SEEP Vol.25 No.3 Fall 2005

volume 25, no.
3
Fall2005
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and
East European Peiformance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Margaret Araneo
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Carly Smith
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Louise Lytle McKay
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Kim Sandberg
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen]. Kuharski
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that desire to
reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared in SEEP may
do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must
be furnished to the editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Daniel Gerould
DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS
Frank Hentschker
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION
Jan Stenzel
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants from
the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre of the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 2005 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No.3
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
IN MEMORIAM
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Jarka Burian, 1927-2005"
ARTICLES
"Sergei Artsybashev: The New Stanislavsky?
The Rise of a Post-Soviet Russian Director"
Elisabeth Rich
"Unraveling the Gordian Knot:
The Transformation of Czech Theatre Organization
and Financing in the Twenty-First Century"
Stepan Simek
"Oleg Menshikov: Daring To Be Different"
Olga Muratova
"An Interview with Oleg Menshikov"
Helene Lemeleva
REVIEWS
"Mrozek's Serenade and Philosopher Fox"
Arnie! Melnick
5
6
7
14
16
22
45
56
69
78
3
"Bard SummerScape 2004:
Shostakovich and His World"
Mary Keelan
"When Americans Play Czechs:
Svejk Off Broadway"
Veronika Tuckerova
"Off the Rails:
Witkiewicz's Crazy Locomotive
by the Trap Door Theatre Company"
Kevin Byrne
89
102
111
4 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 25, No.3
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 with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and
film; with new approaches to older materials in recently published works;
or with 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 that
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Transliterations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as Word 97 Documents for Windows and a hard copy
of the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all
reviews. All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East
European Peiformance, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified
after approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Peiformance by visiting our website at http/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProOuest Information and Learning as
abstracts online via r o ~ e s t information service and the
International Index to the Performing Arts.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are
members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
Volume 25, no. 3 of SEEP opens with a tribute to the noted
authority on Czech theatre, Jarka Burian (1927-2005), who died suddenly on
August 25. An outstanding scholar and theatre artist, as well as a close friend
and valued colleague, Jarka contributed eight articles to our journal over the
past two decades. IN MEMORIAM gives a sketch of his career and indicates
the importance of his life work. The issue itself is devoted to Czech, Russian,
and Polish theatre. First Elisabeth Rich paints a vivid picture of the Russian
director Sergei Artsybashev and indicates his unique position in post-Soviet
theatrical life. Then in the second of two articles on the material conditions
of current Czech theatre, Stepan Simek analyzes the transition to new
methods of organization and financing. There follows a pair of articles on
the Russian actor and director Oleg Menshikov. Olga Muratova gives an
overview of Menshikov's career both on stage and in film, followed by
Helene Lemeleva's interview with the artist during his recent visit to New
York to direct Gogel's Gamblers. In a series of reviews, we cover a wide variety
of performances in New York City and environs. Arnie! Melnick discusses
two of Mrozek's animal fables as produced by the East River Commedia
Company; Mary Keelan surveys the Shostakovich Festival at Bard College in
Annandale-on-Hudson; Veronika Tuckerova considers a British stage
adaptation of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, which appeared Off
Broadway; and Kevin Byrne takes the measure of a Crazy Locomotive from
Chicago that steamed into the New York International Fringe Festival.
6 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No. 3
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
THALATTA! Theatre International, in association with the Play
Company and the New Group, presented a staged reading of Playing the
Victim by the Presnyakov Brothers, directed by Ari Edelson and performed
at the Clurman Theatre on June 20.
The Wooster Group presented the New York premiere of Poor
Theatre, compiled from a range of source materials, including Jerzy
Grotowski and the Polish Laboratory Theatre, directed by Elizabeth
LeCompte at the Performing Garage from September 14 to October 15.
The Currency 2005 International Festival of Performance included
performance art by Denis Romanovski, Jan Swidzinski, Artur Tajber, Uto
Gusztav, Nenad Bogdonovic, Juhasz Josef, and Vassya Vassileva from
October 6 to October 15 at chashama.
The Czech Center New York and the Jewish Repertory Theater
presented a staged reading of The Unlucky Man in the Yellow Cap by J.R. Pick,
directed by Marcy Arlin, at Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Auditorium, JCC
Manhattan, on October 27.
Yuri Kuklachev's Moscow Cats Theatre, which features acrobatics,
clowning, and trained animals, performed at the Tribeca Performing Arts
Center from September 16 to October 30.
The Wierszalin Theatre's production of Saint Oedipus, written and
directed by Piotr T omaszuk, based on the Gesta Romanorum, Polish folklore,
and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and The Chosen, was performed at La
MaMa from October 13 to 30.
On November 11, at the Bohemia National Hall, Pavel Zednicek
and Jana Paulova, playing in Czech, appeared in Bez Pfedsudku (Orgasmo e
Pregiudizio), written by Diego Ruiz and Fiona Bettanini.
7
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
United States Regional
Hand2Mouth Theatre in collaboration with Teatr Stacja Szamocin,
from Szamociny, Poland, presented the first annual Neighborhood
Performance Project, performing BLUE, a large-scale outdoor performance
piece, to neighborhoods throughout Portland, Oregon, from August 20 to
September 29.
Hungarian actor, director, and producer Tibor Varszegi performed
a one-man show at the University of Toledo from September 26 to
October 3.
The Song of the Goat Theatre Company (T eatr Pidn Kozla)
presented Chronicles: A Lamentation, based on the ancient Sumerian poem
"The Epic of Gilgamesh," directed by Grzegorz Bra! at the Freud Playhouse
in Los Angeles from October 12 to 16. For a recent review, see SEEP 24,
no. 2.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International
The Edinburgh International Fringe Festival 2005 Theatre Preview
ran from August 14 to September 3 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and included a
production of Chekhov's Seagull, performed in Hungarian with English
subtitles, by Kretakor Szfnhaz of Budapest, Hungary, directed by Arpad
Schilling, from August 19 to 22.
The Forteenth Divadelnd Nitra International Theatre Festival was
held from September 23 to September 28 in Nitra, Trnava, and Bratislava,
Slovakia. The festival highlighted new work by contemporary European
playwrights. The following plays were performed as part of the main
program:
8
BA CKland, an ensemble piece created by the performers Anna
Veress, Andras ]eli, Mark Moldavi, Arpad Schilling, and Istvan
T asnadi, directed by Arpad Schilling. Presented by Kretakor Szfnhaz
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No.3
of Budapest, Hungary, in co-production with The Valley of the Arts
and Millenaris, at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on
September 23.
Ignorant and a Fool by Thomas Bernhard, directed by Jan Antonin
Pitiinsry, presented by the Drama Ensemble of the Slovak National
Theatre at the Old Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on September 24.
Tiso by Rastislav Ballek, directed by the author, presented by the
Arena Theatre of Bratislava, Slovakia, at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in
Nitra, Slovakia, on September 24.
norway.today by Igor Bauersima, directed by Vladislava Kekete, at
the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on September 25.
Renata Kalenskd, Lidovi Noviny by Jan Antonfn PitfinskY and cast
members, directed by Jan Antonin Pitiinsky, presented by
HaCompany of Brno, Czech Republic, at the J. Palarik Theatre,
Trnava, Slovakia, on September 26.
POWERPOINTby Luke Wright, Ross Sutherland, and Chris Hicks,
directed by the authors, presented by Aisle 16 of Colchester, UK, at
the Old Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on September 25.
Trading (original title: Erreger) by Albert Ostermaier, directed by
Anja Susa, presented by the Belgrade Drama Theatre of Belgrade,
Serbia and Montenegro, at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra,
Slovakia, on September 26.
Big in Bombay by Constanza Macras, directed by the author and
presented by Schaubiihne am Lehniner Platz of Berlin, Germany, in
co-production with Sophiensaele, Schauspielhaus Wien, and T eatro
Comunale di Ferrara, at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia,
on September 26.
The Beauty Queen if Leenane by Martin McDonagh, directed by
Michal Vajdicka and presented by the State Theatre of Kosice,
Slovakia, at the Old Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on September 27.
9
Made in Poland by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek and presented by Teatr
Modjeska of Legnica, Poland, at Matica Slovenska House in Nitra,
Slovakia, on September 27.
Part One- Fiuk/Boys (The Hidden Men) and Part Two- Csajok/Chicks
(Credo Hysterica), a dance piece choreographed by Pal Frenak and
presented by Compagnie Pal Frenak of Paris, France, at the Andrej
Bagar Theatre in Nitra, Slovakia, on September 28.
Entre Nous, a performance piece by Sergei Letov based on texts by
Eugene Ionesco, Daniil Kharms, Valer Novarina, various Medieval French
plays, and Petrushka, directed by Cristophe Feutrier, was performed at
Theatre Chelovek in Moscow, Russia, on September 27.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK, presented the
following two performance pieces by XL LM Slovenia:
Miss Mobile, described as a "cross between a talk show, quiz,
multimedia art and visual installation," conceived by Emil Hvratin,
from October 7 to 8.
The Corridor by Matjaz ZupanCic, directed by the playwright, from
October 10 to 15.
Bosnian Muslim director Haris Pasovic's post 9/11 version of
Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed at the National Theatre in Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, on September 14.
FILM
New York City
Midwinter Night's Dream, directed by Goran Paskaljevich, was
presented as part of the 2005 Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival at the Walter Reade Theatre on June 10 and 12.
Yara Arts Group screened at La MaMa a documentary by Amy
Grappell about the group's 1991 performance of A Light from the East, in
Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union, on July 29.
Knife in the Water, directed by Roman Polanski, was presented by the
Museum of the Moving Image and Partnerships for Parks at the Socrates
Sculpture Park in Long Island City on August 3.
1 AM, directed by Dorota was presented as part of
the New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on September 27 and 29.
Something Like Happiness, directed by Bohdan Slama, was presented
as part of the New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on September 29
and October 1.
Solidarity, directed by Eva Nagorski, was presented as part the New
York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on October 5 and 6.
The Fifth Annual Russian Film Week in New York was held from
October 14 to 19 and included the following films:
Roots, directed by Pavel Lounguine, presented at the DGA Theatre
in Manhattan on October 14 and the Kent Theatre in Brooklyn on
October 15.
Time to Gather Stones, directed by Alexei Karelin, presented at the
DGA Theatre on October 15, 16, and 18.
Runaway Skidding, directed by Georgy Shengeliya, presented at
the DGA Theatre on October 15 and at the Kent Theatre on
October 16.
Counselor of State, directed by Philipp Yankovsky, presented at the
DGA Theatre on October 15.
Not by Bread Alone, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin, presented at
the DGA Theatre on October 15 and 19.
From 180 and Higher, directed by Alexander Strizhenov, presented at
the DGA Theatre on October 15 and 18.
The Italian, directed by Andrei Kravchuk, presented at the DGA
11
Theatre on October 16 and at the Kent Theatre on October 17.
Escape, directed by Yegor Konchalovsky, presented at the DGA
Theatre on October 16 and 18.
Dreaming of Space, directed by Alexei Uchitel, presented at the DGA
Theatre on October 19.
From November 3 to November 6, BAMcinematek and the Czech
Center New York presented the New Czech Films-Film Festival, curated by
Irena Kovarova. The following films were screened:
Bitter Coffee (Silnj kafe), direct ed by Borkur Gunnarsson,
November 3.
Up and Down (Horempddem), directed by Jan Hrebejk, November 4.
Q & A with Jan Tflska.
Champions (Mistfi), directed by Marek Najbrt, November 5.
Q & A with Marek Najbrt.
Czech Dream {Ceskj sen), directed by Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda,
November 5.
Vaterland: A Hunting Logbook (Vaterland-Loveckj dem'k), directed by
David Jafab, November 6.
Landscape of My Heart {Krajina meho srdce), directed Jan Nemec,
November 6.
FILM
International
The Fortieth Annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was
held in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, from July 3 to July 8 and included
the following highlights:
12
Ragin, an adaptation of Chekhov's Ward 6, directed by K.irill
Serebrennikov, presented July 3 and 4.
The Wedding, directed by Wojtek Smarzowski, presented July 3
and 4.
My Nikifor, directed by Krzysztof Krauze, presented July 5 and 6.
The City of the Sun, directed by Martin Sulik, presented July 6 and 7.
The Ruins, directed by Janez Burger, presented July 7 and 8.
My God, directed by Galina Adamovich, presented July 7 and 8.
Compiled by Carly Smith
13
BOOKS RECEIVED
Contemporary Theatre Review 15, no. 1 (February 2005). Special issue. Polish
Theatre after 1989: Beyond Borders. Guest editors: Paul Allain and
Grzegorz Ziolkowski. 187 pages (145 devoted to the special feature).
Contains 11 articles, including Dobrochna Ratajczakowa, "In Transition:
1989- 2004," Leszek Kolanlciewicz, "Kantor's Last Tape," Paul Allain,
"Grotowski's Last Ghosts," Alison Hodge, "Gardzienice's Influence in the
West," Kathleen Cioffi, "New (and Not-So-New} Alternatives," Jacek
Kopcinski, "Directors' Solos: Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krzysztof
Warlikowski," Tamara Trojanowska, "New Discourses in Drama," Elwira
M. Grossman, "Who's Afraid of Gender and Sexuality? Plays by Women,"
Grzegorz Niziolek, "Krystian Lupa: The Double and Utopia," Pia Partum,
"Andrzej Seweryn: Mystery and Discipline," and Beata Guczalska, "Jan
Kott: His Own Witness," plus an editorial, short chronology of social and
political events in Poland (1989-2004), and Polish Drama and Theatre: A
Select Bibliography in English. Many photographs.
Czech Theatre 21 Oune 2005), Theatre Institute Prague. 67 pages. Contains
9 articles, including Marie Reslova, "Zabradlf after Ubl," "Viktor
Kronbauer Photographs the Theatre," and Roman Vasek, "How They
Ballet in Bohemia," as well as an editorial and notebook. Many
photographs. All articles in English.
Subscription: Divadelnf ustav, Celetna 17, 110 00 Praha I, Czech Republic
fax 00420 2232 6100, email: publik@divadlo.cz
Dqbrowska, Emilia. Sztuka albo zycie: Estetyka modernistyczna 'Jedynego
wyjfcia" Stanislawa lgnacego Witkiewicza. Modernizm w Polsce. Maly
Format. Vol. 2. Cracow: Universitas, 2005. 198 pages. Includes a
bibliography, index of subjects, index of names, and short summary in
English.
Filipiak, lzabela. Ksifga Em. Warsaw: doM wYdawniczy tCHu, 2005. 250
pages. A play in four parts with a prologue. Based on the life and work of
the poet Maria Komornicka (1876-1949). Includes a foreword by Elwira
Grossman and an afterword, "Moje zycie z Mariq," by the author.
Koniggratz, Samuel. I'm Still Alive, with a Coatrack, a Cap, and a Signal Disc.
New Czech Play, Vol. 3. Trans. Alex Zucker. Prague: Theatre Institute,
2004. 54 pages.
Sobolczyk, Piotr. Tadeusza Micinskiego podr6t do Hiszpanii. Torun:
Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek, 2005. 264 pages. Includes an appendix,
bibliography, seven illustrations, and index of names.
T olstoi, V.P. Agitmassovoe iskusstvo Sovetskoi Rossii: Materialy i Dokumenty.
Agitpoezda i agitparokhody. Peredvizhnoi teatr. Politicheskii plakat. 1918-1932.
Vols. 1 and 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 2002. 299 and 246 pages. Vol.l contains
three introductory essays by the editors, documents, bibliography, list of
illustrations, and index of names. Vol. 2 contains over 600 illustrations,
many of them in color.
Wojtowicz, Agnieszka. Od Oifeusza do Studium o Hamlecie: Teatr 13 Rzfd6w w
Opolu (1959-1964). Wrodaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrodawskiego,
2004. 273 pages. Part One contains chapters on Orpheus, Cain, Mystery-
Bouffi, Forifathers' Eve, Kordian, Acropolis, The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus, and The Hamlet Study. Part Two contains documents, letters, and
interviews. Includes a bibliography, bibliographical note, ten-page summary
in English, index of names, and list of illustrations. Eighty-five photographs,
posters, and sketches.
15
IN MEMORIAM
JARKA M. BURIAN
1927-2005
Jarka Burian was the leading authority on Czech theatre in the
English-speaking world. His many books and articles were meticulously
researched, elegantly written, and full of a mature understanding and deep
love for the beauty and subtlety of Czech theatre, and of admiration for
the artistry and daring of its creators. He was equally at home explaining
the technical aspects of scene design or the intricacies of the literary text,
and he was always acutely aware of the complex and often troubled
relations between Czech theatre and its political, social, and cultural
context. A professional actor and director, Jarka wrote about Czech theatre
not simply as a scholar but as a witness, participant, and deeply engaged
friend of Czech artists and their world. For this reason his writings bring
Czech theatre alive and recreate for the reader the excitement that he
himself had experienced at many of the landmark theatrical events of the
last half century.
Jarka was born in Passaic, New Jersey, of Czech parents. He
graduated from Rutgers University in 1949, received his MA in
Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 1950, and his Ph.D.
from Cornell University in English Literature in 1955. He served in the
United States Army in 1949-50 and 1951-52. While acting in an Off-
Broadway production, he met his future wife, Grayce Susan DeLeo; they
were married in 1952.
In 1955 Jarka began teaching at the State University of New York
at Albany (when it was the State College for Teachers), becoming Full
Professor in 1963. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1992.
He was Producer-Director of the SUNY Albany Arena Summer
Stage for eight seasons. He directed many productions for the theatre
department, most notably Strindberg's Dream Play in 1980, for which his
friend Josef Svoboda came from Prague and created the stage design. Over
the years, Jarka and Grayce acted and directed in community theatre, for
six summers, appearing in the outdoor drama of the Cherokee in North
Carolina, Into These Hills. After his retirement, Jarka continued teaching
and directing as a visiting professor. In the fall of 1998, Jarka and Grayce
Burian received a regional arts award from the Albany-Schenectady League
of Arts for their lifetime contributions.
Jarka Burian
Jarka was a champion master swimmer, winning hundreds of
ribbons and medals throughout his life. He died on August 25, 2005 of a
brain hemorrhage shortly after swimming. He is survived by Grayce, his wife
of fifty-four years.
A celebration to honor and remember Jarka will be held at the
SUNY Albany Downtown Campus on January 28, 2006 from 1:00 to 4:00
P.M. If you wish to be one of the speakers, please contact Gary Maggio at
518.438.7579, or by e-mail at gmagikman@aol.com.
17
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JARKA BURIAN'S WRITINGS
ON CZECH THEATRE.
BOOKS
The Scenography ofjosefSvoboda. Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1974.
Svoboda: Wagner: josef Svoboda's Scenography for Richard Wagner's Operas.
Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1983.
Translator and editor. The Secret of Theatrical Space by Josef Svoboda. New
York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993.
Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2000.
Leading Creators ofTwentieth-Century Czech Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002.
ARTICLES
(Those appearing in SEEP are marked with an asterisk.)
"Theatre in Czechoslovakia." Drama Survey 6, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1967):
93- 104.
"European Newsletters: Prague." Plays and Players 16, no. 6 (March 1969):
45- 46; 16, no. 8 (May 1969): 58- 59; 16, no. 11 (August 1969): 61-62; 18, no.
2 (September 1971): 60.
"Theatre in Prague." The Village Voice. 21 August 1969: 15-16, 19.
'josef Svoboda: Theatre Artist in an Age of Science." Educational Theatre
journa/22, no. 2 (May 1970): 123-145.
"Art and Relevance: The Small Theatres ofPrague, 1958-1970." Educational
Theatre]ourna/25, no. 3 (May 1971): 229-257.
"Otomar Krejca's Use of the Mask." Drama Review 16, no. 3 (September
1972): 48-56.
"Post-War Drama in Czechoslovakia." Educational Theatre }ournal25, no. 3
(October 1973): 299-317.
"Scenography in Czech Theatre, 1920- 1939." Theatre Design and Technology
41 (Summer 1975): 14-23, 35; 42 (Fall1975): 23-32.
"A Scenographer's Work: Josef Svoboda's Designs, 1971-1975." Theatre
Design and Technology 12, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 11-34.
"E.F. Burian: D33- D41." The Drama Review 20, no. 4 (December 1976):
95-116.
"The Liberated Theatre ofVoskovec and Werich." EducationalTheatre}ournal
29, no. 2 (May 1977): 153-75.
"The Scenography of Ladislav Vychodil." Theatre Design and Technology 15,
no. 2 (Summer 1979): 8-17.
"Alfred Radok's Contribution to Post-War Czech Theatre." Theatre Survey 22,
no. 2 (November 1981): 213-28.
"K.H. Hilar and the Early Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre." Theatre journal
34, no. 1 (March 1982): 55-76.
"High Points of Theatre in the First Czechoslovak Republic." Modern Drama
27, no. 1 (March 1984): 98-111.
"Aspects of Central European Design." The Drama Review 28, no. 2 (Summer
1984): 47-65.
"Prazske poznamky pro meho americkeho kolegu" [Notes from Prague to my
American colleague). Dramaticki Umlni [Dramatic Art] 4 (1988): 89-91.
''Josef Svoboda and Latema Magika's Latest Productions." Theatre Design and
Technology 24, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 17-27.
"Czech Theatre, 1988: Neo-Giasnost and Perestroika." Theatrejourna/41, no.
3 (October 1989): 381-395.
19
"Designing for the 90s." Cue Internationa/62 (November/December 1989):
32-37. About Czech designers Jaroslav Malina and Jan Dusek.
Havel: From Playwright to President: Notes and Recollections."
Soviet and East European Performance 9, no. 2- 3 (Fall 1989): 12- 19.
"Havel and the Velvet Revolution." American Theatre 6 (March 1990): 38-40.
"The Not So Velvet Fallout of Prague's Velvet Revolution." Theatre Three
10/11 (1991): 65- 75.
"Notes from Abroad: Krejca's Voice Is Heard Again in Prague." American
Theatre Gune 1991): 36- 37.
"Ciller and fdek: Two Expressive Minimalists." Theatre Design and Technology
28, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 33-38.
"Hamlet in Postwar Czech Theatre." In Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary
Performance, ed. D. Kennedy. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993.
195- 210.
*"Grossman, Machacek, Schorm: The Loss of Three Major Czech Directors
of the Late Twentieth Century." Slavic and East European Performance 13, no.
3 (Fall 1993): 27-30.
'josef Svoboda: Working into the Nineties. Theatre Design and Technology 30,
no. 5 (Fall1994): 37- 45.
"Notes from Abroad: Cloudy Forecast for New Prague Spring." American
Theatre (December 1994): 76-77.
''"Prague Theatre Four Years after the Velvet Revolution." Slavic and East
European Performance 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 14-26.
"The Dark Era in Modern Czech Theatre: 1948-1950." Theatre History Studies
15 (1995): 41-66.
"Prague's Stavovske Theatre: Its Background and Renovation." Theatre Design
and Technology 31, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 36- 46.
''"Vaclav Havel's Notable Encounters in His Early Theatrical Career." Slavic
and East European Performance 16, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 13-29.
"Two Women and Their Contribution to Contemporary Czech
Scenography." Theatre Design and Technology 32, no. 5 (Fall1996): 19- 29. On
Marta Roszkopfova and Jana Zbofilova.
"Laterna Magika as a Synthesis of Theatre and Film: Its Evolution and
Problematics." Theatre History Studies 17 (1997): 33- 62.
"Svoboda's Scenography for Faust: Evolution in the Use of Mirrors." Theatre
Design and Technology 34, no. 5 (Fall 1998): 34- 41
*"Three Young Czech Directors: Facets of Czech Theatre on the Cusp of the
Millenium."Slavic and East European Performance 19, no. 1 (Spring 1999):
14- 31.
*"Petr Lebl: May 1965- December 1999." Slavic and East European Performance
20, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 16-23.
"Josef Svoboda's Scenography for the National Theatre's 1997 Production of
Goethe's 'Faust': Postmodern or Merely Contemporary?" In Space and the
Postmodern Stage, ed. Irene Eynat-Confino and Eva Sormova. Prague: Theatre
Institute, 2000. 28- 35.
*"Pages from the Past: Meyerhold's 1936 Visit to Prague." Slavic and East
European Performance 21, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 34-48.
*"Josef Svoboda, 1920-2002: Some Retrospective Comments on His Life
and Career." Slavic and East European Performance 22, no. 2 (Summer 2002):
13-26.
We will publish in our next issue Jarka Burian's last essay, "The Adventures
ofVoskovec and Werich in America."
21
SERGEI ARTSYBASHEV: THE NEW STANISLAVSKY?
THE RISE OF A POST-SOVIET RUSSIAN DIRECTOR!
Elisabeth T. Rich
"Ladies and gentlemen! We invite you to come and spend the
evening with us ... Let's dream; let's philosophize ... For
dinner there will be roasted turkey, a sweet pie with apples, tasty
liqueur. We will drink a little glass of wine ... We live without
ceremony; everything is our own."2
All Russian directors, of course, strive to bring a unique and
compelling interpretation to their staging of Chekhov's Tri sestry (Three
Sisters)- one of the most widely performed plays on the Russian and world
stage in the last century despite its designation by the playwright as a drama
with "a spirit more gloomy than gloom itself"3 The legendary Russian
director Anatoly Efros, for example, produced a version of Three Sisters at
the Theatre on Malaya Bronnaya in 1967 that did nothing less than "sum
up the very sensation of theatre" for an entire generation.4 In accordance
with Chekhov's play, Efros began his production with Irina Prozorov's
name-day party; however, instead of a violin or a traditional Russian dance-
song or a waltz from that particular period playing offstage (as in the
original), the audience at Efros's production listened to a popular waltz
from the 1960s-a waltz from the Czech film Obchod na korze (The Shop on
Main Street, 1965), co-directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos- and watched
the actors dance to it (at the suggestion of the actor playing the role of
Tuzenbach, an army lieutenant, who, stationed in the area, is a frequent
guest of the Prozorovs). In this way, Efros achieved what is commonly
regarded as every stage director's principal objective: by having Chekhov's
people dance to a sixties hit, he "immediately dissolved the historical
distance between them and the audience and established a friendly trust in
what was going on."S But Sergei Artsybashev- a director and actor who
emerged as a leading director in the post-Soviet era after working with Efros
at the Taganka Theatre in the mid-1980s-ingeniously took this theatrical
ploy to a greater extreme in his Moscow production of Three Sisters, which
he first staged in 1991. In an effort to make the spectators "co-creators" (his
words), Artsybashev began his production ofChekhov's play by inviting the
Sergei Artsybashev
23
audience to take part in the name-day celebration festivities, side by side
with the actors. 6
"When you come to my production of Three Sisters," Artsybashev
told me during one of our conversations in Moscow, "you come upon a
festively prepared hall, a small room with a table that can seat a great number
of people and that is covered with candles, flowers, champagne, and apple
pie-just like in Chekhov's play; and you quickly realize that you have come
to Irina's name-day party. You have only just walked in, and the actors invite
you to sit at the table, where they pour you a glass of champagne and bring
you some pie.7 Then you begin to congratulate Irina; you begin to sing
'Happy Birthday to You.' It is necessary to create such an atmosphere so that
the spectators want to stand up and sing. Or when the actors say to the
spectators, 'Let's now read poetry by Pushkin,' and the spectators stand up
and chime in ... or when everyone begins to dance. "8 But Artsybashev
insists that the spectators, who come to the production to rest and reap
pleasure, should not be pestered into doing something they are not naturally
inclined to do. For example, if an actor approaches a spectator and invites
Sergei Artsybashev's production of The Three Sisters
him or her to dance, but the latter is too embarrassed to accept, then that "is
the end of it; it should go no further than that."
According to Artsybashev, the purpose of this "theatrical ruse" is to
make the spectator a "gosf" (guest) oflrina's so that he or she participates in
the play and interacts directly with the actors. "Direct contact," he declared,
"is compulsory. In thoughts, in feelings, there must be absolute interaction,
absolute contact. If I do not attain this, the performance is already not what
I had hoped for."
"Spectators receive pleasure not from the fact that they are laughing
or drinking champagne," Artsybashev continued, "but from the fact that
they have become actors and creators. They have been given the opportunity
to play someone else's life. We are all actors, and at that particular moment,
spectators feel creation within themselves; they experience creative pleasure,
regardless of whether it is a tragic or comic play. If they rise, soar, feel this
creative rapture, if they cry from delight ... In short, my ultimate task is that
spectators become creators together with us, that in the process of the
performance they become actors."
This task is by no means unique to Artsybashev. "All people in the
theatre business dream about creating interaction between actors and the
audience," he told me. "Peter Brook is engaged in this problem, as are other
directors. Everyone knows that the spectator is the third participant in a
performance. But how to achieve this objective-that's a riddle."
Artsybashev further implements his creative vision through costume
design. In Three Sisters, Chekhov often uses the color of clothing to convey
subtle moods and emotions: In the first act, for example, Irina Prozorov is
dressed in white- a color intended to radiate her happiness in celebrating her
name day, as well as her longing and hope that she and her family will soon
"get back home to Moscow"; her oldest sister, Masha, wears a black dress to
reflect her pensive, hardened, and generally ill-tempered disposition; and
their future sister-in-law, Natasha, born and bred in the country, appears at
the end of the act in an ill-matched pink dress and green belt- a detail that
not only underscores her garishness, lack of refinement, and provincial
backwardness but also suggests her social-and implicitly understood
spiritual- inferiority to the Prozorov sisters who were raised in Moscow.
However, in Artsybashev's interpretation of Three Sisters, it is the clothing
itself-or, more specifically, the time frame of the clothing- that becomes the
medium for conveying mood and atmosphere. In the first act, during a
family celebration, the actors are dressed in modern clothes-jackets, mini-
25
skirts, and jeans- which make them virtually indistinguishable from their
"guests" (the spectators). In the third and fourth acts, however, as the mood
of the play shifts from festive to tragic, the actors change into attire
appropriate for the historical period of Chekhov's play-the early 1900s; the
male actors appear in officers' uniforms and frock coats, and the female
actors in long, austere dresses with high collars, bows, and lace.9 "The idea,"
he explained, "is that everything begins to break down. In the beginning,
everything is good as we sit together at one table, but then a fire breaks out
[in the town), Natasha [Natalia lvanovna, Andrei Prozorov's fiancee]
emerges [after she becomes Andrei's wife, as a "petty little bourgeois
housewife" who usurps full authority in the Prozorov household],IO the table
is dismantled, and everyone disperses; there is ruin and collapse. Initially
there is a house, a table, but then everything falls to (pieces]; the actors move
away from the spectators;ll all the people separate and everyone is alone. In
the beginning everyone is together, but then they become crushed [just as
the Prozorov sisters, realizing they will not be returning to Moscow, see their
hopes for any future happiness dissipate]." According to Artsybashev, when
the spectator experiences this poignancy of lifelong frustration, disappointed
hopes, and unfulfilled longings, he or she will "cry at the end together with
the sisters."lZ
From Artsybashev's perspective, it is precisely the timeless, universal
quality of Chekhov's characters that makes his plays so compelling.
"Chekhov's heroes are not fixed," he explained. "It seems as though this is
Russia, but the very existence of these characters is universal. They exude a
kind of universal loneliness, a deep melancholy. It's not like when Americans
say 'cheese,' and everything is good. Americans also live and feel the same
way as others- with a certain melancholy existing within themselves. A
person is lonely, regardless of whether he says 'cheese' or not; he is born into
'odinochestvo' [loneliness], and he dies in 'odinochestvo.' In essence a person
searches all the time for some kind of contact [with others], and whether he
finds it or not, he continually lingers in this space.'' To prove his point,
Artsybashev described an experience he had in Torun, Poland, where he
staged his Three Sisters at the International Theatre Festival: "Contact-94" and
was awarded second prize for the production. "People there told me, 'Ah,
the problems [depicted in this play] are Russian; we do not understand
[them],"' he recalled. "But when we set to work, it turned out that they fell
in love with it in the same way [as the Russians]; they cried in the same way;
they suffered and agonized in the same way. They would say, 'This is me; I
am Masha; I am Irina; I am Chebutykin [the army doctor whose regiment
has been stationed in the county town where the Prozorovs live].' These are
not simply words; this is existence."
After Three Sisters, the production that best reflects Artsybashev's
"thoughts about life, about the world, about the universe, about the mutual
interaction between the theatre and the public" (his words), Artysbashev
produced over the next several years a series of productions that received
critical acclaim and helped to solidify his reputation as one of Russia's most
celebrated directors today. Since 1992 his productions include a rendition of
Turgenev's drama Mesyats v derevne (A Month in the Country, 1850), which
received the prestigious Golden Mask Award in 1995 as the best stage
performance of the year; Gogel's masterpieces of stage comedy, Revizor
(Inspector General, 1836) and Zhenit'ba (Marriage, subtitled "A Completely
Improbable Event in Two Acts," 1842), a production that not only received
the Golden Mask Award in 1996 as the best stage performance of the year
but for which Artsybashev was awarded his second State Prize in 2000; one
of Alexander Ostrovsky's late plays, Talanty i poklonniki (Talents and Admirers,
1882), a play that helped to advance reform in the theatre in the 1880s by
featuring an actress heroine and showing that "women have equal if not
more than equal rights with men";13 and, finally, Mikhail Bulgakov's Kabala
svyatosh (A Cabal of Hypocrites [or Moliere], 1930), a drama that addresses "the
fate of a writer fighting for his spiritual and artistic independence and his
right to create."I4 During the 2001 theatrical season, he added three Soviet-
era Russian classics to his repertory: Aleksei Arbuzov's film script Moj bednyi
Marat (My Poor Marat); Alexander Volodin's play and film script about a
man returning to his long-lost love, Pyat' vecherov (Five Evenings); and
Vladimir Malyagin's V tishine (In Silence), which was staged as a tribute to the
dramatist's fiftieth birthday.
Typically Artsybashev stages nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century Russian classics, but on occasion he has deviated from this practice.
In 1995, for example, he staged Ingmar Bergman's Scener ur ett iiktenskap
(Scenes from a Marriage, 1978), and in 1997 he staged Shakespeare's Hamlet.
"Anything that is interesting to me in the West," Artsybashev explained, "I
find in Bergman, because Bergman explores what is common to all mankind.
Scenes from a Marriage is not tied exclusively to Sweden; such scenes could
take place anywhere. And besides that, Bergman adored Russian literature."
It should also be noted that Artsybashev is not averse to staging plays by
contemporary Russian playwrights. In 1995, for example, he staged Mariya
27
28
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 25, No. 3
Arbatova's Probnoe interv'iu na temu svobody (Trial Interview on the Theme of
Freedom)-a production that, in Artsybashev's words, "people really liked"
and that "quickly bore good results." Still, Artsybashev insists that his
"priority" is the Russian classic, although he eschews the interpretation that
he has "turned to the past" for his material. As he puts it, "Because our
Russian literature was engaged in the problems of people in all situations-
situations that called for all kinds of emotional experiences, such as love,
death, jealousy, and envy-it is eternal."
In these plays, as in Chekhov's Three Sisters, Artsybashev endeavors
to create direct contact between his audience and his actors. For instance,
when the lead character has a birthday at the end of Arbatova's play, the
audience members are served champagne in their seats so as to take part in
the birthday celebration. Artsybashev also considered serving the audience
wine during his performance of Hamlet (which premiered in 1997) but later
changed his mind, after realizing that the audience might think it had been
poisoned. "The press," he admitted, "even started to reproach me a little bit,
saying that I was trying to feed my audience at every performance."
Born in 1950, Artsybashev grew up in the Russian province of
Sverdlovsk,l5 where he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute and then
served in the army. Afterward he tried to enroll at the State Institute of
Theatrical Arts (GITIS) in Moscow (in the class of Mariya Knebel') but was
rejected. In order "not to lose time" and still be involved in the profession,
Artsybashev entered the local theatrical school in Sverdlovsk, where he
studied acting under Vasilii Konstantinovich Kozlov, a disciple of
Stanislavsky.
But Artsybashev's introduction to Stanislavsky came much earlier
when he was sixteen years old and began to study the theory of theatre on
his own. During his free time, he played in amateur performances but was
perplexed by the awkwardness he sometimes felt onstage. "There were times
when a director would have me do something that made me feel
uncomfortable. I thought this was due to my lack of experience, but perhaps
I instinctively realized that the director had somehow incorrectly approached
the role." It was this awkwardness, in turn, that prompted Artsybashev to
study the methods of Russia's legendary directors, including Stanislavsky,
Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Tairov. Ultimately, however, it was
Stanislavsky's approach-specifically his "method" system of acting, which
calls for psychological realism and the expression of a character's inner
emotions, that most appealed to Artsybashev. "I understand Stanislavsky
29
very well," he declared, without hesitation. "[His theories] were correct."
Artsybashev was so consumed by his passion for Stanislavsky's theories, in
fact, that, while still studying at the Polytechnic Institute, he decided to
organize his own theatre group in order to "put [Stanislavsky's training
methods] into practice." "I assembled roughly five young people from the
Institute, who still did not know anything about the theatre," he recalled,
"and the result for me was tremendous."
It is no wonder, then, that Kozlov, an advocate of Stanislavsky's
methods, should have immediately commanded Artsybashev's respect upon
his enrollment at the Sverdlovsk theatrical school and that he should have
played such an influential role in Artsybashev's development as an actor.
''When I was accepted in the acting department," Artsybashev pointed out,
"I was told that according to my external features I was [more suitable for the
role ofj a comic. But there was a discrepancy here because that was not the
way I felt about myself. My external features may have been comical,
prompting people to think that I should play the role of a comic, but my
internal condition and disposition were tragic and dramatic. And, of course,
I would never agree to be typecast in one role." Kozlov, however, helped
Artsybashev to develop a wider acting range. Under Kozlov's tutelage
Artsybashev was able to transform himself from a comedic comic into a
dramatic comic, eventually even playing roles in school productions, such as
Fedya Protasov in Tolstoy's drama Zhivoi trup (The Living Corpse) and Treplev
in Chekhov's Chaika (The that, in Artsybashev's words, were
"far from comical." "Kozlov was the teacher who unveiled me to myself and
to those around me," Artsybashev declared. "Therefore, in terms of my
professional career, he is like a father to me." Later, Artsybashev's versatility
as an actor paid off. Over the years he has performed a wide range of roles
running the gamut from the gorodnichii (mayor) in Gogel's comedy Inspector
General to Luzhin in Dostoevsky's Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and
Punishment) to the title role in Shakespeare's Hamlet; he has also
distinguished himself as an eclectic and accomplished film actor, appearing
in comedies (DMB [Demobbed], 2000, directed by Roman Kachanov and
Ivan Okhlobystin; and Nebesa obetovannye [Promised Heaven], 1991, directed
by El'dar Riazanov); dramas (Blizhnij krug [The Inner Circle], 1991, directed by
Andron Konchalovsky; Lestnitsa [The Stairway], 1989, and Vremya fetal [Time
to F(y], 1987, directed by Andrei Sakharov); and romances (Zabytaya melodiya
d(ya jleyty [Forgotten Tune for the Flute], 1988, and Zhestoky romans [Ruthless
Romance], 1984, directed by El'dar Riazanov).
30
Slavic and East European Peifonnance Vol. 25, No.3
In 1975, his final year at the Sverdlovsk theatrical school,
Artsybashev and his classmates were to fulfill one last requirement to
graduate-the staging of several plays representative of different genres-when
tragedy struck: Kozlov died suddenly, leaving Artsybashev and his classmates
to mourn the loss of their leader. "There was still a year left to study," he
recalled. "The class decided that they did not need another leader-they
already had me, Artsybashev. So I, as a student, became the leader of my own
class." The end result was a triumphant success, featuring four productions
by professional directors from other theatres and four independent works
directed by Artsybashev.t6 This experience, in tum, along with the
enthusiastic support he received from faculty members in the department,
soon paved the way for Artsybashev's successful entry into GITIS. Now
when he applied, he was accepted into the class ofMariya Knebel'.
At GITIS, Artsybashev's "diplomnyi spektakl'" (graduating
production) was also a triumphant success. In her article "A Little Orchestra
of Hope: Sergei Artsybashev," Maria Ignatieva provides the following details
about this production:
In 1981, Artsybashev directed a production based on three pieces:
a short story by Alexander Volodin, and two one-act plays: Two
Poodles by Semen Zlotnikov and Love by Ludmila
Petrushevskaya. Artsybashev also played the leading male part in all
three, costarring with a young actress, Nina Krasilnikova, who
played the three female leads. To fmd a home for their production,
Sergei and Nina auditioned for every professional theatre. To their
stunned surprise, they were accepted by the famous Taganka
Theatre. Yuri Lyubimov gave his personal permission to include
their little show in the Taganka repertory.1
7
On the basis of this production, which Artsybashev titled Nadezhdy
malen'kii orkestrik (A Little Orchestra of Hope), Lyubimov invited him to join
his theatre.
Working at the Taganka from 1980 to 1989 as both director and
actor, Artsybashev experienced what he wryly refers to as "all the tragic
stages" of the theatre: the death of Vladimir Vysotsky, the theatre's leading
actor, in 1980; Lyubimov's exile from the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s
(after a twenty-year reign at the Taganka Theatre); a period of transition
under Efros, who was appointed to replace Lyubimov in 1984 but died an
31
untimely death only three years later; another brief period of transition
under Nikolai Gubenko, an actor at the Taganka;
1
8 and, finally, Lyubimov's
dramatic return to the Soviet Union and the Taganka Theatre in 1988. It was
after Lyubimov's return that Artsybashev's situation at the theatre became
especially tenuous. As Artsybashev tells it, there seemed to be every
indication that Lyubimov was pleased with his young apprentice, who had
assisted him in several productions, including Pushkin's historical tragedy
Boris Godunov. "Lyubimov probably counted on my help," Artsybashev
noted, "and I also counted on there being contact and further work between
us." But the theatre became divided at this time, and Artsybashev became
one of the casualties. "Lyubimov was told that I had betrayed him by
working with Efros [with whom, among other things, Artsybashev co-
directed Boris Mozhayev's Poltora kvadratnych metra (One and a Ha!f Square
Meters) at the Taganka Theatre in 1986]," he told me, "and that he needed to
discard me. There was intrigue, and as a result, [my services] were not called
upon for an entire year. Of course, I suffered because of this."
Realizing that drastic measures were needed to jumpstart his career,
Artsybashev decided to take a risk: he would leave the T aganka and become
the main director of the Moscow Theatre of Comedy. That the theatre did
not have its own stage-it was a touring theatre that performed in clubs and
houses of culture-was a source of some confusion and bewilderment for
Artsybashev, but he was assured that the theatre would eventually procure a
building in which to stage its productions. Not only did this not come to
pass, but changes signaled by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union began
immediately to affect Russia's theatrical structure, resulting in the liquidation
of Rostconcert and all its subdivisions-including the Moscow Theatre of
Comedy.
It was at this time that the then forty-year-old Artsybashev implored
the Ministry of Culture to give him an opportunity to create a new theatre.
Although the early 1990s was an extremely difficult period for the arts- there
was no money to subsidize theatres, and many theatres were on the verge of
collapse-the Ministry of Culture had enough confidence in Artsybashev's
abilities to give him a trial run of three years to create and develop a new
theatre. "It was like an experiment," he told me. "The theatre [called "The
Russian State Theatre on the Pokrovka"] was put in my name; only later did
[the government and Ministry of Culture] bring on theatre managers and
enter into contracts with them. I was the first swallow." The experiment
proved to be well worth the risk. After forming a young collective, which
32 Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 25, No. 3
included several members from his former company at the Moscow Theatre
of Comedy, Artsybashev went on to successfully stage five productions based
on Russian classics between the years 1991 and 1994, productions that were
so original and compelling, in fact, that Artsybashev was awarded the State
Prize in 1996 for the entire body of work;l9 in 1992 he also had the title
"Honored Member of the Russian Arts" conferred on him.
Artsybashev's desire to develop a program called "Russkaya klassika
segodnya" (The Russian Classic Today) stemmed from his belief that
"everything [a director needs] is in the Russian classic." "I believe," he told
me, "that our great Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries-the Golden Age and the Silver Age- posed questions about byt
[everyday life] and bytiya [human existence, such as "To what purpose do we
live?" and "Why do we suffer?"], which contemporary dramatists [only]
repeat or develop in part. Time may change, circumstances may change, but
the individual changes little. Everything can be found in our classics. For me
[Samuel] Beckett and Ionesco are there; I also find these authors in
Chekhov's writings. In other words, it is more interesting for me to work in
a large amplitude of existence than in a narrow, small one. For me [the
Russian classic] is contemporary, timely, polysemantic, symbolic, and great
all at the same time.
"I think that all our burning questions can be found in the classics,
but they are not narrowly formulated there. It is difficult, for example, to
write a play about perestroika, so that it should have a lasting effect [on the
Russian public]. In 1987, the onset of perestroika, people would say, 'Well,
everything is possible now, speak the truth,' but then television in 1988 and
1989 talked so much about the truth that the spectator no longer wanted to
see these truths dramatized on stage. It is necessary to go to the theatre not
for something political; the public sees political theatre on television every
day; [the public] has already actively participated in it. But there is the soul,
human existence .... Theatre remembers and thinks about its fundamental
task: to both entertain and educate the spectator; to raise him to a certain
level; to talk about sincere, serious, and spiritual questions.
"There was a period when the classics did not appeal to anyone,
when people went to the theatre to see a 'show.' Women, striptease, putting
sex on the stage in order to draw spectators-everything became possible, and
directors began making money with this kind of thing. In 1991, when they
allowed me to create my own theatre, there was a preponderance of foreign
literature.20 So when I said that I wanted to stage classics, they responded,
33
'Well, let's give it a try.' And it turned out that these classical productions
became very interesting for the spectator."
When asked the reason for this phenomenon-the resurgence of the
Russian classic at the very height of commercialization and Westernization
in Russia-Artsybashev offered the simplest explanation: it is dictated by the
Russian people's perennial quest for spiritual nourishment. "The Russian
nature demands something heartfelt and spiritual," he declared. "But where
can you search for it? Some people rush to a church. A church, however, is
an order, whereas the theatre is free and democratic. No one in a theatre
forces you to get down on your knees and pray; instead, it is an internal
process, inner work. And if based on good material ... [but] what exactly is
good material? It is good language, beautiful language; it is the Russian
classic."2
1
In staging the classics Artsybashev insists above all on scrupulously
following standards that conform to his "own inner artistic criteria." "Under
the [post-1991] market economy," he explained, "[life for me in my capacity
as a theatre director] became more difficult, but better. It is difficult
economically, because now I need to look for money. But it is better today
in the sense that I can stage anything I want-and stage it in the way that I
want." In other words, Artsybashev no longer needs to seek the approval of
the district committee, the Party Committee, or the artistic council, as was
customary during the Soviet era. Instead, he chooses and stages a play
according to his own artistic taste and vision-"as [he] sees the material"-
with the spectator, the press, and the critics only secondary considerations
for him. "I am not influenced by the theatrical market- the market based on
the demands of the spectator and what will attract him or her to the theatre,"
he told me. "Instead, I am guided by a different kind of market, a spiritual
one; therefore I must stage spiritual [plays]. This is not mass entertainment."
But, as Artsybashev is quick to point out, "spiritual" does not
necessarily mean "boring." "My task," he insists, "is to stage classical
productions in such a way that they are interesting to the spectator. I have a
certain responsibility [toward] my teachers, [toward] our great Russian
literature, not to distort these productions but to try to understand them and
attract the attention of the public, [a public that] often relates to the classics
as something too well known. 'Three Sisters,' they say, 'has already been
around for such a long time; it is boring and uninteresting.' But this is our
spiritual wealth, our spiritual legacy. That is why the classics are always
contemporary-because they are classics and it is possible to discover
everything in them. Everything is there. It is great; it is our great Russian
literature; it is unfathomable." Thus, in contrast to antrepriza (private
theatrical enterprise), which creates commercial successes based on what
Artsybashev calls "legkaya literatura" (light, supermarket fare), Artsybashev
strives to show that it is possible to take a creative work by Chekhov or
Gogol-works typically regarded as "elitist"-and tum them into dramatic
productions with wide appeal.
Significantly Artsybashev's authority for staging Russian classics has
not waned in the new millennium but, instead, continues to gain even
greater momentum. In fact, when the position of artistic director at the
Mayakovsky Theatre (or, as Russians call it, the Mayakovka) became vacant
in 2001, the position was offered to-and accepted by-Artsybashev. The
choice was a logical one, especially in light of Artsybashev having had a prior
affiliation with the Mayakovka. At the invitation of the theatre's late artistic
director, Andrei Goncharov,22 Artsybashev staged the works of three well-
known contemporary playwrights there between the mid-1980s and the early
1990s: Alexander Galin's Zhanna, 1987; Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's Uroki
muzyki (Music Lessons), 1989; and Nikolai Kolyada's Pars tol'ko dlya vzroslykh,
ili Skazka o mertvoy tsarevne (A Farce Only for Adults, or a Fairy-tale about a
Dead Tsarina), 1993. Artsybashev also continues to manage the Theatre on
the Pokrovka, thus making him only one of two directors in Moscow to
manage two theatres simultaneously-although, understandably, he intends
to focus more attention and energy on the Mayakovsky Theatre. To this end
he plans to invite other directors to the Theatre on the Pokrovka to stage
productions there. Still, the task of managing two theatres is a daunting one,
particularly since these two theatres follow such radically different paths. On
the one hand, the Theatre on the Pokrovka is a small, chamber-like,
experimental theatre that facilitates maximum contact between actors and
spectators (which, as stated earlier, Artsybashev regards as the director's
principal objective); conversely, the Mayakovsky Theatre is an academic
theatre with a large seating capacity, thus offering directors such as
Artsybashev the opportunity to reach an extremely large audience at one
sitting- which, of course, is a seductive feature for many stage directors today
and an important consideration in a market economy. Significantly,
however, Artsybashev does not perceive a great disparity between the two
theatres-or even the need to adopt a new approach. He insists, for example,
that he has staged his productions at the Theatre on the Pokrovka in such a
way that they can also be played on a big stage in a sizable theatre-which
35
often is the case when he and his company are on tour. Artsybashev also
maintains that his objectives at the two theatres remain essentially the same:
to give the audience what it yearns for, which is simply, as he put it, a "quiet,
sincere theatrical conversation. "23
Although Artsybashev's tenure at the Mayakovsky Theatre has been
relatively brief, he has already moved the theatre in the direction he wishes
to take it-home to the Russian classic; in fact, his first production there was
Gogol's Marriage,24 which premiered on the "osnovnaya stsena" (main stage)
in September 2002, while a year later, on September 10, 2003, his
dramatization of Dostoevsky's Brat'ya Karamazo'lry (Brothers Karamazov)2La
novel filled with "Dostoevsky's agonizing reflections about life, about God
and about the anti-Christ" (Artsybashev's description)2Lhad its debut,
marking the theatre's eighty-first season. For Artsybashev, the appeal of
Brothers Karamazov-as well as Russian classics in general-is that it is a work
that not only addresses questions of "byf' but also "the cursed questions of
bytiya." "Theatre," he says, "does not give ready recipes; rather it [offers] a
diagnosis of its own time .... [Brothers Karamazov] seems like the entire
universe to me-a novel in which all the themes that agitate us are revealed.
This is an attempt from different perspectives [polyphony] to realize the
order of the universe. Dostoevsky designated the genre of his last novel as 'a
symphony of passions,' and it is in these words [that we find] the key to the
frenzied rhythm of the Karamazovs."27 Many critics predicted disaster,
insisting that it was too challenging a project for Artsybashev and that the
end result would be nothing less than "neimovernaya skuka" (incredible
boredom).28 But Artsybashev proved them wrong. By introducing striking
external stage effects, Artsybashev was able to make his three-hour
production significantly more palatable from a commercial standpoint than
critics foresaw and to sustain the audience's interest. First, he created a stage
setting that features the presence of the earthly elements, fire and water. Not
only do clouds of smoke flow through tall, white monastic walls, thereby
producing a sense of the "ethereal, nether world," but it rains onstage and
twice it even snows. Artsybashev also features the troupe's best actors and
incorporates a great deal of live music into the production. In front of the
entrance to the theatre, for example, the military orchestra of the Moscow
garrison entertains the public, while an authentic gypsy choir appears and
sings onstage. Finally, despite intense and probing conversations about
Russia and God, the novel itself inherently contains elements of box-office
appeal, showing Dostoevsky as a master of intrigue, surprising twists, and
Sergei Artsybashev's Karamazovs at the Mayakovsky Theatre
melodrama.29 After all, one of the fundamental questions underlying this
work is who murdered the brothers' father, Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov. As
one Russian critic aptly noted, "[Artsybashev's production of the
Karamazovs] is not artistic chaos, not commercialization, not avant-garde,
not a boring embodiment of a classic .... It is neither one nor the other, but
the Devil knows what."30Jt is hardly surprising, then, that the hall was packed
at its premiere and that the audience included such well-known dignitaries
from the Ministry of Culture as Mikhail Shvydkoi.
But Artsybashev by no means plans to confine himself exclusively
37
to Russian classics at the Mayakovsky Theatre. For example, during the
2002-2003 theatrical season, the premiere of Marriage shared the stage with
another production directed by Artsybashev-Banquet (Banquet)-a tragic-
comedy dealing with the failed marriages of three middle-aged couples,
based on Neil Simon's thirty-first (and most recent) play, The Dinner Party.
Although The Dinner Party represents a significant departure from Simon's
earlier marital comedies, offering a much darker and serious look at marital
relationships, it still may seem like a curious choice for an "elitist" director
such as Artsybashev- a director who has built his entire reputation on
staging Russian classics like Chekhov, Gogo!, and Ostrovsky for a small,
select audience. Yet Artsybashev insists that the themes Simon explores in
this play also fall within "[Artsybashev's own] sphere of thought."31 They
are what he calls "little themes," those dealing with ambition, vanity,
egotism, ambivalence, pretension, and the inability of two people to
compromise in a relationship; that is, the subject matter of the play does
not reflect global world problems but clearly offers a revealing glimpse of
humanity. 32 Artsybashev also had a more pragmatic reason for staging a
The Banquet, directed by Sergei Artsybashev, at the Mayakovsky Theatre
w
"{)
The Women, renamed Razvod po zhenski (Divorce Female-Style),
directed by Sergei Artsybashev, at the Mayakovsky Theatre
play by Simon: by enlisting the services of actors for Banquet from the
middle generation, he was able to give the actors in Marriage- the "stars" of
the Mayakovsky troupe-a respite from daily performances. This, too, is
consistent with one of Artsybashev's primary objectives: to develop a
repertory at the Mayakovsky Theatre that will keep as many actors
performing as possible.
Artsybashev is also looking to other U.S. playwrights for stage
material. In fact, as recently as 2004, he added Clair Boothe Luce's 1936 hit
play, The Women, renamed Razvod po zhenski (Divorce Female-Style), and
featuring an all-female cast (as in the original play), to his repertory at the
Mayakovsky Theatre, premiering in mid-February of that year. It is
significant that Artsybashev's rendition of The Women-a biting satire of life
among women of high society, which the New York Times, in Luce's 1987
obituary, aptly called "an apotheosis of feminine bitchiness"3Lis classified
as a "melodramaticheskoe shay" (melodramatic show) in terms of genre.3
4
It is
also noteworthy that this is the first time the play has been performed on
the Moscow stage.
In conclusion, consider a letter that Chekhov wrote in 1899,
offering these dramatic encouraging words to Nemirovich-Danchenko,
who, a year earlier, had co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre with
Stanislavsky: "Oh, do not get tired, do not cool offl Your theatre will
provide the best pages of the history-when it is written-of the modern
Russian theatre."35 Had Chekhov been alive to see the stage productions of
Sergei Artsybashev, such as his Three Sisters, productions inculcated with
the very spirit of Stanislavsky's teachings, presenting Russian psychological
theatre at its best, would he not have written these same words to this
modern-day Russian director?
NOTES
I In fall 2001, Slavic and East European Peiformance published another article
on the same subject: Maria Ignatieva's "A Little Orchestra of Hope: Sergei
Artsybashev." I will refer the reader to this earlier work where appropriate.
2 Written in Chekhov's handwriting, these words appear on the cover of the
program to Sergei Artsybashev's Moscow production of Three Sisters.
3 See Chekhov Plays, translated and with an introduction by Elisaveta Fen
(Great Britain: Penguin, 1954), 27.
4 Anatoly Smeliansky, The Russian Theatre after Stalin, trans. Patrick Miles
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 68.
s Ibid., 69.
6 Here Artysbashev completely realizes Stanislavsky's dream of spectators
becoming the characters in the play.
7 According to Ignatieva, when Artsybashev staged Three Sisters in 1991, there
were such deficits and food lines in Moscow that "Artsybashev could not
morally sanction having his actors eat in the same room, while others
watched hungrily; therefore, he mixed actors and spectators at one long table
where everyone ate and drank together. ... Artsybashev ordered the actors
to cook at home and to bring the dishes for every show." See Maria
Ignatieva, "A Little Orchestra of Hope: Sergei Artsybashev," Slavic and East
European Performance 21, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 43.
8 Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from Sergei Artsybashev that appear
in this article come from conversations that I had with him in 1996 and 2000
in Moscow.
9 By intertwining the past and the present in this production, Artsybashev
seeks to restore "the disintegrating connection of time"; he also sees the
past as a canvas against which one can better understand the present.
10 Although the house belongs to all four siblings (the three sisters and
their brother Andrei), Andrei mortgages the house and allows his wife,
Natasha, to control the money. Natasha' s usurpation of authority in the
Prozorov household manifests itself in other ways as well: She forces Irina
to move into Olga's room, insisting that "[her son's] nursery is so cold
and damp .... And your room is just ideal for a baby" (Three Sisters, in
Chekhov Plays, 291); she tells the servants not to let the carnival party into
the house; and she fires the old woman who has attended the Prozorov
family for thirty years. In short, Natasha, the new mistress, literally drives
the Prozorov sisters out of their own home. Also because of Natasha's
influence, Andrei no longer works for a professorship, losing all the
inspiration he once had.
11 Before the middle of the production, when the fire breaks out, the
spectators have come to regard the Prozorov house as their own. However,
when the table is dismantled and they are moved to seats outside the
periphery of the stage action and the actors, they again become "ordinary
spectators." Artsybashev's purpose here is to distance the spectator from the
actor in terms of space, which parallels his use of clothing to investigate
issues of time.
41
12 As critics have observed, Artsybashev's production of Three Sisters offers a
much darker world vision of Chekhov's drama than the typical Soviet or
Western production. In his interpretation, Artsybashev tries to show that the
brutal rule of the philistines (petty bourgeoisie) and proletarians that
dominated the twentieth-century began with the ruin of the Russian
intelligentsia and "their literal expulsion from their own homes" (such as
occurs with the three sisters).
13 Handbook of Russian Literature, ed. by Victor Terras (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1985), 325.
14 Ibid., 63. For overviews of these productions, see "A Little Orchestra of
Hope," 44-50.
15 For the significance of Artsybashev's provincial roots in his professional
development, see "A Little Orchestra of Hope," 37-42.
16 Artsybashev's productions at the Sverdlovsk theatrical school included
Jean Anouilh's Antigone, Aleksei Arbuzov's Moi bednyi Marat (My Poor
Marat), Friedrich Diirrenmatt's dark comedy Play Strindberg: Totentanz nach
August Strindberg (Play Strindberg: "The a n c e ~ Death" Choreographed), Vasily
Shukshin's Do tret'ikh petukhov (Bifore Dawn), Alexander Volodin's Pyat'
vecherov (Five Evenings), and Mikhail Roshchin's Speshite delat' dobra (Hurry to
Do Good).
17 "A Little Orchestra of Hope," 39. For more details about this production,
also see pages 40-41 of this article.
18 Nikolai Gubenko was responsible for obtaining Lyubirnov's return in
1988. A year later he became Minister of Culture, and four years later, in
1993, he headed the breakaway part of the T aganka.
19 The productions staged by Artsybashev between 1991 and 1994 included
Chekhov's Three Sisters, Tsvetaeva's Captive Spirit, Turgenev's A Month in the
Country, Gogel's Inspector General, and Ostrovsky's Talents and Admirers.
20 Theatres also turned to previously banned literature for stage material,
such as the Bible, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and avant-garde or
decadent works. However, much of this turned out to be not especially stage
worthy and yielded poor artistic results.
21 Artsybashev also believes that a classical repertory helps actors to grow
both spiritually and professionally.
22 Andrei Goncharov became artistic director of the Mayakovsky Theatre in
1967 and served in that capacity for more than three decades.
23 Aleksei Filippov, "Teatru Mayakovskogo ya ne sovsem chuzhoi" ("I am by
No Means a Stranger to the Mayakovsky Theatre"), Izvestiya, January 4, 2002.
42 Slavic and East European Peifonnance Vol. 25, No. 3
24 This production was originally performed at the Theatre on the Pokrovka.
Because of its success there, Artsybashev no doubt counted on similar
successes at the Mayakovsky Theatre.
25 Vladimir Malyagin, a dramatist, wrote the adaptation of Dostoevsky's
novel for Artsybashev's stage production.
26 Moscow Mayakovsky Academic Theatre (Director. Sergei Artsybashev),
"Official Site," February 4, 2004 http:/ /www.mayakovsky.ru/Reg/reg.shtml.
27 Ibid. By trying to embrace the storylines of all the novel's main heroes,
Malyagin perpetuates this "symphony of passions" in his dramatic rendition
of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. This also explains why Artsybashev
titled his production Karamazovy: Simfoniya strastei (Karamazovs: A
Symphony of Passions).
28 See Grigory Zaskavsky, "Pokupayut rossiiskoe" ('They Buy Russian"),
Nezavisimayagazeta, 16 September 2003, no. 196. There was an element of
truth in their prediction. As Natal'ya Starosel'skaya duly notes in her review
of this production, it is virtually impossible to enclose Dostoevsky's last
novel- and the cosmos it introduces- within "the window of the stage." See
Natal'ya Starosel'skaya, "Ispoved' goryachego serdtsa: Brat'ya Karamazovy-
prem'era Teatra Mayakovskogo" ("Confession of an Impassioned Heart:
Brothers Karamazov-Premiere at the Mayakovsky Theatre"), Trud, 23
September 2003, no. 176.
2
9 The success of the television serial based on The Idiot confirms the fact that
Dostoevsky has box office appeal. It premiered on television when rehearsals
of Artsybashev's production of The Karamazovs were in full swing.
30 Marina Davydova, "Po motivam Dostoevskogo" ("According to the
Motives of Dostoevsky"), Jzvestiya, 12 September 2003, no. 166.
3! Vera Kalmykova, "Tvorite s nami" ("Create with Us"), Teatral'nyi kur'er
Qune 2003).
32 Ibid.
33 Albin Krebs, "Claire Boothe Luce Dies at 84: Playwright, Politician,
Envoy" (obituary, 1987). New York Times on the Web.
http:/ / www.nytimes.com/ learning/ general!onthisday/ bday/ 0310.htrnl.
34 On the Mayakovsky Theatre's homepage, we find a full explanation for the
production's genre classification as a "melodramatic show." "The
production," reads a blurb advertising the play's premiere, "is melodramatic
at its very foundation, [since] a woman is, first and foremost, a feeling
creature. The children's theme that is present in the play is genuinely
moving, but the heroines are also funny, eccentric, mysterious, and very
43
musical! Sergei Artsybashev has imbued his lyrical production with a
remarkable musical atmosphere-the most famous variety-dance music of the
twentieth century ... [jazz music] to which the actresses not only dance, but
perform as well. In sum, the directorial designation of the genre as a
"melodramatic show" is completely on the mark." See Moscow Mayakovsky
Academic Theatre (Repertory), "Official Site," February 4, 2004
http:/ /www.mayakovsky.ru/Reg/ reg.shtml.
35 Chekhov Plays, 25.
UNRAVELING THE GORDIAN KNOT:
THE TRANSFORMATION OF CZECH THEATRE
ORGANIZATION AND FINANCING IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
Stepan Simek
Transformation in Prague
After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the organization of Czech
theatre was a Gordian knot of long-standing traditions, Stalinist structures,
municipal subsidies, new experimental and unsubsidized theatres, and
hopes for a new era in a free nation.
1
The result was a thirteen-year
outpouring of suggested reforms and legislative paralysis. Finally, in 2002,
the Prague City Council adopted a proposal from a commission of the
Czech Theatre Institute that promised to transform Czech theatre and set
it on a modern European path.
Serious discussions of the need for radical change in the
organization and funding of the theatre began about 1994 in the Czech
theatre bi-monthly, Svlt a divadfo.2 As a newly forming European society,
the Czechs naturally looked to the European Union (EU) for inspiration,
especially in finding a way to remedy the inherent discrepancy in public
support between the state and municipally subsidized and unsubsidized
theatres.3 On the one hand, the existing Czech model of subsidized
theatres clearly resembled those of Germany, Austria, and France, where
support of the arts was legislatively anchored at a minimum of one percent
of the state budget. On the other hand, the British system of independent
non-governmental arts councils seemed attractive because the Czechs, tired
of direct state influence in the arts, saw the need to establish a "buffer"
between the state and individual theatre organizations.
The analysis of EU models eventually led to three major
conclusions that were later reflected in the Prague transformation. First, the
arts in general and the theatre in particular are a "service to the public," and
as such, the state has a duty to support them financially. Second, the state
must not exercise direct influence in distribution of funds, and it must not
run arts organizations. Third, the state should support a multiplicity of
financial resources for which all theatres are eligible to compete within
well-defined criteria.
45
According to Alena Brabencova, a small step in the transformation
of Prague's theatre system started in 1996 when she became the city's
Theatre Commissioner.
4
In an effort to begin to close the gap between the
sixteen theatres that the city of Prague operated as subsidized
organizationsS and the fifty to eighty independent theatre companies6
functioning with no reliable source of support, she introduced a severely
limited system of city grants to be distributed to the independent theatres
in Prague.
In 2000, the Prague City Council, under pressure from
Brabencova, commissioned the Czech Theatre Institute to work out a
detailed proposal for the transformation of theatre financing in Prague. It
was this proposal that the City Council adopted in 2002, putting into effect
the first phase of the transformation of Prague theatre organization and
financing.
Building on the three principles mentioned above, the proposal
considers in its preamble culture as a "basic human right" and mentions
the role of the theatre as a means of"social cohesion." At the same time it
calls the theatre an "industry" and spells out the economic advantages of a
vital theatre network for the city, including the so called multiplication
effect.7
The proposal then recommends creating a grant system that
insures equal access to public financing for all theatres in Prague; achieving
the "highest quality" of theatrical output; distributing and using funds
transparently; and allocating funds competitively and non-politically
according to a clear set of qualitative and quantitative criteria. The report
also supports multiple-source financing by both the Ministry of Culture
and the private sector. The proposal further suggests that theatres be
operated as a partnership between the city and the individual theatres
themselves. s
More specifically, the proposal recommends that over a period of
four to eight years all theatres, including the existing subsidized
organizations, transform themselves into one or another form of a not-for-
profit institution. Public financing for the newly designated not-for-profit
theatres would come in the form of four-year grants for which all theatres,
regardless of their legal status, would be equally eligible. The grants would
be distributed through the newly formed Grant Council that would
function as a "bridge between the Prague City Council and the theatres. At
the same time, it would be an independent panel of experts judging the
46
merits of the individual grant proposals."9 Finally, the proposal calls for a
public commitment by the city assuring that the levels of financing of the
newly transformed subsidized theatres remain the same if not higher over
the period of the next four years.
Soon after adopting the proposal, the City Council published the
Declaration of the Support of Professional Theatre by the Capital City of Prague to
assuage the fears of the existing subsidized theatres and a number of special
interest groups, such as the Actors Union. The most important points are:
1) a promise to "continue to support the activities of the newly transformed
former subsidized organizations at least at the level of the current
contributions," and 2) an assertion that the new system brings theatre
"closer to the standards common in the countries of the European
Union."JO
After consultation with the managing directors of several Prague
theatres, three out of the sixteen existing subsidized companies agreed to
transform their legal status from subsidized organization to not-for-profit
organization and to apply for the first set of four-year grants. In 2003 and
2004, two additional subsidized theatres (until then operated by their
individual city districts) joined in the transformation. The city plans to
eliminate the institution of a subsidized theatre by the year 2008.JJ
Thus the Prague transformation actually began to work. After
more than ten years of discussions, empty governmental declarations,
finger pointing, and numerous proposals, the Prague City Council, in
cooperation with the city's theatres, proved that the seemingly
irreconcilable principles of a generous public support for the theatre and a
true independence of the individual theatres along with equality of access
to the public funds were indeed compatible. At the end of 2001, the ratio
of the municipal support for the subsidized versus unsubsidized theatres in
Prague was 90 to 10 percent in favor of the subsidized organizations, but
in 2003, the ratio was about 80 to 20 percent.I2 Soon the field would be
leveled.
One might, however, ask what exactly has changed. The City
Council has publicly committed to "supporting the activities of the newly
transformed former subsidized organizations at least at the level of the
current contributions," and in the first phase of the transformation the
yearly support for the former subsidized theatres will remain exactly the
same.n But the new system of four-year grants has freed both the theatres
and the city from what the managing director of the Theatre on Balustrade
47
calls a "bureaucratic Moloch."I
4
Where previously even the most minute
details of the budgets had been largely dictated by the operator of the
theatres (i.e. the city), the transformed theatres now have complete control
of the allocated funds over the period of four years.
But the transformation has also put the stated principle of multi-
source financing into effect. The not-for-profit theatres now may apply for
additional grants from a number of governmental or non-governmental
sources from which they were previously excluded, such as European
Union cultural grants.IS
However, the most important advantage of the new system is the
sense of freedom that the transformed theatres as well as the City Council
now enjoy. Since the city is no longer an "owner" of the theatre, it no
longer names the artistic and/or managing directors.l6 The City Council is
relieved from undue stress and scrutiny, and the theatres themselves no
longer resent government paternalism. The leadership decisions are now
taken by the boards of directors of the transformed theatres in direct
cooperation with the artistic staff, and the City Council gladly keeps its
fingers out of that process.
Finally, according to Doubravka Svobodova, the managing
director of the Theatre on Balustrade and a professor of theatre
management at the Prague Academy of Dramatic Arts (whose theatre will
begin the transformation process in July 2005), theatre is a dynamic entity
that needs to constantly reassess its raison d'etre and its mission.
Subsidized organizations with an automatic yearly flow of funding do not
engage in that sort of dynamic reassessment. However, the need to re-apply
for the funding every four years in a competitive environment forces each
theatre to justify its existence, re-state its mission, ruminate on its existence,
and if the circumstances so dictate maybe even perish and clear the way for
another company to benefit from the available funding.t7
And the Critics
The Prague transformation, however, has a number of critics who
see several flaws in the new model. They point to the ongoing presence of
the political nomenclatura in the grant decision process. The theatre
professionals only nominate the members of the Grant Council; the final
decision rests with the City Council. Moreover, the decisions of the Grant
Council itself are nominally only recommendations to the City Council,
which, as a political entity, has the executive power to distribute the
48
individual grants. There exists a widespread fear among the independent
theatre companies that because of the inherent crossover between the
theatre establishment and the city political elitei8 the long-established
flagship Prague theatres will inevitably be favored, and that newly formed
companies with young unknown actors and directors will have a hard time
obtaining adequate funding.
Furthermore, there is the problem of the "commercial" for-profit
theatres. Unlike in England or the United States where there exists a clear
dividing line between the West End or Broadway and pure non-profit
theatres, in Prague there is a no such distinction. The rest of the often-
highbrow theatre establishment eyes commercial theatres suspiciously, and
the City Council is reluctant to include them in the new model of
financing. The term "commercial" is a tricky one. For example, the
established ABC Theatre housed in a city-owned space close to the
Wenceslas Square specializes in relatively light commercial dramaturgy,
seats about five hundred people, employs over seventy full-time artists and
staff, and as a subsidized organization of the city, receives twenty million
crownsl9 in yearly subsidies that will continue even as the theatre becomes
a not-for-profit organization.20 On the other hand, the Fidlovacka Theatre
on the outskirts of Prague, whose dramaturgy ranges from English sex
farces and musicals to Chekhov, seats a little over five hundred, has a
permanent company of thirty-five artists and a staff of thirty. It is, however,
widely considered to be a "commercial" house and has so far received only
a single one-time grant of three million crowns from the city, and a yearly
contribution of 1.5 million from the city district where it is housed. The
rest of its thirty-two million crowns yearly budget comes from ticket sales
(whose prices are significantly higher than that in the other theatres),
creative marketing, small corporate support, secondary activities, and a
modest private endowment.21 The founder and artistic director of the
Fidlovacka, Tomas Topfer, points out the incongruity and, as he calls it
"absurdity" of the different standards applied to his theatre as opposed to
the almost identical ABC, but he remains skeptical about his theatre's
chance to receive a four-year grant form the City Council. The widely
accepted image of his theatre as a "commercial house" is difficult to shake
off.22
And in the Provinces
Can the new model be applied outside of Prague? The original
49
transformation proposal from the Czech Theatre Institute specifically
mentioned the uniqueness of the Prague theatre landscape and cautioned
that "its findings and recommendations may not apply to other
municipalities. "23 With the vast majority of independent theatre
companies concentrated in Prague, the question of equal distribution of
funds may be a moot point in the provincial towns. With the exception of
the three other large cities in the Czech Republic, Brno, Plzeii, and
Ostrava, the smaller towns usually operate only one large repertory theatre,
and perhaps one or two non-professional student or studio spaces. The
problem with the subsidized organizations in the provinces is their
complete dependence on the will of the individual city councils and the
economic situation in the often cash-strapped city or town. After the
abolition of the Communist Party Regional Committees in 1991, operation
of the municipal theatres was transferred to the cities themselves, who were
put in the difficult situation of fully financing theatres that often serve a
larger regional population that does not contribute to the tax base of the
city budgets24. For example, a study commissioned by the City Council of
the city of Pilsen found out, that more than 35 to 40 percent of the city's
large municipal theatre audiences come from the larger region rather than
the city itself.25
Since the Czech Republic is a comparatively small country, the
concentration of a number of large, multi-ensemble regional theatres with
their own opera and ballet companies in the same region often borders on
the ridiculous. For instance, within approximately fifty square miles in
Northeastern Bohemia, there are three large opera companies, all financed
by individual, neighboring cities. Perhaps some of the expensive opera
companies should be abolished and the cities should engage in co-
production activities, distributing the funds differently.
The provision of multi-source funding is perhaps the most
debated point. In 2002, after more than ten years of political wrangling, the
Czech Legislature finally created 14 administrative regions with semi-
autonomous administrations elected directly by the regions' populations.
The new regional governments were given the power to keep and
independently distribute taxes and to exercise more executive powers.
Individual city councils and municipal theatre directors have demanded
that the regions contribute funds for the operations of their theatres. At the
beginning of 2004 several regional theatres received the first, albeit limited,
financial contributions from the regional governments, thus taking the first
step toward diversification of their financing and diminishing their
dependence on the cities alone.
The Association of Regional Theatres continues to lobby the
Ministry of Culture to expand its "Program for Support of Regional
Theatres," since the current involvement of the Ministry of Culture in
financing the regional theatres is widely considered substandard, especially
compared with the common practices in the countries of the European
Union. If the concept of multi-sourcing in the regional theatres were to
take hold, the financial involvement of the Ministry of Culture would need
to be dramatically increased. Otherwise, the Ministry would be relegated to
a status of an irrelevant institution, not unlike America's NEA.
Regional theatres are also attempting to involve the private sector
in sponsoring their operations. However in the absence of a tax code that
makes sponsoring attractive, and with a striking lack of tradition and
willingness of private corporations to contribute to a public good, the
financial support of the private sector remains minimal.
Finally, since the Czech Republ ic is now part of the European
Union, regional theatres, are seeking "Structural Funds" from the EU,
funds that are designed to strengthen the economic viability of selected
regions of the newly admitted member states. However, in order to qualify
for such funds, which often require an open economic system, the theatres
may need to relinquish their status as subsidized organizations.
Despite the above problems, regional and municipal theatres
remain the backbone and the workhorse of the Czech theatre network.
They enjoy relative financial security, and, most important, they have the
loyal support of their audiences. With the average attendance of over 85
percent capacity, sold-out school performances, and often more than 30
percent self-sufficiency26 they may be the envy of many regional theatres
in the United States.
The success and stability of regional theatres does come with some
cost. With often more than five plays in repertory, regular guest
appearances in smaller regional towns and villages, and frequent school
performances, their permanent artistic companies are often stretched to the
limit. Their dramaturgy often tends to be relatively tame and secure, and
with few exceptions, the regional theatres are not given to experiment. The
average salaries of the actors are relatively low, and unlike in Prague, there
are fewer opportunities for them to augment their income by TV, film, or
commercial work. They suffer relatively high level of attrition especially of
51
young talent, who often consider their engagement in the regions as a mere
springboard for an eventual career in Prague. But such problems are minor,
compared with the service these companies provide to their communities
and the work opportunities that they offer to hundreds of professional
theatre artists. The regional companies embody the traditional Czech and
Middle-European model of the theatre as a community builder and a
provider of enlightened cultural services to the population. They, and their
financial supporters, continue to carry on those traditions, and remain
symbols of stability in an ocean of cataclysmic change.
Toward the Future
The Prague Transformation shows that reorganization of the
Czech theatre has finally gained momentum. Nevertheless, Bohumil
Nekolny of the Czech Theatre Institute considers unbearable the
disproportion between the financial support of the municipalities, which
contribute around 5 percent of their annual budgets to culture (with the
major portion of the contributions going to the municipal theatres) and the
state, which only allocates 0.6 percent of the budget to its Ministry of
Culture, from which only a minute fraction goes to the theatres, (with the
majority being "swallowed" by the National Theatre)_27 He calls for the
legislative anchoring of the state financial support for culture at the level
of other EU states (one percent of the state budget), and finally, he repeats
the need of multiple sources of financing for the theatre fashioned after the
existing models in the countries of the European Union.28
But the Prague transformation has shown the way to a strong
future foundation for Czech theatre. Czech theatre remains financially
healthy-if sometimes confusing. The Central European tradition of theatre
as a community builder and a standard bearer of national culture is a strong
guarantor of its survival no matter what economic system may be in place.
As long as Czech audiences continue to fill the auditoriums to almost 90
percent capacity, the theatre will do well, no matter what the models of its
financing.
NOTES
I See my article in the previous issue of SEEP 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005).
z Bohumil Nekolny, "V Evrope . .. a u nas-Divadelnf systemy v zemfch
Evropske unie" (In Europe ... and Here-the Theatre Models in the
Countries of the European Union), Svlt a Divadlo 3 (2002): 145-160.
3 For a more thorough discussion on subsidized and unsubsidized theatres in
the Czech Republic, see SEEP 25, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 49-52
4 Alena Brabencova, personal interview with author, 10 September 2004.
5 This includes the three subsidiary theatres in Prague that are financed and
operated by their individual city districts. Even though those three theatres
are not directly supported by the City Council, they too, as subsidiary
organizations, are considered a part of the Prague transformation process.
6 Since many of the unsubsidized theatres come and go, statistics tend to
differ on their exact number
7
The multiplication effect became something of a buzzword in the Czech
Republic. It is a common factor in determining the financial support of
theatres in Switzerland, and its basic premise is that theatrical activities
engender all kinds of other economic growth in their vicinity. There were
several economic studies in the Czech Republic that attempted to calculate
the multiplication effect of the theatres in various cities, and their
conclusions are often used as a means to obtain higher subsidies.
s "Prazska divadelnf sit' jako kulturnf sluzba verejnosti" (Prague Theatre
Network as a Cultural Service to the Public), Svlt a divadlo, 6 (2002): 10-12.
9 Ibid., 15.
10 Igor Nemec, et. a!., "Deklarace hlavnfho mesta Prahy o podpore
profesionalnfho divadla" (Declaration of Support of Professional Theatre by
the Capital City of Prague), Amendment 41=1 to the legislation 4F35/35 of the
Magistrate of the Capital City of Prague on 11. 29. 2001.
II However, one Prague theatre, the venerable Vinohradski divadlo, will
remain a subsidiary organization of the City for the forseeable future. The
theatre is what the Czechs call a "stone-buit theatre," with a magnificent Art
Nouveu building, very large company with a history of star actors and a row
of illustrious artistic directors, and a long tradition of rivaling the national
theatre in terms of the scope of its productions. Since it is defined as a
"Representative City Institution," and perhaps because the Prague City
Council has never warmed up to the state-supported National Theatre, it was
decided that the Vinohradski divadlo will remain "exclusively owned and
53
operated by the city''and thus defiantly stand up to the National.
12 Alena Brabencova et a!, Kultura v Praze, Vjrotni zprdva o financovdni kultury
hl. M. Prahou v roce 2003 (Culture in Prague, Yearly Report on the Financing
of Culture by the Capital City of Prague in 2003), (Prague: Odbor kultury
Magistratu hi. M. Prahy, 2004), 10.
13 So for example, the long-established "Drama Club" in Prague has received
a grant of over sixty million crowns for the next four years. This is exactly the
same amount it would have obtained in direct subsidy before becoming a
not-for-profit theatre, and since the Drama Club is one of the flagship studio
theatres in Prague, it seems unlikely that its future grant applications will be
rejected.
14 Doubravka Svobodova, personal interview with author, 8 September 2004.
15 The cultural policies of the EU bear a resemblance to its agricultural
policies. The EU refuses to provide grants and support to states that heavily
subsidize those industries, and consequently, the subsidiary organizations are
excluded from EU grants.
16 However, the naming of the directors has been, with few exceptions, an
open process emphasizing emphasizing competition and a high level of
professionalism, and the weariness about such decisions has been more
"theoretical" than real.
17 Svobodova, personal interview.
18 The social life in Prague resembles the Paris of Moliere's Misanthrope.
Everybody who is somebody knows everybody else, and the cultural figures,
including many actors and directors, mix freely with the politicians and vice
versa.
19 For the monetary conversion to U.S. dollars, see my previous article in
SEEP.
20 Brabencova, Kultura v Praze, 68.
21 Topfer, Tomas, et. al, Rozbor hospodaienf divadla na Fidlovatce 2003
(Economic indicators of the Fidlovacka Theatre 2003), {Prague: Divadlo na
Fidlovacce, 2004).
22 Tomas Topfer, personal interview with author, 14 September 2004.
23 "Prazska divadelni sit jako kultumi sluzba verejnosti" {Prague Theatre
Network as a Cultural Service to the Public), Svlt a divadlo, 6 {2002): 13.
24 There are two sources of income for the Czech cities and municipalities.
First, they collect taxes and duties on selected goods and services, and
second, they receive funds form the state budget, whose allocation is based
on a complicated formula of their population size, their economic output,
54
cost of living, and other economic and social indicators.
25 Jan Burian, in "Na tema obce divadelniku" (Discussion About the Czech
Theatre Association), Svlt a divadlo, 1 (2002): 93.
26 Ondrej Cerny, et. al., Divadlo v Ceski Republice (Theatre in Czech Republic
2002-2003- A Yearbook), (Prague: Divadelnf ustav, 2004), 817.
27 Furthermore, as a perhaps world-wide oddity, the Ministry of Culture
finances all Czech churches, including the salaries of priests and pastors,
church buildings, etc. The financing of churches constitues almost one fifth
of the entire budget of the ministry.
28 Bohumil Nekolny, personal interview with author, 14 September 2004.
55
OLEG MENSHIKOV: DARING TO BE DIFFERENT
Olga Muratova
Born in 1960, Oleg Menshikov is part of what some in Russian
theatre circles have dubbed "the generation of the three Ms," the other Ms
being Y evgeny Mironov and Vladimir Mashkov. Each member of this
talented trio has achieved enormous popularity both on stage and on
screen. They are all approximately the same age and have demonstrated
equal range as actors.
Menshikov is one of a group of extraordinary actors capable of
individual interpretations of the parts they play. They usually direct
themselves, having a clear picture of their characters' inner worlds.
Depending on whether or not their interpretations agree with that of their
directors, they can be either a director's dream or his/her nightmare.
Menshikov got his big break in 1980, while still a student at the
Shchepkin Theatre School in Moscow. That year, he was noticed by several
prominent directors, including Suren Shakhbazyan, Roman Balayan,
Mikhail Kozakov, and even Nikita Mikhalkov. Almost simultaneously,
Menshikov was offered parts in three different movies- a near impossibility
in Soviet Russia for an actor who was still in training. He accepted the
leading role in Zhdu i nadeyus (Waiting and Hoping),l a movie based on a
novel by Viktor Smirnov. The role was that of Shurka, a member of a
guerilla force operating behind enemy lines during World War II.
Menshikov's Shurka is not "one of the guys"; he stands alone, away from
the mainstream, and always goes against the grain. His comrades-in-arms are
in their element with machine guns and hand grenades. They are all
seasoned warriors, macho and somber. Shurka, in Menshikov's
interpretation, sifts through official documents and papers. He is more
comfortable with reading material than explosives. The actor dared to be
different. He was only nineteen then, but as time would show, his personal
views and artistic approach would take a powerful and influential final
shape.
In 1982, Oleg was offered his second leading part in a movie. (Still
a student, Menshikov was not officially allowed any roles in the professional
theatre.) Kozakov was making a light comedy about life in a communal
Moscow apartment of the 1950s. He needed a happy-go-lucky youth who,
like a puppet master, could manipulate the tenants of a big apartment, but
he had to do so unobtrusively, with natural grace and ease. The actor that
Kozakov was looking for had to be something of a young Andrei Mironov
(a wonderfully talented actor of the 1970s, famous also for his singing and
dancing abilities). A music-school graduate, a passionate pianist capable of
improvisation, a fine singer, and a keen dancer, Oleg Menshikov was an
obvious choice for the part. Pokrovskiye vorota (The Pokrov Gate), based on
Leonid Zorin's elegiac comedy, made Menshikov a household name.
The third movie role that Menshikov obtained the same year was a
minor one, but it had a major impact on his career. In Nikita Mikhalkov's
Rodnya (The Kin), Oleg played the part of Kirill, a troubled young man
waiting to be drafted. The actor was able to work with, and learn from, great
stars of Russian film and theatre, such as Mikhalkov and Nonna
Mordyukova. The friendships that arose while filming Rodnya (The Kin)
proved very fruitful for the actor's future.
After graduation, Menshikov was accepted into the troupe of the
Maly Theatre in Moscow, a prestigious and respected drama theatre that
almost never hires fresh-out-of-school actors. After just one year of working
at the Maly, Menshikov was conscripted for military service, but, like most
promising actors of the time, he was able to "serve" in the Theatre of the
Soviet Army. He was still an actor, but one who was obliged to take orders
and unable to choose parts. During his service, he met Alexander Baluyev,
who would later play the corrupt Russian general in The Peacemaker, a U.S.
film starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Incidentally, that part
was originally offered to Menshikov, who rejected it for patriotic reasons.
Baluyev and Menshikov co-starred in a play based on Boris Rakhmanin's
novel Chasy bez strelok (The Handless Clock). They played two soldiers-one
of whom can travel in time. Among other notable roles by Menshikov
during his two years of obligatory service were Alyosha Bulanov in
Alexander Ostrovsky's Les (The Forest), Lyonka in Alexei Dudarev's war
drama Ryadovye (Enlisted Men), and Ganya lvolgin in a stage version of
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Idiot.
In The Forest, Menshikov rejected the traditional approach to
portraying the character. His Bulanov was not a profit-driven, unscrupulous
gigolo wooing Raisa Gurmyzhskaya, a woman old enough to be his mother.
Oleg's Bulanov was just a guy who was not bright enough to be a cool-
headed predator but could easily adapt to any circumstances. He was
equally ready to become Aksyusha's husband or Gurmyzhskaya's love toy.
Oleg's unorthodox portrayal paid off again; Nina Sazonova, who had been
57
playing Gurmyzhskaya for years, confessed that Menshikov's Alyosha was
by far her favorite.
In Menshikov's portrayal of Ganya in The Idiot, the existential
personality split ever present in Dostoevsky's characters organically
intertwined with the actor's personal perception oflife and reality. The actor
instinctively adopted the writer's doctrine that there are no absolutes in life
and that every individual has a complex and contrasting nature, harboring
both good and evil in his soul. The traditional one-dimensional, "all-black"
interpretation of the character was discarded by the actor as alien to
Dostoevsky's and his own vision. Oleg's Ganya hated himself for being what
he was; his soul was not dead, but his poverty and the need to care for his
mother and sister pushed him into sacrificing himself. Menshikov's Ganya
didn't like the situation he was in but was ready to do what he thought was
right for the sake of his family. His resolve was commendable. Menshikov's
Ganya was not a type character; he was an individual struggling to adjust to
cruel reality.
Menshikov as Ganya in Dostoevsky's The Idiot
58
After his discharge from service, Menshikov refused to return to
what was for him the stifling atmosphere of the Maly Theatre. Instead, he
was accepted into the troupe of the Yermolova Theatre. One of his first
major roles there was the part of Sergei Lukin in Edvard R.adzinsky's play
Sportivnye igry 80 go goda (Sports Games of 1980). Portraying a neurotic
creature looking for love and compassion in a world of the insensitive and
callous, Menshikov brilliantly conveyed the anxiety of the perestroika
generation. Sergei's passivity, incompetence, and paralysis of the soul did not
appeal to the actor, whose own stance is active and uncompromising.
Perhaps what allowed Menshikov to come to terms with the role and play it
magnificently for years was the theme of unshared tragic love that Sergei feels
for his wife.
Since then, the unhappy-love motif has become central in the
actor's art. None of Menshikov's characters has had a fulfilling relationship
or been able to find bliss in love. All his loves are misunderstood, unshared,
or abused. Whether Menshikov, the actor, has brought on stage and screen
the baggage of his own personal experience still remains a mystery, since
Menshikov, the person, has always shunned the world and has even hired
bodyguards to block journalists, paparazzi, and numerous female fans. He
painstakingly dodges all personal questions on those rare occasions when he
does make a public appearance or grant an interview. Fellow actors who have
crossed paths with Menshikov all admit that although he is very
approachable professionally, he always keeps a distance personally, not
letting anybody into his heart and soul.
Valery Fokin, the artistic director of the Y ermolova Theatre, said in
an interview that, after joining their troupe, Menshikov realized that one
thing that theatre lacked was the close-up. Menshikov's eyes, which reflect
every single emotion and movement of his soul, undoubtedly need to be
seen by people beyond the fifth row. Obviously, ample opportunity for that
is provided by the big screen. So it is little wonder that from 1983 (an
important cornerstone year of Menshikov's career) to 1989 the actor chose
to appear in ten different movies. There were two films in 1983: Roman
Balayan's Polyoty vo sne i nayavu (Flights in a Dream and When Awake) and
Potseluy (The Kiss). In 1984, he played Vladimir Mezhirov in Mikhail
Tumanishvili's Polosa prepyatstviy (Obstacle Course). The year 1985 brought
him one of the title roles in Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's film Volodya bolshoy
i Volodya malenkiy (Big Volodya and Little Volodya). Also in 1985, Oleg
starred in yet another title role- that of Captain Fracasse in a remake of Abel
59
Gance's 1943 version of Theophile Gautier's novel, directed by Vladimir
Solovyev. In 1986 Menshikov appeared in three very different films:
Alexander Proshkin's Mikhailo Lomonosov; Pyotr Todorovsky's Po glavnoy
ulitse s orkestrom (Down the Main Street with an Orchestra); and Yury
Kushner's Moy {yubimyi kloun (My Favorite Clown).
Of those movies, Moy {yubimyi kloun (My Favorite Clown) deserves
special mention. The screenplay, based on the novel by Vasily Livanov, was
written by Nikita Mikhalkov and Alexander Adabashian. The plot revolves
around a talented clown, Sergei Sinitsyn, unhappily married to a woman he
loves, who does not appreciate him. The Sinitsyns do not have children, and
Sergei wants to adopt. When his wife (who opposes the idea) goes abroad on
a prolonged business trip, Sergei uses that opportunity to bring home an
orphan. The melodramatic plot is not of primary importance here- the part
of Sergei is. Menshikov plays an individual who dares to be different, who is
ready to forego the conventions of contemporary society in order to prove
to himself that he is a human being. He sacrifices his career, his family, and
the comfort and luxury (his wife is well-off) of his everyday life for the little
orphan. He is willing to endure personal losses and deprivations for a loftier
purpose. Menshikov believes that consciousness is one quality that separates
human beings from animals. But consciousness can only arise out of conflict
with reality. Consciousness is a product of stepping aside from the world and
contemplating one's inner self with pain and anguish. On the other hand,
consciousness cannot originate without society, requiring a certain frame of
reference to be able to judge the self. Therefore, the actor and all his
characters, both on screen and on stage, constantly judge themselves,
juxtaposing their morality and actions with the norms of contemporary life.
Menshikov, the actor, just like Menshikov, the human being, dares to be
different and swim against the current if he strongly believes in a cause.
Menshikov finished his pre-1989 period with Alexei Sakharov's
Lestnitsa (The Staircase) and Stanislav Govorukhin's Bryzgi shampanskogo
(Splashes of Champagne). It is remarkable that the young actor managed to
appear in so many movies within such a short time frame while being fully
involved in theatre productions. What is even more remarkable is that he
turned down almost twice as many movie parts as he accepted. Being that
picky is not typical of an actor-in-the-making, especially during the shaky and
unstable perestroika era.
In 1989, Menshikov left repertory theatre for good, and the
ostensible reason was his role in Alexander Buravsky's allegorical drama
Vtoroy god svobody (The Second Year of Freedom). After playing Sergei Lukin
in Sportivnye igry 80 go gada (Sports Games of 1980), the actor was assigned
the part of Robespierre in a mediocre play written in a broad, loud, and
shallow journalistic manner by a former journalist. In one of his rare
interviews, the actor said that he had left because he was fed up with playing
and doing what he was told and wanted to make his own choices. He did not
have anywhere particular to go; he was just leaving theatre to become the
first freelance actor of the Soviet era. Daring to be different, sacrificing his
career for something he believed in {like Sinitsyn in Moy lyubimyi kloun (My
Favorite Clown), certainly paid off. In a month and a half, Pyotr Fomenko
asked him to play the leading part in Caligula, Albert Camus's historical
drama of the absurd. Destruction of the humane in a human being is the
feature that makes Camus's play so close and understandable to Russians in
the 1990s. For them, the end of the twentieth century was marked by the
ability of men to forget morals for their personal gain and advantage.
Caligula was a great success due in no small part to Menshikov's
interpretation of the Roman emperor. In the role of Caligula, the familiar
motif of being different and, perhaps, chosen (which is very close to the
actor's nature) takes on a new theme of personal defeat, which would later
become central to Menshikov's art. "Men die; and they are not happy,"2
proclaims the Roman Emperor in Act I of Camus's drama, and Menshikov
seems to appropriate this leitmotif and keep it alive in his later stage roles:
Chatsky in Griboyedov's Gore ot uma (Woe from Wit), and Nijinsky in
Alexander Burykin's N. In the film roles of Sashka Sly in Kavkazsky plennik
(The Prisoner of the Mountains), Andrei Tolstoy in Sibirsky tsiryulnik (The Barber
of Siberia), Lyonchik in Mama, and Alexei Golovin in Est/Ouest (East/West),
Menshikov would bring that motif to perfection.
Playing Caligula in theatre proved to be very satisfying, and Oleg's
movie schedule eased up slightly. Between 1989 and 1994, he only appeared
in four movies: Alexei Rudakov's Zhizn po limitu (Life as per Q!.Iota),
Alexander Muratov's Moonsund, Natalia Ilyinskaya's Yama (The Pit), and
Andrei Khvan's Dyuba-Dyuba. All those movies were profoundly
psychological, but none of them achieved popularity with Russian viewers.
In the summer of 1991, Menshikov was invited to play Sergei
Yesenin in Martin Sherman's play When She Danced, staged at the Globe in
London. Vanessa Redgrave played the part of Isadora Duncan, who was
briefly married to Yesenin. Just as in real life, Menshikov spoke only Russian
in the play, while Redgrave spoke only English. The play ran for six months,
61
eight times a week, and was a huge success. While in London, Menshikov
chanced upon the diary of Nijinsky, a controversial Russian ballet dancer
intentionally forgotten in his homeland after he had immigrated to Europe.
Romola Nijinskaya, the dancer's wife, preserved the diary and published it
after her husband's death. Menshikov commissioned Alexei Burykin to write
a play based on the diary. The actor did not only play the leading character
in the drama (entitled N), but also directed it himself. (It is remarkable that
Oleg's natural modesty prevented him from billing himself as director.)
Menshikov's Nijinsky constantly searched for his "self' and for a God that,
to the dancer, was to be found inside a person rather than outside of human
reach. Through his art, Nijinsky/Menshikov tries to unite people with the
God within. N was another milestone on Oleg's path: he has since directed
his stage works himself. In fact, in the late 1990s Menshikov would create his
own makeshift3 theatre troupe, Theatrical Partnership 814, where he could
effectively combine acting and directing.
In 1994, Oleg played Mitya, an NKVD agent, in Nikita Mikhalkov's
film Utomlyonnye solntsem (Burnt by the Sun). The part of Mitya had been
written specifically with Menshikov in mind. The character needed to sing,
tap dance, play the piano, be able to charm all the women at Kotov's country
house, and at the end of the day, ruthlessly arrest Kotov and deliver him, a
former Red Army hero and Stalin's protege, to his execution in Moscow.
Menshikov plays a complex character whose deep, romantic soul and
undying love for his former girlfriend, presently Kotov's wife, Marusya
Golovina (Ingeborga Dapkunaite), coexist with the heartless efficiency of a
well-trained torturer. The constant inner struggle of Mitya, the professional,
versus Mitya, the human being, plays out against the stifling background of
the Stalin regime, ending in mutual defeat. After destroying the Kotov clan,
Mitya cuts his veins in a bathtub. The acute conflict between reality and a
man's inner world results in Mitya's emotional turmoil and subsequent ruin.
In 1996, Menshikov was invited to play a leading part in Sergei
Bodrov Sr.'s The Prisoner of the Mountains. Based on the eponymous short
story by Leo Tolstoy, the movie is modified to fit the realities of the war in
Chechnya. Oleg plays the part of a seasoned soldier, Sashka Sly (inspired by
the nickname of Sylvester Stallone, Sashka's personal role model), who finds
himself in a Chechen prison together with a rookie conscript (Sergei Bodrov
Jr.). Spending day after day with the naive and tenderhearted young man
who harbors no hatred for the enemy, Sly gradually opens up and reveals his
true nature. The tough veteran fights for money: his son is sick and the
Menshikov as Mitya in Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun
medical care is costly. Sashka is not an innate killer; the war is the only way
for him to obtain the necessary amount of money quickly. Under the
innocent boy's benign influence, Menshikov/Sly allows his inner self to shed
layer after layer of protective shielding. Underneath the mask of cruel
indifference and complete self-control, the audience discovers an orphan
with a tragic life story.
Mikhalkov's film The Barber of Siberia was released in 1999, twelve
years after the project was first initiated. The part of Cadet Andrei Tolstoy,
written specifically for Menshikov in the 1980s, was designed to showcase
the diverse talents and acting abilities of the actor who was then in his late
twenties. Menshikov, as Cadet Tolstoy, sings arias from Mozart' s Le Nozze di
Figaro, waltzes, and fences gracefully. For various reasons, the production
came to a standstill. When the project finally got off the ground, Menshikov
was thirty-eight. Playing a wide-eyed and naive twenty-year-old became a
challenge. Instead of Meryl Streep, who was originally intended to co-star
63
64
Menshikov as Sashka Sly in Sergei Bodrov Sr.'s
The Prisoner of the Mountains
with Menshikov in the movie, Julia Ormond was cast in the role ofJane. The
tragic love story of Andrei and Jane is important but definitely not central in
the movie, which glorifies the noble heart and honor of the Russian officer.
Nostalgia for what Russians could have had but irreversibly lost with the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 permeates The Barber. Menshikov's Tolstoy is
a tragic hero, an innocent victim of circumstances who willingly accepts
punishment for a crime he never committed to save the honor of the woman
he loves. About 80 per cent of the dialogue in the movie is in English, of
which Menshikov demonstrates perfect command. In his next movie he
would equally effortlessly speak French.
Also in 1999, Oleg was invited to star in the French film East/West
made by Regis Wargnier. In this movie (Academy Award nominee for best
foreign-language film, winner of the audience award at the Miami
International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Festival),
Menshikov plays a Russian immigrant lured back to his home country by the
government in 1946. Taking Stalin's promises of pardon and a better life at
face value, Alexei Golovine (Oleg Menshikov) optimistically returns to the
Soviet Union with his French wife (Sandrine Bonnaire) and their young son.
On screen, Menshikov is brilliant in another tragedy of an individual who
must choose between love for his wife and her potential freedom (she gets
trapped in Russia with no legal possibility of returning to France), and his
ostensible betrayal of his family.
Menshikov's third movie role of 1999 is that of Leonchik in Mama
by Denis Yevstigneyev. Each of the titular members of "the generation of the
three M's" stars in it. The movie is based on a true story of the Ovechkin
family. Nine! Ovechkina, mother of eleven children, trained her offspring to
compose and perform musical numbers. Having achieved popularity in
Russia as a musical band, they came to a decision to flee the country and
settle in London. They agreed that in case of failure they would all commit
suicide. Their scheme did fail and they all shot themselves, with the
exception of a fifteen-year old son and a seventeen-year old daughter. The
three Ms-Menshikov, Mironov, and Mashkov- play brothers (in the movie,
the name Ovechkin is changed to Yuryev, and there are no sisters) who meet
again a decade and a half after the tragedy, summoned by their mother who
has just served fifteen years in prison.
In addition to his film work, Oleg Menshikov has used his
Theatrical Partnership 814 as a venue for self-expression in theatre. He has
both acted in and directed three plays, which have stirred Russian theatre
65
Menshikov as Andrei Tolstoy in Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia
Menshikov as Alexei Go Iovine in Regis Wargnier's East/West
lovers. The plays were sold out throughout their run even though the ticket
prices far exceeded the customary rate. Menshikov played Chatsky in
Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Gunter in Maxim Kurochkin's Kukhnya (The
Kitchen), and Uteshitelny in Gogol's drama Igroki (The Gamblers). All these
characters are conflicted; all of them are torn between accepted conventions
and their own inner convictions; and all of them let their inner truth win
out, at the expense of their status in society. All three characters, in
Menshikov's interpretation, seemed to be going against the grain, fighting for
their own place in the sun, not allowing themselves to compromise their
principles for the sake of norms dictated by society.
In the spring of 2005, Fillip Yankovsky's movie Statskiy sovetnik
(Civil Counsellor) was released. Menshikov played the leading part of Erast
Fandorin, a brilliant detective of nineteenth-century Russia. The movie is
based on Boris Akunin's popular book series in which Fandorin successfully
uses his deductive method to solve various crimes. Civil Counsellor is the
third movie about the great detective's adventures,
4
and in each one,
Fandorin is played by a different actor. Critics were unanimous in calling
Menshikov the most somber, unemotional, and even morose Fandorin of
the three. The actor's part was very challenging. He had to appear on screen
most of the film (and half of this time in close-ups) with no action and no
lines. Menshikov's "passivity" is so graceful and looks so natural that the
audience never suspects that it is the most challenging part of acting. In Civil
Counsellor, Menshikov is once again paired with Nikita Mikhalkov, who plays
Fandorin's nemesis-a corrupt state official pursuing his own political
agenda. Menshikov portrays an untrusting and asocial human being, and the
price for his professional talents and achievements is separation and
loneliness.
A September 2004 issue of the Telenedelya (a guide for Russian TV
programming in the United States) reports that Menshikov has signed a
contract for two TV series. He will play Ostap Bender, the main character in
Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov's satirical novel Zolotoy telyonok (The Golden Calf),
a charming swindler and con artist with a cynical sense of humor, and Dr.
Zhivago, the title character of Boris Pasternak's lyrical epic. Both productions
are tentatively scheduled for release in 2005. If so, audiences will soon be
moved by Menshikov's interpretation of Pasternak's tragedy of a Faustian
man and a poet in post-revolutionary Russia (a theme very much in line with
the actor's previous characters) and enchanted by the ingenuity and wit of an
amoral trickster of the 1930s.
67
NOTES
I If the text is published or the movie is distributed, the translated title is
given in italics, otherwise the English translation of the title is not italicized.
2 Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New
York: Vintage Books, 1958), 8.
3 Unlike the majority of professional theatres in Moscow, Menshikov's
troupe has neither a permanent place to rehearse and perform nor a set group
of actors and technicians. The troupe reassembles and reorganizes every time
there is a new project and disbands upon its completion.
4 The first Fandorin movie (Azazel) was shot in 2003 by Alexander
Adabashian and starred Ilya Noskov. It won two TEFI awards (Russia's
equivalent to the Emmy awards). The second one, Turetskiy gambit (The
Turkish Gambit) was released in early 2005. It was directed by Dzhanik
Faiziyev and starred Yegor Beroyev.
68
Slavic and East European Peifbrmance Vol. 25, No.3
AN INTERVIEW WITH OLEG MENSHIKOV
Helene Lemeleva
In March, Oleg Menshikov brought to New York a classic Russian
play by Nikolai Gogo!, The Gamblers, which he staged in cooperation with
the co-director Galina Dubovskaya. The following interview took place in
Russian on March 12, 2005 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center before the
opening show of The Gamblers.
Helene Lemeleva: You have brought to New York The Gamblers, the last
production of your theatre enterprise, Theatrical Partnership 814, which you
directed and where you played one of the main roles. What determined your
choice of the material? Why Gogo!?
Oleg Menshikov: Originally, when the whole story was beginning, my
participation was not intended-either as the director, or as the lead. But I
love Gogol, and this title often flashed across my mind. I find this author in
general extremely interesting. And then, when there came the idea to transfer
the whole setting to a Ukrainian village, it solved it. We did not have big
ideas about Gogol, or The Gamblers. It happened by itself The title just came
to us. We started the rehearsals naturally, and I am happy it went that way,
because from the point of view of the director's work, I consider it to be my
best piece.
HL: You have already shown it in Toronto and Boston. Today is the
opening night in New York. Tomorrow there are two more performances
here. How are you being received on this continent?
OM: Very well! But you know how it is on a tour-one city after another, we
keep changing the scenery, the lighting- even now, they are still recording
the lighting .... So, it's all rather stressful.
HL: In Moscow, The Gamblers is played on a small stage. Here the facilities
where you present it are much larger than the Stage under the Roof of the
Mossoviet Theatre. Did you have to make changes to your show to adjust it
to the new conditions?
69
Oleg Menshikov and Helene Lemeleva at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York, NY
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OM: We don't make any major external changes. Everyone adjusts his
performance to this new situation. Actually, in Russia we already played
The Gamblers on larger grounds-when touring to St. Petersburg, Kiev, other
places .... 120 seats-unfortunately, it is not commercially viable, and
people organizing the tours will never agree to that.
HL: Speaking about that, 120 seats is the size of the Stage under the Roof
of the Mossoviet Theatre in Moscow. Having chosen this stage, you
sacrificed significant cash returns from ticket sales.
OM: Well, yes, we did, because it seemed to us that this particular story
requires a small space. In general, I hate small stages! I don't like them,
though I gave my best performances on a small stage. Nijinsky, Caligula ...
So, there are many reasons for me to like them- but I don't. I can't stand
being scrutinized, but here-yes, two hours on a very small stage. But this
story dictated it: a slight turn of the head, which can be seen only from a
close distance, a hint of smile, a subtle change of expression in the eyes ...
There is a moment when we sit with our backs to the audience- which would
look rather provocative on a bigger stage. So, it was our conscious decision
that this play is to be presented on a small stage. But when we go on tours,
it's different; we can't explain all those things to the organizers.
HL: What is the main driving motif of your work? Judging by the fact that
you deliberately chose the small stage, it is definitely not commerce. Then,
what?
OM: (Smiling) Well, it must be something else. What we call artistic
criteria.
HL: Is that what comes first?
OM: Yes. In fact, it has always been like that for us. Well, of course, it's
understandable; we are a theatre enterprise, and we need to earn
money- but, so far, this has never come first. No, really, it's not that we are
so elevated and think only of the spirit and nothing else exists for us
(smiles)- but, thank God, that is not the primary concern. The financial
aspect, I mean. Well, we don't luxuriate, but we exist . . . normally.
71
HL: You enjoy recognition both as an actor and a director. If we were to
imagine a purely artificial situation where you would have to choose just one
of the two: acting or directing, which would you choose?
OM: Honestly? Neither!
HL: Neither!
OM: To escape somewhere . . . To travel ... To have a rest at the sea.
HL: You are tired ... The time difference is really huge.
OM: Perhaps ...
HL: But if we were to be serious?
OM: I'll tell you. . . . For me those two professions are so linked
together. ... Our age is so ... strange. Who can now separate the two? If
an actor is good-I am not trying to say that it's me- but if we are talking
about a good actor, he can't help being the director of his role; he can't
help seeing the show from the outside; he should know how to help a less-
experienced partner be on stage. That's what's called directing, in my view.
And it is naturally, organically connected with acting. In other words, I did
not make a shift to a new profession. It just seemed to me that there were
people to whom I could say something-and they could believe me. And
then it went naturally.
HL: Speaking about the freedom of self-expression, how relative is this
notion for you? How much do you have to look back at the viewers, the
critics, the box-office sales? How much do all these factors interfere with
the creative process?
OM: You know, all of it does interfere, but as far as I don't have to do it- I
won't. Look back, I mean. I can tell you that so far I have not been looking
back. But this does not mean that a moment will never come when I will have
to look back-at the ticket sales, the critics, the press, and so on. But so far,
thank God, I don't. In other words, it must be that the problems that touch
me internally coincide with those of the people sitting in the audience-they
touch them, too. That's what makes everything happen.
HL: You staged classics; you staged postmodernism. And would you turn to
the Silver Age?
OM: Well, it depends on the material. .. . I don't know .... To convey the
spirit of the Silver Age, that anguish .. .
HL: Is it not close to you?
OM: It was very close to me. But now ... It's moving further and further
away. The Silver Age is a little closer to youth. At least, it seems to me that
it is so.
HL: You travel in time; your profession allows you to do so. If you were
offered to choose yourself an epoch, would you stay here or go back or
perhaps run forward?
OM: You know, I'll answer in a banal way: I would just stay. I don't know
what it was like before-in books, one can make everything sound
beautiful. ... The future is even more obscure. "We don't choose the
times, we live and die in them." I think, one needs to try to live worthily
during this space of time-to be, to exist for this time period, given to us
from above.
HL: Not long ago you played the leading part in the production of The
Demon, based on the poem by Lermontov. After just a few opening
performances, the play was taken out of the repertory. I, unfortunately, was
unable to see it. What is the reason of the forced death of a newborn show-a
show that was interesting and had promised success?
OM: If we are talking about the external reasons, the main one was the
absence of Kirill Serebrennikov, whom I consider undoubtedly one of the
most talented directors in our theatre today.
HL: But what do you mean by absence? He staged the play, didn't he?
73
OM: He did, and we played it a few times, and then he disappeared for two
months. And when we all gathered to play the next show, and he was away
at some filming and could not come to continue, simply to conduct the
rehearsals, I understood that it was a nightmare. And Kirill showed up only
in a month and a half. I understand it all-he was staging plays somewhere
else, directing a movie, and so on. But I also understood that without
rehearsals with him, without his interference, it could not go on. Then time
passed, and it all just dissolved by itself. Though not without my
participation, to tell you honestly .... It was hard to perform in this play.
Because of its title. Because of the things it talks about. I never expected it
to be easy-it should be hard, but ... in this case ... Sometimes it was hard
in a wrong way. In short, the external reason was Kirill's absence and the
small number of rehearsals, and the internal reason was connected just with
me and my reflections about ... the heaven and the earth-let's put it that
way.
HL: You said in one of your interviews that you were not going to
participate in the productions of your theatre enterprise as an actor. Is that
right?
OM: No. I just have always said that I want Theatrical Partnership 814 to
have as its aim not only serving my interests as a director and an actor but
also working for the creation of other productions without my
participation.
HL: Let's talk about your cinema works. Nikita Mikhalkov plans to shoot
a sequel to Burnt by the Sun. Judging by the delighted reception by the
American audience of the original movie, one can easily predict lively
interest in a sequel. When is the film scheduled to appear?
OM: Nobody knows that, but, thank God, the scenario has been written. In
my view, it is a wonderful and exciting scenario, and it is ready. But when he
will start to film-that's the question.
HL: Is the film planned to be presented in this country?
OM: (With a smile) Well, what film is not planned to be presented in this
country? Yes, I think so ....
HL: Now you are working on two new movies: the first Russian screen
version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the film The Golden Calf
based on the Soviet satirical novel by Il'f and Petrov. It is difficult to imagine
two characters who would be more different from each other. How do you
manage to embody both practically simultaneously?
OM: No-no-no, that's all just talk; don't believe it! There is no such a thing
as simultaneously for me. Now I am working only on Doctor Zhivago; in April
I'll be finishing it, and in May I am starting The Golden Calf.
HL: You have worked much in the West. Your theatrical debut in London
brought you the Lawrence Olivier prize; you played on the Paris scene, acted
in a movie by Regis Wargnier. . . . What do you think: do Russian and
Western theatre and cinema cultures differ much? Are these different
schools, different approaches to art, different types of perception-or are
there no different schools but just different themes, directors, and actors, so
ultimately everything depends on the person?
OM: I agree with the second statement. Though I understand that there
must be some differences in schools-but who would say that Brando did not
work in Stanislavsky's system? Well, he had never been to Russia, had not
studied there, and had no idea what the Russian theatre school was, but if an
actor or a director is good, there are all the systems in him, and all the
schools are there .... Everything, everything- Meyerhold, and T airov, and
Lee Strasberg, everything in the world!
HL: Has Omar Sharif, in your opinion, embodied Doctor Zhivago?
OM: Bless you, no!
HL: And, in general, can a Western actor play a Russian intellectual?
OM: I don't know .... Well, I think, yes .... It just seems to me that the
tasks of that movie were different. The story it told was not about a Russian
intellectual.
HL: In the post-perestroika period in Russia, a lot of movies started to come
out to satisfy certain market needs: criminal TV serials, one-day butterflies in
75
the genre of light comedy or melodrama, not demanding much intellectual
investment from either the creators or the viewers, but enjoying huge
popularity among the widest audience. It is a normal phenomenon. Such
movies are made in every civilized country. But you have never appeared in
these kinds of projects, despite the fact that they bring immediate fame and
material well being. You have most likely been offered roles in such films
more than once. And this means that you refused. Why?
OM: You've posed your question so well that it already contains the answer.
That is why. Yes, really, it exists everywhere. And will always exist, and now
it appears in Russia, too. But everyone makes his choice. And as far as I have
an opportunity to choose, I choose. But nobody knows what will happen
tomorrow. Tomorrow everything can be taken away from me, and I will act
in these soap operas.
HL: As a cinema actor you are known in this country for the films Burnt by
the Sun and East/ West. Russia knows you by a number of outstanding films,
some of which-such as The Prisoner qf the Mountains-are also known in the
West. If we look at such films as Moonsund, Burnt by the Sun, East/ West, and
now also Doctor Zhivago-we can see that a certain image has been formed
that unites all these stories, although they are set in different historical
moments: a Russian intellectual at a critical time in Russian history. This is
the image in which your talent is revealed, in my view, to its fullest. But now,
having talked to you for an hour, I can judge it is not just an image- and not
just roles. And I would like to ask you: at this time, also crucial for Russia, is
it difficult for a member of the Russian intelligentsia to remain himself?
OM: You know ... This notion is so broad: Russian intelligentsia. But it seems
to me that now it's disappearing so rapidly you can hear a whiz-both the
notion and these people. Yes, certainly, they do exist. But there have always
been so few .... And in this, perhaps, is their unique quality-that there are
few of them, and there will never be many.
HL: Do they have to make a compromise with the time now more than ever
before?
OM: No, the real intelligentsia does not, but it seems to me that the Russian
intelligentsia, m a broader sense, got spoiled by constantly making
compromises. It compromises all the time, and it justifies itself all the time,
saying that since we have a sense of guilt, we are already the intelligentsia. No,
I don't agree with that. This is a subject for prolonged discussion, and we can
get lost in it now. But the Russian intelligentsia at this critical time ... (after a
longpause) I would like to take a look at them. No, seriously. I am not saying
that there are none. But there are few. Very few.
77
MROZEK'S SERENADE AND PHILOSOPHER FOX
Arnie! Melnick
Over the last two years, East River Commedia has done many plays
by Slawomir Mrozek. We've performed them in theatres, parks, parking lots,
and malls; in the United States and in Poland; and, most recently, at
Tribeca's Collective: Unconscious where we presented the animal fables,
Serenade and Philosopher Fox. There's definitely something about Mrozek
that appeals to us, despite the fact that these plays clearly belong to the
very specific context of the 1960s in Poland and may seem somewhat out
of place in the United States. In reviews of our production, reviewers
almost invariably call the plays "absurd," often using the term to suggest
that the plays are foreign, incomprehensible, or irrelevent to U.S.
audiences.
When Martin Esslin included Mrozek in the second edition of his
influential book The Theatre of the Absurd, he anchored the playwright in a
very particular historical moment and gave his work a label that really
stuck. We were not surprised to learn that Mrozek himself still feels
constrained by it. In an interview at the 2000 Reykjavik Literary Festival, he
comments:
Wherever I've gone over the last forty years I've hardly been asked
about anything but the Theatre of the Absurd, every interview
starts with Martin Esslin, his book has been read in every
university all over the world, for all the critics it became a mantra
in their criticism .... I suppose, for me, it's okay because I am
known, somehow, thanks to it, but bad because it makes no sense.
The book is now very old, very dusty, and I think, I even hope,
that a new generation will have new ideas and find a completely
new approach.!
Mrozek's objection to being pigeonholed and his disappointment
with the shortsightedness of readers seems valid given how rarely his plays
are produced in the United States today. Still, several of the qualities of the
absurd that Esslin points out- a bleak view of society and civilization, a
powerful charge of violence, attention to "the inadequacy of the rational
approach"-are of great interest to East River Commedia and say more
Bishop and Fox in East River Commedia's production of
Mrozek's Philosopher Fox
about Mrozek's endurance than about his irrelevance. To us, these qualities
seem very appropriate for U.S. audiences.
Of course, in many ways Mrozek is a little out of place in New
York today, and that's undeniably part of the attraction. The strange
exterior and foreign references of Mrozek's plays make the disconcerting
familiarity beneath the work all the more striking. East River Commedia is
interested in producing work that is not only relevant to our time and
place, but that also questions what it means to be "relevant"; Mrozek's
plays, half-political satire, half-parable, consistently ask just that question.
The plays are full of unexpectedly intimate moments, and because
Mrozek's critique of social and political institutions is first and foremost a
critique of human nature, their dark humor is entirely comprehensible.
The first thing we learned about Mrozek was that he has to be
played to be understood. His superb sense of comic timing only reveals
itself onstage, and his use of pauses, silences, and tempo changes is so well
79
controlled that in performance you can almost hear the meaning by
listening to the rhythm. In fact, the rhythm often says more than the words
themselves, which dance around their own core meanings with a lightness
that entirely belies their context. And it didn't take much to realize that the
plays' gravity is best expressed in their most wildly funny moments. During
the most recent production at Collective: Unconscious, laughter became a
measure of the production's accuracy. In the chuckles and guffaws that
accompanied Serenade and Philosopher Fox, we heard both appreciation of
the humor and the audience's startled recognition of the plays' underlying
ruthlessness.
Serenade and Philosopher Fox do set out to be ruthless; both plays
expose the insatiable and irrational desires that underpin human actions. In
Serenade, Fox (the main character of both plays) tantalizes three attractive
inhabitants of a henhouse, who take turns flirting voraciously with him. Each
hen seems, despite the warnings of their rooster husband, not to recognize
the danger Fox brings-or rather, they are irresistibly attracted to it. Fox
Fox in Mrozek's Serenade
Rooster, Red, Blonde, and Brunette in the henhouse of Mrozek's Serenade
adapts his seductive tactics to the individual hen, accusing romantic, sex
kitten Blonde of not trusting him; using reverse psychology on the pseudo-
psychiatrist Brunette; and waiting patiently for Red-a man clad in a red satin
robe and heels, and speaking with a thick Polish accent-to come to him.
Fox's murderous charm (not to mention his formidable knowledge
of1980s love songs) goes a long way toward getting the hens to the very door
of the henhouse, but the victim he actually extracts from the wire cage ends
up being the overprotective Rooster. Despite his fear, Rooster is as easily
manipulated by Fox as the hens, and in the end, he actually chooses to go,
shirtless, with sequined briefs bared, into the mouth of the beast.
Disturbingly, this is a "happy ending," leaving everyone with what they
(more or less) wanted-the play's "villain" dead, the heroines free from his
jealousy, the hero sated.
Of course, Fox is bound to be hungry again, and the stage is set for
Philosopher Fox. But the hunger in this second play is of a more spiritual kind,
81
triggered by Fox's chance encounter with a bishop sitting on a bench in the
park. Trying to make the most of his opportunity, Fox reasons, demands, and
finally pleads with Bishop to give him a religious validation for his bestial
need to keep killing. Fox's desperate wish to justify the desires that seemed
so straightforward in Serenade is suddenly revealed, and the effortless control
that made the killer so attractive in the first play disappears.
The unwitting object of Fox's tirade, his "victim," is a cock in a torn
red dress and fishnets, with a leash attached to the studded dog collar around
his neck. Cock is a joyful relic of the amorous self-destruction of the previous
play (he might even be Red, spared from the massacre in Serenade). He's
completely trashed and even more eager than the hens to be devoured, as
long as it's a good time. Like the characters of Serenade, if more extreme,
Cock suggests that the desire for self-destruction is as irresistible as that for
power. Fox's downfall reveals that desire to be more insatiable than hunger.
Together the plays ask, what do we really want and why? Can we possibly
know?
Fox and Red in Mrozek's Serenade
82 Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 25, No.3
The panting willingness of the chickens to be eaten also works as a
form of theatrical commentary: the prey wants nothing more than to be
good in the role of prey. Fox is similarly eager to demonstrate how much like
a fox he can be-he constantly displays his "cunning" tricks for all to see. Of
course, in announcing his menace, he defuses it. ("Did your husband not tell
you who I am ... ? A fox, therefore a murderer"; "doubtless your Excellency
knows I'm a bloodthirsty animal?") The plays' self-referential redundancy
makes it clear that the pretext of using animals as a metaphor for humans is
in fact not a pretext at all; the bestial impulses that drive humans are
completely self-evident, and it is their distortions and convolutions that
become interesting. In Mrozek's dialogue, language, which pretends to mask
the characters' lust for power, sex, "truth," freedom, etc., in fact makes their
motivations clearer and the framework of the play more apparent. If Mrozek
seems foreign to U.S. audiences, it is partly because he eschews the
emotional complexity of naturalism; in these plays, manipulation is sincerity.
Yet Mrozek's use of self-conscious archetypes and overstatement
create an uncommon relationship with the audience. He manages to surprise
by simply doing the most obvious thing. In Serenade, for example, coy
exchange after coy exchange gets the audience laughing at the characters'
failed attempts at subtlety, until Fox and Blonde suddenly drop the pretence
of their conversation about "trust":
FOX: Please tie my hands. Then not only will you be completely
safe but I will be completely unarmed. Can there be greater proof of
trust?
BLONDE: The ribbon is not enough. I need a bigger guarantee.
FOX: In that case I suggest we go to my place. I have handcuffs at
home.
BLONDE: Really?
FOX: Handcuffs, chains, ropes, and even stocks.
BLONDE: And you'lllet yourself be tied up?2
The palpable sexual tension and innuendoes of Serenade have completely
anticipated the S&M references of this scene-at the very first mention of
tying hands, the audience ought already to be thinking of handcuffs. Even
then, when the thing that was being hinted at so broadly was actually said
out loud, when Fox actually named his implements, the audience burst into
83
Fox and his prey, Cock, with Bishop in Mrozek's Philosopher Fox
embarrassed laughter. The play itself laughs at the idea of leaving the
discussion on a "nudge nudge, wink wink" level. The characters have every
intention of taking the game much further than that. For East River
Commedia, this scene was a kind of a path marker, a sanction even, urging
us to take the production to much greater extremes of explicitness-not only
in allowing the sexuality of characters' relationships to be presented, but in
creating a direct and knowing bond with the audience.
It is very clear in Mrozek's plays that the relationship between
language and action is not natural, that it is a transaction. Like any satirist,
he uses archetypes and stereotypes to create recognizable characters that can
broker this transaction, asking the audience to see reflections of themselves
and their society in the work. This use of specific types should create a
perfect opportunity to recontextualize the plays by updating the types. But
East River Commedia found New York's endless variety too difficult to
package. Our productions of both Serenade and Philosopher Fox drew more on
an overall sense of madness in New York, on the generalized extremity of the
behavior we see all around us. Finding inspiration in the melodrama of sex,
drugs, and rock 'n' roll, the fervor of the religious fanatic, the zeal of the
sadomasochist, and the thoughtless brutality of the American torturer, our
characters became familiar by allowing an in-your-face vehemence to show
through the controlled language of the dialogue.
The excessiveness of these wide-ranging contextual references was
matched in the production by an over-the-top theatricality that physically
and emotionally stretched the limits of the text. By the middle of the second
play, Fox is almost over the edge, physically exhausted by his attempts to
play both Bishop's part and his own, and mentally in knots as a result of his
own reasoning. Cock is even more visibly going to pieces. At one point,
already on the verge of collapse, he cracks open a can of Budweiser and
downs the whole can in one go. Beer spurts out of the can, sprays the
audience, and gushes over the front of his torn dress. The huge burp assures
the audience that there was no fakery in his performance. The physicality,
like the language, relies on an almost gross overstatement that crosses the line
Fox and Cock in Philosopher Fox
85
between the theatrical and the real-the characters seem to be genuinely on
the verge of falling apart, destroyed by their own theatricality.
After so much flirting with disaster, the ending had to be a matter
of life and death. In the final scene of Philospher Fox, Bishop refuses once and
for all to speak to Fox, destroying all his Old World arguments with the
simple baring of a pink, plastic, all-too-feminine breast, and then leaves.
Cock asks, 'Where are we?"- to which Fox can only respond despairingly,
"The end." The text ends there, but that final self-referential shrug, allowing
an escape in theatricality, was not the gesture East River Commedia wanted.
Instead, Fox strangles Cock. The death is violent, drawn out, and near
pornographic, and when it's all over, Fox nestles up behind his victim,
seeming to go to sleep. Unlike the bloody, chewing mouth that is the final
image of Serenade, this scene was disturbingly peaceful-the lights went out
very slowly. When the audience applauded, it did so hesitantly, as if afraid
of waking Fox. It was as though the play, having coaxed audience members
into identifying with Fox, was forcing them to admit this bond at the very
Blonde, Red, and Brunette following Serenade
moment in which it had become most distasteful. Unwillingly applauding a
murder, the audience, like Fox, seemed conscious of only being able to do
what it was programmed to do.
Having applauded, the audience seemed to want to forget the end
entirely. Still, people lingered. There was one moment they did want to
discuss: the entracte. After Serenade, the hens, dressed in mourning for their
husband, come out of the henhouse. Three in a row, they begin to move side
to side, dancing in the face of death. In many ways this is the real cathartic
moment in these plays. As Marek Grechuta's song plays, Red
exits the stage, then Brunette, leaving an accelerating Blonde in stiletto heels,
hair swinging, terrifyingly precarious and completely wild. The dance was
irrational and inexplicably compelling, and it was almost impossible to think
of it as a choreographed performance. Everyone wanted to know, where did
it come from? Did Mrozek write it? Even the director answered that he
hardly knew where it came from. The dance could almost be an eruption of
Mrozek's subconscious, enacting the fight to stay alive that he describes as
his reason for writing:
I have an unceasing need of organization and clarity, because I feel
threatened by chaos and darkness. I believe that chaos and darkness
are natural elements, our natural setting, of which we have more
than enough. I am constantly blurred, torn, decentralized and
consider that only through constant centrifugal work can I in some
way balance this process, stay alive, protect myself from
disintegration and madness.3
The dance strips off the pretense of control in the plays, in writing
itself, and suggests that a "new approach" to the plays must be one that risks
losing its balance. In this production we came closer than we expected to
disaster. Just about everything fell apart; by the end of the run, the doors
were falling off the chicken coop, there were holes in the wire, the shriveled
Christmas tree had lost all but a few needles, several performers were injured.
But the performances kept getting better. The more the show tested the
boundaries of the stage, and the more the set went to pieces, the more the
sense that something was really happening crept in. The considered and
scripted choices that separate the performer from the character were revealed
as a doorway through which chaos could enter the room. And as always with
Mrozek, we recognized reality in this chaos by discovering our renewed
87
ability to laugh. Watching Blonde slam Fox's hand in the door for the fourth
time that week, we'd find ourselves delightedly, gleefully surprised as though
seeing the production for the first time. Not knowing why or how, we
discovered the play had taken on a life of its own, overwhelming even our
intimate knowledge of its choreography with the feeling that anything could
happen.
Serenade and Philosopher Fox by Slawomir Mrozek. Directed by Paul Bargetto.
Trans. by Jacek Laskowski. Featuring Troy Lavallee (Fox), Ray Wasik
(Rooster/Bishop), Rad Kaim (Red/Cock), Heather Benton (Brunette), and
Michelle Guthrie (Blond). Dramaturgy: Arnie! Melnick. Set Design: Mimi
Lien. Costume Design: Oana Ban Botez. Lighting Design: Allen Willner.
Music Composition: Lucien Ban. East River Commedia, Collective:
Unconscious, New York City. February 3 to 27.
NOTES
I Ami Ibsen, "No One Believes Plays," interview with Slawomir Mrozek,
Reykjavik, 2000, http:/ / au.geocities.com/ masthead_21issue5/ Mrozek.html.
2 Slawomir Mrozek, Serenade, trans. Jacek Laskowski, in The Mrotek Reader
(New York: Grove Press, 2004), 545-6.
3 Qtoted in Halina Stephan, Transcending the Absurd: Drama and Prose of
Slawomir Mrotek (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), fn. 10.
88
BARD'S SUMMERSCAPE 2004:
SHOST AKOVICH AND HIS WORLD
Mary Keelan
During the summer of 2004 Shostakovich and His World, a
festival of theatre, music, dance, and film played at the Richard B. Fisher
Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, located in the village of
Annandale-on-Hudson, ninety miles north of New York City. Opening in
June of2003 to universal accolades, the Frank 0. Gehry "frugally" designed
performance building ($62 million) startles visitors experiencing it for the
first time. Walking across the pastoral campus, one sees the building rise
like a glistening mirage in a meadow stretching along the river highland,
facing the Catskill Mountains. Its shimmering concrete, glass, and steel
structure houses two main theatres: the nine-hundred-seat Sosnoff and the
two-hundred- seat Theatre Two; and for students, rehearsal spaces in the
Stewart and Lynda Resnick Theatre Studio and the Felisitas S. Thorne
Dance Studio. The high-tech acoustics, designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, and
versatile lighting imbedded in the architectural design seem to cry out:
"Come, perform, enjoy!" In the summers of 2003 and 2004, Bulgarian,
Czech, and Russian artists, among many others, did just that, introducing
many rarely performed works.!
Shostakovich and His World delighted the 2004 summer
audiences who were introduced to interpretations of Shostakovich, Gogo!,
and Akhmatova by such theatre groups as the Alexandrinsky Theatre,
Potudan, and AKHE from Russia, and the Credo from Bulgaria. A Russian
film festival, which complimented the stage performances, presented
cinematic works with music composed by Shostakovich and scenarios
inspired by GogoJ.2
The featured programs at the SummerScape 2004 were: Gogol's
Inspector General; Gogol!Shostakovich's The Nose; Shostakovich's Cherry
Tree Towers; and Akhmatova/Marvin/ Levi's Guest from the Future, all of
which I saw in preview, premiere, or dress rehearsal. As a longtime resident
of the Hudson Valley, I welcomed the opportunity to see seldom-staged
Slavic and East European works at Bard's SummerScape Festival.
89
I.
The first production of the festival was Meyerhold and Korenev's
1926 version of Gogel's Inspector General in a new interpretation by Valery
Fok:in, co-produced by the Alexandrinksy Theatre (the A.S. Pushk:in Russian
State Academic Drama Theatre) of St. Petersburg and the Meyerhold Center
ofMoscow. On opening night-July 8, 2004-buzz was everywhere in Gehry's
incandescent lobby air at the Sosnoff Theatre. Most of the predominantly
Russian-speaking audience knew that Fok:in's Moscow production had
recently received the Russian Festival of Performing Arts Golden Mask award
for best large-scale production.
Fokin created a grotesque, tragicomic spectacle richly layered more
through the music and movement than through the dialogue. Decorum was
quickly dispensed with as Khlestakov, played by Alexei Devotchenko, spun
increasingly out of control. The lush Tsarist-era costuming, at once elegant
and motley, contrasted with Alexander Borovsky's lopsided opening set, in
which a skewed building and shifting doorway suggested a world gone topsy-
turvy. Once the agile rake Khlestakov and his shadow servant Osip, played
by Yuri Tsurilo, careened into the town and occupied the home of the
mayor, played by Sergei Parshin, the townspeople's volcanic gullibility-
expressed by atonal music-began to pulsate beneath the surface. The
audience, caught up in the suspenseful deception that is plotted more
specifically by Fokin than by either Gogo! or Meyerhold, laughed loudly at
the dark jokes conveyed through the "musical realism."
When the handsome stern-faced Khlestakov arrived at the mayor's
home, the mayor's wife and daughter (played by Svetlana Smirnova and
Elena Zimina respectively), clearly charmed by the outlandish behavior of
the stranger, entertained him with a romantic play. Swirling and spinning in
a bouffant spectacle, the two women hunger for Khlestakov's favors and sing
together as doubles of each other's appetites in a wittily staged piece of
meta theatre.
Fokin translated Gogol's pillorying of bureaucratic bungling into
visual images with the aid of Leonid Desyatnikov's score, which blended the
surreal with the satiric-all perfectly timed. Melodic dissonance always
conveyed the comedic intent. Sergei Gritsay's asynchronous choreography of
arms, legs, heads, and torsos constantly created new configurations that then
disassembled. This initially appeared overly stylized in its exaggerated
angularity, but it soon made sense. No one was connected with any one else;
misrule was the only rule.
"'
......
Inspector General, directed by Valery Fokin, at Bard SummerScape 2004
The many in the audience who understood Russian responded
instantly with laughter to the moments of unadulterated comedy; the
supertitles, by Anna Oralova, and the program synopsis, by Jonathan Levi,
helped those not familiar with the text, which had undergone significant
changes from Gogol's original. As Pesochinsky explains in the program,
"Fokin's new staging uses the text written for Meyerhold's production, based
on Gogol's early variants of the play and also incorporating some elements
from Gogol's other writings, including Dead Souls, The Marriage, and The
Gamblers." But reading Meyerhold's version would not have helped much,
because "Fokin discards quite a few of the episodes and motifs that were
specifically important to Meyerhold in 1926."
For his re-interpretation, Fokin concocted something deliciously
baroque and bawdy, but even the frivolity of a wedding celebration
contained sinister and diabolical overtones. The duped, cardboard-like
officials, doomed to repeat their ingrained stupidity, amuse us ominously, at
our peril. Remake, the vocal group that sang blithely from afar, could not
dispel the dark mood at the heart of Fokin's staging of society's grimmest
foibles. Although I recognized a debt to Gogo!, this Inspector General was an
entirely new work.
Inspector General, directed by Valery Fokin, at Bard SummerScape 2004
II.
When the lights came up at the end of the dress rehearsal for the
production of Shostakovich's, Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers [Moskva
Cheryomushkz], director Francesca Zambello leaned forward in her seat in
Theatre Two, instantly capturing the attention of the assembled cast, many
of whom were singers from former Soviet republics. Oblivious to the
applause of friends, the press, and the house audience, the acclaimed director
continued working with the performers, fine-tuning the production in
preparation for the six performances scheduled for that weekend.
This was the American premiere of Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers. The
staging in Theatre Two allowed for the experimentation for which Zambello
is recognized. The sparkle and zest of the production came from
Shostakovich's music, as adapted and conducted by Sergei Dreznin, who
infused the satiric tone of the story with his own musical wit. At times, he
and his musicians created a cabaret feeling of intimacy for the audience.
Maintaining a fast-paced piano rhythm for the four male dancers,
Dreznin conveyed the comforting reassurance of traditional Russian folk
music and love ballads while injecting irony through songs such as "Workers
of the World Unite." The satire on urban housing problems was never hard-
edged, nor did it succumb to sentimentality. Though this type of satire might
have been highly topical when it was first performed at the Moscow Operetta
Theatre on January 24, 1959, the Bard audience was able to relate to a work
that transcends the immediacy of its own time. The musical deals with the
struggles of three couples competing for an apartment in a new high rise
government building being erected on the outskirts of Moscow-in
Cheryomushki, or Cherry Trees. They succeed in gaining the coveted prize
only after misadventures, disputes with officials, and subterfuges intended to
mislead their competitors.
The set by G.W. Mercier for the production of Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers
was designed to create the feel of a TV soap opera in which the camera can
zoom in on the happenings in one family's life, simultaneously capturing
what is going on somewhere else in another apartment or in the street. To
the right, an interlocking, moveable scaffolding, painted a crimson orange-
red, suggested the skeletal structure of a Moscow apartment building and
provided the frame for acrobatic dancing and lovers' duets.
A beautiful effect was thereby produced; the metal structures on
stage complemented the open girders in the auditorium, as if all were part
of one single stage setting. When the scene shifted to the street, large
93
cement-looking blocks were pushed onto the stage to become a bench or
car, changing colors to suit the setting. To the left an enormous video
screen flashed scenes corresponding to the subject of a given song: Moscow
streets, Soviet-style apartments of the 1950s, classic books, museum rooms,
touring maps. The overall effect of the media projections was distracting;
the music and libretto did not need visual illustration. To the side of the
scaffolding, a piano and accordion, supplemented at times by other
instruments, kept up the fast-paced momentum of the piece.
The Russian audience particularly enjoyed the nostalgic fun of this
Communist-era musical, which seemed to bring back many memories.
III.
Perhaps the most awaited event at the Bard SummerScape 2004
festival was the American Symphony Orchestra's performance of
Shostakovich's comic opera in three acts, The Nose, directed by Francesa
Zambello and conducted by Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College
and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. I attended a
performance on preview night in late July; the Sosnoff Theatre was filled
with a standing-room-only audience who had come to hear and see a rarity.
Shostakovich's operatic version ofGogol's story was premiered in January of
1930 at the Maly Theatre in Leningrad, but it was never revived in the
composer's lifetime; the opera was not rehabilitated in the USSR until1974.
In Gogol's fantastic tale, the loss of a nose by a public official and
his quest for its return via a classified ad is treated as an ordinary everyday
event. Eventually, the missing appendage is returned to its rightful owner.
Inspired by Gogol's grotesque satire, the twenty-one-year-old Shostakovich
composed his first opera, The Nose. It was considered by one critic as "an
autobiographical opera" and "his first creative and social manifesto."3
The opera focuses on a government official, Major Kovalyov
(played by Igor Tarassov) who draws many others into an extended chase to
reclaim his missing nose. Even with his newly reattached nose, Kovalyov's
paranoia intensifies, and he blames Madame Podtotschina (played by
Makvala Kasrashvilli) for his dilemma, since she is involved in seeking a
husband for her daughter (played by Lauren Skuce), who with her mother
dances and sings a sexy duet.
The SummerScape production eschewed seriousness as well as the
temptation to rely too much on slapstick. The American Symphony
Orchestra contributed a formidable sound, accenting the satiric and allowing
Sketch by Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, costume designer,
for The Nose, directed by Francesca Zambello,
at Bard SummerScape 2004
95
96
The Nose, directed by Francesca Zambello, at
Bard SummerScape 2004
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 25, No.3
the absurd to resonate. At times, however, the musicians so overpowered the
singers that the theatrical aspect of the opera often seemed secondary to its
musical form. Fortunately, Francesca Zambello, working in close
collaboration with set designer Rafael Viiioly, and costume designer Georgi
Alexi-Meskhishvili, effected a balance between the two. The sets moved with
precision and grace, engaging the audience's imagination throughout all the
bizarre happenings. The opera was sung in Russian with supercities by Cori
Ellison.
IV.
Three of Gogol's short stories: The Overcoat, Nevsky Prospekt, and
White Cabin, were presented at the festival in new interpretations by Russian
performance artists under the rubric Petersburg Tales. The performers were
selected and invited to Bard by Jonathan Levi, managing director of
SummerScape 2004. Levi described to me his discovery of one of the groups:
"It was late November, a month of slush and little light .... A few steps off
Nevsky Prospekt [in St. Petersburg], a tiny puppet theatre, the Potudan, was
performing a marionette version of Gogol's story Nevsky Prospekt in the
basement of Dostoevsky's house."
The three different versions of Gogol's Overcoat presented at
SummerScape 2004 bore scant resemblance to each other. Each was in a
different medium, and each came from a different period. There was a
celebrated Soviet silent film from 1926, directed by Grigori Kozintsev and
Leonid Trauberg; an animated work-in-progress from 1978, created by Yuri
Norstein; and a clown performance by the contemporary Bulgarian Credo
Theatre.
The Kozintsev/Trauberg eighty-four-minute silent film, in a quality
restored print with well-lit scenes, powerfully evoked the profound loneliness
of the clerk, but it was slow moving. The screening came alive because of the
music, in the form of a live piano accompaniment, joyously played by Sergei
Dreznin (whose stunning musical adaptation of Shostakovich's Moscow:
Cherry Tree Towers I would not hear for another few weeks). I asked Dreznin
if he had composed a score for The Overcoat. He laughed a "no," saying he
simply watches the film and improvises as he goes along, although he
confessed to having done one run-through the previous day. His energetic
improvisation was the result of a combination of his own brilliance on the
piano, his sensitivity to the work of the filmmakers (subsequent collaborators
with Shostakovich), and his intuitive grasp of Russian character and culture.
97
The puppet company Potudan's marionette production of Gogel's Nevsky
Prospekt presented at Bard SummerScape
Different music was heard at The World of Yuri Norstein film
program in early August. As the spectators filed into the screening center, the
strings of the American Symphony Orchestra were tuning up to play the
premiere of composer Alexander Bakshi's Dialogue with the Overcoat, which
was written to accompany Norstein's "masterwork-in-progress." In his
exuberant introduction, Jonathan Levi advised the audience that they were
"in for a treat." He described Norstein as "the greatest living animator," who
was such a "stickler for detail" that he finished but twenty-two minutes of his
animated Overcoat in twenty-five years. It proved to be a spellbinding
expenence.
Also in August, AKHE, the three-person Russian engineering
theatre ensemble, presented in Theatre Two their version of Gogel's White
Cabin as part of Nightscape, "a cabaret of informal entertainment." AKHE
was founded in 1989 by St. Petersburg actors and artists Maxim Isaev, Pavel
98 Slavic and East European Petformance Vol. 25, No. 3
Semtchenko, and Vadim Vasiliev, who left the Russian Yes/No Theatre and
began to stage their structured happenings in both Petersburg and Moscow.
Andrei Sizintsev is the composer and Vadim Gololobov the lighting
designer. Their 2004 tour, which included venues in France, Germany,
Mexico, Spain, and Italy, brought AKHE to SummerScape at Bard College.
AKHE, which has already attained cult status among the performing arts
avant-garde of Eastern Europe, is now generating interest worldwide on the
basis of their perplexing and unnerving performances.
As the diverse crowd took their seats, they were confronted by a
strangely calming opening image: a spotlight shone on a lone chair facing
upstage and another illuminated a woman, her hair in curlers, seated at a
whirring film editing machine, seemingly watching something. Otherwise
there was silence but for the gradual piercing sound of Latvian composer
Nick Soudnick's music. Fifteen minutes remained before the start of the
performance, but AKHE was already controlling the audience, preparing
them for what was to follow.
Gogol's White Cabin presented by AKHE (Russian Engineering Theatre) at
Bard SummerScape 2004
99
The drama resided in images. When the woman protagonist rose
from her editing machine and sauntered over to the chair at the front of the
stage with her back to the audience, rumbling, frightening sounds
announced a lighting shift, first making visible a man smoking and reading,
then a bearded sailor in white beret entangled in bubble gum. All the male
roles were played by Pavel Semtchenko and Maxim lsaev. Twittering sounds
suggested hovering birds. The spotlight staggered across the stage,
illuminating two bearded men smoking, then a sailor standing on a chair and
constructing a noose. The music intensified as he positioned his head and
allowed himself to drop only to have the rope break. A red liquid spilled
down onto him, which he then licked. The eyes of the spectators zigzagged
and darted about the stage, unable to stay focused on a single character. The
scenes shifted kaleidoscopically. As a clump of newspapers wafted down
from above, someone appeared dressed in news print, and a red-hatted man
struggled to remove papers from a briefcase as the entire stage became filled
with newspapers. The red-hatted man swung the briefcase at the woman,
eventually pouring wine into a box she was holding, but the sailor, costumed
in newspaper, disentangled himself, dancing away, naked, only to become
ensnared in a web of rope crisscrossing the stage.
For the next hour the three AKHE performers mesmerized the
audience with what they refer to as "living body installations." Their
ingenious maneuvering among the intertwining ropes produced a war of
entanglement and extrication. Images within images proliferated, resulting in
auditory and visual hallucinations. The spectators were assaulted by silent
film projections, smells, fire and smoke, masks, transforming colors, dolls
with porcelain mugs, bourbon-spewing marionettes, lip-synching
manuscripts, phone books, and musical instruments screeching to such a
crescendo that some audience members clasped their hands to their ears. The
minimal props manipulated by the cast seemed to have their own souls.
The DVD of AKHE performances was unfortunately sold out,
although some CDs remained. At midnight, after the show, the perplexed
audience wanted more information and explication.
4
SummerScape 2004 produced a beautifully printed program
describing all the events, with additional essays by practitioners and scholars.
I could only hope that there would be full archival documentation that
would contribute to electronic-based performance-studies scholarship.
SummerScape 2004 was possible not only because of the visionary planning
of Leon Botstein and Jonathan Levi, but also thanks to support and
100
underwriting from many generous sponsors and donors, including POM
Wonderful, pomegranates, for The Nose. Ticket prices were realistic for the
region, with senior, student and "rush" honored. As Richard Fisher, principal
donor to the center and chairman emeritus of Morgan Stanley, comments,
"It's absolutely essential to develop financial support for risk-taking
performing arts centers."
NOTES
I See: Sharon Marie Carnicke, "Henrietta Yanovska and Kama Ginkas
Premiere in the United States," Slavic and East European Petformance 24, no. 1
(Winter 2004).
2 Shostakovich, who as a young musician played the piano for silent films, is
credited with the scores of thirty-seven films.
3 Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin (New York: Knopf, 2004), 65.
4 See AKHE's website: www.akhe.ru.
101
WHEN AMERICANS PLAY CZECHS:
SVE]K OFF BROADWAY
Veronika Tuckerova
Theatre for a New Audience in November 2004 presented the
American premiere of Colin Teevan's Sve;k, based on Jaroslav Hasek's The
Good Soldier Sve;k and directed by the Lithuanian Dalia lbelhauptaite. The
play was first performed by the Gate Theatre in London in 1999. It starts
with the undercover detective Bretschneider and Svejk sitting at a white
clad table in Prague's Chalice Pub. Bretschneider reads Pratski noviny, dogs
are barking in the background. It is the pub owner's wife, not Svejk's
charwoman as in the original Hasek's novel, who pronounces the novel's
famous opening lines: "And so they've killed our Ferdinand,"! having in
mind, of course, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the emperor Franz
Joseph's nephew. The props are unexpected: spotless white tablecloth, wine
glasses rather than beer mugs, and the lean figure of Bretschneider in a hat
and a raincoat, reminiscent of an efficient British spy rather than a clumsy
Czech.2 The lean and tall figure ofJosef Svejk is also striking; the image of
the "Good Soldier" as a corpulent man was created almost simultaneously
with the novel by Hasek's friend Josef Lada in a serialized comics
adaptation of the novel for a Czech newspaper, and this is the image any
Czech associates with Svejk. The very first impression from the British play
thus promises a fresh reinterpretation of the novel.
Rather than a new interpretation, however, we get a play well
informed by the long tradition of theatrical adaptations of Hasek's epic
novel. The first Czech play based on Sve;k dates from 1921, still during
Hasek's life, when only the first two of the planned six volumes had been
published. Hasek completed another two volumes before his death in
1923. Among the famous adaptations was the one by Max Brod and Hans
Reimann; in this version Sve;k has been played on many European stages
since the beginning of the 1930s. Perhaps the most influential
dramatization of Svejk was the one written by Brecht, Gasbarra, and Lania,
directed by Erwin Piscator and with Max Pallenberg as Svejk. This version
from 1928-29 also marked an important stage in the development of
Brecht's epic theatre-a theatre that fundamentally changed the
relationship between the actor, the role, and the audience, and opposed the
102
....
0
w
Svejk, based on Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, directed by Dalia Ibelhauptaite
Josef Lada's illustration of Svejk
popular model of Stanislavsky's theatre. The epic and episodic character of
the novel called for a new theatrical practice. The character of Svejk is one
that the reader cannot identify with and, when transposed to theatre, allows
for the sort of estrangement that Brecht tried to achieve through a variety
of theatrical means. A number of musicals, operettas, and even operas
inspired by the novel testify to the popularity of Svejk; among them, for
example, there is the 1952 opera by the American composer of Czech
lineage, Robert Kurka, famously staged in 1960 by Berlin's Komische Oper.
In some respect, this new production follows in the footsteps of
Piscator. Similarly to the German director, Teevan used only the first two
volumes of the picaresque novel and maintained its episodic structure. He
chose a few key episodes rather than attempting to bind the episodes by a
unifying plot, a practice common to some of the earliest adaptations but
totally alien to the novel. The play starts with the assassination of the
Archduke Ferdinand, lingers on Svejk's encounters with bureaucratic
machinery, whether psychiatric or military, in "the rear," and follows Svejk
to the front, which forms the beginning of tbe second volume. It goes
beyond the scope of the novel when it presents some actual fighting at the
front, not to be found in Hasek's novel. The play's ending achieves a sense
of completion by having Svejk return to the table at the Chalice Pub. A
serious tone, added by the realistic cannonade in the background, followed
by one or two brief moments betraying Svejk's genuine bafflement, are
missing in Hasek; they, however, accentuate the customary interpretations
of Svejk as an anti-war and anti-military satire.
But most of the play is humorous, swift, and crisp. The stagecraft
is a modernist rendering of the lower-class and far less artistic original Sve;k.
Cabaret style permeates some of the episodes and marks the most
innovative and enjoyable scenes. The canine motif introduced by barking
in the first scene is recurrent and culminates in an amusing operetta-like
encounter between Colonel Kraus and Lieutenant Lukas. Lukas takes a
walk with his newly acquired pincher, not knowing that his butler Svejk
stole the dog from colonel Kraus. It is this incident that leads to LukaS's
and Svejk's being sent off to the front. A scene ensues when the oblivious
Lukas runs into his superior promenading on Prague's corso: the ever
increasing and accelerating voices of the colonel and Lukas turn into
barking staccato; the pincher completes the trio. A stylized representation
of speech recurs also in a later episode when Svejk delivers Lukas's amorous
letter by mistake to the addressee's husband. The betrayed husband
screams in Hungarian, and his incomprehensible speech- gibberish, in
fact- now mimics the Hungarian intonation. Actors impersonate animals,
Lukas's cat and canary, which Svejk introduces as friends, with a deadly
result that everybody (the audience and the reader that is) but Svejk
expects: only a few yellow feathers remain from the canary. In a shift
typical of this production, LukaS's lover who arrives uninvited resembles a
1920s cabaret-like, blase courtesan, rather than an aging provincial
housewife. Songs, pantomime, and acrobatic movements contribute to the
sense of the 1920s cabaret-extravaganza.
The stage is bare and not especially imaginative. Yellow walls are
splintered with black; a clock decorates the wall. An occasional prop
includes a large suitcase and a typewriter, suggesting the writer Jaroslav
Hasek, who included some autobiographical references in the novel. Two
characters complement the action on stage: the figure of a Footnote
providing additional information and brief commentaries (the Footnote
105
Stephen Spinella as Svejk in the American premiere of Colin Teevan's
Svejk, directed by Dalia Ibelhauptaite
appears as a soldier, as a butler, as a reporter for The Animal World, a journal
where Hasek worked as an editor), and a man in a striped suit and a bowler
hat, a Franz Joseph character, some sort of controlling intelligence, who
appears above the stage and personifies a higher or divine authority. These
two characters mediate between the audience and the events on the stage.
They supply the voice of the author, almost entirely missing in the novel,
one of the reasons that we can only cautiously call the book a satire. The
Footnote and the larger than life Emperor function as devices producing an
effect of estrangement, breaking the fictional theatrical space by
introducing another perspective of a different degree of fictionality.
The songs are reminiscent of songs in Brecht's plays that often are
not part of any of the roles. Most of the songs in Sve;k were composed by
Lenny Pickett, with lyrics by Colin T eevan. The songs both suggest the
meaning of the play (one song is titled "The Little Man of History") and
the sense of time and place ("0 Austria My Fatherland"); or comment on
the action on stage ("As the Soldiers Marched Away") and some add a local
Czech texture, such as the Czech colloquial song "Kazda holka da." If we
see Teevan's play as influenced by Brecht's theatre, we must admit that
Piscator and Brecht came up with a solution that is not dated even today.
Piscator's production was very innovative for its time; the German director
used various visual means, such as stills of Prague, a film of Georg Grosz,
puppets and photomontage.3 It used moving belts, a new invention, to
emphasize the novel's steady epic movement. A contemporary audience, of
course, is accustomed to modern theatrical techniques, as well as a theatre
that freely breaks the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, while
taking them for granted.
Any translation depends on an interpretation. Teevan's Svejk
depends on two interpretations: one that helped the translation from
Czech to English, and one that enabled the transposition of the literary
text into a play. Svejk has traditionally been read as an anti-war satire, both
in official Czech (Marxist) criticism, as well as abroad (most significantly
due to the Brecht's 1942 play Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg, which sets a
Svejk character in the Second World War), and this is also the
interpretation behind Teevan's version. This is revealed by an occasional
interpretive remark in the play emphasizing the absurd situation of a man
caught in the machinery of military bureaucracy, such as "I find myself in
a vicious circle," and "You can't get crazy over things you can't control."
The play echoes the Brechtian "small man" caught in the larger context of
history. The Emperor's words, "You are the footnote," addressed to the
audience toward the end of the play, generalize Svejk's experience: an
individual is a mere footnote to the "official history." Hasek's own
description of Svejk is less tendentious.
The original novel is perhaps more complex and elusive; it rarely
comments directly, but rather exposes the corruption of the bureaucratic
system and its representatives by using Svejk's innocence as a foil. The
extraordinary richness of the novel's language with its wealth of Czech
idiom and use of numerous other languages (above all, German), is mostly
lost in English translations. The play's transposition of speech into barking
in the scene when Colonel Kraus shouts at Lukas is thus an interesting and
original solution to the question of the representation of the novel's
linguistic richness.
There is no doubt that the popularity of the novel since its first
publication owes much to the figure of Svejk himself. It is also the figure
107
of Svejk that has led to the various, often contrary, interpretations. Is Svejk
an idiot, is he a fool, or is his idiocy (certified by the state, as he happily
admits) only a mask that helps him survive? In the recent production,
Teevan's Svejk (Stephen Spinella) has a lively, happy face, and joyously
declares his official idiocy. He is swifter than the novel's Svejk. He eludes
interpretation in the same way that the character in the novel does, due to
his composite nature. This is perhaps what allowed such varied and often
far-fetched interpretations, both in the Czech and world context. Hasek's
limited description of Svejk can be found in the novel's "Preface" where he
describes Svejk as a "quiet, unassuming, shabbily dressed man," yet a
"heroic and valiant good old soldier."
The Marxist critics (along the same lines as Brecht) read Svejk as a
subversive character, willfully attempting to undermine the Austro-
Hungarian state "from below." It took a while for the Czech critics to
accept Svejk as an important literary work; in the beginning, many ignored
the book, considering it a form of a low entertainment. Official
Czechoslovak scholarship then exploited the popularity of the book and
the character and insisted on their "anti-imperialist" content.
In the United States, Svejk has often been read from yet another
angle: through the prism of other, later anti-war novels, primarily Heller's
Catch-22, but also Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. The reviewer of the
play in the New York Times, Caryn James, refers to this tendency: "[I]t is
possible to see how Hasek's themes echo through the past century, even if
his novel was not the direct influence on books like Catch-22 or Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five that many blithe claims make it seem." But
even James likes to draw the parallel: "There is something Svejkian, though,
about Heller's Yossarian, the ordinary guy trapped in the twisted logic of
army regulations. "
4
In a more scholarly analysis, J.P. Stern saw the affinity
between Svejk and Catch-22 in that both heroes behaved similarly in the
circumstances of a war that is presented as a "self-contained pursuit." Stern
claims: "The obvious direct influences of Hasek's work on Mr. Heller's
occur where the conflict between the military machine and the private
person is presented in its crassest and most absurd form."5 Although Stern
admits that Heller did not count Hasek among the writers who influenced
him, he still discerns the influence of Hasek in the humor of Heller's later
novel.
Svejk's behavior is at the crux of the diverse interpretations. The
New York Times reviewer mentioned the word "svejkism" (translated here
not very precisely as "extreme passivity"), apparently the anglicized version
of the Czech fvejkovat, which in Czech describes playing truant,
malingering, pretending stupidity out of passive resistance. But as the
Czech critic Blaiicek pointed out, Svejk is anything but passive.6 On the
contrary, Svejk is the only citizen who is enthusiastically patriotic and who
insists that despite his rheumatism, Svejk's charwoman Mrs. Muller pushes
him to the draft committee in a wheelchair, while he holds up his crutches
and shouts: "To Belgrade, to Belgrade!" Another cliche has it that Svejk
above all tries to survive; also this is a doubtful claim if we consider that
Svejk never thinks about his immediate needs, but rather openly embraces
any situation that he finds himself in, not calculating and not thinking
about consequences. Perhaps there is a need for a new, more nuanced
interpretation of the novel, a reading that would pay a close attention to
the text. Teevan, in his own words, focuses on Svejk's "simple non-political
desire to survive the madness." In this, Teevan perhaps makes a first step
in this new direction, and in his liveliness, Svejk does more than merely
survive. This play is not groundbreaking, but it is a funny, lively and
entertaining extravaganza that occasionally raises more serious questions, if
not about war, then certainly about life.
Works Consulted:
Blazicek, Premysl. Has"kuv Svejk. Praha: Ceskoslovensky- spisovatel, 1991.
Hajek, Jiri. ''Jaroslav Hasek a divadlo." In Scina (12/83).
Hasek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the World War.
Trans. Cecil Parrott. London: Penguin Books, 1973.
Hasek, Jaroslav. The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk. Book I.
Trans. Zdenek K. Sadlon and Emmett M. Joyce. Bloomington, IN:
First Books, 1997.
James, Caryn. "The Model of a Soldier (But No Model Soldier)." The New
York Times, Wednesday, 17 November 2004.
NOTES
I I use Cecil Parrott's translation of The Good Soldier Svejk in all the
quotations from the novel. The English reader can now read the novel in
three translations: Paul Selver's from 1930, Sir Cecil Parrott's from 1973,
109
and, most recently, in the 1997 translation by Zdenek Sadlon and Emmet
Joyce, which, however, so far includes only the first volume.
2 The shift in style is brought to the audience's attention when Svejk is
reprimanded and asked to tidy himself up: "We may be Czechs, but the
world doesn't have to know!"
3 Jiff Hajek, 'Jaroslav Hasek a divadlo," Scina (12/ 83): 3.
4 Caryn James, "The Model of a Soldier (But No Model Soldier)," The New
York Times, Wednesday, 17 November 2004.
5 J.P. Stern. "War and the Comic Muse: The Good Soldier Schweik and Catch-
22," in Comparative Literature 20, no. 3 (Summer, 1968), 204.
6 Premysl BlaZ!cek, Hafkuv Svejk (Praha: Ceskoslovenslcy spisovatel, 1991).
OFF THE RAILS:
WITKIEWICZ'S CRAZY LOCOMOTWE
BY THE TRAP DOOR THEATRE
Kevin Byrne
Machines are worshiped because they are beautiful, and
valued because they confer power; they are hated because
they are hideous, and loathed because they impose
slavery_!
Any successful production of Stanislaw lgnacy Witkiewicz's Crazy
Locomotive must find a way to convey the type of contradictory attitude
toward technology emblematic of the inter-war years. Like the inevitable
train crash that punctuates The Crazy Locomotive, the growth of technology
throughout the twentieth century had an almost fated quality for thinkers
such as Russell and Witkiewicz. This seemingly unstoppable charge forward
of technology, as appropriate today as it was in 1923, is one of the
compelling reasons artists keep returning to Witkiewicz's proto-absurdist
masterpiece. The play is such a glorious mess, and I find encouraging the fact
that there are U.S. theatre companies brave enough to embrace Witkiewicz's
linguistic, philosophical, and dramaturgical gallimaufry. A recent production
by the Chicago-based Trap Door Theatre during the 2005 New York
International Fringe Festival did just that with manic humor and an intense
pessimism that bordered on the nihilistic. For all the talk in the play about
collisions and explosions, the real drive of this production was toward its
own annihilation; it cancelled itself out like a Qletzalcoatl locomotive
swallowing its own caboose.
The content of The Crazy Locomotive is really a collection of
Witkacy's (as he was known to his friends) various interests. He loved
trains/ was fascinated with particle physics, and had a strange affinity for
pop culture. Oh yes, he also obsessed over how the unmooring of personal
identity, a by-product of the machine age, was pushing the civilized world to
the brink of collective insanity. In an hour, on a nearly bare stage, with a cast
of six, the Trap Door was able to mash all ofWitkacy's objectives together
to amazing effect. Under the helmsmanship of Beata Pilch, who also directed
this show, the Trap Door has established itself in Chicago as proselytizers of
all things Witkiewicz: the company's debut production ten years ago was The
111
Trap Door Theatre Company's production of The Crazy Locomotive,
directed by Beata Pilch
Madman and the Nun, and they have mounted a string of the playwright's
works since then. Also, Witkiewicz's writings on the Theatre of Pure Form
have become the aesthetic grounding of the more successful productions the
company has produced over the past several years. Witkacy advocates a
synthesis of all design and production elements of a theatre piece to force
upon it an "internal, formal logic, independent of anything in 'real life."'
Regardless of whether the Trap Door production was written by Fernando
Arrabal or adapted from an Emile Zola novel; the resulting "absolute
freedom" describes perfectly how the staging, live music, and use of
different media all work in tandem to create the systematized lunacy for
which the company is justly renowned.3
Trap Door's Crazy Locomotive was, really, a study in Witkiewicz
appreciation. As the audience entered the space, the actors performed a kind
of pre-show performance. Three robed individuals circled an altar on which
a doll was perched. Dressed as a baby, a woman entered and was
subsequently killed by an old man spouting non-sequiturs and
malapropisms. This scenario, not part of the Crazy Locomotive text, was
instead taken from Witkiewicz's writings on Pure Form. Despite its tangential
connection to the actual play, the scene highlighted certain themes that are
at the heart of Witkacy's oeuvre: the infantilism of humankind and the
randomness of violence (slapstick or otherwise).
Following the pre-show, the play proper opened with several
characters preparing a train for departure. Onstage, however, no such
contraption actually appeared. The only set piece was a rubberized brain,
about the size of a large television set, which was placed center stage. The
obvious implication-the play is taking place inside someone's head-was
clearly made but never became overly tiresome. In the course of the show,
the brain was caressed and battered, stood upon and jumped off of by many
of the characters. In the set's only concession to anything train-like, the brain
occasionally emitted puffs of steam. This economic design completely
ignored the rather detailed set directions of the playwright, but in doing so,
freed the actors to explore a highly expressionistic, almost eurhythmic, acting
style. The cast was wholly committed to this aesthetic, which gave the play a
wonderful humor and menace. In particular, Trap Door veteran Nicole
Wiesner brought a demonic intensity to her role of the initially innocent but
easily corruptible Julia. After Julia's debasement aboard the locomotive,
Wiesner's delivery oflines such as "Nothing beautiful can exist in this world!
The human animal always interferes and spoils everything!" combined a fury
and sadness of the newly fallen.
The bulk of the first half of the play is an extended dialogue on the
nature of space and time between the locomotive engineer Sigfried Tenser
and his fireman Nicholas Slobok. The characters' struggle to comprehend
the relativity of motion cannot be disentangled from their mutual sexual
obsession with Julia or their increasingly frantic alienation from other human
beings both on the locomotive and on the ground. To demonstrate this, the
actors literally threw themselves into their roles. John Gray brought a simian
agility to Slobak that contrasted well with the Caligari-esque performance of
Carl Wisniewski. In his stage directions, Witkiewicz is very explicit that the
gradually increasing speed of the locomotive is to be represented by
projected landscapes rushing by the train's windows. In this production, the
urgency and energy of mechanical motion was absorbed into the bodies of
the performers onstage. By degrees the actors became louder, faster, and
113
more repetitive as the throttle was pushed down.
Like many characters in Witkacy's work, those in Crazy Locomotive
are other than what initial impressions would have the audience believe.
Both Slobok and Tenser reveal themselves to be master criminals and mass
murderers hiding behind the guise of their blue-collar professions. The Trap
Door production added interesting costume changes to symbolize the
characters' unmasking. After ducking behind curtains, Slobok and Tenser
emerged dressed in the military garb of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany,
respectively. (The actors also donned unconvincing- almost cartoonish-
accents.) It was a sophisticated directorial choice. Pilch wasn't trying to give
the show a contemporary resonance by updating its iconography of
totalitarianism with twenty-first century examples, but was instead
attempting to demonstrate the insight and prescience of Witkacy himself as
an artist and thinker. The Crazy Locomotive was written in 1923, and
114
Trap Door Theatre Company's production of The Crazy Locomotive,
directed by Beata Pilch
Trap Door Theatre Company's production of
The Crazy Locomotive, directed by Beata Pilch
Witkiewicz (with memories ofWorld War I) realized the machine age would
further push the Western world toward more efficient forms of wholesale
slaughter. "Is this the beginning of mechanized madness?" a character
screams at the play's climax. The train collides with another train, it slams
into its own future, and the result is apocalyptic. According to Pilch and the
Trap Door production, Witkiewicz divined the massive destruction of
Europe by staring into the well-stoked belly of the steam engine.
The train fulfills the homicidal desires ofTenser and Slobok. In the
epilogue of the playtext, Witkacy describes a group of rescue workers sifting
through the rubble. Trap Door opted to convert the entire epilogue into a
short film projected on the back wall of the theatre space (specially created
for the production by Carrie Holt de Lama). To the strains of tinny piano
music, a montage of carnage was shown while the characters blandly
described their disappointed thoughts on their disappointing deaths. After
115
an amped-up stage production in which characters were constantly running
through the theatre space and engaging the audience directly, the piece
ended on a curiously sterile note. I wondered if the production was reflecting
back to us our own desensitivity to mediatized violence or perhaps was
announcing the obsolescence of theatre in the age of mechanical
reproduction, with all subtlety and danger ironed into a two-dimensional
passivity. Did I just watch a play commit suicide? As the credits started to
roll, I thought of Walter Benjamin, whose ruminations on technics and
technology have also reached oracle-like status since his death. Commenting
on how "sense perception ... has been changed by technology," Benjamin
wrote: "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. "4
When the show ended, everyone in the audience clapped loudly.
The Crazy Locomotive by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Directed by Beata
Pilch. Trans. by Daniel Gerould and C.S. Durer. Featuring John Gray, John
Kahara, Beata Pilch, Carolyn Shoemaker, Nicole Wiesner, and Carl
Wisniewski. Assistant Director: Andrew Krukowski. Set Design: Ewelina
Dobiesz. Lighting Design: Richard Norwood. Sound Design: Anna
Czerwinski. Film Design: Carrie Holt de Lama. Costume Design: Beata
Pilch. Trap Door Theatre, New York International Fringe Festival, Theatre
at the Center for Architecture, New York City. August 23 to 27.
NOTES
1 Bertrand Russell, "Machines and the Emotions," in Sceptical Essays (New
York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1928), 83. I would like to thank my colleague
Margaret Araneo for bringing this quote to my attention.
2 He started photographing locomotive engines at the age of fourteen. See
Carter Ratcliff, "In the Theatre of the Self," Art in America 72, no. 4 (1984):
162-171.
3 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, "On a New Type of Play," in The Madman and
the Nun and The Crazy Locomotive: Three Plays, edited and translated by Daniel
Gerould and C.S. Durer (New York: Applause Books, 1989).
4 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1968), 242.
116
CONTRIBUTORS
KEVIN BYRNE is an adjunct lecturer at ~ n s College and works as an
assistant editor on Theatre journal. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre
Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
MARY KEELAN, a former university teacher and library system manager,
is a theatre reviewer in New York's Hudson Valley. She is a Ph.D. candidate
in the Theatre and Film Certificate Program at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York.
HELENE LEMELEV A was born in Moscow and graduated from the
Moscow State Linguistic University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the
Comparative Literature Program at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. Her main area of concentration is Russian
Symbolism and its Western European parallels.
AMIEL MELNICK has been working with East River Commedia as a
dramaturg since her graduation from Columbia University in 2003. She has
published articles on several West African playwrights and is currently
studying contemporary Slovenian theatre in Ljubljana.
OLGA MURATOV A teaches many of the courses in the Russian Studies
minor program (including Russian drama and literature) at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative
Literature Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York where she is writing her dissertation on nineteenth-century Russian
drama. She is a frequent contributor to SEEP.
ELISABETH RICH is Associate Professor of Russian at Texas A&M
University. She has published essays and reviews in The Nation, Washington
Post, and Civilization/The Magazines of the Library of Congress, as well as in
many leading Russian and American scholarly journals. She is a frequent
contributor to SEEP.
STEPAN SIMEK is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Lewis and Clark
College, Portland, Oregon. He has directed a number of modern Czech
117
plays in his translations in Seattle and Portland, and he travels regularly to
Prague to research Czech theatre after the fall of Communism
VERONIKA TUCKEROV A is a native of Prague and a graduate student in
the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She
received her M. Phil. degree in Comparative Literature at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. She is a regular contributor to
the Czech art and literature journal, Revolver Review.
Photo Credits
Three Sisters, Karamazovs, The Banquet, and The Women
Courtesy of the Mayakovsky Theatre
Serenade and Philosopher Fox
Courtesy of Piotr Redlinski and East River Commedia
Inspector General
Viktor Sentsov
Courtesy of the Alexandrinsky Theatre and Bard SummerScape
The Nose
Sketch: Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili; courtesy of Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili
and Bard SummerScape
Photo: Ken Howard; courtesy of Ken Howard and Bard SummerScape
Nevsky Prospekt
Courtesy ofTheatre Potudan and Bard SummerScape
White Cabin
Courtesy of AKHE and Bard SummerScape
The Good Soldier Svejk
Courtesy of Theatre for a New Audience
The Crazy Locomotive
Courtesy ofT rap Door Theatre
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewicz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The
Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and
Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his
theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
about the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by
the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and
Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd-Beckett, Jones co, Genet, Arrabal-of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties. It is high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
USA $20.00 PLUS SHIPPING $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Mail checks or money orders to:
Circulation Manager
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016-4309
Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES Of THE
17tH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@ Regoa.cl: T!.e.AI.eat-Mu.ded lover
@ De.toud.eo:TheCo..celtedCow.t
@ Lc.O......-TI.el'aohloaablePrejudioe
@ J....g..,T!.el'rte..doltheLc.ws
TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches' s The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modern era.
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Circulation Manager
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uco Ma
P MO TAl
TRANSLATED AND EDIT D IIY
DA I GFROULD I< MARVIN CARLSON
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of
Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon,
or Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of
Montatgis, or The Forest of Bondy,
Christopher Columbus, or The
Discovery of the New World, and
A lice, or The Scottish Gravediggers,
as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected
Edition of Pixerecourt's plays and
the two theoretical essays by the
playwright, "Melodrama," and
"Final Reflections on Melodrama."
"Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century ...
Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements
of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and
Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and
secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book contains
an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami 's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the
World."
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and
prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety
plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with an intro-
duction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The
Hair of the Dog.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $ 15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Nr .. \tlll"- env
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars, including
public and private libraries, museums, historical societies, university and college
collections, ethnic and language associations, theatre companies, acting schools,
and film archives. Each entry features an outline of the facility's holdings as well
as contact information, hours, services, and access procedures.
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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