SEEP Vol.14 No.1 Spring 1994

volume 14, no. 1

spring 1994

SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A), Graduate Center, City University of New York. The Institute is Room 1206A, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Editors of SEEP: Daniel Gerould and Alma Law, CAST A, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

EDITORS Daniel Gerould Alma Law

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Patrick Hennedy Jay Plum

ADVISORY BOARD Edwin Wilson, Chair Marvin Carlson Leo Hecht Martha W. Coigney

CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.

Copyright 1994 CASTA

SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:

a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing before the fact;

b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;

c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 14, No. 1

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Editorial Policy From the Editors Events Books Received

"Orchestics: A Direction in Hungarian Movement Theatre" An Interview with Maria Tatai and Eszter Szalczer

"Theatre Scholars Tour the Baltic States" Marvin Carlson

"The Rise and Fall of the Youth Movement in Moscow: The Fomenko Studio and Others" John Freedman

"Arthur Miller at the Theatre-on-Podol: A Crucible and a Coup" Suzanne Trauth

"International Conference on Jewish Theatre Held in Poland" Michael Steinlauf

"Polish Theatre in the Nineties: Catastrophe and Hope" Juliusz Tyszka

PAGES FROM THE PAST

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"Frolov on Tragicomedy" 49 Daniel Gerould

"Vladimir Frolov: Tragicomedy" 53 Translated by Leonid Chechelnitsky and Roberta Reader

REVIEWS

"How Are Things in Bratislava?: The Slovak National Theatre Visits Ohio" Scott T. Cummings

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"Nikolai Gogol's 7be Government Inspector 76 at the National Actors Theatre, New York" David Callaghan

"Ukrainka's Forest Song at La Mama, New York" 79 Roxana Stuart

"On Viewing a Production 86 of Vladimir Gubaryev's Sarcophagus" Charlotte J. Headrick with contributions by Vreneli Farber

Contributors 91 Playscripts in Translation Series 93 Subscription Policy 95

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 14, No. I

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EDITORIAL POLICY

Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies. Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works, or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogol but we cannot use original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.

Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.

All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Transliterations should follow the Library of Congress system. We encourage submissions on computer disk. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after approximately four weeks.

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FROM THE EDITORS

The Spring issue, our longest ever, bears witness to the vitality

of theatrical activity in Eastern Europe and Russia and to the growing

number of contributors to SEEP responding to these events. We are

delighted to have new authors providing information about the revival of

Orchestics in Hungary and the Conference on Jewish Theatre in Poland.

The occasional feature, "Pages from the Past,'' makes a re-appearance with

Vladimir Frolov's study of tragicomedy. We hope to continue this feature

on a more regular basis and welcome suggestions for future issues.

--Alma Law and Daniel Gerould


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EVENTS

STAGE PRODUCTIONS

7be Seven Beggars, "a story of virtues based on the eighteenthcentury tale by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav," was presented in New York by La Mama E.T.C., December 8 through 19. The one-man show was conceived and performed by Victor Attar.

The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble of Los Angeles presented Gogol's 7be Inspector General. The production opened in January runs through March.

Carol Rocamora's translation of Uncle Vanya was performed at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, January 19-30.

From January 21 to February 27, 7be Cherry Orchard was presented by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

David Fishelson's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's 7be Brothers Karamazov opened on January 21 at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York. The production will run though May.

The Players Forum in New York presented a series of three staged readings of East European plays: Simon Zlotnikov's A Man Who Came to See a Woman (February 16); Daniela Fischerova's 7be Massage Table and Lumir Tucek's Who's Afraid Can't Make It (March 16); and Jaroslaw Abramow-Newerly's Maestro (March 30).

Chekhov's Uncle Vanya was staged in New York by the Juilliard Drama Division, March 2-6. Eve Shapiro directed.

New York's Time and Space Limited produced Arkadin Overruled, Linda Mussmann's multi-media adaptation of Chekhov's 7be Seagull, March 4-26.

Petrashevsky Circle Productions presented Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, adapted for the stage by Robert Hein, at the Perry Street Theatre in New York, March 5 to April 2.

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The New York-based Threshold Theatre Company will perform a program of several contemporary Hungarian one-act plays on April 23 as part of the nineteenth annual conference of the American-Hungarian Educators' Association, sponsored by Rutgers Universiy in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Threshold troupe recently returned from Hungary, where it toured with Geza Paskandi's No Conductor, a production that originated in New York City (SEEP vol. 13, no. 1). The upcomming program will include a new translation of Ferenc Karinthy's comedy, Bosendorfer (a.k.a. Steinway Grand). Tickets will be available to the general public at $15. For precise location and directions, please call the Threshold office: (212) 724-9129.

With the support of the Association Fran~aise d'Action Artistique, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and three Parisian theatres..:.the Maison de Ia Culture 93 de Bobigny, the Odeon, and the Theatre de Nanterre-Amandiers-are sponsoring a Russian season of eight different productions representative of the contemporary repertory emerging under the new conditions of freedom. There is also a series of lectures and play readings. January 18 to February 6: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre of Saint Petersburg presented a new production, Claustrophobia (Bobigny). February 16-25: Leb Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1990

· production, Gaudeamus (Bobigny). March 3-6: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1985 production, Brothers and Sisters (Odeon). March 7-April 8: Anastasia Vertinskaya and Aleksandr Kaliagin of the Moscow Art Theatre presented in French with French actors, Chekhov Act III--the third acts of Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard-(N an terre-Amandiers). March 9-12: Lev Dodin and the Maly Theatre presented the 1986 production of Aleksandr Galin's Stars of the Morning Sky (Odeon). March 23-27: Lluls Pasqua!, using Dodin's actors, directed a Russian translation of Bernard-Marie Koltes's Roberto Zucco (Odeon). April 5-10: Dodin and the Maly Theatre are presenting a new production of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (Odeon). May 3-14: Ivan Popovsky and the actors of the Pyotr Fomenko Studio of Moscow will present a new production of three lyrical plays by Aleksandr Blok, The Fairground Booth, The Unknown Woman, and The King on the Square (Odeon).

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FILM

The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film (New York) screened Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Stalin's Funeral, December 21, 1993. According to Y evtushenko: "The film is based on the tragic events of March 1953, during Stalin's funeral, when many people were crushed by the crowds. Not long before Stalin's death, his physicians were accused of an attempt to poison him; they were arrested and tortured. When the film was first shown in the Soviet Union, the movie theatres were attacked by Stalinists."

Stalin's Funeral was also presented at Baruch College in New York, February 24.

The Last Bolshevik, Chris Marker's television film about Aleksandr Medvedkin, who was once described as "a pure communist in a land where all communists faked being communists,"was also screened at the Museum of Modern Art, January 7.

Mikail Bogin's A Train to Happiness was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, February 24. Bogin opens this documentary film about the contemporary Russian Yiddish theatre Sholom with footage taken at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in the 1930s. We see the stately opening of Solomon Mikhoel's internationally-celebrated King Lear, next we watch the famous actor in his dressing room applying his make-up, and then we witness Lear's tragic finale as he dies beside Cordelia. The narration explains how the triumphs of Jewish culture in the USSR turned to persecution and extermination after World War II. Stalin appears at a meeting in a theatre before an applauding audience of officers; the dictator holds a rifle which he manipulates as though to take aim. His target proves to be Mikhoels, who is killed in 1948 in a staged automobile accident. Many of those attending his funeral are hunted down and eliminated; the State Jewish Theatre is closed.

The film now switches to the present. In 1988, six survivors of Mikhoels's troup founded the Sholom Theatre which has since played in Yiddish and Rusian to more than 150,000 spectators throughout the country. Bogin juxtaposes scenes of the twenty-member company touring by train and appearing before enthusiastic audiences in the provinces with interviews exploring the dimensions of anti-Semitism in the present political crisis. Leaders of extremists groups like Pamyat express their determination to rid the country of Jews and punish them for causing all the troubles that Russians now face. In emphasizing song and dance, the Sholom Theatre directly confronts these fascist threats and inculcates pride and a sense of solidarity in Jewish racial identity. Other scenes show

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tearful farewells in airports as Russian Jews fearing pogroms go into exile. Particularly moving is a festive good-bye party given by the theatre for one of its actresses who is leaving for America; she is convulsed with sobbing at the prospect of leaving her friends and homeland. The image of railroad travel dominates the film, which includes a delightful glimpse of two performers in a compartment rehearsing a dramatization of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story that takes place aboard a train.

The contemporary part of the documentary concludes with the entire company on stage aboard The Train to Happiness, the Sholom Theatre's recent production celebratingJewishness. Then as a coda Bogin switches back to Mikhoels singing and dancing joyously with his full company at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre in Sholom Aleichem's 200,000. The message of continuity is reinforced by Mikhoels's words about weddings and births guaranteeing survival that are printed on the screen before the credits and the long list of sponsors and contributors.

-Daniel Gerould

CONFERENCES

The Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures of the University of Ottawa is hosting an international symposium on the reception of Chekhov in world culture, May 5-7, 1994. For information, contact J. Douglas Clayton, Chair of the Organizing Committee (25 University, P.O. Box 450 STN A, Ottawa, ON KlN 6N5 Canada; [613] 564-2305).

The American University in Washington, D.C. will host the fiftysecond annual meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, June 3-4, 1994. This year's conference theme will be: "Poland and Eastern Europe and the New World Order."

LECTURES

Anatoly Smelyansky of the Moscow Art Theatre lectured on Stanislavsky at Barnard College, February 28 and March 1.


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BOOKS RECEIVED

Blazina, Dalibor. Katastrofizam i Dramska Struktura. 0 Stanislawu Ignacyju Witkiewiczu. Zagreb: Hrvatsko filolosko drustvo bibliotekaknjirevnasmotra, 1993. pp. 282. Blazina studies the structure of Witkiewicz's plays in relation to his theory of catastrophism.

Osinski, Zbigniew. Grotowski wytycza trasy·-studia i szkice. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Pusty Oblok, 1993. pp. 363. Osinski examines Grotowski's career from its beginnings to 1992. Includes thirty pages of photographs and drawings.

Tyszka, Juliusz. Widowiska Nowojorskie. Poznan: Ars Nova, 1994. pp. 227. A collection of essays about Tyszka's theatre experiences in New York as a visiting Fulbright scholar during the 1992-1993 season.

W~chocka, Ewa. Micdzy Sztukq. a Filozo[14: 0 teorii krytyki artysrycznej Stanisiawa Ignacego Witkiewicza. Katowice: Uniwersytet Sl~ki, 1992. pp. 111. Between Art and Philosophy is a study of Witkiewicz's theory of artistic criticism.

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ORCHESTICS: A DIRECTION IN HUNGARIAN MOVEMENT THEATRE

An interview with Maria Tatai by Eszter Szalczer

Orchestics is a systematic theory of movement created by Valeria Dienes (1879-1978), which became the basis of a movement theatre genre created in Hungary around 1910 and developed throughout the twentieth century. This interview took place in August 1993 in Budapest with Maria Tatai, choreographer, teacher of Orchestics, and leader of the Orchestics Group.

ES: Where does the term "Orchestics" come from?

MT: It was derived from the Greek word orcheomai (to dance) by Valeria Dienes who applied it to the art of movement as well as the study or science of movement.

ES: What do you mean by science of movement?

MT: Valeria Dienes was inspired by dance as an art form, but later she started to elaborate on her experiences in a systematic manner. She experimented with the possibilities of the natural movement of the human body and created a system of coordinates along which movement can be described. Even though she considered Orchestics an art form, her basic approach to it was "scientific" in this sense.

ES: She is known in Hungary chiefly as a philosopher. How did her involvement with dance and movement begin?

MT: Dienes was one of the first women to attend a university in Hungary. She studied mathematics and philosophy in Budapest and continued her studies in Paris as a student of Henri Bergson between 1908 and 1912. There she saw Isadora Duncan perform, and she was so deeply moved that she immediately joined Raymond Duncan's school to study dance and movement. This was not an ordinary dance school, but a community for which dance was an integral part of a simple and natural way of life.

When Valeria Dienes came home in 1912, she opened her Greek Gymnastics School, which she soon renamed the Orchestics School. At first she taught what she had learned from Raymond Duncan. It is dif-


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Antique Feast, Hungarian Museum of Fine Ans

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ficult to know what the movements were actually like, but we do know that Raymond and Isadora Duncan were inspired by Greek art and especially by the representations of movement on ancient Greek vases. We know also that , as opposed to Isadora, Raymond preferred linear, profile movements.

ES: What do you mean by linear movement?

MT: He did not move in space, so to speak. He did not move back and forth, but to the side, on a plane. Valeria Dienes also taught these profile movements at the beginning, but then she tried other kinds of movement: the so-called frontal movement, for example. Eventually, she created a rectangular system of coordinates which she called the trihedron system. This geometrical framework made it possible for her to describe all kinds of movements in any direction. This part of the theory of Orchestics is called Plastics, and it describes the geometry of movement.

ES: You mentioned the frontal movement which is sometimes referred to as the "Egyptian" style as opposed to the profile "Greek" style of movement. Did Valeria Dienes use these terms?

MT: Her approach was purely analytical, it had nothing to do with historicism or nostalgia. Frontal movement is when the line of the pelvis stays parallel with the shoulder-line while the body moves, whereas in profile movement these two lines turn horizontally away from each other. She did not assign any culturally or historically specific names to these movements. She simply realized that one can see representations of frontal movements in the art of ancient societies such as Egyptian and Indian, while the representation of profile movement is more common in classical Greek art.

As far as I know, there is no other analytical system of movement except for Rudolf Laban's. The two of them worked independently of each other at about the same time, but Valeria Dienes's work has not become known because it happened here in Hungary.

These studies of movement were pursued at the Orchestics School, along with the teaching of Orchestics for pedagogical purposes and as a performing art form. Performances included etudes and movement pieces created for poems and contemporary music. In the 1940s Valeria Dienes wrote mystery plays, which were performed to the music of Lajos Bardos.


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After World War II, Orchestics was officially declared a decadent bourgeois genre, and it was banned along with many other movement schools. In the realm of dance and movement arts in Hungary only Russian classical ballet and folk dance were allowed during the socialist regime. Orchestics was totally suppressed. Then in 1975, during a TV interview with Valeria Dienes about her work in semiotics, with which she was involved at that time, she mentioned the important role Orchestics had played in her life. She explained that even her research in semiotics had its roots in Orchestics.

After the interview Valeria Dienes was visited by two young women who wanted to learn Orchestics from her. Since she was ninetyseven, she recommended a former student of hers as a teacher, Maria Mirkovszky, who was only seventy-nine. That is how Orchestics, however illegally, started again.

ES: How did you, an architect by profession, get involved with Orchestics?

MT: During my student years I trained and performed with the Domino Mime Group. I was one of those people who always sought to do something different from what was allowed. Pantomime was also in the banned category, but it very gradually became tolerated. Modern dance and jazz dance also started to be accepted during the late seventies. But I was still searching for the "real thing" for me. In 1980 I attended a private demonstration performance of Orchestics by Maria Mirkovszky's two students, and I immediately started to study with her.

ES: What was it that captivated you?

MT: First of all, I was attracted by the freedom of the performer. One is not forced to assume a specific style. Instead movement and gesture are rooted in one's own personality. On the other hand, I have a tendency to systematize things, so I liked the fact that Orchestics had a system. It is, however, not a prescriptive system, it does not bind, but rather aids the performer. It describes the possibilities of human movement in space. Every movement happens in space and time, expends energy, and is meaningful, even if it is not meant to be expressive. These aspects of movement are treated in the four main sections of the theory of Orchestics. Plastics, as I mentioned, describes the spatial aspects of movement, Rhythmics the temporal aspects, Dynamics the ways of expending energy by movement, and Symbolics the possibilities of expresswn.


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Forms of Motion, The Orchestics Group

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ES: What happened after you ~iscovered Orchestics?

MT: A former student of Maria Mirkovszky, who taught in a ballet school, let us use a room there illegally, during lunch hours and on Saturday afternoons.

ES: But this was already in the 1980s.

MT: Yes, in 1980.

ES: Was it still illegal then? Were you harassed by the police?

MT: Not like in the fifties, when the secret police came to Maria Mirkovszky's apartment when she tried to give lessons at home. But in 1980 self-censorship within the dance community still worked very strongly. For example, when one of Maria Mirkovszky's students applied for permission to work as a teacher and performer of Orchestics, they said that they could not grant it because such a genre did not exist. Thus there was no need for direct political interference, since Orchestics was prevented from even existing. Even in 1987, when I was already teaching, and we did a performance, I asked several dancer friends who sympathized with Orchestics to write an article about it. But nobody dared to, they were afraid that it would harm their careers. Even though Orchestics could be a great asset to Hungarian dance, it has not received any professional support to this day.

ES: How did you start teaching Orchestics?

MT: Maria Mirkovszky taught until 1986; she died in 1987. I started teaching in 1984 hoping to keep Orchestics alive. I met Anik6 Bognar, a jazz dancer, who was very enthusiastic about Orchestics, and wanted to help me. She suggested that we work together, which we did in 1984. In 1985 we opened a studio managed by Anik6. There were many different movement and dance classes; I taught Orchestics. We had public demonstration performances at the end of each semester, so that a wider circle of people started to know about Orchestics. In 1987 we received a grant from the Soros Foundation to create a performance. At the time of the production we founded the Orchestics Group. We performed Antique Feast at the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts. In 1988 we created our production of Forms of Motion, which we also performed at the First Meeting of Hungarian Movement Theatres.

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Four Elements, The Orchestics Group

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However, at the end of 1988 Anik6 moved to the United States, and the Studio closed. We no longer had a space, and we struggled with financial problems. Finally we were able to get a rehearsal room in the students' resident hall at the University of Economics. I was teaching again, and we worked on a new production, Four Elements. But after that we could not produce a full scale performance because of the constant struggle for a place and money. I was about to give up, when in 1991 Nora Kesmarky, program manager at the Downtown House of Culture, invited me to give Orchestics courses there.

In the meantime I was also invited to teach at the College of Applied Arts in Budapest. Orchestics became an optional class in the first year. While my other courses have been more dance oriented, at the college we exploited the visual interests and talents of the students. Orchestics thus evolved into a physical-visual theatre in which environment, space, form, color, and movement played an equally important role. Here, too, we showed the results of our experiments at demonstration performances. We also created productions of which the last one, Colour Play, was also performed at the International Colour Congress in 1993 in Budapest at the Szkene Theatre.

ES: Indeed, this production seems to me very much different from the work you did in the eighties. Earlier you focused on the exploration of body-space relationships, while what I saw now is rather three-dimensional poetry of unfolding images on stage. To what extent do you think it is still Orchestics?

MT: Those who saw Orchestics performances before World War II might not find much relationship between their recollections and our latest production. In the beginning, my work was also very much influenced by the particular style of movement that I learned from Maria Mirkovszky, which was still apparent in Antique Feast. But as I said, Orchestics is not a style or a fixed set of rules, and its ability to change shows that it is a living art. As far as the theory of Orchestics is concerned, I think it is a kind of "compass" that aids one in ever further explorations.

ES: How do you see the future of Orchestics?

MT: It is hard to tell what direction Orchestics will take. Although we still work under difficult circumstances, the interest in Orchestics is growing with each of our productions. There is an increasing demand for courses, and some of my students have already

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started teaching, too. On the other hand, though Orchestics has quite a stormy history, it is still a young performing art form whose potentialities can now be realized since today it is possible to pursue it without facing any internal or external constraint.


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THEATRE SCHOLARS TOUR BALTIC COUNTRIES

Marvin Carlson

The International Federation for Theatre Research met in August last year in Helsinki. Following the sessions of the Federation, Professor Pirkko Koski of the University of Helsinki, which hosted the meetings, organized a theatre tour of the Baltic states for Federation delegates wishing to add this experience to their visit. Twenty-one persons from seven countries joined in the excursion.

Their first stop was in western Estonia, in the old university town of Tartu, where the group toured the state theatre and attended a reception at the university, which is in the process of establishing a program of theatre studies. The next day they returned to Estonia's east coast, to the resort town of Parnu, on the way stopping in Viljandi, where they visited another state theatre, this one serving much of the southern region of the country.

In Parnu the delegates attended their first Baltic performance, on the small "Endla" stage upstairs in the national theatre. The production, Epp Pillarpart's Punjaba Pottery, was an amusing folk narrative by Priit Pedajas based on the short stories and a play by the popular Estonian author, Peet Vallak. This tale of love and rivalry in a bustling pottery shop was charmingly done. After the show the delighted audience was treated to an auction of pottery actually made during the play. Following the performance, the delegates had an opportunity to talk with the director and actors in the theatre cafe. The group spent the night in Riga, Latvia, and went on the next day to Vilnius, Lithuania.

After lunch in the old town of Vilnius, the group attended a production of There to be There, based on the writings of Russian experimental author Daniil Kharms. It was a stunning piece of theatre so beautifully mimed by the Oskaras Korsunovas Group at the Academic Drama Theatre that the simultaneous English translation provided by headphones was scarcely necessary. After the performance, the company treated the group to supper at the theatre cafe, followed by a lively discussion of their work and the play. Perhaps most strikingly, director Oskaras Korsunovas and his actors insisted that there was no political dimension to this production, although it seemed to a number of the delegates that the Estonians' interest in the techniques of Meyerhold and the writings of Kharms and his circle, all of them victims of artistic purges by the Soviet promoters of Socialist Realism, must surely have political resonance in Lithuania at this time, literally before the departure of the


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last Russian troops. In fact, it gradually became clear that for these artists theatre with a "political" dimension meant the narrow social realist tradition, which they were at some pains to put behind them.

The following day the group returned to Riga where they visited the Eduards Smilgis Theatre Museum. Established in 1976 in the former home of this noted founder of Latvia's leading experimental theatre of the 1920s, it is devoted to the history of Latvian theatre. After this visit, the group had lunch at the Riga Arts Club, followed by a discussion with Latvian critics and journalists interested in the theatre. A reception at the Finnish Embassy concluded the afternoon, and in the evening the group again attended the theatre, to see a staging of Dostoevsky's The Possessed on tour to Riga from the state theatre in Daugavpils, Latvia's second theatre city, in the southeast corner of the country.

For the final day of the trip the group returned to Tallinn, Estonia, where after a tour of the old town they attended a production of Romeo and juliet by the company that had been organized under Soviet administration as the Tallinn Youth Theatre, but which was changing its name to the City Theatre. Although the company is a young one, it was called a "youth theatre" because the Soviet authorities would allow only one professional "adult" theatre in the city. The mainstage of the new City Theatre is a charming, small proscenium theatre on the first floor of an old merchant house very similar to those that line the canals of Amsterdam. Romeo and Juliet, however, was staged in the cellar on its ground floor, where ancient stone columns and staircases, and sunken wooden doors provided a marvelous unit setting for the Shakespearean tragedy.

As in an all-male Romeo and Juliet that we saw in Finland earlier, all of the state and most of the family material has been cut in order to concentrate on the tragic story of the two young lovers. After the performance the group joined the actors as well as other theatre people and local dignitaries at the local Arts Club where, as usual, the play and current theatre life in the country were discussed. In an interesting parallel to the observations concerning the apolitical nature the experimental work seen in Lithuania, the Estonian company defended the disappearance of this background material from the play on the grounds that their theatre had seen enough politics. Leave that, they said, to Parliament, and let the stage deal with what they see as the more fundamental and neglected matter of "the deeper human emotions."

In each of these countries theatre people felt that they were entering a period of serious new challenges. They often expressed a deep concern about the economic instability now found in so much of Europe and how this would affect the theatres, their funding, and their audiences. At the same time, a conviction was expressed in each country that the

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theatre, even if not "political" in the old Soviet sense, was nevertheless an essential part of the national consciousness. As the modern states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania began to develop, the theatre played an important role in establishing the legitimacy of the national language and culture, and as these nations re-emerge in the new Europe that traditional role has not been forgotten. Even in a period of severe economic strains, there seems no doubt that the theatre must continue to be supported so that it may continue to play its role in the intellectual, artistic, and cultural definition of these newly-independent states.

Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 14, No. 1

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE YOUTH MOVEMENT IN MOSCOW: THE FOMENKO STUDIO AND OTHERS

John Freedman

In recent years, dissatisfaction, disagreement, and mistrust have been the rule in most every aspect of the theatrical process in Moscow. Playwrights were unhappy with theatres for diving headlong into the classics, while theatres were unhappy with playwrights for writing bad, gloomy plays. Critics accused theatres and playwrights alike of churning out so much drivel, while theatres and playwrights were unified in their anger at critics for carping at everything they did.

Things got so bad that everybody finally started looking for a way to break the stalemate, and the answer for many was a turn to youth. Critics were the first to jump on the bandwagon. Fed up with what they perceived to be a tremendous drop in quality in the professional theatres, they turned their attention to a few unusually talented productions at various theatre institutes. That brought a swift response from the theatres: they tried cashing in on the new fad by including student productions in their repertories. Even a famous movie director (Sergei Solovyov) tried escaping the "other" Russian cultural crisis--in film-by making his theatrical debut with students. Meanwhile, encouraged by abundant publicity, two graduating classes formed their own professional theatres.

But, as with any fad, there was a lot more sparkle than gold in the flood of student-oriented productions. This time critics and theatres inadvertently found common ground: they were unified in forgetting that the exciting energy of a student performance looks a lot different when it is transferred to the professional stage and offered to the public, not as a learner's exercise, but as a legitimate work of theatre.

The first to learn this hard lesson were the members of the 1992 graduating class of the Shchukin Institute. Primarily on the strength of the talented May 32/City of Mice, this group succeeded in staying together as a professional theatre named the Learned Monkey (SEEP vol. 12, nos. 2-3, Fall 1992). (fhe name is taken from a game made up by Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Mikhail Chekhov.) The problem was that, essentially left alone, the former students were able to do little more than fall apart gradually and quietly. The Shchukin Institute appointed a low-key artistic director (Yury Avsharov), provided some funding, and helped them find a location to perform (a stage at a so-called "Palace of Culture"). But efforts to do more than perform some of their student productions were

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~ ~


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not crowned with success. Eduard Radziukevich, the student who scripted, scored, and directed the haunting City of Mice, got almost no support from either his fellow actors or the theatre's administration as he tried to stage Daniil Kharms's Yelizaveta Bam. It was eventually pushed aside in favor of an extremely amateurish, all-male production of Romeo and Juliet (directed by Anatoly Furmanchuk), the premiere of which came only at the tail end of the 1992-1993 season.' It was performeda handful of times and then disappeared. As the 1993-1994 season moved into its second quarter, the future of the Learned Monkey was unclear. A large number of actors had left the troupe, performances were few and far between, audiences were painfully sparse, the critics who once had trumpeted praise were nowhere to be seen, and the company's remaining die-hards were talking more about bare survival than growth.

It would appear that the new Fomenko Studio (Masterskaya Fomenko) will have an easier go of it. The students graduated in spring 1993 from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RA Tl, formerly GITIS) and turned professional in the fall. The studio-named after Pyotr Fomenko, the artistic director of both the class and the new theatre-has solid financial backing and an active, devoted administration. For the moment, at least, it remains the apple of the Moscow critics' eye, and performances (mostly in tiny halls) are well attended. As of the end of December 1993, it was performing four of its "exam-productions" and was preparing to revive the fifth, Marina Tsvetayeva's The Adventure. There was also talk of a new production scheduled for early 1994.

The studio's active repertory consists of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's Wolves and Sheep (directed by Fomenko), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (directed by Yevgeny Kamenkovich), Nikolai Gogol's The Order of St. Vladimir (directed by Sergei Zhenovach), and a dramatization of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (also directed by Zhenovach).

The unprecedented fame garnered by this youthful group started with The Adventure. Directed by Macedonian Ivan Popovski (himself one of the students), it had critics gushing superlatives that are rarely heard in Moscow these days. The Moscow Critics' Association even named it the best production of the 1991-1992 season, snubbing all the professional entries in the process. Unquestionably a talented student work, The Adventure was performed in a narrow corridor on one of the upper floors of the RA Tl building. But it was the setting, more than anything else, that gave the performance its sense of innovation. The tiny audience of forty, also crammed into the corridor, saw only fleeting glimpses of the "action" as characters quickly flew down or across the corridor-stage before disappearing into neighboring rooms. As such, the actors seldom had to build or sustain a mood; it was enough for them to strike effective poses and let their youthful energy and Tsvetayeva's verse do the rest.

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Popovski's work, deservedly praised, brought him premature fame. When he was contracted to stage Ferdinand Crommelynck's The Sculptor of Masks in Autumn 1992 for the Alla Sigalova Independent Company, he quickly learned how fickle critics and artistic directors can be. Sigalova herself removed this very unsuccessful production from her repertory after only a few performances and some suddenly unfriendly reviews. In early 1993, Popovski was one of three directors (another, incidentally, was Fomenko himself) who were fired as quickly as they were hired to help stage the Bogis Agency's production of Alexei Burykin's Nizhinsky. Popovski's rather harsh personal experiences in his first forays into professional theatre can be seen as metaphors for the problems the Fomenko Studio as a whole may soon face.

While some of the young actors show extraordinary potential, it is clear that many are not ready to be thrust into leading or even secondary roles. Moreover, the play selection that was so crucial to broadening their education experience can come across as silly in a professional context. Especially striking in that category is the dreary, four-and-a-half hour dramatization of 7he Sound and the Fury. The young Russians make a game effort to plumb the depths of this wrenching drama about the Compson family, one of the great composite literary images of the decaying American South in the early twentieth century. But, despite a stunning performance of the mute Benjy (Yury Stepanov), this one should have been abandoned as a warm memory of lessons well learned. The cultural and generational gaps separating the actors from their characters are downright deadly. It simply is not possible to take twentyyear-olds seriously as they struggle to impersonate such complex characters as Caroline, the bitter, ruthless, old matriarch, or Dilsey, the wise and ancient black cook.

The Order of St. Vladimir, which combines several early dramatic scenes by Gogol, in part because its subject matter, is something with which the students-turned-pros can identify. Nevertheless, the episodic performance looks more like a collection of clever sketches than a finished work. Twelfth Night is simply an excuse to turn loose a stage-full of energetic young people. The problem is that the players are so wrapped up in their own enthusiasm they never get around to drawing the audience into the fun.

It should come as no surprise that the troupe does its best under the guidance of Fomenko himself. The director's light, ironic touch in Wolves and Sheep, a wicked comedy about a group of provincials whose only purpose is to cheat each other out of as much as they can, creates a performance so sly and subtle that it almost has an aroma. First and foremost, Fomenko freed the young actors of weighty form and alien content, and invited them to just go out and act. Some of them did with

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Wolves and Sheep, The Fomenko Studio, Moscow


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a dazzling flair. The Kutepova twins, Kseniya and Polina, are perfectly cast and utterly charming as the dueling principals, Murzavetskaya and Kupavina: Yury Stepanov, the studio's only fully mature actor so far, gives a Siberian-sized, heartaching performance ofLynyayev, the paunchy, well-meaning judge who is as helpless before the intrigues of his neighbors as before the charms of Murzavetskaya's mysterious relative, Glafira. She is played with poisonous grace by Galina Tyunina, for whom many have predicted stardom. The remainder of the cast ranges from the adequate to the abysmal.

But the intimate and atmospheric Wolves and Sheep, originally staged in 1992, is probably more interesting for another reason altogether. It is clearly a forerunner to Fomenko's spectacular production of Guilty Without Guilt at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Spring 1993. Both make the most of unusual settings in small rooms (the obvious influence of Popovski's The Adventure), and both recast well-crafted but somewhat formulaic melodramas by Ostrovsky in a spell-binding atmosphere of mttmacy. But Guilty Without Guilt was a universally acknowledged masterpiece, many say a turning point in end-of-the-century Russian theatre. Meanwhile, Wolves and Sheep was a clever and endearing performance that showed off some potential talent and gave Fomenko an outlet for some ideas that had captured his imagination at the time.

Regardless of the outcome of the Fomenko Studio experiment, it has solidified its founder's reputation as the leading director in Moscow today. Suddenly, the former assistant to Yury Lyubimiv at the Taganka Theatre in the 1960s is hearing people idolize him as a "master," and is watching retrospective showings of his productions on television. The critical and popular success of Guilty Without Guilt capped it all off, but it was sustained, one might even say frenzied, publicity surrounding his RA TI class that laid the foundation.

Other examples of student infiltration into the professional world have been less heralded, although their purpose was similar: directors and theatres were looking for something new. The long-suffering Pushkin Theatre picked up Vladimir Dolgachyov's rambunctious staging of Carlo Gozzi's One of the Last Nights of the Carnival from the Moscow Art Theatre School. The National Youth Theatre picked up a similar production with An Evening of Russian Vaudevilles (directed by Y elena Dolgina at RA 11).2 Mikhail Levitin incorporated his RA TI students' breathless performance of "Where is Alice? (an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland), into the repertory of his Hermitage Theatre. Mark Rozovsky gave professional billing at his Nikita Gates Theatre to his RA TI students's largely immature work, Murder (Rozovsky's adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment). These productions, and many

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Wolves and Sheep, Fomenko Studio, Moscow


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more of their kind, have little to recommend beyond the fact that they are earnestly and/ or energetically acted.

The dividends (or damages) of hurrying so many young people into the spotlight so early will only become clear with the passage of time. Some are bound to be the actors and directors who will eventually help lead Russian theatre out of the Soviet era. But it is most likely that we will now begin to see a drop in the popularity of student work. After all, the unusually high interest in what was transpiring at the schools and institutes was more an emotional rejection of the offerings in the professional theatres than an honest appraisal of some talented apprentices. Ultimately, the formation of the Fomenko Studio will probably be seen as the high-water mark in Moscow's youth movement.

1For a rather diffuse, though positive review of Romeo and Juliet, see Elena Levinskaia, "Melodiia za kadrom," Moskovskii nabliudatel', 8/9 (1993): 40-42.

2The National Youth Theatre (Rossiiskii molodyozhnyi teatr) is the new name of the former Central Children's Theatre.

35

ARTHUR MILLER AT THE THEATRE-ON-PODOL: A CRUCIBLE AND A COUP

Suzanne Trauth

An exchange project in global education between my academic institution and the Theatre-on-Podol in Kiev, Ukraine, in August 1991 provided an extraordinary theatrical and personal experience. My partner in the project, a colleague at Montclair State College, and I spent each evening during our seven-day visit sampling the dramatic fare created by these unique and wonderfully talented artists (SEEP vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 1993). Our primary mission, however, was to introduce the Theatre-onPodol to the American theatre by way of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Because the Ukrainian company had only limited contact with American dramatists, Miller seemed an appropriate choice for a first venture. In addition to his classical stature and international popularity, his weaving of socio-political threads throughout his plays would appeal to a theatre that placed a high priority on political issues in their own work.

Parallels exist between the Soviet life that still dominated Kiev and The Crucible. The period of perestroika, where the examination of the past served to restructure the future, was akin to Miller's depiction of political life in 1950s America: a result of his examination of a dark chapter in our own history relating to seventeenth-century Salem.

Act II, scene ii of The Crucible, the John Proctor courtroom scene, was sent to the Podol Theatre for translation a month before our arrival, and we carried with us to Kiev a synopsis of the play and characters prepared and translated here. I chose, for working purposes, a section of the scene that had a cast of about a dozen actors and involved a relatively large number of the company. It would permit the use of stylized movement (i.e., the possession of the young women by the spirit of Mary Warren), and would be a very highly-charged, climactic moment that would urge strong physical and emotional involvement. These parameters were determined by the performance style of the Podol actors who inhabit their roles with a theatrical life that is extremely physical, emotionally full, daringly sensual, and downright gutsy. Bodies are fluid and expressive, and voices display a wonderful range of sounds and rhythms. Theirs is a kind of movement theatre that permits them to incorporate music and dance into all of their stage work.

Upon arriving in Kiev we met with artistic director Vitaly Malakhov and the acting company and planned our rehearsal schedule. We worked every day for six days, spending a preliminary hour on dance


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and movement and the remainder of the rehearsal period on The Crucible. On the first day we read the previously translated courtroom scene with four actors reading all the parts, as it was impossible for the theatre to xerox more than four copies. (As American artists and academics, we often take the simplest task for granted. Xeroxing, for example, was a major undertaking for the theatre. In order to obtain additional copies of the scene to be rehearsed, theatre personnel had to appeal to the mayor's office for assistance.)

Following the read-through, I discussed Arthur Miller's background, his writing, the political ramifications of the McCarthy period in America, the witchcraft trials in Salem, the issues at work in the play, and the circumstances leading up to the courtroom scene. This was all slow going, as the interpreter attempted to keep up while I rushed headlong into my "lecture." The acting company listened intently and seemed to grasp the issues of the play: presumption of guilt, repressive social policies, the evils of righteousness, censorship of the individual, fear bred by mass hysteria, the pursuit of vengeance, and the loss of freedom. They nodded their heads, and a few said, "Stalin."

This was not new territory for them. We were in the midst of a community of artists familiar with a kind of tragic fatalism that drives their collective existence on a daily basis. These actors have seen Chernobyl's effect first-hand: their children are weakened and listless, cancer prematurely claimed the life of the leading company member a few weeks before our arrival, and heart disease, already flourishing due to their lifestyles, has reached epidemic proportions. This is a company whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with devastating consequences as Theseus, angry with the mechanicals for mocking the behavior of the aristocrats, exchanges a fake sword for a real one and both Bottom and Flute, as Pyramus and Thisby, lose their lives. "There are few happy endings in the Soviet Union," they said when questioned about the liberties taken with the play. The Crucible had the capacity to touch their lives in a very direct fashion.

The second and third rehearsals were spent reading, discussing, and improvising a small segment of this scene (ten to twelve minutes). Because many of the actors were eager to participate, roles were re-cast each of the first three days so that several actors had the experience of playing a single character, thus including as many company members as possible. In all, some fifteen actors participated in actual rehearsals. We finally chose a single cast to rehearse the scene in order to arrive at a stageworthy piece of theatre by the end of the week.

The final three rehearsals were spent staging the scene in some detail. These actors improvise easily, and characters with no written lines in the scene frequently provided a fair amount of verbal input. Even the

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most specific direction was sometimes re-interpreted in a unique and innovative fashion. Actors' creativity and improvisational skill often led them to adjust or cut lines and actions at will. I could tell when they had made some changes in the script by the reactions of the other actors on stage as well as those in the house observing the rehearsal. These disciplined professionals were often child-like in their enthusiasm for the work and their commitment to the moment. A single question or statement from me, via the interpreter, would often signal the start of a vigorous, ten-minute discussion among themselves that might have been a battle of wills for all its verbal vehemence. I would appeal to the interpreter for clarification of the "discussion," but often she was too involved with the actors in the interpretation of the direction. Hence my ability to pursue the subtleties of the script were sometimes limited. On the other hand, the characters' physical and emotional lives were so strong that Miller's bold strokes took on an almost surrealistic aspect.

We decided to begin the scene with a short, semi-improvised movement piece, organized by my colleague, that established the atmosphere. It was choreographed to folk music performed acapella by the actors. The female characters dance simply and with abandon only to be "crushed" by footsteps and the resounding thud of furniture as male characters enter and set the scene. This moment of movement provided a springboard for Danforth's first line, the order to fetch Elizabeth Proctor. It created in physical form· the struggle between the individual's need for freedom and the censorship of a repressive society.

On the last day of rehearsal, actors found costumes of the desired period, style, and color; the scene was run and videotaped before the remainder of the acting company and staff who had assembled to view our final product. The response from on and off stage was surprise and delight in our unexpected achievement.

To see a portion of this play performed in Russian with such emotional and physical commitment was a truly amazing and rewarding experience. These Podol artists are a very talented, eager group of actors. We felt gratified by the success of the project, though I must admit that this was possibly one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. It was very educational to learn that the language of theatre is the language of the body, of the emotions, of the soul, and that the supposed "language barrier" proved to be less of an issue than we had anticipated. Most of the time we were able to communicate fairly easily with pantomime, demonstration, and a good sense of humor. The interpreter helped, of course.

As I look back now, I remember the scene as a collection of specific images generated by these courageous actors: Galina, a beautiful,


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sensual Abigail, possessed by the spirit of the character, whose electric performance demanded attention; Tolya, an earnest, young cabaret artist, whose Reverend Hale was an honest man struggling to provide a conscience for the play; Tanya (who had lost her own husband, Sasha, only a month earlier to cancer), heart-breaking as Elizabeth Proctor fighting for the life of her stage husband; and Valeri, whose mature artistic judgment provided shape to the scene as well as to his John Proctor. All of them were memorable characterizations.

On Sunday evening, August 18, several hours after the conclusion of the taping of The Crucible scene, the actors and staff hosted a party for us in the tiny theatre on St. Andrew's Descent. Because we were leaving Kiev the next day, this would be the last opportunity to spend time with our new friends. We shared champagne, fruit, and cookies (all delicacies by Ukrainian standards), snapped endless pictures, and "talked" in our newly-discovered language of gestures, a few Russian words, and simplified English spoken loudly and slowly with great expression. We had all enjoyed each other immensely during the previous week's rehearsals, and this theatre experience had bound us together for life. Promises to keep in touch, visit each other, and never forget the past week were traded on all sides. There was much laughter, the exchange of gifts, and even a few tears. Finally, the evening had to end. As we made our way to the door saying our final good-byes, several actors promised to see us off at the train station Monday evening for our return trip to Moscow. Tanya, the actress who played Elizabeth Proctor, softly sang a few words of " America the Beautiful" in halting English. It was an extraordinarily moving moment.

The air of celebration created that evening was shattered the morning of August 19 as we woke to the news of the coup. We gathered at the theatre shortly before our hastily arranged departure for the Kiev airport and joined some actors who were preparing for rehearsal, business as usual. One commented that working on The Crucible at this particular time was almost prophetic. Its issues stood out in bold relief against a backdrop of potential repression, fear, and hysteria. The play seemed more than ever a metaphor for the ever-present dangers of living in the modern world.

39

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON JEWISH THEATRE HELD IN POLAND

Michael Steinlauf

An unprecedented scholarly event, the first international conference devoted to the history of Jewish theatre was held in Poland, October 18-21, 1993. Twenty-seven papers were presented by scholars from Poland, the United States, Israel, Germany, Ukraine, and Italy. The conference was organized by the Theatre Department of the University of L6d:l and the Polish Society of Theatre Historians under the auspices of the Polish Ministry of Culture, and was held at the Aleksander Zelwerowicz State Theatre School in Warsaw. Papers were simultaneously translated into English and Polish.

The conference took place on the heels of the publication earlier this year of Volume 41 of the Polish theatre history journal Pamit:tnik Teatralny. This five-hundred-page issue, entirely devoted to research on the history of Jewish theatre in Poland up to 1939, is the first such publication since Jacob Shatzky edited the Arkhiv far der geshikhte fun yidishn teater un drama (Archives for the History of Jewish Theatre and Drama) in New York in 1928.

Coinciding with the conference, a festival of Jewish culture was held that included the screening of pre-war Yiddish films made in Poland and Ukraine, talks by Polish Jewish writers, and performances by Yiddish singers and theatre troupes from throughout the world.

The conference opened on Monday afternoon, October 18, with the screening of two films: Aktor (1993), Krystyna Bevis-Shmeruk and Irena Kamienska's film about Michal Szwejlich of the Polish State Yiddish Theater, and]ej teatr (Her Theatre, 1967), Wladyslaw Forbert's film about Ida Kaminska. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to a talk by the legendary Yiddish theatre director J ak6b Rotbaum of W rodaw who began his professional career staging Eugene O'Neill with the Vilna Troupe in 1930. Rotbaum reviewed his early years in theatre, including his studies in Moscow with Meyerhold and Shlomo Mikhoels, emphasizing the importance of theatre as an agent of education and social change.

The first paper was presented on Tuesday morning, October 19, by conference organizer Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, director of the Department of Drama and Theatre at the University of L6di and President of the Polish Society of Theatre Historians. Kuligowska stressed the need to approach Yiddish theatre, which was once performed in every corner of Poland, without either sentimental or ideological lenses, in order


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to "track the traces of the great and vanishing culture with which fate has linked us." Her paper was fQllowed qy t~at of the academic consultant to the conference, Chone Shmeruk of Jerusalem, who reviewed Yiddish dramatic literature created up to World War I. Shmeruk began with an analysis of why this literature did not develop until the sixteenth century and then discussed the first Purim plays, early modern biblical and Enlightenment dramas, the rise of professional Yiddish theatre under Abraham Goldfaden, and the contributions of the "classical" Yiddish writers such as Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, andY. L. Peretz. J6zef Gelston (Lvov) traced the history of the Broder Singers, several generations of peripatetic Galician musicians, singers and jesters (originally associated with Ber Morgulis of Brody) from the late nineteenth century until the Holocaust. Jan Michalik (Cracow) closed the morning session presenting press and archival research documenting the first performances of Yiddish theatre in Cracow in the late 1880s.

The afternoon session began with a paper by Maria Stykowa (Lublin) chronicling Yiddish amateur theatre in Lublin from 1864-1916. Maria Prussak (Warsaw) examined demonstrations by Jewish students protesting the staging of certain antisemitic Polish plays at the turn of the century in Warsaw and other Polish cities. Her paper was followed by that of the conference secretary, Malgorzata Leyko of L6di, who chronicled the work of Yitzhak Zandberg, who directed the first permanent Yiddish theatre in L6dz from 1907-16. Keren Goldberg (Los Angeles) closed the afternoon session with an overview of the development of Yiddish theatre in Poland and its meaning for us today.

The morning session on October 20 began with a paper by Elinor Rubel Gerusalem) on popular Yiddish theatre (the so-called "shund theatre") based on a study of the performances of Avrom Fishzon's traveling company at the turn of the century. Focusing on Y. L. Peretz's theatre writings in Warsaw after 1905, Michael Steinlauf (Philadelphia) proposed a model for exploring the "kunst/shund" (high/low) distinction introduced by Peretz into Yiddish theatre discourse. Michael Taub (New York) then presented an analysis of the social issues raised by Peretz in his one-act plays, contrasting this body of work with his stories and fulllength plays. Kazimierz Nowacki (Cracow) chronicled Yiddish theatre activity, both popular and dramatic, professional and amateur, in the cities and town of Galicia during the interwar period. Closing the morning session was a paper by Mieczyslaw Abramowicz (Gdansk) focusing on the little-known activity of Yiddish theatres in Danzig during the first years of the Nazi regime (1934-38).

The afternoon session began with a paper by J6zef Weichert of Tel Aviv (read by Marek Bielacki of L6dz) discussing aspects of his father

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Michal Weichert's work with the avant-garde Yiddish company Yung Theater (Young Theatre) which he directed in the 1930s. Zbigniew Osinski (Warsaw) surveyed the little-known work of the Hebrew Theatre Studio in Vilna from 1927-1933, and its close relations with Juliusz Osterwa's Reduta Theatre. Focusing on the reactions of the Polish and Polish-Jewish press to Habima's three tours of Poland (1926, 1930, and 1936), Katarzyna Leienska (Warsaw) presented a contribution to social as well as theatre history. Eleonora Udalska (Katowice) analyzed Polishlanguage productions of Anski's The Dybbuk during the interwar period, focusing on differences between the styles of Yiddish and Polish productions. Jan Ciechowicz (Gdansk) surveyed the writings on Yiddish and Polish theatre that appeared in the popular Polish-language Jewish weekly Opinia, published in Warsaw from 1933-1935.

The morning session on October 21 began with a paper by Brigitte Dalinger of Vienna (read by Kowalska) documenting the origins of Yiddish theatre in Vienna during the last years of the nineteenth century, and comparing its development to that of Yiddish theatre further east. On the basis of research in the contemporary German-Jewish press, Heide Riss (Munich) chronicled the activity of Polish Yiddish actors and companies in Berlin from the early 1920s to 1933. Liana Tedeschi (Milan) analyzed the powerful mediating function of Yiddish theatre in New York at the turn of the century and suggested its displacement of the synagogue as the social and spiritual center of Jewish life. Marta Meducka (Kielce) traced the effects of the Yiddish popular repertory developed in the late nineteenth century in the United States on Yiddish theatre activity in Poland in the early twentieth century and between the wars. Edward Krasinski (Warsaw) closed the morning session with a survey of the many forms of contact and collaboration between Polish and Jewish actors, directors, scenographers, audiences, theatre critics, and instructors during the interwar years.

The afternoon session began with a paper by Ruta Sakowska (Warsaw) on Jewish theatre activity in the Warsaw Ghetto, focusing on the most ambitious of these efforts: Mark Arnshteyn's Polish-language Nowy Teatr Kameralny (New Chamber Theatre). This was followed by two papers devoted to Ida Kaminska's activities in post-war Poland. Analyzing recently accessible government documents, Joanna KrakowskaNaroiniak (Warsaw) documented the vicissitudes of Kaminska's efforts to continue staging Yiddish theatre in communist Poland. Danuta Gibas (Cracow) explored Kaminska's collaboration with the Polish director Konrad Swinarski in his productions of plays by Brecht and Diirrenmatt in Warsaw in the early 1960s. Dr. Marian Fuks (Warsaw) closed the


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sesswn with a paper chronicling the development of Jewish musical theatre.

The conference concluded with an appearance by Shmuel Atzmon, director of the Yiddish Theatre of Israel, who discussed the development of this theatre. over: the past t"o/O decades and screened video excerpts from recent productions.

The conference organizers plan to publish the complete proceedings of the conference in Polish and English. For further information about the conference, contact: Malgorzata Leyko, Katedra Teorii Literatury, Teatru i Filmu Uniwersytetu L6dzkiego, ul. Sienkiewicza 21, 90-114 L6dz, POLAND, fax: 011 4842 78 39 58; or Michael Steinlauf, Department of History, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003; tel: (717) 291-4288; fax: (717) 399-4413; e-mail: M _ [email protected].

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POLISH THEATRE IN THE NINETIES: CATASTROPHE AND HOPE

Juliusz Tyszka

Editor's note: The following article is a revised and edited version of a talk given on April14, 1993 as part of the colloquium, "Performance in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States Since 1989," sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Polish theatre is tasting freedom, and the taste is bitter. The directors of 109 Polish state theatres (sixty·five drama·repertory theatres, twenty-six puppet theatres, nine opera theatres, eight musical theatres, and one dance theatre) have expressed a desperate need for money to preserve the "human substance" of their institutions. Poles have not yet challenged the socialist principle of "common access to cultural goods." Because of the existing inflation and recession of the last three years, people in Poland cannot afford the increasingly expensive theatre tickets.

This state of affairs did not change until very recently. The present state theatre artists have resisted changes that might diminish their income, social status, and security. There exists in Polish a wise but, in my opinion, very fatalistic proverb: "People are only human beings." People in the Polish state theatres are indeed nothing more than human beings. They are not willing to take risks; they like to be employed for extended periods in "artistic enterprises" belonging to the state. State theatre employment guarantees them the security of a regular salary, not to mention any additional monies for extracurricular activities. More importantly, it gives them state insurance plus a so-called "continuity of employment" needed for retirement pensions. The status of being an artist associated with a state theatre also provides actors with a great deal of spare time, which can be used in such ways as working as a waiter. One can also tour the country with a second-rate production. Considering the increasing number of artists who earn their living in these ways, it is not surprising that quality theatre has been neglected.

Perhaps it is also not surprising that Polish drama-repertory theatres have been trying to stage a little bit of everything: farces, musicals, contemporary dramas, and, most often, dramas included on school reading lists. There is at least one production for children each season. However, there have been many incidents in sold-out houses when a small group of the students have disrupted performances. These students have launched objects from slingshots at the actors and offended

Slavic and East European Pe-rformance Vol. 14, No. I

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them by making loud noises during the performance. There have not only been individual demonstrations of bad manners and misbehavior but rebellions against compulsory theatregoing in general. State theatres are at the risk of becoming phantoms: there are no actors, no audiences, no income, soon there won't be any subsidies.

I am exaggerating of course, but not too much. Let's take, for example, one of the weekly repertories of the Polish state theatres between Spring 1991 and Fall 1992, published weekly in Goniec Teatralny (Iheatrical Messenger). Between April 9 and 14, 984 performances were staged on the 164 stages of the Polish state theatres. Two hundred and eighty performances that could have been presented were not, which represents 28.5 percent of the theatres' total capacity. The number of theatrical presentations has been continually decreasing. State subsidies are still paid to the theatres even if they do not put on as many productions.

The attitude of government officials is ambiguous. Although committed to a free market economy, they are very aware of the importance of theatre in the social life of Poland. They do not want history to remember them as the ones who gave up on the theatre, nor do they want to increase the number of unemployed theatre artists. Only one theatre ensemble has been dissolved: a company located in Grudzi~dz in the region of East Pomerania. Most regional officials prefer not to make painful decisions about the theatre's future; they are swayed by the argument that closing theatres will mark the end of culture in their regions of the country.

O n the other hand, state officials seem quite willing to get rid of the problem. Warsaw's administration agreed instantly to rent the Dramatic Theatre to Wiktor Kubiak, a private entrepreneur who produced the musical, Metro {SEEP vol. 12, nos. 2-3). The decision prompted protests from the artistic community. Although city officials agreed with the protesters in principle, they continuously pointed out that the rent paid by Kubiak would enable the city to provide an additional seventeen billion zlotys per year to the other theatres. But the demise of Metro on Broadway forced Kubiak to withdraw his offer; thus the prospect of additional subsidies vanished.

The directors of state theatres are trying to fill the gap between the subsidies and the additional financial needs of their institutions by using various strategies. The most popular is the rental of the premises to another institution. As a result, many little shops and stands can be found in the foyer of Teatre Wybrze:ie in Gdansk and part of the Poznan Nowy Theatre's foyer has become a cafe after performances every evening. The local radio broadcasting company has found a home in the Kochanowski Theatre of Radom. There are many more examples.

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Another strategy to raise funds is the enlistment of local businessmen to subsidize the theatre or to invest in the theatre. Unfortunately, Wiktor Kubiak seems to be the only person who has shown any interest in this kind of investment. Other businessmen have been neither investing nor helping. Thanks to numerous criminal offenses, arrests, and accusations against some businessmen, the only investments that have increased are the ones going to Swiss bank accounts. The theatre appears to be the last place they want to put their money, and the hostility of the theatrical community towards Kubiak is a strong deterrent as well .

Provincial theatres (i.e., theatres outside Warsaw and Cracow), are trying to organize more tours than before in their regions but the costs of such enterprises are in most cases too great. The directors are trying to invite stars from leading theatres to play parts in their productions Qanusz Gajos in Converted in jaffa by Marek Hlasko in Teatr Polski, Poznan, for example) or to give recitals. Thus, many provincial theatres are gradually changing their character from a drama-repertory theatre to theatre de l'impresariat. In addition, the experimental, independent companies have developed a system of "special events" tours. A company from Lublin, for example, organizes a special event in their town and gets money for it from the state or regional budget. Two weeks later another special event will be scheduled in Wrodaw. These "special events" bring money and a viewing public; it is much easier to get money for a "special and unique tour of theatres 'X' and 'Y' on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Town Hall" than it is to procure funds in connection with a "simple, ordinary" tour.

And what about the famous Polish experimental theatre? After all, it seemed to be more flexible and better prepared for dramatic changes. Experimental theatres either received very small state subsidies or no subsidies at all. Therefore, they came to rely either on their own money-making activities or on the occasional state subsidy, or on donations from the few public and private foundations which have come into being in recent years. The greatest obstacle to receiving private donations is a law that does not allow people or enterprises making donations to cultural institutions to claim them as tax deductions. Every donation must be simply taken from one's income, and, what is more, the benefactor must pay a "donation tax." The state budget desperately needs money and the fiscal officers are keen to tax "everything that moves."

Experimental theatres are trying to cope with the economic crisis by engaging in the art of "grant writing." They have been filling out as many grant applications as possible and then waiting impatiently for the results. In most cases, the results are promising but tricky. Grants from


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the Ministry of Culture are much less than the amount requested (the average cut is about fifty percent) and are paid with great delay because of the slowness of the bureaucratic machine. Consequently, the organizers of festivals, when announcing their events and inviting theatres to participate in them, must add the caveat that ·"all final decisions are determined by the financial possibilities of the Festival Bureau." (This is quoted from the letter of the organizers of the Theatrical Reminiscences Festival which took place, after much delay, in Cracow in March, 1993.) Such an uncertain situation is typical for all kinds of festivals in Poland. For example, one of the independent theatres from Poznan applied in June 1992 for a grant to co-produce a production with a theatre from Switzerland. The grant, cut in half, was not paid until February 1993 even though the opening night of the show had already taken place in October 1992.

Attempts to earn money for artistic activity by economic activity are very rare and bring mixed results. When the young company Klinika Lalek (The Clinic of Puppets) moved out from Wrodaw to the small town of W olimierz in Lower Silesia, they tried to achieve financial stability for their theatre and their daily existence by buying a cinema theatre and cafe. They have been successful in their business but have not produced anything for more than a year.

Finding an appropriate place to work is also becoming a serious problem for the experimental theatre companies nowadays. Currently, they do not pay rent for their rehearsal and performance space. But it appears that this comfortable situation is going to change in the near future. Space is becoming a source of capital as people learn that space can bring money. Already in a few Polish cities theatre companies that had located a performance space, renovated it by their own means, and attained permission to use it for their own purposes, have had to face representatives from the local bank, cafe, or boutique offering much higher rent to the city officials. Because the town councils of Polish cities have recently been in a state of permanent economic crisis, the fate of the theatre companies is quite easy to guess. They are "encouraged" to look for space elsewhere.

In conclusion, I would say that this period of "transition" forces the artists of all kinds of Polish theatres to face many problems. They will have to learn how to work harder and to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, and unselfish. Many of them will have to redefine their craft and, first and foremost , the nature of their professional vocation. The theatre is losing its great social importance and is gradually becoming only entertainment.

The tradition, however, still exists. I think it will be much easier to preserve a noble tradition of Polish theatre in small experimental

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companies than in great theatrical institutions. The latter are, by their character, much more susceptible to transformation into uncreative institutions of "theatre industry." However, I will be pleased if I have an opportunity to see something like Mickiewicz's Forefather's Eve or Krasinski's Undivine Comedy on a great stage once more during my lifetime, and probably will have such an opportunity because both are on school reading lists.

State officials will have to redefine the goals of cultural policy. Although this concept seems to have been totally discredited by its abuse in Communist times, this kind of thinking about the organization and importance of national culture simply cannot be avoided. It seems to me quite clear that the continuation of the strategy of "preserving the substance" and waiting for better times is silly and dangerous. In Western Europe there are many examples of successful financing of theatre that the former Communist countries can follow.

One optimistic note is that Polish theatres of all kinds are finally searching for their own public. This may very well result in the establishment of an authentic link between theatres and their audiences. It can only enhance the great, noble tradition of Boguslawski, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Krasinski, Norwid, Wyspianski, Schiller, Osterwa, not to mention Kantor, Grotowski, and Szajna.


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PAGES FROM THE PAST FROLOV ON TRAGICOMEDY

Daniel Gerould

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Russian theatre critic and historian Vladimir Frolov produced a long essay on tragicomedy in which he argued for the importance of the genre in Soviet drama and forecast the significant role it was destined to play in contemporary writing for the stage in the USSR. As a theoretical work Frolov's essay is an original and pioneering study of a subject that had scarcely been treated before in Russian. As a polemic with the repressive Soviet establishment still attempting to enforce a stri<;t code of Socialist Realism, it is a spirited defense of the new post-thaw playwrights and their experiments with dramatic form. As has often been the case, tragicomedy meant freedom from restrictive rules.

Frolov's essay on tragicomedy has never been published in Russian; because of its promotion of banned and controversial works, it may have seemed too heretical for home consumption during the Brezhnev years. A 1968 version appeared in the Polish drama monthly, Dialog, in November, 1969, and was reprinted in a collection of Frolov's theatre writings published in Warsaw in 1976. Closely resembling the Polish version, the longer Russian text consists of a theoretical introduction and detailed analyses of major Soviet plays that Frolov interprets as tragicomedies--Erdman's Suicide, Bulgakov's Flight, Babel's Sunset, and Shvarts's The Dragon-plus a discussion (added after 1968) of contemporary specimens of the genre by Vasily Aksyonov, Juozas Grusas, and Andrei Makayonok.

We are presenting here the theoretical introduction, approximately one third of the entire essay. Frolov makes a particularly valuable contribution to critical discourse on the nature and evolution of the genre on at least two counts. First, he offers a new theory of tragicomedy based on Russian and Soviet models generally ignored by scholars and critics investigating the genre. Second, he considers tragicomedy not simply as dramatic literature but also as performance and examines the role of the director and actor in creating tragicomic interpretations of drama on stage. In fact, Frolov demonstrates that in Russia it has been outstanding theatrical practitioners like Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Ruben Simohov, and Georgi Tovstonogov who have been the important theorists of tragicomedy. In these ways Frolov has greatly enlarged our understanding of tragicomedy and its liberating role as an innovative genre.

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It is worth noting Frolov's methodology. To validate a genre with low visibility and questionable status in Soviet literature, his initial rhetorical strategy is to cite as proponents of tragicomedy such prominent authorities as Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Gorky. Then after examining tragicomic stagings ranging from Vakhtangov's Wedding (Chekhov) in 1920 to Tovstonogov's Barbarians (Gorky) in 1959, Frolov establishes a Russian national tradition of tragicomedy whose roots he is able to trace back to Griboyedov, Gogo!, and Sukhovo-Kobylin.

Tragicomedy has always been a potentially disruptive genre. It challenges authority, defies the rules, subverts hierarchies. For example, it flourished in France as a free form in the chaotic early seventeenth century until brought to heel and eventually eliminated under the cultural absolutism of Richelieu and the French Academy which insisted on a state-sponsored classicism.

In the USSR Socialist Realism became the stifling neoclassicist doctrine. Unruly genres were suppressed. Of the three tragicomic masterpieces of 1928 held up for admiration by Frolov, the first two, Suicide and Flight, were forbidden by the censors before they could reach the stage, and the third, Sunset, was stopped after two performances. In presenting these works as exemplary tragicomedies, Frolov hoped to rehabilitate a genre of bitter satire and sardonic humor that had recently reappeared in such rebellious new tragicomic plays as Aksyonov's Always on Sale, Grusas's Love, jazz and the Devil, and Makayonok's 1he Tormented Apostle and 1he Tribunal.

Frolov's promotion of the tragicomic was a bold defense of the grotesque and the fantastic in native Russian and Soviet guise as opposed to officially sanctioned realism. Of course, the grotesque and the fantastic already dominant in the Western European theatre of the absurd were still forbidden as decadent and bourgeois. For the young generation of Russian writers in the post-Khrushchev era the ironies, ambiguities, and relativism characteristic of the tragicomic genre offered an appealing alternative to the smug certainties of Socialist Realism. It is not surprising that new Soviet playwriting of the 1960s tended toward tragicomedy and that Aleksei Arbuzov, Grigori Gorin, and Aleksandr Vampilov sometimes used the term to describe their own work and that many plays by Leonid Zorin, Aleksandr Volodin, Viktor Rozov, and Edvard Radzinsky can appropriately be assigned to the genre.

The uneasy transitional world of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the USSR with its crumbling of absolutes, self-questioning doubts, and breakdown of barriers was profoundly tragicomic. First, notions of heroism had been undermined, and then moral values lost clear definition both in the family and in society at large.


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A dramatic form without rigid structure, allowing mixed responses, suited the times. This is the context in which Frolov wrote his provocative essay on what he regarded as the most difficult and complex of dramatic genres, tragicomedy.

The Tormented Apostle, Satire Theatre, Moscow, 1970


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VLADIMIR FROLOV: TRAGICOMEDY

Translated by Leonid Chechelnitsky and Roberta Reeder

Tragicomedy is a classical genre that occurs in contemporary drama. This genre arose a long time ago and evolved in the practice of world drama. However, it has never been the subject of theoretical analysis. We cannot point to a single work or article in Soviet theatre scholarship devoted to this problem. Only isolated statements by those active in the theatre and by critics can testify to the fact that this genre is alive in the drama. It has attracted the attention mainly of the practitioners of theatrical art and especially of directors.

And yet if one speaks about the power of survival of genres, then tragicomedy has a broader diffusion in contemporary Western art than, let us say, tragedy, which has lost its former dominance. This is significant in that tragicomedy, which had originated as a result of the blending of the tragic and the comic, is a synthesis of mid-genre elements and, like anything possessing a synthetic form, answers the formal conceptualization, problems, and goals of contemporary art. It is not "pure" tragedy, but tragicomedy that has become the most "suitable" and enduring genre in the dramatic art of the twentieth century. Bernard Shaw observed that "In its tragedy and comedy alike, the modern tragicomedy begins where the old tragedies and comedies left off."1 We might recall that Shaw credited Ibsen with establishing tragicomedy "as a much deeper and grimmer entertainment than tragedy. "2

It is well known that Shakespeare boldly varied different genre elements in his tragedies and comedies. But this mixing did not destroy the genre dominant in either the tragedy about King Lear, where there is so much comic mischief, or the comedy, Twelfth Night, in which we are moved by the serious dramatic episodes.

However, in Shakespeare's works there are plays which, having originated from the blending of tragedy and comedy, have produced a new genre. These are the plays written after Hamlet: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All's Well that Ends Well . Shakespeare scholars define them in different ways as "dark comedies," "problem plays," or "tragicomedies."

These Shakespearean plays are close to tragicomedies. There are no tragic catastrophes in them. However, the state of hopelessness, the collapse of ideals, and the most profound moral crises bring the images of these works close to the tragic. The best impulses of the heroes find no support in actual life. Love, honor, conscience come into conflict with the ugly laws of life. If in the comedies of the earlier periods (Twelfth

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Night, As You Like It) love was, as Aleksandr Anikst notes, "invariably healthy and the basic principle of life," then in the "dark comedies" it is "the source of disharmony and even misfortune."3

Everything in the world collapses, is shaky, unstable. This is essentially the leitmotif of these three Shakespeare plays. In their substance they tend toward the genre of tragedy, but it is still impossible to call them tragedies. A satiric view of the world is strongly reflected in them, but they are still not comedies. In the works of Shakespeare these plays are separated into a special genre; they are tragicomedies. The social, philosophical conflicts in these plays are embodied through the prism of a tragicomic conceptualization: the artist sees the epoch as a capricious mix of the comic and the tragic, and at times also in the form of the phantasmagoric. The noble heroes do not find satisfaction either in love or in deeds.

In Russia, tragicomedy arose only gradually. From Gogo! and Griboyedov to Sukhovo-Kobylin, and then to Chekhov, Gorky and Andreyev there extends a profound tragicomic sadness which colors the humor and laughter of the dramas and comedies of these dissimilar artists.

In the comedies of the Russian classics, which portrayed great social conflicts, there was no " laughter without sadness," there was no "exposure without pain." The serious aspect of the comic suffused the language, images and situations of comedies with a dramatic effect and with very strong tragic emotion. This was, evidently, purely Russian, a national feature of the conceptualization of the artists reflecting the character of the genre combinations.

In 1909 the critic Aleksandr Kugel, comparing Chekhov as a playwright with Gogo!, found that they had much in common. We cannot totally agree with him, but in the richness of the tragicomic element that brings Chekhov close to Gogol, he was correct.

"In Chekhov, of course, there is no mysticism," wrote Kugel, "as there is in Gogol. Gogol was of a passionate and seeking nature, and that is why his laughter had its complement in mystical pessimism. Chekhov was by nature more even tempered, more contemplatively calm, and that is why his humor found its complementary color in elegiac pessimism. But both were melancholy. There is no artistic laughter without sadness, no exposure without pain [italics ours- V.F.] ... Gogol's mysticism, his religiosity, his asceticism are a natural atonement for the genius of a humorist who has revealed and described life for us as a combining of tragic banalities. And Chekhov paid for his humor with the endlessly sad, plaintive notes, quiet as an angel's lament, of Ihe Cherry Orchard."4

Of course, we do not wish to make absolute only one side of the comic which appears so typically in Gogo) and Chekhov's satire and

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humor. This was merely one current in Russian drama. In Chekhov's plays, genres developed which were not always tragicomic. The particles and elements of comedy, drama, and tragedy were constantly varied in them. There was always present that tragicomic view of the life of his times which also determined the sad comic quality of Chekhovian dramas and comedies. This was the special genre tuning fork that resounds in his plays, even in those that Chekhov said were cheerful.

Referring to the last act of 1he Cherry Orchard, he declared in a letter to Olga Knipper, "the last act will be cheerful, indeed the entire play is cheerful, light. " 5

Was this really the case? In a letter to Chekhov dated May 8, 1904, Vsevolod Meyerhold

wrote of 1he Cherry Orchard:

Your play is as abstract as a Tchaikovsky symphony. And the director must above all catch its tonality. In the third act with stupid "stamping of feet" in the background (and this "stamping of feet" must be audible) Horror makes its entrance unnoticed by anyone.

"The cherry orchard has been sold." They keep on dancing. "It has been sold." They keep on dancing. And so it continues until the end. When you read the play, the third act produces the same effect as that droning in the ears of the sick man in your story "Typhus." A kind of itch. Mirth in which the sounds of death are heard. In this act there is something Maeterlinckian, something frightful. I make the comparison only because I am powerless to express it more precisely. You are incomparable in your great work. When one reads the plays of foreign authors, you stand out by yourself in your originality. And in drama, the West must learn from you.6

Meyerhold found the precise definition of the tragicomic conceptualization that appears in The Cherry Orchard: "Mirth in which the sounds of death are heard." Of course, this is really no longer mirth, but something different--a tragicomic interpretation of life.

Almost twenty years later another director, Evgenii Vakhtangov, in pondering the problems of Chekhovian drama, stresses precisely this tragicomic characteristic which brings Chekhov's comedy close to the tragedies of Aleksandr Pushkin. On March 26, 1921 Vakhtangov noted in his diary, "I want to present Pushkin's Feast In a Time of Plague and Chekhov's Wedding in one evening. In 1he Wedding there is a feast in a time of plague. Those infected with plague are even unaware that there

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is no more plague, that humanity is liberated, and that people do not need generals at their weddings. There is no lyricism in Chekhov; there is tragedy."7

When Vakhtangov noted these words down, he had already produced Chekhov's Wedding at the Mansurov Studio. Pushkin's Feast In a Time of Plague was never realized by Vakhtangov on stage. But how strikingly and daringly did the director conceive it: in one performance he dreamed of putting on The Wedding and Feast in a Time of PlagueChekhovian comedy and Pushkinian tragedy--recognizing that these pieces, which appeared to be heterogeneous by genre, are closely connected in their tragic effect.

Vakhtangov interpreted The Wedding as a tragicomedy. In his book on Vakhtangov, Ruben Simonov described effectively the nature of the work on the performance, how its genre developed. We naturally will not linger in detail on this production. We will emph~ize only two episodes which are essential for understanding the genre of tragicomedy.

First of all, work on The Wedding helped the Vakhtangov troupe to develop a theatrical style and the skill to perform tragicomedy, which demands of the actor a special relationship to the nature of the character and to the genre of the play.

"In the tragicomic genre," writes Simonov, "the difficulty consists in knowing how to combine the comic and the tragic, how to support vividly expressive outward characteristics with inwardly saturated comic and dramatic feelings. An actor of tragicomedy must be equally as susceptible to dramatic or tragic as to comic or gay situations. He must be able to make the audience laugh at one moment, and in the next make it listen to him attentively and sympathetically, and a minute later reduce it to tears."8

And second, Vakhtangov's Wedding, just as later Princess Turandot, determined the entire direction of the creative work at the Vakhtangov Theatre. From Chekhov's Wedding to Gorky's Yegor Bulychov, Aleksandr Korneichuk's The Front, and Ruben Simonov's adaptation of Gorky's novel Foma Gordeev right up to the production of Mikhail Stelmakh's Truth and Falsehood the director and actors at this theatre have shown an attraction to and bent for a t ragicomic conception of individual characters and plays as a whole (thus, for example, the brilliant satirical parody scenes in Truth and Falsehood are combined with markedly dramatic episodes). - We need only refer to the words of Simonov, ·who writes, "Vakhtangov's work on The Wedding was to us, the witnesses of his work and participators in it, a theatrical university. . . . We entered into his special Chekhovian understanding of tragedy and

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comedy. We acquired a feeling for genre, and especially the genre of tragicomedy, whose model was Chekhov's Wedding."9

Motifs of tragicomic conceptualization can also be discovered in Andreyev's plays, Blok's lyric dramas, and Gorky's "scenes." Naturally, in each writer these motifs appear in connection with different ideological and artistic problems.

The beginning of the twentieth century in Russian literature is marked by a significant, almost universal proclivity of writers for mixing the tragic and the comic, for creating new genre structures on the basis of the intermixing of these elements. Thus, for example, after having created a type of profoundly social revolutionary drama, Gorky also used tragicomic elements extensively. In The Petty Bourgeois and The Lower Depths, in these plays typical of Gorky, a special technique of mirroring invariably operates--the tragic nature of the ridiculous, of the absurd, which translates the action into an aspect of the tragicomic perception of life.

But we can easily relate Gorky's Barbarums to the genre of tragicomedy.

And indeed we will be aided in understanding the genre of this work in a contemporary way by Soviet theatre practice, and in particular by the work of Georgi T ovstonogov on Barbarians at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre.

In his book, The Profession of the Stage Director, Tovstonogov writes that in rehearsing the play, they treated Barbarians at the BDT as a tragicomedy. For the director the contrast between the ridiculous and the tragic constituted the key to the solution of the separate images and of the play as a whole. Based on this, combinations and emotional states in the given circumstances10 were discovered, justifications for the scenes and their interrelationships were found.

It is interesting that Tovstonogov's ideas about the principles of tragicomic performance agree with what Simonov wrote. This shows once again that in the practice of creating a tragicomic performance the representatives of different generations of Soviet directing have followed the same path.

Demanding a contrastive representation of character from the actors, Tovstonogov writes, "It was necessary to ensure that the actor derived pleasure from the combination of the ridiculous and the horrible in his role, from the constant ·combination of hot and cold, black and white, and all this within the framework of the author's logic and the logic of normal experience, and within the framework of external verisimilitude. " 11


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Within the "framework of external verisimilitude"-this is not a trivial stipulation. Actually Barbarians is a tragicomedy written without extremely grotesque, or even psychologically grotesque episodes. In this respect it is different from, say, The Wedding and from Sukhovo-Kobylin's The Death of Tare/kin. Gorky constructs the dramatic narration in Barbarians in outwardly peaceful, somewhat muted tones. The tragicomic is revealed in the prosaic, everyday grotesque, in the profundity of the development of each character. It is important to emphasize this, for it so happens that tragicomedy is characterized not only by external intensification and marked stylization of the action, as in The Death of Tare/kin, or by the psychological grotesque as in The Wedding (where there is also absurdity, the "sadness" of the comic in an ordinary situation--a false general!). Plays of "external verisimilitude" can also belong to this genre. It is possible for the structure of the genre to be different, but it must answer one requirement: the portrayal of the tragicomic fates of the characters.

"Where does the play's genre definition as tragicomedy come from?" Tovstonogov asks as he establishes the genre of Barbarians, and he answers, "I think it is resides in Gorky's work itself. The writer finds the tragic in all that is ridiculous, and the ridiculous in all that is tragic. If you look at the composition of the work, you will see that the entire play is constructed according to this principle. The author chose those turning points where comic scenes pushed to the grotesque become horrifying. You will not find a single exception. Every character who seems ridiculous at first glance turns out to be profoundly human. Even someone like Redozubov. At first he is a huge scarecrow in the backwoods of provincial life. The humor lies only on the surface (he puts up posts in the middle of the road that are of no earthly use to anybody, he forces his son to wear a fur coat in summer in order to make him lose weight), but unless behind this facade there is tragic paternal love and the drama of Redozubov's life of failure, unless one feels a touch of human warmth, the essence of Gorky's character will be entirely missed.

Or take Golovastikov. What kind of a person is he? He goes around snooping, he is an informer and spy. He is an amalgam of vices. But there is something else more important. What is truly horrible is that he is a crucified Christ. He offers himself as a sacrifice. People do not like him. He knows it and bears his cross, because he considers he is doing something pleasing to God. At that point he is not simply ridiculous, he is horrifying, because he is a messiah, a martyr. The essence of the character as conceived by Gorky lies in this combination of martyrdom and the abominable." 12

Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 14, No. 1

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Barbarians, Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre, Leningrad, 1959

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Tovstonogov's conception is clear. He staged Barbarians as a tragicomedy, finding in this genre the true key to conveying all the riches of Gorky's drama. The combination of the tragic and the comic was central to the acting technique. From the director's point of view, it completely corresponded to Gorky's play, to its conception and to its system of scenic realization. T ovstonogov carried out the solution of the genre problem in "each atom of stage action," by revealing the tragicomic essence of such extremely complex characters as Monakhov, Cherkun, Lydia Pavlovna, and the result was a tragicomedy of life. A philosophical drama emerged which for many years enjoyed undiminished success with audiences.

Gradually, step by step, the Soviet theatre has assimilated the most difficult, synthetic genre, the genre of tragicomedy. Of course, we cannot say that tragicomedy has achieved wide dissemination in the theatre in our country. In this genre we remain behind Western European theatre, where tragicomedy is written and produced more than tragedy. That is why we find so precious those little grains of experience gathered by our theatre in the genre of tragicomedy.

It is now possible to draw some conclusions. Tragicomedy in Russian drama has its own national features. It basically arose from the satiric current which was connected with the Gogo! and Chekhov traditions, from the serious and sad comic spirit evoking the most profound pain and tragicomic sorrow. Therefore it is natural that one of its basic techniques is the grotesque-excessive exaggeration, justified by the logic of the characters, exposing a comically absurd, monstrously inept, worthless trait. The grotesque itself serves as a technique and device in any comedy. However, the tragicomic grotesque, stressing a sense of the horrifying, is further enlarged and exaggerated in scope. Inherent in it there is always to be found in one way or another the tragic quality of the ridiculous. For an example one can compare two classic comedies: The Inspector General and The Death of Tare/kin. They are similar in one respect-in the comic, satirical exposure of life. The misunderstanding in The Inspector General, leading to the tragic denouement, transforms a comedy into a tragicomedy. Gogol's play, saturated with the dramatic, constantly turns into comedy "louder than ordinary life." The seriousness inherent in it becomes dramatized and is at times close to tragedy.

In The Death of Tare/kin, the grotesque grows on the soil of the tragic nature of the ridiculous: in this case the exaggerations have reached enormous, almost fantastic dimensions; facets of the real and the unreal are intermixed; the dead Tarelkin delivers a speech about himself as already deceased; different people appear within one person, Varravin is


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at one point Varravin, and at another Polutatarinov, etc. Given such a perception of life, the ridiculous gives rise to the phantasmagoric: we are shaken by the tragic nature of the comic. Comedy is naturally transformed into tragicomedy.

In addition to the tragic grotesque, the genre of tragicomedy also uses fantasy. Fantastic images operate in the real world of the play, and, as in Gogol's humoresques, features of the real alternate with elements of fantasy painted with somber humor. Vakhtangov provisionally called this particular type of realism "fantastic realism." After his brilliant productions, The Wedding, and especially the rehearsals of Princess Turandot, where he magnificently combined realism with the fantastic as well as with techniques of improvisation, Vakhtangov noted in his diary (it was, as Simonov testifies, his last entry): "The correct theatrical means, when discovered, give the author's work a true reality on the stage. One can study these means, but the form must be created, one must fantasize. This is why I call it 'fantastic realism.' Fantastic realism exists, it should now be in every art.''13

One must not think that Vakhtangov wanted his "fantastic" realism to contrast with realism as a method of art. He wished to emphasize the idea that "the form must be created, one must fantasize." Without creative fantasy supported by the truth of feelings and the given circumstances, it is difficult to solve many problems in art, and especially in the art of tragicomedy. Essentially Vakhtangov "fantasized" the form of The Wedding. Fantasy, supported by the nature of the genre of Chekhovian comedy, allowed the director to clarify its essence with great inventiveness and richness. Fantasy enabled another artist of the stage, Georgi Tovstonogov, to find the basic points for embodying tragicomedy in a play of "external verisimilitude"--in Barbarians. In both cases the directors did not fantasize abstractly, but proceeded from the spirit and content of the tragicomic works. Fantasy served only as a supplementary component; it led to a search for the nature of the feelings characteristic of each of these tragicomedies.

In the structure of tragicomedy one can discover another similar feature: its action, its themes assimilate the characteristics of high comedy and tragedy. What seems to take place is a joining of the two genre currents. In speaking about satiric comedy, we noted its tendency toward tragedy, an approach toward tragicomic content. In tragicomedy this interaction of tragedy and comedy forms a single whole, more complete than in satiric comedy. If in tragedy the action flows impetuously toward catastrophe, toward tragic denouements with inexorable force, then in comedy it stops suddenly, returns to its initial position, and again receives a new impetus (for example, in The Inspector General the rising action mounts until Khlestakov's departure, then there is an interruption,

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a return to the point of departure, and again a new impetus, the letter read by the postmaster, and again a return to the original position-the denouement and tableau).

In tragicomedy there develop simultaneously, in various ways, both an impulse toward an inevitable denouement and also a return to the points of departure that emphasize with new force the comic fate of the hero. The rhythms of tragicomedy are more severe and alarming than the rhythms of comedy; they contain a sense of the destructiveness of the hero's behavior that derives from tragedy. But the character's comic destiny and the futility of his aims are stressed by comic techniques.

In other words, tragicomedy is comedy, but only as conceived by the writer in such a way that life appears with all the tragic permanence of evil. Laughter then stops being exclusively a force for exposure, and the dominant role is taken by a tragic sense of the ridiculous and its social danger--a tragic sense of unthinking foolishness and, at the same time, of the nightmarish consequences resulting from it.14

The difficulties of this genre arise from its very nature: a simple mixture of the elements of the tragic and the comic does not yet provide the basis for the development of tragicomedy. We know that since the time of Shakespeare, the regrouping of mid-genre elements within the same type of drama has become common practice everywhere. Tragicomedy arises from such a joining of the tragic and the comic only when the given circumstances have been intensified and strained to the utmost. Therefore, tragicomedy is perhaps the highest form of the blending of comedy and tragedy, a form of artistic unity in which comedy could turn into tragedy if it were only a question of the importance of the subject matter. But this cannot happen, because what in tragedy is serious to the highest degree (insurmountable social conditions, the hero's tragic flaw, the great strength of his aspirations) seems to be inverted in tragicomedy, i.e. it turns out to be insurmountable absurdity, bitter, senseless error, futile pretensions, etc.

Joining the tragic and the comic produces one type of tragicomedy that has various individual species. For in the practice of the art there is yet another type of tragicomedy that arises from joining comedy to serious drama. As examples of this kind of tragicomedy we can cite Ostrovsky's An Ardent Heart and Chekhov's Wedding where the action develops as a mixture of the comic with elements of a serious drama of manners. (There are no signs of tragedy in either An Ardent Heart or The Wedding. These are plays in which parallel to the comic there arise moving episodes characteristic of serious drama.) Comedy may be joined not only with tragedy, but also with serious drama in order to undergo a transformation into tragicomedy.


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A characteristic norm can be established: no matter what kind of motifs make up the serious, philosophical basis of tragicomedy, whether tragic or dramatic, in tragicomedy the dominant will always be the comic principle, but of a kind that brings not only laughter, but also pain, distress, a sense of disorder and of the perniciousness of the ridiculous. We can define this crucial element of tragicomedy as the tragic nature of the ridiculous (a phantasmagoric condition).

The tragic nature of the ridiculous constitutes the special state of crisis typical of the characters of tragicomedy. They are ridiculous and at the same time tragically doomed. They may make every effort to achieve their goals, attempt to accomplish a significant action, strive to play their unique role, but their nature is always such that in the end their aims prove comically worthless or tragically dangerous. Therefore, the exposure of the heroes of tragicomedy is grandiose, and the losses and casualties are extremely instructive. (In this connection it is worth recalling Nazim Hikmet's tragicomedy Was There an Ivan lvanovich or Not? which exposed very emphatically and very wittily the pretenses of a person who was tragically dangerous and at the same time comically worthless.)

Tragicomedies have appeared at different times in Soviet drama. There are not many of them, but their appearance is extremely interesting for clarifying the richness of the genre of Socialist Realism. In this genre Gorky led the way for Soviet writers. From his first plays right up to Yegor Bulychov, the writer's attention to tragicomic images and situations did not waver. Gorky's experience, his skill in this genre, was not widely followed, although we should mention that the writer himself highly valued and defended such tragicomedies as Nikolai Erdman's Suicide (1928) and Mikhail Bulgakov's Flight (1928).

For various reasons these tragicomedies, as well as Babel's Sunset (1928), provoked the censure and bans of the contemporary Glavrepertkom (Central Repertory Committee) and were not distributed. These plays had a difficult and sad fate. Gorky's favorable attitude toward them did not help. Suicide was forbidden in Meyerhold's production and at the Moscow Art Theatre; Sunset was played twice on the stage of the MAT-2 in 1928; Flight saw the boards only at the end of the 1950s (at the Volgograd Theatre in 1957, at the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad in 1958).

Yet these plays are very significant for the development of the genre of tragicomedy in our drama. They are diverse in kind, and each one of them belongs to a different type of tragicomedy. We may say that Babel's Sunset is a serious drama which turns into tragicomedy as a result of the coupling and regrouping of elements of comedy. Bulgakov's Flight belongs to plays with a tragic theme which is conceived in a tragicomic manner. And Erdman's comedy, Suicide, by the nature of its genre,

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continues the tradition of Gogol and Sukhovo-Kobylin: the embodimentof the tragic nature of the ridiculous is its main characteristic which defines the tragicomic conflict.

Translation revised by the editor.

1Bernard Shaw, Selections from Shaw (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 277.

zrbid., 277.

3 Aleksandr Anikst, Tvorchestvo Shekspira (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1963), 405.

4Aleksandr Kugel, " Teatral'nye Zametki," Teatr i iskusstvo 12 (1909): 229.

5Anton Chekhov, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 20 {Moscow, 1951), 135.

6Chekhov. Literaturnoye nasledstvo, vol. 68 {Moscow: Akademiya nauk SSSR, 1960), 448.

7Evgenii Vakhtangov, Zapiski. Pis'ma. Stat'i. {Moscow-Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1939), 232.

8Ruben Simonov, S Vakhtangovym {Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959), 40-41.

%id.,62.

10'fhis phrase refers to Stanislavsky's concept discussed in An Actor Prepares. "Given Circumstances. This expression means ... the story of the play, the facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors' and regisseur's (director's) interpretation, the mise·en-scene, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects--all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role. (The Magic) If is the starting point, the given circumstances, the development." A n Actor's Handbook, trans. E.R. Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1936) first ed. 1924. [Translators' note.]


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11Georgi Tovstonogov, 0 professii rezhissera (Moscow: Vserossiskoye Teatral'noye Obshchestvo, 1965), 142.

12Ibid., 142-3.

13Vakhtangov, 262.

14This paragraph, important for Frolov's argument, is not in the Russian test, but appears in the Polish translation: Wladimir Frolow, Dramaturgia i Teatr (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1976), 111. [Editor's note.]

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Bockerer, Slovak National Theatre, The Cleveland Playhouse


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HOW ARE THINGS IN BRATISLAVA?: THE SLOVAK NATIONAL THEATRE VISITS OHIO

Scott T. Cummings

It turns out that Cleveland has more than one sister city. In June 1992, the New Experimental Theatre of Volgograd, Cleveland's "partner city" in Russia, brought their production of Erdman's The Suicide to the Cleveland Play House as part of an international theatre exchange titled Full Circle. In 1993, the program completed its second trip around the block, this time in conjunction with Bratislava, Cleveland's "partner city" in the newly independent Slovak Republic. The Cleveland Play House toured Bratislava and Prague in June with their production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, and in September the Slovak National Theatre brought Bockerer, a 1948 folk comedy by Ulrich Becher and Peter Preses, to northern Ohio.

The Slovak National Theatre (SNT), like Slovakia itself, has its origins in the ashes of World War I and the crumbling Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Organized as a private professional theatre in 1919, the SlovenskC Narodne Divadlo has maintained opera, ballet, and theatre companies since it opened in the spring of 1920 with Smetana's opera Hubicka, the ballet Coppelia, and a play by the Brothers Mrstlk titled Marisa. In the first decade, the theatre company included both Czech and Slovak actors; as a result, Slovak-language plays were produced infrequently. In 1932 two independent ensembles were created, one performing in Czech and the other in Slovak, and in 1939, when the first independent Slovak state was proclaimed and the SNT became a national cultural institution under the Ministry of Education, the Czech acting company was dissolved and the enterprise "Slovakized." Ironically, the Slovak Republic had to endure a hot war and a cold one before becoming a truly independent nation on January 1, 1993. The current repertoire of the SNT includes two dozen plays, among them works by Shakespeare, Pirandello, Camus, Sartre, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, and the Slovak playwrights Karvas and Mnacko.

Ulrich Becher (1910-1990), a native of Berlin, was a novelist and playwright whose 1932 anthology of short stories, Men Make Mistakes, was illustrated by George Grosz and burned by Hitler as an example of "decadent art." Peter Preses (1907-1961), an Austrian, was an actor and director who spent most of his career at the Josefstadt Theatre in Vienna. Both men spent time in the United States during the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria as the eastern province of the Third Reich). They returned to Vienna after WWII, where they collaborated on

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two plays, The Viennese Whistler and Bockerer, a Viennese folk comedy in the realistic and satirical tradition of Nestroy and Anzengruber. First performed at the Neues Theatre in der Scala in Vienna in 1948 with Fritz Imhoff in the title role, Bockerer has had a sporadic production history, waiting fifteen years for its second production (on Austrian television) and another fifteen for its German debut at the National Theatre in Mannheim. Peter MikuHk first directed the play for the Slovak National Theatre in 1986; the simultaneous translation provided during the Cleveland performances represents its English-language debut.

Given the century-long struggle for Slovak cultural autonomy and respect, the choice of Bockerer for the Full Circle program seems, at first glance, odd. Not only is it a German-language play first performed in Austria, but it passed out of the SNT's repertory in March 1992 after 130 performances in six years and had to be remounted specially for the Cleveland engagement. International exchanges are Janus-like affairs which must face two different cultures and Bockerer's familiar situation and popular theme made it a natural choice for a large Midwestern industrial city with a multi-ethnic immigrant population that includes, among many others, John Demyanuk. It is a play about Hitler, the madness of Nazism, and a farcical form of passive resistance which makes a hero of an everyday Joe.

Set in Vienna during the Anschluss, the play revolves around a Schweik-like butcher and sausage-maker named Karl Bockerer (played with comic aplomb by Leopold Haverl) whose good-hearted oafishness helps him to remain ethically unscathed while others around him are capitulating, fervently or grudgingly, to the institution of Nazi law in Austria. As fascism encroaches more and more on the life of the people, his simple-minded commitment to basic folk values such as love of family and loyalty to friends make him something of a moral beacon, a keeper of the faith until the Allies come and chase the brown shirts away.

The play begins in Bockerer's cozy dining room as he and his best friend Hatzinger (a postal inspector) await the arrival of their Jewish friend Rosenblatt (a lawyer) for their regular Thursday-night card game. They discuss the "new reality" and wonder how many more card games they will have now that the Nuremberg Racial Laws have made it illegal for Aryans to socialize with "racially impure elements." In his typical literal-minded way, Bockerer does not understand at first why the Nuremburg law applies to the city of Vienna or, for that matter, to those who have no fear of racial pollution. "Jew, not Jew. Pure bred, rye bread. I don't care," he says with comic nonchalance. When Rosenblatt arrives, he announces that he is emigrating to America. Bockerer's son passes through on his way to a meeting of the Nazi SA. His wife calls on


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Rosenblatt's legal expertise to doublecheck the documents which prove her Aryan heritage. A question mark on a relative's baptismal certificate has her worried and her husband teases her about being part-gypsy, part"Zulu," or maybe even a Jew.

In a series of thirteen episodic scenes, each of which is introduced by a Brechtian scene-title banner high overhead, the play goes on to trace the dehumanizing effects of the Anschluss on all but the happy-go-lucky butcher. Nothing makes Bockerer's isolation clearer than the third scene, which takes place on Austria's newest national holiday, the Fuhrer's birthday. His son polishes his boots and his wife puts on her Sunday best before heading off to march in the big parade, but Bockerer is going nowhere. April 20th is his birthday, too, as it turns out, and he elects to stay home alone to toast himself with a shot of kvass in each hand. When Hatzinger stops by to offer his congratulations, Bockerer, halfdrunk, becomes contemplative. He is only a simple butcher, he says, but he has a good nose. "I smell blood," he says ominously. Hatzinger strikes up a boisterous drinking song on his accordion, but the sounds of the martial celebration in the street and on the radio once again dampens the mood.

In scene after scene, Bockerer's jolly insistence on just being himself amounts to a back-handed defiance of Nazism. When a panicstricken mother is afraid to retrieve her young daughter who has wandered into a park forbidden to Jews, Bockerer volunteers (and suggests his own child-like innocence by spending a few minutes playing with the girl). When Rosenblatt surreptiously appears at the train station to leave the country, Bockerer is there to say good-bye and run interference if necessary. When a bunch of chauvinistic Berliners question the national character and drinking preferences of the Viennese, Bockerer stands up to them and triggers a barroom brawl. When interrogated by the local Gestapo about his relationships with Rosenblatt and another friend named Hermann (a railway worker and a Communist), Bockerer claims he has nothing to hide, including the blood on his butcher's apron.

From the beginning, the play puts Bockerer on a collision course with his son Hans, a thinly drawn character so caught up in his career as a Nazi that he strikes his father in one scene and informs on him in another. When Hans causes Hermann death's by reporting him to the Gestapo, Bockerer throws his son out of the house. In the second act, Hans, now an SS officer, suddenly develops a conscience and a queasy stomach when a friend home on leave from Russia describes in vivid detail "the liquidation of suspicious elements in the occupied territories." Hatzinger lures his drinking buddy Bockerer into a cafe for a sentimental reconciliation scene with Hans before he leaves for the Russian front, where he dies in the Battle of Stalingrad.

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This, of course, marks a turning point in the war and for the remaining four scenes, Bockerer and all Vienna hope not to be destroyed while waiting for the Allies to liberate Austria. The final scene offers a few surprises. The war is over and while Bockerer's wife and Hatzinger hang American, British, French, and Russian flags outside the shop to welcome the Allies to Vienna, Bockerer is inside soaking his feet. Suddenly, Adolf Hitler walks into the room, seeking refuge in the city of his youth and exhorting Bockerer to carry on the struggle for Aryan supremacy. When the initial shock wears off, Bockerer steps out of his foot bath and says, "For twenty-five years you haven't shut up. Now I'm going to talk." And he proceeds to lambaste Hitler with much the same fearlessness he has demonstrated throughout. Not until the furious Fuhrer comes at him with a meat cleaver do the men in the white coats arrive with a strait jacket. It turns out that this Hitler is no more than an escapee from a nearby psychiatric hospital. (A curious case, say the orderlies, a paper-hanger with a case of megalomania.)

The second surprise brings the play to its happy conclusion. Bockerer's wife announces the arrival of a special visitor and in walks Rosenblatt, now a sergeant in the United States Army. He has returned home as a member of the Allied forces arriving just in time for their Thursday-night card game. The three men share a heartfelt toast and resolve to be on their guard lest a nightmare like Nazism ever sneak up on them again. The cards are shuffled and dealt and the play ends exactly where it began.

This tidy, "full circle" ending and the wishful return to normalcy which it depicts suggest how the play's folksy simplicity extends all the way to the dramaturgy itself. We watch Nazism descend on middle-class Vienna like a storm or a plague and then watch to see how the citizens react while they wait for the cavalry to come and chase it out again. This creates a connect-the-dots moral hierarchy in the dramatis personae with Bockerer at the top, his friend Hatzinger (a master of the art of looking the other way) a bit below that, his wife (a slavishly obedient moral chameleon) further down, and his son-the-Nazi near the bottom. Oddly, none of them ever faces a moment of truth or even stands at the bar of poetic justice. When Hatzinger's apartment building is bombed, he is out getting drunk. The wife is never exposed for the moral hypocrite that she is. Even the son is at his most sympathetic when we last see him on his way to fight and die in Russia. They are, in the end, all victims of Hitler, who turns out to be just another loony who walked away from the local nuthouse.

There is something naive and simple-minded about all this, even for a folk play, as if wishing fascism away would make it so. When


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Bockerer stands in wet bare feet and tells off the surrogate Fuhrer, it ha, all the power of scolding the dog for peeing on the rug ("Bad Hitler! Bad!"). And when the reunited friends sit around the card table and vow, "Never again," it has the ring of a Sunday school catechism. The play makes no attempt to plumb the evil within (or whatever human trait it is that tolerates an evil like Nazism), and if it implicates in the least the simple masses as silent Holocaust collaborators, it does so gently and forgivingly as to be ineffectual. As represented by Bockerer, they are just plain Volk, charismatically jolly, inured to hardship by a life of hard work, proud, true to hearth and home, subject to human foibles, but decent deep down, in a word, good. There is a time and a place for a message such as this--"It's not your fault. There's nothing you could have done"--and perhaps 1986, a few years before the Velvet Revolution, was such a time in Czechoslovakia. In Cleveland in 1993, it seems a bit quaint.

The choice of the production was probably inevitable, given the competing priorities, numerous compromises, and logistical nightmares that go into arranging a direct one-to-one exchange between two theatres on two continents. The souvenir program for Bockerer includes an excerpt from a letter which hints at the ultimate value of such an exchange. Written by Dusan Jamrich, director of the Slovak National Theatre, to Josie Abady and Dean Gladden, the artistic director and managing director respectively of the Cleveland Play House, it says, in part:

For more than forty years we had an iron curtain on the edge of our town--the barbed wire, minefields and observation towers with machine guns separated us from peace-loving and neutral Austria. The road to Vienna, which measures thirty miles from Bratislava, was for us, then, as long and unimaginable as the road to Cleveland .... We can now reach Vienna easily in less than an hour- if we observe the speed limit. The only curtain we are left with is in the theatre, and this is as it should be, for in the theatre a curtain serves its purpose. What is now closer to us is not only Vienna, but also, as you can see, Cleveland. For us, too, the world has become a "global village," and while for you something like that is quite natural, to us it still feels like we are celebrating a festival.

The Cleveland Play House merits high praise for bringing a small part of that festival to the Midwest's "North Coast" and for fostering the kind of international ties which, if wishing (or theatre) could make it so, would keep a play like Bockerer a historical curiosity for a long time.

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NIKOLAI GOGOL'S THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR AT THE NATIONAL ACTORS THEATRE

David Callaghan

Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century comedy, The Government Inspector, was recently presented as the second production of The National Actors Theatre's (NAT) 1993-1994 season in New York City. Under the artistic leadership of Tony Randall, the company has persevered despite much negative criticism and several lackluster productions. Last year Randall added Michael Langham to his staff as an "artistic advisor," with Langham serving as the director for The Government Inspector (as well as for NAT's successful production of Timon of Athens last Fall).

Gogol's well-known plot is set in Czarist Russia, providing a pointed expose of the corrupt, provincial bureaucrats of a typical small town. Led by the bullying Mayor, the authorities cheat and abuse the local populace at will. Upon this scene arrives Ivan Khlestakov, an anonymous clerk from Moscow who has squandered his money en route to his father's estate in the provinces. Stranded without funds in the town's inn, the urbane dandy is mistaken for a government inspector by the leaders of the community. Thinking that Khlestakov has arrived "incognito" to expose the incompetence and graft which is the lifeblood of the town, the Mayor and his cohorts flatter and bribe the unsuspecting clerk in their fawning efforts to obtain a positive report.

As the play progresses, Khlestakov takes increasing advantage of the officials' hospitality, finally offering a false proposal of marriage to the Mayor's daughter before leaving town with a bulging wallet. The fauxInspector's true identity is revealed shortly thereafter by the Postmaster (he habitually reads the town's mail), who has opened a letter in which Khlestakov has described his good fortune to a writer friend in Moscow. Each of the dupes receives his or her comeuppance as the Inspector's descriptions of their foibles is read aloud. As they descend into a cacophony of finger-pointing and outrage, a gendarme arrives to inform the gathering that the real government inspector has arrived (consequently, the officials are literally frozen in horror in the play's final tableau).

Gogol's barbs cut deep into the institutional life of the Czarist Empire, with references to "learned" teachers who make idiot faces, drunken soldiers who wander about town naked under their overcoats, and civil authorities who inflict frequent injustices on their charges. In

Slavic and East Et~ropean Performance Vol. 14, No. 1

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a scene where the townspeople petition Khlestakov concerning the Mayor's brutality, a Sergeant's widow reveals that she has been crippled by a flogging. Upon learning of her confession, the Mayor whines to Khlestakov, "I never flogged her--she flogged herself!" Such moments of dark satire lay bare the pressing social problems of Gogol's Russia, thereby grounding the humorous antics of the characters in a broader context of much-needed humanitarian reform.

Unfortunately, while competent and fairly amusing, Langham's production never quite achieves the manic level needed to maximize the full impact of Gogol's comic masterpiece. Furthermore, and perhaps more troubling, the production lacks the biting edge needed to underscore Gogol's satirical portrait of a society in chaos. The result is a muting of the social criticism which is the true intent of the play beneath its broad humor.

These problems result primarily from the casting of Tony Randall as Khlestakov. As with last season's Three Men on a Horse, Randall is far too old for the role, which Gogo! describes as "a young man of twentythree, thin and slender." Randall's bland characterization relies upon his patented comic takes and "shtick," and his languid portrayal of the Inspector results in an approach which deadens the comic energy of the production. Furthermore, David Patrick Kelly's throw-away performance as Khlestakov's servant, Osip, exacerbates the tempo problems, while the talented Lainie Kazan turns in a disappointing performance as the Mayor's wife, Anna (complete with an inexplicable pseudo-English accent).

Randall 's casting is especially unfortunate when juxtaposed against the fine group of character actors who portray the town bureaucrats. Particularly noteworthy are Peter Michael Goetz as the conniving, obsequious Mayor (or "Police Governor" in this slangy translation by Adrian Mitchell, further adapted into an "American version" by Mark Vietor), and Derek Smith and Jefrey Alan Chandler as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, the two foppish landowners who first recognize the "incognito" Inspector. Whenever these actors dominate the action the production moves along briskly, only to be sidetracked when Randall, Kelly, or Kazan re-appear.

To Langham's credit, his staging of several difficult crowd scenes is active and adroit, and he seamlessly choreographs a large group of supernumerary actors (costumed as servants) in rapid, almost frantic scene changes that are often quite comical in their own right. Ironically, the madcap quality of these busy sequences, accompanied by Stanley Silverman's lively original score, captures the flavor of Gogol's comedy more effectively than does the overall production itself.

Douglas Stein's setting consists of two flown panels of what appear to be crude flats, as well as of two wagons representing the town's

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inn and the Mayor's home. As with the settings of previous NAT productions such as The Seagull, the overall look of the show seems cheap, not very sturdy, and conceptually fuzzy. Luckily, Lewis Brown's costumes fare much better in conveying the squalor of provincial life and the officials' pompous, overly-ceremonious efforts to impress the Inspector.

Despite the aforementioned problems, this production of The Government Inspector is a respectable effort and certainly the best NAT production to date seen by this reviewer. While Tony Randall's performance fails to illuminate the key role of Khlestakov, there are enough strong supporting performances and moments to convey the essence of Gogol's play, which retains an all-too-unfortunate connection with the social ills of our present era.


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UKRAINKA'S FOREST SONG AT LA MAMA

Roxana Stuart

New Yorkers will have a rare opportunity this spring to see Lesya Ukrainka's Forest Song in an innovative adaptation at La Mama E.T.C. Under the direction of Virlana Tkacz, the Yara Arts Group will first take the production to Ukraine, where it will be presented as a coproduction of the Lviv Youth Theatre. After the tour, the company returns to New York for the run at La Mama, beginning either May 27 or June 9, 1994.

I saw a performance of this work-in-progress at the La Mama First Street Workshop Space on December 5, 1993. Yara's Forest Song, as this production is now called, is a very free adaptation by Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. The adapters have not attempted to reproduce the complex verse forms of Ukrainka's original, but instead have striven for the spareness and directness of free verse. They simplify, consolidate, and eliminate some characters. The play is much cut, and additional poetry has been included by Pavlo Tychyna, Uvanuk (an Iglulik Eskimo woman), Margaret Atwood, and anonymous Japanese poets translated by Kenneth Rexroth, among others.

Forest Song {1911), a "fairy drama in three acts," is one of the outstanding works of Ukrainian literature, rich in folklore and love of the landscapes and forests of Ukrainka's native Polissia. The themes of alienation from nature and betrayal of one's own nature are beautifully intertwined. The play is a subtle retelling of a myth which has variations in many cultures: the story of a female nature spirit who falls in love with a mortal man, always with tragic results (except in Disney's 1he Little Mermaid, the most recent version). Earlier versions include Jean d ' Arras's fairy tale of the mermaid Melusine (c1387), Friedrich de Ia Motte F ouque 's Undine ( 1811 ), Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" (1836), and Jean Giraudoux's Ondine (1939). Most closely related to Forest Song is Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka (1900), with libretto by the Czech poet Jaroslav Kvapil. In Dvorak's opera, Rusalka's prince is unfaithful, damning her forever to lure mortals to their death at the bottom of the lake. In the last scene the repentant prince dies by Rusalka's kiss. Giraudoux's Ondine also ends with the prince's death. While a rusalka (naiad) is a secondary character in Ukrainka's play, her heroine, Mavka, is rather a forest sprite, tree spirit, or dryad (called Sylph in Tkacz's translation). Rejecting her former lover, Will-o'-the-Wisp, she falls in love with the peasant boy Lukash as he makes music on a reed flute, symboli-

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zing a spiritual side to his nature of which he is unaware and which soon dies away under the brutality and coarseness of his life. The peasants live in conflict with nature; their way of life is a bitter struggle against starvation in which they subdue the earth and all living things, killing them or forcing them to obey. Mavka attempts to yoke herself to this life, but the plants and animals speak to her, pleading for mercy. Lukash's mother sees her as lazy and sly, much preferring the industrious and materialistic widow Kilina for her son's bride. Kilina easily seduces Lukash, as physical powers are superior weapons to spiritual ones in this case. This error of judgment results unhappily for all four principals: Mavka, Lukash, Kilina, and the Mother. Mavka is condemned to oblivion by "He Who Dwells in the Rock," while the Forest Elf, a nature spirit and father figure (Willow Mother in Yara's version), turns Lukash into a wolf as punishment for his greed and blindness. In the last scene he plays again on his pipe, Mavka is called back to her human form, and the lovers die together under the falling snow.

In Yara's Forest Song the domestic drama ends when Luke (Lukash) takes the wrong bride, choosing industry over nature, as it were. The symbolic nature of the choice is revealed as the Sylph, rejected by Luke, is carried off by the Spirit of Shadows. Her punishment consists of being transported to a future time in which the forest has been obliterated, her clearing is a city street, and the lake has become a bar presided over by a female bartender, the rusalka (Ondine) now transformed into the "Mistress of the Waters." The production's funniest moments come when the Sylph, more out of her element than ever, tries to order a drink as the bar's various denizens try to seduce her, and fragments of her first love scene with Luke are replayed as dej(~ vu. The sympathetic Ondine tells the Sylph of a favorite oak tree, the last of the forest to survive, condemned by city planners for being "on the wrong side of the street," and facing its death with courage and nobility. The play ends with a strong ecological message.

One's first impression on reading Ukrainka's Forest Song is that it is an unproducible, if beautiful, closet drama with its talking plants and animals, living, growing scenery, and seemingly unrealizable stage effects. Yara's production, however, demonstrates that such an impression is due to a poverty of imagination and that the simplest means are often the best. The piece adapts very well to Yara's minimalist presentational staging, reminiscent of Paul Sills's Story Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby. Assuming multiple roles with simple changes of costume pieces, members of the ensemble easily transform themselves from the trees of the forest to a field of wheat to the barroom customers in an ecologically devastated future. The Sylph's Willow Mother and Luke's Mother are played by the same actress in a nice touch

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Mother and Luke's Mother are played by the same actress in a nice touch of coincidentia oppositorum.

The simple abstract setting, designed by Watoku Ueno, consists of a large white rectangle with a smaller one in front of it. Images of nature and, as the evening progressed, abstract collages of the detritus of civilization are projected on them. The smaller rectangle serves at first as Ondine's lake, concealing a transparent water tray illuminated from below in which the actors play with their hands and seem to submerge themselves, effectively creating a rippling water effect on the ceiling. These simple but evocative means creates a watery environment that is both poetic and convincing.

The Yara company exhibits a pleasing blend of ethnicities and styles. Katy Selverstone was outstanding in the cast as Ondine and other characters; she has an authoritative stage presence and a trained voice. The Sylph was expressively portrayed with open-eyed innocence, graceful movement, and raw vulnerability by Yunjin Kim. Timothy Reynolds as Luke was natural, honest, and resisted editorializing against his character.

Some of the most lyrical passages are echoed in Ukrainian by one of the actresses, Irina Soto, and more Ukrainian texts by Oksana Batiuk and Attila Mohlny will be added. The goal is a truly bilingual production, each language providing a musical accompaniment to the other. One added poem was spoken simultaneously in Japanese. The influence of Chinese and Japanese theatre was also apparent in the pervasive use of music (composed by Genji Ito), stylized movement (choreography by Shigeko), impersonation of inanimate objects, and the use of symbolic props.

According to Virlana Tkacz, founder and artistic director, Yara means "spring" in Ukrainian, "arrow flying to the target" in Japanese, and "body" in Polish, and therefore is triply appropriate for the company. Tkacz has created several other works for the group: Blind Sight, about the blind poet Vasyl Yeroshenko who lived and wrote in Japan (SEEP vol. 13, no. 3), Explosions, concerning the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, and A Light from the East, on Les Kurbas, a theatre director of the 1920's from Kiev (SEEPvol. 11, no. 1 and vol. 12, nos. 2-3). These bilingual productions toured extensively in the United States and Eastern Europe, including an appearance at the Berezil International Theatre Festival in Kharkiv. Tkacz has won a number of grants and prizes for her translations. The Y ara Arts Group, according to its literature, "creates theatre that explores the ideas and cultures of the East. Yara artists are of Asian, African, Eastern and Western European ethnic origin and create original theatre pieces using poetry, historical documents, drama, and song to form what one critic described as 'extended meditation on an idea.' "

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Yara 's Forest Song is a work-in-progress which will be developed further while the company resides in Ukraine. Tkacz told me that she envisions . moving the piece in the direction of illuminating our relationship with trees and strengthening the ecological message that underlies Ukrainka's work. While the United States is certainly in no position to boast of its record in protecting the environment, nature conservation is a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe and after the decades of ecological devastation by the Soviet industrialization of this area, the message is of urgent importance for this newly independent state. Tkacz remarked, "In Ukraine, people talk too much about being part of European theatre rather than of world theatre."

When the company returns to La Mama this spring it will be a fine chance to see an imaginative production of one of the most interesting and unusual Symbolist dramas by a distinguished and too-littleknown poet, Lesya Ukrainka, and also to see an innovative intercultural theatre group developing a fascinating synthesis of East European, Asian, and American folkways and theatrical traditions.

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ON VIEWING A PRODUCTION OF VLADIMIR GUBARYEV'S SARCOPHAGUS

Charlotte J. Headrick with contributions by Vreneli Farber

Entering the theatre for the production of Sarcophagus at Oregon State University, April 1993, the audience was disturbed by the austerity and sterility of Richard George's set: a series of ten doors, five on either side of the central opening with a nurse's station anchoring the playing space. Downstage were three conversation clusters, chairs and circular coffee tables. Except for the computer at the nurse's desk, the setting recalled the 1950s.

While the set was under construction, I often wandered into the theatre and was reminded repeatedly of Meyerhold's famous setting for Gogol's The Inspector General in 1926. Meyerhold's design consisted of ten dark red wooden doors in the upstage area with four doors on either side of the downstage area surrounding a central playing area. Although Sarcophagus's scene designer denied the inspiration, saying that the script calls for the doors, the arrangement had bizarre and ironic echoes: the tension of Meyerhold's revolutionary tragicomedy against a chill ing indictment of a catastrophic system breakdown.1

Commenting on Meyerhold's masterpiece, Herbert Marshall says that beneath the surface of comedy, Meyerhold was attacking "the fact of autocratic bureaucratic stupidity that continued to pervade even Soviet Russia. . . . Meyerhold would be caught in the coils of this ancient Russian tradition of autocratic oppression, which he satirized so savagely in his productions."2 Gubaryev in 1986 in his loose docudrama Sarcophagus writes about more "bureaucratic stupidity" surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 in Ukraine, an explosion which spewed radiation across Europe.

In Sarcophagus each of the doors, as per Gubaryev's stage instructions has a light over it.3 In the Oregon State production the lights were red which glowed when the cubicle was occupied. As the play progressed, the lights flashed to alert the hospital staff and as patients died, one by one, the lights were extinguished. Throughout the production, the cyclorama changed colors from pale green to muted blue to electric red.

Sarcophagus is a very difficult play for any theatre company to attempt but especially challenging for a university group. Director C. V. Bennett was fortunate to have two experienced community actors to balance the undergraduate cast. One of the two, a computer software designer and engineer, holds an undergraduate degree in physics and so

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brought an immediate credibility to his portrayal of the Physicist. He understood the Physicist's desperation to finish his computations. Because of a low turnout of men at auditions, Bennett very shrewdly saw an opportunity to do cross gender casting. The role of the Investigator, intended for a man, was ably played by a woman. In addition, one young man was cast in two roles, the Fireman and Kyle, the American Professor of Surgery. Finally, the voice of the former head of Broadcasting at Oregon State University, a professional broadcaster most of his life, was used as the radio announcer of the play and considerably enriched the production. As he soothingly offered instructions on what to do in a nuclear emergency, his melodious voice simultaneously calmed and unnerved us as we sat in the dark listening to his words.

In this American university production, at times the British translator's idioms struck the audience as odd, further removing us from the world of the play. Like many East European dramatists, Gubaryev wants us distanced; he wants us to hear the message, absorb the lesson. It is a cliche to term the play Brechtian because on the surface it is not, but with the use of the voice over, the lights, the double casting, and the message being presented over and over, it takes on some aspects of Arturo Ui or Galileo.

Occasionally, Gubaryev's Sarcophagus reminds us of Janusz Glowacki's Cinders, first produced in the United States in 1983. Roughly contemporaneous to the 1987 Sarcophagus, Cinders like its Russian cousin has received dozens of American collegiate productions across the United States. Gubaryev's world is that of the hospital research center, Glowacki's is that of the reformatory and the artificial world of the filmmaker. Glowacki wants to expose corruption and repression, and his heroine becomes a symbol for Solidarity and the Polish people. Gubaryev communicates his message through the world of the hospital and its patients with an investigator hunting the truth in order to expose a chain of incompetence and inefficiency. Both plays are message oriented with large casts; both expose corruption and incompetence leading to tragedy: the crushing of the Cinderella figure in Cinders and the nuclear explosion of Reactor 4 in Sarcophagus. The heroine of Cinders who refuses to

cooperate becomes a symbol of the spirit of her country. She functions much as Bessmertny does in Sarcophagus; he is a symbol of the indomitable spirit of the Russian people, refusing to die against all odds.

Selling this play to a typical American undergraduate college audience was not easy. One of my students asked me if I "enjoyed" the play. My response was that this was East European theatre and one did not necessarily "enjoy" it. The task of an audience member, I explained to him, was to be instructed and to learn, and even to take action. As I was explaining this, I thought about Dmitri, a Russian biology student

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from St. Petersburg who is also studying to earn a theatre arts minor at Oregon State. In this past year, Dmitri's favorite play produced by the University Theatre was a rather weak student-directed production of Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon. Sarcophagus and Aunt Dan are intellectual pieces, theatre of ideas rather than action. My feelings about both pieces are the same: they are worthy pieces of theatre but they demand work from the audience, oftentimes work American audiences, particularly an undergraduate one, are not willing to give. Just as Shawn wants us to analyze the seductive nature of evil, Gubaryev wants us to examine the results of Chernobyl, hopefully forcing us both to think and to act. In a program note for the Oregon State University production, director C. V. Bennett cites translator Michael Glenny who says that Gubaryev wants us to see "the appalling dangers inherent in the way this energy source has so far been handled by those responsible for it. " 4

Dmitri's glowing reaction to Aunt Dan was the minority one. And the minority viewpoint was reflected in the attendance figures for Sarcophagus. Sadly, students did not flock to see Gubaryev's work.

Watching Sarcophagus triggered more in me than an academic, intellectual response. It brought back memories. My father and the father of one of my college friends, both now in their seventies, worked most of their lives with nuclear energy. Because of their firsthand experience with it, both are still staunch believers in nuclear energy as a power source. In another program note, Robert Gale is quoted, "if we misuse nuclear energy, there will be no history. . . . Nuclear energy anywhere on this planet is nuclear energy everywhere."5

Sarcophagus brought back waves of images of growing up in East Tennessee in Knoxville, seventeen miles from the Oak Ridge nuclear laboratories. I remember "duck and cover" exercises, school evacuations, never really knowing what my father did, a friend's family bomb shelter stocked with canned goods, growing up knowing that if the Russians attacked, we in East Tennessee were major targets and we would not survive a blast. Sarcophagus reminds me that Three Mile Island is closed and Chernobyl is a wasteland. It reminds me that Oregon voters closed down the Trojan Power Plant and that the plant is now being dismantled.

As the world shrinks and we daily become more and more of a global community, the message of Sarcophagus continues to speak to us and will continue to speak to us as long as nuclear energy remains a source of power in Russia, France, England, the United States, or in any country. Three Mile Island seems like a small glitch compared to the magnitude of Chernobyl and its aftermath. Playwright Gubaryev warns us that we have to be vigilant, ever vigilant to avoid even the tiniest of errors, the most insignificant of misjudgments.

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As long as there are nuclear power plants in active use throughout the world, productions of Sarcophagus will continue to be scheduled. Like the genre of anti-war plays, starting with Aeschylus's Agamemnon and continuing into the present,6 a growing body of antinuclear plays has developed. Dating from Greece in the fifth century B.C. to the troubled Northern Ireland of our own time, a large canon of antiwar plays have been penned. They continue to be written and not heeded. If we do not heed the lessons of Sarcophagus, there will be no need to build a body of anti-nuclear plays. Sarcophagus warns us that if we do not learn this lesson, we are doomed.

Postscript: On April 6, 1993, during the run of the Oregon State University production of Sarcophagus, a tank of radioactive waste exploded and burned in the Siberian city of Tomsk-7, "contaminating a vast area and exposing the firefighters to dangerous levels of radiation. " 7 Art imitating life and life imitating art. The explosion was yet another chilling reminder of the currency of Gubaryev's play.

1Perhaps Gubaryev is consciously or unconsciously alluding to Meyerhold's design. It may have served as an inspiration for him when he wrote the stage directions for Sarcophagus.

2Herbert Marshall, The Pictorial History of the Russian Theatre (New York: Crown Publishers, 1977), 135.

3Vladimir Gubaryev, Sarcophagus, trans. Michael Glenny (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company). This translation was first produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, September 17, 1987.

4Bennett in his director's notes asks, "So what is the message of the play?" and quotes translator Glenny to answer this question: "Sarcophagus is not a polemic against the use of civil nuclear energy. Although fueled by a considerable charge of emotion, the author has not set out to be a partisan on either side of the issue . ... These are the facts, he is saying: disregard them at your peril. Possessed of these facts, it is then the business of the politicians, their scientists, and administrators, and ultimately the public to debate and to pronounce on the broader questions raised by the play's warning." Program, Sarcophagus, Oregon State University, April 2-4 and 8-10, 1993.

5Quoted in the program notes.

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6Despite the terror and hardship of war, a production of Hair continued to play in Sarajevo, with a Bosnian/Croat/Muslem overlay making its own anti-war statement rather than an American anti-Vietnam War protest. As recently as the spring of 1993, CNN carried reports of this production. Folk singer Joan Baez even sang with the production on her visit there in the Spring of 1993. As of August of 1993, the shelling of Sarajevo continues. It is unknown if Hair is still playing.

7"Tank explosion at Siberian plant spreads radiation," Corvallis [Oregon} Gazette-Times, April 7, 1993, 1.

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CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID CALLAGHAN is a freelance director and a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School. He reviewed Witkiewicz's The Water Hen in SEEP vol. 13, no. 1.

MARVIN CARLSON is the Executive Officer and Sidney Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School. He is author of Theories of the Theatre and many other books.

SCOTT T. CUMMINGS writes about theatre and drama from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

VRENEU FARBER is an assistant professor of Russian in the Department of Foreign Languages at Oregon State University. She is currently engaged in a long-range project on the life and work of Aleksandr Vampilov. She is also an actress.

JOHN FREEDMAN is the author of Silence's Roar: The Life and Drama of Nikolai Erdman (Mosaic Press) and the editor/translator of The Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman and A Meeting About Laughter: Sketches, Interludes and Theatrical Parodies by Nikolai Erdman, both forthcoming from Harwood Academic Publishers. He lives in Moscow where he is the theatre critic for the Moscow Times.

CHARLOTTE J. HEADRICK is an associate professor and coordinator of Theatre Arts in the Department of Speech Communication at Oregon State University. Her research areas include Southern playwrights and contemporary British and Irish theatre. She is primarily a director.

MICHAEL STEINLAUF teaches modern Jewish history and culture at Franklin and Marshall College, where he is the Straus Judaic Scholar in Residence. He has written about Jewish theatre and press m preHolocaust Poland, and the history of Polish-Jewish relations.

ROXANA STUART is a professional actress and professor of theatre at Adelphi University. Her doctoral dissertation, "Vampires of the Nineteenth-Century Stage" (CUNY 1993), will be published this year by Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Her writing has also appeared in Theatre Studies, Themes in Drama, and other journals.

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ESZTER SZALCZER, a native of Hungary, is a student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York Graduate School.

SUZANNE TRAUTH is an associate professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Dance, Speech Communication, and Theatre at Montclair State College in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.

JULIUSZ TYSZKA is a Polish theatre critic who was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at New York University in the Spring of 1993. He has recently authored a collection of essays about his theatre experiences in New York (see Books Received).

Photo Credits Antique Feast, The Orchestics Group, Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts Peter Mezei

Antique Feast, The Orchestics Group, Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts Forms of Motion, The Orchestics Group Four Elements, The Orchestics Group Colour Play, Szkene Theatre, Budapest Zolran Magyarosy

Wolves and Sheep, The Fomenko Studio, Moscow Mikhail Guterman

The Tormented Apostle, Satire Theatre, Moscow, 1970 Always on Sale, "Sovremennik" Theatre, Moscow, 1965 Barbarians, Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre, Leningrad, 1959 The Alma Law Archives

Bockerer, Slovak National Theatre, The Cleveland Playhouse Slovak National Theatre

Yara's Forest Song, The Yara Arts Group, La Mama's First Street Workshop Space Watoku Ueno


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PLAYSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES

The following is a list of publications available through the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):

No. 1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin. Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 2 I, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 3 An Altar to Himself, by Ireneusz Iredynski. Translated by Michal Kobialka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski. Stage Adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English verstion by Earl Ostroff and Daniel C. Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 5 1be Outsider, by Ignatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter Goslett . $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) .

No. 6 1be Ambassador, by Slawomir Mrozek. Translated by Slawomir Mrozek and Ralph Mannheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

No. 8 1be Trap, by Tadeusz R6zewicz. Translated by Adam Czerniawski. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Toborski, Michal Kobialka, and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).

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Documents

SEEP Vol.14 No.1 Spring 1994