is a charming, small proscenium theatre on the first floor of
an old merchant house very similar to those that line the canals of
Amsterdam. Romeo and Juliet, however, was staged in the cellar on its
ground floor, where ancient stone columns and staircases, and sunken
wooden doors provided a marvelous unit setting for the Shakespearean
tragedy.
As in an all-male Romeo and Juliet that we saw in Finland earlier,
all of the state and most of the family material has been cut in order to
concentrate on the tragic story of the two young lovers. After the
performance the group joined the actors as well as other theatre people
and local dignitaries at the local Arts Club where, as usual, the play and
current theatre life in the country were discussed. In an interesting
parallel to the observations concerning the apolitical nature the
experimental work seen in Lithuania, the Estonian company defended the
disappearance of this background material from the play on the grounds
that their theatre had seen enough politics. Leave that, they said, to
Parliament, and let the stage deal with what they see as the more
fundamental and neglected matter of "the deeper human emotions."
In each of these countries theatre people felt that they were
entering a period of serious new challenges. They often expressed a deep
concern about the economic instability now found in so much of Europe
and how this would affect the theatres, their funding, and their audiences.
At the same time, a conviction was expressed in each country that the
25
theatre, even if not "political" in the old Soviet sense, was nevertheless an
essential part of the national consciousness. As the modern states of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania began to develop, the theatre played an
important role in establishing the legitimacy of the national language and
culture, and as these nations re-emerge in the new Europe that traditional
role has not been forgotten. Even in a period of severe economic strains,
there seems no doubt that the theatre must continue to be supported so
that it may continue to play its role in the intellectual, artistic, and
cultural definition of these newly-independent states.
Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 14, No. 1
26
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT
IN MOSCOW: THE FOMENKO STUDIO AND OTHERS
John Freedman
In recent years, dissatisfaction, disagreement, and mistrust have
been the rule in most every aspect of the theatrical process in Moscow.
Playwrights were unhappy with theatres for diving headlong into the
classics, while theatres were unhappy with playwrights for writing bad,
gloomy plays. Critics accused theatres and playwrights alike of churning
out so much drivel, while theatres and playwrights were unified in their
anger at critics for carping at everything they did.
Things got so bad that everybody finally started looking for a
way to break the stalemate, and the answer for many was a turn to youth.
Critics were the first to jump on the bandwagon. Fed up with what they
perceived to be a tremendous drop in quality in the professional theatres,
they turned their attention to a few unusually talented productions at
various theatre institutes. That brought a swift response from the
theatres: they tried cashing in on the new fad by including student
productions in their repertories. Even a famous movie director (Sergei
Solovyov) tried escaping the "other" Russian cultural crisis--in film-by
making his theatrical debut with students. Meanwhile, encouraged by
abundant publicity, two graduating classes formed their own professional
theatres.
But, as with any fad, there was a lot more sparkle than gold in
the flood of student-oriented productions. This time critics and theatres
inadvertently found common ground: they were unified in forgetting that
the exciting energy of a student performance looks a lot different when
it is transferred to the professional stage and offered to the public, not as
a learner's exercise, but as a legitimate work of theatre.
The first to learn this hard lesson were the members of the 1992
graduating class of the Shchukin Institute. Primarily on the strength of
the talented May 32/City of Mice, this group succeeded in staying together
as a professional theatre named the Learned Monkey (SEEP vol. 12, nos.
2-3, Fall 1992). (fhe name is taken from a game made up by Yevgeny
Vakhtangov and Mikhail Chekhov.) The problem was that, essentially
left alone, the former students were able to do little more than fall apart
gradually and quietly. The Shchukin Institute appointed a low-key artistic
director (Yury Avsharov), provided some funding, and helped them find
a location to perform (a stage at a so-called "Palace of Culture"). But
efforts to do more than perform some of their student productions were
27
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not crowned with success. Eduard Radziukevich, the student who
scripted, scored, and directed the haunting City of Mice, got almost no
support from either his fellow actors or the theatre's administration as he
tried to stage Daniil Kharms's Yelizaveta Bam. It was eventually pushed
aside in favor of an extremely amateurish, all-male production of Romeo
and Juliet (directed by Anatoly Furmanchuk), the premiere of which came
only at the tail end of the 1992-1993 season.' It was performeda handful
of times and then disappeared. As the 1993-1994 season moved into its
second quarter, the future of the Learned Monkey was unclear. A large
number of actors had left the troupe, performances were few and far
between, audiences were painfully sparse, the critics who once had
trumpeted praise were nowhere to be seen, and the company's remaining
die-hards were talking more about bare survival than growth.
It would appear that the new Fomenko Studio (Masterskaya
Fomenko) will have an easier go of it. The students graduated in spring
1993 from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RA Tl, formerly GITIS)
and turned professional in the fall. The studio-named after Pyotr
Fomenko, the artistic director of both the class and the new theatre-has
solid financial backing and an active, devoted administration. For the
moment, at least, it remains the apple of the Moscow critics' eye, and
performances (mostly in tiny halls) are well attended. As of the end of
December 1993, it was performing four of its "exam-productions" and
was preparing to revive the fifth, Marina Tsvetayeva's The Adventure.
There was also talk of a new production scheduled for early 1994.
The studio's active repertory consists of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's
Wolves and Sheep (directed by Fomenko), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
(directed by Yevgeny Kamenkovich), Nikolai Gogol's The Order of St.
Vladimir (directed by Sergei Zhenovach), and a dramatization of William
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (also directed by Zhenovach).
The unprecedented fame garnered by this youthful group started
with The Adventure. Directed by Macedonian Ivan Popovski (himself one
of the students), it had critics gushing superlatives that are rarely heard in
Moscow these days. The Moscow Critics' Association even named it the
best production of the 1991-1992 season, snubbing all the professional
entries in the process. Unquestionably a talented student work, The
Adventure was performed in a narrow corridor on one of the upper floors
of the RA Tl building. But it was the setting, more than anything else,
that gave the performance its sense of innovation. The tiny audience of
forty, also crammed into the corridor, saw only fleeting glimpses of the
"action" as characters quickly flew down or across the corridor-stage
before disappearing into neighboring rooms. As such, the actors seldom
had to build or sustain a mood; it was enough for them to strike effective
poses and let their youthful energy and Tsvetayeva's verse do the rest.
29
30
Popovski's work, deservedly praised, brought him premature
fame. When he was contracted to stage Ferdinand Crommelynck's The
Sculptor of Masks in Autumn 1992 for the Alla Sigalova Independent
Company, he quickly learned how fickle critics and artistic directors can
be. Sigalova herself removed this very unsuccessful production from her
repertory after only a few performances and some suddenly unfriendly
reviews. In early 1993, Popovski was one of three directors (another,
incidentally, was Fomenko himself) who were fired as quickly as they
were hired to help stage the Bogis Agency's production of Alexei
Burykin's Nizhinsky. Popovski's rather harsh personal experiences in his
first forays into professional theatre can be seen as metaphors for the
problems the Fomenko Studio as a whole may soon face.
While some of the young actors show extraordinary potential, it
is clear that many are not ready to be thrust into leading or even
secondary roles. Moreover, the play selection that was so crucial to
broadening their education experience can come across as silly in a
professional context. Especially striking in that category is the dreary,
four-and-a-half hour dramatization of 7he Sound and the Fury. The young
Russians make a game effort to plumb the depths of this wrenching drama
about the Compson family, one of the great composite literary images of
the decaying American South in the early twentieth century. But, despite
a stunning performance of the mute Benjy (Yury Stepanov), this one
should have been abandoned as a warm memory of lessons well learned.
The cultural and generational gaps separating the actors from their
characters are downright deadly. It simply is not possible to take twenty-
year-olds seriously as they struggle to impersonate such complex
characters as Caroline, the bitter, ruthless, old matriarch, or Dilsey, the
wise and ancient black cook.
The Order of St. Vladimir, which combines several early dramatic
scenes by Gogol, in part because its subject matter, is something with
which the students-turned-pros can identify. Nevertheless, the episodic
performance looks more like a collection of clever sketches than a finished
work. Twelfth Night is simply an excuse to turn loose a stage-full of
energetic young people. The problem is that the players are so wrapped
up in their own enthusiasm they never get around to drawing the
audience into the fun.
It should come as no surprise that the troupe does its best under
the guidance of Fomenko himself. The director's light, ironic touch in
Wolves and Sheep, a wicked comedy about a group of provincials whose
only purpose is to cheat each other out of as much as they can, creates a
performance so sly and subtle that it almost has an aroma. First and
foremost, Fomenko freed the young actors of weighty form and alien
content, and invited them to just go out and act. Some of them did with
31
Wolves and Sheep, The Fomenko Studio, Moscow
32
a dazzling flair. The Kutepova twins, Kseniya and Polina, are perfectly
cast and utterly charming as the dueling principals, Murzavetskaya and
Kupavina: Yury Stepanov, the studio's only fully mature actor so far,
gives a Siberian-sized, heartaching performance ofLynyayev, the paunchy,
well-meaning judge who is as helpless before the intrigues of his neighbors
as before the charms of Murzavetskaya's mysterious relative, Glafira. She
is played with poisonous grace by Galina Tyunina, for whom many have
predicted stardom. The remainder of the cast ranges from the adequate
to the abysmal.
But the intimate and atmospheric Wolves and Sheep, originally
staged in 1992, is probably more interesting for another reason altogether.
It is clearly a forerunner to Fomenko's spectacular production of Guilty
Without Guilt at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Spring 1993. Both make the
most of unusual settings in small rooms (the obvious influence of
Popovski's The Adventure), and both recast well-crafted but somewhat
formulaic melodramas by Ostrovsky in a spell-binding atmosphere of
mttmacy. But Guilty Without Guilt was a universally acknowledged
masterpiece, many say a turning point in end-of-the-century Russian
theatre. Meanwhile, Wolves and Sheep was a clever and endearing
performance that showed off some potential talent and gave Fomenko an
outlet for some ideas that had captured his imagination at the time.
Regardless of the outcome of the Fomenko Studio experiment, it
has solidified its founder's reputation as the leading director in Moscow
today. Suddenly, the former assistant to Yury Lyubimiv at the Taganka
Theatre in the 1960s is hearing people idolize him as a "master," and is
watching retrospective showings of his productions on television. The
critical and popular success of Guilty Without Guilt capped it all off, but
it was sustained, one might even say frenzied, publicity surrounding his
RA TI class that laid the foundation.
Other examples of student infiltration into the professional world
have been less heralded, although their purpose was similar: directors and
theatres were looking for something new. The long-suffering Pushkin
Theatre picked up Vladimir Dolgachyov's rambunctious staging of Carlo
Gozzi's One of the Last Nights of the Carnival from the Moscow Art
Theatre School. The National Youth Theatre picked up a similar
production with An Evening of Russian Vaudevilles (directed by Y elena
Dolgina at RA 11).2 Mikhail Levitin incorporated his RA TI students'
breathless performance of "Where is Alice? (an adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland), into the repertory of his Hermitage Theatre. Mark
Rozovsky gave professional billing at his Nikita Gates Theatre to his
RA TI students's largely immature work, Murder (Rozovsky's adaptation
of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment). These productions, and many
33
Wolves and Sheep, Fomenko Studio, Moscow
34
more of their kind, have little to recommend beyond the fact that they
are earnestly and/ or energetically acted.
The dividends (or damages) of hurrying so many young people
into the spotlight so early will only become clear with the passage of
time. Some are bound to be the actors and directors who will eventually
help lead Russian theatre out of the Soviet era. But it is most likely that
we will now begin to see a drop in the popularity of student work. After
all, the unusually high interest in what was transpiring at the schools and
institutes was more an emotional rejection of the offerings in the
professional theatres than an honest appraisal of some talented apprentices.
Ultimately, the formation of the Fomenko Studio will probably be seen
as the high-water mark in Moscow's youth movement.
1
For a rather diffuse, though positive review of Romeo and Juliet,
see Elena Levinskaia, "Melodiia za kadrom," Moskovskii nabliudatel', 8/9
(1993): 40-42.
2
The National Youth Theatre (Rossiiskii molodyozhnyi teatr) is
the new name of the former Central Children's Theatre.
35
ARTHUR MILLER AT THE THEATRE-ON-PODOL:
A CRUCIBLE AND A COUP
Suzanne Trauth
An exchange project in global education between my academic
institution and the Theatre-on-Podol in Kiev, Ukraine, in August 1991
provided an extraordinary theatrical and personal experience. My partner
in the project, a colleague at Montclair State College, and I spent each
evening during our seven-day visit sampling the dramatic fare created by
these unique and wonderfully talented artists (SEEP vol. 13, no. 1, Spring
1993). Our primary mission, however, was to introduce the Theatre-on-
Podol to the American theatre by way of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
Because the Ukrainian company had only limited contact with American
dramatists, Miller seemed an appropriate choice for a first venture. In
addition to his classical stature and international popularity, his weaving
of socio-political threads throughout his plays would appeal to a theatre
that placed a high priority on political issues in their own work.
Parallels exist between the Soviet life that still dominated Kiev
and The Crucible. The period of perestroika, where the examination of
the past served to restructure the future, was akin to Miller's depiction of
political life in 1950s America: a result of his examination of a dark
chapter in our own history relating to seventeenth-century Salem.
Act II, scene ii of The Crucible, the John Proctor courtroom
scene, was sent to the Podol Theatre for translation a month before our
arrival, and we carried with us to Kiev a synopsis of the play and
characters prepared and translated here. I chose, for working purposes,
a section of the scene that had a cast of about a dozen actors and involved
a relatively large number of the company. It would permit the use of
stylized movement (i.e., the possession of the young women by the spirit
of Mary Warren), and would be a very highly-charged, climactic moment
that would urge strong physical and emotional involvement. These
parameters were determined by the performance style of the Podol actors
who inhabit their roles with a theatrical life that is extremely physical,
emotionally full, daringly sensual, and downright gutsy. Bodies are fluid
and expressive, and voices display a wonderful range of sounds and
rhythms. Theirs is a kind of movement theatre that permits them to
incorporate music and dance into all of their stage work.
Upon arriving in Kiev we met with artistic director Vitaly
Malakhov and the acting company and planned our rehearsal schedule.
We worked every day for six days, spending a preliminary hour on dance
36
and movement and the remainder of the rehearsal period on The Crucible.
On the first day we read the previously translated courtroom scene with
four actors reading all the parts, as it was impossible for the theatre to
xerox more than four copies. (As American artists and academics, we
often take the simplest task for granted. Xeroxing, for example, was a
major undertaking for the theatre. In order to obtain additional copies of
the scene to be rehearsed, theatre personnel had to appeal to the mayor's
office for assistance.)
Following the read-through, I discussed Arthur Miller's back-
ground, his writing, the political ramifications of the McCarthy period in
America, the witchcraft trials in Salem, the issues at work in the play, and
the circumstances leading up to the courtroom scene. This was all slow
going, as the interpreter attempted to keep up while I rushed headlong
into my "lecture." The acting company listened intently and seemed to
grasp the issues of the play: presumption of guilt, repressive social
policies, the evils of righteousness, censorship of the individual, fear bred
by mass hysteria, the pursuit of vengeance, and the loss of freedom. They
nodded their heads, and a few said, "Stalin."
This was not new territory for them. We were in the midst of
a community of artists familiar with a kind of tragic fatalism that drives
their collective existence on a daily basis. These actors have seen
Chernobyl's effect first-hand: their children are weakened and listless,
cancer prematurely claimed the life of the leading company member a few
weeks before our arrival, and heart disease, already flourishing due to their
lifestyles, has reached epidemic proportions. This is a company whose
production of A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with devastating
consequences as Theseus, angry with the mechanicals for mocking the
behavior of the aristocrats, exchanges a fake sword for a real one and both
Bottom and Flute, as Pyramus and Thisby, lose their lives. "There are
few happy endings in the Soviet Union," they said when questioned about
the liberties taken with the play. The Crucible had the capacity to touch
their lives in a very direct fashion.
The second and third rehearsals were spent reading, discussing,
and improvising a small segment of this scene (ten to twelve minutes).
Because many of the actors were eager to participate, roles were re-cast
each of the first three days so that several actors had the experience of
playing a single character, thus including as many company members as
possible. In all, some fifteen actors participated in actual rehearsals. We
finally chose a single cast to rehearse the scene in order to arrive at a
stageworthy piece of theatre by the end of the week.
The final three rehearsals were spent staging the scene in some
detail. These actors improvise easily, and characters with no written lines
in t he scene frequently provided a fair amount of verbal input. Even the
37
most specific direction was sometimes re-interpreted in a unique and
innovative fashion. Actors' creativity and improvisational skill often led
them to adjust or cut lines and actions at will. I could tell when they had
made some changes in the script by the reactions of the other actors on
stage as well as those in the house observing the rehearsal. These
disciplined professionals were often child-like in their enthusiasm for the
work and their commitment to the moment. A single question or
statement from me, via the interpreter, would often signal the start of a
vigorous, ten-minute discussion among themselves that might have been
a battle of wills for all its verbal vehemence. I would appeal to the
interpreter for clarification of the "discussion," but often she was too
involved with the actors in the interpretation of the direction. Hence my
ability to pursue the subtleties of the script were sometimes limited. On
the other hand, the characters' physical and emotional lives were so strong
that Miller's bold strokes took on an almost surrealistic aspect.
We decided to begin the scene with a short, semi-improvised
movement piece, organized by my colleague, that established the
atmosphere. It was choreographed to folk music performed acapella by
the actors. The female characters dance simply and with abandon only
to be "crushed" by footsteps and the resounding thud of furniture as male
characters enter and set the scene. This moment of movement provided
a springboard for Danforth's first line, the order to fetch Elizabeth
Proctor. It created in physical form the struggle between the individual's
need for freedom and the censorship of a repressive society.
On the last day of rehearsal, actors found costumes of the desired
period, style, and color; the scene was run and videotaped before the
remainder of the acting company and staff who had assembled to view
our final product. The response from on and off stage was surprise and
delight in our unexpected achievement.
To see a portion of this play performed in Russian with such
emotional and physical commitment was a truly amazing and rewarding
experience. These Podol artists are a very talented, eager group of actors.
We felt gratified by the success of the project, though I must admit that
this was possibly one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken.
It was very educational to learn that the language of theatre is the
language of the body, of the emotions, of the soul, and that the supposed
"language barrier" proved to be less of an issue than we had anticipated.
Most of the time we were able to communicate fairly easily
with pantomime, demonstration, and a good sense of humor. The
interpreter helped, of course.
As I look back now, I remember the scene as a collection of
specific images generated by these courageous actors: Galina, a beautiful,
38
sensual Abigail, possessed by the spirit of the character, whose electric
performance demanded attention; Tolya, an earnest, young cabaret artist,
whose Reverend Hale was an honest man struggling to provide a
conscience for the play; Tanya (who had lost her own husband, Sasha,
only a month earlier to cancer), heart-breaking as Elizabeth Proctor
fighting for the life of her stage husband; and Valeri, whose mature artistic
judgment provided shape to the scene as well as to his John Proctor. All
of them were memorable characterizations.
On Sunday evening, August 18, several hours after the conclusion
of the taping of The Crucible scene, the actors and staff hosted a party for
us in the tiny theatre on St. Andrew's Descent. Because we were leaving
Kiev the next day, this would be the last opportunity to spend time with
our new friends. We shared champagne, fruit, and cookies (all delicacies
by Ukrainian standards), snapped endless pictures, and "talked" in our
newly-discovered language of gestures, a few Russian words, and simplified
English spoken loudly and slowly with great expression. We had all
enjoyed each other immensely during the previous week's rehearsals, and
this theatre experience had bound us together for life. Promises to keep
in touch, visit each other, and never forget the past week were traded on
all sides. There was much laughter, the exchange of gifts, and even a few
tears. Finally, the evening had to end. As we made our way to the door
saying our final good-byes, several actors promised to see us off at the
train station Monday evening for our return trip to Moscow. Tanya, the
actress who played Elizabeth Proctor, softly sang a few words of
" America the Beautiful" in halting English. It was an extraordinarily
moving moment.
The air of celebration created that evening was shattered the
morning of August 19 as we woke to the news of the coup. We gathered
at the theatre shortly before our hastily arranged departure for the Kiev
airport and joined some actors who were preparing for rehearsal, business
as usual. One commented that working on The Crucible at this particular
time was almost prophetic. Its issues stood out in bold relief against a
backdrop of potential repression, fear, and hysteria. The play seemed
more than ever a metaphor for the ever-present dangers of living in the
modern world.
39
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JEWISH THEATRE
HELD IN POLAND
Michael Steinlauf
An unprecedented scholarly event, the first international
conference devoted to the history of Jewish theatre was held in Poland,
October 18-21, 1993. Twenty-seven papers were presented by scholars
from Poland, the United States, Israel, Germany, Ukraine, and Italy. The
conference was organized by the Theatre Department of the University
of L6d:l and the Polish Society of Theatre Historians under the auspices
of the Polish Ministry of Culture, and was held at the Aleksander
Zelwerowicz State Theatre School in Warsaw. Papers were simul-
taneously translated into English and Polish.
The conference took place on the heels of the publication earlier
this year of Volume 41 of the Polish theatre history journal Pamit:tnik
Teatralny. This five-hundred-page issue, entirely devoted to research on
the history of Jewish theatre in Poland up to 1939, is the first such
publication since Jacob Shatzky edited the Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun
yidishn teater un drama (Archives for the History of Jewish Theatre and
Drama) in New York in 1928.
Coinciding with the conference, a festival of Jewish culture was
held that included the screening of pre-war Yiddish films made in Poland
and Ukraine, talks by Polish Jewish writers, and performances by Yiddish
singers and theatre troupes from throughout the world.
The conference opened on Monday afternoon, October 18, with
the screening of two films: Aktor (1993), Krystyna Bevis-Shmeruk and
Irena Kamienska's film about Michal Szwejlich of the Polish State Yiddish
Theater, and]ej teatr (Her Theatre, 1967), Wladyslaw Forbert's film about
Ida Kaminska. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a talk by the
legendary Yiddish theatre director J ak6b Rotbaum of W rodaw who began
his professional career staging Eugene O'Neill with the Vilna Troupe in
1930. Rotbaum reviewed his early years in theatre, including his studies
in Moscow with Meyerhold and Shlomo Mikhoels, emphasizing the
importance of theatre as an agent of education and social change.
The first paper was presented on Tuesday morning, October 19,
by conference organizer Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, director of the
Department of Drama and Theatre at the University of L6di and
President of the Polish Society of Theatre Historians. Kuligowska stressed
the need to approach Yiddish theatre, which was once performed in every
corner of Poland, without either sentimental or ideological lenses, in order
40
to "track the traces of the great and vanishing culture with which fate has
linked us." Her paper was fQllowed qy t ~ t of the academic consultant
to the conference, Chone Shmeruk of Jerusalem, who reviewed Yiddish
dramatic literature created up to World War I. Shmeruk began with an
analysis of why this literature did not develop until the sixteenth century
and then discussed the first Purim plays, early modern biblical and
Enlightenment dramas, the rise of professional Yiddish theatre under
Abraham Goldfaden, and the contributions of the "classical" Yiddish
writers such as Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, andY. L.
Peretz. J6zef Gelston (Lvov) traced the history of the Broder Singers,
several generations of peripatetic Galician musicians, singers and jesters
(originally associated with Ber Morgulis of Brody) from the late
nineteenth century until the Holocaust. Jan Michalik (Cracow) closed the
morning session presenting press and archival research documenting the
first performances of Yiddish theatre in Cracow in the late 1880s.
The afternoon session began with a paper by Maria Stykowa
(Lublin) chronicling Yiddish amateur theatre in Lublin from 1864-1916.
Maria Prussak (Warsaw) examined demonstrations by Jewish students
protesting the staging of certain antisemitic Polish plays at the turn of the
century in Warsaw and other Polish cities. Her paper was followed by
that of the conference secretary, Malgorzata Leyko of L6di, who
chronicled the work of Yitzhak Zandberg, who directed the first
permanent Yiddish theatre in L6dz from 1907-16. Keren Goldberg (Los
Angeles) closed the afternoon session with an overview of the
development of Yiddish theatre in Poland and its meaning for us today.
The morning session on October 20 began with a paper by Elinor
Rubel Gerusalem) on popular Yiddish theatre (the so-called "shund
theatre") based on a study of the performances of Avrom Fishzon's
traveling company at the turn of the century. Focusing on Y. L. Peretz's
theatre writings in Warsaw after 1905, Michael Steinlauf (Philadelphia)
proposed a model for exploring the "kunst/shund" (high/low) distinction
introduced by Peretz into Yiddish theatre discourse. Michael Taub (New
York) then presented an analysis of the social issues raised by Peretz in his
one-act plays, contrasting this body of work with his stories and full -
length plays. Kazimierz Nowacki (Cracow) chronicled Yiddish theatre
activity, both popular and dramatic, professional and amateur, in the cities
and town of Galicia during the interwar period. Closing the morning
session was a paper by Mieczyslaw Abramowicz (Gdansk) focusing on the
little-known activity of Yiddish theatres in Danzig during the first years
of the Nazi regime (1934-38).
The afternoon session began with a paper by J6zef Weichert of
Tel Aviv (read by Marek Bielacki of L6dz) discussing aspects of his father
41
Michal Weichert's work with the avant-garde Yiddish company Yung
Theater (Young Theatre) which he directed in the 1930s. Zbigniew
Osinski (Warsaw) surveyed the little-known work of the Hebrew Theatre
Studio in Vilna from 1927-1933, and its close relations with Juliusz
Osterwa's Reduta Theatre. Focusing on the reactions of the Polish and
Polish-Jewish press to Habima's three tours of Poland (1926, 1930, and
1936), Katarzyna Leienska (Warsaw) presented a contribution to social as
well as theatre history. Eleonora Udalska (Katowice) analyzed Polish-
language productions of Anski's The Dybbuk during the interwar period,
focusing on differences between the styles of Yiddish and Polish
productions. Jan Ciechowicz (Gdansk) surveyed the writings on Yiddish
and Polish theatre that appeared in the popular Polish-language Jewish
weekly Opinia, published in Warsaw from 1933-1935.
The morning session on October 21 began with a paper by
Brigitte Dalinger of Vienna (read by Kowalska) documenting the origins
of Yiddish theatre in Vienna during the last years of the nineteenth
century, and comparing its development to that of Yiddish theatre further
east. On the basis of research in the contemporary German-Jewish press,
Heide Riss (Munich) chronicled the activity of Polish Yiddish actors and
companies in Berlin from the early 1920s to 1933. Liana Tedeschi (Milan)
analyzed the powerful mediating function of Yiddish theatre in New York
at the turn of the century and suggested its displacement of the synagogue
as the social and spiritual center of Jewish life. Marta Meducka (Kielce)
traced the effects of the Yiddish popular repertory developed in the late
nineteenth century in the United States on Yiddish theatre activity in
Poland in the early twentieth century and between the wars. Edward
Krasinski (Warsaw) closed the morning session with a survey of the many
forms of contact and collaboration between Polish and Jewish actors,
directors, scenographers, audiences, theatre critics, and instructors during
the interwar years.
The afternoon session began with a paper by Ruta Sakowska
(Warsaw) on Jewish theatre activity in the Warsaw Ghetto, focusing on
the most ambitious of these efforts: Mark Arnshteyn's Polish-language
Nowy Teatr Kameralny (New Chamber Theatre). This was followed by
two papers devoted to Ida Kaminska's activities in post-war Poland.
Analyzing recently accessible government documents, Joanna Krakowska-
Naroiniak (Warsaw) documented the vicissitudes of Kaminska's efforts to
continue staging Yiddish theatre in communist Poland. Danuta Gibas
(Cracow) explored Kaminska's collaboration with the Polish director
Konrad Swinarski in his productions of plays by Brecht and Diirrenmatt
in Warsaw in the early 1960s. Dr. Marian Fuks (Warsaw) closed the
42
sesswn with a paper chronicling the development of Jewish musical
theatre.
The conference concluded with an appearance by Shmuel
Atzmon, director of the Yiddish Theatre of Israel, who discussed the
development of this theatre. over: the past t"o/O decades and screened video
excerpts from recent productions.
The conference organizers plan to publish the complete
proceedings of the conference in Polish and English. For further
information about the conference, contact: Malgorzata Leyko, Katedra
Teorii Literatury, Teatru i Filmu Uniwersytetu L6dzkiego, ul.
Sienkiewicza 21, 90-114 L6dz, POLAND, fax: 011 4842 78 39 58; or
Michael Steinlauf, Department of History, Franklin and Marshall College,
Lancaster, PA 17604-3003; tel: (717) 291-4288; fax: (717) 399-4413; e-mail:
M _ Steinlauf@acad.FandM.edu.
43
POLISH THEATRE IN THE NINETIES:
CATASTROPHE AND HOPE
Juliusz Tyszka
Editor's note: The following article is a revised and edited version of
a talk given on April14, 1993 as part of the colloquium, "Performance
in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States
Since 1989," sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies at
New York University.
Polish theatre is tasting freedom, and the taste is bitter. The
directors of 109 Polish state theatres (sixtyfive dramarepertory theatres,
twenty-six puppet theatres, nine opera theatres, eight musical theatres, and
one dance theatre) have expressed a desperate need for money to preserve
the "human substance" of their institutions. Poles have not yet
challenged the socialist principle of "common access to cultural goods."
Because of the existing inflation and recession of the last three years,
people in Poland cannot afford the increasingly expensive theatre tickets.
This state of affairs did not change until very recently. The
present state theatre artists have resisted changes that might diminish their
income, social status, and security. There exists in Polish a wise but, in
my opinion, very fatalistic proverb: "People are only human beings."
People in the Polish state theatres are indeed nothing more than human
beings. They are not willing to take risks; they like to be employed for
extended periods in "artistic enterprises" belonging to the state. State
theatre employment guarantees them the security of a regular salary, not
to mention any additional monies for extracurricular activities. More
importantly, it gives them state insurance plus a so-called "continuity of
employment" needed for retirement pensions. The status of being an
artist associated with a state theatre also provides actors with a great deal
of spare time, which can be used in such ways as working as a waiter.
One can also tour the country with a second-rate production. Con-
sidering the increasing number of artists who earn their living in these
ways, it is not surprising that quality theatre has been neglected.
Perhaps it is also not surprising that Polish drama-repertory
theatres have been trying to stage a little bit of everything: farces,
musicals, contemporary dramas, and, most often, dramas included on
school reading lists. There is at least one production for children each
season. However, there have been many incidents in sold-out houses
when a small group of the students have disrupted performances. These
students have launched objects from slingshots at the actors and offended
Slavic and East European Pe-rformance Vol. 14, No. I
44
them by making loud noises during the performance. There have not
only been individual demonstrations of bad manners and misbehavior but
rebellions against compulsory theatregoing in general. State theatres are
at the risk of becoming phantoms: there are no actors, no audiences, no
income, soon there won't be any subsidies.
I am exaggerating of course, but not too much. Let's take, for
example, one of the weekly repertories of the Polish state theatres
between Spring 1991 and Fall 1992, published weekly in Goniec Teatralny
(Iheatrical Messenger). Between April 9 and 14, 984 performances were
staged on the 164 stages of the Polish state theatres. Two hundred and
eighty performances that could have been presented were not, which
represents 28.5 percent of the theatres' total capacity. The number of
theatrical presentations has been continually decreasing. State subsidies
are still paid to t he theatres even if they do not put on as many
productions.
The attitude of government officials is ambiguous. Although
committed to a free market economy, they are very aware of the
importance of theatre in the social life of Poland. They do not want
history to remember them as the ones who gave up on the theatre, nor
do they want to increase the number of unemployed theatre artists. Only
one theatre ensembl e has been dissolved: a company located in r u d z i ~ d z
in the region of East Pomerania. Most regional officials prefer not to
make painful decisions about the theatre's future; they are swayed by the
argument that closing theatres will mark the end of culture in their
regions of the country.
On the other hand, state officials seem quite willing to get rid of
the problem. Warsaw's administration agreed instantly to rent the
Dramatic Theatre to Wiktor Kubiak, a private entrepreneur who
produced the musical, Metro {SEEP vol. 12, nos. 2-3). The decision
prompted protests from the artistic community. Although city officials
agreed with the protesters in principle, they continuously pointed out that
the rent paid by Kubiak would enable the city to provide an additional
seventeen billion zlotys per year to the other theatres. But the demise of
Metro on Broadway forced Kubiak to withdraw his offer; thus the
prospect of additional subsidies vanished.
The directors of state theatres are trying to fill the gap between
the subsidies and the additional financial needs of their institutions by
using various strategies. The most popular is the rental of the premises
to another institution. As a result, many little shops and stands can be
found in the foyer of Teatre Wybrze:ie in Gdansk and part of the Poznan
Nowy Theatre's foyer has become a cafe after performances every
evening. The local radio broadcasting company has found a home in the
Kochanowski Theatre of Radom. There are many more examples.
45
Another strategy to raise funds is the enlistment of local
businessmen to subsidize the theatre or to invest in the theatre.
Unfortunately, Wiktor Kubiak seems to be the only person who has
shown any interest in this kind of investment. Other businessmen have
been neither investing nor helping. Thanks to numerous criminal
offenses, arrests, and accusations against some businessmen, the only
investments that have increased are the ones going to Swiss bank accounts.
The theatre appears to be the last place they want to put their money,
and the hostility of the theatrical community towards Kubiak is a strong
deterrent as well .
Provincial theatres (i.e., theatres outside Warsaw and Cracow), are
trying to organize more tours than before in their regions but the costs
of such enterprises are in most cases too great. The directors are trying
to invite stars from leading theatres to play parts in their productions
Qanusz Gajos in Converted in jaffa by Marek Hlasko in Teatr Polski,
Poznan, for example) or to give recitals. Thus, many provincial theatres
are gradually changing their character from a drama-repertory theatre to
theatre de l'impresariat. In addition, the experimental, independent
companies have developed a system of "special events" tours. A company
from Lublin, for example, organizes a special event in their town and gets
money for it from the state or regional budget. Two weeks later another
special event will be scheduled in Wrodaw. These "special events" bring
money and a viewing public; it is much easier to get money for a "special
and unique tour of theatres 'X' and 'Y' on the occasion of the 400th
anniversary of the Town Hall" than it is to procure funds in connection
with a "simple, ordinary" tour.
And what about the famous Polish experimental theatre? After
all, it seemed to be more flexible and better prepared for dramatic
changes. Experimental theatres either received very small state subsidies
or no subsidies at all. Therefore, they came to rely either on their own
money-making activities or on the occasional state subsidy, or on
donations from the few public and private foundations which have come
into being in recent years. The greatest obstacle to receiving private
donations is a law that does not allow people or enterprises making
donations to cultural institutions to claim them as tax deductions. Every
donation must be simply taken from one's income, and, what is more, the
benefactor must pay a "donation tax." The state budget desperately needs
money and the fiscal officers are keen to tax "everything that moves."
Experimental theatres are trying to cope with the economic crisis
by engaging in the art of "grant writing." They have been filling out as
many grant applications as possible and then waiting impatiently for the
results. In most cases, the results are promising but tricky. Grants from
46
the Ministry of Culture are much less than the amount requested (the
average cut is about fifty percent) and are paid with great delay because
of the slowness of the bureaucratic machine. Consequently, the
organizers of festivals, when announcing their events and inviting theatres
to participate in them, must add the caveat that "all final decisions are
determined by the financial possibilities of the Festival Bureau." (This is
quoted from the letter of the organizers of the Theatrical Reminiscences
Festival which took place, after much delay, in Cracow in March, 1993.)
Such an uncertain situation is typical for all kinds of festivals in Poland.
For example, one of the independent theatres from Poznan applied in
June 1992 for a grant to co-produce a production with a theatre from
Switzerland. The grant, cut in half, was not paid until February 1993
even though the opening night of the show had already taken place in
October 1992.
Attempts to earn money for artistic activity by economic activity
are very rare and bring mixed results. When the young company Klinika
Lalek (The Clinic of Puppets) moved out from Wrodaw to the small
town of W olimierz in Lower Silesia, they tried to achieve financial
stability for their theatre and their daily existence by buying a cinema
theatre and cafe. They have been successful in their business but have not
produced anything for more than a year.
Finding an appropriate place to work is also becoming a serious
problem for the experimental theatre companies nowadays. Currently,
they do not pay rent for their rehearsal and performance space. But it
appears that this comfortable situation is going to change in the near
future. Space is becoming a source of capital as people learn that space
can bring money. Already in a few Polish cities theatre companies that
had located a performance space, renovated it by their own means, and
attained permission to use it for their own purposes, have had to face
representatives from the local bank, cafe, or boutique offering much
higher rent to the city officials. Because the town councils of Polish cities
have recently been in a state of permanent economic crisis, the fate of the
theatre companies is quite easy to guess. They are "encouraged" to look
for space elsewhere.
In conclusion, I would say that this period of "transition" forces
the artists of all kinds of Polish theatres to face many problems. They
will have to learn how to work harder and to be self-reliant, self-sufficient,
and unselfish. Many of them will have to redefine their craft and, first
and foremost , the nature of their professional vocation. The theatre is
losing its great social importance and is gradually becoming only
entertainment.
The tradition, however, still exists. I think it will be much easier
to preserve a noble tradition of Polish theatre in small experimental
47
companies than in great theatrical institutions. The latter are, by their
character, much more susceptible to transformation into uncreative
institutions of "theatre industry." However, I will be pleased if I have an
opportunity to see something like Mickiewicz's Forefather's Eve or
Krasinski's Undivine Comedy on a great stage once more during my
lifetime, and probably will have such an opportunity because both are on
school reading lists.
State officials will have to redefine the goals of cultural policy.
Although this concept seems to have been totally discredited by its abuse
in Communist times, this kind of thinking about the organization and
importance of national culture simply cannot be avoided. It seems to me
quite clear that the continuation of the strategy of "preserving the
substance" and waiting for better times is silly and dangerous. In Western
Europe there are many examples of successful financing of theatre that the
former Communist countries can follow.
One optimistic note is that Polish theatres of all kinds are finally
searching for their own public. This may very well result in the
establishment of an authentic link between theatres and their audiences.
It can only enhance the great, noble tradition of Boguslawski, Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, Krasinski, Norwid, Wyspianski, Schiller, Osterwa, not to
mention Kantor, Grotowski, and Szajna.
48
PAGES FROM THE PAST
FROLOV ON TRAGICOMEDY
Daniel Gerould
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Russian theatre critic and
historian Vladimir Frolov produced a long essay on tragicomedy in which
he argued for the importance of the genre in Soviet drama and forecast
the significant role it was destined to play in contemporary writing for
the stage in the USSR. As a theoretical work Frolov's essay is an original
and pioneering study of a subject that had scarcely been treated before in
Russian. As a polemic with the repressive Soviet establishment still
attempting to enforce a stri<;t code of Socialist Realism, it is a spirited
defense of the new post-thaw playwrights and their experiments with
dramatic form. As has often been the case, tragicomedy meant freedom
from restrictive rules.
Frolov's essay on tragicomedy has never been published in
Russian; because of its promotion of banned and controversial works, it
may have seemed too heretical for home consumption during the
Brezhnev years. A 1968 version appeared in the Polish drama monthly,
Dialog, in November, 1969, and was reprinted in a collection of Frolov's
theatre writings published in Warsaw in 1976. Closely resembling the
Polish version, the longer Russian text consists of a theoretical
introduction and detailed analyses of major Soviet plays that Frolov
int erprets as tragicomedies--Erdman's Suicide, Bulgakov's Flight, Babel's
Sunset, and Shvarts's The Dragon-plus a discussion (added after 1968) of
contemporary specimens of the genre by Vasily Aksyonov, Juozas Grusas,
and Andrei Makayonok.
We are presenting here the theoretical introduction,
approximately one third of the entire essay. Frolov makes a particularly
valuable contribution to critical discourse on the nature and evolution of
the genre on at least two counts. First, he offers a new theory of
tragicomedy based on Russian and Soviet models generally ignored by
scholars and critics investigating the genre. Second, he considers
tragicomedy not simply as dramatic literature but also as performance and
examines the role of the director and actor in creating tragicomic
interpretations of drama on stage. In fact, Frolov demonstrates that in
Russia it has been outstanding theatrical practitioners like Meyerhold,
Vakhtangov, Ruben Simohov, and Georgi Tovstonogov who have been
the important theorists of tragicomedy. In these ways Frolov has greatly
enlarged our understanding of tragicomedy and its liberating role as an
innovative genre.
49
It is worth noting Frolov's methodology. To validate a genre
with low visibility and questionable status in Soviet literature, his initial
rhetorical strategy is to cite as proponents of tragicomedy such prominent
authorities as Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Gorky. Then
after examining tragicomic stagings ranging from Vakhtangov's Wedding
(Chekhov) in 1920 to Tovstonogov's Barbarians (Gorky) in 1959, Frolov
establishes a Russian national tradition of tragicomedy whose roots he is
able to trace back to Griboyedov, Gogo!, and Sukhovo-Kobylin.
Tragicomedy has always been a potentially disruptive genre. It
challenges authority, defies the rules, subverts hierarchies. For example,
it flourished in France as a free form in the chaotic early seventeenth
century until brought to heel and eventually eliminated under the cultural
absolutism of Richelieu and the French Academy which insisted on a
state-sponsored classicism.
In the USSR Socialist Realism became the stifling neoclassicist
doctrine. Unruly genres were suppressed. Of the three tragicomic
masterpieces of 1928 held up for admiration by Frolov, the first two,
Suicide and Flight, were forbidden by the censors before they could reach
the stage, and the third, Sunset, was stopped after two performances. In
presenting these works as exemplary tragicomedies, Frolov hoped to
rehabilitate a genre of bitter satire and sardonic humor that had recently
reappeared in such rebellious new tragicomic plays as Aksyonov's Always
on Sale, Grusas's Love, jazz and the Devil, and Makayonok's 1he
Tormented Apostle and 1he Tribunal.
Frolov's promotion of the tragicomic was a bold defense of the
grotesque and the fantastic in native Russian and Soviet guise as opposed
to officially sanctioned realism. Of course, the grotesque and the fantastic
already dominant in the Western European theatre of the absurd were still
forbidden as decadent and bourgeois. For the young generation of
Russian writers in the post-Khrushchev era the ironies, ambiguities, and
relativism characteristic of the tragicomic genre offered an appealing
alternative to the smug certainties of Socialist Realism. It is not surprising
that new Soviet playwriting of the 1960s tended toward tragicomedy and
that Aleksei Arbuzov, Grigori Gorin, and Aleksandr Vampilov sometimes
used the term to describe their own work and that many plays by Leonid
Zorin, Aleksandr Volodin, Viktor Rozov, and Edvard Radzinsky can
appropriately be assigned to the genre.
The uneasy transitional world of the late 1960s and early 1970s
in the USSR with its crumbling of absolutes, self-questioning doubts, and
breakdown of barriers was profoundly tragicomic. First, notions of
heroism had been undermined, and then moral values lost clear definition
both in the family and in society at large.
50
51
A dramatic form without rigid structure, allowing mixed
responses, suited the times. This is the context in which Frolov wrote his
provocative essay on what he regarded as the most difficult and complex
of dramatic genres, tragicomedy.
The Tormented Apostle, Satire Theatre, Moscow, 1970
52
VLADIMIR FROLOV: TRAGICOMEDY
Translated by Leonid Chechelnitsky and Roberta Reeder
Tragicomedy is a classical genre that occurs in contemporary
drama. This genre arose a long time ago and evolved in the practice of
world drama. However, it has never been the subject of theoretical
analysis. We cannot point to a single work or article in Soviet theatre
scholarship devoted to this problem. Only isolated statements by those
active in the theatre and by critics can testify to the fact that this genre
is alive in the drama. It has attracted the attention mainly of the
practitioners of theatrical art and especially of directors.
And yet if one speaks about the power of survival of genres, then
tragicomedy has a broader diffusion in contemporary Western art than,
let us say, tragedy, which has lost its former dominance. This is
significant in that tragicomedy, which had originated as a result of the
blending of the tragic and the comic, is a synthesis of mid-genre elements
and, like anything possessing a synthetic form, answers the formal
conceptualization, problems, and goals of contemporary art. It is not
"pure" tragedy, but tragicomedy that has become the most "suitable" and
enduring genre in the dramatic art of the twentieth century. Bernard
Shaw observed that "In its tragedy and comedy alike, the modern
tragicomedy begins where the old tragedies and comedies left off."
1
We
might recall that Shaw credited Ibsen with establishing tragicomedy "as
a much deeper and grimmer entertainment than tragedy. "
2
It is well known that Shakespeare boldly varied different genre
elements in his tragedies and comedies. But this mixing did not destroy
the genre dominant in either the tragedy about King Lear, where there is
so much comic mischief, or the comedy, Twelfth Night, in which we are
moved by the serious dramatic episodes.
However, in Shakespeare's works there are plays which, having
originat ed from the blending of tragedy and comedy, have produced a
new genre. These are the plays written after Hamlet: Troilus and Cressida,
Measure for Measure, and All's Well that Ends Well . Shakespeare scholars
define them in different ways as "dark comedies," "problem plays," or
"tragicomedies."
These Shakespearean plays are close to tragicomedies. There are
no tragic catastrophes in them. However, the state of hopelessness, the
collapse of ideals, and the most profound moral crises bring the images of
these works close to the tragic. The best impulses of the heroes find no
support in actual life. Love, honor, conscience come into conflict with
the ugly laws of life. If in the comedies of the earlier periods (Twelfth
53
Night, As You Like It) love was, as Aleksandr Anikst notes, "invariably
healthy and the basic principle of life," then in the "dark comedies" it is
"the source of disharmony and even misfortune."
3
Everything in the world collapses, is shaky, unstable. This is
essentially the leitmotif of these three Shakespeare plays. In their
substance they tend toward the genre of tragedy, but it is still impossible
to call them tragedies. A satiric view of the world is strongly reflected in
them, but they are still not comedies. In the works of Shakespeare these
plays are separated into a special genre; they are tragicomedies. The
social, philosophical conflicts in these plays are embodied through the
prism of a tragicomic conceptualization: the artist sees the epoch as a
capricious mix of the comic and the tragic, and at times also in the form
of the phantasmagoric. The noble heroes do not find satisfaction either
in love or in deeds.
In Russia, tragicomedy arose only gradually. From Gogo! and
Griboyedov to Sukhovo-Kobylin, and then to Chekhov, Gorky and
Andreyev there extends a profound tragicomic sadness which colors the
humor and laughter of the dramas and comedies of these dissimilar artists.
In the comedies of the Russian classics, which portrayed great
social conflicts, there was no "laughter without sadness," there was no
"exposure without pain." The serious aspect of the comic suffused the
language, images and situations of comedies with a dramatic effect and
with very strong tragic emotion. This was, evidently, purely Russian, a
national feature of the conceptualization of the artists reflecting the
character of the genre combinations.
In 1909 the critic Aleksandr Kugel, comparing Chekhov as a
playwright with Gogo!, found that they had much in common. We
cannot totally agree with him, but in the richness of the tragicomic
element that brings Chekhov close to Gogol, he was correct.
"In Chekhov, of course, there is no mysticism," wrote Kugel, "as
there is in Gogol. Gogol was of a passionate and seeking nature, and that
is why his laughter had its complement in mystical pessimism. Chekhov
was by nature more even tempered, more contemplatively calm, and that
is why his humor found its complementary color in elegiac pessimism.
But both were melancholy. There is no artistic laughter without sadness, no
exposure without pain [italics ours- V.F.] ... Gogol's mysticism, his
religiosity, his asceticism are a natural atonement for the genius of a
humorist who has revealed and described life for us as a combining of
tragic banalities. And Chekhov paid for his humor with the endlessly sad,
plaintive notes, quiet as an angel's lament, of Ihe Cherry Orchard."
4
Of course, we do not wish to make absolute only one side of the
comic which appears so typically in Gogo) and Chekhov's satire and
54
55
humor. This was merely one current in Russian drama. In Chekhov's
plays, genres developed which were not always tragicomic. The particles
and elements of comedy, drama, and tragedy were constantly varied in
them. There was always present that tragicomic view of the life of his
times which also determined the sad comic quality of Chekhovian dramas
and comedies. This was the special genre tuning fork that resounds in his
plays, even in those that Chekhov said were cheerful.
Referring to the last act of 1he Cherry Orchard, he declared in a
letter to Olga Knipper, "the last act will be cheerful, indeed the entire
play is cheerful, light. "
5
Was this really the case?
In a letter to Chekhov dated May 8, 1904, Vsevolod Meyerhold
wrote of 1he Cherry Orchard:
Your play is as abstract as a Tchaikovsky symphony. And the
director must above all catch its tonality. In the third act with
stupid "stamping of feet" in the background (and this "stamping
of feet" must be audible) Horror makes its entrance unnoticed by
anyone.
"The cherry orchard has been sold." They keep on
dancing. "It has been sold." They keep on dancing. And so it
continues until the end. When you read the play, the third act
produces the same effect as that droning in the ears of the sick
man in your story "Typhus." A kind of itch. Mirth in which
the sounds of death are heard. In this act there is something
Maeterlinckian, something frightful. I make the comparison only
because I am powerless to express it more precisely. You are
incomparable in your great work. When one reads the plays of
foreign authors, you stand out by yourself in your originality.
And in drama, the West must learn from you.
6
Meyerhold found the precise definition of the tragicomic
conceptualization that appears in The Cherry Orchard: "Mirth in which
the sounds of death are heard." Of course, this is really no longer mirth,
but something different--a tragicomic interpretation of life.
Almost twenty years later another director, Evgenii Vakhtangov,
in pondering the problems of Chekhovian drama, stresses precisely this
tragicomic characteristic which brings Chekhov's comedy close to the
tragedies of Aleksandr Pushkin. On March 26, 1921 Vakhtangov noted
in his diary, "I want to present Pushkin's Feast In a Time of Plague and
Chekhov's Wedding in one evening. In 1he Wedding there is a feast in a
time of plague. Those infected with plague are even unaware that there
56
.A
0
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ri
3

57
is no more plague, that humanity is liberated, and that people do not need
generals at their weddings. There is no lyricism in Chekhov; there is
tragedy."
7
When Vakhtangov noted these words down, he had already pro-
duced Chekhov's Wedding at the Mansurov Studio. Pushkin's Feast In a
Time of Plague was never realized by Vakhtangov on stage. But how
strikingly and daringly did the director conceive it: in one performance
he dreamed of putting on The Wedding and Feast in a Time of Plague-
Chekhovian comedy and Pushkinian tragedy--recognizing that these
pieces, which appeared to be heterogeneous by genre, are closely
connected in their tragic effect.
Vakhtangov interpreted The Wedding as a tragicomedy. In his
book on Vakhtangov, Ruben Simonov described effectively the nature of
the work on the performance, how its genre developed. We naturally will
not linger in detail on this production. We will m p h ~ i z only two
episodes which are essential for understanding the genre of tragicomedy.
First of all, work on The Wedding helped the Vakhtangov troupe
to develop a theatrical style and the skill to perform tragicomedy, which
demands of the actor a special relationship to the nature of the character
and to the genre of the play.
"In the tragicomic genre," writes Simonov, "the difficulty
consists in knowing how to combine the comic and the tragic, how to
support vividly expressive outward characteristics with inwardly saturated
comic and dramatic feelings. An actor of tragicomedy must be equally as
susceptible to dramatic or tragic as to comic or gay situations. He must
be able to make the audience laugh at one moment, and in the next make
it listen to him attentively and sympathetically, and a minute later reduce
it to tears."
8
And second, Vakhtangov's Wedding, just as later Princess
Turandot, determined the entire direction of the creative work at the
Vakhtangov Theatre. From Chekhov's Wedding to Gorky's Yegor
Bulychov, Aleksandr Korneichuk's The Front, and Ruben Simonov's
adaptation of Gorky's novel Foma Gordeev right up to the production of
Mikhail Stelmakh's Truth and Falsehood the director and actors at this
t heatre have shown an attraction to and bent for a t ragicomic conception
of individual characters and plays as a whole (thus, for example, t he
brilliant satirical parody scenes in Truth and Falsehood are combined with
markedly dramatic episodes). - We need only refer to the words of
Simonov, who writes, "Vakhtangov's work on The Wedding was to us,
the witnesses of his work and participators in it, a theatrical university.
. . . We entered into his special Chekhovian understanding of tragedy and
58
59
comedy. We acquired a feeling for genre, and especially the genre of
tragicomedy, whose model was Chekhov's Wedding."
9
Motifs of tragicomic conceptualization can also be discovered in
Andreyev's plays, Blok's lyric dramas, and Gorky's "scenes." Naturally,
in each writer these motifs appear in connection with different ideological
and artistic problems.
The beginning of the twentieth century in Russian literature is
marked by a significant, almost universal proclivity of writers for mixing
the tragic and the comic, for creating new genre structures on the basis of
the intermixing of these elements. Thus, for example, after having created
a type of profoundly social revolutionary drama, Gorky also used
tragicomic elements extensively. In The Petty Bourgeois and The Lower
Depths, in these plays typical of Gorky, a special technique of mirroring
invariably operates--the tragic nature of the ridiculous, of the absurd,
which translates the action into an aspect of the tragicomic perception of
life.
But we can easily relate Gorky's Barbarums to the genre of
tragicomedy.
And indeed we will be aided in understanding the genre of this
work in a contemporary way by Soviet theatre practice, and in particular
by the work of Georgi T ovstonogov on Barbarians at the Bolshoi
Dramatic Theatre.
In his book, The Profession of the Stage Director, Tovstonogov
writes that in rehearsing the play, they treated Barbarians at the BDT as
a tragicomedy. For the director the contrast between the ridiculous and
the tragic constituted the key to the solution of the separate images and
of the play as a whole. Based on this, combinations and emotional states
in the given circumstances
10
were discovered, justifications for the scenes
and their interrelationships were found.
It is interesting that Tovstonogov's ideas about the principles of
tragicomic performance agree with what Simonov wrote. This shows
once again that in the practice of creating a tragicomic performance the
representatives of different generations of Soviet directing have followed
the same path.
Demanding a contrastive representation of character from the
actors, Tovstonogov writes, "It was necessary to ensure that the actor
derived pleasure from the combination of the ridiculous and the horrible
in his role, from the constant combination of hot and cold, black and
white, and all this within the framework of the author's logic and the
logic of normal experience, and within the framework of external
verisimilitude. "
11
60
61
Within the "framework of external verisimilitude"-this is not a
trivial stipulation. Actually Barbarians is a tragicomedy written without
extremely grotesque, or even psychologically grotesque episodes. In this
respect it is different from, say, The Wedding and from Sukhovo-Kobylin's
The Death of Tare/kin. Gorky constructs the dramatic narration in
Barbarians in outwardly peaceful, somewhat muted tones. The tragicomic
is revealed in the prosaic, everyday grotesque, in the profundity of the
development of each character. It is important to emphasize this, for it
so happens that tragicomedy is characterized not only by external
intensification and marked stylization of the action, as in The Death of
Tare/kin, or by the psychological grotesque as in The Wedding (where
there is also absurdity, the "sadness" of the comic in an ordinary
situation--a false general!). Plays of "external verisimilitude" can also
belong to this genre. It is possible for the structure of the genre to be
different, but it must answer one requirement: the portrayal of the
tragicomic fates of the characters.
"Where does the play's genre definition as tragicomedy come
from?" Tovstonogov asks as he establishes the genre of Barbarians, and he
answers, "I think it is resides in Gorky's work itself. The writer finds the
tragic in all that is ridiculous, and the ridiculous in all that is tragic. If
you look at the composition of the work, you will see that the entire play
is constructed according to this principle. The author chose those turning
points where comic scenes pushed to the grotesque become horrifying.
You will not find a single exception. Every character who seems
ridiculous at first glance turns out to be profoundly human. Even
someone like Redozubov. At first he is a huge scarecrow in the
backwoods of provincial life. The humor lies only on the surface (he puts
up posts in the middle of the road that are of no earthly use to anybody,
he forces his son to wear a fur coat in summer in order to make him lose
weight), but unless behind this facade there is tragic paternal love and the
drama of Redozubov's life of failure, unless one feels a touch of human
warmth, the essence of Gorky's character will be entirely missed.
Or take Golovastikov. What kind of a person is he? He goes
around snooping, he is an informer and spy. He is an amalgam of vices.
But there is something else more important. What is truly horrible is that
he is a crucified Christ. He offers himself as a sacrifice. People do not
like him. He knows it and bears his cross, because he considers he is
doing something pleasing to God. At that point he is not simply
ridiculous, he is horrifying, because he is a messiah, a martyr. The
essence of the character as conceived by Gorky lies in this combination
of martyrdom and the abominable."
12
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 14, No. 1
62
Barbarians, Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre, Leningrad, 1959
63
Tovstonogov's conception is clear. He staged Barbarians as a
tragicomedy, finding in this genre the true key to conveying all the riches
of Gorky's drama. The combination of the tragic and the comic was
central to the acting technique. From the director's point of view, it
completely corresponded to Gorky's play, to its conception and to its
system of scenic realization. T ovstonogov carried out the solution of the
genre problem in "each atom of stage action," by revealing the tragicomic
essence of such extremely complex characters as Monakhov, Cherkun,
Lydia Pavlovna, and the result was a tragicomedy of life. A philosophical
drama emerged which for many years enjoyed undiminished success with
audiences.
Gradually, step by step, the Soviet theatre has assimilated the
most difficult, synthetic genre, the genre of tragicomedy. Of course, we
cannot say that tragicomedy has achieved wide dissemination in the
theatre in our country. In this genre we remain behind Western
European theatre, where tragicomedy is written and produced more than
tragedy. That is why we find so precious those little grains of experience
gathered by our theatre in the genre of tragicomedy.
It is now possible to draw some conclusions. Tragicomedy in
Russian drama has its own national features. It basically arose from the
satiric current which was connected with the Gogo! and Chekhov
traditions, from the serious and sad comic spirit evoking the most
profound pain and tragicomic sorrow. Therefore it is natural that one of
its basic techniques is the grotesque-excessive exaggeration, justified by the
logic of the characters, exposing a comically absurd, monstrously inept,
worthless trait. The grotesque itself serves as a technique and device in
any comedy. However, the tragicomic grotesque, stressing a sense of the
horrifying, is further enlarged and exaggerated in scope. Inherent in it
there is always to be found in one way or another the tragic quality of the
ridiculous. For an example one can compare two classic comedies: The
Inspector General and The Death of Tare/kin. They are similar in one
respect-in the comic, satirical exposure of life. The misunderstanding in
The Inspector General, leading to the tragic denouement, transforms a
comedy into a tragicomedy. Gogol's play, saturated with the dramatic,
constantly turns into comedy "louder than ordinary life." The
seriousness inherent in it becomes dramatized and is at times close to
tragedy.
In The Death of Tare/kin, the grotesque grows on the soil of the
tragic nature of the ridiculous: in this case the exaggerations have reached
enormous, almost fantastic dimensions; facets of the real and the unreal
are intermixed; the dead Tarelkin delivers a speech about himself as
already deceased; different people appear within one person, Varravin is
64
at one point Varravin, and at another Polutatarinov, etc. Given such a
perception of life, the ridiculous gives rise to the phantasmagoric: we are
shaken by the tragic nature of the comic. Comedy is naturally
transformed into tragicomedy.
In addition to the tragic grotesque, the genre of tragicomedy also
uses fantasy. Fantastic images operate in the real world of the play, and,
as in Gogol's humoresques, features of the real alternate with elements of
fantasy painted with somber humor. Vakhtangov provisionally called this
particular type of realism "fantastic realism." After his brilliant
productions, The Wedding, and especially the rehearsals of Princess
Turandot, where he magnificently combined realism with the fantastic as
well as with techniques of improvisation, Vakhtangov noted in his diary
(it was, as Simonov testifies, his last entry): "The correct theatrical
means, when discovered, give the author's work a true reality on the
stage. One can study these means, but the form must be created, one
must fantasize. This is why I call it 'fantastic realism.' Fantastic realism
exists, it should now be in every art.''
13
One must not think that Vakhtangov wanted his "fantastic"
realism to contrast with realism as a method of art. He wished to
emphasize the idea that "the form must be created, one must fantasize."
Without creative fantasy supported by the truth of feelings and the given
circumstances, it is difficult to solve many problems in art, and especially
in the art of tragicomedy. Essentially Vakhtangov "fantasized" the form
of The Wedding. Fantasy, supported by the nature of the genre of
Chekhovian comedy, allowed the director to clarify its essence with great
inventiveness and richness. Fantasy enabled another artist of the stage,
Georgi Tovstonogov, to find the basic points for embodying tragicomedy
in a play of "external verisimilitude"--in Barbarians. In both cases the
directors did not fantasize abstractly, but proceeded from the spirit and
content of the tragicomic works. Fantasy served only as a supplementary
component; it led to a search for the nature of the feelings characteristic
of each of these tragicomedies.
In the structure of tragicomedy one can discover another similar
feature: its action, its themes assimilate the characteristics of high comedy
and tragedy. What seems to take place is a joining of the two genre
currents. In speaking about satiric comedy, we noted its tendency toward
tragedy, an approach toward tragicomic content. In tragicomedy this
interaction of tragedy and comedy forms a single whole, more complete
than in satiric comedy. If in tragedy the action flows impetuously
toward catastrophe, toward tragic denouements with inexorable force,
then in comedy it stops suddenly, returns to its initial position, and again
receives a new impetus (for example, in The Inspector General the rising
action mounts until Khlestakov's departure, then there is an interruption,
65
a return to the point of departure, and again a new impetus, the letter
read by the postmaster, and again a return to the original position-the
denouement and tableau).
In tragicomedy there develop simultaneously, in various ways,
both an impulse toward an inevitable denouement and also a return to the
points of departure that emphasize with new force the comic fate of the
hero. The rhythms of tragicomedy are more severe and alarming than the
rhythms of comedy; they contain a sense of the destructiveness of the
hero's behavior that derives from tragedy. But the character's comic
destiny and the futility of his aims are stressed by comic techniques.
In other words, tragicomedy is comedy, but only as conceived by
the writer in such a way that life appears with all the tragic permanence
of evil. Laughter then stops being exclusively a force for exposure, and
the dominant role is taken by a tragic sense of the ridiculous and its social
danger--a tragic sense of unthinking foolishness and, at the same time, of
the nightmarish consequences resulting from it.
14
The difficulties of this genre arise from its very nature: a simple
mixture of the elements of the tragic and the comic does not yet provide
the basis for the development of tragicomedy. We know that since the
time of Shakespeare, the regrouping of mid-genre elements within the
same type of drama has become common practice everywhere. Tragi-
comedy arises from such a joining of the tragic and the comic only when
the given circumstances have been intensified and strained to the utmost.
Therefore, tragicomedy is perhaps the highest form of the blending of
comedy and tragedy, a form of artistic unity in which comedy could turn
into tragedy if it were only a question of the importance of the subject
matter. But this cannot happen, because what in tragedy is serious to the
highest degree (insurmountable social conditions, the hero's tragic flaw,
the great strength of his aspirations) seems to be inverted in tragicomedy,
i.e. it turns out to be insurmountable absurdity, bitter, senseless error,
futile pretensions, etc.
Joining the tragic and the comic produces one type of
tragicomedy that has various individual species. For in the practice of the
art there is yet another type of tragicomedy that arises from joining
comedy to serious drama. As examples of this kind of tragicomedy we
can cite Ostrovsky's An Ardent Heart and Chekhov's Wedding where the
action develops as a mixture of the comic with elements of a serious
drama of manners. (There are no signs of tragedy in either An Ardent
Heart or The Wedding. These are plays in which parallel to the comic
there arise moving episodes characteristic of serious drama.) Comedy may
be joined not only with tragedy, but also with serious drama in order to
undergo a transformation into tragicomedy.
66
A characteristic norm can be established: no matter what kind
of motifs make up the serious, philosophical basis of tragicomedy,
whether tragic or dramatic, in tragicomedy the dominant will always be
the comic principle, but of a kind that brings not only laughter, but also
pain, distress, a sense of disorder and of the perniciousness of the
ridiculous. We can define this crucial element of tragicomedy as the tragic
nature of the ridiculous (a phantasmagoric condition).
The tragic nature of the ridiculous constitutes the special state of
crisis typical of the characters of tragicomedy. They are ridiculous and at
the same time tragically doomed. They may make every effort to achieve
their goals, attempt to accomplish a significant action, strive to play their
unique role, but their nature is always such that in the end their aims
prove comically worthless or tragically dangerous. Therefore, the
exposure of the heroes of tragicomedy is grandiose, and the losses and
casualties are extremely instructive. (In this connection it is worth
recalling Nazim Hikmet's tragicomedy Was There an Ivan lvanovich or
Not? which exposed very emphatically and very wittily the pretenses of
a person who was tragically dangerous and at the same time comically
worthless.)
Tragicomedies have appeared at different times in Soviet drama.
There are not many of them, but their appearance is extremely interesting
for clarifying the richness of the genre of Socialist Realism. In this genre
Gorky led the way for Soviet writers. From his first plays right up to
Yegor Bulychov, the writer's attention to tragicomic images and situations
did not waver. Gorky's experience, his skill in this genre, was not widely
followed, although we should mention that the writer himself highly
valued and defended such tragicomedies as Nikolai Erdman's Suicide (1928)
and Mikhail Bulgakov's Flight (1928).
For various reasons these tragicomedies, as well as Babel's Sunset
(1928), provoked the censure and bans of the contemporary
Glavrepertkom (Central Repertory Committee) and were not distributed.
These plays had a difficult and sad fate. Gorky's favorable attitude toward
them did not help. Suicide was forbidden in Meyerhold's production and
at the Moscow Art Theatre; Sunset was played twice on the stage of the
MAT-2 in 1928; Flight saw the boards only at the end of the 1950s (at the
Volgograd Theatre in 1957, at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad in 1958).
Yet these plays are very significant for the development of the
genre of tragicomedy in our drama. They are diverse in kind, and each
one of them belongs to a different type of tragicomedy. We may say that
Babel's Sunset is a serious drama which turns into tragicomedy as a result
of the coupling and regrouping of elements of comedy. Bulgakov's Flight
belongs to plays with a tragic theme which is conceived in a tragicomic
manner. And Erdman's comedy, Suicide, by the nature of its genre,
67
continues the tradition of Gogol and Sukhovo-Kobylin: the
embodimentof the tragic nature of the ridiculous is its main characteristic
which defines the tragicomic conflict.
Translation revised by the editor.
1
Bernard Shaw, Selections from Shaw (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1977), 277.
zrbid., 277.
3
Aleksandr Anikst, Tvorchestvo Shekspira (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1963), 405.
4
Aleksandr Kugel, " Teatral'nye Zametki," Teatr i iskusstvo 12
(1909): 229.
5
Anton Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 20 {Moscow,
1951), 135.
6
Chekhov. Literaturnoye nasledstvo, vol. 68 {Moscow: Akademiya
nauk SSSR, 1960), 448.
7
Evgenii Vakhtangov, Zapiski. Pis'ma. Stat'i. {Moscow-
Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1939), 232.
8
Ruben Simonov, S Vakhtangovym {Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959), 40-
41.
%id.,62.
1
0'fhis phrase refers to Stanislavsky's concept discussed in An
Actor Prepares. "Given Circumstances. This expression means ... the
story of the play, the facts, events, epoch, time and place of action,
conditions of life, the actors' and regisseur's (director's) interpretation, the
miseen-scene, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting
and sound effects--all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take
into account as he creates his role. (The Magic) If is the starting point, the
given circumstances, the development." An Actor's Handbook, trans. E.R.
Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1936) first ed. 1924.
[Translators' note.]
68
11
Georgi Tovstonogov, 0 professii rezhissera (Moscow:
Vserossiskoye Teatral'noye Obshchestvo, 1965), 142.
12
Ibid., 142-3.
13
Vakhtangov, 262.
14
This paragraph, important for Frolov's argument, is not in the
Russian test, but appears in the Polish translation: Wladimir Frolow,
Dramaturgia i Teatr (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe,
1976), 111. [Editor's note.]
69
Bockerer, Slovak National Theatre, The Cleveland Playhouse
70
HOW ARE THINGS IN BRATISLAVA?:
THE SLOVAK NATIONAL THEATRE VISITS OHIO
Scott T. Cummings
It turns out that Cleveland has more than one sister city. In June
1992, the New Experimental Theatre of Volgograd, Cleveland's "partner
city" in Russia, brought their production of Erdman's The Suicide to the
Cleveland Play House as part of an international theatre exchange titled
Full Circle. In 1993, the program completed its second trip around the
block, this time in conjunction with Bratislava, Cleveland's "partner city"
in the newly independent Slovak Republic. The Cleveland Play House
toured Bratislava and Prague in June with their production of John
Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, and in September the Slovak National
Theatre brought Bockerer, a 1948 folk comedy by Ulrich Becher and Peter
Preses, to northern Ohio.
The Slovak National Theatre (SNT), like Slovakia itself, has its
origins in the ashes of World War I and the crumbling Austro-Hungarian
monarchy. Organized as a private professional theatre in 1919, the
SlovenskC Narodne Divadlo has maintained opera, ballet, and theatre
companies since it opened in the spring of 1920 with Smetana's opera
Hubicka, the ballet Coppelia, and a play by the Brothers Mrstlk titled
Marisa. In the first decade, the theatre company included both Czech and
Slovak actors; as a result, Slovak-language plays were produced
infrequently. In 1932 two independent ensembles were created, one
performing in Czech and the other in Slovak, and in 1939, when the first
independent Slovak state was proclaimed and the SNT became a national
cultural institution under the Ministry of Education, the Czech acting
company was dissolved and the enterprise "Slovakized." Ironically, the
Slovak Republic had to endure a hot war and a cold one before becoming
a truly independent nation on January 1, 1993. The current repertoire of
the SNT includes two dozen plays, among them works by Shakespeare,
Pirandello, Camus, Sartre, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, and the Slovak
playwrights Karvas and Mnacko.
Ulrich Becher (1910-1990), a native of Berlin, was a novelist and
playwright whose 1932 anthology of short stories, Men Make Mistakes, was
illustrated by George Grosz and burned by Hitler as an example of
"decadent art." Peter Preses (1907-1961), an Austrian, was an actor and
director who spent most of his career at the Josefstadt Theatre in Vienna.
Both men spent time in the United States during the Anschluss (the
German annexation of Austria as the eastern province of the Third
Reich). They returned to Vienna after WWII, where they collaborated on
71
two plays, The Viennese Whistler and Bockerer, a Viennese folk comedy in
the realistic and satirical tradition of Nestroy and Anzengruber. First
performed at the Neues Theatre in der Scala in Vienna in 1948 with Fritz
Imhoff in the title role, Bockerer has had a sporadic production history,
waiting fifteen years for its second production (on Austrian television) and
another fifteen for its German debut at the National Theatre in
Mannheim. Peter MikuHk first directed the play for the Slovak National
Theatre in 1986; the simultaneous translation provided during the
Cleveland performances represents its English-language debut.
Given the century-long struggle for Slovak cultural autonomy and
respect, the choice of Bockerer for the Full Circle program seems, at first
glance, odd. Not only is it a German-language play first performed in
Austria, but it passed out of the SNT's repertory in March 1992 after 130
performances in six years and had to be remounted specially for the
Cleveland engagement. International exchanges are Janus-like affairs
which must face two different cultures and Bockerer's familiar situation
and popular theme made it a natural choice for a large Midwestern
industrial city with a multi-ethnic immigrant population that includes,
among many others, John Demyanuk. It is a play about Hitler, the
madness of Nazism, and a farcical form of passive resistance which makes
a hero of an everyday Joe.
Set in Vienna during the Anschluss, the play revolves around a
Schweik-like butcher and sausage-maker named Karl Bockerer (played
with comic aplomb by Leopold Haverl) whose good-hearted oafishness
helps him to remain ethically unscathed while others around him are
capitulating, fervently or grudgingly, to the institution of Nazi law in
Austria. As fascism encroaches more and more on the life of the people,
his simple-minded commitment to basic folk values such as love of family
and loyalty to friends make him something of a moral beacon, a keeper
of the faith until the Allies come and chase the brown shirts away.
The play begins in Bockerer's cozy dining room as he and his
best friend Hatzinger (a postal inspector) await the arrival of their Jewish
friend Rosenblatt (a lawyer) for their regular Thursday-night card game.
They discuss the "new reality" and wonder how many more card games
they will have now that the Nuremberg Racial Laws have made it illegal
for Aryans to socialize with "racially impure elements." In his typical
literal-minded way, Bockerer does not understand at first why the
Nuremburg law applies to the city of Vienna or, for that matter, to those
who have no fear of racial pollution. "Jew, not Jew. Pure bred, rye
bread. I don't care," he says with comic nonchalance. When Rosenblatt
arrives, he announces that he is emigrating to America. Bockerer's son
passes through on his way to a meeting of the Nazi SA. His wife calls on
72
Rosenblatt's legal expertise to doublecheck the documents which prove
her Aryan heritage. A question mark on a relative's baptismal certificate
has her worried and her husband teases her about being part-gypsy, part-
"Zulu," or maybe even a Jew.
In a series of thirteen episodic scenes, each of which is introduced
by a Brechtian scene-title banner high overhead, the play goes on to trace
the dehumanizing effects of the Anschluss on all but the happy-go-lucky
butcher. Nothing makes Bockerer's isolation clearer than the third scene,
which takes place on Austria's newest national holiday, the Fuhrer's
birthday. His son polishes his boots and his wife puts on her Sunday best
before heading off to march in the big parade, but Bockerer is going
nowhere. April 20th is his birthday, too, as it turns out, and he elects to
stay home alone to toast himself with a shot of kvass in each hand.
When Hatzinger stops by to offer his congratulations, Bockerer, half-
drunk, becomes contemplative. He is only a simple butcher, he says, but
he has a good nose. "I smell blood," he says ominously. Hatzinger
strikes up a boisterous drinking song on his accordion, but the sounds of
the martial celebrat ion in the street and on the radio once again dampens
t he mood.
In scene after scene, Bockerer's jolly insistence on just being
himself amounts to a back-handed defiance of Nazism. When a panic-
stricken mother is afraid to retrieve her young daughter who has
wandered into a park forbidden to Jews, Bockerer volunteers (and suggests
his own child-like innocence by spending a few minutes playing with the
girl). When Rosenblatt surreptiously appears at the train station to leave
the country, Bockerer is there to say good-bye and run interference if
necessary. When a bunch of chauvinistic Berliners question the national
character and drinking preferences of the Viennese, Bockerer stands up to
them and triggers a barroom brawl. When interrogated by the local
Gestapo about his relationships with Rosenblatt and another friend named
Hermann (a railway worker and a Communist), Bockerer claims he has
nothing to hide, including the blood on his butcher's apron.
From the beginning, the play puts Bockerer on a collision course
with his son Hans, a thinly drawn character so caught up in his career as
a Nazi that he strikes his father in one scene and informs on him in
another. When Hans causes Hermann death's by reporting him to the
Gestapo, Bockerer throws his son out of the house. In the second act,
Hans, now an SS officer, suddenly develops a conscience and a queasy
stomach when a friend home on leave from Russia describes in vivid detail
"the liquidation of suspicious elements in the occupied territories."
Hatzinger lures his drinking buddy Bockerer into a cafe for a sentimental
reconciliation scene with Hans before he leaves for the Russian front,
where he dies in the Battle of Stalingrad.
73
This, of course, marks a turning point in the war and for the
remaining four scenes, Bockerer and all Vienna hope not to be destroyed
while waiting for the Allies to liberate Austria. The final scene offers a
few surprises. The war is over and while Bockerer's wife and Hatzinger
hang American, British, French, and Russian flags outside the shop to
welcome the Allies to Vienna, Bockerer is inside soaking his feet.
Suddenly, Adolf Hitler walks into the room, seeking refuge in the city of
his youth and exhorting Bockerer to carry on the struggle for Aryan
supremacy. When the initial shock wears off, Bockerer steps out of his
foot bath and says, "For twenty-five years you haven't shut up. Now I'm
going to talk." And he proceeds to lambaste Hitler with much the same
fearlessness he has demonstrated throughout. Not until the furious
Fuhrer comes at him with a meat cleaver do the men in the white coats
arrive with a strait jacket. It turns out that this Hitler is no more than
an escapee from a nearby psychiatric hospital. (A curious case, say the
orderlies, a paper-hanger with a case of megalomania.)
The second surprise brings the play to its happy conclusion.
Bockerer's wife announces the arrival of a special visitor and in walks
Rosenblatt, now a sergeant in the United States Army. He has returned
home as a member of the Allied forces arriving just in time for their
Thursday-night card game. The three men share a heartfelt toast and
resolve to be on their guard lest a nightmare like Nazism ever sneak up
on them again. The cards are shuffled and dealt and the play ends exactly
where it began.
This tidy, "full circle" ending and the wishful return to normalcy
which it depicts suggest how the play's folksy simplicity extends all the
way to the dramaturgy itself. We watch Nazism descend on middle-class
Vienna like a storm or a plague and then watch to see how the citizens
react while they wait for the cavalry to come and chase it out again. This
creates a connect-the-dots moral hierarchy in the dramatis personae with
Bockerer at the top, his friend Hatzinger (a master of the art of looking
the other way) a bit below that, his wife (a slavishly obedient moral
chameleon) further down, and his son-the-Nazi near the bottom. Oddly,
none of them ever faces a moment of truth or even stands at the bar of
poetic justice. When Hatzinger's apartment building is bombed, he is out
getting drunk. The wife is never exposed for the moral hypocrite that she
is. Even the son is at his most sympathetic when we last see him on his
way to fight and die in Russia. They are, in the end, all victims of Hitler,
who turns out to be just another loony who walked away from the local
nuthouse.
There is something naive and simple-minded about all this, even
for a folk play, as if wishing fascism away would make it so. When
74
Bockerer stands in wet bare feet and tells off the surrogate Fuhrer, it ha,
all the power of scolding the dog for peeing on the rug ("Bad Hitler!
Bad!"). And when the reunited friends sit around the card table and vow,
"Never again," it has the ring of a Sunday school catechism. The play
makes no attempt to plumb the evil within (or whatever human trait it
is that tolerates an evil like Nazism), and if it implicates in the least the
simple masses as silent Holocaust collaborators, it does so gently and
forgivingly as to be ineffectual. As represented by Bockerer, they are just
plain Volk, charismatically jolly, inured to hardship by a life of hard
work, proud, true to hearth and home, subject to human foibles, but
decent deep down, in a word, good. There is a time and a place for a
message such as this--"It's not your fault. There's nothing you could have
done"--and perhaps 1986, a few years before the Velvet Revolution, was
such a time in Czechoslovakia. In Cleveland in 1993, it seems a bit
quaint.
The choice of the production was probably inevitable, given the
competing priorities, numerous compromises, and logistical nightmares
that go into arranging a direct one-to-one exchange between two theatres
on two continents. The souvenir program for Bockerer includes an
excerpt from a letter which hints at the ultimate value of such an
exchange. Written by Dusan Jamrich, director of the Slovak National
Theatre, to Josie Abady and Dean Gladden, the artistic director and
managing director respectively of the Cleveland Play House, it says, in
part:
For more than forty years we had an iron curtain on the edge of
our town--the barbed wire, minefields and observation towers
with machine guns separated us from peace-loving and neutral
Austria. The road to Vienna, which measures thirty miles from
Bratislava, was for us, then, as long and unimaginable as the road
to Cleveland .... We can now reach Vienna easily in less than
an hour- if we observe the speed limit. The only curtain we are
left with is in the theatre, and this is as it should be, for in the
theatre a curtain serves its purpose. What is now closer to us is
not only Vienna, but also, as you can see, Cleveland. For us,
too, the world has become a "global village," and while for you
something like that is quite natural, to us it still feels like we are
celebrating a festival.
The Cleveland Play House merits high praise for bringing a small part of
that festival to the Midwest's "North Coast" and for fostering the kind
of international ties which, if wishing (or theatre) could make it so, would
keep a play like Bockerer a historical curiosity for a long time.
75
NIKOLAI GOGOL'S THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR
AT THE NATIONAL ACTORS THEATRE
David Callaghan
Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century comedy, The Government
Inspector, was recently presented as the second production of The
National Actors Theatre's (NAT) 1993-1994 season in New York City.
Under the artistic leadership of Tony Randall, the company has
persevered despite much negative criticism and several lackluster
productions. Last year Randall added Michael Langham to his staff as an
"artistic advisor," with Langham serving as the director for The
Government Inspector (as well as for NAT's successful production of
Timon of Athens last Fall).
Gogol's well-known plot is set in Czarist Russia, providing a
pointed expose of the corrupt, provincial bureaucrats of a typical small
town. Led by the bullying Mayor, the authorities cheat and abuse the
local populace at will. Upon this scene arrives Ivan Khlestakov, an
anonymous clerk from Moscow who has squandered his money en route
to his father's estate in the provinces. Stranded without funds in the
town's inn, the urbane dandy is mistaken for a government inspector by
the leaders of the community. Thinking that Khlestakov has arrived
"incognito" to expose the incompetence and graft which is the lifeblood
of the town, the Mayor and his cohorts flatter and bribe the unsuspecting
clerk in their fawning efforts to obtain a positive report.
As the play progresses, Khlestakov takes increasing advantage of
the officials' hospitality, finally offering a false proposal of marriage to the
Mayor's daughter before leaving town with a bulging wallet. The faux-
Inspector's true identity is revealed shortly thereafter by the Postmaster
(he habitually reads the town's mail), who has opened a letter in which
Khlestakov has described his good fortune to a writer friend in Moscow.
Each of the dupes receives his or her comeuppance as the Inspector's
descriptions of their foibles is read aloud. As they descend into a
cacophony of finger-pointing and outrage, a gendarme arrives to inform
the gathering that the real government inspector has arrived
(consequently, the officials are literally frozen in horror in the play's final
tableau).
Gogol's barbs cut deep into the institutional life of the Czarist
Empire, with references to "learned" teachers who make idiot faces,
drunken soldiers who wander about town naked under their overcoats,
and civil authorities who inflict frequent injustices on their charges. In
Slavic and East Performance Vol. 14, No. 1
76
a scene where the townspeople petition Khlestakov concerning the
Mayor's brutality, a Sergeant's widow reveals that she has been crippled
by a flogging. Upon learning of her confession, the Mayor whines to
Khlestakov, "I never flogged her--she flogged herself!" Such moments of
dark satire lay bare the pressing social problems of Gogol's Russia,
thereby grounding the humorous antics of the characters in a broader
context of much-needed humanit arian reform.
Unfortunately, while competent and fairly amusing, Langham's
production never quite achieves the manic level needed to maximize the
full impact of Gogol's comic masterpiece. Furthermore, and perhaps
more troubling, the production lacks the biting edge needed to underscore
Gogol's satirical portrait of a society in chaos. The result is a muting of
the social criticism which is the true intent of the play beneath its broad
humor.
These problems result primarily from the casting of Tony Randall
as Khlestakov. As with last season's Three Men on a Horse, Randall is far
too old for the role, which Gogo! describes as "a young man of twenty-
three, thin and slender." Randall's bland characterization relies upon his
patented comic takes and "shtick," and his languid portrayal of the
Inspector results in an approach which deadens the comic energy of the
production. Furthermore, David Patrick Kelly's throw-away performance
as Khlestakov's servant, Osip, exacerbates the tempo problems, while the
talented Lainie Kazan turns in a disappointing performance as the Mayor's
wife, Anna (complete with an inexplicable pseudo-English accent).
Randall 's casting is especially unfortunate when juxtaposed against
the fine group of character actors who portray the town bureaucrats.
Particularly noteworthy are Peter Michael Goetz as the conniving,
obsequious Mayor (or "Police Governor" in this slangy translation by
Adrian Mitchell, further adapted into an "American version" by Mark
Vietor), and Derek Smith and Jefrey Alan Chandler as Bobchinsky and
Dobchinsky, the two foppish landowners who first recognize the
"incognito" Inspector. Whenever these actors dominate the action the
production moves along briskly, only to be sidetracked when Randall,
Kelly, or Kazan re-appear.
To Langham's credit, his staging of several difficult crowd scenes
is active and adroit, and he seamlessly choreographs a large group of
supernumerary actors (costumed as servants) in rapid, almost frantic scene
changes that are often quite comical in their own right. Ironically, the
madcap quality of these busy sequences, accompanied by Stanley
Silverman's lively original score, captures the flavor of Gogol's comedy
more effectively than does the overall production itself.
Douglas Stein's setting consists of two flown panels of what
appear to be crude flats, as well as of two wagons representing the town's
77
inn and the Mayor's home. As with the settings of previous NAT
productions such as The Seagull, the overall look of the show seems cheap,
not very sturdy, and conceptually fuzzy. Luckily, Lewis Brown's
costumes fare much better in conveying the squalor of provincial life and
the officials' pompous, overly-ceremonious efforts to impress the
Inspector.
Despite the aforementioned problems, this production of The
Government Inspector is a respectable effort and certainly the best NAT
production to date seen by this reviewer. While Tony Randall's
performance fails to illuminate the key role of Khlestakov, there are
enough strong supporting performances and moments to convey the
essence of Gogol's play, which retains an all-too-unfortunate connection
with the social ills of our present era.
78
UKRAINKA'S FOREST SONG AT LA MAMA
Roxana Stuart
New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity this spring to see
Lesya Ukrainka's Forest Song in an innovative adaptation at La Mama
E.T.C. Under the direction of Virlana Tkacz, the Yara Arts Group will
first take the production to Ukraine, where it will be presented as a co-
production of the Lviv Youth Theatre. After the tour, the company
returns to New York for the run at La Mama, beginning either May 27
or June 9, 1994.
I saw a performance of this work-in-progress at the La Mama
First Street Workshop Space on December 5, 1993. Yara's Forest Song, as
this production is now called, is a very free adaptation by Tkacz and
Wanda Phipps. The adapters have not attempted to reproduce the
complex verse forms of Ukrainka's original, but instead have striven for
the spareness and directness of free verse. They simplify, consolidate, and
eliminate some characters. The play is much cut, and additional poetry
has been included by Pavlo Tychyna, Uvanuk (an Iglulik Eskimo woman),
Margaret Atwood, and anonymous Japanese poets translated by Kenneth
Rexroth, among others.
Forest Song {1911), a "fairy drama in three acts," is one of the
outstanding works of Ukrainian literature, rich in folklore and love of the
landscapes and forests of Ukrainka's native Polissia. The themes of
alienation from nature and betrayal of one's own nature are beautifully
intertwined. The play is a subtle retelling of a myth which has variations
in many cultures: the story of a female nature spirit who falls in love
with a mortal man, always with tragic results (except in Disney's 1he
Little Mermaid, the most recent version). Earlier versions include Jean
d' Arras's fairy tale of the mermaid Melusine (c1387), Friedrich de Ia Motte
F ouque 's Undine ( 1811 ), Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid"
(1836), and Jean Giraudoux's Ondine (1939). Most closely related to Forest
Song is Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka (1900), with libretto by the Czech poet
Jaroslav Kvapil. In Dvorak's opera, Rusalka's prince is unfaithful,
damning her forever to lure mortals to their death at the bottom of the
lake. In the last scene the repentant prince dies by Rusalka's kiss.
Giraudoux's Ondine also ends with the prince's death. While a rusalka
(naiad) is a secondary character in Ukrainka's play, her heroine, Mavka,
is rather a forest sprite, tree spirit, or dryad (called Sylph in Tkacz's
translation). Rejecting her former lover, Will-o'-the-Wisp, she falls in love
with the peasant boy Lukash as he makes music on a reed flute, symboli-
79
80
zing a spiritual side to his nature of which he is unaware and which soon
dies away under the brutality and coarseness of his life. The peasants live
in conflict with nature; their way of life is a bitter struggle against
starvation in which they subdue the earth and all living things, killing
them or forcing them to obey. Mavka attempts to yoke herself to this
life, but the plants and animals speak to her, pleading for mercy.
Lukash's mother sees her as lazy and sly, much preferring the industrious
and materialistic widow Kilina for her son's bride. Kilina easily seduces
Lukash, as physical powers are superior weapons to spiritual ones in this
case. This error of judgment results unhappily for all four principals:
Mavka, Lukash, Kilina, and the Mother. Mavka is condemned to oblivion
by "He Who Dwells in the Rock," while the Forest Elf, a nature spirit
and father figure (Willow Mother in Yara's version), turns Lukash into a
wolf as punishment for his greed and blindness. In the last scene he plays
again on his pipe, Mavka is called back to her human form, and the lovers
die together under the falling snow.
In Yara's Forest Song the domestic drama ends when Luke
(Lukash) takes the wrong bride, choosing industry over nature, as it were.
The symbolic nature of the choice is revealed as the Sylph, rejected by
Luke, is carried off by the Spirit of Shadows. Her punishment consists
of being transported to a future time in which the forest has been
obliterated, her clearing is a city street, and the lake has become a bar
presided over by a female bartender, the rusalka (Ondine) now
transformed into the "Mistress of the Waters." The production's funniest
moments come when the Sylph, more out of her element than ever, tries
to order a drink as the bar's various denizens try to seduce her, and
fragments of her first love scene with Luke are replayed as d e j ~ vu. The
sympathetic Ondine tells the Sylph of a favorite oak tree, the last of the
forest to survive, condemned by city planners for being "on the wrong
side of the street," and facing its death with courage and nobility. The
play ends with a strong ecological message.
One's first impression on reading Ukrainka's Forest Song is that
it is an unproducible, if beautiful, closet drama with its talking plants and
animals, living, growing scenery, and seemingly unrealizable stage effects.
Yara's production, however, demonstrates that such an impression is due
to a poverty of imagination and that the simplest means are often the
best. The piece adapts very well to Yara's minimalist presentational
staging, reminiscent of Paul Sills's Story Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare
Company's Nicholas Nickleby. Assuming multiple roles with simple
changes of costume pieces, members of the ensemble easily transform
themselves from the trees of the forest to a field of wheat to the barroom
customers in an ecologically devastated future. The Sylph's Willow
Mother and Luke's Mother are played by the same actress in a nice touch
81
82
Mother and Luke's Mother are played by the same actress in a nice touch
of coincidentia oppositorum.
The simple abstract setting, designed by Watoku Ueno, consists
of a large white rectangle with a smaller one in front of it. Images of
nature and, as the evening progressed, abstract collages of the detritus of
civilization are projected on them. The smaller rectangle serves at first as
Ondine's lake, concealing a transparent water tray illuminated from below
in which the actors play with their hands and seem to submerge
themselves, effectively creating a rippling water effect on the ceiling.
These simple but evocative means creates a watery environment that is
both poetic and convincing.
The Yara company exhibits a pleasing blend of ethnicities and
styles. Katy Selverstone was outstanding in the cast as Ondine and other
characters; she has an authoritative stage presence and a trained voice.
The Sylph was expressively portrayed with open-eyed innocence, graceful
movement, and raw vulnerability by Yunjin Kim. Timothy Reynolds as
Luke was natural, honest, and resisted editorializing against his character.
Some of the most lyrical passages are echoed in Ukrainian by one
of the actresses, Irina Soto, and more Ukrainian texts by Oksana Batiuk
and Attila Mohlny will be added. The goal is a truly bilingual
production, each language providing a musical accompaniment to the
other. One added poem was spoken simultaneously in Japanese. The
influence of Chinese and Japanese theatre was also apparent in the
pervasive use of music (composed by Genji Ito), stylized movement
(choreography by Shigeko), impersonation of inanimate objects, and the
use of symbolic props.
According to Virlana Tkacz, founder and artistic director, Yara
means "spring" in Ukrainian, "arrow flying to the target" in Japanese,
and "body" in Polish, and therefore is triply appropriate for the
company. Tkacz has created several other works for the group: Blind
Sight, about the blind poet Vasyl Yeroshenko who lived and wrote in
Japan (SEEP vol. 13, no. 3), Explosions, concerning the nuclear disaster in
Chernobyl, and A Light from the East, on Les Kurbas, a theatre director
of the 1920's from Kiev (SEEPvol. 11, no. 1 and vol. 12, nos. 2-3). These
bilingual productions toured extensively in the United States and Eastern
Europe, including an appearance at the Berezil International Theatre
Festival in Kharkiv. Tkacz has won a number of grants and prizes for her
translations. The Y ara Arts Group, according to its literature, "creates
theatre that explores the ideas and cultures of the East. Yara artists are
of Asian, African, Eastern and Western European ethnic origin and create
original theatre pieces using poetry, historical documents, drama, and song
to form what one critic described as 'extended meditation on an idea.' "
83
84
Yara's Forest Song is a work-in-progress which will be developed
further while the company resides in Ukraine. Tkacz told me that she
envisions . moving the piece in the direction of illuminating our
relationship with trees and strengthening the ecological message that
underlies Ukrainka's work. While the United States is certainly in no
position to boast of its record in protecting the environment, nature
conservation is a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe and after the decades
of ecological devastation by the Soviet industrialization of this area, the
message is of urgent importance for this newly independent state. Tkacz
remarked, "In Ukraine, people talk too much about being part of
European theatre rather than of world theatre."
When the company returns to La Mama this spring it will be a
fine chance to see an imaginative production of one of the most
interesting and unusual Symbolist dramas by a distinguished and too-little-
known poet, Lesya Ukrainka, and also to see an innovative intercultural
theatre group developing a fascinating synthesis of East European, Asian,
and American folkways and theatrical traditions.
85
ON VIEWING A PRODUCTION
OF VLADIMIR GUBARYEV'S SARCOPHAGUS
Charlotte J. Headrick with contributions by Vreneli Farber
Entering the theatre for the production of Sarcophagus at Oregon
State University, April 1993, the audience was disturbed by the austerity
and sterility of Richard George's set: a series of ten doors, five on either
side of the central opening with a nurse's station anchoring the playing
space. Downstage were three conversation clusters, chairs and circular
coffee tables. Except for the computer at the nurse's desk, the setting
recalled the 1950s.
While the set was under construction, I often wandered into the
theatre and was reminded repeatedly of Meyerhold's famous setting for
Gogol's The Inspector General in 1926. Meyerhold's design consisted of
ten dark red wooden doors in the upstage area with four doors on either
side of the downstage area surrounding a central playing area. Although
Sarcophagus's scene designer denied the inspiration, saying that the script
calls for the doors, the arrangement had bizarre and ironic echoes: the
tension of Meyerhold's revolutionary tragicomedy against a chill ing
indictment of a catastrophic system breakdown.
1
Commenting on Meyerhold's masterpiece, Herbert Marshall says
that beneath the surface of comedy, Meyerhold was attacking "the fact of
autocratic bureaucratic stupidity that continued to pervade even Soviet
Russia. . . . Meyerhold would be caught in the coils of this ancient
Russian tradition of autocratic oppression, which he satirized so savagely
in his productions."
2
Gubaryev in 1986 in his loose docudrama
Sarcophagus writes about more "bureaucratic stupidity" surrounding the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 in Ukraine, an explosion which
spewed radiation across Europe.
In Sarcophagus each of the doors, as per Gubaryev's stage
instructions has a light over it.
3
In the Oregon State production the
lights were red which glowed when the cubicle was occupied. As the play
progressed, the lights flashed to alert the hospital staff and as patients died,
one by one, the lights were extinguished. Throughout the production, the
cyclorama changed colors from pale green to muted blue to electric red.
Sarcophagus is a very difficult play for any theatre company to
attempt but especially challenging for a university group. Director C. V.
Bennett was fortunate to have two experienced community actors to
balance the undergraduate cast. One of the two, a computer software
designer and engineer, holds an undergraduate degree in physics and so
86
Slavic and East European Performance, Vol. 14, No. 1
brought an immediate credibility to his portrayal of the Physicist. He
understood the Physicist's desperation to finish his computations. Because
of a low turnout of men at auditions, Bennett very shrewdly saw an
opportunity to do cross gender casting. The role of the Investigator,
intended for a man, was ably played by a woman. In addition, one young
man was cast in two roles, the Fireman and Kyle, the American Professor
of Surgery. Finally, the voice of the former head of Broadcasting at
Oregon State University, a professional broadcaster most of his life, was
used as the radio announcer of the play and considerably enriched the
production. As he soothingly offered instructions on what to do in a
nuclear emergency, his melodious voice simultaneously calmed and
unnerved us as we sat in the dark listening to his words.
In this American university production, at times the British
translator's idioms struck the audience as odd, further removing us from
the world of the play. Like many East European dramatists, Gubaryev
wants us distanced; he wants us to hear the message, absorb the lesson.
It is a cliche to term the play Brechtian because on the surface it is not,
but with the use of the voice over, the lights, the double casting, and the
message being presented over and over, it takes on some aspects of Arturo
Ui or Galileo.
Occasionally, Gubaryev's Sarcophagus reminds us of Janusz
Glowacki's Cinders, first produced in the United States in 1983. Roughly
contemporaneous to the 1987 Sarcophagus, Cinders like its Russian cousin
has received dozens of American collegiate productions across the United
States. Gubaryev's world is that of the hospital research center,
Glowacki's is that of the reformatory and the artificial world of the
filmmaker. Glowacki wants to expose corruption and repression, and his
heroine becomes a symbol for Solidarity and the Polish people. Gubaryev
communicates his message through the world of the hospital and its
patients with an investigator hunting the truth in order to expose a chain
of incompetence and inefficiency. Both plays are message oriented with
large casts; both expose corruption and incompetence leading to tragedy:
the crushing of the Cinderella figure in Cinders and the nuclear explosion
of Reactor 4 in Sarcophagus. The heroine of Cinders who refuses to
cooperate becomes a symbol of the spirit of her country. She functions
much as Bessmertny does in Sarcophagus; he is a symbol of the
indomitable spirit of the Russian people, refusing to die against all odds.
Selling this play to a typical American undergraduate college
audience was not easy. One of my students asked me if I "enjoyed" the
play. My response was that this was East European theatre and one did
not necessarily "enjoy" it. The task of an audience member, I explained
to him, was to be instructed and to learn, and even to take action. As I
was explaining this, I thought about Dmitri, a Russian biology student
87
from St. Petersburg who is also studying to earn a theatre arts minor at
Oregon State. In this past year, Dmitri's favorite play produced by the
University Theatre was a rather weak student-directed production of
Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon. Sarcophagus and Aunt Dan are
intellectual pieces, theatre of ideas rather than action. My feelings about
both pieces are the same: they are worthy pieces of theatre but they
demand work from the audience, oftentimes work American audiences,
particularly an undergraduate one, are not willing to give. Just as Shawn
wants us to analyze the seductive nature of evil, Gubaryev wants us to
examine the results of Chernobyl, hopefully forcing us both to think and
to act. In a program note for the Oregon State University production,
director C. V. Bennett cites translator Michael Glenny who says that
Gubaryev wants us to see "the appalling dangers inherent in the way this
energy source has so far been handled by those responsible for it. "
4
Dmitri's glowing reaction to Aunt Dan was the minority one. And the
minority viewpoint was reflected in the attendance figures for Sarcophagus.
Sadly, students did not flock to see Gubaryev's work.
Watching Sarcophagus triggered more in me than an academic,
intellectual response. It brought back memories. My father and the
father of one of my college friends, both now in their seventies, worked
most of their lives with nuclear energy. Because of their firsthand
experience with it, both are still staunch believers in nuclear energy as a
power source. In another program note, Robert Gale is quoted, "if we
misuse nuclear energy, there will be no history. . . . Nuclear energy
anywhere on this planet is nuclear energy everywhere."
5
Sarcophagus brought back waves of images of growing up in East
Tennessee in Knoxville, seventeen miles from the Oak Ridge nuclear
laboratories. I remember "duck and cover" exercises, school evacuations,
never really knowing what my father did, a friend's family bomb shelter
stocked with canned goods, growing up knowing that if the Russians
attacked, we in East Tennessee were major targets and we would not
survive a blast. Sarcophagus reminds me that Three Mile Island is closed
and Chernobyl is a wasteland. It reminds me that Oregon voters closed
down the Trojan Power Plant and that the plant is now being dismantled.
As the world shrinks and we daily become more and more of a
global community, the message of Sarcophagus continues to speak to us
and will continue to speak to us as long as nuclear energy remains a
source of power in Russia, France, England, the United States, or in any
country. Three Mile Island seems like a small glitch compared to the
magnitude of Chernobyl and its aftermath. Playwright Gubaryev warns
us that we have to be vigilant, ever vigilant to avoid even the tiniest of
errors, the most insignificant of misjudgments.
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Slavic and East European Performance, Vol. 14, No. I
As long as there are nuclear power plants in active use
throughout the world, productions of Sarcophagus will continue to be
scheduled. Like the genre of anti-war plays, starting with Aeschylus's
Agamemnon and continuing into the present,
6
a growing body of anti-
nuclear plays has developed. Dating from Greece in the fifth century B.C.
to the troubled Northern Ireland of our own time, a large canon of anti-
war plays have been penned. They continue to be written and not
heeded. If we do not heed the lessons of Sarcophagus, there will be no
need to build a body of anti-nuclear plays. Sarcophagus warns us that if
we do not learn this lesson, we are doomed.
Postscript: On April 6, 1993, during the run of the Oregon State
University production of Sarcophagus, a tank of radioactive waste exploded
and burned in the Siberian city of Tomsk-7, "contaminating a vast area
and exposing the firefighters to dangerous levels of radiation. "
7
Art
imitating life and life imitating art. The explosion was yet another chilling
reminder of the currency of Gubaryev's play.
1
Perhaps Gubaryev is consciously or unconsciously alluding to
Meyerhold's design. It may have served as an inspiration for him when
he wrote the stage directions for Sarcophagus.
2
Herbert Marshall, The Pictorial History of the Russian Theatre
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1977), 135.
3
Vladimir Gubaryev, Sarcophagus, trans. Michael Glenny
(Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company). This translation was
first produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, September 17, 1987.
4
Bennett in his director's notes asks, "So what is the message of
the play?" and quotes translator Glenny to answer this question:
"Sarcophagus is not a polemic against the use of civil nuclear energy.
Although fueled by a considerable charge of emotion, the author has not
set out to be a partisan on either side of the issue . ... These are the facts,
he is saying: disregard them at your peril. Possessed of these facts, it is
then the business of the politicians, their scientists, and administrators,
and ultimately the public to debate and to pronounce on the broader
questions raised by the play's warning." Program, Sarcophagus, Oregon
State University, April 2-4 and 8-10, 1993.
5
Quoted in the program notes.
89
6
Despite the terror and hardship of war, a production of Hair
continued to play in Sarajevo, with a Bosnian/Croat/Muslem overlay
making its own anti-war statement rather than an American anti-Vietnam
War protest. As recently as the spring of 1993, CNN carried reports of
this production. Folk singer Joan Baez even sang with the production on
her visit there in the Spring of 1993. As of August of 1993, the shelling
of Sarajevo continues. It is unknown if Hair is still playing.
7
"Tank explosion at Siberian plant spreads radiation," Corvallis
[Oregon} Gazette-Times, April 7, 1993, 1.
90
Slavic and East European Peiforrnance, Vol. 14, No. I
CONTRIBUTORS
DAVID CALLAGHAN is a freelance director and a doctoral student in
the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York
Graduate School. He reviewed Witkiewicz's The Water Hen in SEEP vol.
13, no. 1.
MARVIN CARLSON is the Executive Officer and Sidney Cohn
Distinguished Professor of Theatre in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at
the City University of New York Graduate School. He is author of
Theories of the Theatre and many other books.
SCOTT T. CUMMINGS writes about theatre and drama from his home
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
VRENEU FARBER is an assistant professor of Russian in the
Department of Foreign Languages at Oregon State University. She is
currently engaged in a long-range project on the life and work of
Aleksandr Vampilov. She is also an actress.
JOHN FREEDMAN is the author of Silence's Roar: The Life and Drama
of Nikolai Erdman (Mosaic Press) and the editor/translator of The Major
Plays of Nikolai Erdman and A Meeting About Laughter: Sketches, Interludes
and Theatrical Parodies by Nikolai Erdman, both forthcoming from
Harwood Academic Publishers. He lives in Moscow where he is the
theatre critic for the Moscow Times.
CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK is an associate professor and coordinator
of Theatre Arts in the Department of Speech Communication at Oregon
State University. Her research areas include Southern playwrights and
contemporary British and Irish theatre. She is primarily a director.
MICHAEL STEINLAUF teaches modern Jewish history and culture at
Franklin and Marshall College, where he is the Straus Judaic Scholar in
Residence. He has written about Jewish theatre and press m pre-
Holocaust Poland, and the history of Polish-Jewish relations.
ROXANA STUART is a professional actress and professor of theatre at
Adelphi University. Her doctoral dissertation, "Vampires of the
Nineteenth-Century Stage" (CUNY 1993), will be published this year by
Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Her writing has also
appeared in Theatre Studies, Themes in Drama, and other journals.
91
ESZTER SZALCZER, a native of Hungary, is a student in the Ph.D.
Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate
School.
SUZANNE TRAUTH is an associate professor in the Department of
Broadcast ing, Dance, Speech Communication, and Theatre at Montclair
State College in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.
JULIUSZ TYSZKA is a Polish theatre critic who was a visiting Fulbright
Scholar at New York University in the Spring of 1993. He has recently
authored a collection of essays about his theatre experiences in New York
(see Books Received).
Photo Credits
Antique Feast, The Orchestics Group, Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts
Peter Mezei
Antique Feast, The Orchestics Group, Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts
Forms of Motion, The Orchestics Group
Four Elements, The Orchestics Group
Colour Play, Szkene Theatre, Budapest
Zolran Magyarosy
Wolves and Sheep, The Fomenko Studio, Moscow
Mikhail Guterman
The Tormented Apostle, Satire Theatre, Moscow, 1970
Always on Sale, "Sovremennik" Theatre, Moscow, 1965
Barbarians, Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre, Leningrad, 1959
The Alma Law Archives
Bockerer, Slovak National Theatre, The Cleveland Playhouse
Slovak National Theatre
Yara's Forest Song, The Yara Arts Group, La Mama's First Street
Workshop Space
Watoku Ueno
92
PLAYSCRIPTS 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 I, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No. 3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredynski. 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 1be Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett . $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .
No. 6 1be 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).
No. 8 1be Trap, by Tadeusz R6zewicz. Translated by Adam
Czerniawski. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled
and edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00
foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Toborski, 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).
93

SEEP Vol.14 No.1 Spring 1994

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SEEP Vol.14 No.1 Spring 1994

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volume 14, no.

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