SEEP Vol.24 No2 Spring 2004

volume 24, no.
2
Spring 2004
SEEP(ISSN 4F 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East
European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Theatre Program, The
City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York,
NY 10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Melissa Johnson
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Margaret Araneo
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Jill Stevenson
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGER
Serap Erincin
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen]. Kuharski
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that desire to
reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared in SEEP may do
so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing before
the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be
furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTNE DIRECTOR
Daniel Gerould
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Frank Hentschker
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants from
the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre of the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 2004 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
2
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 24, No.2
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Kama Ginkas Rehearses Rothschild's Fiddle:
An Annotated Diary''
John Freedman
"A Spanish Yvonne Princesa de Burgundid'
Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton
REVIEWS
"Song of the Goat's Chronicles- A Lamentation"
Kathleen Cioffi
"Witkiewicz's The Mother
by the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf at La MaMa"
Kimon Keramidas
"Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk
at Chicago's European Repertory Company"
Jeffrey Stephens
"Chekhov's Platonov on the Stage of the
Comedie-Fran<;:aise"
Ekaterina Sukhanova
5
6
7
10
12
28
44
50
56
62
3
"Alexander Nwsky Revisited in 2003"
Saera Yoon
"Prokofiev and his Contemporaries:
The Impact of Soviet Culture"
Daniel Gerould
Contributors
66
72
82
4
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 24, No.2
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either
with contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama
and film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published
works, or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogol but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogol as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else
which may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-literations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as Word 97 Documents for Windows and a hard copy of
the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all
reviews. All articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East
European Performance, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after
approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East European
Performance by visiting out website at http//web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc. Email
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProOuest Information and Learning as
abstracts online via ProO!Iest information service and the
International Index to the Performing Arts.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are
members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
Volume 24, No. 2 of SEEP has a special focus: current Russian and
Polish productions and events in an international context. The issue opens
with two accounts of the creative process by participants involved in the
performances. John Freedman gives his day-by-day report on the rehearsals
of Kama Glinkas's Rothschild's Fiddle at Yale. Next Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton
describes her work as stage and costume designer on a new Spanish
production of Gombrowicz's Ivana directed by Zywila Pietrzak. The rest of
the issue is devoted to six reviews.
The first two productions reviewed took place in New York at La
MaMa, which has been the home of so much significant Polish and Eastern
European theatre over many decades. Kathleen Cioffi analyzes Chronicles-A
Lamentation by Teatr Pidn Kozla (Song of the Goat Theatre), and Kimon
Keramidas describes Witkiewicz's The Mother directed by Brooke O'Hara
with music by Brendan Connolly. Jeffrey Stephens reports on the
production of Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk in Chicago, and Ekaterina
Sukhanova provides an account of the premiere of Chekhov's Platonov at
the Comedie The issue concludes with two celebrations of
Prokofiev on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Saera Yoon documents the
live performance of his music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky,
accompanying a screening of the film at Indiana University, and I review the
exhibition, Prokofiev and His Contemporaries, at the New York Library for the
Performing Arts.
6
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York
EVENTS
David Auburn's new play, The journals of Mihail Sebastian, had a
limited run off-Broadway at the 45th Street Theatre, March 6 to April 4.
Helena- The Emigrant .Q]teen, a one-woman play by Kazimierz Braun,
was presented at the Kosciuszko Foundation Gallery on March 20.
La MaMa, in association with the Polish Cultural Center, presented
Chronicles-A Lamentation, a new work by Teatr Pie5n Kozla (Song of the
Goat Theatre), April 15 to May 2.
A staged reading of Saviana Stiinescu's play Lenin's Shoes was
presented at the Goldberg Theatre of New York University on April 23.
A production of The Pragmatists by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,
translated by Daniel Gerould and directed by Jeffrey A. Lewonczyk, was
presented at the Brick, May 13-June 5.
The Jumble Shop Theater performed Recitalfor Brancusi, 1955, a
theatrical performance based on an encounter between Eugene Ionesco and
Constantin Brancusi, at the Donnell Library, May 15 and 23.
The Czech Center of New York in coordination with the
Immigrants' Theater Project and the Theater Institute in Prague presented a
third season of New Czech Plays in Translation at the Public Theatre. The
following pieces were performed:
22 Anxiety Street (Stisnend 22) by Iva Volankova, translated by
David Nykl, May 3.
I'm Still Living with a Coat Rack, a Cap, and a Signal Disc (!efte iju s
vlfdkem cepici a pldcackou) by Samuel Koeniggratz (nee Rene
LevinskY), translated by Alex Zucker, May 24.
7
The Moment before I Opened the Drawer and Pulled Out the Knife ( Chvfli
pfedfm, ne jsem otevfela zdsuvku a vyndala nuz") written and translated
by Ivana Ruzickova,June 7.
Dad Scores (Tat'ka stfz1 g6!Y) by Jiri Pokorny, translated by David
Short, June 21.
Lincoln Center will present the following productions as part of its
2004 summer festival:
Shosha and The Slave, directed by Yebgeny Arye,July 21-25.
Egyptian Nights and War and Peace, both directed by Piotr Fomenko,
July 6-10.
Forbidden Christmas or The Doctor and the Patient, directed by Rezo
Gabriadze,July 9-11 and 14-17
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
United States
Bard Summerscape, Shostakovich and His World-a four-week
performing arts festival at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New
York- will present the following theatrical and operatic productions:
8
The Alexandrinsky's Theatre's production of Gogel's The Inspector
General, directed by Valery Fokin, with an original score by Leonid
Desyatnikov, July 8-11.
Nine Circles Chamber Theater's production of Guest from the Future,
with music by Mel Marvin, libretto by Jonathan Levi, directed by
David Chambers, July 22- 25, 29, 31, and August 1.
The East Coast professional premiere of Dimitri Shostakovich's
opera The Nose, based on the story by Nikolai Gogol, with Leon
Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra, directed
by Francesca Zambello, July 28, 30, August 1, 6, and 7.
Dimitri Shostakovich's Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers, adapted by
Sergei Dreznin, directed by Francesca Zambello, August 12-15.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International
Le Dibbouk, adapted by Hanna Krall, directed by Krzysztof
Warlikowski, ran at the Theatre de Bouffes du Nord in Paris, March 6 to
April30.
FILM
New York
In March 2004, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presented Bdnk
Bdn, directed by Csaba Kael, March 11.
CUNY-TV, Cable Channel 75 City Cinematheque, in cooperation
with the Donnell Library Center, presented a five-week series on the films of
Romania. Films screened included: Forest of the Hanged, directed by Liviu
Ciulei; Stone Wedding, directed by Mircea Veroiu and Dan Pita; The Cruise,
directed by Mircea Daneliuc; The Oak, directed by Lucian Pintilie; and West,
directed by Cristian Mungiu.
OTHER EVENTS
New York
Makor at the 92nd Street Y presents a four-day tribute to the
Fourteenth Annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland, featuring
films, music, and panel discussions, June 26 to July 4.
Compiled by Margaret Araneo
9
BOOKS RECEIVED
Gavran, Mira. Dangerous Plays: How To Kill The President, Doctor Freud's
Patient, Night of the Gods. Tr. from the Croatian by Laura Gudim. Zagreb:
Teatar Gavran, ITG, 2004. 134 pages. Includes biographical sketch of the
playwright.
The Mrozek Reader. Ed. Daniel Gerould. New Y ark: Grove Press, 2004. 680
pages. Includes fourteen plays and ten stories from The Elephant, and a
chronology, introduction, and bibliography.
Notatnik Teatralny, 30-31, 2003/2004. 215 pages. Special issue devoted to
Henryk Tomaszewski and the Wrodaw Pantomime Theatre. Includes
twenty articles, among them reminiscences, writings by Tomaszewski and
conversations with him, and a letter from Marcel Marceau. A second special
feature of seven articles is devoted to Jan Kott. Other articles cover theatre
in Wroclaw, books, and photography. The issue contains dozens of
illustrations and photographs, many of them rare.
The Theatre in Poland, vol. 1- 2, 2003. 68 pages. Includes Wojciech Majcherek,
"A Report on the Current State of the Polish Theatre" and Piotr
Gruszczyriski, "The Second Wave in the Theatre," as well as a tribute to
Kazimierz Dejmek, articles on new productions, new Polish plays, and
books on the theatre. Contains many photographs, some in color.
The Theatre in Poland, vol. 3-4, 2003. 70 pages. Includes Jacek Sieradzki,
"Szczecin: Anna Augustynowicz and Her Theatre" and Maryla Zieliri.ska,
"TV Theatre: An Interview with Jacek Weksler" as well as articles on new
productions, new Polish plays, and books on the theatre. Contains many
photographs, some in color.
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy. Marginalia filozoficzne. Warsaw: Centrum
Sztuki Wsp6lczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2004. 140 pages. Book serving as
the catalogue for the exhibition held from January 19 to February 22, 2004,
at the Centrum Sztuki Wsp6lczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski. Texts by Bogdan
Michalski and Pawel Polit. Contains dozens of reproductions of
10
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 24, No. 2
philosophical texts annotated by Witkiewicz and drawings, paintings, and
photographs by the artist, as well as photographs and drawings of him and
his friends and art works by contemporary artists inspired by Witkiewicz.
Many of the illustrations are reproduced in color or in monotints. Also
included are fragments of music by Witkiewicz and a ten-minute CD by
Maciej Grzybowski, PezzoJ(Jit-cazzo, a piano fantasy on the theme of musical
sketches by Witkacy. Contains lists of sources for works in the exhibition
and a complete list of philosophical works with Witkiewicz's marginalia.
11
KAMA GINKAS REHEARSES ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE:
AN ANNOTATED DIARY
John Freedman
Over the years, Kama Ginkas has been adamant about keeping the
world at bay while he works. Rehearsal for him is, to use his phrase, an
"intimate" process, one that is nobody's business but that of the few who are
crucial to the creation of the show. This famously strict rule, however, may
be breaking down some now. I would never suggest that this fiercely
uncompromising artist is mellowing at age sixty-two, but one does see in
him what appears to be an increased willingness to be observed and
examined by outsiders. Although I have been acquainted with Ginkas for
over a decade, the last three years of which we collaborated on a book, the
first rehearsal of his I ever attended was in Cambridge in August 2003 when
he was preparing Lady with a Lapdog at the American Repertory Theatre.
These notes begin on October 31,2003, and this time I am a minor
participant in the process. I will create the supertitles for the world premiere
of Rothschild's Fiddle, Ginkas's adaptation of the Anton Chekhov story,
which will be performed by Russian actors sixteen times at the Yale
Repertory Theatre in New Haven from January 14 to 31,2004, before going
on to a repertory run at the Moscow New Generation (Young Spectator)
Theatre.
Ginkas adapted Chekhov's story about a coffin maker, who is
obsessed with the losses life brings, by subtly distributing the original text
among four characters: Yakov/Bronza (Valery Barinov), Rothschild (Igor
Yasulovich), Marfa (Arina Nesterova), and the Doctor's Assistant (Alexei
Dubrovsky). As is always true in Ginkas's prose dramatizations, the actors
speak the third-person, omniscient narrative with few changes besides minor
cuts and some added pronouns and interjections. The tale is one of
Chekhov's bleakest, and Ginkas frames it in the austere light of his own
challenging art. For me, three themes emerge almost immediately and
remain valid after the show opens: 1) the calamity of seeking validation in
profit; 2) the calamity of prejudice; and 3) the mystery of creativity, of
making and doing, regardless of what is being made. Ginkas's prowess at
creating an autonomous language out of action, gestures, pauses, mises en
scene, and the unorthodox use of props is unsurpassed. Rothschild's Fiddle
12
Igor Yasulovich (Rothschild) and Valery Barinov (Yakov) in
Chekhov's Rothchild's Fiddle directed by Kama Ginkas,
Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven.
13
provides further evidence of this skill. Long, wordless scenes are filled with
action as Yakov labors at his work table or lies sleepless in bed at night,
Rothschild plays a keening saw (in place of a flute and violin), and the
Doctor's Assistant fastidiously downs a bottle of vodka while the dying
Marfa moans and waits.
I am struck by one thing in particular as I leap onto this theatrical
train that is already in full motion. (The company has been working for
some time but has only just recently moved onto the stage outfitted with
Sergei Barkhin' s set of stylized vertical coffins.) Before the rehearsal gets
underway, I see a handful of observers in the hall. Over the next two
months, others will come and go, contradicting my naive impression that no
one ever gets into a Ginkas rehearsal. But Ginkas has requirements about
visitors: if he has allowed you to observe, you sit quietly, watch alertly, react
candidly and sit to the end, or you don't come at all. One day, a visitor
innocently takes a seat a few rows in front of Ginkas's chair located behind
a small table in the aisle at the seventh row. Ginkas curtly but politely asks
the woman to move behind him.
"That is an old rule of Georgy Tovstonogov's," Ginkas explains to
no one in particular. "Nobody comes between the director and his actors."
Later, when the show is coming closer to the semi-public dress
rehearsals, he will specifically ask people to take seats in the front rows to
give the actors spectators with whom to work. But on October 31, that seems
a long way off.
Although there is probably no sin greater at a Ginkas rehearsal than
rustling a piece of paper-Ginkas will not abide extraneous noise of any kind,
and above all, he loathes the rustle of paper-I doubly risk the wrath of the
master. Not only am I bound to work with the pages of the emerging English
script balanced gingerly in my lap, but I simultaneously keep a sporadic on-
the-spot diary in a spiral notebook. I will become good at turning pages
silently, although on occasion my heart will sink as I fumbled a page noisily
in the dark. Ginkas never says a word to me, although I will notice his most
pointed criticisms are usually made indirectly. One day, while talking with
his actors, he launches into an excursus about the evil of petty noises, and I
suspect who had prompted this lecture. I redouble my efforts to perfect the
delicate art of page-turning in absolute silence.
What follows is a selective and enhanced version of my diary.
Although I expanded cursory notes into full sentences and added
descriptions, I did not attempt to give the text a polished flow. My purpose
14
Valery Barinov (Yakov) and Igor Yasulovich (Rothschild) in
15
was to reveal the extraordinary energy, conviction, humor, and devotion
that Ginkas brings to his work, and to provide a glimpse into the atmosphere
of that work in process. If such a picture does not arise in these notes, the
fault is entirely mine.
October 31, 2003. Barkhin's amazing set of stylized coffins, boats,
piles, and buildings stands on stage. Lined in a straight row, like a written
text developing from the crude and the ancient at the left to the refined and
the modern on the right, they give the sensation of the world reduced from
three dimensions to two. The proliferation of so much yellowish, unfinished
pine lends tangible warmth to the picture. At first I don't notice an
enormous, real tree trunk standing deep upstage in the shadows. Sticking out
of the neat line of vertical objects in the direction of the hall is a wonderfully
battered workbench.
Ginkas is all over the place-on stage, in the hall, sitting down,
jumping up- unleashing bursts of energy in gestures, shouts and
exhortations. You can see him physically working to fill the empty hall with
creative tension. Shouts of "good!" and "thank you!" boom out constantly,
every time anyone does something well, from the actors to the lighting and
sound engineers. Then, suddenly, Ginkas is quiet and gentle, working with
an actor intimately, in a whisper or an enchanting singsong voice. There is
one long moment when he almost sings as he stands in front of the stage
and speaks to the cast. He is letting them hear first-hand an example of the
rhythm and ambience he might like to see in their performances. "Don't
ruin the scene with text," he urges Barinov later.
Ginkas wants the huge tree in back to be hidden from sight by three
long planks stood up on end. He asks stage hands to encircle the planks with
a rope, so they don't fall on anyone. When they do this, he asks if they can
drop the rope lower.
"We can," says the master carpenter, "but we tied them high for
safety."
"I know," Ginkas replies. "But I have a disease. I wake up in the
middle of the night and move the table lamp because it doesn't fit perfectly
with the corner of the table. I need that rope lower." The rope is lowered.
Igor Yasulovich, who will play Rothschild, is out of town. His place
is temporarily filled by Robert Olinger, an American student in Ginkas's
directing class at the Moscow Art Theatre who also performed as one of the
Resort Bathers in Lady with a Lapdog at the American Repertory Theatre.
Ginkas stares at Olinger for a moment and quips, "Robert, you look like a
16
......
'I
Valery Barinov (Yakov) in Chekhov's Rothchild's Fiddle directed by Kama Ginkas,
Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven .
Alexei Dubrovsky {The Doctor's Assistant), Valery Barinov (Yakov), Arina Nesterova
{Marfa), and Igor Yasulovich (Rothschild) in Chekhov's Rothchild's Fiddle
directed by Kama Ginkas, Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven.
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dog. No, you look like a lady with a dog." Burst of laughter.
November 8, 2003. Ginkas begins, as he often does, telling a story
or engaging in seemingly irrelevant talk that imperceptibly segues into
rehearsal before anyone notices it. Today he tells about working with the
designer David Borovsky in Helsinki in 1990 on Crime and Punishment.
"The whole set was made of doors," Ginkas explains. "I wanted
them to be those filthy, banged-up things you used to see fences made of in
Leningrad. The Finnish carpenters made a set of modem, beautifully crafted
doors. Then, when they painted them, they didn't use brushes that leave
behind crude paint strokes and stray hairs; they used paint guns. It was
hopelessly sterile, like something out of a hospital. I asked Borovsky if
maybe the carpenters could 'ruin' them. He said, 'Kama, you'll never get a
Finn to ruin anything!' But, in time, as we worked with the set, I began to
realize that the sterility of the set was even better than the mess of junk I had
wanted. It gave us something to work against."
Later, as Ginkas steers his actors away from delivering Chekhov's
narrative like storytellers, he utters the memorable phrase: "Chekhov will
constantly get the upper hand. But we must nevertheless do what we have
to do."
November 12, 2003. "We may think some things are micro-
events," Ginkas tells his cast as he works meticulously on the nuances of
speech and action. "For example, someone rustles a piece of paper barely
audibly. Somebody may think this is unimportant, even non-existent. But I
will overreact terribly, in a completely inappropriate way. In the thirty years
I have been doing this, I have learned that the little things take on enormous
significance. There are no micro-events in theatre."
Ginkas is almost coquettish with Barinov today. At one point,
when he jumps up on stage to talk to him, he looks like a love-struck young
man falling head over heels to please a reticent girl. His laughter is forced,
almost fawning. Meanwhile, the message of his words is tough, very critical.
Ginkas bobs and weaves around Barinov, not touching him, but almost
caressing him as he coos and envelops him in a physical space of comfort
and acceptance while whacking him with words about what must be done
differently. Suddenly, Ginkas abruptly interrupts himself and heads back to
his place in the hall. As he steps off the stage, he flatly tosses off the phrase:
"I've just been trying to seduce you."
Ginkas later stops a scene and says to Barinov, "Even when Yakov
is talking to a piece of wood, he is talking to ... " and his voice trails off as
19
he spreads out his arms and trains a fierce gaze toward the heavens. This
captures in a nutshell what Ginkas is up to, no matter what he is doing:
conducting a silent, indirect dialogue, or, perhaps, monologue, with God.
November 17, 2003. Ginkas speaks to Barinov before rehearsal
begins. (He directs almost all of his comments to Barinov and frequently
calls this show with four characters Barinov's "one-man show.") "I am going
to repeat myself now," Ginkas says. "But that's all right. Most of what a
director does is repeat himself I once read Efros's book and I was amazed.
He said, 'Don't fear telling actors the same thing over and over.' I used to
suffer because I didn't always have anything new to say to an actor. Now I
don't suffer over that anymore."
Rehearsal begins, but Ginkas immediately interrupts it and the
following dialogue ensues.
GINKAS:
time?
BARINOV:
GINKAS:
BARINOV:
GINKAS:
You remember, don't you, that we changed a lot last
We did?
In a technical sense.
I don't remember.
We did. Forget it. You'll remember as we go along.
This is Ginkas throwing his actors off-guard, creating an atmosphere that will
foster the birth of the unexpected and the spontaneous. It is also an example
of how he establishes a sensation of comfort within a state of free-fall. After
pulling the rug out from under Barinov by interrupting him just as he began
to work, Ginkas reassures him at the same time. Vintage Ginkas.
November 18, 2003. The mainstage is occupied today, and we are
up in the fourth-floor rehearsal room of the New Generation Theatre. After
working so long on the stage, the actors struggle in the small space with the
mock set. Ginkas, looking to involve the actors, begins a detailed discussion
about props. Props are crucial for him- they are the actors' work tools. There
has been a problem with one of the coffins, and Ginkas encourages Barinov
to suggest how to fix it. At that moment, Yasulovich and Dubrovsky are
rehearsing a mugging scene in another corner and Yasulovich accidentally
whacks Dubrovsky on the lip. Arina Nesterova runs over from where she has
been helping Barinov to find out what happened. Yasulovich opens the
window and grabs a handful of wet snow. By now, Barinov is showing the
master carpenter what needs to be done with the coffin. Nesterova, who
20
Valery Barinov Cf akov) and Igor Yasulovich (Rothschild) in
21
must slip out of the coffin through a trap door in the back, returns to help
them as they bang and hammer. Y asulovich is stuffing snow between
Dubrovsky's gums and upper lip, and Ginkas suddenly backs off to watch it
all happen. Everyone has completely forgotten about him. He slowly walks
over to me, sits down silently, and leans back as a big grin breaks out on his
face. "Fun rehearsal today, huh?" he remarks.
This is Ginkas in his element. The actors are completely removed
from "make-believe." They are not "rehearsing" but are involved in real tasks
that deepen their attachment to each other and the tools with which they
work. All Ginkas has to do is sit back and let the process develop on its own.
Later, Ginkas stops Barinov in the middle of a scene. He walks up
to him and says very quietly and tenderly, "I like everything you are doing,
except one thing .... " Ginkas places his hand on Barinov's shoulder gently,
but forcefully, and adds in a whisper, "You have lost the sensation of being
empty."
November 21, 2003. Rehearsals of a highly emotional and violent
scene: Yakov, aided by the Doctor's Assistant, beats up on Rothschild. As
the actors slam each other around the stage, Ginkas careens around the hall.
He begins by shaking and shuddering in his seat, but before long, leaps onto
his feet and races down to be by the stage where he runs back and forth with
the actors, jumping and waving his arms in the air. When the beating has
almost, but not quite, ended, Ginkas bounds up onto the stage. As soon as
the fight ends, Ginkas begins throwing energetic shadow punches at Yakov,
who fends off the director's attack. Everybody bursts into laughter.
This is another quintessential moment: Ginkas taking on
everything from the conventions of theatre and Russian culture to himself
and Chekhov.
Ginkas to Barinov, later: "Be careful. Anton Pavlovich is winning
again. You are slipping back into storytelling."
November 22, 2003. At one point in the show, Barinov must rotate
blindly on his heels and sink an axe into a narrow stump of wood standing
on end. He is extraordinarily good at it, but today, he misses repeatedly,
barely grazing the stump with a tinny, clanging sound rather than sinking
the axe meatily and heavily into the wood. Ginkas says, "Valery, don't worry
about it. We'll make sure you have a thicker stump to hit." Barinov
grumbles, "No. I must be able to split a pencil." Ginkas spins around with
sparkling eyes and exclaims, "You hear that?! A Russian actor must be able
to split a pencil with an axe!"
22
Ginkas rehearses one of the show's most remarkable scenes, a
passage when Y akov dreams that the dead Marfa has returned to him as a
young woman before she suddenly transforms into an old hag again. It is a
beautiful and painfully brieflove scene cut off in full bloom by the intrusion
of reality. "Americans don't like pauses," Ginkas explains to his actors. "And
they'll hate this part, which I really love. Some of the Americans who came
to see Lady with a Lapdog watched with interest and said, 'Too long.' Unless
there was action and text together, they didn't know how to respond."
November 24, 2003. Today's rehearsal of the scene just before
Yakov dies is especially tender and gentle. Ginkas frequently stands right
next to Barinov and whispers his directions as he touches him fleetingly and
delicately. He gets down on his knees before him, making Barinov look
down on him as he speaks. Shortly afterwards, Ginkas comments: "This is a
very fragile scene. We must rehearse it rarely and carefully, or we will run it
into the ground."
During a notes session, Ginkas talks at length about Fellini for the
second day in a row. He tells how he snuck into the Kremlin Palace of
Congresses during the Moscow Film Festival to see 8 112 when he was still a
student in Tovstonogov's directing course. As he passed through a foyer, he
recognized Fellini and Giullietta Masina walking arm in arm. "I was
shocked!" Ginkas admits. "I knew her as the simple little girl from La Strada,
and here she was all dolled up with a fancy hairdo: the wife of a great
director. And then Fellini comes out onstage to introduce his film. He
begins wondering aloud if anybody can possibly be interested in what he's
done. This great artist, mumbling something like that publicly! He's not
even talking to the audience, really, just thinking aloud. And then you know
what he does? He bends over and ties his shoelace, right there on stage.
These were unthinkable knockouts for me.''
November 25, 2003. They begin attempting the finale for the first
time, but it is not working. After interrupting the scene for the third time,
Ginkas jumps up and announces that rehearsal is over. "Let's not do this!"
he says. "We must come up on it suddenly. It will work. I know that. But it
has to happen on its own, without my direction and without your trying."
December 4, 2003. I arrive to discover a new element in the set.
Ginkas and Barkhin have added (something they planned to do all along)
four planks that stretch across the entire width of the stage opening and
hang on booms in a staggered, frame-like line just above the highest point
of the rooftops at stage left. The effect is striking. Suddenly, the
23
environment is more "constructed," more artificial and more
claustrophobic. But the real surprise comes when Yakov, frustrated utterly
by his wasted life, goes on a rampage, knocking over half the objects in the
set. At this moment, the planks jerk upward and ride out of view. Combined
with the gaping hole left by the knocked-over coffins, the thickly tangible
sense of expanded space is breathtaking. Ginkas comments:" Amazing, isn't
it? A simple theatrical trick: a boom rises. But you do it and you get goose
bumps."
Rehearsal began as Ginkas's assistant asked what they would be
doing today. "Oh, let's do nothing," Ginkas quipped. "Ken Reynolds [the
photographer) is here today. Let's all go drink Scotch." Everybody concurs
enthusiastically, although within thirty seconds rehearsal is underway.
December 5, 2003. Ginkas works with Barinov on one of the
action-filled "pauses," a scene in which Y akov silently tries to overcome his
growing exasperation with the "terrible losses" of his life by stopping and
fondling the tools and materials on his workbench. "I want a long chunk
here," Ginkas tells his actor, "an inspired, erotic scene of Bronza meeting
with his work tools." Ginkas himself picks up a saw, then a hammer, then a
plane, then a yardstick, holding and stroking them lovingly. "These are my
women," he continues, almost cooing. "My women that give me no peace."
December 9, 2003. Ginkas to his actors before rehearsal: "There is
a moment when the time has come to fill the veins of the show with blood,
24
Igor Yasulovich (Rothschild) in Chekhov's Rothchild's Fiddle directed by Kama
Ginkas, Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven.
when all the veins are in place, but no blood is in them yet."
December 16, 2003. Ginkas and lighting designer Gleb Filshtinsky
are discussing the proper brightness for a scene. Ginkas wants a slightly
dimmer quality. He asks Filshtinsky to start with the stage in total darkness
and slowly run the light up. When it reaches what he wants, he calls "Stop!"
The light is now at twenty-five percent brightness; Filshtinsky had suggested
thirty percent. Ginkas asks Filshtinsky to run it up a bit more. A few seconds
later, he comments, "There. That's where theatrical lighting appears. The
illumination of the set. That is exactly what I don't want." Ginkas decides to
compromise. "Let's call it twenty-seven and a half percent," he laughs. After
a few seconds of thought, he adds in all seriousness, "No, let's compromise
even more. Move it another two percent in my direction."
December 23, 2003. Today is the first of three consecutive days
with afternoon and evening run-throughs before a short break and then the
trip to New Haven. Ginkas is addressing Yasulovich, although, in his way of
saying the most important things indirectly, I sense the comments are
primarily intended for Barinov. "Yesterday you began allowing yourself
some improvisations," Ginkas tells Yasulovich. "That is correct. Like
Alyosha and Arisha, you must toss Valery surprises all the time. His line is
much more structured. Your unexpected actions help create a sense of fresh
air and freedom for him. You essentially have localized episodes. No matter
what you do, the essence of the show will not-cannot-change. So don't fear
going out on a limb. Valery's position is much more difficult. He must keep
his sense of freedom even though he is bound to execute a whole series of
specific tasks."
December 25, 2003. After the first of the final two run-throughs,
Ginkas addresses Yasulovich. "Igor Nikolaevich," he says, "when you are up
on top of the houses playing on the saw, you are playing atmosphere. I want
you to play the saw."
Ginkas then comments on the way Yasulovich has been gaily
shouting "I've been looking for you!" in the scene shortly after Yakov has
buried his wife. "Igor Nikolaevich," Ginkas begins, "you do something that
all actors do and I can't stand that ... " but never finishes the phrase because
Yasulovich abruptly drops down on the stage and whacks his head loudly on
the boards in mock self-penance. Bursts of laughter.
January 14, 2004. Following a week of technical rehearsals in New
Haven and just ninety minutes before the lone preview, Ginkas addresses his
cast. ''Who will your audience be tonight?" he asks rhetorically. "Professors.
25
This is a difficult crowd. These people know that Chekhov is tender and
gentle. They know there must be a yellow leaf falling, perhaps with a bit of
green still in it. They know all of this about Chekhov, although, except for
those who teach it, they haven't read 'Rothschild's Fiddle.' It will be very
difficult to reach these people. They will come to enhance their intellectual
and aesthetic leisure. They don't want to be challenged. They want to have
a philosophical experience. I want to attune you to the fact that you will not
get the lively reactions the students gave you last night. If you do, it will be
a great gift."
The record of the reactions belongs to others. At this point,
Ginkas's job and my notes are at an end.!
NOTES
1 Following is a chronological selection of the press:
E. Kyle Minor, "From Russia, a Poetic Tale that Isn't Lost in
Translation," NewHavenRegisterOanuary 16, 2004): Weekend, 16-17.
Tom Isler, '"Rothschild's Fiddle' Premieres at the Rep," Yale Daily
News, Oanuary 16, 2004): B6.
Malcolm Johnson, "The Grim Ordeal of Peasant Life," The Hartford
Courant Oanuary 17, 2004): 01, 04.
Joe Meyers, '"Fiddle' Plays for First Time at Yale Rep," Connecticut
Post, Oanuary 18, 2004): F1, F4.
Laura Collins-Hughes, 'With Tenderness, a Russian Director
Finally Tells the Story of'Rothschild's Fiddle'," New Haven Register Oanuary
18, 2004): Gl, G2.
Bonnie Goldberg, "A Tale of Old Russia Comes to the Yale Rep,"
Middletown Press Oanuary 22, 2004).
Christopher Arnott, '"Rothschild's Fiddle,"' New Haven Advocate,
Oanuary 22, 2004).
Aleksandr Popov, "Russky medved' so skripkoi," Izvestia Oanuary
22, 2004): 13.
John Freedman, "Laughter and Tears at Ginkas' Yale Premiere," The
Moscow Times Oanuary 23, 2004): Metropolis, vi.
Jeffery Kurz, "Little Moments in 'Rothschild's Fiddle' Make it
Worthwhile," The Cheshire Post Oanuary 24, 2004): 8.
26
Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 24, No.2
Alvin Klein, "A Chekhov Story, Distilled to Drama," New York
Times, Connecticut Weekly Desk Qanuary 25, 2004).
Chesley Plemmons, "Chekhov in a Truly Russian Key," Danbury
News Times Qanuary 25, 2004).
Irene Backalenick, "Inspired Design, Acting in Debut of 'Fiddle' at
Yale," Connecticut Post Qanuary 25, 2004).
Frank Rizzo, "Rothschild's Fiddle," Variety Qanuary 25, 2004).
Joanne Greco Rochman, "Yale Troupe Hits Chekhov's Notes,"
The Sunday Republican Qanuary 25, 2004): SH.
David A. Rosenberg, "New Play at Yale Captures Chekhov's
Worldview," Nowalk Hour Qanuary 25, 2004).
Steve Starger, "Yale Offers Rare Opportunity to See Russian
Theatre," journal Inquirer Qanuary 26, 2004).
Maria Sedykh, "Lyubov' do groba," Itogi Qanuary 27, 2004): 60-62.
Lindy Lee Gold letter to the editor: "Yale Rep in Russian Expands
Horizons," New Haven Register (February 1, 2004).
Vladimir Orenov, "Russky desant so 'Skripkoi Rotshil'da',"
Teatral'nye novye izvestia 2 (February 2004): 2.
See also, www.scriptum.ru for detailed information about
rehearsals, performances, and the aftermath, and the forthcoming casebook
on Rothschild's Fiddle that will consist of articles by Mark Bly and me with a
translation of Ginkas's adaptation: TheatreForum 25 (Summer/Fall 2004).
27
A SPANISH YVONNE PRINCESA DE BURGUNDIA
"Now there are no more heroes, only a chorus."
Ortega y Gasset
Early in 2000, I was asked to design the scenery and costumes for a
Spanish production of Witold Gombrowicz's Ivana, Princess of Burgundia
(1938), It was to be the first major performance of a new theatre group,
T eatro C6nkavo, formed by the graduates of the Madrid drama school,
Replika, whose artistic director Jaroslaw Bielskil based his methods of
teaching and molded the school' s curriculum on Polish models. The co-
director, Zywila Pietrzak,2 taught master classes and headed the group that
organized the Teatro C6nkavo. Gombrowicz was a gigantic and risky
undertaking for a first venture by an untested ensemble. The budget was
miniscule.
From my New York drafting board, I tried to imagine how Ivana
would sound in Castillian and how my designs would be read by Spanish
audiences. I was flattered to be asked to undertake this task, as there are so
many excellent Spanish designers. In many e-mails and telephone
conversations from Madrid, Zywila Pietrzak discussed with me her ideas
about the play, elucidating why and how she wished to stage it. She
explained that Ivana attracted her because in a world of cruelty, hypocrisy,
cowardice, and fear it is a comedy with a deeper meaning, a subtext with a
message. It is both a tragedy and a comedy: a tragedy because it deals with
the shame of our times; a comedy because of its form and the ridiculous
nature of its characters. The spectator can laugh and cry at the same time.
For Zywila, Ivana is a play full of surprises, brimming with acerbity
and anger, but never losing its light touch. For these reasons she felt that
Gombrowicz's work calls for a contemporary theatre of rebellion and
provocation. Because it is cast in the form of farce (a genre popular at the
time the play was written), at first sight, Ivana seems facile, requiring no great
intellectual effort on the part of the spectator. This aspect of the piece,
however, in the end proves a great strength. Beneath the surface of farce,
there lurks a bitter truth. In the words of the author, the central character,
28
Costume design for character oflvona by Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton for
Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia.
29
&7
... , , ~ ") """ c ~ .
~ 1 , . .r,.;.,.1 -""\ - #Hc.JtsZ..
- ~ ~ ..
Costume designs by Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton for Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia.
Ivona, "functions as a detonator whose presence endangers an ancient order
which is based on hypocrisy, boredom, and a lack of ideals. That is why she
must die. A being whose mere presence could endanger the total order
surrounding her must be eliminated."
Zywila asked me to design a collapsible segmented scenic space full
of concave mirrored panels, which could also reflect a deformed audience.
It was to be constructed for a traveling production of Yvonne Princesa de
Borgoiia, as the Spanish translation was hitherto called. The two-leveled
modular set had to adapt to different theatres with scenic spaces and
prosceniae of various shapes and sizes. Although chosen to be a part of the
prestigious Madrid Fall Festival, the play would at first be performed only
once in each of four different locations before staying in a larger city for a
longer run. Often a town hall auditorium with no fly space had to suffice.
The crucial platform had to be assembled and reassembled for each of these
first one-night stands, and as it was bulky, only a minimum of elements
could be used.
Among the other properties, Zywila demanded a clanging iron
chain "cage" that could be dropped from the ceiling (for which a fly space
30
was required), as well as a park bench and a tree. All that had to fit in the
small rented truck used for transport. In the smaller pueblos, traffic jams were
sometimes caused by a relic of the past, a donkey with a "Sancho" mounted
on it who would later form a part of the respetable (the audience).
For me the performance by the spectators was often the best part of
the whole experience. In one of the smallest villages the audience
participation made it difficult for all of us to keep a straight face. Not only
were loudly voiced comments occasioned by the transparent or scanty attire
of the actors, but also by the many simulated sex acts performed on the
stage. Ivonne's character, however, drew solidarity and sympathy for her
plight. This was spontaneously expressed by supporting comments from the
audience, such as "Onward Joan of Arc!" Since Gombrowicz's Prince is
named Phillip and the present Crown Prince of Asturias is also a Felipe- the
latter at the time being almost equally capricious in his choice of a bride (the
subsequent announcement of his engagement to the controversial Leticia
was still to come)- the public was quick to discern and comment on the
similarity.
\ I
'
-'I'M !>I..,. ..,.,nc_
tJ!. t1/1/l !.w:/'M t.;,Ptl I f If<
-, -..t>/'1.,_ 41 I:!PflC:.Jf'ti:-I A
l.)llfl./N
fl .. s.t
Set for Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia.
Designed by Elizabeth Witdin Lipton.
31
For the meticulous and exact execution of the costumes, I thank the
talented Ana Bravo. The director Zywila Pietrzak set certain unusual
preconditions for the realization of the heroine's character; she wanted
Ivona to be normal and beautiful, a victim but in no way an integral part of
her own unlucky abjection. This approach was totally new to me as I had
always understood the text to demand just the opposite. Sonia de Rojas, the
actress playing Ivona, rose to the occasion admirably and was much
applauded.
Spain's already not-so-new freedom (growing ever since Franco's
death a quarter of a century ago) was to be celebrated by the application of
a strong dose of explicit sex . This was a good strategy for enhancing box-
office appeal. Many proper mamds and papds were eager to take their
offspring to the show, thinking that the title indicated a fairy tale, with the
result that at the last moment the warning "Not suitable for minors" had to
be pasted on the misleadingly innocent-looking poster designed by Jaime
Nieto, who received his training in this art in Poland.
32
Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia produced by
Teatro C6nkavo, Madrid.
Teatro C6nkavo, Madrid.
The director seemed pleased with most of my costume renderings,
but as the rehearsals progressed, often until5:00 A.M. (not unusual in Spain),
the dramatis personae had to be reduced in size. Inocencio had also to carry
the role of the Beggar. After seeing and hearing at rehearsals the whining
little voice and fragile stature of the actor Raul Chacon being taunted by the
Olympian and arrogant Cyrilo (Andres Capano), who in turn egged on the
even taller Principe Felipe (Pablo Chiapella), I could only think of the poor
and somewhat evil Inocencio as the object of the extreme Fuerza Nueva's
wall graffiti: "Mason]udioy Comunista. "Little Raul with his trembling skinny
calves, which he somehow managed to force into a bow shape, contrasted
33
34
,
'
Costume designs for King and Qy.een by Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton
for Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia.
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 24, No. 2
T eatro C6nkavo, Madrid.
35
with the long-legged athleticism of the handsome Felipe and Cyrilo, which
to him and to us represented the cruel "fun and games" of a "Master Race."
Inocencio brought the house down.
To appeal to Spanish audiences, I included a cardinal mounted on
a scooter, with a pacifier hanging around his neck, wearing shorts made out
of an American flag and playing a flute to alternate with the trumpeter, who
was also Valentfn the lackey, alias the cook and sommelier Goaquin Abaci),
but the budget prohibited another actor and another costume, and the
cardinal never appeared. I made the headgear and many of the props and
accessories and painted the set on a fifteen-foot ladder. Toward the end, I
stitched and stitched, literally finishing the sewing on a Madrid Plaza bench.
This drew an intrigued and admiring crowd, as I waited-threaded needle
and thimble in hand-for the SUV of one of the actors to pick me up one
hour before curtain time.
Although I imagined the young Gombrowicz (after all, the play had
been written in 1936) to be somewhat of a Noel Coward, a decadent dandy,
it was not to be the style of the production. This was not at all the director's
vision. Instead of Strauss's Tales of the Vienna Woods, I would have preferred
to hear Mad Dogs and Englishmen as the introductory music before the
curtain went up, but that was neither here nor there. I do feel that any scenic
designer of worth is in some way a visual dramaturg, although of necessity
compliant to the director's wishes. With the Atlantic Ocean between us, it
was not always easy for me to understand Zywila's requirements and fullfil
them all, and it was not much easier once I was in Spain. Nevertheless, we
reached a compromise by following my suggestion of using the word
"Burgundia" contained in the title and visual representations of
Gombrowicz's idea of "immaturity" as a sort of clef French and Flemish
portraits of Phillippe Le Bon served to illustrate the first concept of
stylization, and the paintings of Balthus provided examples of the second.
Hard-core porno was an important element for Pietrzak, which I must admit
I resisted and even fought against bitterly, since I am a close and indebted
friend of Gombrowicz's widow Rita, who was supposed to arrive for the
opening. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Mme Gombrowicz was taken ill
just in time.
Once in Spain, I had my arm twisted and partially complied by
giving in to thong cache-sexe garments for the Principe and his cohort Cyrilo,
which resulted in their both exhibiting an admirable pair of buttocks. The
rest was not as controversial. I approved the idea of revealing the true caliber
36
of each character through his or her underwear by means of totally
transparent overgarments for all but Ivona and her two Aunts. Those three
were prudishly covered up in opaque fabrics.
Besides the shopping for underwear in both the straight and gay
hard-core prostitution bamos, my personal X-rated experience consisted of
purchasing oversized plastic breasts for the Q!een (Socorro And6n). Unable
to procure the right prostheses and refusing to expose the actress to such
humiliation (and she herself refused adamantly), I had the problem on my
own hands. Camouflaging her natural beauty and gentle character and
transforming her into an exaggeratedly demonized murderous Lady
Macbeth was quite enough of a task. I found the grotesque characterization
legitimate as it could translate into a Valle-Inchinesque esperpento personage-
something a Spaniard could traditionally understand; the form has long
existed and been taught in the schools since its popularity dates back to the
Golden Age of Quevedo and his La vida del Buscon (The life of a Scoundrel).
In desperation, as time was pressing and the couturiere hysterical, I
left early one morning for the center of town, the "Puerta del Sol." Right off
"Sol," the well-equipped supermercado of the time-honored Spanish
institution "El Corte Ingles" was to be found. I needed some heavy groceries,
and for that reason I took my shopping cart along. My first stop, however,
was not the supermarket, but the porno shop on the adjacent, infamous,
vice-ridden Calle Montera. The store had just opened, and now was the only
time to shop; soon hordes of of people, some shady, would arrive en mass
and pour into the area. Lunch hour was out, since any self-respecting
establishment except the Corte Ingles closes for at least four hours. After
lunch and siesta, the swelling numbers of customers render the shopping
panorama apocalyptic.
Although there were some earlier customers behind the black-
curtain side of the store, which presumably functioned as a peep-show area,
I was the first "serious shopper" to arrive. I was treated with great respect,
and, although the shelves and ceiling were well purveyed and overflowing
with all sorts of merchandise, the large-size breasts were out of stock, but "if
the Senora would be willing to wait, a clerk would procure them from the
nearby warehouse." I really had no choice but to exercise patience. I was
offered a comfortable seat, the only one in the store, a place was found for
my cart so as not to obstruct traffic to the black-curtain area, which got
busier by the minute, and the owner, who stood as I had taken his chair,
went out of his way to entertain me. He offered me mineral water and shared
37
I C/V.',yl"''""' ": ,&.CN< ......
f. ;. -
Costume design for the character oflnocencio II
by Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton for Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia
38
39
Costume design for the character of Cyril II
by Elizabeth Wittlin Lipton for Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia
40
Yvonne Pn.ncesa de Burgundia produced by
41
with me the sad fact that business was not good this fall. There we
commiserated with each other, sighing all the while. After a while the early
clients from behind the curtain began to leave and others entered to take
their place. Each, without exception, gave me a quizzical look, some with
their mouths gaping open, but the real object of their curiosity was the still
empty shopping cart next to me as I sat and waited surrounded by hanging
rubber merchandise typical of such establishments. They seemed surprised
at my gray hair as well. I answered their buenos dias as one is wont to do in
Spain. After enough of such greetings, I began to perspire, although the cool
weather had arrived, and I noticed in a mirror that my face had turned an
unbecoming crimson. Finally, I was rewarded; the breasts arrived and the
size was right. I could not make my getaway until the breasts were proudly
modeled by the owner over his sweater and their merits described to justify
the elevated price. Once approved and properly repacked and paid for, a tax
free receipt was issued. This last consideration is always granted for cultural
endeavors in Spain.
The play was first performed within Madrid's Comunidad
(Metropolitan Area) in San Martin de Valdeiglesias at the Teatro Municipal
on October 19, 2002. Other venues for the play were San Fernando de
Henares in the Teatro Auditorio Federico Garda Lorca on November 9; and
on December 10, it was shown in Pozuelo de Alarcon in the Patronato
Municipal de Cultura. There were more performances within the Comunidad
before the production went on to large cities such as Valladolid and Zamora.
Both of these took place later in 2003. The critics in the many Valladolid
newspapers were unanimous in their praise. King Ignacio, acted by Emilio
Gomez as a tyrannical caricature, was compared to Jarry's hero, Ubu. Las
Tias (the Aunts) were portrayed by Aurora Rodriguez and Paloma Luaces,
who also played the Ladies-in-Waiting. Isabel (Alejandra Caparros) was
temptingly feline. The Chambelan (Chema Perez) set the pace as a diabolic
master of ceremonies who ran the proceedings using gestures appropriate to
the Commedia dell' Arte. Chema, a responsible problem shooter, was also
the treasurer, truck driver, carpenter, and invaluable stage-manager. Marta
Graiia managed the lighting ably. I received much favorable mention for the
set and costumes, but the director Zywila Pietrzak got the highest praise for
her dynamic direction as well as for her skillful adaptation of the play. The
production is supposed to have a run in the center of Madrid soon and is
now scheduled to travel to Poland in the fall.
42
NOTES
1 Jaroslaw Bielski graduated from the Theatre School in Cracow in 1983 and
worked as an actor at the T eatr Wybrzeze in Gdansk and at the T eatr J aracza
in L6di. In 1984 he received a grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture and
Art to study directing in Spain. After being denied permission to return
home by the Polish authorities in 1988, he decided to remain permanently
in Spain where he has pursued his career as a director, teacher, and actor in
theatre, film, and television,. He has translated, published, and directed
many Polish authors, including Witkiewicz, Mrozek, R6zewicz, Schaeffer,
and Kajzar. He has also directed Unamuno, Lope de Vega, Beckett, and
Lorca. In 1989 he co-founded with Socorro Anadon the Compaii.ia de
Teatro Nuevo, which in 1997 became the Academia de Actor. His most
recent translation and production was Dale Wasserman's One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest, given its Spanish premiere at his own theatre, Replika,
established in Madrid in 2003. He has frequently worked abroad as an actor,
director, and teacher, and he has presented many productions at
international festivals.
2 Zywila Pietrzak graduated from the Film, Television, and Theatre School
in L6di in 1980 and until1989 worked as an actress at the New Theatre in
Poznan and at the Teatr Jaracza in L6di, appearing in over thirty
productions, including Wisniewski's End of Europe and Panoptikon d Ia
Madame Tussaud. She also appeared in many Polish television dramas and
films, directed by Wajda, Kie5lowski, Holland, and others. In 1989 at the
invitation of Los Goliardos she went to Spain to play the role of Estelle in
Sartre's Huis Clos, directed by Angel Facio. Since then she has continued her
career in Spain as a director and actress, appearing in many films and
television series. Her 1997 production, Frida Khalo, co-directed with Peter
Hinton, is still in the repertory. She began teaching in 1991 and joined the
Academia de Actor in 1997. In 2002 she founded her own Teatro C6nkavo,
where in addition to Gombrowicz she has also presented in 2004 Janusz
Glowacki's Antigone in New York.
43
SONG OF THE GOAT'S CHRONICLES-A LAMENT AT/ON
Kathleen Cioffi
After the fall of communism in 1989, Polish alternative theatre
should have died. But surprisingly, despite the disappearance of political
opposition as its raison d'etre, it experienced a revitalization. As Magdalena
Golaczynska declared in these pages, "There are more and more alternative
or independent companies created every season, and all of the roughly three
hundred companies currently in existence can be considered as working
outside the mainstream repertory theatre."' Teatr Pidn Kozla [Song of the
Goat Theatre], one of the new alternative theatre companies formed in the
1990s, recently visited New York and performed Kroniki- obyczaj
lamentacyjny [Chronicles-A Lamentation].
2
The company's intensely theatrical
language is derived from Jerzy Grotowski by way of Gardzienice yet also
owes something to opera, dance, and storytelling (though it is nothing like
any opera, dance performance, or storytellers you've ever seen), as well as
something to the company's investigations of folk rituals. Yet, it has
produced something more vital and more gripping than any of those
separate elements, something unique that, nonetheless, partakes of the work
of its theatrical forebears as well as of other performing arts practitioners.
Chronicles is based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian
heroic poem that has been called "the first great book of man's heart."3
Gilgamesh predates the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Bible, though it may well
have influenced those works. The epic tells the story of Gilgamesh, a half-
human, half-divine king who rules over the Babylonian city-state ofUruk, in
modern-day Iraq. Gilgamesh and his wild friend Enkidu journey together
and share many adventures, but they incur the wrath of the goddess Ish tar,
because Gilgamesh refuses to become her lover and Enkidu insults her.
Enkidu is condemned to die by the gods, and when he dies, his death forces
the inconsolable Gilgamesh to realize that he too must eventually die. He
cannot accept this, so he journeys to the Underworld to meet Utnapishti,
the Sumerian Noah, who survived the great flood and was given immortality
by the gods. The gods refuse to grant Gilgamesh immortality, but Utnapishti
gives him an herb that restores youth, which, on Gilgamesh's return to the
upper world, is stolen by a serpent. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and at last
44
Maria Sendow as Death and Anna Zubrzycka as the Mother of
Gilgamesh in Song of the Goat's Chronicles- A Lamentation
45
Marcin Rudy as Enkidu and Anna Krotoska as the goddess Ishtar
in Song of the Goat's Chronicles-A Lamentation
accepts his fate.
The production is not a straightforward adaptation of mythic
materials, such as Mary Zimmerman's adaptations of Homer's Odyssey or
Ovid's Metamorphoses. Instead, Song of the Goat has taken certain themes
from the epic and woven them together with songs, chants, and movement.
The founders of Song of the Goat, Grzegorz Bra! and Anna Zubrzycka, are
former members of the Gardzienice Theatre Association, and they have
brought with them that company's interest in the power of the human voice.
Wlodzimierz Stan.iewski, the founder and artistic director of Gardzienice,
once declared in an interview, ''We start with the question, 'How can we sing
it?"'4 And this is obviously the fundamental question for Song of the Goat
as well. Chronicles is the culmination of two years of research into a particular
European and Asian tradition of song, the tradition of musical lamentation.
The company journeyed to northern Epiros (a region straddling Greece and
Albania) and found there a rich tradition of polyphonic lamentations. They
46
built their performance around the lamentations they had found, and thus
the production incorporates laments sung in Albanian and in Greek,
together with Polish and English chants and dialogue.
The production may also be seen as very much in the tradition of
Grotowski's "theatre of sources" phase. The structure of the polyphonic
lamentations that the company found in Epiros reminded company
members of the structure of Greek tragedy, which they have been interested
in exploring since the company's founding in 1997. Indeed its name, "Song
of the Goat," was also the title of their first production, and is derived from
the ancient Greek for "tragedy," tragon ode [goat song]. In the program notes
for Chronicles, they ask:
Is it possible that that a tradition has survived which was itself the
inspiration for Greek tragedy? ... Can theatre archaeologists seek
their answers even further back in time? Is it possible that an
ancient tradition survived, when an ancient theatrical form did not?
We know that the origins of some songs and dances date back as far
as two or three thousand years. Is it possible that what was once the
inspiration for ancient theatre has survived and may also be a
theatrical inspiration for us?
Rafa! Habel as Gilgamesh, Marcin Rudy as Enkidu, and Christopher Sivertsen
as a Shaman in Song of the Goat's Chronicles-A Lamentation
47
Although it seems as if these questions about tragedy's ongms may be
impossible to answer with any certainty, the active way Song of the Goat is
pursuing this research-with their voices and bodies- creates a theatrically
exciting form, one that incorporates song, dance, rhythm, movement,
gesture, and the spoken word.
The choice of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh seems particularly
appropriate for an approach that puts lamentation at its center: when
Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh utters what poet Derrek Hines calls "the first great
lament for a dead companion in literature."5 We are plunged in the
performance into a kind of ceremonial lamentation that also reenacts parts
of the Gilgamesh myth. The theatre manages to create a feeling of being part
of some kind of performative primitive ritual akin to what I imagine tribal
ceremonies to be. The polyphonic laments are sung by the actors in an
open-throated, energetic style, in which their voices seem to be coming up
not just from their diaphragms but from the soles of their feet. And they not
only lament with their voices; they move their bodies in such an athletic way
that they at times seem to be dancing, at others performing gymnastics.
Certain moments particularly stand out in memory. The opening of
the show, when women with veils over their faces sit in a semi-circle and sing
an open-throated lament in Albanian to the drone of a hurdy-gurdy, creates
the atmosphere of something sacred happening in the theatre that
Grotowski was always aspiring to. Ishtar's creation of the wild man Enkidu
and her initiation of him into the mysteries of sex are embodied by a dance
that is at once sexy and ritualized. Anna Zubrzycka as Gilgamesh's mother
reenacts his birth, all the while lamenting as Death torments her. And when
Enkidu dies and is laid to rest on a funeral bier, Gilgamesh and the two other
men in the cast leap onto the bier and do cartwheels over the corpse with a
lightness that gives the illusion that they're flying; soon Enkidu's soul joins
them in their sacred acrobatics.
As I watched Chronicles- A Lamentation, I recalled the words of
Richard Demarco, an impresario who has hosted many Polish groups at the
Edinburgh Festival, and who in a 1992 interview said, "Polish theatre is a
particular voice, different from others that one can hear in Europe .... The
only important energy in art is the energy of the spirit. You still have it."6
Song of the Goat seems to embody that spirit energy with a marvelous
control over voice and body that feels more akin to what singers and dancers
must master than to the kinds of emotion-based training that actors trained
in traditional theatre programs undergo. Nevertheless, Manchester
48
Metropolitan University in England will start to offer a master's course based
on the company's technique this fall. It will be fascinating to see whether
work produced by students of this program will somehow combine the
musicality, physicality, and mystery of the Song of the Goat performance
technique with a more Anglo-American theatre convention. Avant-garde
Polish theatre, from Mickiewicz to Wyspianski through Grotowski and
Gardzienice, has been far more interested than Anglophone theatre in
exploring the roots of its own theatricality and establishing a mysterious
place apart where magical/sacred things occur. Song of the Goat fits squarely
within this tradition: I had the feeling not of watching a play but of stepping
back in time and witnessing a group of incredibly skillful shamans as they
recreated an ancient ceremony. As the actor/shamans reenacted the ancient
story of Gilgamesh, I felt their songs throb through my own body and
somehow had the illusion that I myself had participated in the ceremony,
and been, at least for a little while, healed.
NOTES
1 Magadalena Golaczynska, "Malta 2002 and Other Alternative Theatre
Festivals," Slavic and East European Peiformance 22, no. 3 (Fall2002): 21.
2 Chronicles-A Lamentation was performed at La MaMa, April 15- May 2,
2004.
3 Derrek Hines, Gilgamesh (London: Chatto and Windus, 2002), ix.
4 Wlodzimierz Staniewski, interview with Richard Schechner, The Drama
Review 31, no. 2 (1987): 147.
5 Hines, xi.
6 Richard Demarco, was" [I Need You], interview with
Malgorzata Szum, Teatr 47, no. 12 (1992): 12. My translation.
49
WITKIEWICZ'S THE MOTHER
BY THE THEATRE OF A TWO-HEADED CALF AT LA MAMA
By Kimon Keramidas
In April of 2003, the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf presented The
Mother at La MaMa in New York City, their second interpretation of a play
by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz in a little over a year. Following in the wake
of the previous year's frenetically entertaining and successful Tumor
Brainowicz, l director Brooke O'Hara and her team of collaborators adapted
and developed Witkiewicz's play to suit their unique style. This production
was no small achievement as the company tackled the characteristically
difficult text, while integrating technical aspects into the work that
challenged the rugged simplicity of the small stage and limited resources at
La MaMa. Along with the successful integration of different media into the
live performance, including live and recorded audio and video, the company
expanded the scope of the production to include a pamphlet and website,
developing a rough-hewn but high-tech cross-media event that extended the
fleeting moment of performance and had the potential of expanding the
audience's immersion in the finished product and in the process of creating
the work.
As in their work on Tumor Brainowicz, the Theatre of a Two-Headed
Calf was able to combine O'Hara's unpredictable and sometimes frenetic
directing style with Brendan Connelly's equally eccentric musical score and
sound design. As O'Hara and Connelly let the story and environment
unfold, they are at once able to grasp and negotiate Witkiewicz's high level
of intellectual detail, as well as reveal and portray the grotesque absurdity
that is at the root of his characters, plots, and storylines. O'Hara feels that
"Witkiewicz's plays are always awful and beautiful at the same time. I hate
them and I'm madly attracted to them,"2 and in this piece, she revealed an
understanding of this tension in Witkiewicz's highly crafted works.
A satirical commentary on the work of writers such as Ibsen and
Strindberg, The Mother reveals Witkiewicz's dislike for the bourgeois drama
of his time. O'Hara and Connelly followed the playwright's lead and probed
the distorted relationships within the family and the society surrounding it.
O'Hara allowed her actors to explore a full range of emotion and means of
50
Suli Holum in Two-Headed Calfs production
ofWitkiewicz's The Mother at La MaMa in New York City.
51
expression, and they engaged the audience with an energetic and physical
acting style that suited the play and the small space at La MaMa. The actors,
in particular Tina Shepherd as the sometimes dignified and sometimes
delusional mother and Suli Holum as the highly animated and occasionally
disturbing object of male desire, were intense during the most unsettling of
scenes but were also capable of delivering comedy when necessary.
The physically centered acting style of the performers was
complemented by the director's creative use of simultaneous streaming
video. The video equipment was strategically placed on the stage. One
wireless camera was inserted into the eye of a doll (the doll doubling the role
of the son, Leon), another placed on the mother's hat. One wired camera
was perched on the top of a table with another positioned in the downstage
area to face into the action, simulating the position of the audience. Four
computer monitors were also visible on stage- two underneath the table
center stage and one on each side of the stage, which were rotated frequently
by the actors either to reveal or hide the front of the monitor. A television
acted as an object in the world of the play while also displaying stills and
video captured from the various cameras embedded in the action.
Initially, the technology was not made apparent to the audience,
since much of it was either covered or too small. Monitors were slowly
revealed to frame the stage action. The audience would then try to figure out
which camera was feeding the monitor. The wireless cameras were especially
challenging, since they were small and purposely hidden in the hat of the
mother and the eye of the Leon puppet. O'Hara used this puppet to great
effect, as she has used puppets in past productions, creating some amazing
points of view for the audience to consider simultaneously on the monitors
along with what they were seeing on stage. The video from these cameras
was sometimes frozen, replayed, slowed down, or blended with prerecorded
video, and at times, it was challenging to determine which view was which,
and to discover whether or not the video being shown was live from the
performance or had been manipulated or previously recorded.
With this array of technology, O'Hara was able to capture more
than one view of the action for the audience. Through the orchestration
and manipulation of the cameras and displays by video designer Bilal Khan,
the video and stills that were captured could then be presented on the
monitors and television. These images conflated the typical subjective-
objective relationships between the characters on the stage giving the
audience more than one dominant viewpoint and often challenging
52
V1
w
Tina Shepard (the Mother), Jim Fletcher (Leon Eely) and Suli Holum (Sophia)
in Witkiewicz's The Mother at La MaMa in New York City.
traditional stage conventions. The end result was that the cameras changed
the nature of the scenic structure, augmented the performances of the actors,
and complicated the relationships of the characters.
Just as O'Hara embraced rough energy in her directorial style and
was not afraid of challenging juxtapositions, the stage was mostly composed
of found furniture that created an appropriately aged and battered
environment for the family to exist in. The impact of the video was also felt
in the design of the piece, both structurally and in the ornamentation of the
scenery, as objects were positioned and adapted to accommodate the
cameras and monitors. A large wooden table in the center of the stage was
flanked on stage right by the mother's chair and on stage left by a pedestal
on which the television sat. Behind the table was a wall, part scrim and part
solid, adorned with a roughly drawn image of the dead father. The scrim
was used with simple effectiveness to reveal or hide the orchestra, depending
on the music in the scene, as well as for the appearance of the dead father,
Albert. The visual appearance of the monitors and television contributed to
this environment of accumulated detritus. Rather than the slickest new
technology, coordinated to create a specific visual unity, the screens on stage
were of varying type and quality. As a result, the image was fuzzier on some
rather than others, though not to the point of distraction, and the plastic
casings showed a range of age and use. But this physical reality, even if it
was determined by questions of cost, blended into the disrupting
juxtapositions of the entire piece and helped to situate the video even more
squarely in the world of play.
The performance of Tbe Mother had another life beyond the lived
experience at La MaMa. Hoping to enlarge their audience, develop their
association with other companies, and explore the impact of different
media, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf published a pamphlet, which they
distributed at the performance and have launched a website that displays
information about the company and its work. Each of these media has a
scope that covers more than just information about Tbe Mother. The
pamphlet, entitled Tbe Tbeatre qf a Two-Headed Calfs Narrow Sheet, included
information on film, theatre, and music performances at the time of the
production, as well as general information on the company. The company's
website, http://www. twoheadedcalf.org, includes information on
performances, members, press, and the artistic goals.
The pamphlet and website contribute to the experience of the play
by providing the insights of the collaborators through images, script drafts,
54
and production notes. In the pamphlet, the dramaturg Inna Giter interviews
Brooke O'Hara about her theatrical experience as well as her attraction to
Witkiewicz's work, in particular The Mother. There is also a synopsis of the
play and description of how the company worked on the production. The
website provides even more information, offering extensive and detailed
notes from O'Hara, Connelly, Giter (whose notes include three drafts of the
script at different stages), and Khan. Khan's notes are of particular interest
because he describes in detail the hardware and software used in the
production as well as provides production and video stills used to illustrate
the project's different dramatic techniques, such as distortion of past and
present, subtext, table play, and two-fisted videos, which were made possible
by the implementation of the cameras.
The pamphlet and website provided a useful accompaniment to the
production and allowed the interested viewer to investigate more deeply the
process and world of the play, offering useful links and hyperlinks to other
works and companies directly or indirectly connected to the work of the
Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. The extension of the live performance
through these various media reflects the broader aims of the Theatre of a
Two-Headed Calfs production of The Mother. O'Hara and her collaborators
were able to assemble puzzle pieces pulled from disparate sources, place
them side by side, and from seemingly irreconcilable juxtapositions
successfully create Witkiewicz's grotesquely absurd and socially challenging
worlds.
The Mother by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. Directed by Brooke O'Hara. Tr.
by Daniel Gerould. Starring Tina Shepard, Jim Fletcher, Suli Holum, Nicky
Paraiso, Wilson Hall, Zakia Babb & Barb Lanciers. Theatre of a Two-Headed
Calf, La MaMa, New York City. March 27- April13, 2003.
NOTES
1
Kimon Keramidas, "Two by Witkiewicz in Manhattan: Tumor Brainiowicz
and The Water Hen;' Slavic and Eastern European Performance, 22, no. 3 (Fall
2002): 88-93.
2 Brooke O'Hara to Inna Giter, "From Thermodynamics to Theatre," The
Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf's Narrow Sheet 1 (March 2003):
55
V ASSILY SIGAREV'S BLACK MILK
AT CHICAGO'S EUROPEAN REPERTORY COMPANY
Jeffrey Stephens
Lyudmila Razumovskaya's Dear Elena Sergeevna (1987) gave us an
almost perfect snapshot ofBrezhnevian youth in the Soviet Union's period
of stagnation. Now Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk, which received its American
premiere in Chicago last year, says things about the post-Yeltsin generation
that no article in the New York Times could capture as effectively for an
American audience. I hesitate to call it a major new work, but it is a hugely
actable one. Deeply rooted in its milieu and time, Black Milk may not be in
quite the same class as the naturalistic masterpieces of Chekhov or Gorky,
but it nonetheless demands attention. Today, we read a satirical comedy like
Nikolai Erdman's long suppressed Suicide (1928) as a savage portrayal of
Soviet life at the end of the NEP era, even though it has not proved able to
maintain a place in the current performance canon; such may be the fate of
Black Milk. But while its depiction of a Putinesque Russian world may not
speak as clearly to future generations as Cherry Orchard or Lower Depths,
Sigarev's play tells a compelling and sometimes devastatingly accurate story.
In a superb English translation by Sasha Dugdale, Black Milk is consistently
surprising, richly nuanced, and grimly realistic.!
The director Luda Lopatina, who, like the playwright Sigarev, was
born in Ekaterinburg (Soviet Sverdlovsk), has worked with Chicago's
European Repertory Company (ERC) for the past decade, staging Russian
standards and Soviet plays, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's Zoya's Apartment
(1926) and Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky (1987). Established in 1992, the
ERC is Chicago's best small theatre company. The ensemble members have,
more or less, remained committed to the company's mission over the years,
and co-directors Y asen Peyankov and Dale Goulding have steered the
company through many artistically successful seasons. The work of the ERC
is consistently solid in ways that few other Chicago companies of the past
decade and a half can boast of. Lopatina explains that the ERC seeks out
new plays from Eastern Europe and specifically Russia, although many a
non-Slavic play has been mounted over the years, including major
productions of Agamemnon, The Mayor of Zalamea, and Roberto Zucco
56
Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk directed by Luda Lopatina
at Chicago's European Repertory Company.
57
(classical Greek, Golden Age Spanish, and modern French respectively). I
have seen several of the company's Russian productions, and it is in this
metier that the group seems most at home. The path to their production of
Sigarev's play is not really all that circuitous, but, like most stories
surrounding how the rights of a modem foreign play are secured, it is worth
telling.
While in Moscow after directing a new Russian adaptation of
Albee's W'ho's Afraid of Virginia Woo!fl-for which she won a Russian Bravo
Award-Lopatina contacted Sigarev. She discovered that in keeping with its
long tradition of supporting new work, the Royal Court Theatre in London
had staged Sigarev's Plasticine as part of their annual International
Playwrights Seasons in 2002. In that same year, Sigarev was named "Most
Promising Playwright" by London's Evening Standard. Sigarev explained to
Lopatina that, native-born Ekaterinburger or not, she needed to contact the
Royal Court (since it handled the rights to his plays) for information about
staging the play in the United States. Although Lopatina remains based in
Chicago and Sigarev in Moscow and London, the two remain close friends.
Lopatina persevered, obtained the rights, and invited Sigarev to Chicago for
the American premiere, which he attended in November 2003. His most
recent play, Ladybird, was staged at the Royal Court in March 2004 and will
most likely be shepherded to the ERC for its American premiere. British
critical response to Ladybird has been overwhelmingly positive.
In Black Milk, against the dingy, peeling walls of a decrepit train
station somewhere in the "boundless motherland," a narrator accompanies
himself on the accordion while commenting on the inanity and
contradictory nature of contemporary Russian life. Sasha Dugdale's
eminently actable translation brings the dialogue to life in English. The
ticket clerk rules the freezing station from the confines of an ancient kiosk
in which she passes the time by listening to vapid Europop. Poppet and
Lyovchik arrive, cursing loudly and impudently at each other and at those
they encounter, only to be informed that the next train out of town won't
arrive until morning. Pregnant Poppet, Lyovchik's partner and lover, chain-
smokes her way through a vulgar litany of abuse directed at the town. A
ragtag group of villagers enters and demands refunds for the defective
toasters they have been sold by the pair. Led by Mishka, the group finds
strength in their collective will but is eventually crushed by the taunts and
humiliating logic behind Lyovchik's reasoning: he and Poppet are merely
middlemen, selling goods for the shady "Kanzai" company to the gullible.
58
It's not his fault that the town harbors so many suckers.
After the group has departed, a drunken man sprawled upstage
awakens and delivers a vodka-sodden ode on the death of the Russian souL
Mishka returns with a gun and fires several shots-all blanks-as chaos ensues
and the ticket clerk-echoing the plea of Bobchinsky in Gogol's Inspector
General, but turning it on its ear-screams, "When you get back to Moscow,
tell them how people really live in Russia!" The seemingly impenetrable
barrier between Russia's provincial poor and her urban inhabitants remains
unbreeched as the city folk are left on stage alone to deal with the terrifying
prospect of the birth of their child in what Poppet has many times labeled a
Vassily Sigarev's Black Milk directed by Luda Lopatina
at Chicago's European Repertory Company.
59
"shithole."
Sigarev uses sexy con artists, Lyovchik and Poppet, as
representatives of Russian urban survivors among the wretched poor of the
town of Mokhovoye hundreds of miles from Moscow. They have made it
through the first post-Soviet decade by selling worthless gadgets to easily
duped peasants. They are modern-day Chichikovs who ingratiate themselves
with all the provincials they meet and then hoodwink their prey with their
oily enthusiasm and eventual quick getaway. Their troika is the train, and it
plays a pivotal role in the plot. Poppet and Lyovchik are smarter than
Gogol's Khlestakov, less gregarious than Chekhov's Lopakhin, and more
destructive to those they encounter than those two upstarts combined.
Pregnant and quite literally on the verge of labor throughout Act I, Poppet
smokes, sucks on lollipops, and eats nothing that could nourish a baby. Her
callous treatment of their customers is made to seem less cruel than it would
be in reality, because there is so much talk about how the couple will change
once they have their child. Instead, the child's birth eventually forces them
into an untenable position that leads to the most compelling conclusion to
a new play that I have seen in years.
An eerie sense of impending catastrophe permeates Act II. A
perambulator sits immobile upstage, and since Black Snow is a drama
characterized by black comedy and an ambiguous tone, one thinks
immediately of Edward Bond's unnerving Saved and the fate of that play's
helpless infant. It is ten days later; Poppet (now referred to, in the
diminutive, as "Shura" by a new character, the doting Auntie Pasha) has
given birth and undergone an obvious physical and spiritual transformation.
She announces that she is "tired of being a bitch" and "wants to be a real
person." Although the baby is healthy, the infant refuses her mother's milk,
because it has been made too bitter by an irresponsible diet and, according
to Auntie Pasha, too much tobacco in the bloodstream.
To Lyovchik's utter disbelief, Shura wants to settle down in this
desolate hinterland. Arguments ensue, trains continue to roar past the
station, and Lyovchik gives Shura an ultimatum disguised as a legitimate
choice. He will allow her to stay in the town as long as the baby goes back
with him to Moscow. With all the ferocity of a crazed animal, Shura-acted
with special reserves of grace and skill by Heather Prete-fights for her baby,
for Russia, and, it seems, for the dignity of the Mokhovoye villagers whom
she once despised. The verbal duel metamorphoses into a physical one.
Although Shura is now light years ahead of Lyovchik in a strictly moral
60
sense (even refusing the proffered cigarettes that were once her lifeblood),
Lyovchik is physically powerful and, making him even more dangerous,
devoid of scruples. He punches her repeatedly in the womb until she lies
howling on the floor. As he bundles the child up and steals out the door,
Shura grabs the backpack full of bottled milk left by Auntie Pasha and flings
it full force against the upstage wall, while the baby begins screaming and
another train roars past.
In a complex scene expertly choreographed by Lopatina, the baby's
cries stop, the train's roar slowly fades, and the blindingly white milk from
the shattered bottles begins to ooze from the soaking backpack- all
underscored by Shura's wailing. When Lyovchik returns, the baby is gone,
presumably having been thrown underneath the speeding train. There is
nothing left for Shura to do but allow herself to be assisted out the door by
her lover, now branded to him for all time by her complicity in the death of
their child. The play ends with mournful notes from the accordion as yet
another train speeds by.
These last images may read as excessively melodramatic on paper,
but in the context of the ERC's production, they constitute theatrical
moments so pure and so perfect that they take on the quality of a
touchstone for contemporary Russian playwriting, superseding anything
written in a book about the period.
Black Milk is an exciting new play that can be mounted relatively
easily in studio theatres and black box spaces. It can serve as an important
introduction to new Russian drama for both audiences and young actors
who will relish the opportunity to play such richly seductive characters in
emotionally extreme circumstances.
Black Milk by Vassily Sigarev. Directed by Luda Lopatina. Translated by
Sasha Dugdale. European Repertory Company at the Athenaeum Theatre,
Chicago, Illinois. November 2003-January 2004.
NOTES
1 Published by Nick Hem Books, London, 2004.
61
QUI SAlT?
CHEKHOV'S PLATONOVON THE STAGE OF
THE COMEDIE-FRAN<;AISE
November 22, 2003-March 31, 2004. Directed by Jacques Lassalle
Ekaterina Sukhanova
Chekhov's younger brother, Michael, reported sharing some of the
earlier plays of Anton with his own literary contacts and receiving the
following feedback: "The style is excellent, there is skill, but observation and
life experience are insufficient. In due time, qui sait, he may develop into a
worthwhile writer. " 1
Platonov (left by Chekhov without a title) could indeed be called a
problematic play. Never revised by the author, it is rarely included in
collections of Chekhov's works and not frequently staged. Most non-
specialist readers are familiar with it only through excerpts incorporated into
Nikhita Mikhalkov's film Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano,2 whose script
represents a creative pastiche of different works by Chekhov.
Platonov is itself a bit of a pastiche as the spectator starts to
recognize the outlines of various characters and situations that Chekhov will
return to in Ivanov, Seagull, Three Sisters, and Cherry Orchard. Chekhov may
not have thought of his play as worthy of reviving, but he certainly did not
let his drafts and sketches go to waste. It is not often that the audience is
permitted such a close look at the workshop of a master. We can already
witness his utter disregard for political correctness, and his unwillingness
either to exonerate or vilify his characters.
Ironically, the Comedie-Franc;:aise finishes its cycle of Chekhov
productions with Platonov, the only play by Chekhov never before staged at
the French theatre. We are back at the beginning: Jacques Lassalle, in his
direction, chooses to pretend that no one in the audience or on stage has
read anything else by Chekhov and to take the text at face value. Neither the
richer, subtler palette of the mature Chekhov nor the righteous rage of the
liberal Russian literature of the late nineteenth century are allowed to make
their way into this staging. The actors approach their characters with an
almost clinical detachment, which Dr. Chekhov might have appreciated.
As the curtain rises, we see a young girl in a neoclassical dress, lying
62
Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 24, No.2
in a languid pose. Mter a while, she gets up, puts on a gray coat and leaves.
This scene serves as a silent epigraph to the entire play: when the larger-than-
life ideas shatter, the only refuge seems to be behind a gray coat of cynicism.
For some, however, this coat proves to be leaden.
The play opens with the Russian "nichego" [it's nothing], and
occasionally the characters break into singing in Russian before switching to
French. The stage set and movements (except for a couple of overly
choreographed scenes) may be seen as rather conservative. It is the
psychological motivation of the characters that is radically different from
what would be seen in a traditional Russian production. There is not a touch
of melodrama, hysteria, or self-pity. The reference to the contemporary
social conditions is cut to the minimum, as if not to grant the characters any
claim to mitigating circumstances.
The production uses a new translation by Serge Rezvani, which
captures the idiosyncratic twists of Chekhov's language rather well, even if
the result may sound a tad too colloquial at times. It is usually a practical
necessity to trim the lengthy original text when staging Platonov.
Interestingly, in addition to some clearly repetitive scenes, the references to
the classical works of Russian social satire were among the lines cut, while all
quotes from Hamlet were retained. It would seem that this is explained not
just by the fact that Shakespeare is incomparably better known in France
than Griboyedov and Fonvizin (the translation could have made the
references understandable), but also by the overall approach to the staging:
the shift from the social to the personal.
The contrasts are made sharper, the representation almost merciless:
Chekhov is taken at his word. In the first few scenes, Sophia (Catherine
Sauval), the woman Platonov loved in his youth, speaks with the artificial
friendliness of a professional politician. Even the servant put in charge of
delivering love notes allows herself a degree of sarcasm that would be
unconvincing were she supposed to give a realistic representation of a
Russian peasant woman.
Grekova, the "blue stocking," who files a harassment complaint
against Platonov and ends up trying to shield him from another woman's
bullet, becomes a caricature reminiscent of Chekhov's earliest short stories.
Later, Chekhov himself will write: "It's true, caricature is sharper and
therefore easier to understand, but it's better to leave something unfinished
than blacken it."3 In Platonov, admittedly, Grekova is not portrayed with the
complexity characteristic of Chekhov's mature work. Clothilde de Bayser's
63
acting does not smooth over the rough edges, but rather highlights them.
In the scene of final explanation with Sophia, Platonov no longer
believes in the possibility of rebuilding his life. Yet at a certain moment he
does waver: "Bring me back to life, put me on my feet, do what you want,
but quickly, or I will lose my mind!" When Sophia sets their departure at
ten o'clock the following morning, Platonov repeats: "Eleven or ten?" In this
production, the order is inverted: Denis Podalydes as Platonov says:"Ten ...
or eleven?" in the tone of a schoolboy hoping to skip a class. Plato nov
himself, and the audience along with him, is completely clear that this
meeting will never take place. Chekhov may lead us to the same conclusion
but only in the following scene. Here, the diagnosis had already been made.
The greater is the impact of those key moments throughout the play when
buffoonery yields to drama, and we see Platonov desperately trying to
believe his own words-and, by extension, to regain self-respect by proving
to be the person capable of these thoughts and gestures.
The characters thirst for a new life; yet, all the while talking about
being still young and wanting to live, they destroy themselves and each
other, both figuratively and literally. Anna Petrovna, the young widow at
whose country house the action takes place, loses her estate and her
livelihood. Platonov's wife Sasha swallows poison. Platonov clumsily
attempts to shoot himself. Sophia, now abandoned by Platonov and having
been told by Anna Petrovna that begging a lover to stay is "unwomanly,"
shoots him-resolutely firing two bullets in a row. When Platonov is
pronounced dead, Anna Petrovna (Muriel Mayette) makes a gesture absent
in Chekhov's text: taking the revolver away from Sophia, she puts it into
Platonov's hand. Is she merely protecting her rival and her house from
police inquiries? Or is it the final attempt to credit Platonov with having
made his own choice, the first and last time in his existence?
The play thus ends on a note that precludes emotional outbursts.
Strange to say, freed of the exotic condition of l'dme slave and other popular
myths, Chekhov becomes more relevant to the modern audience. It is not
only the suffering of men and women in the (perpetually) stifling Russian
society, but their existential burden that comes into focus. The
indecisiveness and ambiguity that plague the characters become
recognizable as symptoms of the modern condition. We are left with
Chekhov's signature paradox: the ridiculous, awkward, and decidedly
"unromantic" nature of human suffering as it is perceived today does
nothing to make the pain any less profound.
64
As Yury Lotman said, "Only Chekhov was able to escape from the
temptation of straightforward sermons and to avoid bringing art down to the
level of a propaganda tool. Yet there was no genius more lonely in Russian
culture and, most importantly, no other writer whose work would have no
continuation (if Chekhov's approach to art was continued at all, then ... it
was continued in poetry ... )."4 Jacques Lassalle's production successfully
conveys that "otherness" of Chekhov's aesthetics, which explains why
Chekhov did not develop into a regional writer of "one of the southern
provinces." At the Comedie-Fran(:aise, we observe a lonely genius in the
making. Somehow the performance manages to convey the anxiety present
in the question: what will become of this promising young author? Qui sait?
It is an anxiety echoed by one of Chekhov's three sisters when she says,"If
only we could know ... if only!"
NOTES
1 Perepiska A. P. Chekhova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1984),
2:48.
2 Mosfilm, 1977; recently released by RUSCICO on DVD with multilingual
subtitles.
3 Perepiska A. P. Chekhova, 2: 208.
4 Yury Lotman. 0 poetach i poezii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1996), 679-
680.
65
ALEXANDER NEVSKYREVISITED IN 2003:
A FILM SCREENING WITH A LIVE PERFORMANCE
Sacra Yoon
On July 24, 2003, the Indiana University Summer Music Festival
presented a performance of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky that accompanied
a screening of Eisenstein's film for which the music had been composed.
Audiences had a rare opportunity to appreciate the collaborative genius of
two twentieth-century masters in a perfect realization that both Eisenstein
and Prokofiev would have acclaimed. The event was part of a worldwide
celebration commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Prokofiev's death.
As a film, Alexander Nevsky has consistently attracted the attention
of both critics and fans, and Prokofiev's musical score has been widely
popular in its own right on recordings and at concerts. But the union of
music and visual image achieved in the film's 193 9 release was far from
successful due to the limited technical resources available in the Soviet
Union at the time. To make matters worse, it seems Stalin inadvertently gave
his blessing and unconditional permission to the project, which was still in
the process of final editing, so no subsequent Soviet bureaucrats dared to
authorize any improvements to the "Stalin version." As a result, despite
Prokofiev's brilliant score, the "original" soundtrack, which had not been
completed at the time of Stalin's viewing, still remained bound to the "Stalin
cut." This original soundtrack failed to provide the film with the full power
of its projected effect as conceived by its creators.
The live performance of Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky that
accompanied the film not only reinstated the collaborative artistry of the
two creators but went beyond the original intentions of the filmmaker and
composer. Documents show that Prokofiev, fascinated by Walt Disney's
work, made various experiments with recording techniques, but he hardly
envisioned a film screening accompanied by live musical performance.!
It is William Brohn who deserves the credit for realizing this
ground-breaking project. When John Go berman arranged for the screening
of a new print of Alexander Nevsky in 1987, he commissioned Brohn to
reconstruct Prokofiev's lost score to the film. Prokofiev's extant Alexander
Nevsky Cantata had been adapted for concert purposes and did not match
the full length of the film. Brohn, in fact, had to turn a forty-minute Cantata
66
Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 24, No.2
into a sixty-minute film score, largely by inserting repeats, but also by
occasionally transcribing from a videotape of the soundtrack and by
creatively filling in the gaps.2
The format of live orchestra and chorus accompanying the
screening of a film is not a totally new experiment. Since 1987, it has
become a regular feature of cinema in Europe, while it has slowly gained
popularity in the United States, after its American debut in 1987 with Andre
Previn.3
Alexander Nevsky was a milestone in Eisenstein's career; it was his
first completed sound film4 and first collaboration with Prokofiev, whose
deep respect he reciprocated. After a decade of humiliating career setbacks
and with his life in danger as Stalin's Great Purge approached in 1937,
Eisenstein had to abandon his visual experiments and instead depict what at
first glance appeared to be a grandiose figure according to the tyrant's
demands for a national hero capable of arousing the Russian people's
patriotic sentiments.s
As a result, Alexander Nevsky is often considered to be Eisenstein's
simplest narrative, characterized by smooth linear editing, while eschewing
his trademark intellectual montage. Alexander Nevsky was a nationalistic film
that focused on a single hero, whereas the earlier silent films were socialist
productions with a strong emphasis on the collective proletariat.6
Nonetheless, the film was rewarding for Eisenstein for another reason. He
was grateful to have an opportunity to explore a new territory (sound and
music) in which he could expand the semantics of the visual image.7
Reflecting upon his collaboration with the renowned composer, Eisenstein
wrote that "working with Prokofiev's music and collaborating with Prokofiev
to develop new dialectical theories of integrating music into film were the
only enriching aspects of Nevsky for him."8
Although Alexander Nevsky has been acclaimed as having one of the
finest film scores, little attention-at least in English-has been devoted to
examining the idiosyncratic quality of the music. Prokofiev's score not only
complements the exquisitely framed visual presentation (the conventional
function of most soundtracks), it also, more interestingly, occasionally
contradicts what is being presented visually in favor of developing, as
Eisenstein himself put it, "new dialectics." Merritt provides a few convincing
examples that demonstrate the deliberate discrepancy between the visual
image and the musical lyric. He draws attention to the early sequence at
Lake Pleshcheyev where Alexander Nevsky' s life is depicted in a very idyllic
67
tone. The chorus, however, sets up a contrasting image, as it sings about
Alexander Nevsky's military triumph and, in doing so, communicates to the
audience the true identity of the fisherman Nevsky as the savior of Rus'.9
Merritt aptly argues that Prokofiev's music serves as a counterpoint to the
visual presentation.JO
Given the importance of the lyrics, an English translation of the
text of the choral music is necessary so that non-native Russian audiences
can follow the "dialectics." The Indiana University Orchestra appropriately
provided subtitles for the choral pieces as well as for the dialogue. The
chorus for the performance was made up of the Bloomington Chamber
Singers and students of the Indiana University Music School students,
numbering 169 singers.ll Thanks to Kyrill Dyachkov's coaching, the Russian
diction of the singers was more than satisfactory.
The "counterpuntal method" of sound that aims at a "sharp discord
with the visual images" to achieve a higher level of montage was strongly
promoted by Eisenstein in his early "Statement on Sound" (1928).12 Later,
however, he modified his views about sound in discussing the synthetic
fusion of sound and pictorial presentation in Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein
called it "vertical montage," presenting a diagram that graphically illustrates
a complete correspondence between movement and music patterns.l3
Alexander Nevsky indeed reveals that the director shunned overly
experimental, drastic, or sharp discords, and rather chose safer ground for a
more comprehensible fusion. Yet Eisenstein made use of his old principle
on some occasions with a subdued intensity, to which Merritt's observation
testifies.
Deliberate mismatch of music and picture occurs also in the
sequence of the "Battle on the Ice," which the director himself claimed was
the most complete fusion of audio-visual images.l4 Just as Eisenstein gave
the German knights and Russian soldiers visual leitmotifs by assigning each
side characteristic costumes and armor,IS so Prokofiev provided a musical
leitmotif for each camp.
1
6 The Germans are associated with intentionally
jarring sounds produced by a heavy use of brass. On the other hand, the
Russians are linked to an orchestration of bright tonality. Yet in some
sections, the Russians appear on screen with the leitmotif of the Germans.
One such instance occurs when the Russian leaders look afar, awaiting the
confrontation with the Germans. The music implies apprehension on the
part of the Russians regarding the approaching German force; the overcast
sky, with its dark clouds, suggests that the Russians are brooding about the
68
Germans. This scene allows the audience to feel a double presence-a visual
presence of the Russians and a cognitive presence of the Germans-at the
same time in a single frame.l7
The visual climax of the film, the "Battle on the Ice," did not cast
its spell on today's young audience as it invariably did on past spectators.
Today's viewers have grown accustomed to more sophisticated or more
spectacular films about war. The choreography of the close-up sword fights
may have appeared too simplistic. The cracking of the ice perhaps seemed
to be shot at too close a range, which would not satisfY a contemporary
audience's taste for panoramic views.
A more powerful scene for the contemporary audience came
immediately after the battle as Ol'ga searched for her suitors on the dark
battlefield. Its emotional range was enlarged by our memories of the
opening vignette portraying a deserted battlefield strewn with skeletons. The
previously fierce clash of musical themes between the German and Russian
leitmotifs then gave way to the voice of mezzo-soprano Sophie Roland who
sings the only solo vocal piece in the entire score; its heartrending melody,
in Roland's moving rendition, enhanced the audience's emotional
experience. Preceded by the battle and followed by Nevsky's victorious
return, this expression of sorrow contrasted with the highly masculine,
dynamic sequences.
The night' s sorrow was followed by the day's joy and its clear
justice. The orchestra came back to dominate with jubilant music. After the
resolution of national and personal problems (traitors and German leaders
were executed; two brave Russian soldiers settled their rivalries without bitter
confrontation), the movie ended in a solemn chorus exalting Russian
patriotism.
Live performance of the music gave the film a chance to come alive
as a synthetic art. The live orchestra added a unique flavor to the film so that
an identically reproducible art, film, turned into a one-time performance
akin to an opera or a play. When it was over, I could not help feeling the
urge to reach for a remote control to rewind and watch the film again. But
alas, it was a one-time showing with live musical accompaniment. After all,
this live performance of Prokofiev's score that accompanied the screening of
the film had fulfilled all the expectations that Eisenstein and Prokofiev had
aroused.
69
NOTES
I Russell Merritt, "Recharging Alexander Nevsky: Tracking the Eisenstein-
Prokofiev War Horse," Film Quarterly, vo!. 48, no. 2 (1994-1995 Winter):
42-43.
2 One ofBrohn's insertions is a bell ringing that is played simultaneously on
and off screen, creating a feeling of immediacy in the pictorial presentation.
The Indiana University Orchestra, under the direction of Erich Kunzel,
astounded the audience with its perfect synchronization. On Brohn's
contribution, see Robert Faires's article in Austin Chronicle, vol. 22, no. 38
(May, 2003).
3 Merritt, 34. To my knowledge, the presentation of a live performance of
the film score in conjunction with a screening has already been done a few
times in 2003: in England in March with Ashkenazy and in April under the
direction of Andrey Boreyko. The Austin Symphony presented such a
performance on May 23 and 24, and Indiana University and the Salt Lake
City Film Center staged their screening in July.
4 Eisenstein's first attempt at a sound film was the ill-fated Bezhin Meadow.
s The propaganda value of the film lies in the fact that Nevsky is a thinly
veiled epic hero alluding to Stalin. For more on this topic, see James
Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993). Historically, the conflict between the Teutonic knights and the
Eastern Slavs took on a strong religious coloration, since the former took
their crusades as a holy war to spread Catholicism over Orthodoxy. To a
large extent, the film avoided portraying Russian Orthodoxy positively, but
the Germans' religious designs were made clear. Eisenstein, however,
surreptitiously incorporated Biblical symbolism into the image of Alexander
Nevsky, who is in fact a saint in Russian Orthodoxy. Alexander Nevsky first
appears in the film as bearded and dressed in a plain white tunic while he
and his people are fishing. He is also endowed with the Christ-like attributes
oflove for children (as stressed in his victorious return parade to Novgorod)
and leadership of his people.
6 However, the idea of a collective protagonist did not altogether disappear.
It attains a historically adapted form in the humble armorer, !gnat'. He
represents the simple folk. Other significant secondary figures are Gavrilo
and Vasily, who serve the military hero Nevsky. They also provide a love
plot, while the armorer offers a folkloric story about catching a rabbit, which
70
Nevsky employs in his military tactics. On the other hand, Goodwin
explains Eisenstein's artistic shift in the political landscape as the result of
the regime's cult of a nationalistic autocrat (156-7).
7 Indeed, long interested in the use of sound in cinema, Eisenstein wrote an
article "Statement on Sound" (1928) ten years prior to Alexander Nevsky.
Sound cinema was not feasible in 1928, he admitted, given the "technical
capabilities" available in Russia. See Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) vol.l.
8
Merritt, 42
9 Rus' was Eisenstein's title for the film.
10 Merritt, 38-39
11 It is interesting to note that whereas Prokofiev was given only a studio-size
ensemble (about twenty, Merritt speculates), the Indiana University
Orchestra consisted of ninety musicians.
12 Eisenstein, Selected Works, 114.
13 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense (New York: A Harvest Book, 1975), 157-
216.
14 Ibid, 174.
15 In a curious inversion of the usual practice about color schemes,
Eisenstein puts white robes on the Germans and gives the Russians dark
costumes. On the visual style of the film, see Michael Grost. He detects the
Malevich style in the Germans' clothes.
http:/ /www.mem bers.aol.com/M G4273/ eisenstn.htm
16 Furthermore, Eisenstein provided the musical component with visual
imagery by sharply contrasting the use of music by the two opposing camps.
A hideous monk-musician, little better than a living corpse wrapped in a
black hood, plays a portable organ for the Teutonic knights, while a band of
peasant youths playing horns often appears to cheer on the Russians.
17 Although Eisenstein did not develop this point further, he was well aware
of a "psychological viewpoint" that allowed the audience to direct their
attention to "some unseen point from which they (the Russian forces] are
expecting the foe to attack," Eisenstein, Film Sense, 185.
71
PROKOFIEV AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES:
THE IMPACT OF SOVIET CULTURE
Vincent Astor Gallery, The New York Library for the Performing Arts
October 15, 2003 to March 27, 2004
Daniel Gerould
The small but choice exhibition, Prokofiev and His Contemporaries,
shown in the ground-level gallery of the Library for the Performing Arts,
exuded a special atmosphere that was conducive to reflection and
daydreaming. The exhibit was scheduled to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of Prokofiev's death on March 5, 1953, which at the time had
been overshadowed by Stalin's death three hours later-both victims of
cerebral hemorrhage.
On the four or five occasions that I visited the show, I was virtually
alone in the one-room gallery, only once or twice sharing the space for a few
minutes with some other discrete time-traveler who dropped by briefly,
breathed in a whiff of those bygone times, and left unobtrusively. For the
most part, I was at the exhibit by myself, in quiet isolation with the artifacts-
designs and costumes, personal memorabilia, photographs, letters and
drawings- neatly labeled and enclosed in their glass cases. My access to the
past was undisturbed by the usual jostling and gaping of museum-going
hordes at major exhibits. No one blocked my view; I could return as often
as I wished to re-examine a theatre program or take a second or third look at
a photograph that intrigued me. Nor was I unaware of the paradox that here
in perfect solitude I was able to enter into private communion with the
creators of an art designed for the masses.
The effect produced was evidently what the curators had intended.
Invited to make a journey back to the great age of Soviet culture and its
utopian dreams, I experienced nostalgia for the days when the mighty USSR
was the lodestone drawing artists and intellectuals from around the world
who were attracted by the Russians' bold innovations in the performing arts.
An exhibit of simple means and limited quantities, Prokofiev and His
Contemporaries evoked the era when the Soviet Union was at the height of its
cultural power. As I wandered among the display cabinets and looked at the
pictures and documents, I tried to imagine how that distant and now "lost"
72
Photograph of Sergey Prokofiev, inscribed to Carl Lachmund,
New York, 1920. Carl Lachmund Collection, Music Division,
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
73
civilization must have appeared when Soviet composers, directors, theatre
artists, and designers were, for the first time, being discovered and serving as
an inspiration to students, scholars, and artists in the West.
The overarching theme of the exhibit was the impact of Soviet
culture on the American performing arts, and its aim was to recapture the
excitement occasioned by the pioneering tours of Russian artists in America
and to experience the exhilaration felt by American tourists going to the
Soviet Union on cultural pilgrimages.
Prokofiev, an international artist who worked in many genres and
media in both Russia and the West, was the focal point of the exhibit, but
it also featured directors, writers, and designers with whom he worked in
theatre, film, dance, and opera, as well as the creators of other works
thematically or aesthetically related. Above all, interdisciplinary connections
among the arts were very much in the foreground.
TOURS AND TOURISM
The two ground-breaking visits, organized by Edgar Guest, of the
Moscow Art Theatre to the United States-the First Studio in 1923-24 and
Nemirovich-Danchenko's Second (Musical) Studio in 1926-were
documented by photographs and letters. For example, there was a picture of
Guest, John Barrymore (in costume for Hamlet), Stanislavsky, Olga Knipper-
Chekhova, Jane Cowl, Ethel Barrymore, and others, accompanied by a letter
of thanks from Stanislavsky to Guest, signed by the members of the
company,
However, opportunities to see Soviet theatre on tour in America
were rare. The surest way to discover what was new in the performing arts in
Moscow and Leningrad was to go to the source. The exhibit provides
amusing evidence showing that theatre was a tourist attraction cultivated by
the Soviets for money and prestige. The In-Tourist agency arranged study
tours and festivals for academics and theatre artists, which were led by
Russian-speaking scholars like Norris Houghton. On display were booklets
and brochures about Soviet theatre published by In-Tourist to attract
tourists. After reading the posters for the Fourth Soviet Theatre Festival held
in Moscow and Leningrad from September 1-10, 1936, I was ready to book
my place! The complete ten-day tour, encompassing hotels, meals,
sightseeing, theatre tickets (plays mostly by young Soviet authors), and rail
fare between the two cities, cost $65 third class, $95 tourist class, and $165
74
Slavic and East European Performance VoL 24, No.2
first class. And these prices also included speeches to the VISitors by
Meyerhold, Tairov, Stanislavsky, Koonen, Kachalov, and Moskvin.
For me, the most fascinating instance of theatrical tourism in the
exhibit was Hallie Flanagan's month in Soviet Union in November 1926 as
part of her study program in Europe. A display case full of documents (from
the Hallie Flanagan Davis Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Collection) gave an
immediate sense of actually being there on the trip. Inscribed theatre
programs and notebooks with her day-by-day schedule indicated exactly
who and what she saw: Salome at the Kamerny, Meyerhold's Inspector General
and Magnanimous Cuckold, Michael Chekhov's Hamlet, Bulgakov's Days if
the Turbins, Bely's adaptation of his novel Petersburg, on the program of
which Flanagan had written: "Chekhov as the old senator gives the most
marvelous single acting I have seen in Russia (November 24, 1926)."
PROKOFIEV AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
Prokofiev was a perfect figure around whom to organize such an
exhibition. Pre-eminently a composer for the stage and screen, he worked
collaboratively with the outstanding talents of the time in America, Western
Europe, and Russia: Diaghilev and les Ballets Russes, Tairov, Meyerhold,
and Eisenstein. He wrote eight operas, eight ballets, and many film scores,
as well as incidental music for Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, Evgenii
Onegin, and Boris Godunov.
Of all the arts, theatre was what Prokofiev liked best; its stagecraft
never ceased to fascinate him. He had developed this love as a child when
his mother took him to see Gounod's Faust, Borodin's Prince Igor, and
Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. He was convinced that "Russian theatre leaves
far behind it the French and American."
Prokofiev was a literary man himself He wrote the libretti-alone or
in collaboration- for all his operas, adapting the Russian classics, Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, and T olstoi, and the symbolists, Balmont and Bryusov, as well
as Shakespeare-the source for his most successful ballet, Romeo and juliet. As
a young man, he wrote fantastic stories. He met and was greatly impressed
with Mayakovsky. Pushkin was his favorite author (for balancing irony and
romanticism). He was a prolific letter writer and brilliant diarist. If Prokofiev
had not studied music and become a composer, he might well have become
a writer- or a chess player.
75
76
Photog(aph of the Herald in the Bolshoi Opera production of Prokofiev's
The Love for Three Oranges, 1927. The State Academic Bolshoi Theat(e
Museum, Moscow.
Slavic and East European Pnformance Vol. 24, No.2
PROKOFIEV'S PERSONALITY
What sort of a person was Prokofiev? He remains something of an
enigma, a man protected by a mask. He left his homeland in 1918 at the age
of twenty-seven and only returned permanently in 1937 when he was forty-
seven. Why did he come back to the Soviet Union after spending twenty
years in the West? How do we explain his transformation from the nomadic
cosmopolitan enfant terrible of the 1920s to the national Soviet composer of
his last years? In the West Prokofiev was known for playfulness, primitivism,
satire, and sarcasm. When in 1948 he was criticized for formalistic
distortions and anti-democratic tendencies, he docilely agreed to try to
modify his style and wrote music more in line with the official decrees.
The personal memorabilia (from Glinka State Central Museum of
Musical Culture, Moscow) provide us with some clues as to what he was like.
On display are Prokofiev's Erikaz Cyrillic typewriter, gloves, razor, hat, cane,
chessboard and pieces, surmounted by an announcement of a match with
David Oistrakh on November 9, 1937. Other items include binoculars,
small English Bible (he was obsessed with Christian Science), metronome,
harmonica, briefcase, collar and collar box, playing cards, and Schirmers
music notebooks
As a piano virtuoso and iconoclastic composer, Prokofiev was
perceived to be brash, cocky, and arrogant. He liked the exact sciences, five-
star French restaurants, maps, fancy motorcars, and elegant clothes, but he
was not a social snob like Diaghilev and Stravinsky who relished aristocratic
patronage. Devoid of sentiment and concern for others' feelings, Prokofiev
was demanding, totally absorbed in his musical projects, for which he acted
as his own manager and agent. Self-discipline, hard work, and the joy of
creativity ruled his life.
Mocking and ironic in tone, he could be acerbic, even abusive, in
his dealings with others. Certainly an episode with George Balanchine, who
choreographed Prokofiev's L'Enfantprodigue for les Ballets Russes in 1929,
reveals a violently intemperate streak. According to Balanchine, when he
asked Prokofiev whether he would have the same financial arrangement as
with Stravinsky in their collaboration on Apollon, Prokofiev snapped, "Why
should you get money? Who are you? You're nothing but a lousy ballet
master. Get out!"! Balanchine never worked again with Prokofiev, dismissing
his approach to dance in these terms: "Prokofiev was a great chess player,
and that's how he thought-in straight mathematical terms."
77
On the other hand, Prokofiev was unusually generous to other
musicians and supportive of his Soviet colleagues, promoting their works in
the West when he lived abroad. And he developed enduring artistic and
personal friendships with Meyerhold and Eisenstein. His potentially most
fruitful collaboration would undoubtedly have been with Meyerhold, the
artist closest to him in outlook and temperament. The vagaries of fate and
the hostility of the Soviet bureaucracy saw to it that none of their
collaborative projects was ever realized. I should like to look more closely at
Prokofiev's projected work with Meyerhold since it is not well known
(having been suppressed after Meyerhold's disgrace and execution) and
throws interesting light on both artists.
PROKOFIEV AND MEYERHOLD: THE IDEAL COLLABORATORS
WHO NEVER COLLABORATED
Only in the past decade has it been possible to recognize how deep,
extensive, and significant were the ties between Meyerhold and Prokofiev.
Meyerhold saw Prokofiev as the ideal composer for his theatrical
experiments. They were a natural collaborative pair. Believers in the magic
and fantasy of theatre, both valued precision, wit, and dexterity typified by
the commedia dell'arte. Both were interested in popular entertainment,
buffoonery, and archaic folklore.
From the start Meyerhold defended Prokofiev against attacks
claiming he was an emigre corrupted by Western modernism and thus alien
to Soviet culture. Prokofiev felt particularly close to Meyerhold, who had
musical training and a musical conception of theatre and wanted musical
exactness in theatrical production.
In 1918 Meyerhold gave Prokofiev the first issue of his new journal,
Love for Three Oranges, which contained the adaptation the director and his
associates had made of Gozzi's play and suggested that Prokofiev make an
opera of it. (Meyerhold had originally thought of Richard Strauss but then
decided that the German composer showed a "lack of taste.") Prokofiev read
Love for Three Oranges on his way to America and wrote his opera which was
premiered in Chicago in 1921.
Prokofiev wanted Meyerhold to direct his opera The Gambler and
his ballet Pas d'Acier. Meyerhold, who considered The Gambler as redefining
opera for the future, planned to produce it at Mariinsky in 1917. Meyerhold
asked Prokofiev to write the music for his production of Mayakovsky's
78
Bedbug and only turned to Shostakovich when Prokofiev could not
undertake the task because of his commitment to L 'Enfant Prodigue for
Diaghilev. On his visit to USSR in 1927 Prokofiev saw Meyerhold's Inspector
General and Magnanimous Cuckold. Prokofiev wrote incidental music for
Bons Godunov, which Meyerhold rehearsed and prepared from 1934 to 1936.
Meyerhold was rehearsing Prokofiev's opera Semyon Kotko when he was
arrested in 1939.
THE EXHIBITION BROCHURE AND ITS READING OF SOVIET
CULTURE AND CREATIVITY
Since the fall of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union,
a more complex and nuanced view of Prokofiev's career has become possible
now that we have access to diaries, correspondence, and archival material
previously unavailable and, most important, now that old iron curtain
attitudes have changed. This shift is reflected in the handsome ten-page fold-
out brochure accompanying the exhibit, which contains photographs,
drawings, and an extensive interpretive text containing the essential
argument underlying the exhibition about the flowering of Soviet music and
theatre from the Revolution through the early 1950s and their impact on the
American performing arts.
It is revisionist reading of this controversial period of Soviet-
American cultural history. All traces of cold war rhetoric have been shed; the
word propaganda is never used, There is nothing about Prokofiev's two
Stalin prizes or about Meyerhold's execution. The narrative strives to be
conciliatory and non-judgmental, without the self-righteousness of safe
hindsight. Emphasis is on artistic collaborations and friendships, on the
business of making theatre and music, no matter how difficult or dangerous
the times. The brochure stresses accomplishments and the legacy, rather
than on tragedies and failure.
The sub-headings of the text tell the story: "An Era of
Experimentation, An Era of Nationalism, An Era of Didacticism, and The
Impact on American Performing Arts." Socialist realism, the brochure
maintains, "began as a popular movement in the Soviet Union, attracting a
general audience by representing real life. In their effort to connect the
performing arts to the Soviet populace, artists looked for themes and plot
lines from Soviet life and history."
Such an account suggests that socialist realism at first may have
79
been a spontaneous movement providing audiences with what they wanted-
representations of real life-while downplaying the idea that it was a strategy
for controlling the arts imposed from on high.
Although there is mention of this aesthetic becoming mandatory in
the late Stalinist period (the only mention of Stalin in the brochure), official
denunciations, and the stunned reaction of artists at the 1948 meeting of the
Union of Soviet Composers, nothing is said of the fate of those who
opposed the imposition of rigid controls by a rigid and ruthless bureaucracy.
This is a narrative that does not harp on political terror, repression of the
arts, and duped American fellow travelers, but rather chooses to explore the
actual functioning of the arts in the Soviet Union, the outpouring of
creativity, and its impact on sympathetic American artists.
The conclusion of the brochure makes clear its depoliticized
reading of events: "Creativity was made more demanding by revolution and
war. For Prokofiev and his contemporaries, the greatest challenge to
creativity was caused when the central government stepped in to refocus the
arts." The phrases "stepped in" and "refocus" mark the extent to which the
exhibit curators have moved the discussion away from moral absolutes and
indignation in an attempt to a consider how artists actually attempted to live
and function under the circumstances in which they found themselves. It is
a non-melodramatic, unmanichean account; there are no longer heroes or
villains among Russian artists according to who collaborated with the
government and who dissented openly or covertly; nor are there good and
bad artist-tourists according to who saw through the fraud and those who
believed all the appearances.
The exhibit celebrated creativity in its day to day operations; it told
stories about artists and audiences, about their comings and goings, and it
also gave credit to those who arranged and organized the production and
consumption of culture, such as the National Council of American-Soviet
Friendship and the American Soviet Music Society founded by Aaron
Copland, which sponsored concerts.
After my final visit I left the exhibit feeling that I had been in a
hermetically sealed tiny replica of a world that was once immensely
powerful, a source of new and vital creativity in the arts, and this was
something thrilling. But as I remembered that it was hollow, its ideals false
(the Hymns to Lenin and Odes to Stalin!), and that it all fizzled out, I was
overcome by nostalgic sadness. For all that, the fabulous legacy left by
Prokofiev and his contemporaries remains very much alive. The ambient
80
musical soundtrack and images on video monitors, which went along with
the exhibit, as well as the lectures and film series, made that evident.
Prokofiev and His Contemporaries was a joint Project of The New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the MUSSICA RUSSIA
FOUNDATION. It was developed by Barbara Cohen-Stratyner and Judy R.
and Alfred A. Rosenberg. I am grateful to them for this exceptional exhibit.
Postscript: The Fiery Angel, Prokofiev's sensational opera based on Valery
Bryusov's novel of the occult and erotic, opened at the Bolshoi in Moscow
on April24, 2004.
NOTES
1 Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev (New York: Viking, 1987), 231.
SOURCES
Ansimov, Georgii. Sergei Prokofiev: Tropoiu opemoi dramaturgii. Moscow:
GITIS, 1994.
Prokofiev, Sergei. Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings. Tr. And ed. Oleg
Prokofiev. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.
Robinson, Harlow, tr. and ed. Selected Letters of Sergei Prokifiev. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998.
__ .Sergei Prokifiev. N.Y.: Viking, 1987.
Samuel, Claude. Prokifiev. Tr. Miriam John. N.Y.: Grossman Publishers,
1971.
81
CONTRIBUTORS
KATHLEEN CIOFFI is a book editor and independent scholar who writes
frequently about Polish theatre. She was a co-founder of Maybe Theatre, an
English-language theatre company in Gdansk, Poland. Her book Polish
Alternative Theatre 1954-1989 won the American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies Orbis Award and the Polish Studies
Association's Third Biennial Prize.
JOHN FREEDMAN is the author or editor and translator of nine books
about Russian theatre and has been the theatre critic for the Moscow Times
since that newspaper's inception in 1992. His latest book is Provoking Theater:
Kama Ginkas Directs, co-authored with Ginkas.
KIMON KERAMIDAS is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in
Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York working
on the intersection of live performance and digital media. He received his
B.A. in Theatre Studies from Swarthmore College and also works in
professional theatre, most notably with The Builders Association, a New
York based multimedia theatre company.
ELIZABETH WITTLIN LIPTON is a costume and scene designer who
resides in both Madrid and New York. A disciple of Jan Kott, Rosette
Lamont, Francisco Nieva, and Paul Steinberg, with whom she studied
experimental theatre design at Parsons School of Design, she worked on
many projects for director Robert Falls as visual dramaturg for the Wisdom
Bridge Theatre in Chicago. She has designed costumes and masks for Juan
Antonio Castro's Tiempro de '98; effigies for Lopez Mozo's Guernica; and
sets and costumes for Calderon's Phantom Lady (Dama Duende), directed by
Nuria Alcorta at ART. Other credits include She 1st Met Her Parents on the
Subway by Sergio Castilla for HOLA, Thanksgiving Day by Andrew Young
and Stanislaw Moniuszko's Halka for Nina Polan's Polish Theatre Institute.
JEFFREY STEPHENS is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Oklahoma State
University, having recently returned from Chicago where he worked in
corporate and foundation development at Lyric Opera. His reviews have
appeared in SEEP and Theatre journal.
82
EKATERINA SUKHANOVA holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
the CUNY Graduate Center. Her book, Voicing the Distant: Shakespeare and
Russian Modernist Poetry, is coming out in summer 2004. She has written for
the Dalkey Archive Press casebook series, the American Book Review, and a
number of scholarly journals. She is based in New York.
SAERA YOON has recently defended her dissertation in Russian Literature,
"Mythical Imagination in Historical Fiction: Pushkin, Lermontov, and
Gogol,"at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has also published on
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Photo Credits
Rothschild's Fiddle
Ken Reynolds
Yvonne Princesa de Burgundia
Chronicles-A Lamentation
Arek Chrusciel
The Mother
Zygmunt Malinowski
Black Milk
Kirk Anderson
Prokofiev
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
83
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
fOUR fRENCH COMEDIES Of THE
17tH AND 18ru CENTURIES
@ n...Ahoomt-Mu.lod Lover
@ I:>ootoucL. n..eo.-.ac-.t
@ taa.....o.
@ Lu,o:TI..&...Icl tlo.La-
T RANSLATED AND EDITED BY
MARVIN CARLSON
T he Hei rs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four representa
tive French comedies of the period from
the death of Moliere to the French
Revolution: Regnard's The Absent-
Minded Lover, Destouches's The
Conceited Count, La Chaussee's The
Fashionable Prejudice, and Laya's The
Friend of the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to
capture the wit and spirit of the origi-
nals, these four plays suggest something
of the range of the Moliere inheritance,
fmm comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy of
the mid eighteenth century, to comedy
that employs the Moliere tradition for
more contemporary political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that show
changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and politics through
the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to the modern era.
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 Internat ional
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center
Mail checks or money orders to:
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The CUNY Graduat e Center
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Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.cd u/mestcl
Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
Thi s volume contai ns four of
Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon, or
Jafar and Zaida, The Dog of Montatgis,
or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher
Columbus, or The Discovery of the New
World, and Alice, or The Scottish
Gravediggers, as well as Charles
Nodier 's "Introduction" to the 1843
Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's plays
and the two theoretical essays by the
playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final
Reflections on Melodrama."
"Pixen\court furnished the Theatre of
Marvels with its most stunning effects,
and brought the classic situations of
fairground comedy up-to-date. He
determined the structure of a popular
theatre which was to last through the 19th century ... Pixerecourt determined that scenery,
music, dance, lighting and the very movements of his actors should no longer be left to
chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Wi nter, The Theatre of Marvels
USA $20.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
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Visit our web-site at: web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/
Contact: mestc@gc.cuoy.edu or 212-817-1868
Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a SympoSium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and Lenin
El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and sec-
ondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
(USA $12.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book eontams
an introduction and fifteen essays. organized into sections on .. Zcami's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zcami and the
World."
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus contains translations of four plays
by the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry, and
prose. Flemish by birth and upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety
plays, novels, and collections of poetry. The plays collected here with an intro-
duction by David Willinger include The Temptation, Friday, Serenade, and The
Hair of the Dog.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign SI5.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue of New York City research facilities avai lable to theatre scholars. Within the
indexed volume, each facility is briefly described including an outline of its hold-
ings and practical matters such as hours of operation. Most entries include elec-
tronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped as follows:
Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies; University and College Libraries;
Ethnic and Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools; and
Film and Other.
(USA S5.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $5.00 plus S6.00 shipping)
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Ma rtin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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Contact: mcstc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868

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