SEEP-Vol.19 No.2 Summer1999

volume 19, no.
2
Summer 1999
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SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) 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 at the City University Graduate
Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4307. All subscription
requests and submissions should be addressed to the Slavic and East European
Perfonnance: CASTA, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center,
365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4307.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Jennifer Parker Starbuck
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Lars Myers
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Melissa Gaspar
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Susan T enneriello
ASSIST ANT CIRCULATION MANAGERS
Patricia Herrera
Ramon Rivera-Servera
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
Allen J. Kuharski
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 1999 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. 19, No.2
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In Memoriam: Lucille Lortel
In Memoriam: Paul Schmidt
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
"Victor Rozov: Alive Forever?"
Elisabeth Rich
"Interview With V!t Horejs"
Lars Myers
"What Do We Care If the Winter Is Cold and Stressful?
Five St. Petersburg Directors: A Generation with
an Aversion to Politics"
Daria Krizhanskaya
"Fighting Fences: Theatrical Rule-breaking in the
Serbian Republic of Bosnia"
Sonja Kuftinec
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Mikhoels in America"
Mel Gordon
"Did Kurbas Stage King Lear in Moscow? Unraveling
the Mystery of Les' Kurbas's Last Production"
Natalia Chechel
REVIEWS
"Who's Legs Are Those?
The Czechoslovak-American Marionette
Theatre's Rusalka, the Little Rivermaid''
5
6
7
8
9
15
17
28
36
so
58
69
80
3
Blanka Kfivankova
"Testa's Letters at Ensemble Studio Theatre"
"A Hungarian Film of Woyzeck"
Roger Hillman
Contributors
Publications
85
89
94
97
4
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and
film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works,
or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo! but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should
be submitted on computer disk as either Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS or
Wordperfect 6.0 for Windows documents (ASCII or Text Files will be
accepted as well) and a hard copy of the article should be included.
Photographs are recommended for all reviews. All articles should be sent
to the attention of Slavic and East European Performance, cl o CAST A,
CUNY Graduate School, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4307.
Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after
approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Performance by visiting our website at: http:/ /web.gsuc.cuny.edu/casta
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The current issue has a strong emphasis on Russia. Contrasting approaches
to the contemporary state of Russian drama and theatre are to be found in
Elisabeth Rich's conversations with Viktor Rozov, an octogenerian living
legend of the Soviet era, and Daria Krizhanskaya's investigations of the
work of a new generation of St. Petersburg directors half Rozov's age.
PAGES FROM THE PAST has a double feature on the great Russian
Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels. Natalia Chechel speculates on the
possibility that the avant-garde Ukrainian theatre artist Les' Kurbas was the
real director of Mikhoels's King Lear, while Mel Gordon examines
Mikhoels's visit to New York through a study of the FBI reports. The issue
also contains Lars Myers's interview with the Czech American puppeteer
V!t Horejs and Blanka Kfivankova's review of Horejs's Rusalka, the Little
Rivennaid, as well as Sonja Kuftinec's reflections on the theory and practice
of community theatre based on her experiences in Serbian Bosnia. The issue
is rounded out by Roger Hillman's film review of a Hungarian Woyzeck and
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck's review of Tesla's Letters at Ensemble Studio
Theatre.
6 Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 19, No.2
In Memoriam: Lucille Lortel 1900-1999
The theatre artist, benefactor of the arts, producer, and theatre
owner Lucille Lortel died on Sunday, April4, 1999 in Manhattan. In 1988
Lortel established the Lucille Lortel Distinguished Chair in Theatre at the
Graduate School of the City University of New York. Slavic and East
European Performance as well as other CAST A publications are supported
by the Lortel Chair, which is held by the journal's editor.
Lortel started her career in the theatre as a stage and film actress but
gave her career up in 1939 to spend more t ime with her husband, Louis
Schweit zer. Lortel remained in the theatre, providing the White Barn in
Westport in 1947 as an experimental summer theatre space where she
nurtured writers, actors, and companies from the U.S. and abroad. In 1955
Schweitzer gave Lortel a theatre, the Theatre de Lys, at 121 Christopher
Street in Manhattan. Now the Lucille Lortel Theatre, it became the home
for a twenty-year-long experimental matinee series featuring new American
playwrights and as yet undiscovered European masters.
Lortel produced or co-produced more than 500 plays on and off-
Broadway. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lee
Strasberg Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985, and was inducted to the
Theatre Hall of Fame in 1990. The Lucille Lortel Awards were established
in her honor in 1986 by the League of Off Broadway Theatres and
Producers. A memorial tribute, attended by the many playwrights, actors,
directors, and producers who had received her support over the years, was
held at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on May 24. The editors and staff at Slavic
and East European Performance join in this t ribute in appreciation for her
enduring support of our work.
7
In Memoriam: Paul Schmidt 1934-1999
Paul Schmidt, librettist, translator, poet, teacher, playwright, and
actor, died in New York on February 19, 1999 at the age of sixty-five.
Schmidt was born in Brooklyn and received his doctorate in Slavic languages
from Harvard with a dissertation on director Vsevolod Meyerhold.
As a translator his work ranged from Chekhov, Mayakovsky, and
Gogol, to Moliere, Marivaux, Racine, Brecht and Genet. He served as a
poet/translator of Rimbaud and the Russian Futurist Khlebnikov. In
collaboration with Peter Sellars, Schmidt saw Khlebnikov's play, Zangezi,
produced in Los Angeles and later at Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1990,
he created an alternative translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters for the
Wooster Group's piece, Brace Up!, a production in which he also acted,
playing the part of Dr. Chebutykin.
Schmidt was also a playwright. His original play about Stalin and
Shostakovich, Black Sea Follies, was produced in 1986 by Playwrights
Horizons and the Music Theatre Group. He also wrote the libretto for
Alice, a collaboration with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits which played at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in 1995.
8
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 19, No. 2
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
The Pantheon Theatre presented an adaptation by George Loros of
Chekhov's Three Sisters from February 18 to March 7.
Target Margin's artistic director David Herskovits directed a
production of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Ohio Theatre from February 24
to March 20.
The Pearl Theatre presented Shepard Sobel's staging of Chekhov's
The Seagull from March 1 to 22 with Joanne Camp as Arkadina.
La Mama and Yara Arts Group presented Flight of the White Bird,
a newly developed music theatre piece inspired by Oleh Lysheha's poem
Swan. Directed by Virlana Tkacz, the piece was performed from March 5
to 21. Performers included artists from the Buryat National Theatre of
Siberia.
The Actors Studio Free Theatre presented Vaclav Havel's The
Increased Difficulty of Concentration at Raw Space from March 24 to April
11. The production was directed by Arthur Storch.
The Julliard Drama Theater presented Chekhov's The Cherry
Orchard, directed by Brian Mertes, from March 27 to 30.
Jeffery Stanley's new play Telsa's Letters ran from April20 to 26 at
the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Starring Dragan Milincevic and Judith
Roberts, the play concerns the life of acclaimed scientist Nikola Tesla, a
Croatian-born Serb (See a review of this production on page 90).
The Pulse Ensemble Theatre presented Gorky's Lower Depths,
directed by Thelma Louis Carter, from April through mid-May.
A stage adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita was presented at the Gene
Frankel Theatre in April.
9
Brian Rogers directed a production of Karel Capek's R. U.R.
(Rossum 's Universal Robots) at the Mazer Theatre in April.
Theatre by the Blind presented Maxim Gorky's Vassa at the Samuel
Beckett Theatre in April.
An adaptation of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, written
and directed by Michael Gardner and starring Robert Honeywell, was
performed in the basement of The Emerging Collector art gallery in April
and May.
Rude Mechanicals Theatre Company presented a production of
Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato, directed by Derek Cecil, at the Greenwich
Street Theatre in May.
Brenda Lynn Bynum directed Platonov: Yalta's Don juan, an
adaptation of Chekhov's first play, at the Oasis Theatre Company from
May 14 to June 6.
Stavrogin's Confessions, an adaptation of an excerpt from
Dostoevsky's novel The Devils, was presented by the Storm Theatre
Company at the Red Room along with Chekhov's The Brute from May 14
to June 6.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Regional U.S.
Bailiwick Repertory Arts Center of Chicago presented Brian Friel's
adaptation of Turgenev's A Month in the Country in March and April.
Paul Kampf's stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Heart
of a Dog was presented at the Breadline theatre in Chicago in March.
The European Repertory Company of Chicago with director Luda
Lopatina presented Chekhov's Ivanov at the Wellington Avenue Church in
Chicago in March.
The Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore College presented
Stanislaw lgnacy Witkiewicz's The Water Hen from April 22 to 24. The
show was designed and directed by Michal Zadara from Warsaw.
10
In the first of a series of Russian programs included in the Kennedy
Center's 1999-2000 Season, the Meyerhold Institute Theatre presented A
Hotel Room in the Town ofNN during the second week of May. Adapted
from Gogol's Dead Souls, the production was directed by Valery Fokin.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Europe
From April 26 to May 4, the Contemporary Drama Festival was
held in Budapest. The extensive program of productions from throughout
Europe included the following Eastern European plays and performances:
Jerzy Lukosz, Thomas Mann (Teatr Polski, Bydgoszcz); Gy6gy Spiro,
Quartet (Harmadik, Pees); Jana Dobreva, Sand Puzzle (Teater 199, Sofia);
Arpad Schilling, Little Dot, Or What if the May-Fly is Having a Bad Day!
(Chalkcircle Theatre, Budapest); Lajos Parti Nagy, Railway Station Ibusar
Gatekszfn, Budapest); Matei Visniec, The Female Genital Organs at the
Bosnian Battlefield (Teatrul Mic, Bucharest); Zold.n Egressy, Dreaming
Portugal (Katona J 6zsef, Budapest); Kornel Hamvai, Linesman Marton is Out
in the Cold (Arpad Horvath Studio, Csokonai Theatre, Debrecen); Attila
L6rinczy, By Post Horse Up to Heaven (Csiky Gergely Theatre Studio,
Kaposvar). Off program were productions of Lajos Parti Nagy, Mausoleum;
Istvan Tasnadi, Public Enemy, and Slawomir Mrozek, Widows. There were
also discussions with artists, dramaturgs, and critics, rehearsed readings,
meetings of drama agents and of festival directors, translators' workshops,
and a bookfair.
St. Petersburg's Maly Drama Theatre Company toured the UK
from April 29 to June 3 with The Winter's Tale; directed by Declan
Donnellan, the show was performed in Russian with subtitles.
The Barbican Centre in London held a two-month long festival to
celebrate the arts of St. Petersburg. The festival, titled "St. Petersburg:
Romance and Revolution," ran from April 30 to June 30. The theatre
events included the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg presenting
Chekhov's Platonov, or The Play with No Name at the Barbican Theatre from
June 9 to 13. Directed by Lev Dodin, the show was performed in Russian
with subtitles. Collaborators from the Guildhall School of Music and
Drama, and the Royal College of Art created a version of Victory Over the
Sun, the Futurist opera of 1913 by Alexei Kruchonykh, Kazimir Malevich,
11
and Mikhail Matiushin. The show, directed by Julia Hollander, ran from
June 18 to 20.
Brokenville, a new play by Philip Ridley, was performed entirely by
Kosovan refugees at St. George's Church in Dagenham, Essex from May 4
to 8. The director, Benjamin May, and designer Atlanta Duffy, work-
shopped the play for six months with the refugee community.
DANCE
New York City
Yugoslav choreographer Marija Krtolica presented new and old
work with Meg Wolfe at Context from February 27 to 29. Krtolica also
appeared at Dixon Place as part of their Underexposed dance series on
March 10.
The Silesian Dance Theatre (Poland) presented the American
premiere of WK-70 at t he Kaye Playhouse from March 13 to 15.
FILM
New York City
The Brooklyn Museum of Art presented a series entitled "East Side
Stories: Coming of Age Behind the Wall" from March 6 to April 17.
Hungarian director Ibolye Fekete's Bolshe Vita (1996) was shown on the first
night; Fekete was present to introduce her film. On March 13 the screening
of Whisper (1996), directed by David Ondricek (Czech Republic), was
followed by a panel which included Ondricek and Boris Frumin (Russia).
On March 20 Frumin's film Viva Castro (1993) was screened. On March 27,
Maciej Dejeczer's (Poland) 300 Miles to Heaven was shown. Goran
Markovic's (Yugoslavia/ France) Tito and Me (1992) was screened on April
3. Perfect Circle (1997) by Ademir Kenovic (Yugoslavia) was screened on
April17. The series featured a panel discussion on March 8 which included
Fekete, Ondricek, and Frumin.
The Museum of Modern Art presented the 28th "New
Directors/New Films" series from Apri11 to 11 at the Roy and Niuta Titus
Theatre. Screened were Passion (1998) by Gy6rgy Feher; The Wounds (1998)
in Serbo-Croatian, written and directed by Srdjan Dragojevic and starring
12
Dusan Pekic and Milan Marie. Also screened was Buttoners (1997), directed
by Petr Zelenka.
Encore Screenings at the Walter Reade Theater of the Film Society
of Lincoln Center featured a Polish and a Russian film. On May 21, 23, and
24, Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript (1964) was shown in a newly
restored and subtitled print (presented by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford
Coppola in dedication to Jerry Garcia). On May 22, 23, 25, and 26, Alexei
Guerman's My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1986) was screened.
Savior, a film by Serbian filmmaker Peter Antonijevic, was released
on home video by Columbia Tri-Star in April. The film, starring Dennis
Quaid and Natasa Ninkovic, dramatizes the 1995 conflict in Bosnia.
Street of Crocodiles (1986) by the Brothers Quay, a short animated
film inspired by the Bruno Schulz story of the same name, was screened on
April 14 at the Donnell Media Center as part of their series entitled
"Featuring ... The Cult Film."
ARTS, CULTURE, NEWS
On April 24 and 25 the Department of Slavonic Languages and
Literatures at the University of Glasgow, in cooperation with the Bristol
Association of Teachers of Polish as a Foreign Language, held the Donald
P. A. Pirie Memorial clevot.ed to "The Question of the 'Other'
in Polish Literature and Culture." Among the many papers on linguistics,
fiction, and poetry, presentations dealing with drama and theatre included
the following topics and speakers: Gardzienice (Paul Allain), Stanislawa
Przybyszewska (Kazimiera Ingdahl), Tadeusz R6zewicz (Tamara
Trojanowska and Agnieszka Skolasiiiska), Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
(Daniel Gerould), and Kosciuszko melodrama (Halina Filipowicz). The
conference was organized by Elwira Grossman.
On May 15 the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts
University celebrated twenty-five years at Tufts for Laurence Senelick, the
Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory.
An exhibition of sculptures and installations by Warsaw's Miroslaw
Balka was shown at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery from April10 to May 15.
13
The exhibition, titled "be good," was Balka's first one person show in New
York.
The New York Public Library held an exhibit drawn from the
Vladimir Nabokov archive titled "Nabokov Under Glass" from April 23 to
August 21. The exhibition was part of the centennial celebration of
Nabokov's birth.
On March 21, a memorial for Jerzy Grotowski was held at St
Marks Church, New York City.
The New York Women's Film Festival held a tribute to Agnieszka
Holland on April 23. Holland was present to discuss her work.
Russian immigrant Tod Machover's new opera, Resurrection, was
premiered by the Houston Grand Opera on April23. The libretto is based
on Tolstoy's novel of the same name.
The first American solo exhibition of Czech glass sculptor Vaclav
Cigler was held at Barry Friedman Ltd. Gallery from April29 to June 18.
The exhibition, entitled "Sculptural Thoughts in Glass," highlights the
famous Czech style of glass art, characterized by geometric shapes of highly
polished optic glass that use the reflective quality of the medium. Cigler, a
contemporary of famous Czech glass-artists Stanislav Libensky and
Frantisek Vizner, arranges his work in order to highlight the space that it
creates as much as the piece itself.
The Consortium for Theatre Practices, comprised of members of
the Double Edge Theatre, the Staniewski Centre for Theatre Practices, and
Kadmus Theatre Studio, held a workshop in Gardzienice, Poland from
August 3 to 18.
-Compiled by Lars Myers and Melissa Gaspar
14
BOOKS RECEIVED
Carnicke, Sharon M. Stanislavsky in Focus. Vol. 17 in the Russian Theatre
Archive, edited by John Freedman, Leon Gitelman, and Anatoly Smeliansky.
Luxembourg Harwood Academy Publishers, 1998. 235 pages. Contains a
selected glossary, notes, bibliography, index, and 12 illustrations.
Englelander, Rudy and Dragan Klaic, editors. Shifting Gears.: Reflections and
Reports on the Contemporary Performing Arts. Theater Instituut Nederland,
1998. 182 pages. Contains articles on Croatian, Czech, Russian, and Serbian
performing arts.
Ingdahl, Kazimiera. A Gnostic Tragedy. A Study in Stanis/awa Przybyszewska 's
Aesthetics and Works. Translated from Swedish by Charles Rougle. Slavic
Studies 26. Stockholm Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977. 214 pages.
Contains extensive notes, bibliography, index of names, photographs,
drawings, and paintings by Stanislawa Przybyszewska, including 8 color
reproductions of her chalk drawings and her sketch of Robespierre on the
cover.
Kott, Jan. Szekspir wsp61czesny 2 (Shakespeare our contemporary 2), edited,
selected, and with an introduction by Tadeusz Nyczek. Cracow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999. 287 pages. Includes sixteen essays by Kott
written in the 1990s, an introduction and editorial note by Nyczek, an index
of names and titles, and two illustrations by Andrzej Dudzinski (the cover
shows a dapper Kott and Shakespeare on a stroll together).
Kwartalnikfilmowy, No. 23 (Fall1998) . Instytut Sztuki PAN. Special issue
devoted to the documentary. 244 pages. Contains 17 articles, filmographies,
notes, many photographs, brief summary in English and French.
Kwartalnikfilmowy No. 24 (Winter 1998). Instytut Sztuki PAN. Special
issue devoted to Krzysztof Kieslowski. 180 pages. Contains 7 major articles
with bibliographies, many photographs including 7 color reproductions, brief
summary in English and French.
Meierhol'd: k istorii tvorcheskogo metoda [Meyerhold: on the history of the
creative method], ed. E. Khvalenskaya. St. Petersburg: Kul'tinformPress,
1998.247 pages. A collection of essays by and about Meyerhold.
15
Meierhol'd v russkoi teatral'noi kritike 1892-1918 [Meyerhold in Russian
theatrical criticism 1892-1918]. Moscow: Artist, Rezhisser. Teatr., 1997. 526
pages. Index of names and of titles.
PQ '95. Magyar Szinpad-Kep-fr6k; Hungarian Sceno-graphers; Ungarische
Szeno-graphen, ed. by Nina Kiraly and Margit T6r6k. Catalogue issued for the
Prague Quadriennial '95. Budapest: Hungarian Theatre Museum and
Institute, 1995. 170 pages. Text in Hungarian, English, and German.
Contains introductory essay "Theatre of Changes (1990-1995)," register of
designers, bibliography index of names and of subjects, extensive photographs
and illustrations, many in color.
Slovak Drama 1990-1995, ed. Bozena Cahojova-Berm1tova and Zuzana
Ulicianska, tr. Andrea Cabajsky. Bratislava: National Theatre Centre, 1996.
15 unnumbered pages, summaries and analyses of 14 contemporary Slovak
plays with cast and production information.
The Slovak Theatre. Contemporary Slovak Theatrical Architecture. Bratislava:
National Theatre Centre, 1998. 71 pages. Texts in Slovak, English, and
German. Contains 11 articles, numerous photgraphs and illustrations, many
in color.
The Slovak Theatre. Historical Theatre Architecture in Slovakia. Bratislava:
National Theatre Centre, 1996. 75 pages. Texts in Slovak, English, and
German. Contains 6 articles, numerous photographs and illustrations, many
in color.
16
Slavic and East Eumpean Performance Vol. 19, No. 2
VICTOR ROZOV: ALIVE FOREVER?
Elisabeth Rich
What is the current status of Russian playwriting? When, during
one of my recent trips to Moscow, I asked the eighty-five-year-old Victor
Rozov, one of the acknowledged patriarchs of twentieth-century Soviet
drama, he told me that, "The change of [Russia's] course from Socialism to
Capitalism has not given rise to anything new; it has bred only carrion."
1
Leaning on an elaborately hand-carved wooden cane (Rozov was
wounded during World War II and has used a cane ever since), Rozov,
limping, led me into the dining room; despite his stature in the theatrical
world, his apartment was small and modestly furnished. It could hardly
have been otherwise. Like Oleg, his fifteen-year-old hero in V poiskakh
radosti (In Search of Happiness; 1957), who, apropos of his sister-in-law's
insatiable hunger for expensive and unwieldy furniture, makes a dismissive
sweep of his hand and declares, "What a person really needs is to have a lot
up here! (Taps his forehead.) And here! (Taps his heart.},"
2
Rozov, too, eschews
materialism and crass creature comforts in favor of moral, ethical, and
spiritual values. At the end of our conversation we were joined by his wife,
Nadezhda, six years his junior, who most hospitably brought bread, fancy
cheeses, kielbasa (sausage), cookies, and homemade apple pastries on a tray
for us to snack on. In prerevolutionary style, Rozov drank tea from his
saucer instead of from his cup, so that the tea would cool faster. For a man
who has survived Nicholas II (Russia's last tsar), Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev,
and Brezhnev, it was only natural for him to sip his tea this way- or so, at
least, it seemed to me.
Born in Yaroslavl in 1913, Rozov was only five years old when a
revolt broke out, destroying his hometown. Escaping with his family to the
small city Vetluga, in the Kostromskaya Oblast, Rozov spent his childhood
in the country. These were years of civil war and terrible famine, which
Rozov still vividly remembers. "For the most part," he reminisced, "we
gnawed on linden bark and linden leaf-buds. We went to the slaughterhouse,
where they drove the livestock in. We ran with mugs, and when they drove
a cow in and cut its throat, blood flowed. We would spoon it up and drink
it . .. in order to stay alive. It was horrible." When he was ten years old,
his family moved to Kostroma, a city situated by the Volga River, where,
after graduating from high school, he went to work at a textile factory,
joined the factory theatre group, and enrolled in an industrial technical
school. Then, in 1934, "all alone, with a little pasteboard suitcase, rather
17
18
ragged," he moved to Moscow to study at the studio of the Theatre of the
Revolution, which is now the Mayakovsky Theatre; later he joined the
company of that theatre as an actor.
This "magical time" was soon interrupted by the outbreak of World
War II, whereupon Rozov, like his fictional hero Boris in Vechno zhivye
(Alive Forever}, went to volunteer for the front. "How could I do anything
else?" Boris, an obvious mouthpiece for the author, tells his young
sweetheart, Veronica, in Alive Forever. "You know, things are going to be
hard for everybody now. It'll be hard to work, to study, to live, and hardest
of all to fight. If I'm honest, I've got to be where it's hardest of all, you
understand?"
3
However, due to extremely poor vision in his right eye, a
defect from birth, Rozov was refused by the enlistment office. "Go on
home," he recalls them saying; "you won't do." Undeterred, he instead
joined the people's volunteer corps, where he served in the artillery. "It was
the fall of 1941," he told me. "There was already frost; snow had fallen.
The Germans were approaching Moscow. The Germans were all iron-with
motorcycles, tanks, planes-while we had nothing. Our political instructor
told us to delay their approach to Moscow, if only for a few days. And all
our thousands-tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young
people-having joined the people's volunteer corps from Moscow
University, from the Theatre of the Revolution, from the
Conservatory- we ground the German soldiers into dust." Struck down by
a shell, Rozov was seriously injured, and he spent an entire month in a ward
for the fatally wounded; in fact, the doctors were uncertain whether he
would survive, since he had gangrene up to his waist and many of his bones
were broken. "But here I sit," he interjected on a more whimsical note,
"talking with you."
After recovering from his near-fatal wound, which left him with a
limp, Rozov organized an actor's brigade in Kostroma, which played to
nearby troops. Then, in the postwar period, he returned to Moscow;
realizing that his physical handicap barred him from pursuing the
professional acting career toward which he had once aspired, he entered the
drama section of the Gorky Literary Institute and started writing plays.
Subsequently, he taught many years at the Institute, eventually attaining the
rank of professor.
4
It is only recently that Rozov has felt compelled to
retire, because he no longer "knows what to teach" or "what is happening
around [him]."
Rozov's plays, which shy away from politics, maintain that people
should behave like human beings instead of animals, and that their most
precious values should be of a spiritual, ethical, and moral nature.
19
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Victor Rozov's From Night Till Noon, at the Sovremennik Theatre, Moscow.
Directed by Oleg Efremov, with Georgi Burkow as Yegorev and Oleg Efremov as Zharkov
Goodness, honesty, empathy for others, bravery-these are the qualities that
render people distinct from wild animals and that fascinate Rozov. "My
plays are mostly about this and, conversely, the seamy side of things." For
example, in V dobry chas (Good Luck!; 1954), one of Rozov's early plays,
which enjoyed a long and successful run in Moscow and in the provinces,
the seventeen-year-old hero, Andrei Averin, has just finished secondary
school and decides to leave Moscow to go and live with his cousin Alexei
and his family in Siberia. Instead of trying to enroll in an Institute; instead
of thinking of his "future," as his ambitious and materialistic mother laments
time and again, Andrei wants to work-to find employment in a workshop,
or to take up "any odd job."
5
"I want to find my place," he confides to his
cousin, "the one that 's waiting for me somewhere. I want to live, but the
kind of life that's worth living, not just to learn a trade in order to earn a
living, go to the pictures, eat and sleep. "
6
In a parting shot at his mother,
who regards his decision as nothing less than catastrophic and tells him in
no uncertain terms that he has "lost [his] mind,"
7
Andrei neatly sums up his
fundamental principles of life as follows: "Mother, what difference does it
make what sort of profession I have. It's what I am that matters."
8
This
philosophy is, in a nutshell, the sum and substance of this play; these
themes, in one guise or another, also come to the forefront in other Rozov
plays, including In Search of Happiness and Alive Forever.
Yet for all his political neutrality, Rozov still fell victim to the
censors. In some instances, he would simply bargain with them. "You
would barter with them. It was like an old woman who wants to sell you
something for seventy-five roubles, and you say, 'My dear, sell it to me for
sixty.' You haggled in this way." On other occasions, Rozov was less
fortunate. His play Alive Forever (1943), which was banned under Stalin and
lay on the shelf for about thirteen years, was finally staged in 1956, only
after Nikita Khrushchev had come to power; in fact, it was the play with
which the Sovremennik Theatre, one of Moscow's leading theatres, opened
its first season. Later Alive Forever was turned into the film Letyat zhuravli
(The Cranes Are Flying), which became an immediate international hit and
received the Golden Palm Branch award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958;
at the request of the well-known director Mikhail Kalatozov, who produced
and directed it, Rozov wrote the screenplay. Another play, Kabanchik (The
Little Boar), which was not allowed to be staged between 1981 and 1986,
reached the Moscow stage only with the onset of
Given his age and his artistic orientation, it hardly seems surprising
that Rozov should be critical of what is taking place in today's Russia. "I
really don't like what I see today; perhaps this is because I am old. But I
21
cannot accept the new values where, instead of moral values, material values
reign supreme. How much you earn and your ability to cheat someone in
order to make a profit- now this is all very fashionable. In a word, the
system that is being cultivated today is alien to me ... and unpleasant for
me."
Rozov describes the theatrical world today as complicated, because
"all theatres are in such a difficult position materially." With the exception
of the more popular and influential theatres, such as Lenin Komsomol,
which is abbreviated to Lenkom, or the Satirikon Theatre under Konstantin
Raikin, most theatres in Russia nowadays pay their actors what Rozov calls
"miserly wages." He should know; his daughter, Tatyana, is an actress at the
Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT), while his fifteen-year-old
granddaughter is a child actress there.
Of the younger dramatists, Rozov has a high opinion of the forty-
one-year-old Nikolai Kolyada from Ekaterinburg, one of the most prolific
and frequently staged playwrights in Russia today; although he describes
Kolyada as "a dramatist with special inclinations that seem strange to [him),"
he still extols him for being an "indisputably gifted individual." Rozov also
appreciates the early plays by the now fifty-year-old Aleksandr Galin, who
rocketed to national and international fame in the 1980s with such dramatic
successes as Retro and Zvezdy na utrennem nebe {Stars in the Morning Sky).
As for the "new wave"
10
-the wave that crested in 1991, when the
course of Gorbachev's perestroika was altered and Y eltsin came to
power-Rozov is disdainful. "They began to show life's filth. All the bad,
the dirt ... not political dirt, but simply the everyday filth of life ... a kind
of human uncleanliness." Although plays of this ilk ostensibly should have
evoked feelings of pathos and empathy from the audience, Rozov claims that
they only succeeded in bringing forth an atmosphere of gloom and what is
commonly referred to by Russian critics as "masochistic self-denunciation."
Rozov is especially appalled by the image of ribaldry and obscenity
that has become so fashionable and commonplace among the younger
generation of dramatists. "I cannot endure this at all," he stated
emphatically. "If there is vulgar language in a play or in a story, it should
be thrown into the furnace, because art is of a divine origin. It is the same
thing as a priest in a church swearing." It was in this context that Rozov
made mention of Nadezhda Ptushkina's Ovechka (The Small Sheep), which
mixes erotica with the biblical story of Jacob and Rachel and was widely
regarded as one of the most scandalous plays of the 1996-7 theatrical
season.
11
"Let's say, hypothetically speaking, I were to take the biblical
theme about Mary Magdalen. Let's say that before I describe her meeting
22
with Christ, I show all her licentiousness, all the unseemliness of her
prostitution. 'What's all this for?' When playwrights start taking biblical
themes and making them bawdy, I simply am at a loss."
"The plays being staged today are immoral," he continued. "Plays
that corrupt people. Actors now walk naked on the stage. You understand?
Naked. There is a banya [bathhouse] for that: go to the banya if that's what
you want; everyone there walks around naked. There is shamelessness in
this, and a shameless person is a very bad person. No, I do not like this.
Art, the theatre-it is a temple, and in a temple you need to behave as
though you were in a real temple."
Rozov, who stays abreast of current Russian drama by reading such
journals as Teatr (Theatre} and Sovremennaya dramaturgiya (Contemporary
Drama},
12
describes the young Russian dramatists today as "capable people,"
but lacking something essential. "They don't know what to write about.
In their plays, there is no burning subject matter that touches my heart.
This is only natural. Why? Because our government does not make any
sense. It has only some vague ideas for the formation of our society in the
image of a capitalist society. Earlier there was the myth of Socialism and
Communism. Still, it was something to aspire toward. What is there to
strive for now? To earn as much money as possible? The young dramatists
do not touch my heart. They don't write badly, but they don't touch your
soul, which is a gift from God."
In his less than enthusiastic evaluation of the young dramatists,
Rozov by no means stands alone. For example, when eighty-five Moscow
and Petersburg theatre critics were polled in 1996 by the newspaper
Nezavisimaya gazeta (Independent Newspaper) to name Russia's ten most
significant and influential dramatic productions from 1991 to 1996,
contemporary plays were strikingly absent from the list.
13
Nor, according
to the Moscow directors whom I canvassed in 1998, including Sergei
Zhenavach, chief artistic director at the Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya, and
Henrietta Y enovskaya, chief artistic director at the Theatre for Young
Spectators, has there been any appreciable change in the situation from 1996
to the present.
Expressing his distaste for the present, Rozov argued most
emphatically: "Everything today has become mixed up. Aesthetic values
have become confused; nothing new has sprung up. If after the October
Revolution a new art was born, it sprang up at the very beginning: with the
emblem of the hammer and sickle, the national anthem, the red banner. But
now what is there? Nothing new has sprung up to take its place."
"Now it's a worse time. There is no censorship, but there is no
23
meaning to life either. Now you can write plays freely, but what is there to
write about? To write the kinds of plays that appeal to those people who
embrace today's lifestyle-to have the actors take off their clothes, or to be
scandalous in some other way-this is not interesting for me personally. If
only someone would write a comedy like Gogel's The Inspector General.
Now is the time for comedy ... because everything that is taking place
around us is comedy."
Although he disapproves of most of what he sees and reads, Rozov
is not so cynical or pessimistic as to perceive the current Russian theatrical
scene as catastrophic. When I asked him if Russian drama was on the verge
of collapse, as many conservative critics in fact have argued, he responded,
"Let's not say that it's collapsing. Let's just say that it is going through a
complicated period now. That's how I'd put it ... again, I repeat, there are
a fair number of capable young dramatists." Asked about the future of
Russian drama, Rozov avoided predictions, stressing the fact that "[he] is not
a fortune-teller." Still, he believes that a genius will emerge in the theatrical
world-and preferably not a second Chekhov. "It would be better if it was
someone new; we don't need another Chekhov ... because Chekhov
already was. Ostrovsky wrote plays; Tolstoy wrote plays; Turgenev wrote
plays; Gogo! wrote plays-and they all were different. Russia needs a new
giant like Chekhov, but not Chekhov."
Although Rozov supports the staging of modern Russian drama, he
also is in favor of the staging of American plays, which have recently
dominated the Moscow theatrical repertory. During the 1997-98 season
there have been productions of Arthur Miller's The Price and The Creation
of the World and Other Business, Jason Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama
The Championship Season, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night
and Beyond the Horizon, Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park and Last of the
Red Hot Lovers, and Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, The Glass
Menagerie, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here
Anymore, Camino Real, and Small Craft Warnings. Rozov finds these plays
"congenial to [him]."
14
For example, he liked the production of Tennessee
Williams's first full-length play, Battle of Angels, which premiered in 1998 at
the Ermolova Theatre; he also applauds Sergei Jashin's production of
Tennessee Williams's Clothes for a Summer Hotel at the Gogo! Theatre,
saying that "the play is good, but the stage production is excellent." Still,
Rozov laments the fact t hat "Western plays are for the most part staged
poorly."
And what about Rozov himself? Is he still relevant today? Are his
plays still staged as a part of the current theatrical repertory? Or has he
24
become, to quote the frequently used adage, "one of last year's well-known
writers"? "Strange as it may sound," the playwright modestly stated, "they
still stage my plays." Falling under the rubric of "modern Soviet classics,"
with special appeal for an adolescent audience, Rozov's Yeyo druzya (Her
Friends}, a lyrical drama about love, compassion, friendship, and youth
written in 1949, was revived in 1998 at the Gorky Moscow Art Theatre,
15
while a film adaptation of his play V dobry chas (Good LuckO was the Sunday
matinee drama on Russian television as recently as mid-June 1998.
Rozov's dramatic adaptation of I. A. Goncharov's novel
Obyknovennaya istoriya (11 Common Story), for which he received the
prestigious Soviet State Prize in 1966 when it was finally staged by the
Sovremennik Theatre, is also currently being performed by the increasingly
popular Tabakov Theatre in Moscow. The history of this play, which
Rozov wrote in 1939, is unusual. Because of a hectic acting schedule and a
shortage of paper, Rozov wrote it in the early morning hours on the unused,
backside pages of an old ledger; it was also on the basis of this work that
Rozov was subsequently admitted into the drama section of the Gorky
Literary Institute. Still another early play, V den' svad'by (On the Wedding
Day; 1964), which is set in a provincial milieu (a small Volga city), continues
to be staged in the provinces.
Rozov's post-Communist creations include Gofman (Hoffmann), a
dramatic version of the life and works of the German romantic E.T.A.
Hoffmann that Rozov wrote in 1995. It enjoys periodic runs on the small
novaya stsena (new stage) of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre (MXA T); it
was also featured in the second 1996 issue of Sovremennaya dramaturgiya as
a showcase for the section on modern drama. A curious blend of real events
and characters from the German romantic's biography, including Hoffmann
himself, with fantasy and phantasmagorical images taken from Hoffmann
(most notably a tomcat named Murr who chats self-assuredly, if not
arrogantly, with his
this work represents a marked departure from

Rozov's earlier plays, which were so firmly entrenched in the realistic
tradition. Writing it, though, proved to be a monumental task for Rozov.
"My son-in-law, who is a director at the Moscow Art Theatre, asked me to
do this," he confided to me. "After reading everything I could get my hands
on-either about Hoffmann or by Hoffmann-I sat down and wrote it. I
cannot say that it is a very good play, but it certainly is interesting. It
required a completely different approach toward playwriting; I really
agonized over it." Finally, Rozov recently finished a dramatic adaptation of
Guy de Maupassant's novel Pierre et Jean, a penetrating study of jealousy; to
date, Rozov's latest play still has not been published or staged in Russia.
25
In all probability, this adaptation of Pierre et Jean will be the
playwright's final creation. In 1997, he admitted to having "little strength
these days," telling me almost wistfully that "before [he] wrote so easily, ah,
easily;" still he was writing and planned to continue writing. In 1998 he
retracted his earlier remarks, telling me most emphatically that he has lost
all desire to write. "Last year I wanted to," he declared, "but now I don't
want to. I feel lazy; I'm simply not in the mood. Not only that; I don't
know what to write about. You know, I write only whatever flies into my
head, bJ.It now nothing flies into it ... What kind of plans can you have at
eighty-five? You need to know your conscience; at this age you don't
write."
What then? Now that he has lowered the curtain on the theatre
and playwriting, Rozov's more immediate plans include snuggling on the
top of a warm pechka (stove), in the old, time-honored Russian way, and
doing whatever it takes to stay alive. "Yes, I caused a sensation here," he
declared warmly, summing up his life. "Yes, I made a hubbub. What else
am I supposed to do? I need to breathe, so that I can keep on living."
NOTES
1. All quotations from Victor Rozov that appear in this article come from
conversations that I had with the playwright in 1997 and 1998 in Moscow.
2. Victor Rozov, In Search of Happiness, in Classic Soviet Plays, trans. by Robert
Daglish (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979), 739.
3. Victor Rozov, Alive Forever, in Contemporary Russian Drama, ed. and trans.
Franklin D. Reeve (New York: Pegasus, 1968), 26.
4. Those who attended a seminar conducted jointly by Rozov and fellow playwright
Aleksei Arbuzov included, among others, Nina Sadur, a poet, novelist, and
playwright who took a menial job as a cleaner in a theatre until she received critical
notice and was able to earn a living with her literary work; Grigory Gorin, whose
hit plays, Zabyt' Gerostrata! (Forget HerostratusO and Korelevskie igry (Regal Games),
a historical drama about Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, have made him one of the
reigning kings of contemporary Russian dramaturgy; and Aleksandr Vampilov, a
Siberian writer who penned such masterpieces as Utinaya okhota (Duck-Hunting}
before his untimely death by drowning in 1972 at the age of thirty-four, and whom
Rozov heralds as "the outstanding dramatist of the Soviet period."
5. Victor Rozov, Good Luck!, in Soviet Literature 9 (1955): 55.
26 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 19, No.2
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Ibid., 56.
8. Ibid., 57.
9. Rozov's plays have also been staged-and received critical acclaim-beyond
Russia's borders. For example, The Nest of the Wood Grouse (Gnezdo glukharya, 1979,
translated by Susan Layton) was staged in 1984 at New York's Public Theatre, with
Eli Wallach, Mary Beth Hurt, and Ann Jackson in lead roles, and Phoebe Cates in
a secondary role.
10. The "new wave" includes such plays as Mikhail Volokhov's avant-garde Igra v
zhmuriki (A Game of Blindman's Buf!), which features two drunken orderlies in a
morgue.
11. Ovechka, which was staged at the Mossoviet Theatre, was deemed so scandalous
that some Russian critics initially argued that Ptushkina should be excommunicated
by the Russian Orthodox Church.
12. Rozov also belongs to the editorial staff of Sovremennaya dramaturgiya.
13. Grigory Zaslavsky and Gleb Sitkovsky, "Vox artis," Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1
October 1996, 7.
14. A substantial number of contemporary foreign plays currently being staged in
Moscow are American; this can be explained not only by the recent
"Americanization" of Russian culture, but also by the high quality of American
drama. For more details on the staging of American plays in Russia, see Viktor
Denisov, "Made in USA: 'projdennoe' i propushchennoe," Sovremennaya
dramaturgiya, 1 Q'anuary to March 1996): 175-85.
15. In the 1950s, Her Friends enjoyed a long run at the Central Children's Theatre.
16. The tomcat Murr originally appeared in E.T.A. Hoffmann's second novel The
Life and Opinions of Kater Murr with the Fragmentary Biography of the Kapellmeister
johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Scrap Paper (Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters johannes Kreislers in zufalligen
Makulaturblattern}, which was published in Berlin circa 1820.
27
AN INTERVIEW WITH ViT HOREJS
Lars Myers
In October 1998 I met with V1t Horejs, founder and artistic
director of the Czechoslovak- American Marionette Theatre (CAMT), at the
Cooper Square Restaurant on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 5th Street for
an informal interview. His company had recently performed Golem at St.
Mark's Church as part of the 1998 International Puppet Festival in New
York City (for a review see SEEP 19 .1) and was in the planning stages for
remounting Rusalka at La Mama (for a review see page 80 of this issue).
What follows is a condensed version of that interview.
LM: Was it your discovery of the marionettes in the Jan Hus Church [on
East 74th Street] in 1990 that started your career as a puppeteer or did you
have previous experience and/ or training?
VH: I didn't have any puppet training per se. My puppet training comes
from my toy puppet theatre-whatever training that is-and from just
watching puppeteers, either traditional puppeteers or the more experimental
Drak Theatre. I started with storytelling. I used to do more far out stories
that people wouldn't know that were, well , weird ... with jazz music and
rock music-improvised music. I did an "experimental" play myself with
the toy theatre in my twenties, which was an essence of all fairy tales. It was
called Fairytale. And it had all these abrupt, sudden changes, no
psychology-things happen as in fairytales: the Prince comes to ask the
Princess for her hand and she immediately consents and then there is some
problem and he goes on a quest. There was no manipulation basically, just
the puppet ... as they came up for their scenes I would just pull them up on
a pulley and just jiggle them around.
LM: Now was this when you were in Czechoslovakia?
VH: Right. When I moved to New York I was doing storytelling and
acting here and there. I was in an experimental production of Faust at the
Marymount Theatre in 1981 and I told the director [Ann Wilson) about the
Faust puppet tradition. So she said "Well, take a scene and direct it and do
it with puppets." So I had a devil puppet sent to me from Prague by my
mother. Then I started putting him in my storytelling and sometimes I had
requests to do storytelling for children and that was vary scary.
28
LM: Scary for you?
VH: Yes. I wasn't used to children as an audience really. With straight
storytelling, to maintain their attention for fifty minutes or an hour is very
hard. Some will just stare at you and listen and others run around. It's
distracting. So, with the puppets it was easier. I ended up having three
puppets. One by one they were coming from Czechoslovakia. The devil
actually got an immigration passport. To this day he has a stamp on his
foot-his hoof. It was a permit from the National Gallery that he was not
a national treasure.
LM: So you had previously owned this puppet.
VH: No, my mother actually coerced a collector to sell it to her. And it
was an antique, about a hundred years old. It was made either by a father
or son named Chochol. After I got the devil my sister asked me "Do you
want a witch or a princess?" I said, "A witch!" In the end they had the
princess for me as well. I then did a show at the Jan Hus church and they
told me that they used to have puppet theatre there. So I kept asking what
happened to the puppets until they said they must be stored somewhere. I
finally coaxed them to take me to the attic, and there they were. Only one
of them had a control and the other ones I fashioned a control for. They
did not have strings of course and a lot of the clothes were falling apart. But
I kept thinking that they should be used somehow. I had a friend, Jan
Unger, who went to the Prague puppetry school, and I got him to work
with me. We did a puppet version of Faust on a totally traditional
marionette stage that we built with a flipping backdrop. I was interested in
the Drak Theatre puppet style, which was for me a big revelation about
puppetry from Czechoslovakia. The Drak came up with the idea of
combining live performers and puppets, which led to a renewal of puppetry
and caused an increased interest in puppetry. The Drak puppeteers also
started doing puppet shows again for adults. I was so surprised by the
reaction of people to Faust that we tried to market it for adults; and we were
quite successful.
LM: So there was a favorable reaction?
VH: Yes. I also discovered that very standard fairytales that every Czech
child knows were not known here. People were coming and saying "we've
never seen traditional marionette theatre" and I realized this is something
29
that I would continue doing. Recently since I've been going back to Prague
I've been surprised that there is a lot of interest in the traditional marionette
theatre. Partly it's a political reaction. The puppet theatre in
Czechoslovakia was influenced by the Soviet puppet theatre. The Russians
established the big rod puppets as the only convention-nothing else in the
world. So all these traditional puppet theatres-wonderful marionettists,
traditional marionettists actually lost their living. The authorities just
stopped giving them licenses to perform. Now when I recently went back
I found out that the contemporary Czech puppeteers were going more and
more to the basics of working with very simple puppets, even having
marionettes without strings.
LM: So, as a reaction to the Soviet-style the marionettes are being stripped
of their strings?
VH: Right. Which is similar to what we do. We're not virtuoso
performers necessarily, even though I like good virtuoso puppet
performance. If there are strings, novice puppeteers feel compelled to keep
moving those hands up and down to the rhythm of their speech, when there
is speech. I'm also interested in doing shows without speech, as Go/em
basically is. The strings can be done away with, because there's much more
strength in just one movement of the hand, whether it's done by a string or
the hand of the puppeteer holding the hand of the puppet or by the
movement of the whole body of the puppet. So, I can understand-I can
relate to the stripping the marionettes even of their strings.
LM: How would you classify your marionettes?
VH: They're rod marionettes. If you trace back the history of marionettes,
the traditional marionettes have the rods, as is the case with Sicilian
marionettes. None of the antique puppets I found at the Jan Hus church
had a rod. Actually, one of them did. They used to have rods. Someone
cut them off, I guess, or pulled the rods out to be able to store them in the
chest. I didn't want to put rods back in them because they're antiques ...
although they can take enormous amounts of abuse.
LM: Calculated abuse.
VH: Right. The first time I worked with Jakub Krejci, one of the best
puppet carvers and designers in Prague, for The White Doe-he told me that
30
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 19, No.2
if I wanted traditional marionettes, then they would have to have rods and
that was it. I wanted to discover how puppets can lie down on stage and
that's difficult with rods, but then I grew accustomed to it. It becomes very
interesting when the marionettes lie down with the rods. The audience sees
the control coming down on the stage. And if you need to get the control
up again, you can use a hook that is visible on stage and that creates tension
between the manipulator and the puppets. Most of our puppets-the newer
puppets-were made by Jakub. He made the puppets for The White Doe,
which were actually in three more shows. In Golem, the ghetto inhabitants
and smaller characters were from The White Doe. Jakub also made the big
puppets for Golem. When he first made the puppets for The White Doe, I
was discovering the traditional puppet theatre style and I wanted traditional
marionettes from him. He was interested in more stylized marionettes, but
I would say "No, I just want very traditional marionettes." Then for Golem
I did want them more stylized. We came up with the idea that every puppet
would have, physically, inside them, a symbol of its character and that
worked very well.
LM: There was a rotating book in one of the puppets ...
VH: Yes. Isaac, the Student Scholar.
LM: In Golem many of the marionettes were on rollers.
VH: Yes, the casters, the rollers. Well, we wanted big puppets- ! wanted
big marionettes. I wanted to go as big as we could because we planned to
stage Golem at La Mama on the big stage. We ended up doing a compromise
at four feet; the reason was semi-technical. Two people had to hold them
at all times; one person would be just totally stuck holding them, so we
realized that we would have to move them around differently somehow or
stand them up when they were not in use. So we devised the stands. I don't
remember who came up with the idea to put them on wheels. The stands
also became a cage for the puppets. The characters are always in a cage
because they are in the ghetto, an idea we developed further on with the set
designer. So, this wonderful creative moment came out of the solutions to
technical problems: we discovered that the puppets can dance on casters at
certain points. And sometimes they get out of their cages. They can have
these wonderful fluid movements. When I started working with Naomi
[Goldberg], she started doing movements that I immediately saw the puppet
couldn't do. When you cross your legs or turn your hand around your head
31
or something like that, the puppet cannot really do it. But just attempting
such a move creates, in a stylized way, a similar movement.
Then Naomi would do a jump and the puppet can do a jump, but
then I immediately started playing with the fact that the puppet can prolong
movements. The puppet can hold the jump, suspended upside down or
sideways in the air held by one string and spinning around. And in a similar
way with the casters, the puppet can do a beautiful, gliding movement,
sometimes being held just by a string and turning around the puppeteer who
holds the string as the puppet spins around. Working with the
choreographer, I tried this movement in the studio and then I did my own
abstract puppet piece, which was part of developing the idea of dance that
I did in the late night show of the last Henson festival two years ago. It was
called The First Steps, and it came from trying those dances, as if it was a first
ballet lesson. At first I was just using puppet legs, doing the bar exercises
and I was just holding the legs on the toy puppet stage. Eventually I
dropped the legs and developed it in another way.
LM: Is dancing unusual in the Czech tradition?
VH: It is a traditional thing. There are specialized puppets that are built to
do virtuoso dancing and other particular actions. The old puppeteers had
specialized puppets ... not so much for dance but for things like acrobatics,
for little acrobatic acts in between scenes. The "stomper" that I've been
using as a character is a double puppet that retracts and becomes longer and
shorter with two heads, and it stomps on the ground. It's a percussion
instrument. It was just for in-between scenes to use as a percussion
instrument with music when you were changing scenes. But I've been
giving him parts. In Hamlet he was Rosencranz and Guildenstern, which
works very well because you don't have that many hands. So you have a
double puppet. One of the reviewers wrote about this wonderful idea of the
designer creating a double puppet for Rosencranz and Guildenstern, but like
the old puppeteers we just used what we had. The Stemper was made for
us by Ivan Antos, but it's a traditional style puppet.
LM: When did you first start working with a choreographer?
VH: We did Golem first in '97 and about a year or two before that I started
thinking about having the puppets dance. My original thought was whether
the puppets could do Graham or other recognizable styles of modern dance.
I was working with a choreographer Uody Oberfelder] in the studio for a
while, finding out what puppets definitely cannot do-especially my
puppets, which are full wooden puppets. After that I worked with Naomi
on Golem. Sometimes she would get me to work more with puppets in the
virtuoso style, if you can call it that, in doing real puppet animation or using
strings for puppet animation. In Rusalka there's a very short scene that
develops into a dance of the two puppeteers. I called in a friend [Susan
Campanaro) to help as a choreographer. I sketched it out with the
puppeteers first and then called Susan and everything changed for the better.
I first did one scene from Rusalka at the Dixon Place in 1994. I did the scene
myself with the Rusalka puppet, which became a core scene. My idea was
that the heroine goes to the witch and gets what she wants, which is legs to
be able to follow her love to the dry land. But the witch is a mad surgeon
who performs the surgery, but it's not quite successful. Rusalka ends up as
a beautiful woman with legs, but on crutches. I developed this crutch scene
as a solo dance for the series of new dances at Dixon Place. I was surprised
when the audience had all kinds of questions about a male manipulating a
female puppet. I had never thought about it that way. Different tensions
do come into play between the manipulator and the puppet, but it isn't
always necessarily just that. Sometimes it's fate manipulating the puppet.
Sometimes, in my productions, the puppet and the manipulator fight. Not
that this is anything new. I mean that's like a dummy and a ventriloquist.
They fight a lot.
LM: What struck me in particular about the performance of Golem was the
highlighted presence of the puppeteers and their interactive relationship
with the marionettes. When you direct, do you have a clear idea of the
relationship between the performer and the marionette?
VH: It's something that performers keep asking me-about what the
relationship really is. But the relationship shifts. Sometimes the puppeteers
are an extension. I mean, even before they are an extension of the puppets,
they're first the invisible stage servants. But they are visible. It's a
combination. The puppeteers take on the character a little, but they are also
technicians. There's concern in their faces as to whether it's just total
technical concern or concern for the character. Sometimes I ask the
puppeteers to become the characters. Sometimes it's a technical thing.
We're not only interested in virtuoso puppetry. It's beautiful when the
puppet lifts things perfectly, but it's not necessary. Sometimes the puppet
tries to lift a prop but its hand is not long enough so the puppeteer reaches
and gets it. And then it becomes even more intricate when you have more
33
Vit Hofejs and his puppets.
puppeteers. They might interact between themselves as well and sometimes
the puppets fall in love so the puppeteers start having something going on
between them and there's just so many variations there happening. It's a
mystery. I know the tension exists. I know we're going to be using it, but
it's a mystery to me and I'm not going to say you're only this or only that.
All these things are happening at the same time: being a puppeteer, being the
same character as the puppet, commenting on what's happening, being
concerned about the puppets, and playing against the puppet as another
character. Sometimes I may have a plan of, for example, of having the
performer stay in character during the scene. But all these facets are always
there-they will be there anyway. The important thing is to use all of these
levels, but not to overpower the thread of the play and not to upstage the
puppets.
35
WHAT DO WE CARE IF THE WINTER IS COLD AND
STRESSFUL? FIVE ST. PETERSBURG DIRECTORS: A
GENERATION WITH AN A VERSION TO POLITICS
Daria Krizhanskaya
It was freezing last February in St. Petersburg. The city stood
immobile covered with snow packed in huge piles. Landmarks of a
dysfunctional era, these piles grew taller and taller, yet the authorities didn't
bother to remove them. Petersburg eventually turned into a war-torn winter
landscape-one-way car tracks instead of the city's wide avenues, unheated
municipal transport, and icy apartments in which the temperature never
rose above sixteen degrees Celsius. Theatre buildings were inescapably cold
as well. Their gloomy interiors reminded me of military barracks hastily
built on the march, while the humble tea-coffee-vodka stands in the lobby
bore likenesses to field kitchens.
Yet, despite the hardships of the winter, there was lots of good
theatre in St. Petersburg. The art of directing keeps on thriving. Some
theatre professionals even claim that the true dramatic art is now produced
solely in Petersburg, since Moscow's theatre has been rapidly shifting
towards consumerism. Last year Petersburg theatres took home one third
of all the Golden Mask awards (five out of fifteen); this year they are aiming
at fifteen out of twenty-one. Of the eight current nominees for the best
drama production, four Petersburg shows form an impressive half.
That doesn't mean that Moscow has nothing to offer. Yet, its most
gifted, ambitious, and promising directors have chosen to follow the path
first taken by Mark Zakharov, the artistic director of Moscow Lenkom
Theatre and the godfather of the post-soviet killer shows. Although their
conditions are different-Zakharov still works within the system of the state
repertory theatre, while the new directors have fully embraced all the pros
and cons of a free-theatre enterprise-the artistic results are sadly the same.
High production values and a couple of star names go hand in hand with
huge popular success and lack of any real significance. Concentrated
primarily in Moscow, both private and state money supports the Moscow
glitz, and Petersburg-for better or worse-is left to its dreams, forgotten by
the swinging capital.
But this lamentable lack of financial support is what has saved the
emerging Petersburg directors from going commercial. For them, making
good theatre rather than making good money still remains the highest
priority. Unconcerned with marketing, they prefer to create within the
36 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 19, No. 2
"conservative" system of state repertory theatres which, although constantly
scorned, still provides the necessary professional level and a more or less
stable rehearsal process. Petersburg life thus presents us with yet another
paradox: real new art is frequently created under the roof of the state
theatres, while in the commercial or privately sponsored projects the artistic
achievements are quite rare. Here is something to think about for those
zealous "progressivists" who are so quick to discard the repertory system as
an old-fashioned communist invention in favor of the "healthy" market
interaction between artistic progress and the ticket booth.
One might argue that the above sketched picture only demonstrates
how backward the Petersburg theatre is. Yet, I prefer to relinquish thinking
in binary oppositions such as "progressive-conservative." The problem is
that the opposition between the commercial/popular on one hand, and the
avant-garde/experimental on the other, never really existed in the Russian
theatre mentality, or at least it has never had a chance to be put into practice
as a basic structural principle. All Russian theatre before 1917 was elitist in
the sense that the overwhelming majority of the country's
population- peasants and workers-never participated in the formation of
the popular taste. The audiences in the provincial towns and in the two
capitals were comprised of the members of intelligentsia, gentry, and the
merchant class solely. Furthermore, Russian free enterprise theatre turned
out to be a short-lived venture closed down by the Bolsheviks for entirely
political reasons. But its existence, however brief, demonstrated clearly
what made it different from the Western European model: this theatre was
intended not only to satisfy popular taste but also to set up artistic goals of
its own. The commercial Nezlobin theatre in Moscow worked with art
directors such as Kommissarzhevsky, and the avant-gardist Meyerhold used
the institution of free enterprise to test his new theatrical ideas. In addition,
the very term "commercial" always sounded suspicious, if not negative, to
the Russian artistic mentality.
While the principles of commercial theatre got combined with
other models of development, rotating repertory, the distinctive feature of
the Russian theatre, prevailed in all of them- be it in the Imperial
playhouses, privately sponsored ventures, or free enterprises. With at least
a couple titles on the playbill, this system has historically been an intrinsic
part of the national theatre, responsible both for the development of the
diverse and manifold individual acting skills and the art of playwriting. On
top of that, the very notion of a resident company promulgated by the
practice of Imperial theatres made a powerful impact on the formation of
37
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Alexander Ostrovsky's The Forest, directed by Grigory Kozlov .
With Alexander Bargman and Sergey Baryshev
the Russian theatre tradition. With the Moscow Art Theatre taking this
tradition to an unprecedented artistic level, what other path should the
Russian theatre choose?
In the Soviet era, when the State chose to close down private
theatres taking financial and ideological control over the rest, the hitherto
existing difference between the commercial and the avant-garde suffered a
fatal blow. Attaining financial success by meeting the demands of a popular
taste ceased to be a meaningful option. The capitalist market mechanism
was utterly broken. For this reason, Meyerhold continued to stage his
radical avant-garde shows paying no attention to the needs of his new mass
audience. While poorly educated soldiers, workers, and peasants struggled
through the sophisticated complexities of his theatrical language, Meyerhold
enjoyed unlimited financial support from the State. The same is true of the
other two influential directors, Tairov and Vakhtangov, though their work
seemed to be more accessible to a broad audience. Even Igor Terentyev, the
most consistent and fervent formalist, staged his iconoclastic Revizor in a
state-owned theatre and with a state-provided budget.
What becomes clear as the 90s are coming to a close is that the
repertory theatre, though slightly modified, continues to dominate the
Russian theatre system both economically and artistically. Rehearsing with
a permanent group of actors for a prolonged period of time still remains the
cornerstone of what is generally regarded as the proper rehearsal process.
Creating a work of art rather than a commercial success constitutes the
traditional ethical principle, already formulated by Stanislavsky. Given
Russia's present circumstances, the repertory model seems to be the only
viable model capable of sustaining this twofold objective.
Afraid of unstable working conditions, coupled with the
underdeveloped institution of sponsorship, the emerging young St.
Petersburg directors prefer to work with the state repertory theatres. What
sets them apart from the usual art movements is that they are not a
movement at all. They have never released manifestos or made group public
statements. Each speaks only for himself and out of his own individual
perspective. In the era of individualization and dissolution, each is an
autonomous creative entity with a distinct theatrical voice-a theatrical
language of his own. The list of names shaped and reshaped by recent
theatre seasons looks as follows: Yuri Butusov, Grigory Dityatkovsky,
Grigory Kozlov, Victor Kramer, and Anatoly Praudin.
Though in their late thirties to early forties, they are still called
"young" directors- an homage to the stagnation era (Brezhnev) tradition of
considering everyone who is not yet fifty a beginner. Yet, with the
39
exception of Butusov, they have been around for at least ten years, staging
shows from Siberia and the Ural area to Riga and St. Petersburg. The one
thing they clearly have in common is their age: t hey belong to the
generation formed right before the end of the stagnation era, in the grim
times of all-embracing social sarcasm and apathy.
Surprisingly, this seemingly insignificant fact happens to have a
great impact on them. What accounts for their perception as a particular
phenomenon on the post-soviet stage is their steady aversion to overtly
social and political matters. Making any political or social statement in
theatre seems wrong to them; such statements belong to the domain of the
mundane, pedestrian, and eventually petty while their major concern is
larger-t han-life, generalized human issues.
Shaped by the early 80s, they sensed in the 90s that taking a stand
against a particular social evil is inappropriate and boring. According to
these directors, since there is no right and wrong, and no heroes or villains
anymore, everybody is only a player on the sport field of existential tragedy.
Why preach about a better world then? However crazy it may be, this
world doesn't need to be set right, first, because it makes no difference, and
second, because it is beyond human power to know what the right way is.
What all their work has in common is an understanding of theatre
not as a means to something else (be it education, propaganda, changing t he
world, or entertainment), but as an autonomous art form capable of
conveying the independent truth. The ongoing Western argument as to
whether theatre is a means to something or an end in itself has now been
settled in Russia once and for all. Theatre is here to reflect the dilemmas of
human life in larger-than-life theatrical form. Unlike their counterparts- the
innovative directors in Europe and the United States-the St. Petersburg
directors are not feeling about for discoveries in the marginal areas of the
legitimate t heatre: instead of adopting any of the neighboring arts, they
explore t he endless combinations of the elements immanent in and specific
to the art of theatre. Whenever budget allows, they employ all the elements
that constitute the theatrical language-movement, rhythm, the dynamics
of colors and lights-to reenact the tragedy of human existence, that
primary, all-embracing tragedy which steers into all kinds of other
lamentable issues.
Yet, in the absence of hope and the presence of doom, role-playing
offers itself as the way out. No matter whether there is death at the end or
a closed circle, when performing one can take at least partial refuge in the
aesthetic joy of the process. With this in mind, the "young" directors are
moving, as the last two seasons clearly indicated, towards what I call the
41
glorification of playing. In the times of the post-soviet chaos, increasing
apathy, and alienation, they loyally follow the postmodernist path, having
their actors play characters who perform as well. If only histrions are
capable of perceiving this world adequately, let them have their say. If only
buffoonery provides a temporary relief from the existential pain, let
everybody be a buffoon. What one can observe on stage during the recent
seasons is precisely this ongoing combat between the clown and his
incurable pain. For this very reason, Praudin attempted to stage the
fragmented consciousness of a Russian artist (in his 1997 production of The
Late Demon, the radical stage version of Pushkin's The Tales of Belkin), while
Kozlov, Kramer, and Butusov allowed the histrions to dominate their recent
works.
For forty-two year old Grigory Kozlov this indicates a new turn in
his career. A director of a distinctively lyrical manner, in 1993 he staged
Crime and Punishment as a story of a sweet young man whose loving
kindness is tested by outer circumstances. It was a domesticated,
"privatized" version of Dostoevsky which glorified quiet family gatherings
at a tea table in a warm and homely atmosphere. Too young to master the
glacial peaks of philosophical speculation, Raskolnikov in Kozlov's show is
immersed in everyday life which turns out to have a value and meaning of
its own. While the production definitely lacks both the anguish and
wretchedness of the original, it calls for accepting the world of the concrete
and everyday, suggesting that mundane concerns might be more important
than abstract deliberations. As Raskolnikov comes to take responsibility for
a double murder he did not commit, he realizes one simple thing: one needs
to accept people in order to be pardoned by them. Unlike Dostoevsky,
Kozlov gets his character out of the trap-with no crime committed, no
punishment follows. The director's final choice of reconciling Raskolnikov
with the rest of the world, letting him go in peace, thus seems to be a
consistent and fully justifiable ending.
With his later works Kozlov briskly moves to the realm of homo
ludens. His recent productions include P.S. by a Bandmaster johannes
Kreisler, His Author and Their Beloved julia, a dramatization of two short
novels by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and The Forest, a comedy by Ostrovsky.
Though produced by two different state theatres, they share the same
leading actors-a clear indication that Kozlov prefers to work with a
permanent acting crew comprised, for the most part, of his former
classmates. The Forest (staged at the Liteinyi Theatre), the director's most
significant achievement up to now, belongs to the canon of Russian dramatic
literature and has a regrettable record of cliched realistic interpretations.
43
Caligula, directed by Yuri Butusov. With Konstantin K.habensky
44
Kozlov gives the play a fresh, unexpected spin by focusing on two characters
indispensable to its dramatic structure. These are wandering impoverished
actors, a tragedian and a comedian, forever drunk, noisy, and boastful
vagabonds who prove themselves to be more generous and humane than all
the well-off public around them. Not a theatre radical, Kozlov creates a
psychologically detailed stage world in which the subtleties of the characters'
moods mean more than the tricks of slapstick comedy. And yet, while none
of the actors force the spectators to laugh, the overall result is one of
hilarious comedy. As the director succeeds in stripping the actors of all
comic affectation, the spoken text comes across so fresh and connected to
Russia's present problems that the house fills with the audience's laughter
time and time again.
Tatyana Tkatch, the theatre's leading actress, turns in a versatile
performance in the part of a rich and despotic landlady who seeks the favors
of her young and timid companion. Without any rough modernization or
contemporary costume, the actress portrays an all too familiar type of the
new Russian businesswoman-soft on herself and harsh on others-a nagging
coquettish matron who uses her money to manipulate the rest. Her iron
grip makes her dangerous; her frantic attempts to preserve her fading beauty
make her ridiculous; her fake pretension of being a good Christian makes
her a hypocrite.
Yet, as the action unfolds it becomes clear that no matter how
breathtaking Tatyana Tkatch's performance is, her character is not the pivot
of the production. The director sends another message: he confesses his
love to those who, at least once in a while, perform for the sake of art and
not out of the mercenary considerations. This is a twofold confession-both
to the character-actors and the real actors cast in the production. Kozlov
loves them all, always ready to forgive their vanity and petty animosities.
They fascinate the director as the only true human beings capable of igniting
a creative spark out of the very imperfections of human nature.
If actors are the best people in the world, then theatre must be the
best place to be. The set design by the leading Petersburg designer
Alexander Orlov skillfully reveals that we are in a theatre. The dark
columns on the stage represent the play's forest yet echo some specific
architectural elements of the Liteinyi theatre building decor; a long catwalk
functions both as a road and a bridge spanliing Volga, yet runs so close to
the audience's eyes that it is bound to destroy any illusionistic effect. When
on the catwalk, the actors almost cease to be characters: I can see their
familiar faces and notice how rough their makeup is. Set amidst the
audience, the catwalk is a limbo, a place to get prepared, and a passage to the
45
Caligula, directed by Yuri Butusov. With Konstantin Khabensky
Caligula, directed by Yuri Butusov.
With Konstantin Khabensky and Irina Rakshina
47
stage. It is exactly in this very catwalk that the old motto "the world is
theatre" has brought itself to life with such a happy ease and simplicity.
Like Kozlov, Yuri Butusov, thirty-eight, also believes that the
world is a playground, though for more brutal games. Set on the edge of the
modern industrial civilization, his shows are games played by young men
desperate to overcome the unbearable lightness of being. Whether it is
Waiting/or Godot, Woyzeck, The Caretaker, or Camus's Caligula, it doesn't
really matter. The tragic harlequinade goes on and on, accompanied by
mocking music and an austere black-and-white color scheme. Nothing is
serious in this stage world, and nothing is sacred: death turns out to be a
clown's trick, vicious fights look like virtuoso slow-motion stage combats.
(In fact, these slow-motion combats are masterpieces in themselves;
discovered first in Godot, they have became now the director's professional
signature.)
In Godot, which first appeared as Butusov's thesis production and
was later redone with the same actors as a full-scale production, this
approach was a revelation. The tragic harlequinade is played as joyful
buffoonery by the young and for the young. For this very reason, Didi and
Gogo look like two stand up comedians, and Lucky's monologue hardly
expresses profound human isolation. Along similar lines, his dog-collar
doesn' t signify any human misery. (The young could not care less about the
universal issues.) When they are cold and bored, they simply play their
brutal, yet captivating teenage games. Whether their playing symbolizes an
attempt to reclaim their very existence or just a primitive physiological urge
hardly matters. In the stage world reminiscent of a postindustrial wasteland,
with Beckett's tree turned into a lifeless mutant, both explanations are
equally possible and equally meaningless. The ultimate indifference of the
landscape makes all qualities, meanings, and values indistinct.
As four boys wrapped in coarse oversized coats struggle to amuse
both themselves and the audience, the latter watches a theatricalized portrait
of today's youth. Like Russia's youngsters, the characters on stage are pert
and loud; like their real counterparts, they keep on laughing simply because
no one taught them how to cry. In fact, they are the true children of the
wasteland: bereft of all hope, they keep themselves busy by hanging pieces
of garbage on the tree-like mutant.
It is no surprise then that Butusov deliberately ignores the deep
philosophical and religious undercurrents of Beckett's play. Youth has no
respect for philosophy. Nonetheless, determined to strike sparks of laughter
from human suffering, the director makes the play sound a little too
carefree. As in Kozlov's case, Butusov's small acting team is comprised of
48
Slavic and East European. Performance Vol. 19, No.2
his former classmates, who came to know the director during their four
years of joint training. So far, only Konstantin Khabensky is indispensable
to the director's creations. Khabensky stands out with his exceptionally
expressive body-it twists and throbs to all the swinging rhythms of modern
civilization. He also possesses the ability of being cruel with tenderness and
performing the evil deeds of adults with childish tears in his eyes. Both
manly and infantile, Khabensky presents the ideal clown subversive of all
values in the surrounding world. His "froggy" pouched lips announce the
arrival of a new era, like it or not.
In a similar vein, Khabensky plays Caligula in Butusov's recent
staging of Camus's play. While Godot was admittedly an ensemble work,
Caligula is centered around Khabensky, whose mastery of acting is
incredible. Khabensky's stage creation is a layered construct thrice removed
from reality: the actor plays a clown who plays a character named Guy
who, in turn, plays the horrible tyrant Caligula. (It goes without saying that
the clownish quality is revealed in the acting and not in any red nose or
other accessories.) As Butusov directs the audience's attention from
Camus's heavy-handed existentialism to the art of playing, everything
becomes crystal clear. This stage version of Caligula has no stakes in
Camus's notions of absolute freedom and power. It is Guy's newly invented
game that carnivalizes both his own demise and the murder of his courtiers.
A sheer histrion, Guy sometimes performs the parts of others-when no one
else is on stage, he imitates dialogue with his senators adopting different
voices and trying on various wigs. His helmet looks like a sauce-pan, and his
furry shoulder-straps remind me of white chicken wings. Despite this, he
jerks his head up with a gesture of total superiority, as it should be expected
from a true emperor. And he is an emperor indeed, no matter that his realm
is a shabby desolate space with several chests and chairs in it. What the set
illustrates is not the greatness of ancient Rome but the squalor of Russia's
apartments with their chilling and gloomy ambiance.
I dare say I know where all those images come from. They reflect
the director's own childhood, an ordinary childhood spent in a poor
apartment in endless games designed to acquire the moon, freedom, and
immortality. Those images resonate almost too effectively in the current
state of life in Petersburg. As I left the Lensovet theatre, I found myself
once again in the dark streets covered with snow.
Two months later, as I was about to finish my article, the news
carne that Butusov received the Golden Mask best director award for Godot.
For the director, who appeared on the scene only four years ago and has
staged only four productions as yet, this is a major achievement.
49
FIGHTING FENCES:
THEATRICAL RULE-BREAKING IN
THE SERBIAN REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA
Sonja Kuftinec
In the past ten years community-based performance has come under
intense scrutiny as a viable mode of artistic production and critical analysis.
Baz Kershaw's book 7he Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural
Intervention and Bruce McConachie's article "Approaching the 'Structure
of Feeling' in Grassroots Theatre," among others, have laid the foundation
for analysis of community-based work. One of the difficult issues raised in
this context has been that of the ethics and power dynamics involved in
engaging a community through performance. The work may be seen to
reduce difference to a performative panacea, or to endanger participants who
must return to a divisive situation outside the realm of performance-making.
In former Yugoslavia, these dilemmas come to the fore. An experience I had
creating community-based theatre in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia in the
summer of 1997 helps to clarify these ethical issues.
I had begun creating theatre with youth in the former Yugoslavia
in 1995. While researching a project with the community-based Cornerstone
Theater, I had been offered the opportunity to develop theatre in a refugee
camp in Varazhdin, Croatia. With Cornerstone choreographer, Sabrina
Peck, I worked with youth within the camps and town of Varazhdin to
create an original piece, Odakle Ste, Gdje Ste, Gdje Idete? (W1Jere Are You
From, W1Jere Are You Now, Where Are You Going?). The piece brought
together various groups within and outside of the camp, not without
difficulties. I returned in 1996 and began working with my current artistic
partner, Scot McElvany, in the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia. McElvany
worked with a youth center in the town bringing together Muslim and
Croatian teenagers through common activities, which included
theatre-making. We worked together in a theatre camp run by t he youth
center, Mladi Most, and a German youth group, Schuler Helfen Leben
(SHL), designed to bring together Mostarian youth outside of the divisive
context of the city.
In the summer of 1997 we developed a variety of border-crossing
projects with my former student, Geoff Sobelle. We led another theatre
camp in Romania, bringing together not only Muslim and Croatian teens,
but also Bosnian Serbs. We developed an original performance piece for the
1997 International Days of Youth Theater Festival in Mostar. We also
50
Slavic and East Eumpean Performance Vol. 19, No.2
conceived of a series of workshops that we ran throughout Bosnia, in
Muslim-Croat Federation territory and the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. In
most instances, we had only to overcome the initial fear that the participants
had of working together. Our efforts to bring a Muslim translator into the
Serbian Republic territory proved more complicated.
We knew that ultra-nationalist Srbinje Qiterally "land of the Serbs")
presented a more challenging terrain for cultural interaction, yet we had
worked all summer through our colleague, Shin Yasui, a Japanese citizen
who ran a youth center in the town, to develop this workshop. In order to
promote essential though limited exchange between the Bosnian Serb youth
in Srbinje and the Muslim and Croatian youth from Mostar, we had invited
our friend and colleague, Mesha Begic, to work with us as our translator.
We knew that this interaction transgressed conventions in Bosnia, yet our
will towards reconciliation required transgression. We did not anticipate the
amount of hostility directed towards Mesha, or from whom it would arise,
and, more importantly, from whom it would not arise. The resulting
questions of legality and ethics forced us to reassess, and ultimately reaffirm,
Mesha's presence and eventual departure from Srbinje. In our five-day stay
in Srbinje the performance-making process challenged ethical, political,
cultural and aesthetic borders. Fighting Fences, in process and performance,
established a context for rule-breaking in the Serbian Republic of
Bosnia-Herzegovina-a region where moral calls to action create ethical
dilemmas. We discovered this quite soon after our arrival.
After crossing the border into Srbinje, we met with our colleague
Shin and congregated in a local restaurant for lunch. Towards the end of
our meal, a somewhat drunk man approached, gesticulating wildly and
speaking in an accusatory, mainly incomprehensible tongue. The tenor if
not substance of his speech made all of us uneasy, though no one more than
Mesha who understood the substance of the speech as well. Yet, Mesha was
unable to translate this content to us in the public space of the restaurant.
He knew, but we had not considered, that his very voice, his Mostarian
accent, would reveal his origins as non-Serbian. That Mesha was a Muslim,
though not essential to his own sense of identity, was a marker of potential
death in the Serbian Republic. This in fact, we later found out, was the
substance of the man's speech. Mistaking us for Italians also working with
youth in the town of Srbinje, he threatened to beat us. He had beaten his
young daughter for singing non-Serbian songs and blamed us for teaching
them to her. He also raved about the "Turks" who had killed his brothers
in the hills and the American demonization of Serbs.
In a region in which divided ethno-religious groups speak the same
51
language, share blood ties, cultural histories, and geographic space, linguistics
and action define the newly essential borders of "Serb," "Croat" and
"Muslim" in Bosnia. By referring to Muslims as "Turks" (Not-Bosnians) the
Serbian man in the restaurant physically displaced and differentiated all
Muslim-affiliated Bosnians. In the same breath, he defined Serbian-ness by
opposing it to "non-Serbian" Italian songs. This categorization by difference
is common in contemporary Bosnia where cultural codes rather than
legalities govern behavior. The 1995 signing of treaties in Dayton, Ohio,
legally allowed residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina to move freely across newly
established borders between the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb
Republic. Yet, any Muslim knew that to cross the mountainous terrain into
Srbinje, a district containing the largest concentration of unindicted war
criminals in Bosnia, entailed anxiety, if not life-threatening danger. These
thoughts had assuredly crossed Mesha's mind, as the alcoholic breath of the
self-described Serb gunman swept across our restaurant table. Mesha's
presence in Srbinje broke no laws, yet as someone who could be defined as
Muslim, he had transgressed. Still, the man's specific accusation confused us;
we had taught no Italian songs to anyone. None of us even knew Italian.
Eventually we realized that the man had us confused with another
group engaging in theatrical practice in Srbinje. In opposition to our
methods of bringing together youth through theatre, this group of Italians
purported to follow the rules of the town's authorities, and kept separate
their work with Serbs and Muslims in the region. Their insistence on
defining the rules of game-playing in Srbinje, as much as the drunken Serb's
threats, eventually forced Mesha back to the relatively safer haven of Mostar.
While contemplating Mesha's departure, and our heightening conflict with
the Italian church group, The Blessed Peacemakers, my artistic partners and
I persisted in developing Fighting Fences, while re-examining our theatre
praxis, ethics and effectiveness.
Ethics, agency and effectiveness define much of the discourse of
community-based theatre. Some community-based theatre-makers insist
that only those living within a specific region should attempt to work with
local residents. Others suggest that "outsiders" can more effectively mediate
the theatrical process. Most practitioners insist on the direct involvement
of participants in some artistic decision-making, and the engagement of local
leaders in the process to ensure its sanction. Yet, the "local leaders" in
Srbinje defied the Dayton Peace accords, r e s i ~ t e our colleague Shin's efforts
to build a youth center, and tried on numerous occasions to force
international workers out of the town. We thus chose to work directly
with youth participants in Shin's center without the sanction of municipal
leaders. We did develop our project with Shin, who was seen by the youth
in the center as a local leader. While we thus attempted to side-step the rule
of law in Srbinje, the Italian group chose to work with municipal
authorities. The Peacemakers' invoked this authority when they tried to
block our project. Because of their association with the local leadership,
they too feared the presence of "a Muslim" in Srbinje; they too categorized
Mesha, erasing him of his individual identity.
Prior to our arrival with Mesha, the Peacemakers had agreed to
share with us the schoolhouse space they had chosen for their project. Once
they discovered Mesha's Muslim identification, they attempted to banish us
from this space. In a face-to-face confrontation in which we challenged them
to define the reason for our conflict, they looked away from Mesha, who
was present in the conversation, and said "There is one among you from
Mostar East [the Muslim side of the divided city of Mostar]. Bringing
someone to Srbinje from Mostar East is tantamount to infiltrating a spy in
the region." The Spokeswoman invoked a discourse of war and national
difference, the discourse of local rule, above the international treaty that
designated Mesha's presence as legal. Yet, we (including Mesha) had placed
this rule of law, and our own convictions about the importance of border
crossing, above Mesha's individual safety and security. We had transgressed
ethical borders. Or had we? Community organizer Saul Alinsky suggests
that effective action may need to embrace a more relative set of ethical
guidelines.
In his 1946 manifesto Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky issues a wake-up
call to those individuals interested in provoking social change through
community organization. In a section on means and ends, Alinsky details
the importance of ethical relativity. "Conscience" he quotes Goethe as
stating, "is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action."
1
Alinsky lists
a series of rules dictating the ethics of organization and change, but does not
mention whether means/ ends evaluations shift when someone perceives his
life to be on the line, particularly when that someone is not the community
orgamzer.
Elie Wiesel does situate the moral dilemma of means/ end
evaluations within the context of the Bosnian war. In a November 1998
speech at the University of Minnesota, Wiesel asserted the value of
preserving individual human life. At the same time he argued the moral
obligation of democracies to intervene directly and immediately in sites of
genocide such as Bosnia. This intervention, according to Wiesel, would have
saved "thousands of lives in Bosnia." Yet direct intervention, meaning
military intervention, would assuredly have ended some lives to save others.
2
53
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In Wiesel's terms, as in Alinsky's, moral calls for actions can appear ethically
suspect and tend to raise more questions than they answer.
Mesha had his own opinions about ethics and morality in Bosnia.
Confronted by the hostile Serb and the segregating Peacemakers, Mesha left
Srbinje after one evening. Before leaving, however, he explained that his
decision arose less from our efforts at reconciliation, and more from the
discomfort caused by the Italian group. "People like that," he explained,
"keep my country divided."
With or without Mesha's presence, we still had to engage the local
youth participants' interests in creating a performance piece. Without local
interest and direct participation, community-based theatre has no impact.
We thus began with music, and Mesha remained for the first phase of the
project's development. We sat together in the living area of Shin's youth
center, sharing favorite lines from songs. After this first exercise, based on
a common activity in the center, the youth grew more enthusiastic about
developing a performance piece. They insisted on our staying in the town,
despite hostility from local authorities and the Italian group. They
eventually invited a select number of Muslim teenagers from Mostar to
attend their performance. Mesha also continued his connection with the
group through music rather than physical presence. At one participant's
request, he sent from Mostar the lyrics to U2's song "One."
Adhering to community experience and emotions-in this case, the
unifying aspects of youth culture through music-follows another set of
rules for engaging social change through theatre. In a recent article in
Theatre Topics Bruce McConachie cites the importance of engaging a
community's feelings and emotions, adding to a conversation about
ideological transactions in Baz Kershaw's study The Politics of Performance:
Radical Theatre as Cultural /ntervention.
3
Kershaw asserts that in order to
create social change, performance should cause an audience to reflect upon
their beliefs and actions, without offending the audience and thus causing
them to dismiss the performance.
4
We had our work cut out for us in Srbinje. To begin with, social
gathering of any kind in a "foreigner's" space was illegal in the town. Our
colleague Shin had been trying to follow regulations by registering his youth
center with the mayor. Once the mayor had documentation of Shin's
efforts, however, he instead ordered teenagers to stay away after dark.
Gathering and dispersal thus had to be conducted almost in secret: we tried
to keep youth away from Shin's house after dark, insisted on using the
schoolhouse rehearsal space despite the Peacemakers' protests, and
minimized audience invited to the performance. We also knew that our
55
work could also not directly disparage either Srbinje or the Serb Republic.
We thus had to walk the line between clarity and ambiguity. Over
the past two years, McElvany and I had developed a theatrical vocabulary
that included participant-generated material and physical metaphor.
Through questions and interactions with youth outside of the performance
context, we tried to understand and eventually articulate their interests. The
Srbinje youth had connected with Mesha through songs, and we developed
performance material from lines of these songs. Fighting Fences, derived
from "the first Yugoslav rap song," most directly addressed the Srbinje
youths' feelings about their enclosed "small town" and its fenced-in
environs. The piece began with the idea that after fighting a fence, the
fighter became a part of the fence. The fence itself then begins fighting to
break free. To clarify context of the piece, participants added an opening
moment of people in an unnamed town pausing in their everyday tasks to
glare at someone "different" walking down the street. The townspeople then
transformed themselves into the fence. The newcomer fought to join the
fence, whereupon the fence itself struggled to break free (to the soundtrack
of a Marilyn Manson song). After the fence broke apart, the townspeople
returned to their tasks, joined by the originally "different" person, all staring
down a newer newcomer. The piece reflected the youths' perception of life
in Srbinje, a place in which transgression led either to exclusion or
absorption.
One of the participants, Danka, had clarified these perceptions on
our third evening in town. Danka felt that the rule of law in Srbinje kept
youth around Bosnia from interacting. "There are no independent news
sources in Srbinje;" she explained, "we only receive official propaganda.
People here live in fear of their own government." She then expressed
chagrin at Mesha's departure, urging his return at some point. Danka's
attitude was particularly revealing given the fact that the previous month we
had tried to convince her to attend a theatre camp in Romania for a wide
spectrum of Bosnian youth. At that point, she had expressed fear of Muslims
and Croats and refused to attend. Having met Mesha, she had surmounted
that fear.
The performance as a whole also included material less volatile than
the Fighting Fences piece, such as movement exercises that played with the
definitions of space. In Srbinje, the field of performance, as much as its
content, governed theatre's potential for social change. Rather than
agitating against municipal and state politics, the performance focused on
demonstrating that Serbian and Muslim teenagers could find sites of
commonality that overcame efforts from both political officials and the
56
Slavic ant;/ East European Performance Vol. 19, No.2
Blessed Peacemakers to keep them separated. Our audience eventually
included European governmental administrators, several of the Blessed
Peacemakers, and two Muslim youth from Mostar.
Success in overcoming municipal regulations in Bosnia-Herzegovina
included the bringing together of Muslim, Serbian and Croatian youth in
Srbinje and later in Mostar. This success contrasted with the eventual failure
of our colleague Shin's youth center in Srbinje, and his later evacuation from
the region. Political regulations and atmosphere dictated a small audience
gathered in relative secrecy viewing somewhat ambiguous scenes about life
in Srbinje. The departure of our colleague Mesha, and the threats he faced
in Srbinje, forced us to question some of the ethical guidelines governing our
community-based theatre praxis. Questioning which rules to follow or to
break in Bosnia-Hercegovina remains essential to effective theatrical and
political practice. And questions, Elie Wiesel suggests, can often be more
interesting than answers.
NOTES
1. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1971}, 25.
2. Elie Wiesel, "Speech at the University of Minnesota" (8 November 1998).
3. Bruce McConachie, "Approaching the 'Structure of Feeling' in Grassroots
Theatre" Theatre Topics (March 1998}: 33-53.
4. Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention
(London: Routledge, 1992).
57
MIKHOELS IN AMERICA
Mel Gordon
The Soviet rehabilitation of the Russian-Yiddish actor Solomon
Mikhoels (1890-1948) in 1963 and 1964 sparked an enormous interest- and
a provocative folklore-among Russia's Jewish intelligentsia that continues
into the post-Communist era. Widely heralded as the Yiddish theatre's
greatest modern performer, Mikhoels was also considered the de facto head
of the Russian Jewish community in the thirties and forties. His brutal
murder in January 1948 and the mystery surrounding it is still the topic of
startling international conspiracies and Cold War intrigue. Some
contemporary historians, like Viktor Levashov (see his documentary novel
Ubiistvo Mikhoelsa [Moscow: Izdatel'stvo ACT, 1998], have now speculated
that the strange events surrounding Mikhoels's death were related to much
more than Stalin's attempt to suppress and then liquidate Jewish culture in
postwar Russia; they were part of a wildly insidious scheme to foment a
Third World War with the West.
Born in a small Jewish village outside Riga, Mikhoels moved to
Petrograd at the time of the Russian Civil War. Having abandoned a career
in law, Mikhoels seemed to be an unlikely candidate for serious theatre. He
was short, unattractive, and relatively old at twenty-nine. Raised in a
traditional Jewish background, Mikhoels was fluent in Yiddish and
rabbinical Hebrew. Alexei Granovsky (1890-1937), the cosmopolitan
founder of the newly established State Yiddish Chamber Theatre Oater the
GOSET), reluctantly accepted Mikhoels into his troupe. Their partnership
proved fortuitous, particularly after the theatre moved to Moscow in 1920.
The gnome-like Mikhoels had a grotesque star quality on stage.
Coupled with Benjamin Zuskin, Mikhoels comically portrayed
shtetl types with a depth and pathos that greatly added to Granovsky's
perfectly-composed phantasmagorical spectacles. And not only did the tens
of thousands of newly arrived Yiddish-speakers flock to the GOSET, but
Moscow's resident theatre-going public struggled to find tickets as well. By
1925, some eighty percent of the GOSET's audiences needed Russian
programs to follow Granovsky's Yiddish circus-like extravaganzas. Seventy-
eight RPM recordings of GOSET performances were treasured items among
the Muscovite elite, and the kinesthetic antics of Mikhoels and Zuskin were
widely imitated on street corners and at late-night parties.
A frequent subject of enthusiastic Central European critics,
Mikhoels at the Polo Grounds
59
Granovsky's GOSET traveled to Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and
Vienna in the Spring, Summer, and Fall of 1928. In each city, the troupe
received the highest accolades imaginable from such luminaries as Ernst
Toller, Alfred Kerr, Erwin Piscator, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud.
There was even talk of an American tour. But a box-office scandal in
Germany sullied the GOSET's reputation in the eyes of their Moscow
handlers despite rave-reviews and soldout houses.
Granovsky elected to remain in Berlin, one of his many
pre-revolutionary homes, and joined with Max Reinhardt, his former
mentor, to direct at the Deutsches Theater. Type-cast as an ersatz
Meyerhold, the multi-lingual Granovsky quickly adapted Soviet classics, like
Sergei Tretyakov's Roar China!, and found success as a film director in
Berlin and Paris. He married a woman reputed to be one of the richest in
Europe, but a string of personal tragedies, bouts of alcoholism, and
ultimately a longing for his old Russian milieu propelled him into a period
of dissipation and death.
In Moscow, the GOSET underwent a radical restructuring in 1929
and 1930. Appointed Artistic Director, Mikhoels was charged with creating
a new Yiddish repertoire in the Socialist Realist mode. Handsome and
self-sacrificing Soviet heroes and heroines were to replace the pathetic
luftmenshn, or shtetl hustlers, that Mikhoels and Zuskin embodied with so
much comic panache and surreal artistry. Predictably, the GOSET's first
forays in the melodramatic realm of Socialist Realism were universally
condemned as artificially conceived and poorly executed.
Sergei Radlov, a highly experienced avant-garde director who had
the uncanny ability to work in any style, collaborated with and then
replaced Mikhoels as the GOSET's leading director. Finally in 1935,
Radlov's chess-board like King Lear, starring Mikhoels, reestablished the
GOSET as a world-class company. (In this "dialectic materialist" Lear, the
King becomes younger in every scene as he learns the Marxist truth about
possessions and property from the proto-Communist Cordelia.) The aging
Gordon Craig enthused for years that this was one of the great
Shakespearean productions of the twentieth century.
Throughout of the thirties, Mikhoels's stature as a cultural, and
even political, figure rapidly grew. He received all the honorifics of a
national celebrity: Moscow City Councilman, Honorary Professor at
Moscow University, Stalin Award Recipient. He was featured in Soviet
Russian, Yiddish, and English-language journals. It was even rumored that
Stalin consulted "Solomon the Wise" in midnight telephone calls.
Mikhoels's status increased still in the hectic period following the
60
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Fefer, Einstein, Mikhoels
German invasion in June 1941. At the end of August 1941, he was elected
chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a position he would hold
for six years. Stalin firmly believed that the JAC could quickly galvanize
overseas Jewish populations, especially in America, to influence their
respective governments in supporting the Soviet Union's life-in-death
struggle. With Hitler and Hirohito, Stalin shared a vision of the Western
governments as sham democracies largely beholden to or manipulated by
secretive Jewish financial and media interests.
The true extent of Stalin's anti-Semitic beliefs and their effects over
two decades of Soviet policy are difficult to assess because of Stalin's erratic
statements and decrees-until the final years-sometimes favoring broad
Jewish concerns in Russia or Palestine. Certainly, Jews appeared everywhere
on Stalin's psychic screen, from toady ministers, like Lazar Kaganovich, to
menacing rivals, like Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev, to his own
daughter-in-law and the wives of a dozen Politburo members. Even Father
Ilyich [Lenin] himself had Jewish ancestry.
In April 1942, it was announced that Mikhoels and Itzik Fefer
would travel to North America and Great Britain as representatives of
Marshal Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Although Soviet
writers and artists, like Boris Pilnyak and Sergei Eisenstein, appeared in
America during the 1920s and 1930s as individual artists in a semi-offical
capacity, not since Mayakovsky's trip in 1925, did a Russian mission create
such cultural/political excitement. Mikhail Kalinin and Stalin himself saw
Mikhoels and Fefer off from the Moscow airport.
From mid-June 1942 until the end of November, the two JAC
members would address over 500,000 Jews (and allied supporters) in forty-
six cities in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Britain, collecting
substantial funds for the procurement of tanks and medical supplies for the
Red Army. Mikhoels and Fefer would confer with high government officials
in every country as well as ranking Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and artists,
like Arthur Miller, Lee J. Cobb, and John Garfield, who made an
embarrassing attempt to translate from Mikhoels's folksy Yiddish. Seven
American Yiddish writers commemorated the arrival of Mikhoels-Fefer in
their cities with poetic fanfare. And the Jewish press produced over two
hundred and sixty articles, all but thirty laudatory. For some quarter of a
million left-wing Jews in the US and Canada, the summer of 1943 was an
especially magical moment in time, renewing their once undiluted
enthusiasm for the Workers Homeland. The old ardor had been seriously
compromised by the thirties' Purge Trials, Realpolitik all iances with Nazi
Germany, and the Russo-Finnish war.
63
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Yet for Mikhoels, the seven-month tour was extremely stress-laden.
Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter, the leaders of the Socialist Bund, the mass
Jewish organization in Poland, had been executed in the cellars of Moscow's
Lubyanka prison in early 1943. Throughout North America, the Bundists
represented a huge and politically powerful segment of the Yiddish
establishment. At every outdoor gathering of Mikhoels and Fefer,
anti-Soviet placards in English and Yiddish appeared in annoyingly
substantial numbers. The Forvartz, the largest Yiddish daily and important
organ for Jewish trade-unionism, blasted the Mikhoels-Fefer rally at
Manhattan's Polo Grounds on July 8 with this banner headline: "If We Had
Only One Bullet and Hitler and Stalin Were in the Same Room. We Would
Shoot: Stalin!"
Most disturbing to Mikhoels was the constant presence of Fefer.
A true proletarian type from Ukraine, Fefer effortlessly followed the social
command for the creation of Socialist Realist poetry and parody-proof
paeans to Stalin: "Even the lonely Russian orphan-in his poverty, in his
hunger-has one thing that all of humanity envies: STALIN! ... " Fefer was
known to be close to Soviet secret police circles (GPU; NKVD) and it was
widely assumed that Fefer's main role on tour was to act as a spy and
chronicler of Mikhoels's activities. The few reports by American and
British Jews who managed to see Mikhoels privately confirmed this as well
as a general feeling of dread that constantly radiated from Mikhoels's
expressive face.
The exact reasons for Mikhoels's deep anxiety are unknown
although Cold War historians have linked it to some wartime espionage or
intelligence gathering that was taking place in California and Mexico.
Another theory posits that Mikhoels was ordered to covertly encourage
overseas Jewish leaders to drop their support for Palestine and/ or
Biro-Bidzhan (the failed Soviet equivalent in Siberia) for the secret
development of a homeland-like territory in Soviet Crimea. Accordingly,
as soon as the Nazis surrendered, Stalin would use this clandestine
American-Jewish sponsored "Project" to severe t he Crimea from Russia as
an excuse to deport all Russian Jews and murder their leaders-a provocation
that would immediately plunge the exhausted American military into an
anti-Soviet war. Only Mikhoels's heroic dereliction of Stalin's instruction
prevented an international catastrophe.
Of all the known strange aspects of the Mikhoels-Fefer trip, none
was more peculiar than the "Fur Coat Incident." During the Spring of 1943,
the public relations arm of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, the
65
Speaking Yiddish with LaGuardia
66
Sla-uic and East European Performance Vol. 19, No.2
largest Communist-led union in America, announced a special lottery in
honor of the J AC representatives: t hree-dozen winning ticket holders would
have the august privilege of cutting and tailoring three mink-and-leather
coats for Mikhoels, Fefer, and Stalin; moreover, sewn into the coats would
be a tag with each worker's name. The contest was promoted for weeks in
the organization's journal and in the Daily Worker. Eventually, the lucky
workers were selected but they quickly discovered that the diminutive
Stalin's measurements were a state secret. Mikhoels maintained that he was
roughly the same height as the Great Strategist but a terrified Fefer claimed
otherwise and insisted the coat be made much longer.
Reportedly in February 1944, when Fefer delivered the
American-made "protection against Father Winter" directly to Stalin, several
things occurred instantly to the Marshal: first, the disrespectful way Fefer
had transported the mink coat, cavalierly draped over his shoulder; and
secondly, the possibility that the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of
the CIA)-or the Jewish and Greek furriers themselves-treated the
lambskin lining with a transdermal poison, a la Medea. Some
Kreminologists believed Stalin later stored the coat on a mannequin in his
private "Black Museum," a small room filled with artifacts from various
assassination attempts.
To be sure, both the FBI and OSS tracked Mikhoels and Fefer in
their quest for funds across the US. Lacking indigenous Yiddish-speaking
agents, the FBI relied heavily on anti-Communist Bundist informants while
the OSS had Yiddish-language experts in their Foreign Nationalities Branch.
The agencies' differing interpretations are striking: the FBI accounts
maintained that Mikhoels functioned primilarily as the artistic face of a
coordinated Stalinist propaganda campaign while the OSS was sensitive to
the separate and special political missions of the two JAC representatives.
Four years after his return to Moscow, Mikhoels was murdered in
Minsk on January 13, 1948. Initially reported as an automobile accident,
later said to be the deed of local anti-Semites, Mikhoels's death signaled the
final elimination of independent Jewish cultural activity in the Soviet
Union. Rumors that Mikhoels's corpse showed unmistakeable signs of
severe physical torture were violently quashed. The "Black Years" for
Soviet Jewry began.
Fefer, after arrest, confinement, and secret trial, was executed on
August 12, 1952 along with twenty-three other Jewish writers, actors, and
intellectuals (among them Zuskin, the new head of GOSET). They were
accused and convicted of several treasonous activities, including the plot to
establish a bourgeois Jewish state in the Crimea. The liquidation of the
67
Soviet Union's Yiddish-language elite in autumn 1952 was noted in both the
FBI and CIA files without comment. Not a nuclear threat from America
but Stalin's premature death on March 2, 1953 (the Jewish holiday of Purim)
prevented a second European Holocaust for Russia's Jews.
68
DID KURBAS STAGE KING LEAR IN MOSCOW?
UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF
LES' KURBAS'S LAST PRODUCTION
Natalia Chechel
Historical research can be like solving a murder mystery. The
scholarly investigation resembles a detective novel, with its contradictory
witnesses and mysterious circumstances which, in the absence of
incontrovertible evidence, demand additional sleuthing. Such was the fate
of Kurbas's King Lear. For the delay in such additional investigation, I must
take some of the blame.
It is not easy to give up one's illusions and destroy legends. A good
story lives by its own rules and requires a worthy coda; it is better not to
ruin it. Intuitively, I complied with this unwritten law in my book, The
Ukrainian Theatrical Renaissance: Western Classics on the Ukrainian Stage
1920-1930. Problems of Tragic Performance (Kyiv, 1993). Not having the
opportunity to write a satisfying finale, I remained silent. It would have
concerned Les' Kurbas's last production, Shakespeare's King Lear, at the
Moscow Jewish Chamber Theatre Qater known as the State Jewish Theatre,
GOSET) , with Solomon Mikhoels in the main role. Intrigued by this
theatrical legend, I conducted detailed research in March 1984, taking
advantage of my stay in Moscow and the eyewitness accounts of some
participants in the legendary production of 1935 who were then still living.
Let us try to unravel this mystery. Did Kurbas really work on
Shakespeare's King Lear at the Jewish Theatre, and what in fact was t he role
of this Ukrainian director at GOSET? Turning to the chronicle of events,
we find that after being dismissed from his post as artistic director of the
Berezil' Theatre Oleksandr Stepanovych Kurbas left Kharkiv for Moscow
on 6 October 1933. He was arrested on 26 December 1933 and sentenced
to five years in the labor camps. Thus, Kurbas could have been in Moscow
no more than two months and twenty days.
Why did the multinational capital of the Bolshevik empire become
the last refuge of the fiery Ukrainian genius-a city to which he had once
refused to travel for the Olympiad of national theatres of the fraternal
republics, finding such a categorization of his creative work insultingly
condescending? It is well known that colonial policy is more intense at the
periphery of an empire than at the center. Paradoxically enough, it was the
Jew Mikhoels at GOSET and the Georgian Amaglobelli at the Malyi Teatr
who offered Kurbas a job in the fall of 1933. Aside from personal
69
sympathies and similarities of national problems, ethnocultural resonances
were certainly discernible here. The symphony of the Jewish, Georgian,
and Ukrainian peoples' theatricality, musicality, and plasticity, their
romantic strivings and expressionist reflections, festive contrasts and
unbridled temperaments, result in broad multicultural associations.
Let us proceed to examine this matter in detail. Oleksandr Deich,
who was close to both Kurbas and Mikhoels, observing the genesis of the
production of King Lear, wrote,
in playing Lear, Solomon Mikhoels could not also take on the
responsibilities of director; for this reason, at first they invited
M.O. Volkonskii. After a while he was replaced by the German
director Erwin Piscator, no stranger in this -period of formal
experimentation. Finally, S.E. Radlov, who had already directed
a good deal of Shakespeare, took over the production. He had his
own views of King Lear, which often clashed with Mikhoels's
conception. Twice Radlov refused the job, but later he did reach
an understanding with Mikhoels and the theatre collective.'
Of course, the year 1966 was not very conducive to discussions of Kurbas,
but even later Deich provided no testimony on the Ukrainian director's
participation in the Shakespearian production.
Meanwhile, in the first thorough collection about Kurbas of its
time, and a very important one, entitled Les' Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv
[Les' Kurbas: Reminiscences of Contemporaries] (Kyiv, 1969), we read in the
chapter on "Materials for a Chronology of the Life and Creative Activity of
O.S. Kurbas" this cautious but definitive formulation: "Summer 1934. On
the invitation of S. Mikhoels, L. Kurbas began work at the State Jewish
Theatre (Moscow) on a production of Shakespeare's King Lear."
2
In the
summer of 1934 Kurbas, most unfortunately, was already serving a term at
Vedmezha Hora.
The compilation and editing of this collection was in the hands of
Vasyl' Vasyl'ko. Vasyl'ko was a well-known Ukrainian actor and director
who had begun his career with Kurbas, but had rather soon (and rather
opportunely) left his theatre. He had, however, founded the Berezil'
museum, had contemplated the work of his master all his life, and had
devotedly collected materials about him.
1
In preparing his book for publication, Vasyl'ko developed an
extensive correspondence. Having a talent for theatre studies, he strove for
accuracy. Doubtless the intriguing legend of Lear aroused his doubts,
because of the dearth of facts. These doubts are confirmed by a letter that
I found written on 3 March 1965 by Mikhoels's younger daughter Nina in
reply to Vasyl'ko:
Dear Vasyl' Stepanovych:
Today, March 3, I chanced to learn that you had not received my
telegram. Everything that I had managed to find out for you about
Kurbas and his invitation to stage King Lear is stated in a few
words. In fact, my father did invite Kurbas in 1934, but the
repression of Kurbas put an end to this plan. Viktor Mikhailovich
Sigalov has tried his best to find out all the details for you, but
unfortunately, it was not possible to discover anything more
precise. I am sorry that I made you wait. Perhaps I mixed up the
address.
Respectfully,
Nina Mikhoels
4
Having thus achieved zero results, Vasyl'ko nevertheless transformed an
unconfirmed supposition into a documentary assertion that lasted for many
years.
Many researchers were intrigued by the legend of Kurbas's Lear.
In my view, it was the Leningrad theatrical scholar Eduard Kapitaikin, a
resident of Israel after 1977, who came closest to the truth. In his article
"Les' Kurbas i Solomon Mikhoels," published in the emigre journal
Suchasnist', he describes the ceremonial departure of Kurbas and his
company from Kyiv to the "new Soviet Ukrainian capital" of Kharkiv. At
the occasion "excerpts from the best theatrical productions were shown,"
applauded by "the tried and true admirers of Berezil"' and "their guests,
actors from the Moscow Jewish Theatre, which was then on tour in Kyiv."
Kapitaikin goes on to indicate that "another guest attended that soiree-the
poet Osip Emil'ovich Mandel'shtam," who had published "an unfinished,
fragmentary article entitled 'Mikhoels,' part of which was published in the
Leningrad newspaper Vecherniaia Krasnaia gazeta (10 August 1926)."
5
Kapitaikin quotes from this article:
Recently two excellent theatre companies met in Kyiv: the
Ukrainian Berezil' and the Jewish Chamber Theatre of Moscow ..
. . Seeing off Berezil', which was departing for Kharkiv, the great
Jewish actor Mikhoels turned to the Ukrainian director Les'
Kurbas and said, "We are blood brothers ... " Mysterious words,
which said more than (words about) peaceful cooperation and
cohabitation of peoples.
6
Having cited Mandel'shtam, Kapitaikin continues:
The second creative meeting between Kurbas and Mikhoels took
place eight years later, in 1934, in Moscow. Kurbas was to stage
71
King Lear at GOSET, the same production that soon, without his
participation, would bring fame to Mikhoels. The director and the
actor discussed the future Lear much and in detail, reaching
agreement on how the director would interpret the play and treat
the roles. The first rehearsals were scheduled. But a few days
before the work was to start, Kurbas was arrested.
7
The Leningrad theatrical scholar ends his article with a conclusion which in
my opinion is almost documentarily precise:
What Kurbas and Mikhoels talked about during their meetings in
Moscow can now only be guessed at. Neither testimony nor
witnesses remain. If the actor could rise to grandiose philosophical
and poetical heights in a performance produced by a mediocre and
limited director, actively struggling against him in his
interpretation, then what would have happened if he had worked
with Kurbas, who thought in the same intellectual categories? And
did not the conversations with Kurbas leave a perceptible trace on
Mikhoels's treatment of the image of Lear? They could not but do
so!
8
Personal testimony can help us discover the truth about Kurbas's
involvement with Lear, even though the information is varied or
contradictory. One of Kurbas's finest actors, Iosyp Hirniak, wrote as
follows in his memoirs:
When Kurbas arrived in Moscow, Mikhoels immediately employed
him at the Jewish theatre to produce King Lear; the Malyi Theatre,
which was the Russian academic theatre, engaged him to produce
Othello (the director of that theatre was Amaglobelli, a Georgian,
a very civilized person). Kurbas began these two productions. He
lived in some shabby hotel. But he did not complete these projects.
On December 26 he was arrested on his way to the theatre.
9
More objective sources such as the 1988 anthology Les' Kurbas. Berezil': lz
tvorchoi spadshchyny, dedicated to the creative legacy of Kurbas, appear more
definitive: "1933-1934. Staging of the production of Shakespeare's King Lear.
Work completed by$. Mikhoels and S. Radlov."
10
In the Russian-language
jubilee anthology about Kurbas we read: "Kurbas moved to Moscow and on
the suggestion of S. Mikhoels, began to work at the State Jewish Theatre
(GOSET) on a production of Shakespeare's play King Lear."
11
In Les'
Kurbas: u teatral'nii diial'nosti, v otsinkakh suchasnykiv. Dokumenty, a
thousand-page tome on Kurbas published in the U.S.A., Valerian Revuts'kyi
testifies:
After Kurbas was removed from the post of artistic director of
72
Berezil', he was deprived of the title of People's Artist of the
Republic (which he had held since 1925). In the evening of 6
October, the day after his "trial," he went to Moscow, where the
artistic director of GOSET (State Jewish Theatre), Solomon
Mikhoels, immediately invited him to stage Shakespeare's King
Lear. At the same time he received another invitation: to stage
Othello at the Malyi Theatre. Kurbas did not complete either of
these productions. He was arrested on 26 December 1933 on his
way to the theatre.
12
Ultimately these sources do not come any closer to the truth, as their facts
cannot be corroborated by sources any more reliable than the memoirs.
Nelli Kornienko advanced with much enthusiasm in her hypothesis
about King Lear. She wrote as follows:
When I spoke with A. Potots'ka-Mikhoels, when I look at 0.
Tyshler's sketches for the image of Lear and at photographs of the
production itself, when I read wise and subtle reviews of it, I have
no doubts: behind this stands the conception of like-minded men:
Mikhoels and Kurbas. And it is no coincidence that on the visage
of Mikhoels's Lear there appeared, vulnerably, the ironic and bitter
smile of another skeptical philosopher, his brother-in-experience
Padura [the hero of Mykola Kulish's play Maklena Hrasa] Oook at
the sketch for Lear made by Tyshler in 1942, and compare it with
the photograph of Padura in Kurbas's production: the resemblance
is striking!) u
In her "Detective Story without a Finale," Kornienko asserts
without evidence "that Les' Kurbas made a significant contribution to the
realization of the treatment of the main role." But in developing her
thoughts, the author makes this reservation: "My hypothesis does not rest
on any real documentary basis (then it would no longer be a hypothesis)."H
Kornienko states that "the participants of the production are silent.
In his reminiscences, Tyshler does not say a word about this; Professor M.
Belen'kii [today a citizen of Israel] neither denies nor confirms this version
... Why?" She has only one witness, but a very important one:
Mikhoels's widow Anastasiia Pavlovna Pototskaia told me in the
1960s that Kurbas had discussed the conception and had even
individually rehearsed with Mikhoels. This had to be done
secretly, hidden from the public, since agents were following
Kurbas in Moscow too. According to Pototskaia, Mikhoels kept
a diary of rehearsals in which he noted all the director's
instructions, and kept this diary up to the beginning of the war.
73
Only the possibility of a search and the danger of arrest compelled
him to burn the diary.
15
In his book, Russian and Soviet Theater 1905-1932, the well-known
Moscow theatrical scholar Konstantin Rudnitskii cites Gordon Craig's
reaction to the GOSET Lear-for Craig it was "a completely unexpected
experience and, without any exaggeration, a shock." Rudnitskii goes on to
indicate that:
This Shakespearean production was a shock for theatrical Moscow
as well, and a difficult one to explain. For not only did the
magnificent performance of Mikhoels and Zuskin enrapture and
not only did the highly original form discovered by the artist
Alexander Tyshler delight, but even the direction was exciting.
This was the most surprising element. Sergei Radlov was cited as
the director, although at that time in the 1930s no one had thought
him capable of surprising or startling anyone: it was a long time
since any of his other work had been distinguished by originality.
Only now, half a century later, has an explanation been found for
this longstanding enigma. It has been discovered that the
directorial interpretation of King Lear, in its fundamental, original
outlines, was created by the marvelous Ukranian director Les
Kurbas, one of the boldest theatrical innovators of the 1920s.
Rudnitskii surmises that "Radlov had only completed and 'signed' Kurbas's
last work. "
16
The shadow of Kurbas lies on both the parabolic Lear and the
romantic Othello. One could not evade the fatal coincidence. Sergei
Ernestovich Radlov was the official director of both King Lear with S.
Mikhoels at the Jewish Theatre (premiere on 10 February 1935), and Othello
with 0. Ostuzhev at the Malyi (premiere on 10 December 1935). These two
Shakespearean productions were the greatest creative successes for the
Leningrad director. He had produced Shakespeare, particularly Othello
(1932 and 1935 versions), before at the Youth Theatre in Leningrad, which
he headed (known from 1939 as the Lensovet Theatre). The author of the
translation of Othello in the version staged at the Malyi Theatre was
Radlov's wife, the well-known translator Anna Radlova.
The most colorful reminiscences in this mysterious history are
those of the famous Ukrainian poet and civic activist Mykola Bazhan-in his
youth an inveterate theatre-lover and incompetent actor at Kurbas's theatre.
Bazhan longingly describes his weekly evening meetings with Kurbas.
Bazhan relates his memories of Kurbas's lengthy and numerous
rehearsals of King Lear, after which he frequently went to meet with Bazhan
74
at the Metropole cafe in Moscow:
Almost daily, some time after five o'clock, when the rehearsals
were over, I would go to the cafe, order a cup of coffee, and sit
waiting for Kurbas. He would come, always friendly and amiable,
but in varying moods. If the rehearsal had gone well, if there was
mutual understanding and agreement with Mikhoels in the
treatment of some line or other, of a gesture, of a mise-en-scene (for
the image of the luckless king, treated in a basically unique and
unrepeatable manner, was already becoming clear for both Kurbas
and Mikhoels), then Kurbas would come brimming with joyous
creative preoccupation, but if there had been no rehearsal and
Kurbas had had time for solitary contemplation and reminiscences,
then he would question me with especial eagerness about how and
on what the writers in Kharkiv and Kyiv were living, and what
news there was from the theatrical and artistic life of Ukraine.
17
Among other things, over coffee Bazhan tells of Kurbas explaining his
understanding of King Lear:
This will be an unusual Lear. He is an eccentric and an egotist
blinded by the illusion of autocracy, but the bitterness of truth
opens his eyes, awakens in him his humanity and his individuality;
the storms of life tear off the garments of haughtiness from him,
sending him back to earth to be among human beings and their
suffering. Exhausted, bald, beardless-Mikhoels will play him
almost without make-up-carrying the dead Cordelia, he must raise
himself up in all his human greatness, casting aside the pretensions
and rancor of a blind despot.
18
To me, this commentary of Bazhan's on Lear sounds rather banal. It also
diverges essentially from what Boris Zingerman, the authoritative and
insightful student of this production, felt it was about: "not the touching
story of deceived paternal sentiments, nor a didactic lesson about a ruler's
woes and demise, but a tragic parable about discovering the truth."
19
Such
a reading of this classic work recalls the spiritual journeys of Kurbas and his
Oedipus Rex of 1918.
In his memoiristic narration, Bazhan makes public some hitherto
undocumented facts from Kurbas's creative biography:
Kurbas did not want to stay in Ukraine-and perhaps could not.
He went to Moscow. He began staging King Lear at the Jewish
Theatre, with the famous Mikhoels in the title role. At the same
time, he directed the drama studio of that theatre. I saw him a few
months later, having come to Moscow on cinematographic and
75
literary business. I went to Stoleshnikov Alley, where Kurbas was
conducting rehearsals of Lear on the studio premises, waited for a
long time for the rehearsal to end, and then Kurbas came out into
the anteroom.
20
For many years, the director of the drama studio of the Jewish Theatre was
Moisei Solomonovich Belen'kii, with whom I met personally in 1984. He
did not even mention this detail, which would have been important for him,
quite apart from the absence of this fact in the documents.
In 1984, in addition to Belen'kii, I questioned everyone who might
still remember about the work of Kurbas in the Moscow Jewish Theatre.
From 28 to 31 March these former employees of this theatre gave their
testimonies: Eva Davydovna Itskhoki (who played Cordelia in King Lear);
Khana Borisovna Shagaionok (appeared in the production of King Lear);
El 'ga Bezverkhnia (appeared in the production of King Lear and wife of
Belen'kii); Abram Solomonovich Pustyl 'nik (appeared in the production of
King Lear); and Mariia Efimovna Kotliarova (an actress of this theatre). This
research found no confirmation for Kurbas having staged King Lear at the
Moscow Jewish Chamber Theatre. All six of my interviewees denied that
Kurbas had participated in the work on this production at any stage of its
preparation for public performance. Moisei Belen'kii, a direct participant
in these distant events, told me the following:
Solomon Mikhoels had conversations with Kurbas about the
staging of The Wailing Wall. Kurbas was supposed to stage this
play. A reading of The Wailing Wall took place, but Kurbas was
suddenly arrested, and Fedorov directed the productionY
This testimony struck me as sensational. Looking in the file of GOSET
productions at the bibliographic office of the Moscow Scholarly Library of
the STD, we find this notation: "L. Mizandrontsev. The Wailing Wall.
Premiere 20 November 1935. Director V. Fedorov. Set designer A.
Gusiatinskii. Composer M. Mil'ner."
The director Vasilii Fedorov was from Vsevolod Meyerhold's
immediate circle. He was one of the first students of the Advanced State
Directors' Studios, director of the V. Meyerhold Theatre production Rychy,
Kitai! (Roar, C h i n a ~ by S. Tret' iakov (1926), the author of a treatment of the
celebrated Meyerhold production of Ostrovsky's Les (The Forest)(1924), and
a proponent of biomechanics. He also worked in the theatres of Leningrad.
And who was L. Mizandrontsev? Leafing through the archival
materials on the production, we learn that Mizandrontsev was then a
talented young Armenian dramatist. His name is mentioned in the
six-volume history of the Soviet theatre in connection with the play Khriak
76
(Toburchak), by L. Mizandrontsev and L. Tsinovskii, which was popular in
the theatres of the national republics in the 1930s. The Wailing Wall was
created, of course, in the non-pathetic genre of agitprop (nor could they
assign Kurbas, compromised as he was in the eyes of the ever-wakeful secret
police, anything else).
22
Years passed, and thanks to Case No. 3168, found in the KGB
archives, we were able to find out the following in the words of Kurbas
himself: "I worked on the play The Flaming Wall, by F. Wolf, for the Jewish
theatre; I have no permanent place of work.'
123
He said this at his
interrogation of 17 January 1934. In the protocol of the interrogation of
Oleksandr Stepanovych Kurbas of 3 April 1934 we read: "In Moscow, I
began work at the State Jewish Theatre on the antifascist play of the
German playwright F. Wolf, and agreed with the administration of the
Malyi Theatre on a production of Shakespeare's
(One should
mention Kurbas's one-time intention to stage Othello at the Berezil' Theatre,
which was planned for the repertoire of the first half of the 1927-1928
season.)
25
But The Flaming Wall is not The Wailing Wall, and F. Wolf is not
L. Mizandrontsev. Again, the facts do not tally. Is there such a play by the
German Communist of Jewish origin, who emigrated in 1933 from fascist
Germany to Moscow? After all, he seems to us to have been a person
totally involved with the Stalin regime. It turns out that there is no such
play by him, even if one thoroughly checks credible German-language
sources. Wolf only had an intention to write a play on the subject of Jewish
refugees. It is also worth mentioning the novel Scorched Earth by AI' Hart,
fairly popular at that time. So could not Mizandrontsev have been engaging
in variations on the given theme? This is all the more possible inasmuch as
the titles The Wailing Wall and The Flaming Wall have an obvious
conceptual-semantic similarity.
The circle is complete, and it has revealed a number of new riddles.
It seems that once again, this "case" requires additional research. But one
must draw some conclusions. How are we to answer the initial question:
"Did Les' Kurbas direct King Lear at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre?"
Certainly on the documentary level, I must answer that no, he definitely did
not. Then I formulate the question in another way: "Did Les' Kurbas have
anything to do with the conception of the production of King Lear at the
Moscow State Jewish Theatre?" On the level of a scholarly hypothesis
rather than a proven fact-it is possible that he did.
-Translated by Andrew Sorokowski
77
NOTES
1. Oleksandr Deich, Golos pami4ti: Teatral'nye vpechatlenii4 i vstrechi (Moscow,
1966), 240.
2. M. Labins'kyi, ed., "Materialy do khronolohii zhyttia i tvorchoi diial'nosti O.S.
Kurbasa," in Les ' Kurbas: Spohady suchasnykiv (K yiv, 1969), 347.
3. To this day, Vasyl'ko's archive in the collections of the State Museum of
Dramatic, Musical, and Cinematic Art of Ukraine remains the most complete
collection of documents on Kurbas.
4. Previously unpublished. Vasyl' Vasyl'ko, Shliakhy stvorenni4 pershoi knyhy 'Les'
Kurbas'. No. II (based on archival materials of V. Vasyl'ko at the State Museum of
Dramatic, Musical and Cinematic Art of Ukraine, inventory No. 3907, Supp.)
(Kyiv), 291.
5. Eduard Kapitaikin, "Les' Kurbas i Solomon Mikhoels," Suchasnist' 3, 4 {1981):
79-80.
6. Osip Mandel 'shtam, Sobr. soch.: v J.kh t., vol. 3 {New York, 1969), 110.
7. Kapitaikin, 80.
8. Ibid., 85-86.
9. Iosyp Hirniak, Spomyny {New York, 1982), 370.
10. M. Labins' kyi, ed., Les' Kurbas. Berezil': lz tvorchoi spadshchyny (Kyiv, 1988), 488.
11. M.G. Labinskii and L.S. Taniuk, eds., Les' Kurbas: stat 'i i vospominanii4 o Lese
Kurbase. Literatumoe nasledie (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988), 425.
12. Valerian Revuts' kyi, "Les' Kurbas i teatr," in Les' Kurbas: u teatral'nii dii4l 'nosti,
v otsinkakh suchasnykiv. Dokumenty {Baltimore and Toronto, 1989), 64.
13. Nelli Kornienko, "Teatr 'preobrazheniia'," Teatr 9 {1987): 70.
14. Nelli Kornienko, "Detektivnaia istoriia bez finala," Teatral'nai4 zhizn' 10
{1993): 15.
78
Slavic and East European Performatce Vol. 19, No.2
15. Ibid.
16. Konstantin Rudnitskii, Russian and Soviet Theater 1905193 2 (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1988), 107-8.
17. Mykola Bazhan, "U svitli Kurbasa," Vitchyzna 10 (1982): 149.
18. Ibid. 148-149.
19. Boris Zingerman, "Mikhoels-Lir," in Mikhoels S. M. : Stat'i, besedy, rechi;
vospominaniia o Mikhoelse (Moscow, 1981), 378.
20. Bazhan, 148.
21. Natalia Chechel, "Interview with M.S. Belen'kii," Moscow, 30 March 1984.
22. The play was about German Jews who had emigrated to Palestine at the
beginning of the 1930s. The sad fate of the first emigrants from fascist Germany was
depicted against the background of class warfare and calls for national solidarity: the
Jewish colony "Road of Hope," the romantic poet Leo Berle, the enmity between
the local Arab landowner Bekker Efendi and the immigrant capitalist Smilianskii,
who buys land pretending to care for his co-national but in fact exploits the cheap
workforce of poor Arabs, inflaming hatred between Arabs and Jews, who fail to
reach an agreement on what nation has the right to the holy place known as the
"Wailing Wall."
23. Labins'kyi, M. and M. Shudria, "Sprava No. 3168," Ukrains'kyi teatr 3 (1991):
4.
24. Ibid., 8.
25. "Derzhavnyi dramatychnyi teatr 'Berezil": sezon 1927-1928 r.," Nove mystetstvo
(Kharkiv), 1927, no. 18.
79
WHOSE LEGS ARE THOSE?
THE CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETTE
THEATRE'S RUSALKA, THE LITTLE RIVERMAID
Blanka Kiivankova
A pair of dancing and jumping legs attack a small creature that
seems to be lost in the forest. The creature is Ka5parek, the well-known
jingle-belled joker that has appeared in the productions of puppeteers in
Central Europe since the seventeenth century. But whose legs are those?
And what are they doing in the romantic story of Rusalka, the Little
Rivermaid? The answer was delivered in the form of a mini-opera by the
Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre (CAMT), at La Mama,
directed by Vft Horejs.
Based on a famous opera by Czech composer Antonfn Dvorak,
with additional music by jazz legend William Parker, Rusalka combines
actors, puppets, farce, and the grotesque with horror imagery, folk rituals,
pop-imagery, fairy-tales, and existential drama. Sixteen performers and more
than thirty marionettes are used to re-interpret the original version of
Rusalka in the same manner that the company "decoded" Hamlet at the
Vineyard Theatre in 1997.
A simple story about unrequited love, touched with a Faustian
theme, is told on three stages-a 1920's toy theatre, a classic marionette
proscenium for twenty-five to thirty inch puppets, and the main stage for
live actors. All three stages are situated in front of the closed curtain.
Sometimes they are used simultaneously; at other times there are
cinematic-style changes of perspective. For example, at one point a group
of actors performs the Slavic folk ritual of "drowning the winter" on the
human-scale stage, which then appears in puppet form on the miniature
stage, as if moving from a close-up to a distant shot. In this ritual, a white
"scarecrow" puppet, symbolizing winter and death, is carried around the
village or town by a group singing a traditional folktune. The parade carries
the puppet toward a creek or river, and after it is devoured by water, the
village welcomes spring, the symbol of change and new life.
This particular folk ritual doesn't appear in Dvorak's version, but
the composer's work was certainly influenced by Slavic traditions. Rusalka's
librettist Jaroslav Kvapil, poet and "father" of Czech symbolism, was
inspired by Hans Christian Andersen and old German romantic literature.
The story of Rusalka has also been linked with Gerhardt Hauptmann's
Sunken Bell and themes from Undine by Friedrich de Ia Motte Fouque.
80
Rusalka, the nymph daughter of a male Water Spirit (Vodnlk), falls
in love with a human prince. To follow him into the world of humans, she
has to give up her forest-and-water homeland-the realm of spirits, ghosts,
nymphs, witches, and other supernatural creatures. This is a place that
every Czech child is familiar with from traditional fairy-tales. Dvorak
certainly knew them as well. Written in 1901, Rusalka can be interpreted
as t he composer's tribute to his homeland after he returned from the United
States, where he taught at New York's National Conservatory of Music
(1892-1895). To remind audiences about the composer's connection to
America, Horejs invokes black and native-American music, which fascinated
Dvorak. The melodies are played by the Organic Theater Ensemble, led by
William Parker. Allegedly, Dvorak predicted that a new generation of
American composers would proceed from his African-American and native
American students. He was both right and wrong. His students definitely
made their mark on the history of American music, but their music differs
considerably from the symphonies and operas Dvorak taught them to
compose.
In HorejS's modification of the original story, to achieve a body
that's "made for love," Rusalka has to undergo a rather drastic operation
carried out by the old witch Baba Yaga. Her nymph fish-tail is removed and
she is given in its place a pair of dusty mannequin legs. A small replica of
these is what scared the joker Ka5parek earlier in the forest . In the original
version, Rusalka is allowed to join the prince in exchange for her voice.
Since this "curse" is natural to marionettes, Horejs's puppeteers had to find
some other way to make Rusalka's life among the people complicated. The
fish-tail-leg operation is carried out with verve and the simple-mindedness
of the Marx grotesque slapstick; two men dressed in black and
white bring t wo huge artificial limbs out onto the stage. To underline the
bizzarness of this picture, Rusalka's bloody fish-tail is thrown into a big glass
bowl representing a river, whose waters turn horribly red. The action is
complemented by a hopping Baba Yaga, doubled by a marionette on the
middle stage. Her appearance suggests that she has just escaped from a
Brazilian carnival. In her case, body language certainly stands in adequately
for speech. Clio Young, who was a circus clown for five years, creates the
old witch with elements of farcical vulgarity, pantomime, and transvestite
showmanship.
Since instructions about how to use the legs aren't part of the deal
with Baba Yaga, Rusalka finds herself struggling with the two new
unfamiliar body parts. Ironically, the body, which is now "made for love,"
becomes for the prince, in a metaphorical sense, invisible. At this point, the
81
Rusalka, the Little Rivermaid
atmosphere of farce changes to that of lyrical drama when Rusalka learns to
walk on crutches; it's as if Laura from Williams's Glass Menagerie suddenly
appeared on the stage. The nymph's sad awkwardness is accompanied by
her most famous aria from Dvorak, in which she asks the moon about her
beloved. This is delivered by a real opera diva, Lisa Kable, in a concert
setting seemingly indifferent to the fate of the clumsy marionette. The
relationship between the two-live singer and marionette-symbolizes that
of body and soul. While the body is paralyzed, the soul is still able to sing
clearly and beautifully.
From lyrical drama the production progresses to a pop-show, the
postmodern element in CAMT's production. The puppet prince is
representative of the artist formerly known as Prince. He betrays Rusalka
for a puppet Madonna, and shares the dance floor with a wooden Michael
Jackson on strings. These puppets, like all the most recent CAMT's
marionettes, were made by contemporary Prague carvers Vaclav Krbll and
J akub Krejcl.
In the realm of spirits, having that pair of stiff, out-of-service legs
isn't considered sufficient punishment for loss of human love. In the world
of nymphs and water spirits, only love or death counts in connection with
humans. Therefore, Rusalka is condemned to hover forever over the
swamplands as a spirit who lures humans to their death. The audience itself
is lured by a white, Pierrot-like mask, symbol of the will-o'-the-wisp, into
which has Rusalka turned. Here, the performance draws an imaginary arch:
the drowned puppet-mask of winter and death, known from the folk ritual
at the beginning, is resurrected in the symbolic form of a haunted spirit.
Thus, the fairy-tale evokes the existential fear that there is no escape. All
three different acting zones now disappear underneath a huge, mobile,
naively painted picture of a boat called Happy Oil, and with this shift the
curtain opens to reveal the full stage space transformed into a surrealistic
underwater world filled with the hanging debris of drowned human
existence: hats, chairs, a bicycle, a stuffed bear, a wheel, and various
marionettes. When the puppeteer Rolande M. Duprey places Rusalka down
in a swamp next to her drowned prince, the picture is complete.
The combination of marionettes and live actors creates more levels
of communication than either traditional puppet theatre or traditional
drama. Marionettes interact with each other while their "souls," represented
by actor-puppeteers, enact similar scenes on a physically higher level. For
example, while the puppets of the nymph and the prince try to get closer to
each other, the actors who manipulate them conduct a dialogue between
themselves. Within this framework, there is also dialogue between the
83
actor-puppeteer and her ward. When the prince is too shy to move closer
to Rusalka, his "colleague," puppeteer Theresa Linnihan, gets upset with
him and leaves him sitting on the river-side without help. What Horejs and
his company do is very familiar to those who remember how they explored
the world through a child's eyes and with the help of different kinds of toys.
It's play in the sense of children's play, a way to learn; the actor-puppeteers
play with their toy-marionettes, discovering new meanings for themselves
and those who are watching. The audience plays the role of the metaphoric
loving parent who is both amused and enlightened by the spontaneous
actions and imagery of the child-actor-puppeteer.
84
TESLA 'S LETTERS AT ENSEMBLE STUDIO THEATRE
In a small L-shaped black-box theatre, the audience sits awaiting
Tesla's Letters, a new play written by Jeffrey Stanley and directed by Curt
Dempster. This play is the mainstage production of "First Light," a festival
of new works created to explore "worlds of science and technology." This
festival is part of a three year, half-million dollar collaboration between
Ensemble StudioTheatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and press
material describes the project as one that will "commission, develop and
present new works related to scientific and technological issues and
characters."
As I sit only a few feet away from the stage, I take note of the
surrounding: a table and a few chairs, a small sofa and coffee table
surrounded by a large semi circular wall. Here, I think, is where they will
begin their exploration into the technological aspect of the collaboration.
Perhaps slides will be projected on this enigmatic space, perhaps it is a large
curved video screen. The suspense increases my interests in the production's
multi-media potential.
However, I soon realize that the press material is literal, the play is
simply related to issues of science and technology in content, and in no way
takes advantage of applications of technology itself. Although this is
disappointing to me, and perhaps a missed opportunity given the
predictability of the script, I nevertheless find myself wrapped up in the
content because of the real enigma of the production, Nikola Tesla, as well
as the performances by the small and talented cast, and the extraordinarily
timely nature of the material.
The audience gets a refresher course on the history of Yugoslavia
as a young, female Ph.D. candidate, Daisy Archer, played with strength and
determination by Keira Naughton, arrives at the Tesla museum in Belgrade
to do research for her dissertation. Her knowledge of history, politics, and
Tesla is repeatedly tested by the director of the museum Dragan Milincevic,
acted convincingly by Victor Slezak, in exchange for entry to the Tesla
collection. The play takes place in 1997, after the Serbian-Croatian conflict,
an irony not lost on the audience, and even after Daisy proves her
knowledge of history, Dragan insists that she prove herself further by
traveling to Croatia, ostensibly to photograph Tesla's house in the wake of
destruction of the village. The hidden objectives of each character soon
become apparent. Dragan's hope is that once Daisy witnesses the
85
destruction and death of what is actually also his family's village in Croatia,
she will somehow get the U.S. involved; Daisy strives to uncover
information about Tesla's secret "death ray," information for which she will
evidently do anything. It is here that the story breaks down a bit-if this
sort of "testing" and teasing were to actually happen, I doubt the exchange
would be as smooth and witty, or that such a strong willed a woman as
Daisy would sidle up to a stranger so flirtatiously. Nevertheless, as a plot
device it takes the audience down two quite interesting paths, one, a plea for
peace at whatever cost and the other, a glimpse at the little-known inventor
and "genius,"
1
Nikola Tesla.
Tesla, a Serb born in Croatia in 1856, has remained in relative
obscurity despite his notable record as scientist and inventor. The play
highlights Tesla's life, from rivalry with Thomas Edison over AC or DC
currents, to his supposed "death ray" invention (actually particle-beam
weapons), and status as a cult figure- from technological hero to subject of
a Japanese-based Internet cult seeking to rule the world.
2
Among the
inventions he is credited with are: the alternating-current (AC) polyphase
system, the Tesla coil transformer, the electric-power distribution system,
wireless communication, fluorescent lights, wireless communication, remote
control, and robotics-Tesla applied for a patent for a "telautomaton."
Tesla is a worthy subject for theatre and history to take up again, his
achievements vast and his life dramatic.
Whether or not T esla was a peaceful man is less crucial than the fact
that it provides playwright Stanley's characters with an strong underlying
tension and opposition. Daisy comes in pursuit of "death ray" information,
while Dragan and the museum administrator Biljana, who turns out to be
Dragan's mother, played by a wry Judith Roberts, are trying to preserve
Tesla's peace-keeping reputation as the;r fellow countryman. In an action-
filled sequence, Daisy is accompanied in Croatia (too easily I might add) by
Zoran Jelecic, the engaging Grant James Varjas, who-we find out later-is
Dragan's cousin, sent by him to assure Daisy's safety. Ultimately, Biljana
gives Daisy the secret letters that reveal Tesla's intentions for his weapon.
As expected, the experience has jolted her into an alternate mind set, and she
refuses the material, having learned that "you don't need a death ray to kill."
Despite the predictability of the action, the material presented was
interesting and timely. The history of Tesla as well as a brief history of the
centuries-long Balkan conflict provided an apt and compelling vehicle for a
discussion of peace. The First Light project was successful in their
exploration of scientific ideas on the page; perhaps they might also consider
ways in which to explore a practical, innovative technology on the stage.
87
NOTES
1. For an interesting biography see Marc]. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of
Nikola Tesla, Biography of a Genius, Secaucus: Birch Lane Press, 1996.
2. As an idea ofTesla's increasing popularity-on a simple Internet search his name
turned up over 3,000 results.
88
Slavic and East Performance Vol. 19, No.2
A HUNGARIAN FILM OF WOYZECK
Roger Hillman
Georg Buchner's celebrated play Woyzeck has been filmed a number
of times by German directors, most famously by Werner Herzog. His 1978
version featured the by then iconic Klaus Kinski as Woyzeck and Eva Mattes
as Marie, a role she had played on stage. His largely literal approach to the
subject matter contrasts strongly with a Hungarian film of 1994 made by
Janos Szasz, aged just thirty-six at the time of this, only his second feature
film. Upon release it won a clutch of prizes at the twenty-fifth Hungarian
Filmweek, but its distinctiveness far transcends the merely local. Szasz
transposes the story to a twentieth century setting, with Woyzeck himself
now working in a train marshaling yard, taking a highly imaginative
approach that nonetheless remains faithful to Buchner's conception.
Transfering dramatic material to a related yet distinct medium, Szasz's film
opens up new dimensions in the perennially modern, deceptively familiar
plot.
With Szasz, the words of the grandmother's tale-the bleak epitome
of the whole play-become the first words of the film. During the telling
of the tale the camera roves across the baby of Marie and W oyzeck, then
picks out a child (who plays something of the role of Andres as the only
person who relates to Woyzeck at all), and finally Woyzeck himself, alone
in his signal-box. This succession of images so early in the film creates a
strong sense of a fatalistic life-cycle, and the grandmother's tale functions as
a gloss on life across the generations. As positioned by Szasz, the tale makes
the gradual unfolding of the larger narrative even more Brechtian, signaling
from the outset the total isolation and orphaned state that lie ahead of the
baby.
The mise-en-scene is full of wisps of smoke or steam, emanations
of the t rainyard at a naturalistic level. But punctuating the infernal
industrial landscape towards the end, they almost give a foretaste of hell.
The accompanying sound effects, the clanking of train carriages being
marshaled, strongly suggest prison chains. This starkness is matched by the
abstract quality of the visuals, starting with the silhouette of Woyzeck's hut
looking like a sculpture of Don Quixote. In the opening sequence described
above, the pram with the crying baby is seen between the compressed
latticework of two sets of tracks and two converging carriages, the impact
of their buffers prefiguring this baby's life as one of hammer and anvil, with
no escape from the tightening frame of a threatened existence. Once we
89
overcome the disorientation of first seeing the buffers from an aerial view,
the starkness of their collision is reinforced (in subsequent long shots of the
train lines) by a strong sense of diagonals converging, the tracks as an ideal
metaphor for mental horizons. The unadorned music, repeated well beyond
this exposition, is a Purcell setting of the words "0 solitude, my sweetest
choice," whose aptness is admittedly obscured by the (intentional?) lack of
clarity of their rendition.
Szasz utilizes the camera, the soundtrack, and editing to create a
film that avoids all the pitfalls of a filmed stage performance, without letting
these formal aspects dominate at the expense of the original plot/script.
With regard to the soundtrack, it is somewhat surprising that Szasz (in this
respect like Herzog) makes no attempt to convey Woyzeck's acoustic point
of view with the cosmic subterranean voices the latter claims to hear in the
play.
1
His hypersensitivity to overwhelming natural phenomena beyond
the perception of normal people is a sign of his strong link to nature, an
aspect largely filtered out from the claustrophobic small town atmosphere
of this film setting, with the exception of the snowbound marshaling yards.
But a musical selection spanning Purcell, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater and Bach's
St. Matthew Passion functions almost like the internal voices in Buchner. A
kind of musical inner monologue, their lamentations accompany Woyzeck,
returning him for instance to the emptiness of his sentry box. This he
actually carries across the snow-covered tracks in one notable scene, a bowed
Sisyphus receding into the snowscape with his gigantic snail shell. The
music elevates his oppression into a cosmic wound. With Szasz, Woyzeck's
humiliation is not only present when he is directly confronted by the
Captain and Doctor, but also when his name is spat out and echoed over a
loudspeaker. With the source of his torment invisible but all-seeing, he can
be hunted down in any corner of the rail complex. Perhaps this is a
demystification of the voices Woyzeck claims to be haunted by in the play.
Elsewhere a different source of torment is rendered invisible
through being too dazzling to contemplate. In the crucial scene in Marie's
chamber (undoubtedly an allusion to Goethe's Gretchen in the Abend scene,
loath and yet flattered to receive Mephistopheles's gift of jewelry on Faust's
behalf), Szasz is able to draw on close-up effects not available to play
versions. Where Herzog had used a shot/counter-shot technique for this
scene, as if there were a real split between source and image of a mirror
reflection, Szasz generates yet more tension by using a cracked mirror in the
first place, and then having Marie taunt Woyzeck with blinding light
reflected straight into his eyes. With this extra touch he is able to go beyond
the dimension of individual psychology (here a character divided) to the
social environment, with the poverty of their tawdry surroundings
naturalistically emphasized. Szasz manages to sustain this dual thrust ,
combining the twin axes of Buchner's play, throughout the film.
This Woyzeck is shot very intelligently in black and white, with an
extremely dark atmosphere occasionally relieved by the striking contrast of
snow. The indoors sequences of Herzog's film had an almost painterly
quality, a sense of a period piece, but with Szasz there is an indefinable East
Bloc feel of drabness and of the machinations of bureaucracy having gone
haywire. In Buchner (to whom Herzog remained faithful) the fairground
scene had seen the anticipation of biological Darwinism. Szasz's setting
replaces this strand with an overwhelming sense of social Darwinism. On
the other hand, Szasz's film is never reducible to a lament for the wrongs of
a past system, nor does his Woyzeck have anything to do with positive
heroes of the Socialist Realism mold. In this it stands out against the
wrangling with a new, as yet unassimilated order in Emma and Bobe,
directed by his celebrated compatriot Istvan Szabo. Settings of time and
place are almost indecipherable with Szasz, beyond a twentieth-century
story located in a marshaling yard for trains that go somewhere, somewhere
else.
The ineffectual, flag-waving figure of Woyzeck is frequently effaced
by a train crossing in front of him, or else if interposed between train and
viewer, he is shot from behind, so that his activity seems senseless, never
conveying directness, let alone sovereignty. This is solely a result of
dramatic shaping and not of casting, as Szasz's Woyzeck (played by Lajos
Kovacs) is a physically far more imposing figure than Herzog's Kinski. Yet
for all his stature he is frequently dwarfed by the industrial landscape of the
rail yards. The strength of his frame is transmitted to one notable twist in
the plot where, with blessedly obscured visuals but, far worse, a suggestive
nick on the soundtrack, he slits the throat of the Captain-figure while
shaving him, a scene gauged with horrifying precision. This extension of
Buchner's plot immediately precedes the fateful walk with Marie to the
pond (here more of an industrial slagheap, with the cratered landscape
almost a materialization of the moon mentioned in the Grandmother's tale).
The Captain's fate is a significant departure from the original text, and yet
it is a sign of Szasz's dramatic grasp that it seems an organic component of
the plot, and increases viewer complicity in probably increasing compassion
for the murderer, while simultaneously locating him outside the pale of
society. The director runs the associated risk of diminishing the effect of
Marie's death, but that too is avoided, and the rapid succession of the two
killings in fact synthesizes that dual psychological and social thrust
91
mentioned above, as Woyzeck's endurance cracks at both levels. Along
with other departures from the original, this choice by the film director gels
into a structured total vision, so that such changes as there are from
Buchner's text do not seem piecemeal.
On two occasions towards the end of the film we encounter an
instance of self-referentiality of the medium itself when the tide-figure casts
wholly Expressionist shadows on the wall. These breach the otherwise
largely naturalistic tone, which typifies the film but for a couple of slow-
motion shots, the sole examples of self-conscious camera movements. The
shadows also jarringly magnify the more naturally proportioned shadows
cast by Woyzeck shortly before, when he had pushed the baby carriage
home to the discovery of Marie and her new lover in t he act of lovemaking.
Szasz avoids the anachronism of duplicating the drum major's part by
having a local police officer as Woyzeck's rival for Marie. Marie herself
(Diana Vacaru) provides a far more physical presence and performance than
that of Herzog's Eva Mattes, and she is characterized as being more defiant
and less remorseful.
The further reference to cinema history with the second shadow
effect is not designed to locate temporally this almost un-datable film action,
but to draw on the overtones of such expressive distortion in the direction
of psychological skewing, of the breakdown of normal patterns and
contours. It directly evokes Cesare about to commit murder in The Cabinet
of Dr Caligari, but in a broader sense is akin to the canting of the camera in
The Third Man or The Conformist to convey a world out of kilter, and in
particular to herald the entry on stage of arch villains, Harry Lime and
Manganiello.
Through the final tableau of the wretched, huddled figures of
Woyzeck and Marie, Szasz completes the arch of their passion, which has
become their Passion. Their estrangement was sealed early in the film when
Woyzeck placed his head on Marie's shoulder, nuzzled against her, and then
tried to force himself upon her, which she repelled, threatening him with a
knife and saying she would rather die. At the end, with Marie's head on the
shoulder of a pensive but determined W oyzeck, he stabs her to
death-indeed her whole intervening behavior can in this light be read as
something of a death wish.
Buchner viewed the historical dramatist as bound in material to
historical reality but as remolding that reality in artistic form.
2
In this
fragmentary play about a fragmented, historically documented life-an
existential montage in itself-he effected the transformation of local history
into universal myth. Alongside its strengths, the Herzog film tends to
92
SlavicandEastEuropeanPerformanceVol. 19, No.2
reduce this broader thrust through its period costume-drama quality. Szasz's
controlled suggestiveness through wholly filmic devices provides a
persuasive vision of Buchner's figure and his world. It also announces a
distinctive presence, already a remarkably assured one, on the Hungarian
film scene.
NOTES
1. In a rich analysis of Buchner's play in terms of stagecraft, Michael Ewans makes
a persuasive case for these sounds being heard by W oyzeck alone in stage
productions. See Michael Ewans, Georg Buchner's 'Woyzeck ': Translation and
Theatrical Commentary (New York eta!., 1989), 77.
2. See his letter to his family, written from Strasbourg and dated July 28, 1835. In
Georg Buchner, Werke und Briefe, Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag Gcsamtausgabe, Jrd
edition {Munich, 1968), 181.
93
CONTRIBUTORS
NAT ALIA CHECHEL is a lecturer, theatre historian, playwright and
theatre critic affiliated with the Karpenko-Kary Institute for the Art of the
Theatre in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of The Ukrainian Theatrical
Renaissance (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1993) and many articles on Ukrainian
and world theatre.
MEL GORDON is Professor of Theatre Arts at University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of seven books on French, German, Italian, and
Russian theatre and the forthcoming Voluptuous Panic: the Erotic World of
Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1999).
ROGER HILLMAN is Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Classical and
Modern European Languages, and Art History and Visual Studies at the
Australian National University, Canberra. He convenes and teaches in the
Film Studies Program as well as teaching courses in German literature and
civilization. Recent publications include co-editing Fields of Vision: Essays in
Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography (California, 1995).
BLANKA KRiv ANKOV A is a student in the Graduate Program of Theatre
Studies at Charles University, Prague. She has been an exchange student at
the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and a CASTA Fellow
in the Ph.D. Theatre Program at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York.
DARIA KRIZHANSKAYA holds her MFA degrees in theatre history,
dramaturgy, and criticism both from St. Petersburg Theatre Academy and
Yale School of Drama. She has published in Russian and American
magazines and newspapers, such as TheatreForum, Theatre History Studies,
Boston Courier, New York Seasons, Petersburg Theatre Magazine, and Treble
Clef She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation at Yale School
of Drama.
SONJA KUFTINEC teaches theatre history, theory and social change at the
University of Minnesota. She also works actively as a director and
dramaturg, creating theatre with youth in Bosnia since 1995. She has
published articles on her work and on community-based theatre in Theater
journal, Theater Topics, Text and Performance Quarterly, journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism, The Brecht Yearbook, and Theater InSight.
94
LARS MYERS is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
JENNIFER PARKER STARBUCK teaches in the Fine and Performing
Arts Department at Baruch College and is a doctoral student in the Ph.D.
Program in Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York.
ELISABETH RICH is an Associate Professor of Russian Language and
Literature at Texas A&M University. Her articles and reviews have
appeared in Ihe Nation, Ihe Washington Post, and Civilization/The Magazine
of the Library of Congress. She has also published extensively on
contemporary Russian literature in Moscow and American scholarly
journals.
I.1mto.. Credits
Victor Rozov
Courtesy of Elisabeth Rich
From Night Till Noon
From Nine Modern Soviet Plays,
compiled and prefaced by Victor Komissarzhevsky
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977
V!t Horejs and Puppets
Orlando Mara
The Forest
Alexander Margolin
Caligula
V. Vasiliev
Fighting Fences
Scot McElvany
Mikhoels Photos
Courtesy of Mel Gordon
95
Rusalka, the Little Rivermaid
Jan Frank
Tesla's Letters
Carol Rosegg
96
PUBliCATIONS
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):
Sovi:t 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 Taborski, Michal Kobialka,
and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C.
Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and Catalog
by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
CAST A-THEATRE PROGRAM
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
365 5TH A VENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10016-4307
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:--;u\v in its 15th year, this joumal. edited hy Daniel Gerould,
hrings readers lively, authoritative accounts or drama, theatre, and
tilm in Russia and Eastern Europe. Includes features on important
new rlays in rcrt"ormance, archival documents, innovative
[ln>ductions. significant revivals, emerging artists, the latest in
i"ilm. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Puhlishcd three
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