SEEP Vol.22 No.2 Spring 2002

volume 22, no.
2
Spring 2002
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York Graduate
Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All subscription requests
and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East European Performance:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Theatre Program, The City University of New
York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Kurt Taroff
EDITORIAL ASSIST ANT
Kimon Keramidas
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Jill Stevenson
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Jenna Soleo
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
Allen J. Kuharski
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;
Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be
furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Edwin Wilson
DIRECTOR
James Patrick
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants from
the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 2001 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
2
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 22, No. 2
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
IN MEMORIAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Josef Svoboda, 1920-2002: Some Retrospective Comments
on His Life and Career''
Jarka Burian
ARTICLES
"St. Petersburg Theatrical Season: 2000-2001"
V reneli Farber
"Oleg Tabakov at the Moscow Art Theatre:
An Interview With Alexander Popov"
Maria Ignatieva
"The Idiot and Romanian Renaissance:
The Sibiu International Festival"
Joe Martin
"The MES Sarajevo International Theatre Festival"
Allan Graubard and Caroline McGee
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Introduction to Ferenc Molnar's Still Life"
Eugene Brogyanyi
"Still Life"
Ferenc Molnar
5
6
7
11
13
27
38
48
59
65
68
3
REVIEWS
"Quo Vadis, A Film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz"
William DeJong-Lambert
"Long Distance Performance:
Emil Hrvatin' s Ms. Mobile at La Mama"
Kurt Tarof
Contributors
89
94
98
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. Trans-literations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as Word 97 Documents for Windows and a hard copy of
the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all
reviews. All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East
European Peifonnance, cl o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified
after approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Perfonnance by visiting out website at http/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc. Email
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The Spring 2002 issue opens with Jarka Burian's tribute to Josef Svoboda,
the Czech scenographer who died in April, and features a number of the
author's rare photographs of the artist and his work. Russian Theatre is the
focus of the first two articles. Vreneli Farber surveys the recent season in St.
Petersburg, while Maria lgnatieva explores the current state of the Moscow
Art Theatre in an interview with its General Manager, Alexander Popov.
Next, two International Festivals somewhat off the beaten track are of special
interest to several of our contributors. Joe Martin reports on the Festival in
Sibiu, Romania, and Allan Graubard and Caroline McGee look at the
Sarajevo Festival. In PAGES FROM THE PAST we present Eugene
Brogyanyi's new translation of Ferenc Molnar's play STILL LIFE (1925),
which was performed by the Threshold Theater Company on April 23 at the
Martin E. Segal Theatre, as a special event sponsored by the Hungarian
Cultural Center, New York, in association with the Martin E. Segal Theatre
Center, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the playwright's death.
Reviews by William DeJong-Lambert of Kawalerowicz's film of Quo Vadis
and by Kurt T aroff of Ms. Mobile, a Slovenian performance involving
cellular telephones at La Mama, complete the issue.
6
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York
EVENTS
June Moon Productions with the Polish Cultural Institute
presented The Prisoner, based on Henryk Grynberg's The Diary of Maria
Koper, at the Mazer Theatre from June 7 to 9. The play was adapted and
directed by Omar Sangare, with music by Jakub Omsky and starring
Deborah Latz.
Emil Hrvatin, of the Slovenian organization MASKA, performed
Ms. Mobile, "a performance work for one Slovene and forty audience
members and their cell phones," at La Mama on April 15.
Zabawa Theatre Company presented Slawomir Mrozek's The Party,
directed by Helena White and featuring Paul Paglia, Paul Raff, and Joe Vena,
at Stonestreet Studios from March 14 to 16.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
United States
Family Stories: Belgrade by Biljana Srbljanovic, translated by Rebecca
Rugg and directed by Annie Dorsen, was presented at Market Theatre in
Cambridge, Mass. from April 20 to May 19.
Theatre Exile in association with the Polish Cultural Institute
presented Princess Ivana by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by David
Disbrow, from May 15 to June 2 at St. Stephen's Theatre in Philadelphia, Pa.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International
David Mamet's 0/eanna, tr. Marek K<;dzierski, directed and
designed by Kazimierz Braun, opened at the Scena Nowa of the Teatr Nowy
7
in Poznan, Poland on May 18.
FILM
New York
The Museum of Modem Art screened Lech Majewski's video of his
autobiographical opera Pok6j saren (The Roe's Room) on April 9.
The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center screened a
retrospective of the works of Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko from
May 8 to 21. The following films were shown:
8
Love Berry/ Yagodka Lyubvi (1926) and Diplomatic Pouch/ Sumka
Dipkur'era (1927), May 8 and 9.
Zvenigora/Zvenigora (1927), May 8 and 9.
Earth/Zemlya (1930), May 10 to 12.
Arsenal/ Arsenal (1929), May 11 and 12.
Farewell, America/Proscaj, Amerika (1949), May 11, 18, 19 and 21.
Chronicle of the Years of Fire/Povest' Plamennyh Let (1960) directed by
Dovzhenko's widow Yuila Solntseva, May 12, 18, 19,and 20.
Ivan/Ivan (1932) May 14 and 16.
Aerograd/Aerograd (1935) May 14 and 16.
Shchors/Shchors (1939) May 15 and 17.
Michurin/ Michurin (1948) May 15 and 17.
Battle for Soviet Ukraine/Bitva Za Nashu Sovetskuyu Ukrainu (1943)
May 18 and 20.
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 22, No.2
Victory on the Right Bank Ukraine/ Pobeda Na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine
(1944) May 19 and 21.
"A Symposium: The Art and Legacy of Alexander Dovzhenko" was
held on May 11 at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery of the Walter Reade
Theater.
The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center screened Assassin ofthe
Tsar (1991), directed by Karen Chakhnazarov, on May 24 and 31.
BAMcinematek in conjunction with the Czech Center New York
presented a retrospective celebrating the work of Czech filmmaker Frantisek
Vlacil titled Frantifek Vldcil: Pure Film. The retrospective ran from June 7 to
28 and included the films Marketa Lazarovd (1967), The White Dove
(Holubice) (1960), Glass Skies (Sklenend oblaka) (1957), Serpent's Poison (Had
jed) (1981}, Hot Summer Shadows (Stiny horklho llta) (1977), V aUey of the Bees
(Udolf ~ (1967), Shadow of Fern (Stin kapradiny) (1985), Smoke on the Potato
Fields (Dym bramborovl nate) (1976), and Adelheid (1969)
The Anthology Film Archives held a retrospective of the work of
Dziga Vertov from June 27 to 30. The films in the retrospective included:
Shagai, Soviet (1926), A Sixth of the World (1926), The Eleventh Year (1928),
Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Entuziasm (1931), and Three Songs About
Lenin (1934).
OTHER EVENTS
The Cracow Klezmer Band performed at two venues in New York
City, The Knitting Factory on May 16 and 17 and Makor on May 19.
Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian born novelist, essayist, poet,
screenwriter, and social commentator, read from his new novel Casablanca
in Bohemia on May 22 at the Poetry Project in New York City.
An international reader's marathon of Czech and Slovak authors
wntmg after 1918 took place from May 31 to June 8. The marathon
consisted of each reader reading for approximately fifteen minutes
9
immediately followed by another reader. The "readers' baton" was passed in
this way between cities including Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest,
Sofia, Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Stockholm, New York,
London, Hague, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Munich, and Vienna. In addition,
the whole event was transmitted over the internet all over the world.
The Silesian Dance Theatre in Bytom, Poland will host the Ninth
Annual International Contemporary Dance Conference and Performance
Festival in Bytom and Krakow from June 23 to July 7. The festival will
include companies, teachers, historians, critics, and lecturers from France,
the United States, Austria, Greece, Germany, Finland, Israel. Canada,
Sweden, Ireland, Malta, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia,
Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia.
An exhibition of photographs about the shtetl in pre-war Poland
titled Zalman Kaplan: Lives Remembered--A Shtetl Through a Photographer's Eye
is currently on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City
until September 27.
Compiled by Kimon Keramidas
10
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 22. No. 2
BOOKS RECEIVED
Burian, Jarka M. Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre.
London: Routledge, 2002. 225 pages. Vol. 7, Routledge Harwood Polish
and East European Theatre Archive. Includes chapters on Hilar, Voskovec
and W erich, Burian, Radok, Krejca, Grossman, Machacek, and Schorm,
Svoboda, interwar scenographers, scenographers since 1968, twentieth-
century Hamlets, and Havel, as well as notes, selected bibliography, index,
and 50 illustrations.
De l'Adriatique a la Mer Noire: Ecritures thidtrales. Les Cahiers Maison
Antoine Vitez 5. Ed. Marianne Clevy and Dominique Dolmieu.
Montpellier: Centre International de la Traduction Theatrale, 2001. 255
pages. Contains introductory articles on the theatre in Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria,
Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey as well as Romany theatre, plus excerpts
from 29 plays representing these countries. Also includes general
introductions, essays on translation and the availability of texts, and a
bibliography. Entirely in French.
Gavran, Miro. Four Plays. Zagreb: Epilog Theater, 2000. 178 pages.
Contains All About Women, tr. Nina H. Kay-Antoljak; Chekhov Says Good-bye
to Tolstoy, tr. Ellen Elias-Bursae; Forget Hollywood, tr. Nina H. Kay-Antoljak;
George Washington's Loves, tr Ellen Elias-Bursae.
____ .. Three Plays. Zagreb: The Bridge Collection, 2000. 174 pages.
Contain.s Royalty and Rogues, tr. Ellen Elias-Bursae; Shakespeare and Elizabeth,
tr. Graham McMaster; Death if an Actor, tr. Andreas Varga. Includes an
Afterword by Sanja Nikcevie and a biographical note.
Landscapes if the 20-th Century Polish Stage. Polish Exhibitions on the Prague
Quadrennial ofTheatre Design and Architecture. PQ99. 7-27 June '99. 111
pages. Includes Memory Landscapes devoted to Wyspianski and Kantor
and Landscape of the Turn of the Century devoted to the work of designers
Pawel Dobrzycki, Barbara Hanicka, Marta Hubka and Wojciech Jankowiak
Andrzej Markowicz, Jadwiga Mydlarski-Kowal, Maciej Preyer, Marcin
Stajewski, and Elzbieta Terlikowska. Includes many black-and-white and
color photographs and illustrations.
11
Maska. Vol. XVII, no. 72-73 (Winter 2002). "UCiti za sceno" ("On
Performance Education"). Ljubljana, Slovenia. Editor, Emil Hrvatin, 152
pages. Thirty-one articles and reviews on performance education and post-
dramatic theatre (Twelve also appear in English translation). Authors
include Einaar Schlleef, Jedri Je:l, Misko Suvakovic, Josette Feral, Anne
Bogart, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Johannes Birringer, Emil Hrvatin, Susanne
Winnacker, Marijke Hoogenboom, Bojana Cvejic, Taras Kermauner, Milan
Madarev, Luk van den Dries, Natasa Go vedic, Steven de Beelder, Jela Krecic
and Spela Stramsek, Petra Pogoroevc:l, Martina Siler, Ana Perne, Katja
Praznik, Gerald Siegmund, Thomas Irmer, Ann Adamovic, Igor Stromajer,
and Martin Bricelj. Includes many photographs and illustrations.
'Jbeatre Criticism Today. Pula 1998, Pula 1999, Zagreb 2000. Zagreb: Croatian
Centre of ITI-UNESCO, 2001. 192 pages. Ed. Sanja Nikcevic. Contains
the program and a selection of papers from three years of the International
Theatre Forum in Croatia. Includes essays by Marvin Carlson, Alexis
Greene, Sanja Nikcevic, Manfred Pfister, Boris Senker, David Adams, Heino
Brygesen, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, Ian Herbert, Michael Anthony Ingham,
William Davies King, Andras Nagy, Sibila Petlevski, Rudiger Schaper,
Malgorzata Semi!, Maria Helena Serodio, Dubravka Vrgoc, and Jessica
Yeung, as well as short biographies of the authors.
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw lgnacy. Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics
qf a Two-Headed Ca!f. Ed. and tr. Daniel Gerould. London: Routledge,
2002. 113 pages. Vol 12, Routledge Harwood Polish and East European
Theatre Archive. Includes an Introduction and an Appendix: "Witkacy's
Journey to the Tropics and Itinerary in Ceylon."
12
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 22, No.2
JOSEF SVOBODA, 1920-2002: SOME RETROSPECTIVE
COMMENTS ON HIS LIFE AND CAREER
Jarka Burian
On April 8th, 2002, a month before his eighty-second birthday,
Josef Svoboda, the internationally celebrated Czech stage designer, died in
a Prague hospital. He had been in poor health for more than a year, suffering
a variety of serious ailments.
In the early afternoon of April 15, a week after his death, a
memorial service for him was held at the National Theatre, a traditional
form of farewell accorded to established National Theatre artists. The
ceremony would normally have taken place on the stage itself, with the
auditorium open to the public. On this occasion, however, the director of
the production that was to have its premiere on that stage several days later
required the use of the stage for one of his final rehearsals. Since this director
was a foreign guest, his wishes were respected.
The ceremony took place instead in the entrance foyer of the
theatre, with the coffin placed on the shallow staircase leading to the
auditorium hallway; floral tributes and spectators stood adjacent to the
walls. Several people spoke, including a senior National Theatre actor and
longtime friend of Svoboda, Radovan Lukavsq, who appeared in countless
major Svoboda productions, including the title role in the 1964 Hamlet. The
eulogy included his reading of a Shakespeare sonnet celebrating the
immortality of art. At the conclusion of the service, the coffin was borne
outdoors to the hearse by artists of the National Theatre, to the traditional
accompaniment of a round of final applause by the actors in attendance in
honor of the deceased.
A quieter, less public final farewell took place on April23 in the late
afternoon, in St. Salvatore church, near Charles Bridge. An urn with
Svoboda's ashes was on view. LukavskY spoke again, some members of the
National Theatre opera ensemble sang, and Maria Tomasova recited. (She
played Juliet in Svoboda's celebrated staging of Romeo and j uliet in 1963.)
In the judgment of many, the innovative quality and range of
Svoboda's work on the stages of the world placed him with Adolph Appia
and Edward Gordon Craig as the most important designers of the modern
13
age. Svoboda himself preferred the term scenographer for his profession. For
him the term emphasized a concern with far more than creating an effective
picture on the stage. It meant one who thinks in three dimensions-in terms
of stage space-and is solidly grounded in the discipline of one of the
traditional arts or, indeed, crafts. It also meant one who is familiar with
contemporary developments in the technologies and materials of his time
and capable of employing them theatrically to embody the design concept
of a given production. Other characteristics would include a sensitivity to
one's own era, so that even if a setting were to be based on painted flats it
would be obvious that such flats were designed by an artist of the late
twentieth century rather than being a mere copy of antiquated styles and
techniques. Moreover, this or any other type of setting would not be fixed,
saying all it had to say at once, but would be capable of modulation and
change, evolving along with the flow of dramatic action, in fact becoming
one of the actors in the performance. Perhaps more than any other single
characteristic, it is this creation of dynamic, flexible scenic components
uniquely appropriate to a given production that distinguishes Svoboda's
contribution to the art of the stage.
A scenographer also needs the talent and imagination to work
productively with a host of different directors in creating a production
concept or vision. In the resulting production, the scenographer's
contribution is like an instrument in an orchestra, sometimes part of the
background, sometimes dominating, under the guidance of the conductor-
director. Indeed, music was for Svoboda an ideal model; its primacy of form
and structure, as well as its precision, appealed to his own urge toward
discipline, order, and expressive form.
Svoboda's background included schooling in his father's carpentry
and wood-working shop; formal training (beyond traditional academics)
later extended to interior design and, finally, classic architecture at the
university level in Prague while he was already designing in professional
theatre. Ironically, he never studied stage designing as such, and he never
had very much use for such narrow training, preferring a mastery of other
demanding disciplines.
His theatrical career began in wartime Prague, in the early 1940s.
After the war, he joined other young artists in forming an ensemble known
as the Theatre of the Fifth of May (the date of the uprising of the Czechs
against the German occupants of Prague in 1945). That company was
eventually absorbed by the National Theatre, and by the beginning of the
14
1950s Svoboda had become chief designer and head of technical operations
of the National Theatre's three stages, a position he held until the early
1970s.
By that time, he had designed over 350 productions and worked
with outstanding Czech directors, such as Alfred Radok, Otomar Krejca, and
Vaclav KaSlik (the last in opera), who were a steady source of inspiration. In
the mid-1950s he began to work abroad, at first mainly in the Soviet-
dominated block, but by the mid-1960s he was also very active in the West,
including his first staging in the United States, Luigi Nono's Intoleranza,
produced by Sara Caldwell's Boston Opera company in 1965. Some of the
notable directors and choreographers with whom he later collaborated in
European theatre centers were Laurence Olivier, Georgio Strehler, Roland
Petit, Gotz Friedrich, John Dexter, and Georgy Tovstonogov.
His work on stage was frequently augmented by his work on
exhibitions, to which he brought his theatrical artistry and his command of
technology. Laterna Magika, a system combining live stage action and
projected images, which he created with director Alfred Radok, became an
outstanding attraction of the Czechoslovak pavilion at the Brussels Expo 58,
as did his Diapolyekran, a variant multi-media show at the Czechoslovak
pavilion of the Montreal Expo 67. Both testified to Svoboda's masterful
artistry with lighting and projections, components which he exploited to
great effect in countless theatre productions, often in conjunction with
similar innovations in the use of kinetic scenery and mirrors. Such all-out
multimedia productions culminated in the later evolution of the Laterna
Magika as an independent production company, which Svoboda headed
from 1973 (while concurrently pursuing traditional scenography elsewhere).
Its productions, like Odysseus (1988) and Casanova (1995), were state of the
art theatre spectacles of their time.
Indeed, the technical wizardry dominating Laterna Magika
productions tended to overshadow and distract from Svoboda's more
fundamental virtues as an artist of the theatre: his sense of architectonic
stage space, his love of form, and his poetic talent for metaphoric stage
imagery to embody major dramas, operas, and (frequently) ballets.
His work received ample recognition and many honors and awards
from institutions as varied as England's Royal College of Art, France's
Legion ofHonor, the United States Institute ofTheatre Technology, and the
American Theatre Association, to name but a few. He was granted the
honorific title of National Artist by the Czechoslovak government, and is to
15
receive a posthumous honorary doctorate from the School of Fine and
Industrial Arts in Prague where he himself had studied and subsequently
taught Architecture for over twenty years, from the 1970s to the 1990s. He
also passed on his insights and skills to others in seminars with student
directors at Prague's academy of dramatic art, as well as in master classes with
student designers, such as those in some ten American universities on a tour
in the fall of 1972 (the same season when he designed his first production
for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Carmen).
Offsetting his successes was one major regret: although long
tormented by the spatial restrictions of traditional proscenium theatres for
which he designed most of his productions, he was not able to realize his
dream (as an architect) of designing an ultraflexible theatre based on mobile
modular units for spectators as well as scenic elements. Two such projects
were sanctioned and passed through a design process only to be aborted for
external reasons, one in a suburb of Paris (1970s), another in Prague itself
(1980s).
As a person, Svoboda was inherently focused and industrious,
patient and persistent. Essentially modest and polite, he nevertheless knew
his worth and took a quiet satisfaction in his achievements, even as he strove
to develop and perfect them. Essentially sober and contained, in company
he could be charming and sociable, but not given to effusiveness or chatter.
When discussing his own work he was precise and to the point, but could
also become intensely involved when explicating a certain scenographic
project or effect, sometimes producing in him an almost boyish delight. In
contrast to such moments, his concentration on tasks at hand was total, so
much so that one could easily feel forgotten when in his presence; he
seemed transported to another level of awareness. I knew him from the late
1960s and over the years spent countless hours with him socially as well as
in interviews, became friends with him and his family, and felt privileged as
a director to work with him on two of our university productions, to which
his scenography gave distinction (Strindberg's Dream Play in 1980, and
Gogol's Revizor in 1991).
To put it most simply, he enriched my life, and I remain grateful.
16
Slavic and East European Performance VoL 22, No.2
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For Alois Zimmerman's opera Die Soldaten in Munich in 1969, Svoboda
employed three distinct acting spaces, very expressive frontal and rear
projections, and kinetic elements.
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Svoboda's studio and office in the scene shop of the complex of the National
Theatre in the early 1970s
20
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A relatively little known 1972 National Theatre Production of Paul
Zindel's Man in the Moon Marigolds, for which Svoboda created a set
without any projections, mirrors, or startling effects other than a
metaphoric cosmos enveloping the shabbily realistic interior specified in
the stage directions.
22
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Svoboda's scenography for Strindberg's Dream Play at the State University of New York at Albany in
1980, directed by Jarka Burian, was based on three vertically suspended panels of crumpled wire
screening, which enabled a variety of lighting and projection effects.
24
Svoboda and Vaclav KaSI.ik, the Czech opera director with
whom Svoboda collaborated on more productions than any
other director. Here they are seen during final rehearsals for
Richard Strauss's Salome in Montreal in 1985.
Svoboda, his dog Pako, and Jarka Burian near Svoboda's
home high above the Vltava River in Prague in the early
Spring of 1988.
25
Svoboda and director Otomar Krejea reunited their talents one last time in the
1997 National Theatre production of Goethe's Faust, Part I. Here they are
taking a lunch break during technical rehearsals in the historic Estates Theatre.
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ST. PETERSBURG THEATRICAL SEASON: 2000-2001
Vreneli Farber
If the 2000-2001 theatrical season in St. Petersburg is an indication
of the state of Russian theatre at the outset of the twenty-first century, then
the prognosis for the future is promising. On sabbatical in St. Petersburg
from September 2000 to June 2001, I found a wide variety of plays offered
to theatergoers. The productions included both Russian and foreign works,
contemporary dramas and classics, traditional pieces and experimental ones.
This article surveys the dramatic offerings, excluding musicals, operas and
ballets and focuses on the shows I saw.
A list of the plays performed last year in St. Petersburg reveals that
there were slightly more foreign plays (125) performed than Russian ones
(115). Roughly forty per cent of each category consisted of twentieth-
century works, but less than a dozen of the foreign works date from the last
ten years. Approximately twice as many Russian plays belong to the past
decade. In the preface to the publication of two of his plays, Aleksandr
Volkov argues that there is a paucity of contemporary plays appearing on the
present-day Russian stage that serve as a reflection of the thoughts and
feelings of contemporary Russians.! He has an axe to grind concerning
commercial productions and "shows," arguing that there is a need for more
serious theatre. My experience last year revealed that a lot of serious theatre
was, in fact, taking place in St. Petersburg. However, classics, pre-1991 plays,
and foreign works did far outweigh contemporary Russian ones.2
The most frequently produced foreign authors were Jean Anouilh,
Carlo Goldoni, August Strindberg (three plays each), George Bernard Shaw,
Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams (five plays each), and William
Shakespeare (nine plays). The range of countries and periods represented by
foreign dramatists was diverse, ranging from Alan Ayckbourn to William
Wycherley, from Max Frisch to Monzaemon Chikamatsu.3 The Russian
favorites were Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin
(four works each), Nikolai Gogol (six works), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (seven
plays), and Anton Chekhov (nine productions). In the case of Dostoevsky,
Gogo!, and Pushkin, some of the shows were dramatizations of their prose;
the same was true for two pieces by Lev Tolstoy, one of the two plays by
27
Ivan Turgenev, and all three shows based on stories by Andrei Platonov.
Like the selection of foreign works, the Russian plays were varied, ranging
from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Alia Sokolova, from Daniil Kharms and
Aleksandr Vvedensky to Vladimir Konstantinov and Boris Ratser.4 They
indicate that the Russian repertory did not consist solely of classics, even
though these were widely staged.
All of the large theatres in St. Petersburg, and many of the small
ones as well, included a range of works in their repertories, serious plays and
comedies, Russian and foreign contemporary authors, and classics of both
Russian and Western drama. There seemed to be an attempt to appeal to all
tastes and always to mount a few plays guaranteed to fill the house, perhaps
as a counter-balance to more innovative or experimental productions. In
my experience, however, there appeared to be no problem with attracting
audiences. All thirty-three shows that I went to last year were well attended.
I succeeded in seeing performances in six of the ten large theaters in St.
Petersburg and in two of the roughly half dozen small venues.
At the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater or BOT the most striking
productions were Tom Stoppard' s Arcadia and Gerhart Hauptmann's Bifore
Sunset. In repertory since 1998, Arcadia was impressive because of the
strength of the acting and the effectiveness of the staging, as well as the
success with which translator Boris Tukh rendered Stoppard's complex
verbal games. Estonian director Elmo Niuganen elicited solid performances
from his cast who captured an English flavor in both the early nineteenth
century and the modern-day periods, without slipping into stereotypes and
without sacrificing Stoppard's satire of certain social types, thereby
maintaining the universal appeal of the play. Curiously enough, the actress
who really shined was novice Ekaterina Gorokhovskaya, a student at the St.
Petersburg State Academy of Theatrical Arts (SPGATI), in the role of
Thomasina, rather than veteran actresses Alisa Freindlikh and Maria Lavrova
(whose performance as Hannah Jarvis was self-conscious and artificial). The
scenes between Gorokhovskaya and Pyotr Semak, who played the tutor
Septimus with appropriate dryness and compassion, were the most
successful in the production.
The set design of Bifore Sunset was impressive. Created by St.
Petersburg artist Aleksandr Orlov, its most striking feature consisted of large
"flying" flats: floor-to-ceiling wooden frames stretched with a semi-
transparent gauze-like fabric that were raised and lowered and moved from
left to right across the stage swiftly and smoothly, while music played in the
28
background, in order to create the setting for Inken Peters's home. They
conveyed a sense of lightness, freedom and peacefulness, which Matthias
Klausen finds when he is with Inken. When the scene changes to Klausen's
home, the frames recede and the feeling created is one of a large, cavernous
dwelling lacking in the humanity that exists in Inken's place. The frames
swung across the stage frequently and communicated the shifts that were
occurring in the Klausen family.
Other productions at the BOT did not measure up to these two.
They were either competent, but not brilliant or they were flawed. Neil
Simon's California Suite and Aleksandr Ostrovsky's Talents and Admirers
belong to the first category. Three plays by French playwrights-Jean
Racine's Phaedra, Jean Anouilh's Antigone and Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt's
Enigmatic Variations-were rather boring productions, hampered by weak
choices made by the directors and scene designers and by poor acting.
At the Comedy Theater I saw William Wycherley's The Country
Wife, directed by T atyana Kazakova, artistic director of the theater.
Although the actors fulfilled their roles capably, especially Lena Rufanova as
Marjory, their grasp of Restoration comedy was neither complete nor
consistent. There appeared to be an effort to suggest a seventeenth century
atmosphere, but the role of Horner, performed by Artur Vakha, was entirely
modern in manner.
Kazakova's direction of Israeli playwright Joseph Bar-Joseph's
Difficult People was more successful, perhaps because she focused more on
the play and less on special effects. The play deals with a single woman,
Rachel, in her forties and a middle-aged Jewish man who has odd personality
traits and who is looking for a suitable wife. Brought together in London by
Rachel's brother, the two slowly move toward a fragile rapport, but in the
end they fail to form a relationship. The handling of the emotional kernel
of the play-the issue of being vitally needed by another individual-was
sensitive, and the performances Kazakova drew from the cast of four were
strong.
Inga Garuchava and Pyotr Khotyanovsky's tragicomedy The Hoaxer
(Mistifikator, 1999) at the Komissarzhevsky Theater was cleverly executed
but not a memorable piece of drama. Its story line was fairly simple, having
to do with a mysterious figure, Sput, who convinces Georg, a rough sort of
fellow, to stab him in the heart on a given day, with the consequence that
Georg wins the lottery shortly thereafter. Georg marries his girlfriend Irma,
who had urged him, when he demurred saying he could not kill a man, to
29
accept Sput's offer, but then did not want Georg to perform the deed when
the day came. Georg tries to recreate the event with a doctor in order to
convince him that Sput was not a figment of his imagination. Georg assures
the doctor, who hungers for money, that he will win the lottery. The
experiment, however, appears to fail when the lottery numbers do not match
those on the doctor's ticket. He tears up his ticket, only to discover
moments later that the numbers did match and he has destroyed a winning
ticket. The themes of human greed for money, the complexity of love
relations, and the importance of trust among people are almost too obvious
and the significance of Sput's character is not explored. The most
impressive features of the show were the magical way in which Sput's body
was made to disappear when he was stabbed and the use of only black and
white clothing for the actors, accented at one point with a red teddy on
Irma. The doctor, who appeared in Act Two, wore a multi-colored outfit.
I was equally disappointed in the weak and flawed staging of
Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the Malyi Dramatic Theater or MDT,
especially since it was created by Lev Dodin, one of the most prominent
directors working in Russia today and renowned for his seven-hour epic
Brothers and Sisters (based on a trilogy of novels by Fedor Abramov) that
premiered in St. Petersburg in 1985 and played in New York City in the
summer of 2000. The center of the stage was occupied by an oval-shaped
pool of water, possibly suggesting the river in which Ranevskaya's son
drowned and thus the event that precipitated her departure from Russia,
which in turn set in motion the series of developments leading up to the
present circumstances. The pool was used for comic effect in Act Two when
Epikhodov dunked his head in the water, while Yasha stole a kiss from
Dunyasha. But this piece of business was predictable and overused and
consequently lost its humor. Behind the pool were three staggered rows of
tall reflective panels in large, ornate wooden frames, extending from the
pool backwards, the two side rows in diagonal lines, the central one in a
straight line to the back of the stage. Unfortunately, the audience members
seated in the front rows of the orchestra were reflected in these "mirrors" and
although this was probably deliberate for symbolic reasons, I found it highly
distracting.
The set was minimally furnished: downstage right was a table and
chairs, downstage left a bench. On the stage far right stood the famous
bookcase; stage left constituted the nursery. But both areas were so dimly
lit when any significant action took place in these "rooms" that they were
30
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 22, No. 2
rendered useless as playing areas. Sound effects were uneven in quality,
sometimes entirely appropriate and effective, at other times practically a
caricature of Chekhov's use of sounds.
Most troubling was the weakness of the acting. Igor Ivanov as
Lopakhin and Anzhelika Nevolina as Charlotta gave the only strong
performances. The actors never genuinely "connected" with one another.
Perhaps Dodin was attempting thereby to illustrate the lack of
communication among them, but it came across as a parody of this theme
and left the actors looking as if they did not know what they were doing.
The performance at the Alexandrinsky of Aleksandr Stroganov's
recent work, Ornithowgy (1992), was among the best evenings of theatre that
I experienced in St. Petersburg. It was directed by Roman Smimov and
played on the theatre's small stage. The play involves three characters.
Savva is a scoundrel who has cheated on his wife and spends the whole first
half of the play trying to seduce T atyana. She is an attractive, eccentric and
free-spirited woman, who stands for Death in the second half of the play.
Leonid is Tatyana's brother, who first appears a minute before the stage
darkens for intermission; in the second half of the play he represents an
agent of God. Brother and sister humiliate and threaten Savva, until he
breaks down and cries and feels genuine pain for the first time. The siblings
finally release Savva from their apartment where they have kept him against
his will. It becomes clear that their torture of Savva was an effort to save
him from that part of himself that is a scoundrel. The central theme of
Ornithology is that of freedom from care and pain, seemingly possessed by
the birds in the sky. A repeated refrain in the show is man's longing to soar
freely over the earth like the birds and at the end Savva leaps from the
window to fulfill this longing to fly. In the Alexandrinsky production, the
small stage is such that this finale could not be executed (as it was in the
Moscow staging). Instead the actors circled the stage blowing feathers up
into the air. It was neither as dramatic or effective as a leap from the window
would have been. The only feathered creatures in the play are a rooster,
Leonid's pet that died, and Tatyana's coming on stage at one point in a
hilariously funny rooster costume. In keeping with the symbolic elements
in the play (Death and an agent of God), there are symbolic connotations
surrounding the rooster as well (Peters denial of Christ by the time a rooster
crows three times).
All three actors, Sergei Parshin, T atyana Kuznetsova, and Igor
Volkov, are very talented and the staging of the play was creatively handled.
31
The audience was seated along one side of the small, rectangular playing
area. Circumscribing the area on three sides--upstage, stage left, and
downstage--were cabinets with many small drawers facing into the playing
area. The cabinets were of varying heights, raging from knee level to almost
chest level, and created a kind of counter that actors sat on, walked on, and
passed behind (the upstage one). In the middle of the playing area was a low
round table, at which one sat on cushions. At either end of the rectangle
there were canvases suspended from the ceiling and at various points in the
play, Tatyana paints on these. This set allowed for a variety of playing areas
and levels, and the director used them well. Other aspects of the show--
lighting, music, pace--were also deftly handled.
I succeeded in attending two very small "fringe" theaters, the
Malyshchitsky Theater and the Osobnyak Theater. In the former I saw The
Preserve (Zapovednik, 1997) based on Sergei Dovlatov's prose piece by the
same name. The theater is simply a narrow rectangular room with two rows
of hard-backed wooden benches lining the long sides of the rectangle and
accommodating an audience of about sixty people. The play is partly
autobiographical. expressing Dovlatov's dilemma of not being able to write
freely in the Soviet Union and to be published, yet not wanting to emigrate
to the West to achieve such freedom, because he would lose touch with his
native language and his natural audience, for whom he is more necessary
than for readers abroad. Other themes in the work are pervasive alcoholism,
surveillance by the KGB, compromised individuals, charlatan intellectuals,
and finally Pushkin worship in Russia. Though there was much to
communicate in this play, the production was neither ponderous nor
lifeless. The actors maintained a lively pace and all performed multiple roles
with wit and adeptness. Only "Dovlatov" (whose real-life name I did not
find out since there were no programs) played a single part; he had range.
good timing, and believability in his performance. The set consisted
essentially of long wooden crates stacked on one another and moved around
to create a table, a bed, stools, a separate room, and so on. Props were
minimal. This scaled down approach succeeded in focusing attention on
the characters, their words, and their interactions and made for an
interesting show.
The Osobnyak (Private House) Theater. opened in 1992, is
pleasantly intimate, with chairs for roughly seventy-five people ranged in
slightly curved rows in front of a low stage. There were no programs
available for the Mikhail Chekhov Theatre production of August
32
Strindberg's Miss julie that played on the Osobnyak stage. There was almost
no set, just a table and a couple of stools. It was possible to sit on the front
edge of the stage and rest one's feet on the floor on which the audience was
seated. There were a few simple props, and costumes suggested the late
nineteenth century, while Miss Julie wore a 1950s dress. The actors captured
the erotic tension between Miss Julie and Jean, but failed to catch the class
distinction between the two. There was a great deal of physicality in their
performances, with Jean leaping onto the table, hurling objects around the
stage, Julie also using the table top, and pouring gallons of water on herself.
Occasionally the actors seemed close to losing control, an impression that
may have been heightened by their proximity to the audience. Although the
show at times was more like an etude by advanced acting students, it was
nevertheless a memorable evening.
The other "fringe" show I saw was not a play, but a mime
performance. It took place in a large, high-ceilinged room in the Center for
Aesthetic Education and Difference on Vasilevsky Island. It had the English
title Crazy Fantasy and was conceived and directed by Igor Kachaev, a
fencing and stage movement instructor at SPGATI, who has put together a
troupe of two men (one of them Kachaev himself) and five women. The
make-up on the performers' faces was white with bright red lipstick and dark
eye-lining, no two of them the same, a cross between mime and clown
makeup. The men, both lean and muscular, wore black tights and one of
them wore a white T-shirt with a black tuxedo coat; the other, a white shirt,
black bow tie and black vest with tails. One woman, who was slender and
of medium height, wore a floor-length sleeveless purple velvet dress with
high slits on both sides and her hair was in a braid sticking straight up from
the top of her head. A second woman, short and small, in brightly colored
clothes (a yellow dress, pink jersey, striped stockings), wore a bathing cap. A
third, heavy-set woman wore a black jersey, khaki Bermuda shorts, white
stockings and ballet slippers. The other two women, peripheral to the
performance, were equally singular in their attire.
The set was a bare stage with the three walls at the back covered
from floor to ceiling with newspapers. Occasionally the performers popped
their heads through the newspaper, tearing a hole as they did so; at one
point, two of them entered through the newspaper walls, leaving behind an
opening in the shape of an outline of their bodies. On the right and left
sides of the set there were "doors" cut in the newspaper and these were used
for entries and exits. The only piece of furniture was a single folding chair,
33
used for a number of the sequences. The performance began with one of
the "peripheral" women playing a piano on the right side of the playing area
that thrust beyond the newspaper wall. The live playing switched to
recorded music, initially a recording of the live playing, then to other
selections of music, one after the other. Similarly, the performers'
movements flowed from one sequence to another, first involving everyone,
then one man with the chair, then a duet between him and the large woman,
then between him and the woman in purple velvet, then the two of them
and the small woman in bright clothes and so on. There was a scene
involving just the two men, at the end of which Kachaev juggled small,
empty plastic bags until everyone was on stage handling the bags in one way
or another. Finally they were all lying on the floor "swimming," their heads
covered with plastic bags, with an opening at the mouth. At the end of the
show, facing the audience, the performers stood in a line, left to right, along
the upstage side of a ladder that lay on the floor and divided the "stage"
from the audience. They mimed looking through a glass wall and while they
were waving at people on the other side, a newspaper curtain was drawn
across the stage in front of them. All the lights were turned off, one at a time
they popped their heads through the curtain, and shone a flashlight, passed
from one to the next, on their own faces. When they came out in front of
the curtain, they remained in character. They richly deserved the applause
they received, for their execution of the modern dance and mime sequences
was carried out with great control and grace, with impressive timing and
partner work. The show was thoroughly engaging and imaginative.
The best productions that I saw at the Lensoviet Theater were
Samuel Beckett's Waitingfor Godot, directed by Yuri Butusov (See Theatre
journal, Vol. 53, No. 4, December 2001, pp. 653-655), and Aleksandr
Getman's King, 12Jteen, Knave, based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the
same name and directed by Vladislav Pazi, artistic director of the theater and
a professor at SPGATI (See SEEP, vol. 21, no. 3, Fall2001). It is no surprise
that the first of these received two prestigious Golden Mask awards ("Best
Show" and "Best Work by a Director") for 1997-98, because the staging was
creative and effective and the acting masterful.
Other shows directed by Butusov at the Lensoviet Theater, Georg
Buchner's Wtryzeck and Albert Camus's Caligula were less successful in that
they were uneven: sometimes effective and expressive, other times
uninteresting and tedious. In addition to King, Queen, Knave, the other
shows created by Pazi that I saw were Milan Kundera's jacques and His
34
Master, Ingmar Bergman's The Face, and George Bernard Shaw's You Never
Can Tell. The first two were ably handled but not as engaging as the
Nabokov piece. You Never Can TeU premiered in December of 2000 and
made for a very enjoyable evening at the theatre, capturing Shaw's playful
wit. Oleg Levakov's production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named
Desire was not nearly as successful, mainly because the cast did not really
seem to understand the characters. Though it may not be fair to judge by
one production, I would say that Levakov, who acted in the Camus,
Bergman, and Shaw plays, is a much better actor than director.
I want to conclude with reference to the diploma performances I
saw at SPGATI. Strictly speaking, they do not belong to the St. Petersburg
season, because they took place at the Academy and not in professional
theaters. But there are several reasons to mention them. In the first place,
they were, in fact, advertised with large posters on the Academy doors and
were open to the public. The Academy Theater and the studios where these
shows played are all small and therefore filled up quickly, mostly with fellow
students and Academy faculty, but also with some non-academy spectators.
Secondly, the selection of works illustrates the kind of plays used to prepare
students for professional theater. Finally, the quality of the shows suggested
that the potential for the future of theatre in Russia is encouraging.
The works mounted at the Academy were: The Trace, based on
Harold Pinter's Landscape and The Lover; John Patrick's Dear Pamela; William
Gibson's Two for the Seesaw; Vladimir Sologub's Petersburg Vaudevilles;
Alexander Ostrovsky's In a Lively Place; Chekhov's Three Sisters;
Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; The Lazy Avenger, based on
Shakespeare's Hamlet; Liperiada, a musical based on a play by Finnish
author, Maiju Lassila (a pseudonym for Algot Untola (1868-1918)), Gone to
Fetch Matches; George Bernard Shaw's Great Catherine, a performance
involving English acting students from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in
London and puppeteer students from SPGATI; and Playing With 44 Hands,
"a movement show." I saw all but the fust two of these, and they were for
the most part impressive, especially for their energy. Some actors were weak,
an overly slow pace was sometimes a problem, certain costume choices
failed, and the inclusion of unsuitable dance sequences occasionally
detracted from a performance. But these shows seem to promise that
theatregoers in Russia can expect talented individuals to fill the ranks of
actors in the future. As selections of plays to perform, these shows mirror
the continuing reliance of professional theaters on a more conventional
35
repertory without much exploration of new play writing. Be that as it may,
the 2000-2001 season suggested that the theaters in St. Petersburg were all
striving to create interesting repertories with a mix of foreign and domestic
works, light fare and serious pieces, historical plays and contemporary
dramas, even if this latter category was slimmer than others.
Just as Russia has undergone great change since the collapse of the
Soviet Union - reforms, disintegration, corruption, ferment and renewal -
and now seems slowly to be moving onto a path of stability, so too Russian
theatre has evolved, relinquishing some of its old ways, producing
innovations, and generating a variety of styles and directions. One can only
marvel at its vitality, ample evidence of which was present in St. Petersburg
last year.
NOTES
1. Aleksandr Volkov, "Razgovor o Teatre," Natsional'noye Sostoyaniye: Dramy
(St. Petersburg: Urbi, 2001), 5-7.
2. In 1996 John Freedman discussed the number of new plays appearing in
Moscow and found it to be small. " ... the number of new plays produced
this season (about 19) exceeded last year's output (about 15) by only a small
margin." He goes on to point out the preponderence of non-contemporary
works. "A rough count reveals a whopping 28 productions of plays by
Alexander Ostrovsky currently running in Moscow. Anton Chekhov with
15 productions, is followed by Nikolai Gogol (12) and Moliere (10) ....
Fyodor Dostoevsky, who never wrote a play in his life ... is right up there
with the lot: There are 14 dramatizations of his stories and novels presently
in repertory throughout town." John Freedman, "Playwrights" in Moscow
Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (The Netherlands: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1997), 253.
3. The following list is representative: Alan Ayckbourn, Communicating
36
Doors; Ingmar Bergman, Face; Karel Capek, Mother; Eduardo de Filippo, The
Truth That Was Never Revealed; Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney; Max Frisch,
Andorra; Athol Fugard, People Are Living There; Arthur Kopit, Oh, Dad, Poor
Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad; Arthur Miller, The
Death of a Salesman; Slawomir Mrozek, Tango; John Patrick, Dear Pamela;
Harold Pinter, The Lover; Yasmina Reza, ART; Neil Simon, California Suite
and I Ought to Be in Pictures; Tom Stoppard, You and Only You and Arcadia;
earlier works included Monzaemin Chikamatsu, The Love Suicides at
Amljima; Alexandre Dumas fils, The Lady of the Camellias; Henrik Ibsen,
Ghosts and Hedda Gabler; Jean-Baptiste Moliere, Don juan (two separate
productions) and The Imaginary Invalid; Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de
Bergerac; Eugene Scribe, A Glass of Water; and William Wycherley, The
Country Wife.
4. Examples of works by other Russian playwrights are: Vladimir Arro, A
Blue Slry, But There Are Clouds in It; Aleksei Arbuzov, Lovely to Look At!; S.
Buranov, Soothe My Sorrows; Venedikt Erofeev, The Gospel from Erofeev and
Moscow-Petushki; M. Gavrilova, Sweetheart; Grigori Gorin,jester Balakirev; V.
Gurkin, Quadrille; Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, Bam, Bam,
Bam; V. Konstantinov & B. Ratser, Perpetrator of Triumph, The Hussar from the
KGB and Wife for Sale; S. Lobozerov, Family Portrait With a Stranger;
Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug; Olga Mukhina, Tanya-Tanya; A.
Naidenov, Madonna Kostikova; 0. Nikiforova, Aunt Motya; Mikhail
Saltykov-Shchedrin, Piano for Beginners; Evgeni Shvarts, The Shadow; A.
Slapovsky, My Little Cherry Orchard and Show Me Beautiful Love; Alia
Sokolova, Faratev's Fantasies and Stale Nameday; and A. Ustavshchikov, First
Lesson, Sunday.
37
OLEG TABAKOV AT THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE:
AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER POPOV
Maria lgnatieva
The Moscow Art Theatre (MkhA1) is now 103 years old. Oleg Yefremov, its
artistic director since 1970, died in May 2000. (See SEEP, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall
2000.) Since his death, there have been many changes. Oleg Tabakov, a
well-known actor and the former Head of the Moscow Art Theatre School-
Studio, succeeded Yefremov. At the same time, Tabakov remained the
Artistic Director of one of the most commercially successful and artistically
popular studios since the early 80s, the Tabakov Theatre-Studio. At the age
of sixty-five, he has truly emerged as the most influential theatre practitioner
in Russia, creating his own theatrical empire.
Just a few years ago, though still highly respected for its name, the
Moscow Art Theatre had serious troubles: its legendary leader, Oleg
Yefremov, Russia's beloved actor, had been seriously ill and was dying of
cancer. After thirty years of trying to revive the Moscow Art Theatre,
Y efremov had succeeded in some areas and failed in others. His heroic
efforts met with resistance both from authorities outside the theatre and also
from its own management, bureaucracies, and the members of the company.
Despite its obvious stagnation, the Moscow Art Theatre held many
celebrations during the last years ofYefremov's life. In 1997, it paid homage
to the lOOth anniversary of the historic meeting between Stanislavsky and
Nemirovich-Danchenko. The Moscow Art Theatre held an international
conference dedicated to the eighteen-hour meeting of the founders at the
restaurant called Slavyansky Bazaar. Many internationally acclaimed
directors and actors enthusiastically came to Moscow. Only Peter Brook
declined the invitation to participate in the event, writing the conference
organizers that it was time to analyze the damage that the world theatre had
endured because of the cult of Stanislavsky.l
Then, the following year, 1998, a bigger celebration was held for the
1 OOth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre. Like the previous event, it
again attracted the world's attention to the Moscow Art Theatre; all
television stations in Russia showed this celebration for many hours.
At the same time, the Moscow Art Theatre itself was not at all in
good shape. The house was never sold out (except for evenings when the
38
Alexander Popov and Oleg Tabakov
39
stage was rented out). Once, in the late 90s, during a meeting of the MKhAT
Artistic Council, one of the actors hit the executive director of the theatre
in the face. It caused a real scandal, and the press paid close attention to all
the details. The quarrels inside the theatre seemed to shake further the old
establishment. Even bugs and mice seemed to attack the theatre: in the
dressing rooms, large egg-size cockroaches snooped around. The building of
the School Studio was in bad condition as well: many desks and chairs were
broken, the paint was peeling off the walls, and broken windows badly
needed replacing.
Yet by 2001, the state of things had changed rapidly. The School-
Studio had its long awaited renovation. Anatoly Smeliansky, a world-
renowned scholar of Russian theatre, became Rector of the MKhAT School-
Studio and at the same time deputy artistic director of the Moscow Art
Theatre.
In the following interview, which took place in Moscow on
October 12, 2001, I asked the General Manager, Alexander Popov, to shed
light on changes at the Moscow Art Theatre. Oleg Tabakov served as
Popov's mentor, and the two co-founded the Stanislavsky Summer School
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Popov is thus well-qualified to speak about
Tabakov.2
MI. Oleg T abakov has been a leading figure in Russian and Soviet
theatre since the late seventies. He is a good actor but not a genius; he is a
competent director but nothing extraordinary, and yet he has been one of
the most recognized and successful leaders in Russian Theatre. What's his
secret?
AP. If I were to translate his current title into English, I would call him
Producing Director, not Artistic Director. T abakov is more than just a
leading artistic figure, or a leading actor. He has put himself in charge of
everything: &om conceiving artistic ideas to making sure that stage doors do
not squeak. T abakov is (as he calls himself) a leader if the game. He is a
producer, a man who comes up with ideas and knows how to realize them.
After graduating from the MKhAT School, he rejected job offers &om well-
established theatres in Moscow. He joined forces with Oleg Ye&emov and
other colleagues to conceive and create their own venture, The Sovremennik
Theatre. Twenty-five years later, Oleg Tabakov founded a theatre-studio for
40
teenagers and made it one of the most successful theatres of the nineties.
Tabakov's combination of acting, teaching and producing makes him, as he
says, both the horse and the rider. Recently critics have accused him of not
having a program for the Moscow Art Theatre, or "conceptions" for its
development. T abakov has answered without false assurances. He simply
states that, "We can't afford programs and conceptions at this moment.
When we have a strong troupe and financial security, then we can choose
from among several existing directions the one that will become the leading
one."
MI. Occasionally, he repeats Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-
Danchenko's answers during the first seasons of the Moscow Art Theatre.
AP. Yes, he does. Tabakov has read their books over and over again so
that he can apply their experience (and their mistakes, too) on the current
situation and circumstances. Personally, I think that he is closer to
Nemirovich-Danchenko than to Stanislavsky. Tabakov hates fantasizing; he
is real practitioner who knows how things are done and how to handle
problems. Like Nemirovich, he was born to be a fund-raiser (he calls it
"Putting his face on the market'') and a politician, who knows how to deal
with powers that be (whether the Court, the Bolsheviks, or the "New
Russians").
MI. How does T abakov determine the new strategies of the Moscow Art
Theatre?
AP. One of our most important tasks of the day is to find our own Savva
Morozov (the millionaire backer of the first MkhAT), who will be willing to
spend money on the Moscow Art Theatre. At least three times he salvaged
the theatre from filing for bankruptcy by investing his own money. In 1902
he co-signed the lease on our building to ensure that the mortgage would
always be paid on time. Morozov moved to the construction site of the
Moscow Art Theatre and practically lived there to oversee the renovation of
the building hands-on. No, we don't need a new building, but we need to
renovate our shops and to computerize our box-office.
MI. A few months ago, Tabakov said: "I cancelled democracy at the
Moscow Art Theatre!" It sounded like bravado to some, nose thumbing to
41
42
The first commencement of the Moscow Art Theatre American
School in the Memorial Hall of the Moscow Art Theatre.
From left: Anatoly Smeliansky, Head of the Moscow Art Theatre
School; Oleg Tabakov; Alexander Popov; and Robert]. Orchard,
Managing Director of the American Repertory Theatre.
Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 22, No. 2
others. Can you comment on Tabakov's statement?
AP. The Moscow Art Theatre had become a democratic institution after
the first few seasons simply because its founding members became the
shareholders. so they had the right to decide on the repertory and fiscal
policy. In 1925, when the theatre was nationalized, a so-called Repertory
Board was established within the theatre. Several decades later the Board
degenerated into a controlling and infiltrating ideological force, pretending
to be "a democratic institution representing the majority." Then other
"democratic" organizations within the theatre, such as the Artistic Council,
the Professional Union. and the Communist Party committee were created.
Some of them were dissolved after 1991, but the Artistic Council has
remained. What do the interests of the majority have to do with the artistic
needs of the theatre? Tabakov dismissed the Artistic Council, which often
sabotaged the work of the theatre. Well, do Broadway theatres have "Artistic
Councils"? Tabakov is in charge because he is the Artistic Director. He
decides on the repertory, directors and actors; he evaluates every contract
before it is renewed. He doesn't believe in "parliaments" within the theatre.
MI. It is a daring precedent because every Russian repertory theatre still
has its Artistic Council. Indeed, in many theatres they have become the
most conservative forces, provoking much conflict. How did the actors
respond to the loss of democracy?
AP. They do not seem to have minded.
MI. Theatrical dictatorship is back then?
AP. Oleg Tabakov is in charge, and he is ready to be held responsible.
The Moscow Art Theatre suffocated in previous years because there had
been too many conflicting interests, formalities, pressures, and
considerations that did not allow Oleg Yefremov to reform the stagnating
theatre during a thirty-year period.
MI. Tabakov has recruited leading actors from his own Tabakov
Theatre-Studio to play in the productions of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Consequently, Tabakov involves fewer resident actors of the Moscow Art
Theatre in new productions. I am sure it has created resentment within the
43
company.
AP. T abakov has been teaching for twenty-five years; he has nurtured
many actors. Most of his former students are very well-known actors, almost
all of whom work at the Tabakov Theatre. I think it's quite natural for
T abakov to use the actors he himself trained, the ones he has known for
years. By the way, in the 1920s Stanislavsky and Nemirovich had to call
upon young actors from the Moscow Art Theatre Studios to rescue the aging
institution; and in the 1970s Yefremov invited his actors from The
Sovremennik to join him at the Moscow Art Theatre.
MI. The Tabakov Theatre-Studio and MKhAT have become stepsisters;
they have the same artistic father. Usually, the Moscow Art Theatre Studios
were born within the theatre; this one seems to come from outside. Is
Tabakov going to merge his Theatre-Studio with the Moscow Art Theatre?
AP. Studios were always the illegitimate children of the Moscow Art
Theatre. All of them came about as the result of dissatisfaction with the
Moscow Art Theatre practices. With the help of Studios, both Stanislavsky
and Nemirovich-Danchenko tried to fight stagnation at the Moscow Art
Theatre. The T abakov Theatre-Studio has not ever been the Moscow Art
Theatre Studio: it has always been an independent theatre. It categorically
does not want to merge with the Moscow Art Theatre! In fact, the
mechanical unification of the two institutions could easily destroy the
T abakov Theatre-Studio. At the same time, it is the Moscow Art Theatre that
profits from the collaboration. For example, one of the sensational successes
of the Moscow Art Theatre is a production called No. 13. It was directed by
the internationally acclaimed actor-director of the T abakov Theatre,
Vladimir Mashkov (who played the lead in the Russian Oscar-nominated
film, A ThiefJ, and has some of the T abakov Theatre's best actors in the cast.
MI. What is the economic status of the Moscow Art Theatre?
AP. The theatre's major financial support comes from the government.
At the same time, I think we are now the first and only Russian theatre to
almost match state support with the box-office revenue; each represents
about 40 percent of our operating budget. The remaining 20 percent comes
from corporate sponsors as well as from renting out some of our facilities.
44
By Stanislavsky's grave during the Slavyansky Bazaar Conference in
Moscow, June 1997. From left: Tadashi Suzuki, Declan
Donnellan, Alexander Popov, Robert Brustein, Lev Dodin.
45
The Moscow Art Theatre has just celebrated its 103rd anniversary. How old
is the Tabakov Theatre-Studio?
AP. Tabakov opened a studio for children at one of the district "Palaces
for Pioneers" in Moscow in 1974. In 1976 Tabakov had his first group of
students at the State Theatre Academy. This group later became the heart of
the Theatre-Studio. But, as a historian of the Theatre-Studio, I can cite
another date: the Theatre-Studio was granted its basement (podval) in 1976,
which has become its permanent home until now, and which will never be
abandoned.
MI. I think it is an unusual theatrical experiment to have a younger
theatrical institution set "a positive example" for such an old establishment
as the Moscow Art Theatre. Are you optimistic about this?
AP. I am. I am quite optimistic about the Moscow Art Theatre, about
the T abakov Theatre-Studio, and about the whole cultural situation in
Russia. Look, everywhere in the world there are budget cuts for culture. In
Russia, since last year, the spending on culture in the federal budget was
increased from 1 to 1.5 percent GDP. This, in my opinion, is a very
significant tendency.
MI. No more cockroaches at the Moscow Art Theatre then?
AP. No, there will be no more cockroaches, in either a literal or a
figurative sense. We'll try our best.
MI. Sash a, what is the common thread binding together all of you, all
ofTabakov's theatrical children, people who have been with him for twenty
or more years?
AP. There is something in common in this theatrical family. Just like
our master, Oleg Tabakov, there is one serious condition for our happiness:
we live our real lives onfy when we work. We are a group of workaholics
devoting our whole being to the THEATRE.
46
NOTES
1 Moskovskie Novosti, June 1997.
2 Alexander Popov graduated with an MA in Theatre History and Criticism
from the Russian State Institute of Theatre Arts in 1986. By his late teens,
he was a student, and at the same time, a dramaturg, a PR man, and "a one-
person international office" at the T abakov Theatre-Studio. At the age of
twenty-six, Popov co-founded the Stanislavsky Summer School in
Cambridge, Mass., with Oleg Tabakov, his mentor (whom he resembles as
if he were his son), and later became Administrative Director of the Institute
for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard, a joint program of the American
Repertory Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre School. Leaving behind his
American career, Popov has emerged as the General Manager of the Moscow
Art Theatre in 2001 at the age of thirty-six.
47
THE IDIOT AND ROMANIAN RENAISSANCE:
THE SIBIU INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
Joe Martin
Context is everything. Put the Edinburgh festival in Scotland and
you have a world class event in a preserved citadel ofEuropean culture. Put
a comparable festival in Romania, a country still struggling with scars that
stretch back to the 1930s, World War II and half a century of one of the
most severe totalitarian dictatorships in Europe-and there you have parched
fields of a culture that has been waiting to flower since long ago when the
water was cut off.
Sibiu, one hundred miles northwest of Bucharest, is an industrial
city of 150,000 which is dominated by its astonishingly well-preserved late
medieval old town. The Sibiu International Theatre Festival, held annually
in May and June and now approaching its eighth season, is designed to spill
over the borders of the theatre into the town, and over the walls of the
medieval fortified city into the cultural landscape of Romania. It attracts
top flight artists from Eastern Europe, Russia and North America, serves as
a home to many innovative creators in Romania, and has been influenced
greatly by the work of Andriy Zholdak, a dominating figure from the new
wave of "ex-Soviet" directors. It is affiliated with the Lucian Blaga theatre
school in Sibiu, which aims to turn out actors and directors whose thinking
is not dominated by the cautious and increasingly cerebral Bucharest
theatre.
Loyal readers of Romanian expatriot Andrei Codrescu in the
United States may find the evocation of his childhood home Sibiu in his
classic journalistic work on the Romanian revolution of 1989, The Hole in the
Flag, his most memorable and personal writing. According to Codrescu,
what appears to have been an island of sanity, and to some extent
innocence, during the collective malaise of the e a u ~ e s c u years, was rescued
by the happy circumstance that the Pere Ubu of Communist Politics and his
wife had turned the region over as a personal fiefdom to his son Nicu. The
son was not inclined to declare himself master architect and city planner and
set the bulldozers on a city's cultural heritage to build grotesque pseudo-
Bauhaus and communist post-modern "people's" structures, as did the
father. Perhaps he was a bit more like Prague's curator-communists, for
whom it was a matter of pride to preserve the past. But, the point is that the
48
foundations of the culture were left in place. If we also consider the original
Austro-Hungarian influence on Transylvania, and the relative well-being of
the region compared to the rest of the country, one finds fertile soil for a
thousand artistic flowers.
The festival founded by actor/producer Constantin Chiriac-
described to me by leading Romanian actor Florin Zamfirescu as "the only
theatre entrepreneur in Romania" (a non-profit one at that)-brings together
traditional Romanian performance and Eastern Europe's progressive theatre,
while skirting the middle road of the average and banal.
The festival, the center of which is the Radu Stanca Theatre, spills
over into the city in two ways: The city absorbs the theatre, and the theatre
absorbs the city. I shall say more about this in my overview of some widely
diverse performances, focusing on a remarkable production of Dostoevsky's
The Idiot staged by the Ukrainian director Andriy Zholdak, who has
developed an ongoing collaboration with the Radu Stanca Theatre.
The festival has published a book length "manifesto" entitled
Challenges (Provocdn) which contains documents by the poets, writers and
philosophers of cultural transformation from the last two centuries to the
present. Another publication, a hefty collection of plays in various languages
from the festival's play-reading series includes a manifesto by playwright and
dramaturg Doru Motok, calling for "Teatrul Imaginativ," an imaginative
theatre which eschews the old notion that dramatists should hand directors
plays with characters who have developed backgrounds, revealed through
"exposition." Rather, Motok's manifesto suggests that an encounter with
here-and-now entities-whose motivations may not be indicated and whose
pasts are irrelevant-is the way to provide actors and directors with new
material for the stage which is more plastic, by leaving openings for
imaginative intervention.
Following in the footsteps of other important international festivals
of recent decades, the Sibiu Festival offers events in the central theatre; in
alternative historic spaces such as the palace and the Fortress in the town; in
lesser alternative spaces for fringe events about town; and, significantly, in
the streets as well. In the case of Sibiu, this means events in the "Grand
Square" and the "Small Square," as well as in the park dividing the old city
from Radu Stanca Theatre.
Within twenty-four hours of arriving at the ten-day festival, the
visitor encounters a wide panoply of performance. In 2001, for example, on
the Great Square, La Romani (A Visit with the Romanians), a performance by
49
T eatrul Musca, created an original event out of traditional rural dance and
masked performance. When a village ensemble of sheet-covered couples
with hugely oversized masks stage their dances and are intruded upon, by
evil, following the tradition, the evil is represented by a vampire figure on
stilts. His "Dracula" robe signals a modern phenomenon at work: a
feedback system by which American show-business gives the Romanians a
"traditional" mythic figure who never existed before appearing in Bram
Stoker's novel and various Hollywood film adaptations. Just as folk culture
has its origins in the provincial village, popular culture comes from the
global village. They are both "people's" culture. Nonetheless, the
juxtaposition of western pop and indigenous folk traditions is eye-opening
in a Transylvanian city.
At the Radu Stanca Theatre itself, many fine productions from
within Romania go up, changing almost every day. Included was Alexandru
Darie's long-running staging of Corneille's Comic Illusion from Teatrul de
Comedie It is an anarchic yet highly visually composed
adaptation of Corneille's exploration of the nature of theatre in which the
father figure Pridamant (Ion Chelaru) finds a sage magician to give him
visions of his long lost son Clindor, played by in balletic commedia style by
George character is driven to such desperate straits when he
competes with other men for the woman he will later betray, and with his
swaggering nemesis, the former coldier Matamore (Marian Ralea), that he
quite literally climbs the walls-of the proscenium arch. It is a gesture which
he has to repeat when he finds that the spectator (Pridamant) of his tour-de-
force has dozed off, at which point he can't repeat the feat with elegance.
Such moments are indicative of the interplay of theatre and reality
throughout the production. As the play opens, designer Maria Miu's space,
comprised of magnificent raked planks beneath a sky-like cyclorama, fills
slowly with characters resembling phantoms, as a Renaissance wind machine
is turned in full view on stage to underscore the idea of stage "effects." The
opening pageant brims over with widely diverse character/performers. In
fact, they both begin and end the performance with fluid tableaux in which
they enter and exit each others' space, touch and depart, play and drop
character, a display of character so fluid and continuous that it defies
comprehension, and so stimulates the eye all the more. It is a micro-
manifestation of the production itself. This directors' prologue is a festival
of false joy and phony truths, rendered pleasurable through color and a
beautiful dance of lying gestures. This is all the more true of the finale,
50
which is entirely a game with the spectators. The liberation experienced by
the audience comes not so much from "laughter," but from the complete
lack of obligation to accept any one version of reality and the permission
granted by the production to enjoy artifice and illusion.
Zouhad by Masrah el Tedj from Algeria, was done as an outdoor
site-specific piece performed in the old city plaza at night. Created by
writer-director Omar Cherrouk in Algiers, it is a ritualized embodiment of
the mystic seeker's quest. Stone walls, torches, old city portals and doors
become the tomb-like surroundings of the seeker who studies with a teacher
in white- the Sufi, or one of the illuminati- but cannot succeed in knocking
down a figure propped up on sticks in the center of the performance space.
That figure seems connected to a character in a black burnoose who at times
appears to represent external religion, and at other times, dangling a little
"mannikin," could represent the ego that the seeker must knock down.
Given the events that shook the world only several months later on
September 11, the impassioned ritual performance, which defies dramatic
expectations in the manner of La Mama or Odin Teatret productions,
conveyed a remarkable imagistic commentary on the nature of religion and
authentic spirituality. Events of a ritual nature tend to gravitate to outdoor
performance in Sibiu's two city squares.
One day toward the end of the festival, as midnight approached,
Theatre Cogitali from Poland set up two giant scaffoldings in the park
outside the old city, creating a runway or "field" between the two structures
so that spectators could gather on either side of it. Their piece, Femina,
directed by Mercin Herich, shows the birth of a woman-soul in a
cellophane-like cage mounted on the first scaffolding, while shower nozzles
spray her mostly naked form as she pushes through the clear plastic like a
reptile hatching from the membrane of an egg. From that point on the
spectators are herded about purposefully, since in the course of this
woman's ritualized quest, her own demons present themselves on stilts.
(Since revived as an element of performance by Odin Teatret, stilts seem to
be making a come-back in both traditional and avant-garde performance
throughout Europe.) The stilted giants come at the audience from both the
front and the back. Special preparation on the part of the spectators is
required when the giants part the crowd with roaring, flaming torches. The
cast parades back and forth on the runway connecting the scaffoldings, as
the mournful music of a solo trombone mixes with recorded high decibel
tracks. The Femina character seeks love, gets burned in the deal, and
51
watches as a male and female dangle on the second scaffolding, trying to
emerge from blasts of water. This time, however, the shower image seems to
signify torment; it has the man and woman separated on the second
scaffolding, hanging by their feet in chains, sprayed with terrific jets of
water, like the liberating "birth water" at the beginning. Here they cannot
meet or touch; it is a doomed struggle to get themselves in an erect posture.
The Femina character finally makes her way into a wedding dress, and moves
out in a matrimonial procession with a stilted, masked giant through the
portal and the second scaffolding beneath a huge plume of smoke and a sky
full of fantastically bright stars (real sky and stars). The festival guards and
Sibiu police were an inoffensive presence during the performance in which
various social boundaries were broken. They observed professionally as the
nude or fire-wielding figures performed in public space, standing watch like
border guards between countries, unintentional performers in a theatre of
open spaces.
A more conventional work, Sukhovo-Kobylin's nineteenth-century
satire on the power of money, Krechinsky's Wedding, which was performed at
the Radu Stanca Theatre, bore the stamp of the best of the classicist trend
now dominant in Bucharest. It was directed by the promising young
director Felix Alexa and featured some of Bucharest's seasoned performers,
notably the stylish Coste! Constantin as Krechinsky, and with a tour-de-
force performance by Valentin Uritescu as his grotesque accomplice
Rasplyuev. A masterpiece of timing and pacing, the production of
Krechinsky's Wedding was reassuring in its precision and predictability after
the strident outdoor events.
But the most disconcerting production-in the true sense that it
upset the public's feeling of concert and concord-was Andriy Zholdak's
version of Dostoevsky's The Idiot at the Radu Stanca, co-produced with the
Charity Producers Foundation in Ukraine. The presence of an "Ex-Soviet
New Wave" director is having an impact on the exponents of "art theatre"
in Romania. Zholdak himself is Ukrainian, but is well-known for his
productions in Moscow, where Constantin Chiriac became acquainted with
his work. The Sibiu festival chief had been asked to Moscow to appear in
Zholdak's first version of The Idiot, as Rogozhin, rival of Prince Myshkin
(Dostoevsky's "Idiot") for the love of Nastasya Filipovna. That production
of The Idiot was in Russian. Chiriac didn't know Russian, but Zholdak
assured him that this presented no obstacle. In an extended conversation I
had with Chiriac about his collaboration with Zholdak, he made clear that
52
it was not unusual for the Ukrainian director to operate this way.
After that successful production, Chiriac wanted Zholdak to come
to Romania to recreate the production. Zholdak, uninterested in repeating
what he had done before, proposed another work. He consented to come
to work at The Radu Stanca Theatre "if he could have a chorus of fifty and
a dozen chandeliers." Zholdak's Moscow Idiot used only a few lines of
Dostoevsky's text, relying instead on a physicalized and imagistic retelling
of the narrative. For the production of The Idiot at the Radu Stanca Theatre,
the director retained "maybe two lines" of his own previous production,
according to Chiriac. His designer (set and costumes) as in Moscow, was
Olexandr Bilzoub, and original music for strings was composed by Vadym
Rokochi. At the end there were only a dozen actors and musicians.
The first act of the production is marked by the use of repetition.
This is a literal, "show-stopping" repetition, in which gestures and
movement sequences are extended by, at given moments, "putting them on
a loop": though here I am not speaking of any technology but of the
performance of repetitions by the actors themselves. Even so, when
Myshkin (Virgil Flonda) meets Nastasya (Diana Vacaru Lazar) on the train to
St. Petersburg in an early scene, the idea of "looping" is made quite literal
and technical when the recorded train-track sound cue continually repeats.
Its starting point at the beginning of the loop is not covered over, but
purposely and crudely accentuated. One of life's rhythms is made a pre-
recorded event.
Tempo and vocal dynamics were never changed intuitively, as in
realism, by the actors, but radically and abruptly. In one example Myshkin
and Rogozhin sit down to talk intimately, simultaneously bringing their
voice levels down from stage speech to a normal conversational tone, so
much so that the audience temporarily has to strain to eavesdrop on them.
Zholdak apparently never insisted on his dozen chandeliers. There
is only one, and the set is spare with a giant transformational "table" set
piece in the center. The scenography makes use of the starkest possible
imagery. The idea of "wood" is important to the texture and sound of the
production. Knives thrown into a wood floor or a ramp up to the table
establish the outline and "arms" of invisible chairs for performers to sit in.
In Act Two, as "Rogozhin 2"-Rogozhin's dark double as conceived by
Zholdak (Gelu Potzolli)-pursues Nastasya over a set of wooden plank
"bridges" laid out on the stage floor, he carries a bag of seven or eight axes
which he throws violently into the boards in diagonal rows, forming a
53
Pierre Corneille's Comic Illusion,
T eatrul de Comedie directed by Alexandru Darie
54
Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot,
Theatre Radu Stanca and Charity Producers
Foundation, directed by Andriy Zholdak
55
sculpture of steely violence every time he takes up a new position in her
pursuit.
Against this brash esthetic is posed the elegant neo-romantic piano
and string settings of Vadim Rakochi. The sensuous warmth of this music
clashes violently with the cold performance style employed by the actors,
creating a world of simultaneous hot-and-cold throughout.
Myshkin's wounded psyche (clearly marked by the criss-crossed
medical tape on his head) gives him the purity of an underdog and the
innocent perseverance of Absurd Man; one might say he is a bit like
Romania. Virgil Flonda's portrayal of Myshkin was marked by the clown's
sense of apartness, of collapse and rebound, which has been a hallmark of
the modern Eastern European tradition, which deflates heroes and renders
their quests ironic. Placed in a hall of mirrors, heroes look grotesque or
ridiculous in their own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. Such a
conception calls for a supple acting style, light, sometimes puppet-like, at
other times balletic. When in one scene Rogozhin and Natasya draw close,
Myshkin (Flonda) remains to one side of the stage and devours an apple,
rotating it in his hand while biting it mechanically, and the resulting
"applesauce" spills through his teeth and fingers. Could there be a more
tactile image of jealousy? In a dinner scene prior to Rogozhin's wedding,
Nastasya (Lazar) stands upon the massive dining table and gestures
beckoning Myshkin. Performing in his bare feet, Flonda starts from a
crouch on the floor at the end of the table, and suddenly rises in the air,
landing before her silently amid the plates and silverware, then leaps silently
backward to his crouching position on the floor; then the actor repeats the
whole thing in absolute silence twice more-Zholdak's trademark repetition-
landing each time like a bird on a branch. Such, we are to understand, is
the power of Nastasya's look on the vulnerable prince.
Virgil Flonda explained to me the physical rigor of the work with
Zholdak. Such moments often sprang from the director's imagination, but
the actor was allowed to solve the "problem." The rehearsal environment
was one of what Chiriac calls complete openness and trust. Both performers
found that their energy rose in proportion to their surrender to the task. In
one "repetetive" gesture in the play, Flonda pounds Chiriac so hard on the
chest with his fist that Chiriac's torso recoils as though taking blows from a
boxer, even though his feet remain stationary and his face expressionless. In
the old communist days, "it's not possible" was the habitual phrase for
shrugging off initiative or responsibility. Now, Flonda told me, "There is no
56
nu se poate [it's not possible] in theatre."
The climax of the production, came not at the end of the show, but
during the intermission break, at which point The Idiot spilled into the foyer,
into the cantina, the bar, the sidewalk and the streets of Sibiu. As Rogozhin
and Nastasya prepared to announce their wedding in the last scene in part
one, the sound of traditional music with fiddle, accordion and drums
approached the doors of the auditorium, and a small crowd of wedding
musicians burst in. Members of the audience took some time to understand
they were invited to the wedding reception, where wine was served in the
large foyer. The musicians drew the audience into traditional dances. As
some of the spectators continued to drink and dance, others spotted a horse
drawn cart stopped on the street outside. They began to gather in
expectation. So did city locals. One fascinated elderly Roma woman put
down her bag and watched as the lucky couple were brought out to the cart.
The bride, Nastasya, threw a bouquet, for which there was a bustle and
competition among a few women. Then the cart drove off down the streets
of Sibiu. Some audience members did not realize that they were supposed
to return to the theatre when the second part of the production resumed,
almost an hour after the action on stage had finished.
A percentage of previously occupied seats were indeed empty, for
whatever reason. A colleague who had attended another show reported that
as he stood in another part of town, he saw a silent and spent looking bride
and groom riding in a peasant wagon. They weren't talking. Of course,
that's how actors playing strenuous roles look during intermission. They do
not want to talk as they prepare themselves for what is to follow. For a while
their green room was Sibiu itself.
At Sibiu, there is a constant rhythm of moving into theatre spaces
and back to the streets. At the end of the evenings, the people of Sibiu,
especially the young people, bought barbecue and beer and sat at tables in
the Grand Square. They sit beneath and around the commemorative
plaques to their colleagues who had fallen in the square twelve years before
during the revolution. The heroic dead and the festive living mingle in this
plaza. To an outside eye it had an unreal quality, a stark contrast, cold and
warm, but to those from Sibiu it was only natural. The dead and living sit
together, two crowds mingling with each other with good will. The dead, in
a way, were the founders of this festival. These dead, after all, rejected the
phrase: Nu se poate. It is the opening for cultural rebirth, however long that
takes.
57
WORKS CITED
Antologia: pieselor prezentate in sec(iunea "spectacole-lecturii." Festivalul
International de Teatru de la Sibiu. Trans. Mircea lvanescu. (Sibiu: Editura
Nemira, 2001).
Challenges (Provociirz). Sibiu International Festival. (Sibiu: 2001)
Festivalullnterna(ional de Teatru de !a Sibiu. Program. (Ed. VIII-a, 25 Mai-3
Junie 2001).
ldiotul. (Program. Teatrul Radu Stanca, Sibiu, 2001)
Nunta lui Krecinski. Program. (Teatrul National "LL. Caragiale,"
Stagiunea 1999-2000.)
58
THE MES SARAJEVO INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL
Allan Graubard and Caroline McGee
In June 2001, we traveled to Sarajevo for a week of interviews with
their leading theater artists. When Lejla Pasovic, executive producer of the
MES Sarajevo International Theater Festival, asked us to participate as
festival jurors, we eagerly agreed.
We returned in October for the festival. The city remained as we
left it several months before save for the autumnal shift: cold foggy
mornings that burned off to brief hot afternoons and deliciously cool
evenings. Its sporadic efforts at rebuilding were gaining speed; the evidence
of destruction was still visible anywhere you turned from shrapnel nicks on
walls to bombed out hulks of apartments, to the destroyed relics of its three
tallest buildings: the two federal government office high rises and the
collapsed Oswbodjenje tower, the city's celebrated daily. The newspaper has
elected to keep the tower as is, a monument to the terror of the longest siege
in modem military history.
At the same time, we came to recognize that the city took heart
from its artists while accepting economic manipulation by international
monitors, the mendacity of its politicians, and a strained patience over
impediments delaying a conclusive fulfillment of the Dayton Accords: the
return of refugees to their former homes. the arrest and prosecution of war
criminals, and the resolution of tensions caused by the founding of Republic
Srpska, an execrable appendage of the peace. We also came to recognize,
even with the mushrooming of cemeteries around the old section of the city
to hold the 10,000 killed during the siege, that Sarajevo's revival would
depend as much upon the willingness of its artists to take risks specific to
their current situation as to shed forms that gained resonance during their
struggle to endure.
Theatre then, beginning in June 1992, was a courageous affair, an
attempt to remain human while trapped in a city under daily bombardment.
In response to the aggression, theatre was a lifeline to sanity for its artists and
their audience. For a time, a catastrophic set of years, context ran with
content; the two were inseparable, immediate and reciprocal. And while
theatre provided a space in which to play, it did so with a seriousness that
59
brought to the work of playing a moral dimension of historic significance.
Theatre now, in October 2001, is a different affair. Sarajevo theatre
artists must reach to discover what they had so close and used so well, and
which compelled them to create amidst so much carnage. For better or
worse, Sarajevo theatre takes on the colors of the moment, and the palette
they offer is a reflection of the times. For the people of Sarajevo, theatre has
become a means for survival. It is not entertainment or art alone; it is
sustenance: the stuff needed to live.
There are four main stages and theatre companies in the city: the
National Theatre, Chamber Theatre, Youth Theatre, and SATR Theatre. All
sustain professional companies and several perform educational functions
for student actors. Variety is the spice of the repertory, and it is used with
gusto, unlike Sarajevo's cuisine, which, while hearty, is rarely delicate or
piquant enough.
In this milieu, the MES Sarajevo International Theatre Festival is
unique. For two weeks the city hosts performances in official and "off-
MESS" sites, this year with twenty performances from ten countries:
Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, France, Bosnia Herzegovina, Sweden,
Slovenia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. Initially conceived as a venue for
"experimental" theatre, MESS has become something of a mix, with state-
sponsored national companies and major and minor independent
companies, several with reputations for exceptional artistry, performing
pieces well within the international repertory: Shakespeare, Beckett, Gogo!,
Genet, Muller, Ibsen, Gombrowicz and more. This year, the MESS Festival
was directed by Dino Mustafic, with Lejla Pasovic as executive producer, and
Lejla Hasanbegovic and Nihad Kresevlakovic as program managers.
It is the most important cultural event of the year in Sarajevo,
where theatre has not yet been marginalized by television, cinema and pop
mUSiC.
In Sarajevo, with ticket prices just above $2 per seat and with those
who can't pay allowed in as SRO, theatre has retained its appeal for the
majority, a place for serious social dialogue. This may change in the near
future as Sarajevo enters the digital world more completely, and its television
and cinema offerings expand.
Preeminent this year was Eimuntas Nekrosius's stunning OtheOo
(See SEEP, vol. 21, no. 3, Fall 2001), which recently premiered in Venice.
The play was awarded the MESS "Golden Laurel" for "Best Performance"
and Vlados Bagdonas as Othello received the "Best Actor" award.
60
Nekrosius, now forty-eight, concentrates his talents on lucid
interpretations of Western classics. Critical praise follows each of his
triumphs, whether his recent Hamlet (See SEEP, vol. 22, no. 1, Winter 2002
and vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 1998), performed at MESS in 1999, developed
over seven years, or the current Othello, developed over nine months. But
whether the preparation takes years or months, the mechanism is similar:
simplicity of concept, a precise understanding of character and ample
development for actors to embody it, a vital counterpoint between text and
subtext, resonant physicality, and ingenious stage designs, both functional
and poetic, that propel plot transformations.
Nekrosius's Othello, opens with two "children" (mature actors) who
carry on stage several large, half-filled water bottles that they hold between
their hands, rocking them back and forth throughout the entire performance
stage rear, perennial chorus of waves to the passions of men. Above them
large "sails" hung on ropes from the catwalk unfurl; we are on a victory ship
approaching Venice or the dock itself. The sails will later turn into sailors'
hammocks for Desdemona and friends to sleep in. Two wooden ship doors
angled out to the audience at the wings stage front leak water at various
moments, enhancing the rhythmic sense of waves with an anguished
undertone of tears to come. Primitive dugouts the length of a man note the
fleet; Othello will move them about at will until his suicide, when he falls
face down into one, now his bier. In custom with nautical funerals, Cassio
tips the bier into the empty orchestra pit without allowing Othello to slide
off as he recounts his legacy while Iago, lamed by his deceits into a
contorted beggar, hops about on one leg in the background.
Vlados Bagdonas possesses Othello completely, using his height
and strength with a naturalness that enriches his solitude as commander and
Moor. Yet he courts Desdemona entranced by her beauty, basking in her
presence. She sways above him like some long drink he has just now only
tasted, never having known the pleasure before. It is the closest thing to
compassion we will find in him. When jealousy poisons his love and anger
replaces trust, his honor "defiled," he twists himself, into an engine of
revenge.
A splendid Egle Spokaite plays Desdemona. She is a tall, agile
dancer-actor, charmed by youth and position. She first appears lugging the
door to her father's house on her back, the gift of her name to Othello. At
the close of the second act, stung by Othello's false suspicions at her
"infidelities," she paces anxiously between two wooden chairs, caught by her
61
love and her fear of having lost him. The action builds to panic as a
foreboding of horror overwhelms her. It is an infectious moment. The
audience - now her retinue - exits for the break, drained and pale, primed
for the rage to come. Her murder is terrible to watch: the argument leads to
the blade; she and Othello dance about in geometric anguish. She falls twice
from his arms, seemingly dead, suddenly to rise and embrace him again, a
double terzo fraught with passion and death.
Rolandas Kazlas as Iago seems to have stepped from an Eisenstein
epic during the heyday of Soviet silent cinema. When no one is watching,
he nervously weaves his web with cipher hands. What he gives is trundled
by spite, what he receives burns with bitterness.
Oskar Kor5unovas, a younger Lithuanian compatriot to Nekrosius,
offered a "polyphonic" adaptation of Bulgakov's novel, Master and
Margarita, which had previously delighted audiences at Avignon, gaining
him a MESS award for "Best Young Director" and his writer, Sigitas
Parulskis for "Best Adaptation." The tale speaks of a history of repression
that the former Yugoslavia knew well enough. According to Tanya Miletic,
a festival juror from Mostar, it was a poignant rendering of a period that her
parents and grandparents lived through, a sort of apologia by laughter. A
round, red womb-like table in which our protagonist, Ivan, sleeps is formed
by the other members of the cast: part critics, commissars and asylum mates
to come. As they drift apart onto the stage and the table collapses, the action
effloresces at kindling speed. Presentational motifs proliferate with vivacious
ensemble interludes as Ivan enters the asylum, where the critic-commissar-
inmates traduce his literary gifts, crushing him in the process.
The second act offers a portrait of Margarita, splendidly played by
Aldana Benorinte, also incarcerated in the asylum. Here, unlike most of the
cast, she reveals something more than a directorial conceit. A woman as well
as a courtesan, her struggle to retain the humanity in her character, and her
fidelity to Ivan, flares up admirably against the tempo of the play.
Retrieving several scorched sheets of manuscript from Ivan's
masterpiece, now largely a pile of ash, she mounts the human table we saw
in the first act which has become a large revolving torture table for her
breathless confession here. The Ball follows fast, a Keystone Cops shadow
play of cocktails, trysts, and robotic entanglements whirled up to a giddy
confusion. A video projection suspends our excitement--the exhaustion after
the drunkenness- in Margarita's "dream of a dream of flying" above empty
lanes and spectral forests.
62
That this kind of spectacle exalts clever stagecraft and inventive
visuals, leaving less to character development and poignant relationships, is
a given. Certainly, it prompted little concern in the audience, caught up as
they were in the mayhem, perhaps relieved at not being asked to submit to
the emotional complexities of identification, at least for this evening. But it is
just this sort of difference, and where it tends, that the theatre of spectacle
must question. Otherwise, the cinematic or digital techniques that directors
prefer will not carry the piece as they might wish. We hope that Kodunovas
will discover in future works that the spirit of carnival which he orchestrates
to honor Bulgakov will not need to rely as much on expediency as in the
performance he offers us. For his grasp of adaptation, which is precise, need
only establish an intimacy that touches on the profound.
Special mention goes to Egle Mikulionyte (Anushka), an ugly,
unkempt charwoman who opens and closes the play to a scratchy radio
orchestra as she mutters to herself, dancing with her mop-welcome relief to
the preferred image of women as vamps on Sarajevo's stages and streets.
Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz's novel that chronicles the descent
of a man into the body of an adolescent, is revealed anew in the stage
version by Janusz Oprynski and Witold Mazurkiewicz ofTeatr Provisorium
and Kompania Teatr (see SEEP vol. 20, no. 2, Summer 2000). At the 2001
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Polish production gained the Fringe First
Award, while in Sarajevo the work won special recognition for "Best
Ensemble Acting."
Noted for a precise rendering of the spirit that animates the
original-equal parts slapstick, satire and subversive poetics- Oprynski and
Mazurkiewicz catapult us into a sensibility at odds with all things mature.
The Teatr Provisorium-Kompania Teatr collaboration performs in a variety
of venues, including grade schools. At their press conference in Sarajevo,
they mentioned a suggestion, floated in the Polish press, that they perform
Ferdydurke for the national congress in Warsaw.
Gunpowder Keg, written by Dejan Dukoski, and directed by
Slobodan Unkovski (See SEEP, vol. 21, no. 1, Winter 2001), was premiered
in 1994 at the National Theatre of Macedonia in Skopje. Gunpowder Keg is
the basis of the French-Yugoslavian-Macedonian production of the film
Cabaret Balkan, directed by Goran Paskaljevic. The play, in a Yugoslavian
National Theatre production, directed by Unkovski, was revived for the
MESS Festival. If MESS had an award for stage design my vote would go
here to Miodrag Tabacki: a bare, open stage with several shower heads in the
63
back and every inch of wall space, including a table and tablecloth stage
front, obsessively marked to count off the days in this Balkan madhouse
torched by the barbarity of war.
Its characters have a common purpose: to inflict or suffer physical
and emotional abuse in one extreme vignette after another. An old cripple
(a former cop) lurches into a cafe on crutches, empty save for another man
sipping beer. When the cripple sits down the fellow approaches to remind
him of a previous run in-when he "broke every bone in his body with a tire
iron and twenty pound hammer" in revenge for the cop's near emasculation
of him some time before-the title of the scene: "Health and Happiness." An
aborted rape turns fatal against its protagonist, who is finally shot by the
girl's boyfriend. He stumbles into a filthy outhouse, where he bleeds to
death banging his head against its walls. A city bus is taken over by an irate
passenger, who grows enraged at having to wait for the bus to depart. He
terrorizes the three other passengers until the driver returns, flattens the
punk and throws him out for "having left the door open." Gunpowder Kqjs
finale is a devastating summa of the wounds exposed, the means to do so
and the expected result: a rusty nail for the coffin of Yugoslavia. The same
cripple who opens the play drags forward to the audience to stutter: "I have
something important to tell you, but I cannot remember what it is."
It was also the first time in seven years that a national company
from Belgrade performed in Sarajevo, and the attendant emotions were high.
As Lejla Pasovic explained: "There will be tears tonight at the theatre. We
still feel Yugoslavian."
There are other performances at MESS, including an effective
revival of Waiting for Godot and the "Off-MESS" line up, topped by a
multimedia dance theatre evocation of Heiner Muller's Abandoned Shores
from France's Compagnie Faim de Siecle. But space forbids us to continue.
Sarajevo retains its charge as a hot bed for theatrical research and
experiment. As Bosnia Herzegovina speeds its transition from "international
protectorate" to a political and cultural entity independent of monitors, it is
well that its artists keep their edges honed, their vision clear. Lack of
appropriate public funding will be an issue for some time to come; the
MESS Festival 2001 lost half of its government grant at the last moment.
And Western Europe and the United States are just around the comer,
whose liberal production opportunities may entice talented Sarajevans to
leave. Can Sarajevo theatre culture flourish in these new conditions? The
MESS festival makes the case that it can.
64
INTRODUCTION TO FERENC MOLNAR'S STILL LIFE (1925)
Eugene Brogyanyi
After reading Still Life, a contemporary American may have
difficulty understanding how its author could in any way be controversial,
unless the play in question is not typical. In fact, this one-act play
epitomizes much of what defines Ferenc Molnar as a playwright. (He also
wrote fiction and essays.) His masterly craftsmanship, witty, sophisticated
dialogue, playing hide-and-seek with truth, are very much in evidence here,
as are some of his favorite themes: the love triangle, the psychological
advantage of a woman over a jealous man, hints of sexual impropriety
threatening the facade of middle-class social decorum; and in the end, all's
well as can be in such a world. The play furthermore features one of
Molnar's favorite character types: the actor or actress, i.e., someone whose
very occupation calls for dissembling. a skill carried over into "real life."
The controversy in question is a Hungarian phenomenon. The
opinion of high-brow critics has been at odds with the immense popularity
of Molnar's plays among the theatre-going public in Hungary. In the rest of
the world, Molnar is what he is: a deservedly popular playwright, a brilliant
entertainer. In his native land, he is also the victim of a national
preoccupation with image, something common to small nations on the
periphery of the influential Western European center of gravity. The fact
that the most internationally famous Hungarian playwright is not one of
Hungary's best writers is a source of consternation to some who feel they
must disparage or at least apologize for Molnar. His plays were often labeled
"export drama," a derogation meant to imply that they were written with
foreign middle-classtheater-goersin mind, not fromgenuine artistic impulses.
It has been pointed out that although Molnar deals in reality versus
illusion, he is no Pirandello; though he manifests the influence of Freud, he
is no Schnitzler. He has been called the Hungarian Noel Coward. But this
does not make Coward the English Molnar, because the British have no
need to apologize for any writer in English who may be "lesser," nor to
establish standards by which to make such judgments. A number of
Hungarian authorities, on the other hand, routinely point out that, his
technical brilliance notwithstanding, Molnar never required his audiences to
think deep thoughts, and that his plays contain little or no social criticism.
Does anyone take Coward to task for such supposed flaws?
65
In addition to this small-nation-on-the-periphery syndrome, the
situation is exacerbated by the fact that Molnar belonged to a generation of
Hungarians who brought forth a remarkable bloom in arts, letters, and
sciences, beginning at the turn of the century. This intellectual ferment came
in the midst of Hungary's dizzyingly rapid modernization starting in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, after the country had achieved a degree
of independence within the Hapsburg Empire. World War I and its
aftermath brought political and social development to an abrupt end, but
that remarkable generation continued to influence a cultural climate whose
legacy survives in Hungary and beyond. Bela Bartok is perhaps the most
internationally recognizable name among its members. In poetry Endre Ady
and in prose Gyula Krudy are the outstanding figures among an impressive
number of excellent writers of their generation. But these two in particular
may be untranslatable in certain essential ways. Thus they remain hidden
treasures to the world, trapped in an obscure, minor language. Molnar leapt
out of this trap while remaining Hungarian through his settings and
characters. For this, Hungarians may rightly rejoice and join the rest of the
world in its uncomplicated appreciation for his plays.
And indeed, such appreciation is increasingly evident. After
decades as a Soviet satellite, cut off from its traditional cultural connections,
Hungary's reintegration into the West has encompassed a reevaluation of
Molnar. Two events in 1995 are emblematic ofHungary's joining the rest of
the world in its view of the playwright. The first was the international
Molnar Festival in Budapest, the second was that year's annual Classics in
Context Festival, devoted to Molnar, at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Tamas Ungvari of the Hungarian Academy of Performing Arts spoke at
both, and Krisztina Vincze, manager of Molnar's old theatrical home, the
Comedy Theater (Vigszinbaz) of Budapest, curated an exhibit of pertinent
photographs in Louisville. As a cultural phenomenon, Molnar is being
accorded more respect in Hungary today than when he was one of the main
sources of entertainment to the middle-class audiences he so incisively
portrayed.
In addition to the ethos of middle-class-and, in the case of Liliom,
working-class-Budapest, Molnar's personal relationships and his experience
in the theater have clearly been among his sources of inspiration. Still Life is
no exception. Brooks Atkinson, while making no mention of this short play,
provides a possible clue to its genesis in his book Broadway, in a paragraph
about Molnar's New York hit of 1924-25, The Guardsman, starring Alfred
66
Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The Theater Guild wanted to open its seventh
season with this play written in 1910, but had trouble finding the two leads:
"Star actresses had invariably turned the play down because they thought the
male part was the better. Male stars turned it down because they thought the
female part was the real lead. To the Lunts, it was an ideal vehicle because
they could act it together with the brio and counterpoint of two perfectly
matched geniuses . . . Hungary had given the Guild another plum"
(Macmillan, N.Y., 1974, p. 218). In the wake of the Guild's October 1924
opening of The Guardsman, Still Life was written in 1925. The one-act play's
rendering of professional jealousy between actor and actress reflects the
trouble the Guild had in casting The Guardsman, the happy outcome of
which was the beginning of a successful career of joint appearances at the
Guild by what became Broadway's most celebrated married couple. Like
those in The Guardsman, the two lead parts in Still Life are of equal
importance; and as in The Guardsman, the plot turns on carnal jealousy. Still
Life, then, seems be an outgrowth of Molnar's involvement with this new
production of The Guardsman. Perhaps he was thinking of the Lunts while
writing Still Life.
Molnar's next play, the immensely successful The Play's the Thing,
written in the following year, 1926, also has theater people putting their
talents to deceptive use in order to salvage a "real" situation involving lovers.
Still Life, then, though hardly ever performed and apparently never published
in Hungarian (an unwieldy English version was published in New York in
1929), seems to open a small window onto Molnar at the top of his form.
On April 23, 2002, the Hungarian Cultural Center of New York
and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center commemorated the fiftieth
anniversary of the death of Ferenc Molnar with a celebration of the
playwright in the Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center.
The evening consisted of a lecture by Clara Gyorgyey on Molnar's life and
work, and two performances of his one-act play, Still Life, in a production by
the Obie-winning Threshold Theater Company of New York. The second
performance of Still Life was added in order to accommodate the demand for
seats; the house was filled to capacity both times. This event marked the first
occasion on which Martin E. Segal Theatre was used for a full professional
production. Threshold had previously produced Still Life in its Caught in the
Act Festival in 1999. Then as now, Peter Bennett directed Joel Leffert and
Nancy Nichols in the leading roles. Christi Hatcher joined the cast as the
maid in the 2002 production.
67
STILL LIFE
Ferenc Molnar
Translated from the Hungarian by Eugene Brogyanyi
Still Lifo by Ferenc Molnar is published by permission of the Trust u/w/o Lili Darvas Molnar
and the Trust f/b/o Lukin, Horvath and Sarkozi. All Rights Reserved.
CHARACTERS:
WOMAN, actress (Emma)
S6V AR.Y, actor
BETTY, maid
Takes place in the actress's apartment.
S6V ARY (entering): Good evening, Betty.
BETTY: Good evening.
S6V ARY (puts down his hat and walking stick): Is the actress in?
BETTY: No. (Goes about tidying.)
S6VAR.Y: When is she expected?
BETTY: I don't know.
S6VAR.Y: When did she go out?
S6VAR.Y: Should I wait?
S6V ARY (sits down): How can she be out? There's no performance tonight.
When she's not performing, she dines at eight o'clock. It's quarter
past nine already. (BETTY shrugs.) Didn't she say when she' d be
home?
BETTY: No.
S6V ARY: Is there some sort of supper awaiting her?
BETTY: I don' t know.
S6V ARY: What do you mean, you don't know? Did you ftx supper or not?
That much you know.
BETTY: Leave me alone.
68
S6VAR.Y: You miserable creature! One of these days I'm going to kill you.
You're shortening my life. I'll end up in prison on account of you,
because I'm going to kill you. (BETTY tries to leave.) Stay here! (He
blocks her exit.)
BETTY: Let me out.
S6VAR.Y: You'll stay here and talk.
BETTY: What are we, old chums? Since when do we chat?
S6VARY: How dare you speak to S6viry like that! The famous S6vary,
whose very name sends shivers down the spines of theater
managers!
BETTY: Let me go.
S6V ARY: No. You're going to talk. I don't care if you're being insolent,
that's all too familiar to me. As a matter of fact, I'm glad, because
now I know what to expect when she gets back. She's angry about
something, but I don't care. However, I will kill you if you lie and
keep secrets and conspire and help her deceive me. You will die,
Betty. One of these days. I'm telling you.
BETTY: Leave me alone. What do you want from me?
S6V ARY: Who was here this afternoon?
BETTY: I don't know. I was out getting yeast.
S6VARY: You don't know, you were out getting yeast. Very well. When did
she leave home?
BETTY: She was gone by the time I got back.
S6VARY: She was gone by the time you got back. Very well. Whose cigar
butt is this in the ashtray?
BETTY: Yours. From yesterday.
S6VAR.Y: You haven't emptied the ashtray since yesterday?
BETTY: No, and I won't empty it tomorrow either.
S6V ARY: Will you accept a bribe?
BETTY: Yes.
S6V ARY (reaches into his pocket): How much will it take to get you to talk?
BETTY: I won't take any from you.
S6VAR.Y (shouting): From whom then? From the Count, whom you're in
league with- against me, you miserable creature! Against me! That
I should be stuck in this godforsaken backwater, where there's one
polished gentleman, and he just happens to be after my fiancee.
(Doorbell rings.)
BETTY: Don't worry, I'll tell her everything. You'll soon quiet down. (Exits,
69
returning behind the WOMAN.)
WOMAN (enters, speaks to BETTY behind her back): And how long has he
been here?
BETTY: Not long, a few minutes.
WOMAN: Did you tell him to wait?
BETTY: No.
WOMAN: Then why is he waiting?
WOMAN: Did you tell him I said I wouldn't be home for dinner?
BETTY: No.
WOMAN (putters about): I've told you not to let anybody in while I'm out.
BETTY: What can I do if he bullies me?
WOMAN: Very simple. Get the police.
BETTY: Next time I will. (Exits.)
SOV ARY: Half past nine. (WOMAN does not respond.) Half past nine.
WOMAN: Qyarter past.
SOV ARY: Half past.
WOMAN: What if it is? Who are you? My husband?
SOV ARY: Where were you till half past nine at night?
WOMAN: Nowhere. (Sits down at the table, reads the newspaper.)
SOV AR Y (in an outburst): You miserable creature. Where were you from two
in the afternoon till half past nine? I'll murder you. (Picks up a chair.)
WOMAN (calmly, while reading the newspaper): Drop the dramatics and get
out. Get out or I'll have the police summoned.
SOVARY (puts down the chair, WOMAN turns pages): We'll die together,
because this can't go on. My nerves can't take any more of this, you
unfaithful deceiver, you!
WOMAN (while reading the newspaper): Give me a kiss.
SOVARY: This is terrible!
WOMAN: Sit by me, you monkey, and give me a kiss.
SOV ARY (steps to her, buries his face in her neck, kisses her, and sobs): This is no
time to be reading the paper.
WOMAN: Now, now. Aren't you ashamed? The famous S6vary, crying like
a baby.
SOV ARY: God, how unfortunate I am!
WOMAN: That's enough now.
SOV AR Y (embraces her, his face still buried in her neck): Where were you from
two till half past nine?
70
'-..)
......
Nancy Nichols (as Woman) and Joel Leffert (as S6viry) in
Ferenc Molnar's Still Life directed by Peter Bennett,
at the Martin E. Segal Theatre, 2002
WOMAN: I didn't leave the house till four.
S6V ARY (backing away .from her): That's not true, because I was here at half
past two, and you were gone. Something's going on with you. I feel
it. For a while you were behaving, but now it's starting all over
again. Is there someone else? When you torment me like this, my
acting goes down the drain. You're destroying my talent. Wrecking
my career. (Brief pause. He seizes the newspaper and throws it away.)
Where were you this afternoon? Answer me!
WOMAN: I was at home. I just ran over to the Reiners.
S6VARY: The Reiners weren't home all day.
WOMAN: That's why I came right back.
S6V ARY: I sat here from half past two till half past three. Did it take you
over an hour to come back from next door?
WOMAN: I came back immediately, but I met the janitor on the stairs. He
told me his wife had a baby this morning. So I went down with him
to have a look.
S6VARY: The janitor's wife had a baby three months ago. I know because
I gave her money then. If this is the same child, you're lying, and if
it's a new one after only three months, that's quite a feat.
WOMAN: I could tell right away it was an older child. They tried to put one
over on me again. They're always thinking up ways to make me tip
them.
S6V ARY: So where did you go after that?
WOMAN: I stayed home till seven.
S6VARY: You did not.
WOMAN: I did.
S6V ARY: You did not, because I came back at half past six, and you weren't
here. Besides, this match I put in the keyhole was still the way I'd
left it, so you couldn't have been home after I left here at half past
three. Proof that you're lying again.
WOMAN: So what? Who are you, anyway? My husband?
S6VARY: Ah-hah! It's starting again.
WOMAN: That's right. It's starting. But it could stop right now. That's up
to you. For my part, I've had enough of this. Everybody thinks
you're a cad for not marrying me.
S6VARY: Who is this everybody? The manager's wife? A few backstage
busy-bodies? That's public opinion to you?
WOMAN (suddenly, passionately): Yes, everyone considers it a vile thing that
72
Slavic and East E1tropean Performance Vol. 22, No.2
you don't marry me. If you don't respect me, don't come here. And
if you do come here, don't be making scenes - you have no right
to. Why do you come here, anyway? We both know what you want.
And that's aU you want me for. Everybody says so.
S6V ARY: Starting again?
WOMAN: Yes, I'm starting again. I'm humiliated. Before, at least they
didn't know how I fit in with this provincial society. But now, my
position is crystal clear: I'm the lowest woman, because not even
S6vary wants to marry me.
S6V ARY: "Not even S6viry!" Who says that?
WOMAN: I say it.
S6V ARY: And for my part, I say what I've said a hundred times before: that
S6viry is a respectable man who can't swallow your past in one
gulp.
WOMAN: My past?! How unchivalrous of you, using an expression like
that!
S6VARY: You force me to. "Not even S6vary!" Am I so insignificant that
I'm obliged to marry everybody immediately? Am I not allowed to
have doubts, to hesitate, to think about it? Have I no honor? I
come from a poor but respectable family. I have a proud old
mother and a poor honorable sister who're in despair that I'm ...
that I might . . . that you and I ...
WOMAN: Out of my apartment! Immediately!
S6V ARY (sits down): No wonder I lose my tact when you get me riled.
WOMAN: My past! What do you know of my past?
S6VARY: Lieutenant Zamboky.
WOMAN: I took French lessons from him.
S6V ARY: Judge Pirtos. What kind of lessons did he give you? He was the
next one to drop by every day.
WOMAN: He was in love with me, the poor thing. It's typical of you to be
jealous even of him. Shame on you. That hapless little man.
S6VARY: Is that why you went to Vienna with him?
WOMAN: What was I supposed to do? He happened to be going there at
the same time.
S6V ARY: Zoltanfy the pharmacist.
WOMAN: Outrageous! First of all he's not a pharmacist, and second of all,
you're crazy.
S6V ARY: Robert Stein.
73
WOMAN: You're out of your mind.
sOv ARY: Hugo Kis.
WOMAN: You're not normal.
SOVAR.Y: Professor Aszody.
WOMAN: The professor!
SOV ARY: Lieutenant Zolt.
WOMAN: Good God!
SOV ARY: Laszlo Korb.
WOMAN: Madman!
SOV ARY: Ligeti, Onodi, Schwarz!
WOMAN: Schwarz!
SOVARY: Vasadi!
WOMAN: Schwarz!
SOV ARY: Hamori, Keller, Kovacs!
WOMAN: Schwarz!
SOVARY: That's interesting. Only Schwarz gets to her.
WOMAN: Out! Right now! (Opens the door and holds it.} One-two-three!
SOV AR.Y: And I forgave all that, all of it, because I am insane. You're right
about that one thing. I'm a madman. Because I love you madly.
WOMAN: Get out of here! (Stamps her foot.)
SOV ARY: I wouldn't have said a word if you were behaving decently. But
you're starting all over again. I have a feeling - indeed, I know -
that you want to cheat on me, that you are cheating on me, and ..
. (flies into a rage) . . . you're ruining me, ruining me, I'll go to
prison because of you, because I can't take any more, because I'll
kill you! (Picks up a butter knife from the table.)
WOMAN (calls out the door): Betty! (BETTY steps in.) Get the police right
away.
BETTY: Yes, ma'am. (Exits.)
(The door stays open, the woman sits down. SOV ARY tosses the knife on
the table and turns his back to the woman. He remains standing that way.
Pause.)
SOV ARY: It's enough to drive a man to despair.
WOMAN: Don't strain yourself. The police will be here any minute.
SOV ARY (closes the door): This is terrible. All the things your behavior made
me say. I don't even recognize myself. It ought to be clear to you
how insane your torments drive me, how ... how much I love you.
(Kneels before her.)
74
WOMAN: Save it for the authorities. You threatened to murder me.
S(>V ARY: What's the big deal? Maybe ifl'd broken a plate. But all I did was
run off at the mouth.
WOMAN (strokes his head): You monkey. Why do you get so worked up?
S6VARY {kisses her hand): You're unfaithful. (Looks up at her. WOMAN
stands up, S6VARY too. He embraces her.) Do you love me? Tell me
you love me.
WOMAN: As soon as you recover your sanity.
S6V ARY: Just one more thing, my dear. Let me ask you just one question
(in a quiet, rifined tone), and then it'll be over. But let's do this in a
serene, refined way, as befits two artistic souls. Delicately, as befits
a lady and a gentleman.
WOMAN: What now?
S6V ARY: When you came home just now, you rang the bell.
WOMAN: So what?
S6V ARY: Why did you ring the bell?
WOMAN: I'm not following you.
S6VARY: Think a moment, my dear. As far as I know, you're not in the
habit of ringing because you have a key. Betty has one too. Indeed,
at the risk of committing an indiscretion, I admit to having a key
myself. Why, then, did you have to ring? Where did you leave your
key?
WOMAN: What you're getting at is: to whom did I give my key.
s6v ARY: I prefer a less vulgar way of expressing the question.
WOMAN: You're ridiculous. I rang because Betty's key was blocking the
lock from the inside.
S6VARY: That's not true, because ten minutes before you came home I
opened the door with my own key. The lock was empty and Betty
hadn't left the room before you got here.
WOMAN: You see?! This is the cause of everything.
S6VARY: The cause of everything?
WOMAN (in a weepy voice): This cross examination, this jealousy, is the
cause of all our troubles. To you everything is a lie or a pretext, so
I tried to avoid the unpleasantness this time, but it's no use. Even
though the simple fact of the matter is: one of keys got lost, that's
all. Betty lost her key.
S6VARY: Then why did you say it was in the lock from the inside?
WOMAN: Because you force me to lie even though you know there's
75
nothing I hate so much as lies. {She weeps.}
S6V ARY: If you hadn't started crying just now, I would have believed you.
But something's got to be rotten about this key business if you find
it necessary to resort to tears. You're cheating on me.
WOMAN: How can you say that?
S6V ARY (with increasing vehemence): Because nothing's true. Neither the
janitor, nor the Reiners, nor going away, nor coming back, nor
losing the key. Nothing. The Count kissed your neck by the skating
rink, then helped you into a carriage and the two of you rode to his
mansion and you went inside with him, and don't tell me it was just
for a minute, because you went in at three o'clock in the afternoon,
and don't tell me you came right out, because you came out at
exactly nine. {Grabs her arm.) Is this the gratitude I get for my
faithfulness? For my love?
WOMAN: Let go of my arm.
S6V AR.Y: Never.
WOMAN: I'll bite your hand.
S6V ARY: I'd like to see you do that. (She bites his hand.) Very well. (He lets
go.) I see you'll stop at nothing. If you hadn't bitten me, you would
have died. You'll never see me again. Good-bye. (Lies on the divan.}
WOMAN (rings, BETTY enters): Didn't I tell you to get the police?
BETTY: I thought you were just saying that.
WOMAN: Run right out and get a policeman. (As BETTY exits.} My life is
in danger.
S6V ARY: You will die. My man spied everything out.
WOMAN: You work with spies, do you?
S6VARY: And I saw you, too. One more word out of you and I'll tell you
what you are.
WOMAN (weeping): No don't. I couldn't survive that. (Brief pause.) On the
other hand . . . All right, then, I'll tell you everything . . .
(approaches him with eyes flashing) everything you don't already know.
(Pause.)
S6VAR.Y: Well?
WOMAN: I'll tell you ...
S6VARY: Well? Go ahead! Say it. Don't spare my broken heart.
WOMAN: In the first place, this is my apartment. And in the second place,
it's already half past ten ...
S6VARY: Qyarter past.
76
-...]
-...]
Nancy Nichols (as Woman), Joel Leffert (as S6vary), and
Christi Hatcher (as Betty) in Ferenc Molnar's StiO Lift, directed by Peter Bennett,
WOMAN: Half past. But what difference does it make? A stranger has no
right to create a disturbance in my apartment at night. Go home. I
never want to see you again. You have no rights here. (She rings.)
SOV ARY (bitterly): The Count, on the other hand, has rights.
WOMAN: No more or less than you have.
SOVARY: Very nice. (Coldly, resolutely.) Just for that, I'll tell you what you
are. You're ...
WOMAN: What do I care? Say it. It won't be the first time. (Fo BETTY as
she enters.) Have you prepared supper?
BETTY: I didn't know you'd be home.
SOVARY: A man who sacrificed everything for the sake of a woman: his
good name, his career ...
WOMAN: Are there any cold cuts at least? What about that ham?
SOV ARY: And what for? Just to have his truest and most beautiful feelings
trampled.
BETTY: You scraped the bone yesterday.
WOMAN: Of course.
SOV ARY: A man who has only one sore point . . . the woman he loves.
WOMAN: Is Blau's delicatessen still open?
BETTY: Not at this hour.
SOV ARY: The artist's fate!
BETTY: But I can get something cold from the restaurant.
SOVARY: The fate of a naive man.
WOMAN: Let's make do with that.
BETTY: And what should I get?
SOV ARY: Trust, appreciation, respect, the passionate and mature love of a
man ...
WOMAN: A little salami, a little tongue, a little head-cheese ...
SOVARY: Does that mean nothing to you?
WOMAN: And a peeled cucumber.
SOV ARY: How do you reconcile what you did today with the demand that
I lead you to the altar?
WOMAN: If there's no salami, make it ham.
BETTY: I'll bring whatever is fresher.
SOVARY: You're well trained, Betty. When I have lots of money, I'll hire
you for myself.
BETTY: I'll get going. Till then, here's some bread and butter.
SOV ARY: You're very smart, Betty. I hold you in high regard.
78
BETIY: Sorry about not having supper ready, but you did say you wouldn't
be home this evening.
S6V ARY: In other words, arrangements were made for a rendezvous.
WOMAN: Yes. A rendezvous. (Calmly spreads butter and eats. Betty exits.)
S6V ARY: She's eating. Serenely, heartily, like a child. Like an innocent,
hungry little girl. I'm always touched by the sight of her eating. Like
a little white mouse. I could cry.
WOMAN: Rendezvous.
S6V ARY: The way she eats this meager little supper! Here in this lovely
milieu, which was financed by 1-don't-know-who, and where I
offended her so severely . . . where I was so boorish to her . . . my
poor little angel ...
WOMAN (munching}: Rendezvous, huh?
S6V ARY (goes to her, embraces her): My precious little child, forgive this crazy
... (choked up) ... this crazy old madman . .. (Kisses her hair.)
WOMAN: You've got that right.
S6V ARY (warmly): And ifl were to say that . . . (takes her head in his hands,
turns it toward himse!f. Speaks in a trembling, sincere tone of voice) ...
all this can change . . . that out of this strife, a decent, orderly life
can emerge . . . a decent life . . . Let's pull ourselves out of this
mess we live in . . . drag ourselves up, out of the quagmire ...
together, with determination. My mother will come to understand
and love you .. . and my little sister ... God, she's all heart, that
child . . . Those two women are going to adore you, I know, and I
also know . . . though I must say, my sister will be problematic at
first ... She's not like me. She's all heart, but a terribly respectable
girl .. .
WOMAN: Only your sister matters? It's of no interest to you what my sister
might say if I married such a . . . You talk about marriage as if it
were a family tragedy. You've humiliated me, so get out. Go, you
coward. Go home. I never want to see you again.
S6V ARY: I know, I know. Don't waste your breath. It's been perfectly clear
for the last half hour that you're trying to leave. At this time of
night.
WOMAN: For a rendezvous?
S6VARY: Something like that.
WOMAN: Now you leave, mister. And this time for real. And forever.
S6V ARY: Fine. (Picks up his hat.) Fine. You'll see. (He leaves. She throws herself
79
into the corner of the settee. Betty enters with a tray of cold supper.)
WOMAN: Is he gone?
BETTY: Yes.
WOMAN: Did he say anything to you?
BETTY: He said I'll see.
WOMAN: What did you bring?
BETTY: A nice ham and some cheese.
WOMAN (sits down by the supper, but does not eat, on[y stares at the food): Did
you hear that?
BETTY: The street door slamming. He just left.
WOMAN: Take a look.
BETTY (goes to the window, pushes the curtain slight[y aside): He's going away.
WOMAN: In which direction?
BETTY: Toward the square. (Pause. WOMAN stares at the food, but does not
eat.) He just stopped. He's coming back.
WOMAN (sighs): If only once he could manage not to come right back after
going away forever.
BETTY: He didn't come in. He walked past the entrance.
WOMAN: I know. He's pacing back and forth. I'll bet he's brandishing his
cane in the air.
BETTY: That's right.
WOMAN: That's for the Count ...
BETTY: If he were your husband . . . but he's not, so what business is it of
his what and how and when and with whom ...
WOMAN: Don't worry about me, Betty. Everything's under control.
BETTY (at the window): He's still pacing back and forth. If you don't mind,
ma'am, there's something I'd like to say.
WOMAN: Well, what is it?
BETTY: If things are under control, the way you say, then maybe don't
torment him so much.
WOMAN: Feeling sorry for him?
BETTY: You know me, ma'am, I'm always looking out for your interests, so
please don't take offense. It's a pity to torment him so much, he's
a good man. I'm not saying this out of self-interest, because he
never gave me a penny, but he's a good man, a softy. He'll do
whatever you want.
WOMAN: What do you know what I want?
BETTY: You think I don't know what this is about?
80
WOMAN: You don't. I'll marry him the moment I'm ready. That's not the
Issue now.
BETTY (at the window): He's coming. He's coming. He just walked in the
building.
(SOV ARY enters, puts down his hat and walking stick, sits down.)
BETTY (kindly to SOY ARY}: Care for something to eat?
SOV ARY: Why? So you can poison me?
BETTY: Bullseye. (Exits. WOMAN starts eating.)
SOVARY: Betty being nice to me? Looks like you forgave me while I was
out.
WOMAN: You were out? I hardly noticed.
SOVARY: I went away and came back.
WOMAN: I was so happy to able to eat in peace at last.
SOV ARY: But you didn't eat a single bite since I left.
WOMAN: Of course I did.
SOVARY: You just started the supper, and as for that slice ofbuttered bread
. . . (catches the WOMAN's hand as she's about to lift it to her mouth}
there were exactly three bites in it: one, two, three. That fourth one,
I observed you take that bite just now.
WOMAN: What does that prove?
SOV ARY: That you stopped eating when I left. Don't make yourself out to
be worse than you are, my precious, my sweet. Watching you eat
like this, it makes me want to cry again.
WOMAN: Do I eat so beautifully?
SOV ARY: No. I'm touched by your eating because you don't do that on
stage. You haven't yet discredited it in my eyes. It's yours, it's
sincere, it's private, it's you. I've seen so many of your embraces on
stage that I don't believe in them any more. But if you starve for
just five minutes for my sake, that's true and real. Because there's
no such role on stage. You see how difficult it is to love an actress?
WOMAN: What do you mean? My hugs don't feel good?
SOV ARY: Yes, but they're also painful! You do the same thing on stage for
a monthly salary.
WOMAN: But even so, it's different at home than it is on stage.
SOV ARY: That's just it! If you're a good actress, you do it at home exactly
as you do it on stage. It's terrible. A good actress doesn't invent a
separate embrace for the stage, but brings the truest one from
home. So then what I get is what the audience gets. Eat, sweetheart,
81
eat, because this is really the only thing that's entirely mine.
(Embraces her.) Emma, precious, sweetheart . . . (Long kiss. The
buttered bread is in the WOMAN's hand.) That's it, that's it ... with
this buttered bread in your hand . . . this is sincere, this is private,
private! (Great kiss.)
WOMAN (puts down the bread): Wait, I have to put it down so I can hug you.
(Embraces him.) Do you love me?
S6VARY: I adore you. (They kiss.)
BETTY (steps in with a bucket, puts it down. Places two champagne glasses down):
Careful, the champagne's in this. (Exits, the kiss goes on.)
S6VARY: What did Betty say?
WOMAN (looks at the bucket): Something about champagne. We should be
careful.
s6v ARY: Now sit down, sweetheart, and eat, my precious. (Opens the
champagne.) Well now, French! Mumm! (Pours.) Where did you buy
this Mumm?
WOMAN: I'll tell you, but not one word. The Count sent me two bottles
of it. (S6V ARY pours the champagne from one of the glasses back into the
bottle.) What are you doing?
S6VARY: I won't have any. Why did the Count send it?
WOMAN: So I could drink it.
S6VARY: He wanted to come here at night for some champagne!
WOMAN: Oh, come on!
S6VARY: How did it suddenly occur to him to send over two bottles of
champagne?
WOMAN (quickly): There was some amateur performance in which the
Count was playing a Jew and needed a long black beard, so he came
to me and I got him Miki, who went to the Count and made him
up as a Jew and got a thousand crowns for it, which was much
appreciated because the poor man has five children with a sixth on
the way. There you have it. (She pours him a glass.)
S6VARY: What have Miki's six children got to do with the champagne?
WOMAN: Oh, didn't I mention that? He had these two bottles of
champagne sent over, because I recommended Miki and because
the make-up worked out splendidly and the Count was a big hit in
the play. It's all quite simple.
S6V ARY: Just because you told it so quickly, doesn't make it simple. But
it's all the same to me. I have a principle: I never drink champagne
82
sent to my inamorata by a lascivious Count. (Pours the contents of the
glass back into the bottle.)
WOMAN: What about that golden pin from that redhead Mrs. Bad6?
Didn't you give it to me? And did I ask you what she gave it to you
for?
S6V ARY: Oh please, I coached her for some amateur performance.
WOMAN: See what I mean? (Pours a glass.) If you don't drink it, I'm giving
back the golden pin ...
S6V ARY: I'm not drinking it.
WOMAN: Not to you, to Mrs. Bad6.
S6V ARY: In that case . . . (swills it down) there. Shame on me.
WOMAN (embraces him): You peevish child. Now be nice. Look how nice
I'm being . . . You know, I so hated hurting you! You dear,
talented, precious genius!
S6V ARY: Can't we always talk to each other this way?
WOMAN: You sweet, brilliant . . . wonderful man! If only I were as
talented as you.
S6VARY: Now, now, let's not exaggerate.
WOMAN: All this resentment is because I'm not worthy of you. A second
soubrette with a small voice . . . and the top comic bon vivant, the
top . . . And with such potential . . . I adore you.
S6VARY: Ifi had some peace of mind ... ifyou didn't torture me ... I
could live up to my potential.
WOMAN: You will, sweetheart, you will.
S6VARY: And will you be true to me?
WOMAN (crying): But I am true to you, you silly mug, I just don't show it.
S6VARY: If only I knew what you want from me, angel. Because it's clear
you want something. This whole evening points to the fact.
WOMAN: Your composure came back when I humbled myself before you
as an actress.
S6V ARY: Now, now, let's not exaggerate.
WOMAN: But what can I do? As long as the topic is something else, I'm
the stronger one. But when the topic is acting, you're the great one,
the genius . . . and I'm the mediocrity . . . I can't win in that area.
Not that I even want to. (Weeps.)
S6VARY: Don't cry. Tell me what you want. Go ahead, ask me for
anything. (Drinks champagne.) I'll even marry you, my dear, my
word of honor. As soon as I get that raise, I'll marry you in a
83
heartbeat.
WOMAN: And will you love me then too?
S6V ARY: And how.
WOMAN: And what about your sister?
S6VARY: A single word out of her and she'll never see me again. Impudent
snot-nose. And if they get very argumentative, I'll commit suicide.
WOMAN: You'd die for me?
S6V AR Y: Suicide is not quite the same as death. On the contrary. But yes,
I could also die for you.
WOMAN: Be sincere for once!
S6V ARY: After twenty years of acting? Any other wishes?
WOMAN: Just one.
S6V ARY: Well?
WOMAN: It's the most important one. I'm serious ...
S6V ARY: Ah-hah . . .
WOMAN: What do you mean "ah-hah"?
S6V ARY: Now I'll find out why I had to suffer so much this evening.
WOMAN: Come on, let's be serious ...
S6V ARY: I'm listening.
(Pause.)
WOMAN: In this new operetta, why do you stand directly in front of me in
the group scene at the end of the first act?
S6V ARY: I stand directly in front of you?
WOMAN: Yes. You hide me from the audience.
S6V ARY: In the first-act finale?
WOMAN (seizing the chance finally to tell what is bothering her, she speaks
passionately, sincerely, seriously, indeed manically): Yes. Once in a
hundred years I have a little part I could stand out in, and even
there, when I could finally show something for myself, you stand
in front of me and play your whole big scene so that I'm hidden
from the audience.
s6v ARY: 1 do?
WOMAN: Yes. When everyone comes on stage and the ladies-in-waiting
sing "Oh you silly youthful Prince, youthful Prince, 'fui-Prince 'fui-
Prince," then I, as the Princess, have to stagger stage-right and
collapse on the table because I'm the one the Prince leaves. Then
you come along as Prime Minister, and sing "Dulled is our
homeland's gleam of hope," and then we respond "Gleam of, gleam
84
of, gleam of hope." Right?
S6V ARY (paying close attention): That's right. "'Gleam of, gleam of, gleam of
hope." And?
WOMAN: Well, this gives me a chance to do a nice bit: sob, wring my
hands, look heavenward, faint - great stuff, very effective. And
what happens? You stand smack in front of me.
S6VARY: I stand smack in front of you?
WOMAN: Yes. You see? You don't even notice. My whole part is a big
nothing. Look, I spend the second act in the castle dungeon eating
bread and water, and only in the third act does the Prince free me.
My whole role amounts to a few words and that little business at
the end of the first act. It's at that point that you stand smack in
front of me.
S6VARY: I do? Smack in front of you?
WOMAN: Yes. At first I tried sticking my head to the side, but it was no
use because you leap about. Ifl stick my head to the right, you leap
right, and ifl stick my head to the left, you leap left. The audience
doesn't see me, and my whole part is lost.
S6VARY: That's why you did this whole thing here this evening?
WOMAN (crying): What can I do? It's my only weapon.
S6V ARY: That's why I should marry you? That's why my sister should
jump out a fourth story window?
WOMAN: This is the first time I'm hearing about that.
S6V ARY: I'm not accustomed to making threats with the suicides of others.
WOMAN: I'm so miserable ... (Collapses on the table.)
S6V ARY (pours and drinks): I'm serious now. One question. Tell me: Whom
do I play in the piece?
WOMAN (throughout in a weepy voice, cholud fry tears, at times crying): The
Prime Minister.
S6VARY: And what do I say while you're crying at that table?
WOMAN (crying): "Dulled is our homeland's gleam of hope."
S6VARY: And what do you say to that?
WOMAN (cryinf!): "'Gleam of, gleam of, gleam of hope."
S6VARY: And then what do I sing?
WOMAN: You sing (recites without singinf!):
"My chancellorship is laid to waste,
The coup d'etat has won,
And my career, with undue haste,
85
Nancy Nichols (as Woman) and Joel Leffert (as S6vary)
in Ferenc Molnar's Still Life directed by Peter Bennett,
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Has been undone, undone." (Sobs.)
S6VARY: Right. Do you think no acting is needed here? That the Prime
Minister simply sings about being overthrown? About his career
being undone? That's one of the greatest blows in life, and it's the
duty of the actor to express that pain. So when I say "undone," I
leap to the right and grab my head; and when I say "undone" again,
I grab my head again and leap about with an expression of despair,
as would any overthrown Prime Minister. A thing like that has to
be acted out. (Demonstrates.) Right . . . left . . . undone .. . undone
... (As he demonstrates, he hides WOMAN .from the audience.)
WOMAN: You see? You see? That's what you do on stage. You leap about
right in front of me.
S6V ARY: But there's no room anywhere else! At the left stand the pages
and the peasants in yellow trousers. In the middle, sits the old King.
And over there stand the Royal Guards and the opposition peasants
in green trousers. (Shouting.) Where else can I leap about?
WOMAN (crying): Anywhere except in front of me.
S6V ARY: Try talking to her! (Tries pouring, but the bottle is empty. Takes the
woman's glass, which has not yet been touched, and drinks the contents.)
WOMAN: And then on top of it you say you love me.
S6VARY: Like the moon, the stars.
WOMAN: Oh, really? ... In the third act I could stand in front of you,
because you've been overthrown, whereas I've regained my rank as
Princess. But I don't, because I know that when the King kicks you
in the pants and you react, I know that's an effective bit of yours,
and I purposely stand aside so it can be seen. That's love.
S6VARY: Makes no difference. You may take my life, but I will not permit
you to interfere with my art.
WOMAN: And you say you love me.
S6V ARY: I do, but my art is sacred.
WOMAN: So you won't step aside for me in the finale?
S6VARY: No. I'd rather marry you.
WOMAN: You won't step aside?
S6VARY: No.
WOMAN: Then I'll stand in front of you in the third act, when the King
kicks you.
S6V ARY: That I'd like to see.
WOMAN: You will see it.
87
SOY ARY: And this woman says she loves me!
WOMAN: See what I mean? (Goes toward him.)
SOYARY: Stay away from me, enemy!
WOMAN: Why are you so mean to me? I'll let you out of the marriage, I'll
let you out of the suicide, only don't abandon me in my career .. .
Love me a little more than you do . . . you see how weak I am
compared to you . . . I'm the little mouse and you're the lion!
{Embraces him.)
SOY ARY: Will you interfere in my art after this?
WOMAN: No.
SOY ARY: Ever?
WOMAN: Never again!
SC>V ARY: Well then ... from now on I won't stand in front of you in the
first-act finale. (The woman kisses his hand.) But I'm doing this of my
own free will. It is my whim as a gentleman. I'm not being coerced.
Do you solemnly acknowledge that?
WOMAN: I do, lord and master ...
SOY ARY: Call me lion. I like that.
WOMAN: My lion, my ... King ... my ... President!
SOYARY: That's even better than lion.
WOMAN: I adore you! (Buries her face in his chest.)
SOYARY: My one and only sweetheart, flower of my soul! (The woman
quietly weeps on his chest. He embraces the woman with his left arm, raises
his right and recites.) "Here on my bosom this maiden weeps. Mine
is the red of her lips, her lips ... " (Singing.) "My heart's gleam of
hope ... "
WOMAN: "Gleam of, gleam of. gleam of hope." (Does not lift her head.)
SOYARY: "My heart's, my heart's gleam of hope! "
WOMAN: "Gleam of hope!" (She remains on his chest.)
BOTH. TOGETHER: "Gleam of. gleam of, gleam of hope!"
88
Curtain
translation 1999. The Threshold Theater Company, Inc.
40 Exchange Place, Suite 1313
New York, New York 10005
phone: (21 2) 724-9129 fax: (212) 724-9604
e-mail: thresholdtheater@att.net
QUO VADIS, A FILM BY }ERZY KAW ALEROWiczl
William DeJong-Lambert
Last fall the global premier of Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Quo Vadis
provided Poles with the first Polish cinematographic version of the first work
of Polish literature to receive a Nobel Prize. The opening in Warsaw on
September 30 was attended by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski,
Polish Primate J6zef Glemp, the Marshall of the Sejm Maciej Plazynski, and
the Minister of Culture Andrzej Zielinski. This panoply of Polish
officialdom was matched at a simultaneous screening of the film in the Paul
VI Hall of the Vatican attended by Pope John Paul II. At the press screening
of Quo Vadis Kawalerowicz declared, "We Poles best understand
Sienkiewicz."
Given this endorsement by church and state, it's perhaps surprising
that throughout the entire twentieth century no Polish director attempted to
film one of the greatest works in Polish literature. If it's true that Poles "best
understand" Sienkiewicz, then why have we had to wait so long for a Polish
reading of the book in the medium of film? Although it may be difficult to
answer this question, it is easy to understand how in the early twenty-first
century Q]to Vadis has become a story to be filmed as a key to understanding
Poland's recent history. Absolute power, the recurrence of evil, and the
importance of forgiveness are themes in Poland as it relocates itself in
Europe and the world. In an interview with the Warsaw newspaper
Rzeczpospolita, Kawalerowicz claimed that the key to the film lies in the
question, "Qyo vadis homo? Where am I going, where are we all going,
where is humanity being driven?"2
When Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis achieved its great popularity at the
end of the nineteenth century, the invention of film was about to usher in
a new aesthetic. Soon thereafter, Sienkiewicz's novel began to be interpreted
by a variety of filmmakers, none of whom were Polish. Because there is
nothing specifically Polish about the story itself, Quo Vadis has been easily
accessible to artists and audiences everywhere. Instead of dealing with the
history of his partitioned country, Sinkiewicz told a more universal story-
the role of Christianity in the transformation of antiquity.
The screen history of Quo Vadis began with short adaptations of
portions of the work, before any actual attempt was made to recreate the
89
whole story on film. The first of these, produced by the Lumiere brothers in
1889, was titled Nero Testing Poison on Slaves. Next, Ferdinand Zecca utilized
a few scenes from Quo Vadis in 1901, and in the same year Lucien Nonguet
made a film called Christian Martyrdom, based loosely upon Sienkiewicz's
novel. The first extended adaptation of Quo V adis, directed by Enrico
Guazzoni and starring Amieto Novelli in Italy in 1912, was one of the first
feature-length films ever made. The spectacular film consisted of the most
famous scenes from the story-such as the orgy at Nero's, Christians thrown
to the lions, the burning of Rome, and the death of Petronius-and even
though few theatres at the time owned projectors capable of playing its eight
reels, Quo Vadis made millions. Twelve years later the Italian poet, Gabriele
d' Annunzio worked on a version starring EmilJannings as Nero; it was made
in 1924 as a German co-production, directed by Arturo Amrosio and George
Jalo.
The best-known screen adaptation of Quo Vadis is the 1951 Mervyn
Leroy version produced in Hollywood by Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
Nominated for an Oscar, the film was one of the most lavish productions
ever made. It used fifty-five stages and a cast of 30,000, including such stars
as Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Ustinov. It cost $7 million to
produce, making it, at the time, the most expensive film ever, and its returns
are estimated to have been around $50 million. Kawalerowicz has contrasted
this version with his own, accusing Hollywood of lacking "piety" and not
being faithful to Sienkiewicz. Kawalerowicz's Quo Vadis cost only $18
million, of which a mere $4.4 million were spent on special effects.
This last fact is quite surprising given the rich detail of
Kawlerowicz's work. Filmed in Tunisia, France, Rome, and Poland, Quo
Vadis exhibits the filmmaker's awareness that Ancient Rome was a city of
vibrant color, completely different from the ahistorical, bone white cliche.
Kawalerowicz's camera pans slowly across interiors composed of multi-hued
marble, where the exquisiteness found in the architecture can contrast
sharply with the social interaction taking place in a slave state. The scenes
outdoors present wide panoramas, providing one with the sense presumably
felt by the characters that their milieu consists of the entire world. When
Rome collapses into fire, it does indeed seem as though all that there is to
civilization is being lost.
The methodical presentation of physical setting is complemented
by well-composed dialogue, propelling the plot quickly forward. The love
story and the story of persecution are tightly bound by scenes that allow the
90
A Scene from Quo Vadis, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, with Pawel
Delqg (Marcus) and Malgorzata Mielcarz (Ligia)
91
viewer time to consider the implications of what the characters are saying
and how they are reacting to one another. This is a movie very much about
individuals, where scenery and special effects reinforce the story rather than
distract from it.
Quo Vadis has a number of well-known stars in major roles,
including Michal Bajor as Nero, Boguslaw Linda as Petronius, and Jerzy
Trela as Chilo the Greek. The cinematography is by Andrzej Jaroszewski,
the art direction by Janusz Sosnowski, and the music by Jan Kaczmarek.
The film appears at a critical moment. Polish identity as a Catholic
nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century is confronted by two
issues: the legacy of communist totalitarianism, and the recent revelations
about the 1944 pogrom atJedwabne. Kawalerowicz'sQuo Vadis can be read
in light of these confrontations.
Nero's monumental egocentrism, manifested by his artistic
pretensions, strikes a familiar chord. Michal Bajor explained that he tried to
present Nero as a tyrant who felt his power came from his talent as an artist.
Communist totalitarianism always celebrated the great leader as a genius.
Poland's party chief, Boleslaw Bierut, who fancied himself an architect,
launched the first Six Year Plan by publishing his own Six Year Plan for the
Reconstruction if Warsaw. In Kawalerowicz's film, Nero's feasts, with their
drunken revelry and random violence, are aspects of the cult of personality
that foments paranoia by its arbitrary and unpredictable nature.
The burning of Rome and subsequent scapegoating of the
Christians have analogues in the recent history of communist Poland.
Assigning blame for disasters has been part of Polish historical experience
since the late eighteenth-century partitions. In the 1980s, as the country
spiraled further into economic crisis, the Jaruzelski regime made repeated
attempts to blame Solidarity. The parallel with the experience of Christians
under Nero is clear. Solidarity was a dissident movement with religious
backing; in Quo Vadis Christianity is a religious movement attacked as
dissidency. The conduct of dissent is similar in the case of both Christianity
and Solidarity. The Christians are singled out as victims because they have
replaced worship of Nero with faith in a greater power. Similarly, Solidarity
became an enemy of the state by refusing to accept its place in society as
defined by the Communist Party.
The depiction of Christians as scapegoats and martyrs is central to
the Polish understanding of Sienkiewicz's novel. Kawalerowicz has said that
in making Quo Vadis he sought to create a film that would be viewed as a
92
Latin Mass, that is, as an experience deeply felt, but transcending rational
explanation. To accomplish this, the filmmaker emphasizes the symbolism
of early Christianity, at a time when it was in the process of formulation. In
Quo Vadis the fish is a secret sign, signaling membership in a movement that
is being driven underground. The cross is presented vividly as an instrument
of torture, and kneeling in prayer is portrayed as an act of bravery as the
lions are let loose upon Nero's victims.
The Polish national self-esteem has been dealt a blow since the
publication of] an Gross's Neighbors, a work which describes the massacre of
Jews by their Christian neighbors in the Polish town of Jedwabne during
World War II. Poles have always defined themselves and interpreted their
history in relation to their resistance to the oppression of the Prussians,
Russians, Austro-Hungarians, Nazis, and Soviets. The notion of Poland as
martyr has played a key role in the formation of national consciousness at a
time when the country did not even exist on the map of Europe. What
happened at Jedwabne has tarnished this self-image, and this threat perhaps
explains part of the tremendous appeal of Quo Vadis for the average Pole:
the film restores a lost sense of certainty.
Quo Vadis ends with the image of St. Peter "returning" to modern
Rome. This teleological presentation of history offers the possibility of
realizing a less troublesome, purely romantic notion of Polish nationalism.
The Poland of Mickiewicz, the idea of a country that produced Europe's first
constitution and suffered for being too democratic in the heart of a despotic
Europe, seems a far better Poland to have in mind at the threshold of a new
century.
NOTES
1 Shown on February 28, 2002 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York.
2 The quotes from Kawalerowicz as well as from some of the actors in the
film are taken from "Twarz czJowieka jest widowiskiem," Rzeczpospolita,
August 9, 2001, no. 210.
93
LONG DISTANCE PERFORMANCE:
EMIL HRVATIN'S MS. MOBILE AT LA MAMA
Kurt Taroff
The cellular phone-wonderful modern convenience; or insipid,
irritating scourge of contemporary existence? In the realm of theatrical
performance, the latter would seem the more likely answer. Despite the now
ubiquitous, "Please turn off all cell phones and beepers," that has become
our modern-day curtain raiser, the dreaded beeps, rings, and shrill melodies
announcing a boorish, though apparently popular, audience member, still
fill our theatres on a regular basis. What is to be done? Do we rip the
offenders limb from limb? Hire special phone sniffing dogs to weed out
potential offenders? If you are Emil Hrvatin of Slovenia's MASKA group,
rather than mounting futile resistance to the cell phone, you embrace this
new technology with open arms. Hrvatin's new piece, Ms. Mobile,
performed at La Marna on April 15, 2002, is described in a press release as
"a performance work for one Slovene and 40 audience members with cell
phones." As the press released promised, the cell phones were every bit as
much of the performance as the Slovene.
As the show begins, Hrvatin strolls on stage without fanfare and
greets the audience. He quickly moves into a demographic analysis of his
audience, which, at this particular performance, proved to be a little trickier
than Hrvatin expected. As he started humorously rattling off statistics, such
as "The audience tonight is 40% male and 40% female and 20% not sure,"
Hrvatin seemed to have the answers to his questions figured out in advance.
However, as he confidently asserted, "The audience is 90% American,"
several murmurs of disapproval were heard from the audience, forcing
Hrvatin to revise his estimate downward. As it happened, Hrvatin's
appearance was arranged by Peggy Phelan of New York University and Ellen
Stewart of La Mama in conjunction with the Conference of the Performance
Studies Institute taking place at NYU at the same time, and as such most of
the attendees were from the conference, many of them foreign. Hrvatin
then got himself just a bit deeper into hot water when he said, "The audience
is 100% white, prompting an annoyed (if perhaps a bit facetious) "Uh, no, I
don't think so," from Nicky Paraiso, the Filipino curator of La Mama's Club
space. Now twice thwarted, Hrvatin quipped, "Now you want empirical
94
proof?" Silly though all of this may seem, it is interesting to note the
expectations of the audience in this setting. Perhaps it was Hrvatin's
unassuming entrance, or the direct way in which he asked the audience his
demographic questions, but it was obvious from the opening that this piece
was more along the lines of a television talk show than a solo performance.
As such, the audience appeared to expect a great degree of honesty from
Hrvatin, and furthermore felt perfectly free to interject and contradict him.
From the outset the audience asserted their right to a place in the
performance.
As the Mobile portion of the performance began, Hrvatin asked all
of the audience members who had cell phones (which was a greater number
than he had expected) to call friends. He then asked his two assistants to go
around the room collecting phones from spectators whose friends were
willing to participate. Hrvatin did not mention that the selected participants
would be asked to remain on the phone for approximately one hour. This
caused a couple of problems. For one thing, several phones (including
mine) were not fully charged, and the calls, therefore, could not be
completed. Furthermore, the phone participant, unaware of just how long
he or she would have to wait, became impatient and, in one or two
instances, hung up before Hrvatin actually got on the line.
These difficulties notwithstanding, Hrvatin then began to speak
with each of the mobile participants, explaining what was about to happen
and leaving the audience out of the conversation, at least for the moment.
As Hrvatin began to work his way back through the phones, he now
attempted to make the conversations public by using a small stand to hold
a microphone next to the earpiece. Once again, this posed a problem, in
that while the participants were now mostly audible, they each seemed to
have trouble hearing and understanding Hrvatin. This was indeed
problematic, for although (as I will discuss) this performance was successful,
the difficulties Hrvatin had in garnering participants (out of the eight
phones Hrvatin collected, only four actually survived, and of them, two had
tremendous problems hearing Hrvatin) might well prove disastrous under
certain circumstances. It would seem that with an entire piece based upon
cell phones as an integral part of the performance, it would behoove Hrvatin
to acquire a device such as those made for cars, which allow projection of
the voice both to the ear and mouthpieces, as well as to devise some way of
ensuring that the phones that he does eventually use will survive the
performance. It is somewhat disturbing (and this anxiety was felt during the
95
performance) to think that if one or two minor flukes occurred, Hrvatin
might be left with no cell phones, and thus, it would seem, no performance.
Nevertheless, at least in this case, the four cell phones that
remained proved to be enough, as one of the participants on this night
turned a unique performance into a remarkable evening. As Hrvatin made
his first pass through the phones, one woman could be heard fairly clearly
despite the fact that Hrvatin was not yet using the microphone. "What
languages do you speak?" she asked. As he rattled off a considerable list,
which included English, Slovenian, and Italian, the woman on the other line
began speaking quite rapidly in Italian, to which Hrvatin replied in turn.
Hrvatin then managed to learn that the caller was Cuban, but now living in
the United States, and that her name was Irene. Hrvatin then put her down,
promising to return soon, though she could still be heard talking for about
a minute afterwards.
After the first round of discussions, Hrvatin informed the audience
that we were witnessing the Ms. Mobile Competition. We would hear his
conversations with each of these contestants, and at the end of the
performance, we the audience would decide who was Ms. (or Mister)
Mobile.
As Hrvatin then moved to the part of the competition in which the
contestants were put on the microphone for the audience to hear, it was
interesting to note the different levels of ease with which the contestants
played along. With Irene, it was clear that she was quite comfortable and
was enjoying the opportunity to spar with Hrvatin and the audience.
However, with the two other callers who could understand him, a woman
from Oregon, and a man from New York, it was obvious that they were not
sure how to react to the situation, and though they responded to Hrvatin's
questions (How would you describe yourself as a person? How would you
change the world?) as honestly as they could, it seemed as though they were
very much responding directly to Hrvatin with little, if any, awareness of the
presence of an audience. This is understandable, and may indeed be the
most interesting aspect of the performance. We have become accustomed
to audience participation in shows. From the Happenings of the 1960s to
kitschy theatrical "events" like Tony and Tina's Wedding and Grandma Sylvia's
Funeral, theatregoers have grown to understand that it is possible that they
may be asked to play some role in the production that they are attending.
But what of the unsuspecting friend of the audience member, going about
his or her daily life, who suddenly receives a phone call with an invitation
96
to take part in the performance? In addition to the obvious surprise that this
will cause, we may wonder whether or not these people, sitting alone at
home or walking down the street, can really conceptualize the idea that there
is an audience hearing their words, and that, in essence, they are not only
part of the performance but, to a large extent are the performance.
As Hrvatin resumed his conversation with Irene, asking what she
did for a living, she replied that she was a playwright and director. A
palpable buzz became audible in the room as many began to wonder if this
Cuban Irene might indeed be Maria Irene Fornes. Hrvatin asked who one
of her favorite character was, and the response was "Molly from my play
Molly's Dream," an answer that seemed to elude most of the audience,
including me. Hrvatin switched callers again, and by this point we were
down to two, the man from New York falling victim to another dead battery.
The woman from Oregon was asked what message she would like to give to
the audience, and replied, "I would like to tell them to enjoy New York,
enjoy Fourth Street, since I cannot be there." Hrvatin then returned to
Irene, greeting her with, "Hello, famous playwright Maria Irene Fornes?"
Fornes obligingly confirmed, and then when also asked by Hrvatin to
provide a message to his audience, she replied, "I will tell them not to walk,
but to fly, and you are very good, you can teach them to fly." It was little
surprise that Maria Irene Fornes overwhelmingly won the audience poll, and
became, at least for this night, Ms. Mobile.
Before determining the winner, Hrvatin hung up with the
contestants, telling them that the winner would receive a return phone call,
at which point the winner could do whatever he or she wished with Hrvatin
and the audience. It is perhaps fitting that as Hrvatin attempted to make the
congratulatory phone call to Fornes, he was unable to get through.
97
CONTRIBUTORS
EUGENE BROGYANYI edited and translated the anthology
DramaContemporary: Hungary for PAJ Publications, and the volume Moment
of Sincerity, a collection of plays by Geza Paslcindi, for Polis Publishers in
Kolozsv<ir. Five issues of the magazine Modern International Drama contain
his translations. He also contributed seven entries to The Cambridge Guide to
Theatre. Many of his translations have been produced in New York and
other American cities. He is a recipient of Columbia University's
Translation Center Award.
JARKA BURIAN is Professor Emeritus of the Theatre Department of the
State University of New York at Albany. He is the author of The Scenography
of josef Svoboda and other studies of Svoboda, Czech theatre, and
international scenography. His Modern Czech Theatre: Riflector and Conscience
of a Nation was recently published by the University of Iowa Press and
Leading Creators ofTwentieth-Century Czech Theatre has just been published by
Routledge Harwood.
WILLIAM DEJONG-LAMBERT is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in
Comparative Education at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
Columbia University. He will be writing his dissertation on Lysenkoism in
Poland.
VRENELI FARBER is an Associate Professor of Russian at Oregon State
University, where she is the Assistant Chair of the Department of Foreign
Languages and Literatures. She is the author of The Playwright Aleksandr
Vampilov: An Ironic Obseroer (2001) and is currently working on a book on
the subject of actor training in post-Soviet Russia. Farber has also been an
actress for thirty years and has five years experience directing Russian-
language productions of Russian classics performed by native speakers.
ALLAN GRAUBARD is a poet, playwright, and critic whose works appear
frequently in art and literary magazines internationally. He has previously
collaborated with PEN Center, Zagreb, Croatia.
MARIA IGNATIEV A is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre,
The Ohio State University (Lima Campus). Before coming to the US, she
98
was Assistant Professor at the Moscow Art Theatre School Studio. She co-
organized and catalogued (with Joseph Brandesky) an International
Exhibition of the Theatre Designs of Boris Anisfeld (1994-97), served as
consultant on the exhibition, Spectacular St. Petersburg, at the Columbus
Museum of Art (1999), and published an essay, "Three Hundred Years of
Theatrical St. Petersburg" in the CD-Rom catalog for the exhibit. She is
currently working on The Era cif Stanislavsky and Female Creativi!J, co-
authored by Sharon Carnicke.
JOE MARTIN is an author, playwright and director, and serves as a lecturer
in Theatre at the Catholic University of America. His recent books include:
Strindberg-Other Sides: Seven Plays (Peter Lang Publishers); Conspiracies-Six
Plays by Joe Martin (Aran Press/ Press Open); Keeper of the Protocols-The Works
cif]ens Bjorneboe (Peter Lang); and Parabola-Shorter Fictions (Asylum Arts). He
was a 2001 senior Fulbright scholar in Theatre in Eastern Europe, directing
and lecturing in Bucharest, and has returned to Romania in Spring 2002 as
a Fulbright Specialist to stage a concert reading of a new play about
Romania: The Dogs.
CAROLINE McGEE directs the MFA acting program at the Catholic
University of America in Washington, DC, and tours nationally with her
one-woman performance Lache pas !a palate, chronicling three generations of
Cajun women. She has performed at Yale Rep, Williamstown Theater
Festival, and various New York venues.
KURT TAROFF teaches theatre and literature at Baruch College and
Marymount Manhattan College. He is a student in the Ph.D. program at
the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he is writing his
dissertation on applications of Nikolai Evreinov's theory of monodrama.
Photo Credits
Svoboda
Jarka Burian
Grayce Burian
Ugo Mulas
99
Miroslav Pflug
Josef Svoboda
Dr. Jaromir Svoboda
Moscow Art Theatre
Maria lgnatieva
Igor Alexandrov
Alexander Popov
Sibiu
Theatre Radu Stanca
Still Life
Ferenc Deak
100
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and Lenin
El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and sec-
ondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
(USA $12.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhi bit at the Japan Society. The book contains
an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the
World."
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and
prose. Flemish by birth and upbri nging, Claus is the author of some ninety
plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with an intro-
duction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The
Hair of the Dog.
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue ofNew York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the
indexed volume, each faci lity is briefly described including an outline of its hold-
ings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most entries include elec-
tronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follows:
Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries;
Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and
Film and Other.
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.cdu or 212-817-1868

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