SEEP Vol.16 No.1 Winter 1996

volume 16, no.
1
Winter 1996
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A), Graduate Center, City
University of New York. The Institute is Room 1206A, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Editor of
SEEP: Daniel Gerould, CASTA, Theatre Program, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Da\id Crespy
Jennifer Starbuck
EDITORIAL COORD INA TOR
Jay Plum
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Beth Ouradnik
ASSIST ANT CIRCULATION MANAGERS
Julie Jordan, George Brooker
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
CAST A 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 1996 CAST A
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that
desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared
in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in
writing before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. I
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy 5
From the Editors 6
Events 7
Books Received 12
"Performing Arts of Romania at the New York Public Library 14
for the Performing Arts"
Eric Pourchot
"Croatian Theatre During the Recent War (1990-1995)" 21
Dubravka Vrgoc
"STOKA Group of Bratislava and the Slovak Theatre" 28
J uraj Sebesta
"The Emergence of a New Genre in Polish Drama: 36
Plays of Juvenile Crime"
J adwiga Kosicka
"Moscow Buoyed by Touring Companies" 39
John Freedman
PAGES FROM THE PAST
TARKOVSKY, OR THE BURNING HOUSE
Part II of three parts
Petr KraJ. (translated by Kevin Windle)
REVIEWS
"Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice in Postmodern
Improvisation by the Moscow Theatre Most"
Irina Miller
"Early Soviet Art at New York Galleries"
Daniel Gerould
51
58
62
3
"Witold Gombrowicz's Ivana, Princess of Burgundia
at Columbia University"
David Goldfarb
Contributors
Playscripts in Translation Series
65
68
70
4
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 16, No. I
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and
film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works,
or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo! but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Submissions on
computer disk are strongly encouraged and will receive priority in the
printing queue. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified
after approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The current issue of Slavic and Eastern European Performance covers
a wide range of national cultures. Eric Pourchot reports on the Romanian
festival in New York, while Dubravka Vrgoc, Juraj Sebesta, and Jadwiga
Kosicka comment on recent developments in the Croatian, Slovak, and
Polish theatres and John Freedman provides a survey of the current Moscow
season. "Pages from the Past" features Part II of Petr Kd.l's poetic analysis
of the films of Andre Tarkovsky in Kevin Windle's translation. Irina Miller
reviews a Moscow theatre in New York playing Jean Cocteau in a
deconstructionist reading, and David Goldfarb discusses a Polish play in an
American production.
With this issue Laurence Senelick, a frequent and highly valued
contributor to SEEP, joins the editorial board, and Jennifer Starbuck takes
on the post of associate editor.
-Daniel Gerould
6 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 16, No. 1
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
The Perseverance Theatre of Douglas, Alaska presented Chekhov's
Uncle Vanya, translated by Paul Schmidt and directed by Kenn Watt,
September 24-0ctober 1, 1995.
Tony Kushner's Slavs! Thinking About the Long Standing Problems
of Virtue and Happiness has received several productions across the country:
at the Studio Theatre, District of Columbia, directed by Daniel DeRaey,
through October 18, 1995; at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, directed
by Michael Greif, October 15-November 19, 1995; and at Berkeley
Repertory Theatre, directed by Tony Taccone, March 1-April19, 1996.
La Mama E. T. C. in New York City has produced several events of
interest this season including: M. B. Ghaffari's A Chekhov Trio, music by
Yukio Tsugi, October 11-12, 1995; Chekhov's Ihree Sisters, translated by
Michelle Minnick and directed by Richard Schechner, in cooperation with
East Coast Artists, March 7-17, 1996; the Estonian Cultural Festival, April
4-7, 1996 and Tolstoy's Living Corpse, directed by Jonathan Schilder Brown
(in a Russian constructivist style) with actress Paige Snell as Fedya, January
24-February 4, 1996.
The Actor's Express Theatre of Atlanta, Georgia presented
Chekhov's The Three Sisters, directed by Mary Keystone, March 2-April7,
1996.
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's The Madman and the Nun was staged
at the Baltimore Theatre Project by Impossible Industrial Action Theatre
directed by Tony Tseneas, April10-18, 1996.
Chekhov's The Seagull, adapted and directed by John Peales, was
staged by Boarshead Theatre of Lansing, Michigan, October 12-November
5, 1995.
An Evening of Chekhov, directed by Massoud Saidpour, was
presented at the Cleveland Public Theatre, March 15-30, 1995.
7
Seattle's multicultural theatre, the Group, presented a musical
drama, Sarajevo: Behind God's Back by Amir Beso, Srdjan Y evdjevich, and
Talvin Wilks, directed by Tim Bond, through November 5, 1995.
Milwaukee Repertory Theater, in cooperation with Powerhouse
Theater, produced Chekhov's Seagull, translated by Paul Schmidt, directed
by Joseph Havredaly, February 22-March 31.
New Jersey Theatre Educator's Coalition presented a staged reading
of On the Czechoslovakian Border by Okey Canfield Chenoweth at the
Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, February 9.
In May 1996 the Threshold Theatre Company of New York
presents its first annual Festival of International One-Act Plays. The festival
consists of three separate programs, running for one week each at the HERE
Multi-Arts Center. The repertory includes The Wayfarer (1910) by Valerii
Briusov, the chief theoretician of the Symbolist movement in Russia;
Konstanty Udefons Gakzytiski's The Little Theatre of The Green Goose (1946-
50), and the Hungarian absurdist play, The Line (1968), by Geza Nskandi.
The Threshold Theatre Company, founded in 1979, is committed to
identifying European plays that deserve more attention in the English-
speaking world, commissioning translations of plays when none exists,
seeking out publication opportunities for those translations, and
endeavoring to stage them. Many of Threshold's productions and staged
readings have been of the plays from Eastern and Central Europe. For
information about the programs, call Pamela Billig at (212) 724-9129.
The Vineyard Theatre in New York City presented a musical stage
version of Abram Room's Soviet silent film Bed and Sofa, directed by Andre
Ernotte, February 1-March 10, 1996. The adaptation of the comedy about
apartment-sharing in Moscow in 1926 was by composer Polly Pen and
librettist Laurence Klavan.
The Ubu Repertory Theatre in New York presented Always
Together, a semi-autobiographical drama by Romanian-born writer Anca
Visdei, February 18-25, 1996. The play tells the story of two Romanian
sisters, separated during the e a ~ e s c u regime, who are finally reunited
after seventeen years.
8
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 1
The Les Kurbas Theatre of Lviv, Ukraine, under the direction of
Volodymyr Kuchynsky, has been in residence at the Harriman Institute and
the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia
University in February and March 1996, conducting workshops and
presenting performances. The theatre, one of the country's most acclaimed
theatre companies, is named after the avant-garde Ukrainian stage director
of the 1920s and 1930s, Les Kurbas, who died in a concentration camp
during the purges of 1937. The company has developed a unique style in
which movement and music complement language. The plays presented in
Ukrainian, with English synopses, were Games for Faust, a play based on
Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, and Grateful Erodiy, a staging of
a parable by the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher, Hryhoriy
Skovoroda.
The Denver Theatre Center presented A Dybbuck, or Between Two
Worlds, adapted by Tony Kushner from Ansky's play and directed by Melia
Bensussen, January 18-February 24, 1996. Beethoven in Pierrot by Per
Sorensen and Pavel Dobrusky was also staged, November 30-December 23,
1995.
FILM
In New York
The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented Revelation and
Camouflage, a survey of Polish Cinema, at the Walter Reade Theatre from
January 26 to March 7 that included the following films: Krzysztof
Kieslowski's The Decalogue (1993), Krzysztof Zanussi's Camouflage (1977),
Juliusz Machulsk.i's Sex Mission (1983), and Wanda Jakubowska's The Last
Stage (1948). Featured were Andrzej Wajda's trilogy A Generation (1955);
Kana! (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958); Man of Marble (1977) and new
film Holy Week {1996). The series included two symposiums: "Origins to
Martial Law" on January 27 and "Film Making Now" on January 28.
Cinema Village presented Krzysztof Kieslowski's psychological
drama about a peeping tom, A Short Film About Love (1988), December 29-
January 15.
9
EVENTS IN EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE
Occasionally noted in this column are items of interest which
reflect the changes in the arts across Eastern Europe. In an article, "A Czech
Wields Hatchet on the Arts" in the New York Times of November 14, 1995,
Alan Riding reports on the outspoken Czech Republic's Minister of
Culture, Pavel Tigrid, who would like to shut down the very ministry of
which he is the administrator. Tigrid, a 78-year -old writer who returned
from exile in 1994, sneers at "cultural policy" since to him it reeks of
communism. Tigrid, whose plan was to immediately close down the
ministry has met with opposition from artists struggling to make ends meet
in a market driven economy. Accused of being a hatchet man for Prime
Minister Vaclav Kalus's strongly pro-business economic policies, Tigrid is
straight forward, "I was called in from abroad simply because none of my
three predecessors had succeeded. This is not criticism because I am failing
myself. But I recognize that I belong to a pragmatic Government working
in a market economy. I have no political future so I don't play political
games. I am 78 years old and will return to France when this is over."
While Tigrid takes a hard line view on government interference in the
creation of art, he supports public funding of art through independent art
councils, much the way that art is funded in Britain and Denmark.
Noble prize winning Russian Poet Joseph Brodsky died of a heart
attack on January 28 at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Brodsky was
a playwright as well as poet. His play Marbles was published by Noonday
in 1989. His political satire Democracy was presented in San Francisco in
March 1995. See SEEP vol. 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 8.
In "Belgrade Journal" in the New York Times of February 8, 1996,
Chris Hedges reports on an interview with the Serbian playwright Dusan
Kovacevic who is continuing his exploration into the divided nature of his
society in a new play about the criminal underworld and gangsters who
control even the theatres in Serbia. His twelfth play, The Professional, was
staged last year by Circle Repertory Company in New York City and has
been running in Belgrade since 1989. His film, Underground, won the Palme
d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.
At 11 A.M. on February 24, 1996, the 111th anniversary of the
birth of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, the Polish Center of the International
Theatre Institute in Warsaw placed a plaque in the courtyard of Elementary
10
School Number 40 at 11/15 Hoza Street to commemorate the site where the
playwright was born.
Among the films presented in competition at the 1996 Berlin
International Film Festival held in February were three works from
Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria. The entry from Hungary, Bitches, is lldiko
Szabo's third film. Szabo elects to ignore Hungary's transition to
democracy and instead presents a humorous tale of three unhappily married
women and their struggle to leave their husbands. "I don't understand
politics," Ms. Szabo explains," I just want to make people laugh and cry."
In Andrzej Wajda's Holy Week, contemporary politics are passed over in
favor of a depiction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. In Rolling
Thunder, the Bulgarian director Ivan Tscherkelov tells the story of a man in
his 70s who chooses to contemplate his death in solitude, rejecting the
offered help of his three estranged sons and sticking to his belief in the
meaninglessness of life.
Bennington College and the Kadmus Theatre Studio presented "A
Meeting with Jerzy Grotowski: Art as Vehicle" on March 7 at the Martha
Hill Dance Workshop at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.
Lurana D. O'Malley of the University of Hawaii Department of
Theatre and Dance has started a new computer discussion list devoted to
Russian and Eastern European Theatre and Drama. To subscribe, do the
following using e-mail:
1. Compose a message to:
LISTSERV@UHCCVM.ITS.HA WAII.EDU
2. Put nothing in the subject line.
3. In the message type the following:
SUB RUSSTHEA <your name >
4. Send the message.
5. Whenever you want to post something to the group, compose
a message to RUSSTHEA@UHCCVM.ITS.HA WAII.EDU.
11
BOOKS RECEIVED
Braun, Kazimierz. A History of Polish Theater, 1939-1989: Spheres of Captivity
and Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.
233 pp. A comprehensive study that includes the following
chapters: A Concise History of Polish Theater, 1939-1989; Selective
Issues (The Structure of Theater Life in Poland, Political Character
of the Polish Theater, Totalitarian Control over Theater, Polish
"Citizen" Theater); Selected Theater Artists (26 detailed profiles);
plus a selected bibliography of works in both English and Polish
and indexes of names and plays (with titles in both English and
Polish).
Blonski, Jan. Mrozek: Wszystkie sztuki Slawomira Mrozka (Mrozek: all the
plays of Slawomir Mrozek). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
1995. 285 pp. A comprehensive critical study of the Polish
playwright includes the following chapters: Mrozek's approach to
comedy; Wiseacrer, boor and the one-act play; Dramaturgy of
models; Self-ascension; Mrozek virtuoso and Mrozek politician;
Mrozek the epic writer; Annex: Censor as reader; Bibliographical
note; Index of works by Mrozek.
Eisenstein, S.M. Selected Works. Volume IV Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of
Sergei Eisenstein. Edited by Richard Taylor. Translated by William
Powell. London: British Film Institute, 1995. 889 pp. This first,
complete, unabridged edition in English of Eisenstein's memoirs
includes a foreword by Naum Kleiman, "The History of
Eisenstein's Memoirs," notes, an index, and many illustrations:
photographs, drawings, and art works, some in color.
"Hornmage to Tadeusz Kantor" edited by Michal Kobialka. Supplement
to Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol. X, No. 1 (Fall
1995), 153-290 pp. This special supplement includes articles,
reminiscences, and tributes by critics, members of Kantor's
company, and other artists (including Robert Wilson).
Notatnik Teatralny Vol. 10 (Spring/Summer 1995), 196 pp. Special issue (in
Polish) devoted to Ryszard Cieslak (1937-1990) featuring the
following: Chronology of Cieslak's Life and Work; Attempts at
12 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No.1
Synthesis (including articles by Grotowski, Barba, and a
conversation with Peter Brook); Masks (writings by Cieslak);
Approaches (reminiscences of CieSlak); Evidence (on the influence
of Cieslak's work in the 1980s; bibliography of interviews with
Cieslak and articles based on them. Published by the Center of
Studies on Jerzy Grotowski's Work and Cultural and Theatre
Research in Wrodaw (Rynek-Ratusz 27, 50-101 Wrodaw, Poland).
Vampilov, Aleksandr. The Major Plays. Edited and translated by Alma Law.
Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 260 pp.
Volume 6 of t he Russian Theatre Archives, the collection includes
Farewell in June, The Elder Son, Provincial Anecdotes (An Incident
with a Paginator and Twenty Minutes with an A g e ~ Duck Hunting,
and Last Summer in Chulimsk, as well as an introduction and
illustrations.
13
PERFORMING ARTS OF ROMANIA
AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE
PERFORMING ARTS
Eric Pourchot
Due to geographic, political, and linguistic circumstances, most
Americans have little knowledge of Romanian art and artists. Ironically, the
few artists who do come to mind-authors Eugene Ionesco (1912-1994) and
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), composer George Enescu (1881-1955), and
sculptor Constantin (1876-1957)-spent most of their creative lives
outside of their native country. In the current theatre world, one may add
Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban to this short list of internationally-known
Romanian artists.
1
Celebrating these well-known figures (with the exception of
who was the subject of a major show at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art this fall and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this winter),
as well as many lesser-known artists, The New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts sponsored a festival of Performing Arts of Romania at the
Bruno Walter Auditorium from December 1995 through March 1996. Alan
Pally, Manager of Public Programs at the Library for the Performing Arts,
deserves applause for putting this diverse series of sixteen free events
together, aided by the Romanian Cultural Center in New York, the
Romanian Cultural Foundation in Bucharest, and Adrian Nastase, President
of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies.
The festival opened on December 2, 1995 with a lecture by Liviu
Ciulei entitled "Visual Theatre: Approaches to Stage Design and Direction."
His talk, illustrated with slides of his designs and productions, spanned fifty
years of professional theatre life, from his acting debut in Philip Barry's The
Animal Kingdom in 1945 to his most recent designs in the U.S. and England.
His personal experiences closely reflect the course of Romanian theatre in
general during this period.
Ciulei completed degrees in both architecture and theatre in 1945.
His father, an engineer, discouraged Ciulei from pursuing a career in the
theatre, but ultimately built a theatre for his son. During the war in Fascist
Romania, American plays had been banned, so there was a pent-up demand
to be met. Ciulei acted, directed, designed, and/ or translated productions
of All My Sons, I Remember Mama, The Male Animal, and Golden Boy in the
early post-war years before the communist consolidation of power, as well
as designing Othello for the National Theatre and acting the role of Puck for
14
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. I
his own theatre.
This creative freedom, however, was short-lived. With bitterness
apparent in his voice, Ciulei described how, in 1948, his theatre building was
nationalized. It became the Army theatre and now operates as the Nottara
Theatre. During the Stalinist era, theatre in Romania was controlled by
Soviet censors. Ciulei was "obliged to do very nat uralist ic stuff" which
"replaced poetic truth with reality." He compared his design work during
this period to an artist sketching hands and knees for drawing practice. All
designs had to be stamped by the Soviet counselor before construction could
begin. The control was firm: one of Romania's leading actors, Ion
Manolescu (1881-1959), was physically removed from the stage during a
rehearsal by the censor. Although naturalism dominated the theatre, opera
moved toward a nineteenth-century style. Ciulei found some relief in design
for film during this period.
In the 1960s, the pressure of control loosened somewhat , although
Ciulei likened the political situation to vertical sculpture,
"Endless Column," in that they would "get a little freedom and again be
strangled." Artists such as Brancui and poet/playwrights Lucian Blaga
(1895-1961) and Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967) could now be openly discussed.
Ciulei stated that he and other theatre artists "always tried to put a little
subversive innuendo in our work." For example, his setting for The Lower
Depths suggested the Soviet gulags. Several hallmarks of Ciulei 's stage visions
also emerged at this time: the use of huge photos within architectural units,
first seen in Schiller's Int rigue and Love, and echoed later in The Threepenny
Opera at the Guthrie and in international productions of Buchner's Leonce
and Lena; the obsession with roof structures; and the use of moveable
architectural units that combine in various configurations to suggest locale
and mood.
Ciulei credited his As You Like It in 1961 with changing directing
techniques in Romania, a contention supported by at least one of Romania's
leading theatre historians.
2
Leaving naturalism behind, the play restored the
value of symbolic elements on the stage and mixed visual elements from
various sources. The costumes were inspired by Botticelli, the stage itself
was patterned on the Elizabethan theatre, and the forest was created by
dancers.
Key productions which led to the growth of Ciulei's international
reputation were Danton's Death, in which he played the title role in
Germany, and Leo nee and Lena at the Arena Stage in 197 4, his first directing
job in America. His New York debut was with Frank Wedekind's Spring's
Awakening in 1977 for Juilliard and the Public Theatre, and he later became
15
well-known as a guest artist and Artistic Director at the Guthrie Theatre in
Minneapolis. Notably absent from the many productions he discussed in
his presentation was any mention of Gogel's Inspector General in 1972
which led to his dismissal as manager of the Bulandra Theatre and the
expulsion from Romania of the play's director, Lucian Pintilie.
3
Throughout his presentation, Ciulei mentioned a myriad of
influences on his work, from a red spot on a green background for The
Threepenny Opera inspired by Breughel, to the opinions of Italian stage
carpenters who persuaded him not to paint the set for Shostakovich's opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Modern American painters (such as Edward
Hopper and George Tucker) and the work of the Bread and Puppet Theatre
(which he saw in Paris) were especially influential. Although contact with
the outside world was often difficult, some visual materials "slipped across
the frontier sometimes." Ciulei was also able to get theatre and film
publications through his wife's relatives in Italy, although this activity
caused him to be put under surveillance by the secret police. Ciulei
acknowledged these various influences in a 1990 interview, when he stated,
"My motto is 'originality lacks information.' Everything has been done
before us."
4
Openly borrowing from architecture, art, and even from
himself, Ciulei's contributions to world theatre over the past fifty years have
been truly impressive.
The Festival also offered a rare opportunity to see modern dance
from Romania. The Contemp Dance Company, under the direction of
Adina Cezar, performed on December 13. Ms. Cezar's comments preceding
the performance echoed many of the themes that Liviu Ciulei had
introduced. In the first half of the twentieth century, several dance
companies were established in Romania, but after 1945 the arts were
regimented to address the "needs of the masses." The dance world became
heavily influenced by the Russian school, with a focus on the repertory of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Swan Lake, Don
Quixote, and Sleeping Beauty. In 1970, "art became ideology," and dancers
learned not to show their backs to but always to present smiling
faces. At the same time, however, American dance companies such as Alvin
Ailey, Alwin Nicholais, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor visited
Romania from 1970 to 1972, and it became acceptable to teach modern
dance in the schools. Despite these visits, extensive contact with
contemporary dance in the rest of Europe has been possible only since 1989.
It is clear from Ms. Cezar's comments that modern dance is still not
widely supported within Romania. There are only two state schools of
dance, in which dancers receive fourteen hours per week of training in
16 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 1
classical dance, two hours of contemporary, one hour of improvisation, and
only one hour per month of jazz dance. Unlike writers or actors, dancers
do not have a union to represent their needs. Her company, founded in
1973, has changed locations several times and is now sponsored by the City
of Bucharest, but faces "suffocation by red tape." Cezar, a recipient of an
Arts Link grant from the Foundation to study how non-profit
organizations work, made a plea for support from the United States,
including the establishment of a Romanian-American foundation for
contemporary dance, residencies by major U.S. choreographers, and advice
and support on administrative matters.
The two works that I saw by the Contemp Dance Company
revealed an earnest and creative effort limited by the constraints of training,
experience, and the physical stage at the Bruno Walter Auditorium.
Celebration, choreographed by Adina Cezar, combined salsa and Hasidic
music in sensuous couplings and uncouplings, images of sex, death, longing,
and a sense of disconnection exposed beneath a veneer of formal evening-
wear. Salt of the Earth, choreographed by dancer Liliana Iorgulescu, was set
to ancient Romanian folk tunes and suggested rites of passage through the
use of repetitive rhythmic movements, rolls of cloth used as shrouds or
swaddling, and a handful of dust slowly slipping through the dancer's
cupped hands. The ending tableau, in which the dancer became a living
candelabra, with candles balanced on her arms, lost some of its impact due
to the limited lighting of the Bruno Walter Auditorium, but was still quite
striking. In both pieces, breathing and vocalizations were used as an integral
part of the choreography. Although perhaps not yet a "world-class"
company, the work is interesting, creative, and well-paced. Given the
restraints faced by the group, it is a wonder that such a company can even
exist in Romania today.
A highlight of the festival was the appearance of Masca in their
work, Hey You! Death is Dead! Mihai Malaimare, a leading performer with
the National Theatre in Bucharest, together with designer/director Anca
Dana Florea, founded the company in 1990, shortly after the fall of
The play was adapted and directed by Malaimare from a story
by Ion Creanga (1837-1889) and is performed as physical theatre, using little
dialogue. The work is fascinating on a purely visual and aural level (my
eighteen-month-old son kept pushing me to the side in order to get a better
view), as well as containing deeper resonances, which makes it ideal for
international touring. Indeed, the production has received many
international awards, from the International Experimental Theatre Festival
in Cairo in 1992 to the Artistic Meeting ofNirot, France in 1994.
17
The sixty-minute piece was performed in New York on December
7 and a week later at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf on the
campus of Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C. The ten actors in the
company gave workshops at the College for the public and students during
the week, as well as a public performance co-sponsored by the Embassy of
Romania. Tim McCarty, Director of the Performing Arts Program at
Gallaudet, stated t hat the company worked so closely together that his
students said they must be deaf. The American students also curated an art
exhibit from students in Romania and will be touring to Romania in June
with their own performance.
No written report can do justice to what is essentially a non-verbal
production. Techniques similar to those of children's theatre are used in
very evocative ways. Music and rhythm permeate the production. A stick
dance begins the play, and the rhythmic use of sticks, drums, slapping, and
stamping continues throughout. Folk songs (some on tape by the celebrated
pan-pipe flutist Georghe Zamfir, some live with trumpet, drums, and
singing) from lullabies to drinking songs combine with folk games. Masks,
costume pieces, dozens of props, and dolls and puppets of all
varieties-body, rod, hand, and marionettes-create a carnival-like
atmosphere.
As with many carnivals, death is the reason for the celebration.
One cannot deny death, but one can fight it off as long as possible. Ivan, the
central character (played by Malaimare), is born under the shadow of death,
but instead of being terrified, he is fascinated by its face and able to forestall
his own death by his unexpected attitude. In one scene, for example, devils
surprise Ivan in his sleep and try to kill him. Ivan challenges them to a folk
game, in which the devils, wearing huge yellow foam hands, each try to
knock him over from behind and then to return to their line before he can
identify which one hit him. He is able to catch each one in turn and thus
outwit their plan.
Rather than following a strictly linear narrative, the play moves in
steps, with some scenes reprising the scene before, but using an alternative
performance method. For example, the scene with the devils described
above is followed by the same action told with puppets, as if at a country
fair. Ivan's life is told and retold and becomes a folk legend even as we view
it. Throughout, the energy of the performers, the unexpected visual images,
and rhythmic drive carry us forward. The one exception is a scene set in
heaven, in which God and St. Peter are pestered by a carnivorous plant, a
bumble bee, and a boy mathematician. The scene, especially in comparison
with the rest of the performance, is long and static. Even here, however,
one suspects that this is a deliberate choice, since the program notes indicate
that Ivan sees heaven as a very monotonous, boring place.
Ultimately, Ivan manages t o see the face of Death, who is a woman.
They embrace, kiss, and ultimately "marry." All the props and puppets used
in the production are presented to them in a combination of wedding
offering and kaleidoscopic, pre-death review of Ivan's life. The final tableau
is one of peace, as Ivan is rocked gently to a lullaby, with the shadow of
death looming overhead.
Miilaimare graduated from the Academy of Theatre and Film in
Bucharest and studied at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris in 1981. In a
recent interview, he describes two basic premises underlying his theatre
practice. First, because the financial reality of Romania in the 1990s makes
finding a permanent theatre space unlikely, the company brings their
productions to parks and outdoor stages where there is no admission charge.
Second, the company seeks to create a new actor who can communicate
directly with the audience through bodily expression. Echoing Grotowski
and Peter Brook, Miilaimare says that "such a feverish and agitated society
no longer supports theatres with balconies and plush seats. The theatre can
do with just a single actor and spectators facing him. Between these two
poles, a meeting must occur. The rest is cardboard-and the cardboard could
be thrown in the fire at any time."'
The Festival included many other events, including several
celebrating the music of Enescu and other Romanian composers. Ion
Caramitru, one of Romania's leading actors, presented the poetry of Mihail
Eminescu (1850-1889) and Shakespeare. The Festival concluded on March
30 with a panel discussion on Romanian arts with director Andrei
among the speakers. As Augustin Buzura, President of the Romanian
Cultural Foundation, stated in his remarks at the opening of the festival,
such events help call attention to figures from Romania (other than Dracula
and who have "entered the cultural consciousness of the world."
19
NOTES
1
Theatre scholars may wish to add Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada and
surrealism, and the actress Elvira Popescu, who brought many foreign plays to
France.
2
Simion Alterescu, ed., An A bridged History of the Romanian Theatre (Bucharest:
Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1983), p. 149.
3
Ruth S. Lamb, The World of Romanian Theatre (Claremont, CA: Ocelot Press,
1976), p. 48.
4
Liviu Ciulei, "Theatre in Contemporary World," interviewed by Valentin
Silvestru, Romanian Review no. 6 (1990), p. 81.
5
Mihai Malaimare, interviewed by Ligia Popa, Curierul Romanesc 7, no. 10
(October, 1995), 6 (translation mine).
20
CROATIAN THEATRE DURING THE RECENT WAR
(1990-1995)
Dubravka Vrgoc
From 1945 to 1990 Croatian theatre and drama tried to present the
absurdities of communism. In some way theatre was a "mousetrap" not
only for reality, but also for the ideology which directed and controlled
theatre. The stage was a principal arena for the struggle between ideology
and the individual, and playwrights took up the challenge by using allusion
and metaphor to fight against repression. The characters in their plays were
attempting all possibilities, from scream to silence, to describe the absurd
historical position of the individual in an oppressive society.
Can the theatre change reality, or can the theatre only be an asylum
from reality? That was the most important question of this time. "Our
freedom lies in the possibility of dreaming. And in our dreams we change
the narrow-mindedness of our lives and create a free world. In the end, all
we do is dream and try to act out our dreams in our plays," wrote
playwright Slobodan Snajder. The plays written in Croatia from 1945 to
the end of communism tell us much about Croatian history from World
War II until the late 80s. It was a great period of political theatre.
But in a most difficult and dangerous time, just before the
beginning of the recent war, Croatian theatre began to change. The new
generation of playwrights refused to focus on historical memories or
political struggles. Old distinctions between past, present and future no
longer existed in the new plays, and the characters no longer wished to
consider themselves confined to one body, one city or country. "I would
like to give you all my chess set: the pieces, my knights, rooks and pawns,
my queen, my rules ... and you can play my game instead of me. I ask you
for my non-participation. And I would like for somebody else to be in my
skin and take my part in life. During this time I would like to be far away,
the further the better, completely away, totally elusive. I ask you for my
non-participation" says the Brother in Somebody Else.
The author is the twenty-three year old playwright Ivan Vidic, a
student at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. In Somebody Else,
members of the family meet in the same garden every Sunday morning, at
the same time, and in the same way. They repeat the same old ritual: they
drink tea, talk about the past, re-animate their memories, and say goodbye
until the next meeting. The principal character is the dead brother. In the
clarity of his absence, the members of the family redefine themselves. Thus
21
his absence is a real presence and the others are merely representations of
this loss. By talking about the dead brother, they make an inventory of their
own desires, successes and failures, loves and hates. And each time they
reanimate memories of his presence through his absence.
A major theme for new Croatian playwrights is the problem of
identity. The gap between the sign and the signified, between ourselves and
others, between our inner world and the horrifying reality of the war
produces a crisis of identity that alienates us from ourselves. Therefore, such
young playwrights as Ivan Vidic, Asja Srnec-Todorovic, Pavo Marinkovic,
Lada Kastelan, and Mislav Brumec are obsessed with an archetypal situation
in which characters seek a way out.
In their plays there exists only one dichotomy, the dichotomy
between death and life, which exists as a model for all other oppositions in
the contemporary world. When the Bridegroom in Dead Wedding mentions
the word "death," the Father and Daughter ask him at the same time, "You
mean life?"
Dead Wedding by Asja Srnec-Todorovic, a twenty-five year old
playwright and film director, was performed twice at Teatar lTD (Theatre
ETC) in Zagreb. The first time the play was directed by the Croatian
director Bozidar Violic and the second time by Christian Collen, a French
director who spent two months in Zagreb working with Croatian actors.
Collen created a flexible playing space with a few doors, many empty boxes,
and ruins of old furniture. Apples were thrown on the floor. In this
claustrophobic place four characters-Mother, Father, Daughter and
Bridegroom-are searching for whatever hope they can find. The Mother
died a few months ago, and the Father and Daughter keep her in the closet.
At the very beginning of the performance the Bridegroom comes on stage
to ask for the Daughter's hand and prepare for a wedding. But the Daughter
wants to wait until the winter when she will drown in the river and find a
place in the other part of the closet. Then they can marry and start a new
life.
"Death is only a different arrangement of the body in a landscape.
Nothing else. Nobody disappears," suggests the Daughter. In Dead Wedding
everybody is dead from the beginning of the play and there is no difference
between life and death. The same desires, the same hopes and fears, exist
after death. Crossing back and forth between the past and present, between
life and death, Asja Srnec-Todorovic abandons history and creates only the
subjective space of individual pain. Memories, whether individual or
collective, are always attached to some historical or political project, which
make a person vulnerable. "I hate memories. Memories don't exist. They are
23
lies, the deceit which pursues long life", emphasizes the Daughter. Asja
Srnec-Todorovic, as well as other young Croatian playwrights, try to
protect themselves from reality through such strategies.
In Ivan Vidic's most recent play, Fever, which had its premiere in
March 1995 at Teatar lTD, three girls dream about Saturday night and the
entertainment it may bring. The play, Fever, whose title and substance
ironically recalls the movie Saturday Night Fever, is an imaginary voyage
through reality. Jagoda, Nada and Magdalena spend all their energy retelling
stories of imaginary dates with invented boyfriends that have never
happened. They desperately wish to be somewhere else, believing that a
change of place means a change of reality. As the play opens, we learn that
they will remain in the same room to the very end. "I have the impression
you were talking about suicide," says Nada. Jagoda replies, "It doesn't really
fit my style. I wasn't talking about suicide. I was just saying that I would
like to go somewhere, but not now, not at once, not straight away, not
immediately . . . I would like to do something important first, leave
something behind me. And then I would like to start from the very
beginning, but somewhere else."
Three young actresses-Jelena Miholjevic, Nina Violic and Marina
Poklepovic-present Vidic's play as a tragicomic picture of our everyday
life. They deliberately play with cliches, suggesting how the tragic position
of their characters can be realized only through banal situations that always
seem unimportant to us. By pretending that the dangerous reality of war
doesn't exist and by continuing to play their everyday roles, the absurdity
of the situation is underlined. They simply wish to run away and change
identities, but in actuality they cannot move from the "here and now."
Croatian playwrights as well as the characters in their plays are
caught in the same trap. The trap is the historical moment in which we are
living-a moment that erases the border between life and death and that
cannot be avoided. The same images recur over and over again in the new
Croatian plays. Life calls forth images of home, childhood, morning, kisses,
bread, windows, sun, and flowers, whereas death calls forth images of
blood, water, rain, night, rot, humidity, mud, darkness, cold, and the other
bank of the river.
Gloria, the main character in Pavo Marinkovic's Glorietta, is
obsessed with childhood. In the production directed by Ranka Mesaric,
which opened in November 1994 in Zagreb at the lTD Theatre, Gloria
reminisces about ice-cream, home, the first circus to which she went with
her father, open fields, churches, movies, and kisses in a hay-loft. Now she
works in the circus as a trapeze artist, and is desperately seeking
25
somebody to help her escape. "What do you think about war, home, hate
of conquerors, about memories?" the clown Petruska asks. "Now is the time
to forget. The time to create new memories. That is what the two of us
should do," Gloria answers. At the end of the production she remains alone
on stage. Her hands cover her head. Her body is shaking and from
backstage we hear the sound of a train.
Audiences attending this production are mostly young people.
They are of the same generation as the playwright; they share the same
desires and the same problems as the characters in the play. They find
theatre a safe place where they can react indirectly to reality. In Croatia
today there is new excitement in the complex relations among the
playwright, director, actors, and spectators. In these difficult times, they all
conduct a search for another reality by which to surmount the violence and
hopelessness they see around them.
The new generation of Croatian playwrights are writing plays that
express their hopes and fears and beliefs. Theatre has helped them to learn
how to live in war time and how to survive. "You cannot see the sky in the
dark. There was nobody on the bank. I was fighting for a long time. The
river was so cold. The stones ran along my face. I didn't scream. Suddenly
everything was calm. I was floating in the river. Later the sun appeared and
my blood was golden. I heard people's voices. Somebody closed my eyes. I
opened them again. When they put me on the bier, I caught sight of a
shadow of a branch in the river. That reminded me of my home. I let them
carry me, then I sunk down into the grass. They weren't looking for me any
more," says the Daughter in Dead Wedding.
27
THE STOKA GROUP OF BRATISLAVA
AND THE SLOVAK THEATRE
Juraj Sebesta
In the period between the Soviet Invasion of 1968 and the Velvet
Revolution of 1989 theatre was very popular with Slovak society. Known
theatre professionals were among the most respected citizens. Slovak
theatres were fully subsidized by the state and inexpensive tickets were
generally available.
In addition, the theatre was a place where the public could
experience strong social criticism. When, a few months before the Velvet
Revolution, Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
declared that all of our society is based on a lie and lashed out against the
never-ending stupidity of the local authorities, the audience at the Slovak
National Theatre burst into stormy applause. In director Lubomir
Vajdicka's interpretation of the scene that determines Stockmann's guilt or
innocence, it is not the actors, but the spectators who vote. Printer
Aslaksen falsifies the results of the voting and Dr. Stockmann is declared an
enemy of the people. To the Slovak audience these were clear allusions to
the manipulation of elections, and to the obfuscation of public information
by representatives of the regime who imitated Gorbachev's glasnost
terminology but were unwilling to change anything in society.
That so-called ideological style was very common in Slovak theatre
during the period between 1968-1989. Prominent directors and dramaturgs
often adapted classical plays in order to criticize the regime. Working in a
very different experimental style in the same period was director Blaho
Uhlar, who went on to co-found the STOKA Group in 1991. Two
examples of Uhlar's stylized collective work are The Last but One Supper
(1989), produced by Theatre for Children and Youth in Trnava, and
Heartburn (1990), produced by Ukrainian National Theatre in Presov
(UNT). These productions gave the impression of a mosaic of fragments,
of mythic rituals. The works of Uhlar rank among the best productions in
Slovak theatre of that period.
Together with his collaborator, set and costume designer Milos
Karasek, Uhlar also sought to express his opinions on theatre art in
manifestos characterized by a radical vocabulary. The common slogan of the
works is decomposition (meaning deconstruction) : decomposition of
content and form, story, actions and characters. Uhlar and Karasek sidestep
tradition and history. They prefer scenes without messages; they trust
Dyp Ina/, STOKA Theatre group
with Jozef Chmel, Erika E\bryova, Ladislav Kerata,
Lucia Piussi, Veronika Guranova Tfla Uhreka, Vlado Zboron
29
intuition and improvisation more than intellect and organization. They rely
on the imagination of the spectators whose perception of an artistic work
has to be as free as its creation. The core of the manifestos is also related to
the poetics of STOK.A.
STOKA (in English, Sewer) is a child of the Velvet Revolution.
Previously, according to Socialist law, it was impossible to establish an
independent group that could define itself as a professional theatre. Six years
after the Velvet Revolution, the company has a legal right to exist, but
problems connected with an outdated theatre system inherited from the
communist period remain.
Twenty-nine almost fully subsidized state theatres swallow up
almost 100% of state support for theatre arts. This helps state theatres to
preserve a stable artistic ensemble, including actors, a director, a dramaturg
and often a set and costume designer, but also a surplus of technicians and
administrators. Subsidies pay for the cost of operating the building. It is not
surprising, that the alternative theatres complain about this state of affairs.
STOKA has better critical and social acclaim, higher attendance and more
frequent participation at national and international festivals than any state
theatre, but receives incomparably smaller state support on an irregular
basis. And it must pay rent. STOKA is a striking example of the unjust
treatment of an independent company by the state authorities, especially in
a period when the state is the only major supporter of culture.
STOK.A is a center for alternative art, similar to off-off Broadway
theatres. Plays, bands, (including those from abroad) as well as readings
from works of major Slovak writers are presented there quite often.
Recently the theatre has used its space for a discussion about current
political and social issues combined with musical pieces performed by
STOKA actors. Undoubtedly, these increasingly popular debates with the
participation of top Slovak politicians, often critical of the present
government, have negative repercussions at the Ministry of Culture which
controls state subsidies for theatre arts.
The artistic and technical ensemble of STOKA is more or less
stable; members of the group support themselves by part-time jobs. The
administrative staff is represented by the director and manager Blaho Uhlar.
The company plays four times weekly; its monthly program usually
comprises almost the entire repertory of more than ten productions.
The repertory of STOK.A includes productions (I will mention
only the best and most typical of them) based on texts (Collapse, Eo ipso);
productions characterized by strong visual movement and musical elements
with minimal or no dialogue (Impasse, Dyp Ina/, Nox); as well as productions
30 Slavic arui East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 1
Eo ipso, STOKA Theatre group
with Peter Batthyanyi, Ingrid Hrubanicova, Jozef Chmel, Ladislav Kerata,
Erika Laskova, Lucia Piussi, Vlado Zboron, Moyzesovo Kvarteto
,....,
f""l
in which musical pieces are combined with readings of original texts, poems
or short stories (Nobody Else but a Seagull, Sami Meri Varz). From time to
time STOKA also produces happenings. One of the most famous was a
"fashion" show that included participation of real models and real homeless
men who, at the end of the show, went off of the stage into the night
through a window, accompanied by Phil Collins's Paradise sung and played
by actors.
Eo ipso (1994) is a collective work created during rehearsals, as are
all productions at STOKA. Its themes are broad, including male-female
relationships, problems of communication, problems of authenticity and
make-believe. There is no story, no precise location; the characters differ in
each scene. Actions are reduced to an examination of clothes, to walking,
to sitting at the table and smoking. The artists focus on bizarre moments of
mutual misunderstanding as human beings confront one another.
In a scene entitled "Oneho," (the title is a slang interjection with
no equivalent in English) spectators witness a dialogue between a simple-
minded drunk and his educated female partner. His drunken speech is full
of vulgarisms and interjections. When he has difficulties articulating his
thoughts, he uses the term "oneho." Despite the intellectual differences of
the characters, both are derelicts, brought together by their love of alcohol.
At the end of the scene, the woman, benumbed by coexisting with the man,
takes over his vocabulary. Peter Zagar's minimalistic, lyric music, performed
by the well-known Moyzes's Quartet, functions as a counterpoint of "noble
versus base" to the action on stage.
Eo ipso represents a valuable contribution to contemporary Slovak
playwriting, as does Collapse (1991), an absurd family tragicomedy full of
black humor. Both plays have an unusual form, more reminiscent of a
screenplay than a play, composed of a series of scenes, each with a title. The
dramatis personae are designated by the first names of actors; there are no
stage directions. Both texts were published in respected Slovak and Czech
theatre journals. Despite the fact that these texts are intimately related to
STOKA, I think that they could also be staged by another theatre company.
Impasse (1991), subtitled "Sentimental Journey," had its opening
night in the Netherlands. In this production the spectators's senses are
attacked by a series of images connected by a unifying visual style of bizarre,
multicolored costumes, masks, and music. Although the artists's intention
is to not allow the spectators to interpret the work or to look for a message,
recurring and related motifs are used that allude to current politics and social
1ssuess.
The "Sentimental Journey" begins with a scene that could
Impasse, STOKA Theatre group
with Ingrid Hrubanitova, J ozef Chmel, Erika Hbryova,
Ladislav Kerata, Lucia Piussi, Veronika Turanova,Vlado Zboron

symbolize the meeting of an old and new era in Slovak history. An
"American" in a khaki uniform wearing miniature American flags tied to
his hands confronts a "Russian" in a long red shirt hopping on the stage with
an accordion. The Russian desperately squeezes his instrument as if trying
to express his demands but the cacophony cannot disturb the American
from his investigation of his newly acquired territory. The past is gone and
the "Sentimental Journey" continues as a celebratory parade of free
imagination.
In Impasse I find an emblematic example of the principle of
"decomposition." The artists use recurring motifs which are related to one
another and also make allusions to current political and social matters. An
actor wearing an aluminum mask walks around the neutral stage, declaring
his satisfaction. Two actresses who accompany him tear off his mask and eat
a ham out of his face. His declaration of satisfaction is contradicted by the
violence, the sense of the action is broken, the whole scene is "decomposed".
Dyp lna/(1991), subtitled "Heavy Mental," is a fragmented history
of unrequited love, depicted in a series of images resembling old black and
white photographs. The title itself is indicative of the poetics of the
production. "Dyp Inaf" is a phonetic transcription of the English "deep
enough" into Slovak; the slang subtitle "Heavy Mental" means "crazy
person"-an allusion to the behavior of some fans of heavy metal music.
The opening scene defines the style of this production and all of the
work of the group. A naked man and a clothed woman stand opposite each
other in a spotlight on an empty stage surrounded by black drapes. As the
woman gradually takes off her dress, the man puts it on, while mystical,
languid music, evocative of a pagan past, (composed by Lubomir Burgr with
use of motifs from Mahler's music) is juxtaposed to the howling of a solo
guitar. The lyricism of the couple's meeting is transformed into something
grotesque when the man, wearing a wig and high-heel shoes, makes a clumsy
exit. A cart on rails full of dead bodies passes across the stage, creating a
background to the ceremony clothes-changing and stressing the darker tones
in male-female relationships.
The style of the production resembles the workings of the human
mind with all its irregular rhythms, snatches of memories, and visions
mixing past, present and future. The rhythms of the piece are also part of
the intentionally disorganized collage, typical of other STOK.A productions.
These experimental works bear some similarities to those of Gertrude Stein
or Robert Wilson, although STOK.A artists have never declared any
allegiance to particular predecessors.
The subtitle "Realistic Dumb Show" given to Nox or Who Will
Guess the Name of the Tax Officer (1995) suggests a shift in STOKA's style.
The theme of unrequited love and loneliness recurs, but now with a
discernible story. An oversensitive woman deserted by a lover arrives in a
room strewn with sleeping bags and changes the emotional relationships
among its bizarre, mostly unhappy inhabitants. Unsuccessfully trying to
attract the attention of one man and rejecting the love of another, she ends
up in the arms of a man who is mentally ill and tries to rape her. Compared
to other STOKA productions in which t he individual scenes as well as the
total structure are deconstructed, in Nox t he separate scenes have meaning
but the work as a whole remains impenetrable. What appeared realistic and
understandable turns out to be absurd and mysterious.
In certain scenes the "realistic dumb show" is accompanied by
Mahler's music as adapted by Martin Burlas. The scenes are changed through
use of darkness and light as in a film montage.
STOKA is composed of cr:eative people who share similar attitudes
about art and life. You can feel an atmosphere of mutual understanding and
enthusiasm in each of their productions. The inventiveness of STOKA and
the sincerity and spontaneity of its artistic presentations are appreciated by
an ever-growing number and variety of spectators who cannot find such
excitement in the official state companies. There is no better experimental
theatre group in Slovakia today.
35
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW GENRE IN POLISH DRAMA:
PLAYS OF JUVENILE CRIME
Jadwiga Kosicka
Polish theatre in search of new subject matter that will attract
young audiences has discovered an unexpected drawing card in the
generational problems of disaffected youth prone to drug addiction and
delinquency.
Alarmed by declining attendance in theatres throughout Poland,
managers looking for ways to introduce a more popular and entertaining
repertory have been puzzled by the enthusiastic response given to the revival
of British drama of the sixties. In an article entitled "Landscape for Angry
Young Men" published in the September 1995 issue of Dialog, Maryna Bersz
discusses recent productions of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (Teatr
Powszechny, Warsaw) and the Hall-Waterhouse Billy Liar (Teatr
Prezentacje, Warsaw) and suggests reasons for their critical acclaim and
unprecedented popularity with Polish spectators in their twenties who
constitute the "Angry Young Men" of present-day Poland.
One of the most important reasons is the lack of contemporary
Polish plays dealing with everyday issues. British drama of the 60s fills the
gap admirably; the subject matter of those plays corresponds closely to the
reality of new capitalist Poland, sometimes almost exactly mirroring it.
There are striking similarities in the political climate, caste-like social
structure, high unemployment, lack of future perspectives for young people,
growing dissatisfaction with the political and intellectual elites and with the
Church.
And not unlike the situation in Britain in the 60s, the Polish angry
young generation finds itself in a kind of limbo, hopelessly mired in a
stagnant equilibrium. Polish young people are frustrated and resentful of the
system but not passionately enough to cause serious trouble. Their stance
is clearly apolitical and antiheroic. It is a generation of outsiders who do not
want to be actively engaged in solving society's problems.
Moreover, the popularity of theatre with younger audiences is
declining; they prefer rock concerts, television serials, and soap operas to
Witkacy, Gombrowicz or Mrozek (so popular with the preceding
generation), not to mention the great Polish Romantic dramas. Bersz
concludes that the revival of British 1960s drama is by and large a positive
phenomenon. "Theatre audiences," she writes, "are not entirely composed
of connoisseurs, a fact often overlooked by the theatre people."
The drama of the British angry men is likely to enter the repertory
of Polish theatres as something halfway between high bourgeois comedy and
alternative theatre. It can serve as an example of a "theatre of the middle"
capable of attracting young people who now reject the stage in favor of
video, TV, and rock music.
Here lies the crux of the matter. Certain t rends that previously
made Polish theatre great have come to an end. There are no successors in
sight to replace the aging directors of the golden age. Alternative theatre is
no longer what it was twenty years ago. There is no censorship to
oppress-and to stimulate-theatre artists and playwrights. Despite the
lifting of all controls, drama dealing with social reality has been slow to
evolve.
But the situation seems to be on the mend. There is emerging a new
kind of play about the nastiest of social problems afflicting Polish society:
the growth of hordes of disaffected teenagers who may turn into the violent
angry young men of the near future.
A trilogy of mini-plays by Grzegorz Nawrocki (born 1949), with
a follow-up article by Ewa Nowakowska (all published in the August 1995
issue of Dialog), illustrate what is taking place. The plays entitled Young
Death- the dramaturgical debut for the journalist-author-are based on true
facts: crimes committed by teenagers which have been extensively written
about and commented upon in the media. As the playwright points out in
an author's note, he has merely "moved the dramas from the newspapers to
the stage," taking them "straight from real life without adding or eliminating
a thing."
The three micro-dramatic etudes (as the author calls them) are
linked by the same subject matter: homicide. In Horror with Father, a
teenage boy kills his father for "no reason at all." During the trial the boy
is totally blank and does not show any emotion or remorse. In Hammer to
the Skull, another teenage boy from a prosperous middle-class family kills
the mother of his best friend. The killing takes place on the balcony of the
victim's apartment and is witnessed by neighbors who call the police. In
Teenagers, a youth gang "eliminates" one of its members, a young girl,
because, as they explain, she "has gotten on their nerves." First they torment
her mentally and then they hang her from a tree in a cemetery.
In the accompanying article, "Three Murders in a Vacuum," Ewa
Nowakowska discusses the social background of Nawrocki's plays: the
alarming statistics on juvenile crime in Poland. The number of cases tried in
juvenile courts in 1994 amounted to 75,000, a dramatic increase of 15
percent over the previous year. She points out that the statistics, disturbing
37
as they are, tell only part of the story. Teenage crime, in her opinion, is a
harbinger of a "philosophical vacuum" that spells the decline of society's
morals. Children lacking parental guidance, supervision, and control fail to
develop a sense of moral responsibility.
Moreover, the juvenile offenders are not socially marginal children;
most come from professional, middle-class families. The teenagers in
Nawrocki's "etudes" are not underprivileged; they know no hunger or
abuse, but are simply "marionettes in a theatre of mindlessness and cruelty"
who recognize no authority other than physical strength. Nowakowska
endeavors to explain how the problem of juvenile delinquency has entered
Polish national discourse and become a symbol of the social decay that has
taken hold of post-communist Polish society.
The pathology of increasingly violent juvenile crime, Nowakowska
points out, has been blamed, especially after 1989, on a "turning away from
God." The introduction of religious classes in schools was to reverse the
troubling trend. Up to 90 percent of elementary and high school pupils
attend such classes, and religious training has been introduced in the army
as well. But the expansion of Church influence has not produced the hoped
for results.
Even though they make no commentary on the events, Nawrocki's
short plays reflect the larger concerns of Polish society with the moral,
cultural, and political implications of violent juvenile crime. Contemporary
Poland seems to have lost its sense of belief in the meaning of existence. In
such a "philosophical vacuum" where religious fanaticism, nationalism, and
intolerance gain the upper hand, crime flourishes among the young.
Sources
Grzegorz Nawrocki, "Mloda Smiere," Dialog 8 (August 1995), 5-23.
Ewa Nowakowska, "Trzy zbrodnie w pr6ini," Dialog 8 (August 1995), 87-93.
Maryna Bersz, "Pejzai. dla mlodych gniewnych," Dialog 9 (September 1995),
112-7.
38 Slavic and East European Peiforma11ce Vol. 16, No. 1
MOSCOW BUOYED BY TOURING COMPANIES
John Freedman
The beginning of Moscow's 1995/96 season boasted more shows by
touring companies than at any time in the 1990s. "It was a luxury many
thought had been lost for good. With government money short in recent
years and the ties among nations and former republics of the old Soviet bloc
having broken down, tours from even nearby Russian cities had become a
rarity. But the Russian Ministry of Culture ~ i k the Moscow city
administration) is again loosening the purse strings and international ties are
being restored. The result in October and November 1995 was an influx of
out-of-town shows so great that it was physically impossible to keep up with
them all.
The key, though not the sole, organization responsible for the
boom in visiting troupes was the Theatre of Nations. Called the Friendship
of Nationalities Theatre in the Soviet era, it remains a state-funded structure
with ties to the Ministry of Culture and the Russian Union of Theatre
Workers (STD). It is now located in the coveted old Korsh Theatre building
on Petrovsky Lane (formerly Moskvin Street). More a production company
than a theatre, it arranges and conducts festivals and individual productions
throughout Russia, while supporting Russian projects abroad.
1
In the time
between September 25 and November 27, 1995 alone, the Theatre of
Nations hosted in Moscow the Baltic States Theatre Festival, showcasing 8
theatres; the triumphant tour of St. Petersburg's Maly Drama Theatre,
featuring 17 performances of 5 productions; and the Theatrical Omsk
Festival, presenting 6 performances by 4 theatres.
During that same period, but independent of the Theatre of
Nations, Moscow's Maly Theatre hosted the First International Festival of
National Theatres, and there were a handful of other independent touring
productions. With Moscow's own season getting off to a slow start, the best
shows early on were provided by visitors.
As part of the Baltic festival, the New Riga Theatre showed a fresh,
penetrating production called The Book of Ruth. Scripted and directed by
Mara Kimele especially for the Bible '94 Festival in Helsinki, it made
excellent use of expressive movement (choreographed by Raimonda
Vazdika) am.idst the spare props in Aia Zarinia's pristine, spacious set, and
was accompanied by the sometimes eerie, sometimes primitive music by
Valdis Zilveris. The stage, a square space surrounded on all sides by
spectators, was covered by an off-white drop. A large, primitive mural of
39
40
two birds standing on a horse's back hung over the entrance to the hall,
with a similar drawing hanging against the opposite wall. Three masks of
women's faces hung on elastic strings from the ceiling. The all-women cast
played both the male and female roles in Latvian, while an actress
periodically ran around the perimeter of the stage simultaneously translating
parts of the text into Russian.
The production had a strong collective, even herd-like, feel to it, the
cast often chanting, singing, trotting or marching as a single unit in circles
around the essentially empty stage. The central figures of Ruth and her
mother-in-law Naomi were often performed in pairs, as were the characters
who interacted with them. Especially effective was the harvest scene, after
Ruth has been accepted into Boaz's crew of workers, but has not yet become
his wife. Circling the extremities of the stage, the actresses vocally made the
"whishing" sounds of the harvest, advanced in a synchronized formation,
and made sharp, broad gestures with their arms, as if wielding scythes. They
left behind a trail of straw which Ruth, as a figure alone, ran around and
gathered up.
The impact of having only women perform all the parts was great,
evoking a strong sense of tranquility, tenderness, intuition and non-
aggressive power. Occasionally, male figures were represented by full-size
dolls with which the women danced or fought, although the intent was less
to depersonalize the men than it was a way of creating a sense of otherness
in an essentially female world.
Also as an entry of the Baltic festival, the Riga Theatre of Russian
Drama presented Nikolai Yevreinov's The Main Thing. It was directed by
Roman Kozak, the 38-year old Moscow director and actor who first gained
attention at the Chelovek Theatre-Studio in the early 1980s, and who
recently became an assistant to Artistic Director Oleg Yefremov at the
Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. Kozak, together with set and costume
designer Andris Freibergs, did an excellent job of infusing an old-fashioned
feel into a thoroughly modern production.
As though deliberately spurning Yevreinov's directions calling for
a small, poorly-furnished room in Act 1, Kozak employed the entire large
stage at the Mossoviet Theatre where the single performance was held. The
back wall depicted a shallow balcony within an interior, entrance into
which was accessed by a second floor door and a steep, narrow stair
protruding onto the stage. But for a smoking pot and a chair down front,
there were essentially no other props. The color scheme of t he decoration
and costumes was almost solid black, while the atmosphere, of the Fortune
Teller/Doctor Fregoli receiving actors looking for roles, was a mixture of
41
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mystery and farce. The action took place in one of three small areas within
the huge empty space-either at the back wall, at center stage, or all the way
downstage. Walls of light, designed by Ivan Danichev, isolated the places
which the actors occupied, creating highly pictorial scenes. The music was
an eclectic selection ranging from Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong to
Russian classical composers.
Act 2 more or less followed Yevreinov's lead, with the rehearsal-
within-the-play being performed downstage. The actors, now dressed in
white, were spread out in almost a straight line beneath the arch, with the
huge open space behind occasionally being penetrated by the Barefoot
Dancer or a perennially late pianist who repeatedly held up the rehearsal.
The pianist's dignified, unhurried treks back and forth across the stage
created marvelous, comic pauses in the action which was usually played fast
and loose as if it were a cabaret skit.
Acts 3 and 4 ignored Y evreinov's plan for the stage layout,
substituting a long, rather futuristic, see-through plexiglass structure divided
into the rooms of the inhabitants of Maria Yakovlevna's boarding house.
It occasionally spun in circles while silent but chaotic action took place
inside and outside the cubicles. The actors often slipped into imitative
movements, such as "playing" a non-existent piano when piano music was
heard. Gestures and movements were frequently synchronized. Less farcical
and more melodramatic than the first two acts, the concluding segments
were perhaps less effective, although on the whole, the production remained
a lively, interesting revival of a much-discussed, but seldom-produced play.
Along with productions from Greece and England, the First
International Festival of National Theatres brought to Moscow a
dramatization of Alois and Vilem Mrst!k's novel, A Year in the Country, by
the Czech National Theatre, and Vikienci Dunin-Marcinkievic's An Idyll,
by the Janka Kupala National Theatre of Minsk, Belarus.
A Year in the Country, directed by Miroslav Krobot, frankly struck
me as a morally admirable, but theatrically tedious exercise in social
commentary. The large cast, three-and-a-half-hour chronicle tells of a village
mired in such corruption, deceit and debauchery that the town priest
bitterly weeps, "It is shameful to live here!" Marta Roskopfova provided the
almost oppressively drab, essentially unchanging set that combines several
poverty-stricken interiors into one.
2
An IdylL, directed by Nikolai Pinigin, was a cleverly conceived and
beautifully performed rendition of a macaronic (Belorussian and Polish)
comic opera that first appeared February 9, 1852. Now lost, the original
music by Stanislaw Moniuszko and Konstantin Krianowski was replaced by
43
44
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No.1
songs and compositions of Belorussian composers from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The naive story tells of a local boy, Karol, coming
home from Paris to find unexpected love with a local girl, Julia, and through
the lively music, the colorful costumes, and most of all, the energetic
performances of the actors, it acquired a true sense of national and folk
power. That impression was increased by the inclusion of a lively dance to
"Havah Nagilah," led at first by four spritely Jewish waiters, who were then
joined by the whole cast. Perhaps historically incorrect, the scene, which
ended with the singing of "Sholom Aleichem," was entirely justified by the
overflowing sense of idyllic goodwill which marked this production.
The actors never forgot that their characters and situations were
simplistic and out-of-date, and they used that knowledge to their advantage,
just barely overplaying with a tangible dose of affectionate parody. It
seemed as if no gesture was left to chance; every glance and every movement
either anticipated or responded to another. Among an all-around strong
cast, the unquestioned center was the remarkable Zoya Belokhvostik. Her
spirited, indefatiguable Julia was funny, tender, ironic, sensual, and perhaps
most of all, wickedly smart. Viktor Manayev, as Karol's puffed-up servant,
displayed an impressive talent for physical humor.
Zinovy Margolin's set was dominated by a huge, ornate, hanging
globe, which was occasionally turned by stoic actors wheeled out on 15-foot
platforms. In the finale, the globe became a balloon set to carry away the
happy lovers, but Pinigin added a modern, sobering epilogue. In a clear
reference to the Chernobyl disaster which has hit Belarus as hard as any
nation, a clap of thunder strikes just as the balloon begins to rise, and a
driving, torrential rain drives everyone from the stage.
The T orikos Theatre, from the Russian town of Gelendzhik on the
Black Sea, brought to Moscow a penetrating production of Tennessee
Wil.liams's I Can't Imagine Tomorrow, a one-act play about a husband and
wife confronting their disproportionate needs for one another. Co-
produced by two Moscow-based organizations, the Russian State Theatre
Agency and the Bogis Agency, it starred two Moscow actors-Alexander
Feklistov and Diana Korzun. Brilliantly directed and designed by Anatoly
Slyusarenko, the artistic director at Torikos, it may have been the best
rendition of American drama I have seen on the Russian stage.
Two rotating floor fans stood at either downstage corner, their
humming sound broken only by the light tinkling of bells hanging from one
of the fans, while the only furniture left from Williams's directions were
two straight-backed chairs. A row of seashells lay around the perimeter of
a semi-circle of small, rectangular mirrors on the floor. Like the walls and
45
46
ceiling, the floor was flat black. The mirrors caught and refracted the light
of bright, narrow spotlights which cut across the darkness like sabres. At
times, a large, transparent bowl of water cast rippling rays of light on the
walls and ceiling. In fact, the lighting by Sergei Tyutin was so material that
it took on the qualities of another prop on stage.
Feklistov, as the man who is incapable of verbalizing his emotions,
was dressed in Williams-like, off-white "clothes for a summer hotel." He
was expressively static and frustrated. Korzun, as the slightly nervous,
impatient, sharp-eyed wife, wore a short, billowing, white chiffon cape over
light gray leggings. Sleek, graceful and modern, she was constantly in
motion tipping her head, spreading her arms out straight (with the light
catching just the upper halves), cocking her legs or lithely twisting her body.
She was everything her husband was not-fluid, fluent and free.
Lev Dodin's Maly Drama Theatre from St. Petersburg put on a
spectacular display that will not soon be forgotten. After all, the company's
last trip to Moscow was in 1986, a year before Dodin first ventured abroad
and made himself Russia's theatrical ambassador to the world. The tour
began with Brothers and Sisters, continuing with The Cherry Orchard,
Gaudeamus, Claustrophobia and The Devils.
3
In the course of three weeks,
one thing became increasingly clear: Dodin gets a remarkably high
percentage return out of his company. He has some excellent actors,
although none really stand out as stars; what impresses is the extremely
high, across-the-board quality of the whole troupe, their discipline,
teamwork, and energy.
Brothers and Sisters, though now a decade old, was performed with
breathtaking abandon, its dated, Taganka-like stylistics hindering not a whit.
The Devils is essentially a ten-hour exercise in literary theatre, but what a
careful, penetrating crystal-clear dramatization it is! Gaudeamus, the tour's
unquestionable peak, was a tour de force of acting, directing and design. Its
nineteen episodes following a group of Soviet army recruits through their
two-year stint are hilarious, shocking, moving, and always theatrically
exhilarating. Claustrophobia is another episodical work, only this time being
an examination of the inmates of an insane asylum. It had the same technical
virtuosity as Gaudeamus, but Dodin seemed to indulge himself almost
perversely in the themes of cruelty, stupidity and ignorance, creating a show
you could respect but not really like. The Cherry Orchard was unusual but
powerful. In it, the Ranevskaya family of characters seemed almost
inconsequential, the play's focus shifting to an emphatically dominant
Lopakhin. Igor Ivanov brilliantly played the man trapped between two eras
and two classes.
47
In late November, the Omsk Drama Theatre put on a single
performance of Alexei Shipenko's strange but wonderful Natural
Governance in Shambala. A long, rambling work whose key characters of
Brando and Liza appear in a myriad of times and places, it is probably best
described as a dream play. Liza, it seems, has died and been buried, but
perhaps Brando has just put her to sleep in order to spirit her off to a
hideaway in Tibet. There Hitler hosts a crazy banquet where we also
encounter Napoleon, Mussolini, Karl Marx, and Nostradamus. All of them
are blown away by a crew of sub-machine-gunners headed by Stalin, or at
least his look-alike. Drifting in and out of the action are the Dalai Lama,
Buddhist monks, Liza's parents, her father's mistress, and her cousin, a
young officer in the Tsarist army who is in love with her and comes looking
for her when he learns that she is not really dead. The action begins and
ends with Liza's nude body lying on the autopsy table, suggesting that the
whole thing has been a figment of Brando's imagination. But, at least in
Vladimir Petrov's beautiful, well-acted production, the actress playing Liz
(Anastasia Svetlova) comes out for the curtain calls dressed for the first time
as the 11-year-old she is supposed to be. Suddenly, one wonders whether the
play hasn't been her dream.
Designers Irina Akimova and Yury Ustinov gave the production a
soaring, other-worldly feel. Layers of semi-transparent curtains with large,
free-form patterns on them, cut across the stage allowing action to continue
in one area while props or actors were removed or delivered in another.
When in Tibet, the back wall was illuminated in a translucent sky-blue
against which wind-swept white clouds hurried from one side to the other.
The masterfully-lit stage was kept as if in a murky darkness, at least in
contrast to the enormous, cinema-like sky behind it, the effect being that the
action seemed to take place at the very top of the world.
Finally, as these and other visiting productions were brightening up
the Moscow fall marquee, preparations for the Second Anton Chekhov
International Theatre Festival were progressing at full tilt. A source at the
International Confederation of Theatre Unions, the festival's organizer, told
me that the opener was tentatively slated for Theatre Day at the end of
March 1996. Among those expected to be accepting invitations were
Giorgio Strehler, Peter Stein and Eimuntas Nekrosius.
1
The Theatre of Nations assisted with a production of Alexei Shipenko' s The Last
Russian Play in Berlin in September 1995, and coordinated a multi-city American
tour of the Irkutsk Okhlopkov Drama Theatre with Nina Matkhanova's From
Siberia With Love in October 1995.
49
2
For a different view, see Jarka M. Burian, "Prague Theatre Four Years After the
Velvet Revolution: The Veterans Remain," SEEP 15 (Spring 1995}: 14-15.
3
Brothers and Sisters is adapted by Dodin from novels by Fyodor Abramov. See
SEEP Vol. 9, Nos. 2 & 3, Fall1989, 55-7. Gaudeamus is a play by Sergei Kaledin.
PAGES FROM THE PAST
TARKOVSKY, OR THE BURNING HOUSE
PART II
Petr Kral
for Ivan Divis
Timelessness versus History
The mysterious labyrinth of The Mirror, which drew together
fragments of various memories without integrating them into a single whole,
was judged "elitist" and incomprehensible to the masses when first shot in
Russia. However, the moral that blazes forth with truly indomitable force
is so self-evident that this itself appears to be the reason the film was
proscribed. In spite of its anecdotal content and chronological structure, by
means of fragmentary memories and fragmentary "archetypal" scenes, it
creates a vision of life which highlights all that is most nameless and
ordinary, and which forms, in a sense, the obverse side of History with a
capital "H." And, in addition, the obverse side of ideology: by celebrating
specific gestures and moments which plot the individual's path through life
and form his fragile memory (the namelessness of these gestures provides a
link with life in general), Tarkovsky at a stroke places himself in opposition
to all abstract schemas which seek to subordinate life to some "higher"
purpose. Thus, The Mirror is to the cinema what Ji.i'f Grusa's Questionnaire
is to literature: an implied critique of ideologies seen from below, from the
standpoint of everyday life, whose superstructure they aspire to be, and
which treacherously eludes the grasp of their constructs.
This critique is fully apparent in the riveting and oft-cited
cloudburst scene: the narrator's mother returns through wet and deserted
streets to the printing works where she is a proof-reader, driven by the
hideous vision of a "blasphemous" misprint (the details of which we never
learn) that she might have overlooked in an article about Stalin. When she
finally reads the proofs, and when she confides her fear in a whisper to her
friend, and the two of them laugh with relief, her work-mates, who have
come to console her, also screen with their bodies a huge portrait of Stalin
on the wall. The underlying message of this work goes far beyond mere
political suggestiveness. It may also be read in the striking scene at the end
of the film, in which the camera itself appears to glide along the ground,
revealing as it does so the ruins of an unfamiliar structure-evidently the
51
hero's own home, overgrown with grass and thistles. This is reminiscent of
Stalker, in which, as the camera travels over the surface of the water, it
examines traces of a past life and, at the same time, links them with timeless
nature and its primal, elemental forces. In spite of adversity in history, and
the wounds inflicted upon individuals, the simplest and most private human
existence has the same abiding value-the same real value-as the grass on
those ruins; precisely because, like the grass, it is nameless and powerless.
A return to nature and the elements is omnipresent in Tarkovsky.
Right at the beginning of Ivan's Childhood we see, lying on the cracked
ground split by tree-roots, the head of the young hero, looking as if it were
about to become part of the ground. In Solaris, as the camera ends its glide
over the wet grass, we discover what seems to be the hero beside a pool, but
so close, and in such fragmentary detail, that at first we can hardly recognize
him in the grass, and take him for a stone or a piece of wood. Fire and
water, earth and air reach into the most dramatic scenes, as if to transfer the
action of those scenes back to their ancient, timeless roots, and thus give
back to human gestures their lost substance. In this sense they offer a
corrective to History and its ghosts; the printing-shop scene in The Mirror
is literally awash with water, from the rain in the street to the shower that
the heroine takes at the end to wash away the traces of her fear. The
soldiers roaming on the deserted beach, covered in sand, seem to have fled
here from the fury of battle with the idea of drawing new strength from
their contact with the earth. The hero of Nostalgia can continue on his
mission after descending into the flooded basement of the ruined house; here
he "communes" not only with water, but also with fire (he burns a book
and recites a poem in praise of the flame of a candle). At the end he meets
a little girl, who is no more than an example made flesh of a life brought
back to its beginning and its source. The hero's mission, moreover, is to
keep alive the flame of a candle carried across the bed of a drained thermal
bath, at the moment when a demented old man publicly burns himself to
death. The importance of newly-discovered roots in Tarkovsky's work is
shared by the concreteness of objects, gestures, and the sounds which his
films seem to extract from time and magnify to hallucinatory proportions,
starting with the most ordinary of them: the simple movement of a glass
across the seat of a shaky chair in Stalker becomes a whole dizzying journey.
Here the palpability of the world is sublimated, elevated to cosmic
significance, and also serves as the elemental and irreducible basis of
Tarkovsky's message itself. Hence the predominant role allocated to female
figures in The Mirror and in fact throughout his oeuvre. Women dominate
this key film not only because it deals with the war years, when most men
were away at the front-they are also omnipresent as the privileged
guardians of the material world and its day-to-day memory, which they
maintain securely and patiently-in a time of dire need-by means of simple
but magical rituals: killing a chicken, lighting a fire, whose flames light up
a pair of hands with a coral-red glow, trying on (face to the mirror of the
camera) some earrings that gleam like discovered treasure in the half-light of
the room, while another woman stands by. Women are directly linked with
those items or materials, whether common or rare, which by systematic use
provide references to an original, "pre-modern" world order: the old wash-
basin and pitcher (Solaris, 7he Sacrifice), the portable lamp (7he Sacrifice), the
milk that is common to The Mirror and Andrei Rublev, and which is so
significantly spilt in 7he Sacrifice by the tremor announcing a new war, and
with it, the end of the world.
In 7he Mirror, as they try on the earrings, the women, excited by
the darkness, exchange whispered confidences to do with their femininity
and their lot as wives and mothers-lending their sensuality an almost
magical air. All Tarkovsky's female characters, incidentally, appear at once
calm and troubled, aristocratic and primitive. They give the impression of
being like "God's creatures", dedicated to higher things, but also possessed
by the devil. They seem to hold the key to good and evil, love and hate. In
7he Sacrifice, when the hero's wife is seized by convulsions on hearing of the
approach of war, she writhes on the floor, with her skirt riding up her
thighs, as if shaken at once by insatiability and an organic need to destroy.
Harey, in Safaris, and the Stalker's wife suffer similar seizures, (the latter
after trying in vain to prevent her husband leaving for the forbidden Zone).
The heroine of 7he Sacrifice is symmetrically complemented by the
countrywoman Maria, who evokes at once Christian sainthood (by her
name) and a pagan priestess (beginning with her "swarthy appearance");
1
by
the act of love with the hero she enables him to save the world from
destruction. But is she not also linked to the cause of the impending
disaster, as suggested by her restless behaviour just before the outbreak of
war is announced? Women in Tarkovsky's work are always morally
ambivalent, at once pure and impure, in their natural physicality-which
perhaps for that reason had to be invested with a new meaning. Tarkovsky
finds it in the maternal aspect of femininity (in the broadest sense of that
word), which is clearly the thing that for him makes the act of love an act
of salvation (in 7he Sacrifice). Before making love, Maria ritually washes the
hero-using the old basin and pitcher- just as in Safaris the hero' s mother
bathed him; similarly, after the first meeting in the fields she follows him
and urges him, in a motherly way, to go home, fearing that he will catch
53
cold.
The descent to the bottom, which in Tarkovsky's work precedes
resurrection, is, with regard to the identification of wife and mother, at the
same time, inseparably, a descent into the maternal waters of memory and
a momentary brushing against the base, corporeal physicality to which
women are closer than men, and which must be known if one is to rise
above it. Tarkovsky's shots themselves have a "feminine" duality about
them: if their concreteness is systematically relieved and illuminated by an
inner-almost mystical-light, it is only thanks to the glow of the ever-
present sensuality, at once concealed and dazzlingly revealed.
On Alienation
History and the suffering it brings with it are not set against daily
life in any Manichean sense in Tarkovsky's work. In 1he Mirror, the
uncertainty of human destinies tested by history finds a direct continuation
in a fragmented vision of history itself, in which the destruction it represents
seems to be turned against it. Mao's soldiers waving their Little Red Books
in the wilderness of the frontier zone, hundreds of leaflets tumbling from a
soaring balloon like snowflakes onto the empty pavement of a city
boulevard (seen in aerial view) are no more than the ghosts of a remote and
uncertain history without a controlling hand, and, as it seems, forever
incomprehensible to history itself. In the same way, the elemental and
timeless forces of nature are not merely that which history would like to cut
us off from; on the contrary, they manifest themselves through it and in
spite of 'it-just as the aforementioned leaflets form a kind of snow-so that
it even seems as if only the constant renewal of an ancient menace lies
concealed behind it. War, which figures in all Tarkovsky's films, is more a
mythic than a social phenomenon: a dark trial, by which the forces that
drive the universe occasionally reveal to us their displeasure, and perhaps
even their age-old antagonism. 1he Sacrifice, in which war assumes
apocalyptic proportions (but remains preventable by personal sacrifice), is
in this sense only further confirmation; a similar vision of war was earlier
outlined in 1he Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and Nostalgia. Even Tarkovsky's
first-born, Ivan's Childhood, still close to patriotic films after the manner of
A Son of the Regiment, sees in war a force capable of renewing our contact
with nature and "original" experience. The opening episode leads into the
first characteristic marriage of fire and water in a dark cave resembling a dug-
out (where the exhausted Ivan warms and washes himself). Here the hero
keeps count of enemy units by using fir-cones and beech nuts-according to
the type of weaponry that passes.
War is also a seminal experience in the sense that it is an object
lesson in the impermanence of life, compelling us to consider the
inevitability of loss. It also defines the role of memory as a purely spiritual
property (the old man in Ivan's Childhood continues to live in the ruins of
a house of which only the doors are still standing) and relativizes the
significance of culture as an autonomous asset and as humanity's memory
(in the same film, old frescoes on the walls of a cell are juxtaposed with the
last messages of condemned prisoners). One of the recurrent scenes in
Nostalgia, which is among the most enchanting moments in any film ever
made, also symbolically encapsulates Tarkovsky's view of war. It is entirely
in black and white, and begins on a lonely farmstead somewhere in Russia.
A winding road leads away from the farmstead, across the woods and
meadows of a peaceful landscape. It is early morning, in a house an
unknown woman wakes, draws her curtains-whereupon a bird flutters into
the room-and joins other women passing her door, having first, like them,
put on a long, dark coat over her white nightdress. The women walk away
from us, down the road, and at the edge of the forest pass a prancing white
horse, then they appear again before us close to another bumpy road, and
pass in anxious silence in front of the camera with the timidity of dignified,
but startled crows. Then we hear the rumble of engines, and a hoarse voice
from an unseen loudspeaker reads out an inaudible, but obviously alarming
announcement: evidently war has just broken out. The air is still ringing
with the news when the women begin to stir again, and-before they leave
the spot they turn towards the farmstead on the horizon behind them. A
huge, brilliant sun is just rising over it. With those black-clad mothers and
sisters we have been cast out of Eden and are now cut off from our
childhood, our home, and the promise of a long, uninterrupted sojourn
amidst the meadows and friendly livestock of our own chosen land. And if
the original Eden still endures-apparently within our reach-in the ripe,
sunlit fruit that we have only to reach out for, in the stillness of a new day,
on which the world itself seems to have just been born, we suddenly have
no access to it. The gods have reclaimed their own.
2
The film opens with a wonderful scene (again in black and white),
which fatefully places the beauty of the world elsewhere, in a place accessible
only to our memories and our nostalgia. After a falling white feather has
slid over the hero's tuft of white hair, the man bends and thoughtfully picks
it up, then glances back over his shoulder: on the threshold of the same
farm, shown in the sequence marking the outbreak of war, in the
translucent light of a fine summer's day, under a tree, a large wooden wheel
55
is mysteriously turning, (or so it appears from afar). Tall, white-clad women
disappear in the house, to which they are returning, like proud graces. That
is all-but everything seems to have been said; all the magic of childhood, of
a promised land seen in a dream, a dream triggered by memory and reaching
out into a real landscape, a dream peopled by unfamiliar yet real phantoms.
Just as real as our vain longing to overcome the distance between these two
worlds, between the landscape before us and that other one, forever remote.
In its seething multiplicity and flickering light, the tangibility of the world
Tarkovsky shows us, and its secret riches and beauty, is at once something
that extends us infinitely, and something that disperses us and sends us for
the space of a moment back to some long-lost horizons. On one hand, it is
true, the ever-present flickering leads to mysterious signals and contacts, as
if remote destinies and whole empires were giving one another
conspiratorial signs: the white feather that floats down to the white tuft of
hair on the man's head; the milk that flows into the stream from the
murdered pilgrim's flask, and is carried on the water to the distant spot
where another unfortunate perishes in the water (Andrei Rublev). On the
other hand, "dispersion" is a constant threat; the flickering is the
omnipresent breath of the cosmos and the of realities and lives
disappearing forever into memory (hence Tarkovsky's obsession with
flickering, gradually dying light, seen in The Mirror, Stalker, and The
Sacrifice).
In Tarkovsky's films uncertainty shimmers even under those
(relative) certainties, which form the moral basis of his world view. As with
nature and the elements: fire is at once a purifying force and a destructive
one (the hands warmed by the flames in The Mirror, and the fire in the same
film; the death by burning of the old man in Nostalgia); water is linked both
with the destructive action of time and with the primal, "saving" unification
of the individual with the mother. And even a mother figure does not
represent any fixed certainty. In Ivan's Childhood the descent into the
maternal depths of memory (and the subsequent "ascent") has a nightmarish
quality. When the young hero, tired after his bath, falls asleep in the dug-
out, he sees his late mother from below-as if from the very bottom-
leaning over the rim of a well, accompanied by Ivan himself, but a year or
two younger. Although they are looking down, their image ripples, as if it
were only a reflection on the surface. This alone is giddying and disturbing,
but this is not all; as the well bucket suddenly begins to hurtle down
towards the sleeping boy, a sudden cut shows us his mother falling in the
dust beside the well, into which the same pail of water is rapidly sinking
(and then returning from the depths). The rise and the fall are identified, the
return to the source (soil and water, memory) is, at the same time, birth and
death, a condition of the upward journey, towards the light, and of being
swallowed up by the darkness of the grave. The maternal body of the big
balloon which we see in The Mirror (in a long shot, from old newsreel
footage), surrounded by mysterious uniformed mechanics, hanging
suspended from smaller balloons, and sailing with it through the air as if on
the waters of some primal sea, also evokes the image of an ideal world, but
one forever locked within itself Qike the rising sun in Nostalgia). The
balloon appears to have risen into the air by itself, without any crew, while
its upward movement is balanced only by the downward flight of the
leaflets.
In Tarkovsky's work, childhood is also a treasure lost before it has
begun. The burning barn, shown at the beginning of The Mirror, on the far
side of a clearing adjoining the hero's home, spells the doom of that home
itself, long before the black and white sequence which shows it empty and
abandoned, "inhabited" only by the fluttering white specters of the curtains
drying in the breeze. The creak of the sheet-iron, which, with the flickering
light, accompanies the hero's son as he falls asleep in The Sacrifice, similarly
announces the destruction of the house in which he is growing up, and lays
the foundations for his future on this loss. Our roots are held only in
uncertain, shifting soil, which we inhabit and claim as our own solely via the
medium of memory and its flickering flashes of illumination.
Petr Krdl is a well-known poet and essayist, whose writing has appeared regularly
in Svedecw{jor many years. In 1990 he was the (post communist) Czechoslovak
Republic's cultural attache in Paris.
[This is the second of three installments (one more to follow); translated
from the Czech by Kevin Windle. Originally published in Svedectv{ XXIII,
No. 91, 1990]
Notes
1
This "polysemy" is a feature of Tarkovsky's work and of his personal mysticism,
which is not bound to any particular religious system. The crown of thorns which
appears in Stalker has no greater significance than the dressing-gown with the ying-
yang symbol on it, worn by the hero of The Sacrifice. Both are merely stage props.
2
This scene is also notable for the consistent way in which it translates a historical
event (the war) into its effect on individual (and anonymous) lives. (The official car
drives like an invisible phantom past the women.) The natural spectacle of the
sunrise literally steals the conclusion of this scene from the war, by drawing all
attention-ours and that of the women-to itself.
57
JEAN COCTEAU'S THE HUMAN VOICE IN POSTMODERN
IMPROVISATION BY THE MOSCOW THEATRE MOST
Irina Miller
The production of Jean Cocteau's one-act play The Human Voice
by the Moscow Theatre Most (The Bridge) was brought from Russia to New
York by the efforts of two women: Rose Brandy and Elena Antonenko, the
presidents (in New York, and in Moscow, respectively) of the Russian-
American Cultural Forum, founded at the end of 1994 as a non-profit
organization "dedicated to developing new points of contact between
Russian and American cultures." This year, the Forum took place in New
York at the Sanford Meisner Theatre from January 23 to February 2 and
became a celebration of contemporary Russian theatre, film, music, poetry,
and art. "In Search of the Artist's Voice" was the title of this intercultural
event and the presentation of Cocteau's play became one of its artistic
VOICeS.
Since 1930, the year of its first production at the Comedie-
Francyaise, this play-monologue has proven to be a very powerful vehicle for
demonstrating an actress's dramatic talent. The pain of a woman abandoned
by her lover, the suffering that pours out in her last conversation with him
over the telephone, has inspired many actresses to create a memorable
portrayal of the heroine who is "bleeding, losing her life-blood" (Cocteau)
during the scenic action.
I have seen several productions of the play produced by various
theatres of the former Soviet Union that were usually marked by certain
similarities. The piece was, as a rule, shown in a small room that compressed
both stage and audience into a shared physical and emotional space,
intensifying real human feelings and evading the censorship so strictly
applied to the larger stages of the state theatres. Cocteau's strip-tease of the
suffering soul has often been played by Soviet actresses with an emotional
intensity evoking the brink of insanity, which stands in stark contrast to the
generally lifeless character portrayals in the standard repertory of the larger
theatres. Thus, in the seventies and early eighties, The Human Voice was
considered by many theatre directors, especially in t he provinces, as an
"avant-garde" work that allowed them to deviate from the official
orthodoxies of the Soviet theatrical establishment and to explore the depths
of the female psyche in the innovative settings of the small stage.
The production of The Human Voice by the Moscow Theatre Most
(artistic director-Elena Antonenko) can also be viewed as "avant-garde" with
58 SLavic and East European Performance Vol. 16, No. 1
significant modifications that reflect the present historical and cultural
context. The proclamation of the death of the author has obviously been
heard by Russian theatre practitioners: deconstructionist ideas have found
their significant realization in the presentation of Cocteau's play at the
Russian-American Cultural Forum. The process of disintegration of the
dramatic piece starts from the very beginning: the monologic quality of the
original gives way to the polyphonic character of the production by means
of new personages, both silent and speaking. The characters of the Director
Yuri Vasiliev, Musician Sergey Letov, and Artist Igor Goncharov, reside on
the stage and actively participate in the action according to their real-life
personalities. The director is directing the play. The musician is
accompanying the performance with an original jazz score for saxophone,
clarinet, and flute. The artist is drawing the Actress's portrait.
Instead of the heroine's room envisioned by the playwright, the
space of the production represents an art studio where the Actress (Elena
Antonenko) comes to rehearse the play. At the same time, it is also the real
space of the small auditorium where we, the spectators, are watching the
story unfold. The upper level of the walls in the auditorium are covered
with the artist's paintings, which play a two-fold role: they create the
atmosphere of a studio as the fictitious space of the production and are part
of an actual exhibition of the artist's work at the Forum.
The simplicity of the play is sacrificed to a more complex "play
within a play": the Actress both rehearses the part in Cocteau's play and acts
out her own personal story of separation from her Lover, which is told by
means of a long telephone conversation, constantly interrupted. In the
course of the action, the boundaries between the Actress and her heroine
begin to blur. At one particular moment, the Actress (or the character ?),
asked by her Lover to return his letters, rushes to the typewriter to retype
them or, perhaps, to rewrite the text of the play, thus taking over the role
of the author. The focus of the performance increasingly loses its sharpness:
it is hard to comprehend where the play ends and the Actress's life begins,
or where the Actress and the heroine merge into one character. A clearly
outlined character and well-defined dramatic action are absent in this
production. Instead, a collage of fleeting images, of musical and vocal
sounds, of brush strokes of the painter and the plastic movements of the
actress substitute for these traditional structures. Though not entirely
comprehensible or emotionally moving, this combination is very intriguing.
The spectator's inability to grasp the "meaning" of the unfolding
scenic events (unless he or she has read the libretto of the performance in the
playbill) is also intensified by the fact that the Actress is constantly
59
interrupted by all three men present on stage. The Director demands from
her a realization of his artistic vision, the Artist requires her to adopt an
awkward pose, and the Musician blows deafening sounds from his bass
saxophone in her face, insisting on her silence. The interaction between the
Actress and the men has a certain parodistic element to it. The established
conventions, or rather conventional perceptions, of such relationships as
director-actress, artist-model, male-female become the subjects of the parody.
The Actress's reactions to all these aggressive male forces emanating either
directly from the stage or from the telephone are clearly superficial. There
is no emotional intensity in any of her responses; Antonenko plays these
transformations by merely changing the inflections of her voice. The
actress's task is not to convey the psychological nuances of a character but
to act in the style of jazz improvisation, mirroring, contradicting, dodging,
or accompanying the musical score improvised by the Musician.
Unfortunately, the actress's voice lacked the needed expressiveness and
polish.
There is yet another level of parody introduced by the performers:
the parody of certain iconic images that have been established in such arts
as painting and film. The Actress's costume and poses as a model remind the
spectator of countless female portraits that could bear either of the following
tides: "The portrait of a woman in black," or "The portrait of a woman in
a hat with a feather." The parodistic effect is achieved through the
juxtaposition of two contrasting images: the appearance of the Actress as a
model and the abstract character of her depiction by the Painter in his work.
Parody of this sort reaches its peak when the Actress, freed from
the power of the Director (who leaves the auditorium dissatisfied with her
performance), plays the last part of the scene according to her own
imagination. Her acting style is a caricature of "crime" movies: gun, dark
glasses, wig, and stealthy movements allude to the classic cinematic "murder"
scene. The Actress (or the character?) makes a suicide attempt. It seems that
the pretense is over, that human pain and suffering finally burst from the
Actress, or, perhaps her heroine. The very next moment, the Actress, who
has been lying prone on the floor, crawls out of her fur coat, rises, and
leaves the stage. The Musician and the Artist outline the contours of her
coat in chalk, again a quotation from film noir. The story is over.
This final image of the performance-the empty coat that retains
the shape of a human body-is highly resonant. Like the production as a
whole, it escapes any single interpretation. This image may suggest the
Actress's liberation from her past, or the death of the heroine, or a
metaphor for acting as a constant changing of roles. At the same time, this
image could also be perceived as a metaphor for postmodern art-a wittily
contrived form short on human feelings.
Most's presentation of The Human Voice at t he Russian-American
Cultural Forum shows that Russian theatre practitioners have absorbed the
chief tenets of postmodernism. The change in the political climate of Russia
during the last decade has opened the door wide for creative
experimentation. At the same time, the suddenness of this change has caused
many Russians to undergo an acute loss of identity. The disintegration of
the So\iet Empire has resulted in the "deconstruction" of "Soviet" man. The
absence of character, or its deconstruction, in this production of Cocteau's
play by Russian performers reflects both their experimentation with
theatrical form and their actual state of mind; it is symptomatic of
conditions not only within the theatrical community but also in Russia in
general.
61
EARLY SOVIET ART AT NEW YORK GALLERIES
Daniel Gerould
Two recent exhibitions of works for sale indicate the continuing
flow of early Soviet Art to the West.
From October 28, 1994 to January 7, 1995 an exhibition "ROSTA:
Bolshevik Placards 1919-1921-Handmade Political Posters from the Russian
Telegraph Agency" was presented at the Sander Gallery (19 East 76th St.,
New York 10021). The show (the first in the West of ROSTA posters, few
of which survive) presented 17 groups of 131 posters on sheets of paper
roughly 15 inches square. Made between 1919 and 1922, the posters for
ROST A (acronym for the Russian Telegraph Agency) illustrated the news
and made propaganda for communism in groups of four to fourteen
pictures. The artists turned out sets of drawings quickly; they were
photographed, stencils were cut, and then 50 to 300 copies were printed
overnight and distributed the next day for display in store windows, on the
sides of trains, and on river boats. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mikhail
Cheremnykh, and Amshei Niurenberg were the major ROST A artists on
display in the show. Among the themes of their posters were the evils of
capitalism, the dastardliness of foreign intervention in the civil war, the
treachery of the Poles, the triumph of the Red Army, the dangers of
drinking unboiled water, and the need to work Saturdays without pay to
repair the railroads. This large collection of posters, assembled by an
unidentified ROSTA artist in the 1920s, was taken to Israel in the 1980s and
bought by the Sander Gallery in 1993. Groups of posters were offered at
$12,000 to $42,000. Also on display at the gallery were rare Soviet books
and catalogues from the period and photographs of the artists, including an
unusual photograph of Mayakovsky on his deathbed here reproduced. An
illustrated catalogue of the exhibition was available.
From December 8, 1995 to January 13, 1996 the work of El
Lissitsky was presented at the Howard Sackler Gallery (52 East 76th St.,
New York 10021). All the items in the show were from an archive
discovered in Russia in 1989 by Lissitsky's son. Lissitsky {1890-1941), one of
founders of Constructivism, was an architect, artist, and art critic. He was
represented in the show not by his paintings, but by his innovative
photomontages of the early 1920s, his exhibition designs for Soviet art, his
personal snapshots and letters to colleagues. Of special interest were two
photographs of set designs for Meyerhold. Lissitzky was commissioned
62
Slavic ami East European Performance Vol. 16, No.1
Vladtmzr Mayakovsky on hts Death Bed, 1930
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
14.7x23.8 em Signature in ink on verso
63
to design the set for Meyerhold's production of Sergei Tretyakov's play, I
Want a Child. In his quest for innovation, Meyerhold sought a set that
would lead to an entire restructuring of the theatre. Lissitsky's plans called
for the stage to be moved from the front of the theatre to the center, with
the audience seated around the stage. The play was never performed and the
model was destroyed. An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition was
available.
WITOLD GOMBROWICZ'S
IVONA, PRINCESS OF BURGUNDIA
AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
David Goldfarb
Witold Gombrowicz's Jvona, Princess of Burgundia received a well-attended
New York production on February 9 and 10, 1996, in the Horace Mann
black-box Theatre as Gail Lerner's directorial thesis in the M.F.A. program
in Theatre at Columbia University. While there may be some skeptics of the
potential of "student" productions, the resources of the Oscar Hammerstein
II Center for Theatre Studies and the support of several grants from the
Polish community assured an ensemble and production staff of high
technical competence, well-appointed facilities, and rehearsal time to
produce a more finely crafted performance than one would expect of most
Off or Off-Off Broadway shows in New York.
A potential difficulty, however, in this type of production, particularly
in New York, is that the performance has to serve many purposes other
than those of artistic creation. A New York thesis play is also a professional
showcase, to which the director, actors and designers will invite agents and
colleagues with the hope of attracting commercial attention. Absurdist
drama does not have much commercial potential, so there is a danger of a
realist aesthetic intruding so t hat, when the curtain comes down all can say,
"yes, we can play fools, but we can play real people too."
In spite of this difficulty, there were several outstanding performances.
Ivona was played by Kim Ima with a highly consistent deer-in-the-headlights
catatonia that seemed imported from a Richard Foreman production,
lending this version of Gombrowicz's play a distinctive New York
downtown avant-garde flavor. One of the most delightful acts in this piece
came from Bea Wolfe in the small role of Ivona's luridly disaffected Aunt
number two. Alexander Haseltine held nothing back as a manic, drooling,
country-club King Ignatius, infecting the other performers with his physical
energy.
By contrast, there seemed to be some confusion about what to do with
the main character, Philip. While I would not criticize Michael Gunst for
his technically clean performance, I would question some of the choices
made, which are central to the interpretation of the play. Because the role
is so large and dominant, an actor trained like most contemporary American
actors in the Realist tradition is tempted to get inside the character's head
and render him in all his moods and complexity. This presumes that
65
Gombrowicz created characters with some sort of comprehensible human
psychology, and that his works are in some sense about the human struggles
of the characters, and that they succeed when the spectator can feel a sense
of direct identification with the character. In the ridiculous world of lvona,
howeYer, I doubt that any character could ever appear "real" enough to
make an audience member think "yes, that's just like me."
While Gombrowicz's works might yield psychological insights, they do
so indirectly as studies of form and logic in language and gesture. At one
point, which worked quite well, lvona's suitor, Innocent, raises his finger
to Philip, shouting "I protest!" to which Philip responds with a raised finger.
The motif of the raised finger recurs throughout the play, and in a sense, it
does not matter why the finger is raised at any given moment. The play is
not really about the feelings of the characters which might cause them to
instigate the challenge of a raised finger, but about the congealed forms of
language and social life that dictate that a raised finger-or marriage
proposal, or serving carp rather than pike-is an appropriate and necessary
gesture at certain moments of time. The people do not make the gesture,
but the appropriateness of the gesture determines their actions and feelings.
The strongest elements of this production were several innovative and
effective pieces of staging. Much credit is due to Costume and Scenic
Designer, Greco, who set the actors in a watery blue on blue space with
hanging flats and curtains waving in the air, and Sound Designer Rick
Knutsen whose soundtrack of slowly dripping water grew into a gusher by
the end of the play, producing in combination a progressive feeling of
drowning. This and other creative scenic effects might have been enhanced
by lighting, which at times became too smooth and unobtrusive for
Gombrowicz. Philip's glitzy silver suit seemed to be asking for the
spotlight, for instance, but was played down with mottled light carefully
designed to minimize glare. Again the Realism of the lighting sometimes
operated at cross purpose to the audacity of costumes and setting.
At the striking end of the second act, Philip drags lvona off to the garden
to consummate their engagement. The action takes place entirely behind a
hanging flat, so that the audience is forced, like peeping-toms, to look at
their feet through a narrow slit under the flat to see the action, which
culminates in a figured anal rape (which seems to have emerged as the chief
signifier of debasement for the 1990s). At the end, Philip emerges from the
garden, zips up and walks off. lvona punctuates the scene as, in a heightened
daze, she runs from the stage and slams into the hanging flat, leaving it to
swing in a harsh footlight casting huge shadows.
In another surprising move, the Queen, played by Emily Hellstrom,
emerges for her mad scene from a refrigerator into a dark stage. The
refrigerator door opens and illuminated only by the humming flourescent
lights of the refrigerator, she begins reciting her sappy and self-obsessed
verses. The final grand banquet scene begins with the Queen as Shiva with
the other guests behind her extending their arms, balancing tin cafeteria
trays with eight-ounce milk cartons, as she scoops mashed potatoes from a
large glass bowl. These moments achieved their effect by using strong
dramatic gesture to eclipse any attempt at the representation of human
emotion.
"I was a structuralist before anyone else," Gombrowicz claimed in a late
essay, written in Vence during the 1960s. While this may have been a critical
pose aimed at Barthes and his circle at their height, there is a grain of truth
in it. His earliest stories and his foundational novel, Ferdydurke tried to
demonstrate that in any social setting, if one individual raises a finger,
another individual must of necessity raise the binary opposite finger,
resulting in a "kupa" (or heap) of writhing bodies at the end of the scene in
spite of any individual intentions, motivations, will or good breeding on the
part of those involved. Meaning, the structuralists would argue, occurs only
in virtue of such binary oppositions, but Gombrowicz reveals the binary
opposition as a prison and demonstrates that the artist must strive for the
chaos of the "kupa" to break out of structuralism's logical confinement and
create new meamng.
67
CONTRIBUTORS
JOHN FREEDMAN is the theatre critic of the English-language daily, the
Moscow Times. He writes monthly reports on Moscow theatre for Plays
International (London), and is co-editor of the Russian Theatre Archive, a
series of books published by Harwood Academic Publishers. For that series
he has translated two volumes of plays by Nikolai Erdman, and Two Plays
from the New Russia: Bald/Brunet by Daniel Gink and Nijinsk:y by Alexei
Bury kin.
DAVID A. GOLDFARB teachs Polish and Russian literature at Hunter
College and is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Comparative
Literature at the City University of New York Graduate School.
JADWIGA KOSICKA is a translator of Polish literature. She has recently
translated Jan Kott's autobiography, Still Alive.
IRINA MILLER, a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at
the Graduate School of the City University of New York, writes about
Russian drama and theatre.
ERIC POURCHOT, a site director of Teletechnet at Old Dominion
University in Melfa, VA, who has taught courses in theatre at Long Island
University, is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the
City University of New York Graduate Center.
JURAJ SEBESTA, a theatre critic in his native Slovak Republic, is currently
a Fulbright Scholar studying American Drama in New York as a CAST A
scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center.
DUBRA VKA VRGOC is a theatre critic for Vjesnik, the main daily
newspaper in Zagreb, Croatia. She publishes articles about contemporary
European theatre and culture in Croatian theatre reviews and journals. Dr.
Vrgoc received a Fulbright grant in 1995 for researching contemporary
American theatre and criticism in New York where she was a CAST A
scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center.
KEVIN WINDLE is a tranlator of Slavic languages and a Senior Lecturer
in Russian at the Australian National University in Canberra.
68
Photo Credits
Glorietta, ITD Theatre
S. Novkovic
Dead Wedding, ITD Theatre
S. Novkovic
Dyp Inaf, STOKA Theatre
Pavel Pecha
Eo Ipso, STOKA Theatre
Robo Kocan
Impasse, STOKA Theatre
Ivan Finta
The Book of Ruth, New Riga Theatre
Marina Shikman
An Idyll, Janka Kupala Theatre
Lyudmila Nelinova
Claustrophobia, Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg
Ken Reynolds
Anonymous, Vladimir Mayakovsky on his Death Bed, 1930
Courtesy Sander Gallery, NY
69
PLAYSCRlPTS IN TRANSLATION SERlES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):
No. 1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.2 I, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by
Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
No.3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredyriski. Translated by Michal
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Adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English verstion by Earl Ostroff
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No. 5 The Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
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No. 7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets
and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00
($6.00 foreign).
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Toborski, Michal Kobialka,
and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C.
Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and Catalog
by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April 30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
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CAST A. CUNY Graduate Center
33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
PhD Program in Theatre
at the Graduate School and University Center
of the City University of New York
Offers graduate training in Theatre Studies
Certificate program in Film Studies
Recent Seminars include
Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
The Current New York Season Feminist Theory and Performance Melodrama
The History Play Dramaturgy Simulations Film Aesthetics
African-American Theatre of the 60s and 70s
Lesbian and Gay Theatre and Performance
Theatre History Dramatic Structure Theatre Criticism
Strindberg and Modernism American Film Comedy Kabuki
Films and Theatre of lngmar Bergman Minstrelsy 1865-Present
Italian Theatre Latino Theatre in the U.S. Women and the Avant-Garde
Interdisciplinary Options
with distinguished Graduate Center faculty in other fields
and through a consortia! arrangement with
New York University and Columbia University
Affiliated with Center for Advanced Study in Theatre and
journal of American Drama and Theatre
Western European Stages
Slavic and Eastern European Performance
Theatre faculty include:
Marvin Carlson, Jill Dolan, Dan Gerould, Judith M.ilhous
and James Hatch, Jonathan Kalb, Miriam D'Aponte, Harry Carlson, Jane Bowers
Rosette Lamont, Samuel Leiter, Gloria Waldman, Ralph Allen, Albert Bermel,
Mira Feiner, Morris Dickstein, Stephen Langley, Benito Ortolani, David Willinger
Film faculty include:
Stuart Liebman, William Boddy, George Custen, Tony Pipolo,
Leonard Quart, Joyce Rheuban, and Ella Shohat
Theatre Program
CUNY Graduate Center
33 W. 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-8099
(212) 642-2231
tht:@rnina.gc.cuny.edu

SEEP Vol.16 No.1 Winter 1996

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volume 16, no.

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