SEEP Vol.26 No.1 Winter 2006

SEEP(ISSN 4t 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 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and
East European Peiformance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City
University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
10016-4309
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Margaret Araneo
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Carly Smith
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Louise Lytle McKay
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen]. Kuharski
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that desire to
reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared in SEEP may
do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must
be furnished to the editors of SEEP immediately upon publication.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Daniel Gerould
DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS
Frank Hentschker
DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION
Jan Stenzel
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants from
the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre of the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The City University of New York.
Copyright 2006 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
2
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 26, No. 1
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Hungarian Playwright Janos Hay: Mythologizing Reality"
Eugene Brogyanyi
"Rear Guard Versus Avant-Garde:
A New Frame for an Old Debate in Latvian Theatre at
Splemai}u Nakts 2005, Riga"
Jeff Johnson
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"The Adventures ofVoskovec and Werich in America,
1939- 1945"
Jarka M. Burian
"Lunacharsky on Revolutionary Laughter"
Daniel Gerould
"We Are Going To Laugh"
Anatoly Lunacharsky
REVIEWS
"Exploring New Territories with Ancient Tools:
Gardzienice's Elektra in New York"
Margaret Araneo
5
6
8
16
18
24
34
58
63
67
3
"'Sacred and Pure Like First Love':
Gombrowicz's Marriage Staged by Elmo Niiganen"
Aneta Mancewicz
"White Butterflies, Plaited Chains: A Live Metamorphosis
by Theatre-In-A-Basket from Lviv, Ukraine"
Larissa M. L. Z. Onyshkevych
Three of V aclav Havel's Plays Off-Off Broadway
Veronika Tuckerova
Contributors
75
84
91
95
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EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and
film; with new approaches to older materials in recently published works;
or with new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo!, but we cannot
use original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else
which may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Transliterations
should follow the Library of Congress system. 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 our website at http//web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProOuest Information and Learning as
abstracts online via ProQ.!est 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 26, no. 1 of SEEP covers a wide range of Eastern
European theatre observed in a variety of different places and contexts.
Eugene Brogyanyi presents the Hungarian playwright Janos Hay who
recently discussed his work with American spectators after a staged
reading of excerpts from two of his dramas at the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center in New York. NextJeffJohnson, reporting on an annual
Latvian theatre festival, introduces the outstanding companies,
productions, and directors of Latvia. Our occasional rubric, PAGES
FROM THE PAST, consists of two parts. The first, "The Adventures of
Voskovec and Werich in America, 1939-1945," about the two great
Czech comics in wartime exile, is the last essay written by Jarka Burian
(1927- 2005), to whom we paid tribute in the last issue. We are
publishing this important article as a special feature, extended in length
beyond normal limits, and we thank Gracye Burian for making it
available to SEEP. The second part of PAGES FROM THE PAST,
Anatoly Lunacharsky's "We Are Going to Laugh," is a continuation of
my work on the Soviet Commissar of Education's theorizing of genre
and his promotion of the popular arts in the Soviet Union. The issue
concludes with four reviews. Margaret Araneo analyzes a re-imagining
of Greek tragedy by the Polish group Gardzienice presented at La
MaMa, Aneta Mancewicz describes an Estonian director's version of
Gombrowicz's Marriage shown at the Wilam Horzyca Theatre in Torun,
Larissa Onyshkevych writes about a Ukrainian one-woman show from
Lviv performed in New York, and Veronika Tuckerova discusses a New
York production of three one-act plays by Havel.
2006 is the twenty-fifth anniversary year of SEEP, which was
founded in 1981 by Leo Hecht at George Mason University, Fairfax,
Virginia, as the outgrowth of a National Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Institute in Eastern European Theatre held at the
Graduate Center, CUNY, the same year. SEEP moved to the Graduate
Center in 1987 under the editorship of Daniel Gerould and Alma Law,
who had conducted the NEH Institute in 1981. On Tuesday, April 4,
2006, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, there will be a twenty-fifth
anniversary celebration, which will offer past and present contributors,
editors and staff members, and subscribers and friends of SEEP an
opportunity to meet, mingle, and discuss shared interests and work in
6
progress. An informal colloquium will feature a discussion of aspects of
the current state of theatre and film in Eastern Europe and Russia.
If you plan on attending, please let us know.
Tel: (212) 812-1860
E-mail: MESTC@gc.cuny.edu
FAX: (212) 817-1562
7
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
The Trap Door Theatre presented Old Clown Wanted, written by the
French-Croatian Matei Visniec, translated from the French by Alison
Sinclair, and directed by Gregory A. Fortner, at the HERE Arts Center
from November 29 to December 4, as part of New York City's Act French
Festival. The playwright appeared for discussions with the audience at the
December performances. The play was also staged by the Trap Door
Theatre in Chicago from November 18 to January 14.
The Lark Play Development Center presented Lenin's Shoe by Saviana
Stanescu, directed by Daniella Topol, at the Lark Studio from February 1
to 4 and 6 to 11.
Scena Plastyczna K.U.L. (The Visual Theatre of Catholic University,
Lublin) in association with the Polish Cultural Institute, presented Passing
Away ( Odchodzz), based on the book by T adeusz R6zewicz, directed by
Leszek M<1dzik, at La MaMa, from February 16 to March 5.
The students at Eugene Lang College at the New School for Liberal Arts
presented Gombrowicz's Operetta, directed by Zishan Ugurlu, composed by
Stefania de Kennessy, with Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov, at La
MaMa from March 9 to 12.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, will present the following:
8
Under the Sign if the Crocodile, the current project of the Double
Edge Theatre, based on the stories of the Polish artist Bruno
Schulz, on April 20.
After the Fall: Reality and the New Romanian Theatre, two evenings of
staged readings of plays by Gianina Carbunariu, Bogdan
Georgescu, and Vera Iona, directed by Marcy Arlin, Kaipo
Schwab, and Daniela Varon, on July 10 and 11.
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 26, No. 1
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
United States Regional
The American Repertory Theatre and the Polish Cultural Institute of New
York presented Chekhov's Three Sisters, adapted, directed, and designed by
Krystian Lupa, at the Loeb Drama Center, Harvard University, m
Cambridge, Massachusetts, from November 26 to January 1.
The Brandeis Theatre Company of Brandeis University presented The
Suicide by Nikolai Edrman, in a newly translated adaptation by Professor
David Powelstock, directed by Dmitry Troyanovsky, at the Spingold
Theatre in Waltham, Massachusetts, from February 9 to 19.
The Russian-American Kids Circus performed at the New Jersey State
Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on February 26.
Krtakor of Budapest, Hungary, presented the following productions, in
Hungarian with simultaneous English translation, at Montclair State
University in Montclair, New Jersey:
The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, directed by Arpad Schilling,
translated by Geza Morcsanyi, at the L. Howard Fox Studio
Theatre from February 22 to 25.
BLACK/and, an original piece by the company, directed by Arpad
Schilling, dramaturgy by Barbar Ari-Nagy, at the Alexander Kasser
Theatre from March 1 to 4.
The University Theater at the University of Chicago presented Witold
Gombrowicz's lvona, Princess of Burgundia, directed by Emily Boyd, from
March 8 to 11.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International
At the 2006 Sydney Festival (Australia), a production from the 2005
Chekhov International Theatre Festival (Moscow), Shakespeare's Twelfth
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Night, was performed, in Russian with English subtitles, at the Theatre
Royal from January 7 to 14.
The Minsk-based underground Free Theatre ofBelarus staged Sarah Kane's
4:48 Psychosis, directed by Vladimir Shcherban, at the Meyerhold Center,
Moscow, on February 27 and 28.
The annual Golden Mask Festival of drama, opera, ballet, operetta and
musical theatre, contemporary dance, and puppetry takes place in Moscow
starting on March 31. The Russian Case program, that part of the festival
focusing specifically on theatre, will include the following productions
between April 6 and 11:
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The Presnyakov Brothers' Playing The Victim by the Moscow Art
Theatre.
Chekhov's Scenes of Country Life (Uncle Vanya) by the Okolo
Theatre of Moscow.
The Boys, based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's story, by the Russian
Academy of Theatre Arts of Moscow.
Gorky's Lower Depths by the Nebolshoi Drama Theatre of St.
Petersburg.
Ostrovsky's Forest by the Moscow Art Theatre.
Chekhov's Cherry Orchard by the Drama Theatre of Omsk.
Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire by TYuZ of Moscow.
Saltykov-Shchedrin's Golov{yovs by the Moscow Art Theatre.
An original piece entitled SEPTEMBER.doc by Verbatim and
Theatre.doc ofMoscow.
The Seven "Who Were Hanged, adapted from Leonid Andreev's story,
by the Tabakov Theatre of Moscow.
FILM
An original piece entitled Genesis No.2 by Antonina Velikanova,
Ivan Vyrypaev, "Praktika" Theatre, and Theatre.doc of Moscow,
along with Theater der Welt of Stuttgart, Germany.
New York City
The Czech Center New York offered the following films:
Pupendo, directed by Jan Hrebejk, presented February 9.
Snowboarders, directed by Kare!Jank, presented January 19.
Ballets Russes, a documentary directed by Dan Geller and Dayna
Goldfine, was presented at the IFC Center October 26 to February 2.
Love, directed by Vladan Nikolic, was screened at the Pioneer
Theatre from February 16 to March 1.
The new Russian horror fantasy film, Night Watch, directed by Timur
Bekmambetov, screenplay by Sergei Lukyanenko and Bekmambetov, based
on Lukyanenko's novel, opened in New York, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco on February 17.
Old First Reformed Church presented the second part of their Dekalog Film
Series by Krzysztof Kie5lowski, screened at the church in Brooklyn, on
February 12, 19, 26, and March 5 and 12, when the last five of the hour-long,
made-for-television films were shown.
Baruch College's Weissman School of Arts and Sciences presented
Shostakovich and Film at Engelman Recital Hall on March 7, 15, and 21.
Films shown included:
The New Babylon (Noviy Vavilon).
Rothschild's Violin (Le Violon de Rothschild).
King Lear (Korol' Lir).
11
FILM
U.S. Regional
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, directed by Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu, was
screened at Harvard Film Archive in Boston on January 22.
The European Studies Council at the Yale Center for International and Area
Studies presented Europe at the Crossroads: Cinema Circa 1956, a film
festival and conference at Yale University from February 9 to 11. Eastern
European films shown included:
Man on the Tracks (Czlowiek na torze), directed by Andrzej Munk,
on February 10.
The Shadow (Cien}, directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, on
February 10.
September Nights (Zrijovi nocz), directed by Vojetch Jasny, on
February 11.
FILM
International
The thirty-fifth annual Rotterdam International Film Festival took place
from January 25 to February 5 and included the following Eastern European
films:
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On the Range and I Will Never Forget This, two shorts presented as an
installation by Kazakh performance artist Almagul Menlibayeva.
Amerzga, directed by Igor Aleynikov and Gleb Aleynikov.
Excerpts from CA C TV, in which a collective of amateurs working
with the Contemporary Art Centre of Vilnius, Lithuania, created
live television episodes in a "reality meta-show genre."
City of the Sun, directed by Martin Sulik.
Dealer, directed by Benedek Fliegauf.
The Death of Mister Lazarescu, directed by Cristi Puiu.
Death Rode Out of Persia, directed by Putyi Horvath.
Esther (third chapter of Crazy Prince), directed by Boris Yukhananov.
Honorable Brother, directed by Yuri Leiderman and Andrey
Silvestrov.
I'm Frigid but It Doesn't Matter, directed by Igor Aleynikov and
Gleb Aleynikov.
jihad, directed by Almagul Menlibayeva.
L u n a ~ directed by Jan Svankmajer.
My Nikifor, directed by Krzysztof Krauze.
Nice and Big, directed by Miklos Acs.
Ode to joy, directed by Anna Kazejak-Dawid, Jan Komasa, and
Maciej Migas.
Panoramas (Blue Soup Group 1994- 2005), directed by Danil
Lebedev, Alex Dobrov, and Alexander Lobanov.
Rubin 2004, directed by Monika Sosnowska.
The Shepard, directed by Yusup Razykov.
Silent Coolness, directed by Serik Utepbergenov.
Ten Videoworks (1999-2005), directed by Olga Chernysheva.
A Trip to Karabakh, directed by Levan Tutberidze.
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Vocal Parallels, directed by Rustam Khamdamov.
Vo{ga- Vo{ga, directed by Pavel Labazov, Andrey Silvestrov, and
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro.
Wandering Between, directed by Anatoly Lavrenishin.
What Are You Going To Do When You Get Out of Here?, directed by
Saso Podgorsek.
Wrong Side Up, directed by Petr Zelenka.
OTHER EVENTS: ART, CULTURE, NEWS
Polish-Ukrainian actress and open-throat singer Mariana Sadovska
(formerly of Gardzienice) presented Without Ground, a song cycle with
video by Lars Jan, at Symphony Space on December 9.
Still the River Flows, "A Glimpse into Winter Solstice and Christmas
Rituals in a Carpathian Village," an art installation by Yara Arts Group,
conceived by Virlana Tkacz and Watoku Ueno, was presented at the
Ukrainian Museum in New York (222 East Sixth St.) from December 11
to January 29.
The Polish Cultural Institute in New York and White Box presented
Zbigniew Libera in conversation with Eleanor Heartney and Raul
Zamudio, on the occasion of the exhibition Zbigniew Libera: Work .from
1984- 2004 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Oanuary 13 to
February 17), at White Box on January 28.
The Polish Cultural Institute in New York and Broadway 1602 presented
Charlestone, a performance project by Cezary Bodzianowski, at the
Chelsea Hotel from January 14 to February 9.
The Borderland Foundation of Sejny, Poland-described as "a living
experiment in cross-cultural relations" -sponsored a presentation by its
chairman, Krzysztof Czyzewski, about the avant-garde foundation's
intercultural activities and programs in theatre, music, poetry and
14
wntmg, publishing, and film at Location One m New York on
February 7.
The Ubu Gallery in New York (416 East Fifty-Ninth St.) presents an
exhibition, Stanislaw lgnacy Witkiewicz (1885- 1939): Drawings from
the 1930s, from February 6 to April 22. The exhibit features over 60 rare
works, including a number of photographs. An online catalogue can be
seen at www.ubugallery.com.
Compiled by Carly Smith
15
BOOKS RECEIVED
Bochenski, T omasz. Czarny humor w tw6rczofci Witkacego, Gombrowicza,
Schulza. Lata trzydzieste. Modernizm w Polsce, val. 11. Cracow: T owarzystwo
Autor6w i Wydawc6w Prac Naukowych Universitas, 2005. 311 pages.
Includes a Bibliography, Indexes of Subjects and of Names, and a summary
in French.
Gavran, Miro. Nora in Our Time. Full text of play available in English online:
http ://www.mgavran2.t-com.hr/plays/complete/nora.htm. Other plays,
Gavran's biography and a bibliography of his other work also accessible at
site's homepage: http:/ /www.mgavran2.t-com.hr/ .
Kornas, T adeusz. Wlodzimierz Staniewski i Ofrodek Praktyk Teatralnych
GARDZIEN!CE. Cracow: Homini, 2004. 354 pages. Includes the following
appendixes: Expeditions within Poland and abroad, Productions, Artists,
Selected Bibliography, List of Illustrations, Indexes of Names and of Works
and Productions, plus 118 photographs.
Pieni<}zek, Marek. Akt tw6rczy, jako mimesis: "Dzif 54 moje urodziny"-ostatni
spektakl Tadeusza Kantora. Modernizm w Polce, vol. 10. Cracow:
Towarzystwo Autorow i Wydawcow Prac Naukowych Universitas, 2005. 514
pages. Includes an 87 page bibliography, an index of names and of subjects,
a summary in English, and 64 illustrations (manuscript pages, drawings, and
photographs).
Teatr Witolda Gombrowicza. Pami{tnik Teatralny, vol. 53, nos. 1- 4 (209-212),
2004. Special issue. 832 pages. Contains five sections: Gombrowicz and
Contexts, Gombrowicz in the Theatre: Between West and East, Gombrowicz
in Poland, Interpretations, and Gombrowicz in the Media, plus a summary
in English. Includes over a hundred photographs and illustrations, many in
color.
Visegrad Drama !: Weddings. Bratislava: The Theatre Institute, 2002. 341
pages. Presents plays from the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovak Republic, and
Hungary, plus a Preface and Afterword: Anna Gruskova, "The Visegrad
Legend and Drama"; Alois and Vilem Mrstfk, Maryfa, translated by Barbara
Day, Jan Grossman, "Interpreting Maryfa, List of Productions; Stanislaw
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Wyspianski, The Wedding, translated by Floryan Sobieniowski and E.G.
Hesketh Pearson, Henryk Izydor Rogacki, "Folk, Bohemians and Ghosts,"
List of Productions; Vladimir Hurban Vladimirov, Snowdrifts, translated by
Heather Trebaticka, Dagmar Roberts, "A Portrait of A Man Who Knocked
on the Gates," List of Productions; Ferenc Molnar, The Glass Slipper,
translated by Phillip Moeller, Peter P. Muller, "A Hungarian Cinderella," List
of Productions; Marta Botikova, "Weddings and Family Traditions in
Peasant Culture in Central Europe: Their Reflections in Drama." Includes 36
photographs of playwrights and productions.
17
HUNGARIAN PLAYWRIGHT JANOS HAY:
MYTHOLOGIZING REALITY
Eugene Brogyanyi
Hungarian playwright jdnos Hdy participated in the Martin E. Segal Theatre
Center's "Contemporary Theatre Abroad" series at The City University of New York
Graduate Center on November 18, 2005. The event featured scenes (peiformed by
members of the Threshold Theater Company) from two ofHdy's plays, Geza-boy and
Frankie Herner's Old Man, translated by Eugene Brogydnyi and directed by
Pamela Billig. After the reading, the playwright discussed his work with members of
the audience. The following article, based on the translator's introductory remarks,
places Hdy 's work in the broader context of modern Hungarian drama.
Janos Hay belongs to the third generation of post-World-War-II
Hungarian dramatists. The first generation was late to emerge due to the
compulsory artistic norms required by Stalin and the repression that
followed the crushed Hungarian uprising of 1956. By the early 1960s,
however, Hungary's communist government sought legitimacy by relaxing
its grip on literary expression. Playwrights, still constrained albeit freed from
the shackles of Socialist Realism, turned to metaphor and parable to treat the
individual and social conflicts created by lack of freedom. There developed
an extraordinary, tacit conspiracy between playwright, theatre, and audience,
the latter drawing reassurance from the "coded" messages it received from the
stage. Thus a kind of theatre-between-the-lines emerged, and Hungarian
playwrights, adept at veiling their comments and criticisms in historical
subjects and absurdist parables, enjoyed popular acclaim. The popularity and
influence of Istvan Orkeny, whose Catsplay and The T6th Family have played
in American theatres, made him the key figure of that period. Never before
had Hungarian theatres and audiences been so instrumental in advancing the
creation of socially conscious drama.
In the late seventies, the second post-war generation of dramatists
emerged. These playwrights rejected their predecessors' recognition of a
moral world order to be championed through dramatic depictions of its
violation. Their main motivation was disillusionment with a system they saw
as hopelessly entrenched, especially after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968. Their work has collectively been designated by critics as a "drama of
deficiency" (hidnydramaturgia), since the characters in these plays tend to
18
Playwright Janos Hay and translator Eugene Brogyanyi during the
discussion at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
suffer from a lack of a meaningful past, ideals, possibilities, love, personal
space, even at times a coherent personality, and because action can make no
real difference in this stagnant world. The main practitioners during this
phase were Peter Nadas, Geza Beremenyi, Mihaly Komis, and Gyorgy Spiro.
The tacit conspiracy with audiences continued feeding their drama, even as
the country continued moving from "hard" to "soft" dictatorship.
With the collapse of communism in 1989, the third generation of
post-war dramatists emerged. These playwrights cannot be characterized
collectively, since there is no longer a collective condition imposed on
Hungarian society. After the regime change, the threat to the community by
the political system came to an end and with it the capacity of theatre to
influence public morale. For all its ability to marshal cohesion, for all the
ingenious results, a theatre of coded messages also stifles the inclination of
drama to talk straight. The playwrights of the post-1989 era, freed from the
19
constraints of being code-making strategists, are on a quest for authenticity,
and authenticity speaks in many voices. Never before has Hungarian drama
manifested such a variety of style, language, and genre. For example, in
contrast to previous decades, in which playwrights were almost exclusively
concerned with the intrusion of the public sphere into the private, many
plays of the 1990s and since tend to isolate the individual in a private sphere.
Janos Hay's work, on the other hand, manifests a communal awareness.
The four plays by Hay, set mostly in rural Hungary, display an
incisive, honest approach to social problems and a linguistic boldness based
on a keen sense of hearing and a keen sense of humor, all in service of a
deeper probing into the dilemmas that are at the core of modern human
existence. Hay is, in the words of the critic Istvan L. Sandor, "an author in
search of ways of mythologizing reality."
Gtfza-boy, Hay's first play, written in 2000, is about a young
man with autistic tendencies, who lives in a village at once strangled
20
A quarry scene from Giza-boy, directed by Istvan Pinczes,
Csokonai Theatre, Debrecen, Hungary
and by-passed by modernization. Geza's friends find him a simple job, the
very meaning of which he eventually questions. To boost his morale, they
play a well-intentioned prank on him, but this backfires and only drives him
deeper into his unique world. Geza's story turns symbolic as the play
becomes a meditation on the metaphysical world order. A "deficient" person
ponders whether God ever intervenes to correct the deficiencies of the world.
And how is Geza deficient? He is simply incapable of relying on that
network of self-deceptions- which Ibsen was first to lay bare in the drama-
from which we inhabitants of the modern world draw our survival strategies.
Geza sees the world for what it is. Thus an autistic boy becomes the seer in
an autistic world.
Hay's second play, Frankie Herner's Old Man, involves three
unemployed, alcoholic village men clearing roadside ditches as community
service. As the weeks pass, they intermittently discuss the circumstances of
two deaths, one violent, one not, and get gradually caught up in the
irresolvable dialectic between the eternal cyclicality of nature and the finite
linearity of the individual human life. The play is rife with the tragi-comic
nonsense inherent in the questioning of everyday reality. The point is not
that the characters lack sense, the point is that the world lacks sense when
called into question in this way. Consider this sample of their dialogue:
HERDA: It's not worth turnin' on the radio.
BANDA: How come?
HERDA: 'Cause all you do is listen to it.
BANDA: Well, isn't that what you turn it on for? What're you
supposed to do, watch it?
HERDA: That's not the point, it's what they say on it.
KREKACS: What about that, Stevie, what about what they say on
it?
HERDA: Well, either I don't understand it, which gets on my
nerves, or I do.
21
KREKACS: What then, if you do?
HERDA: That gets on my nerves too.
KREKACS: Just tum the sound off, Stevie, let it talk to itself
HERDA: What self?
KREKACS: The radio.
HERDA: You got it good, Bela, a lot better than other people.
KREKACS: How come you're sayin' that, Stevie, how come?
HERDA: 'Cause you're so stupid, you're really better off When
you die, you won't even notice. Maybe even after you die you'll
think you're alive.
BANDA: There are people like that. They live after they die, 'cause
they don't notice they died. I heard about it on the radio.
These two plays take place today in the same unnamed village, and some of
the same characters appear in both. Hay's third play, named for its villain,
Sendk, is also set in that village, during the time of the forced collectivization
of agriculture. In a sense then, this play goes back to the origins of the
problems exposed in the first two. Hay's fourth play, Uncle Stevie's Son, takes
place partly in the village and partly in Budapest when the capital's
underground metro system was opened in 1972. The play is, among other
things, a hilarious look at the big city from an outsider's point of view. While
fundamentally tragic, Hay's plays in general contain a great deal of humor.
This no doubt accounts for much of their popularity both in Hungary and
abroad.
His dramas have so far been translated into Polish, Russian,
Slovak, Croatian, Finnish, German, Italian, and both British and American
English. In addition to receiving multiple productions in Hungary and at
Hungarian-language theatres in the surrounding states of Slovakia,
Ukraine, and Romania, Hay's plays have been performed in full
productions or staged readings in New York, London, Warsaw, Lodi,
22
Community service in Frankie Herner's Old Man, directed by Istvan
Pinczes, Sandor Hevesi Theatre, Zalaegerszeg, Hungary
Poznan, Naples, Tampere (Finland), and at the 2005 Heidelberg Drama
Festival, where Frankie Herner's Old Man received the Audience Award. New
York readings of Giza-boy were staged in 2004 and 2005 by the Threshold
Theater Company.
Hay turned to drama relatively recently in his career. Since the
publication of his first book in 1989, he has become an increasingly
celebrated writer of poems, novels, and short stories, of which sixteen
volumes have been published so far. Hay has received numerous literary
awards, including the prestigious Attila Jozsef Award, named for the great
twentieth-century Hungarian poet, and the Best Hungarian Drama Prize in
2002 for Giza-boy. It is not unusual for a Hungarian writer to come to drama
from other literary forms. Indeed, an "exclusive" playwright is a rarity among
Hungarian authors, and Hay continues writing poetry and fiction, even as his
contribution to contemporary Hungarian drama grows.
23
REAR GUARD VERSUS AVANT-GARDE:
A NEW FRAME FOR AN OLD DEBATE IN LATVIAN THEATRE
AT NAKTS 2005, RIGA
Jeff Johnson
Spelmaq.u Nakts ("celebration nights") is an annual showcase of
Latvian plays organized by the Latvian Theatre Union in Riga. In 2005,
November 19- 22, eight of the plays nominated by a jury of prominent
theatre critics for best performance, best director, best actor, etc., were
performed by various major theatre ensembles, followed by a conference
featuring independent experts, critics, and guests from around Europe. The
experts included Annelis Kuhlmann from Denmark, Irina Rakhmanova from
Belarus, Malgorzata Semi! from Poland, and Ladislava Petiskova from the
Czech Republic. Other invited guests in attendance represented Finland,
Poland, Slovakia, Russia, and Lithuania. The festivities culminated in an
awards ceremony held on November 23 to commemorate the birthday of the
famous Latvian theatre director Eduards Smi!gis.
Most of the major theatres in Latvia were represented this year with
an impressive array of styles-traditional, modern and post-
modern- underscoring the diversity (and critical controversies) driving
Latvian theatre today. From the Stanislavskian school of psychological
realism, New Riga Theatre performed Turgenev's A Month in the Country,
directed by Mara and the Valmiera Drama Theatre presented The
Filled Spring (Aizbirufais avots), based on stories by Rudolfs Blaumanis and
directed by Felikss Deics. Representing a more modern approach, Liepaja
Theatre staged a conceptual work, The Blue (Zilii), written by Gunar Priede
and directed by Martins Eihe, the Riga Russian Drama Theatre presented a
minimalist piece by Mara Zalite, All Humans Are Cats (Visi cilveri ir katz), also
directed by Deics, and the Valmiera Drama Theatre presented a metaphorical
treatment of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directed by Olgerts Kroders. Working out
of a postrnodernist sensibility, Alvis Hermanis staged his Latvian Stories
(Latviefu stiistz) at the New Riga, and at Riga Art Theatre Dz. Di. Dzilindzers
directed his bizarre Penelope and Dick (Penelope un Diks), an adaptation of
Somerset Maugham's comedy Penelope. Finally, in a production impossible
to classify, director Galina Pojiscuka at the Latvian National Theatre treated
the classical verse drama Blow, Wind! (Put, vejini.0 by Janis Rainis
(1865- 1929), the most famous Latvian poet, as a contemporary physical
24
performance piece, managing to retain its traditional sense even as she recast
the historical folk customs into a modern context, using contemporary stage
language without ruining the uniqueness of the original play.
Of the performances, the less traditional plays were shunned by the
critics, with A Month in the Country, an unapologetic exercise in strict
nineteenth-century realism, sweeping the awards, winning in every major
applicable category, including best play, best acting, best costumes, etc. This
privileging by the jury of realism over more metatheatrical approaches
exposes a rift within the Latvian critical community, with the established
critics supporting the tendency of the traditional repertory theatres like the
National to stage pro forma classics and young directors, who prefer to
explore the possibilities and limitations of what sustains a "performance,"
insisting on plays that challenge the very idea of "theatre."
The difficulty began after independence, when the dominance of
Stanislavskian realism was challenged and/or modified by the novelty and
"pop" appeal of Western influences, and now contemporary Latvian
playwrights and directors are well versed in postmodern tendencies. But the
older generation of audiences, echoed by the critics in the popular press,
continues to demand and promote the typical psychological realism that
dominates repertories at most of the major theatres. The younger audiences,
meanwhile, prefer more adventurous directors, or at least a rethinking of how
to stage classical plays, mai ntaining the uniqueness of the original but
translating the action into more contemporary theatre language.
Ga{ina Poliscuka's treatment of Blow, Wind!, a classic reworked
through a feminist perspective and staged in a contemporary fashion, marks
a radical departure from the National' s usual, more conservative style.
Poliscuka's approach represents a determined attempt to connect the
country's past with its present, employing contemporary sensitivities while
maintaining the eternal elements of traditional tragedy. Poliscuka eschews
anachronistic elements and uses no special effects (except for professional
lighting); the ambient noises and the music are created live by the actors, the
songs and instruments the same today as a hundred years ago. In this way
Poliscuka remains faithful to the historical aspect of the piece while
presenting the material as a modern predicament.
The performance space is a bare black floor bordered with a wooden
frame like a sandbox and flanked by bleacher seating on either side. Arrayed
around the frame are various farm implements- traditional tools and baskets
along with costumes on wooden scarecrow-like manikins. The effect creates
25
The cast of Blow, Wind! directed by Galina Poliscuka, presented at
Spelmagu Nakts 2005, Riga
a scene from a museum, where historical artifacts are on display. The actors
and musicians enter from the audience in normal street clothes, like students
visiting an exhibition, but soon each one pauses before a display and begins
to undress, stripping out of their contemporary clothes and donning the
costumes of the play, allowing the audience to witness the transformation of
the actors into their characters and the creation of theatre time and place, as
if carving out a magic space of verisimilitude while acknowledging the
limitations of realism. The process also strips away the romantic notions
usually associated with Rainis's play and highlights the brutal naturalism that
distinguishes Poliscuka's production from more traditional renditions.
Another play in the showcase, Mara Zalite's All Humans Are Cats.
offers a sly comment on contemporary life in the "new" Latvia, while
emphasizing the timeless values that elevate her play out of mere topicality
into universal tragedy. Staged in the tiny loft-style space above the main
26
performance hall at the Russian Drama Theatre, the play shows the influence
of Beckett and Grotowski but achieves an intimacy and passion that sets
Zalite's work off as patently original, analyzing the lives of people, Herman
and Zente, who share an unpleasant past and who are now marginalized by
society.
The play resonates with meaning for Latvian audiences. On a
contemporary social level, the play exposes the distressing plight of the
elderly, whose pension programs are constantly at risk in the free market
system, whose family properties are threatened by gentrification, and whose
abandonment by members of their extended families as they seek
employment abroad have left them lonely and isolated in an unfamiliar
world that offers little sympathy for the old, the destitute, or the infirm.
The play also dredges up issues many Latvians would prefer to
ignore or forget. Herman complains that his family disappeared in a Soviet
gulag, and Zente confesses that she granted sexual favors to her superiors at
the Central Committee to advance her career; though never more than a
secretary, she enjoyed caviar and other elaborate perks while her peers had to
settle for much more modest fare. Not as pervasive today as during the
Soviet era of corruption and elitist hypocrisy, means of advancement for
women in contemporary Latvia are still exploitative in the professional
world. And the crass commercialism that comes with privatization, the
constant need for money and the ideology of measuring value by cost, not
quality, causes Herman to calculate the worth of his actions-what others
may discount as acts of compassion- in terms of an economic bottom line.
He constantly nickels-and-dimes Zente until finally he is driven to suicide,
partly (or especially) because of the government's threat to evict him and
confiscate property that has been in his family for generations. Also, his faith
in his brother is based more on his brother's wealth than any genuine filial
affection. All bonds are reduced to economic exploitation, in Herman's case
the desire for a bigger apartment and a shopping spree, as if his brother were
a modern Robin Hood dispensing money, not justice, compassion or
traditional family values.
Theatrically, the play appears to adhere to the tenets of naturalism,
but it also creates a kaleidoscopic world of illusions that not only comments
on the nature of the theatre but also on the tendency in contemporary
society to forsake the actual world for a virtual reality with no real
consequences that can be switched on and offlike television. The real world
is replaced by wishful thinking, the displacement of an actual life by that of
27
an onamsttc, imaginary surrogate existence conditioned by avoidance,
denial, and, finally, pure desire, whether nostalgic or utopic, nonetheless
impossible. The danger lies in the characters' masturbatory withdrawal from
the real-as indicated by Zente's playing with her puppet cat. In this sense,
All Humans Are Cats displaces metatheatrical assumptions that belie its
naturalistic structure and by its design illustrates the fragile construction of a
Latvian society confronting its identity, both as a precious illusion and a
hard reality.
A third standout, Latvian Stories, continues Alvis Hermanis's
investigation into both a more realistic style and the dramatic potential
expressed in ordinary lives. A performance of one of the monologues, staged
in an upstairs loft-style black box at New Riga (one of several performance
spaces surrounding an impressive courtyard) indicates Hermanis's interest in
"pure" acting. By stripping away the normal theatrical framing devices, he
exposes the medium for what it is, an actor becoming another person
indulging an audience in an act of empathetic identification. The impulse
driving this approach seems to suggest that all the props and scenery and
elements of dramatization directors use to enhance the presentation in
"typical" theatrical productions tend, instead, to falsify rather than clarify the
action. In this instance, the set consists only of a bare stage and a backdrop
collage of photographs depicting apartments in various stages of lived-in
disarray. The actor simply sits on a stool between the audience and the
photo-collage, telling the story of the character he has assumed.
Latvian Stories is composed of stories collected from interviews,
often recited verbatim. Hermanis discards theatrical presentation, opting
instead for straight delivery, an adumbration with hardly any fictional
structuring. This is theatre reduced to voice and delivery, expressed with
sensitivity, exposition without dramatic effects. A traditionalist could argue
that without dramatic structure- i.e., an applied technique of metaphorical,
naturalistic or mimetic strategies of representation beyond mere recitation-
the monologues, delivered, granted, with sensitivity and immediacy, might
just as well be performed as a book reading.
In this sense, Latvian Stories represents an end of "theatre." The
approach implies nihilism within the genre: theatre reduced to the art of
storytelling, stripped of verisimilitude or, indeed, of any enhancement by
visual means. The argument from genre insists that the beauty and appeal of
art, per se, is form. Life, after all, is contingent, art arranged. And it is in that
arrangement, the structural semblance of reality-not in its naive
28
Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 26, No. 1
presentation, which by its ordinariness is boring-that the craft of the artist
imposes design on the chaos of experience. Only a dilettante would
complain that theatre somehow sacrifices its value by its artifice; in reality,
theatre as a genre posits quite the opposite: beauty is form, art the skill of
shaping experience. Hermanis's collection might be engaging, but the stories
are not his, not the actors', and in the end not the "real" story of the clerk,
the bus driver, or the unemployed student who inspired the original piece.
But this seems to be his point: to challenge representation at all levels.
At the other end of the continuum from Hermanis's Theatre of
Exhaustion lies Dz. Dz. Dzilindzers's Total Theatre, extravaganzas that
celebrate and mock the very artificiality of stage effects that "purists" like
Hermanis distrust. Dzilindzers's disdain for psycho-realism-"1 hate it," he
says bluntly-and what he derisively refers to as Latvia's "actor's theatre" -is
seriously evident in Penelope and Dick. He reduces Maugham's comical but
subtle psychological study of marital infidelity and the willful deceit of the
couples involved-a staple element of stereotypical British discretion,
decorum, and the art of keeping up appearances-to an absurdist farce that
has little to do with British behavior and everything to do with Dzilindzers's
own love affair with the quirky Warholian, image-saturated landscape that
passes for normalcy in the new fangled, consumer-driven contemporary
Latvian society.
Whereas Maugham shellacs the veneer of social manners by which
the Edwardians masked their perversities and maintained their peculiar
fac;:ade of normalcy, Dzilindzer works from a prime-time soap ethos in which
vixens vie for incompetent males, sex is never an end in itself but always
merely another option in an arsenal of manipulative tools, and personal
obsessions-fitness, pornography, alcohol, religion- become interchangeable
cultural commodities, nothing more than convenient lifestyles, as ephemeral
as the guts of a lava lamp.
What at first seems irreverent-Dzilindzer ridiculing a pop-art
culture he obviously adores-belies a more serious critique. Dzilindzer,
typically, prefers to hedge his moral intentions: eager to claim the mantle of
po-rno alchemist, turning trash into gold, he is less willing to acknowledge
his role as ethicist. His irony more closely resembles that of an old school
reformer like Kierkegaard than the easy cynicism of Joe Orton. Any
moralizing in the play, he says, occurs "by accident." Yet he identifies his
"mission" as a "fight against untruths." He argues that if people are "living
old truths, they become lies." He says that in his version, unlike Maugham's
29
Dz. Dz. Dzilindzers's Penelope and Dick at Spelma!}u Nakts 2005, Riga
30
original, he has Dick kill Penelope because to let the couple continue living
as they have before would affirm the established values that are actually, in
the context of the play, decadent and useless. "Truth," he says," is a new
thing that happens to you in a different context." Penelope's murder destroys
the "old truths" and forces the survivors to rethink their values. In an
existential coda, the raison d'etre of his own career, he adds, "You have to
recreate truth to survive life."
Another play presented in the showcase that challenges the
prevailing Latvian preference for actor-based performances is The Blue.
Although trained as an actor, director MartiQ.s Eihe says his acting experience
is merely a "bonus" when it comes to directing; he can tell, for instance,
when an actor is cheating. In a tongue-in-cheek moment of self-deprecation,
he recalls a former teacher telling him, "All bad actors are going to be
directors."
Performed in one of the three main spaces at New Riga-this one a
black box with a raised stage and "dining room chair" seating-The Blue
crosses minimalism with mixed media to jazz up and contemporize what is
basically straightforward Grotowskian "poor theatre." The tiny stage is bare,
but from the front of the stage out, over and through the audience, a network
of chrome rails, with what appear to be subway straps attached, support a
half dozen video monitors, intended to produce the effect of the audience
traveling on a mass transit bus, while on the screens the single image of a cow
floats against a dull blue and white background.
Suddenly the monitors flash a red alert warning, the lights go down,
and a loud siren blasts. A man in a wheelchair rolls onto the set; three other
actors sit offstage facing the rear curtain. The story unfolds as each actor takes
the stage to interact both with one another and with the audience directly in
a combined approach, working within a realistic frame and yet breaking the
frame by what amounts to confessions directed outside the "time" of the
play.
The story deals with the events leading up to a tragic automobile
wreck and the aftermath, told in what amounts to flashback dialogue
delivered in a series of visits during a day in the life of the survivor, the
temperamental, spoiled son of a wealthy family, and his mother. The son,
Juris, while driving drunk, killed his father, his grandmother, and another
woman in a head-on collision that also left the passengers in the other car
with debilitating injuries. His mother, Rasma, has sold everything and moved
from Riga to a house by the Black Sea in Georgia hoping to facilitate her
31
son's recovery. On the day of the present action, a former acquaintance,
Linda, turns up with a male co-worker, Vidvuds, ostensibly on a business
trip, but both harbor ulterior motives, Linda hoping Juris will give her
money to support a son she has never acknowledged, Vidvuds expecting to
cultivate a lover to take his mind off his own family problems. Within this
plot design, Juris, strapped into his wheelchair, solipsistic, and obsessed with
guilt and despair, seems like an agent of expiation, a prompt for expurgation,
as the others, while confronting him, must ultimately confront themselves.
What at first appears to be a gratuitous use of the bars and video
monitors through the course of the play becomes symbolically significant,
the bars an image ofJuris's confinement in the wheelchair, the monitors on
which the white lines of a highway scroll by in super slow motion indicating
his conscience fixed on the accident and the blue cow that he has come to
pray for like some idealized deus ex machina that will deliver him from his
physical and psychological suffering. Eihe suggests that the extended set of
MartiQs Eihe's The Blue at the Spelmal}u Nakts 2005, Riga
32
bars and monitors should also create in the audience a sense of collectively
traveling the same highway, emulating Juris's journey toward self-
recognition, a simple attempt to create a subjective verisimilitude that also
explains the staging, combining realistic interaction among the characters
interspersed with their attempts to rationalize their motives by plea
bargaining with the audience. Significantly, Juris is the only character who
does not address the audience, reinforcing the idea that the entire "vision" of
the play is constructed through his perspective as the audience experiences
not so much a play as the working of]uris's mind.
Traditionally, the themes coursing through Priede's Soviet-era script
deal with moral corruption engendered by envy, an indictment of the
economic inequities endemic in the cronyocracy that passed for communism
under the corrupt Soviet regime. These themes-the recklessness of spoiled
youth, class envy, the desire for love and the impossibility of innocence-are
universal, and the action of the text, in this sense, transcends the particulars
of the Latvian social context. But Eihe is less interested in themes than
presentation so that the staging itself becomes an editorial on current values.
The quick scenes, the actors reciting summaries of their situations, the
brevity of the play itself-running a short hour at most-represent for Eihe the
reality for a young audience demanding immediate, abbreviated shots of
information, their attention span conditioned by news flashes, high-speed
video games, MTV collages, e-mail correspondence, and fifteen-second
advertising spots. Even the use of the video monitors, providing a visual
portal into Juris's mind and signifying his fixation, was as much a practical
component for Eihe as a metaphorical one. He explains, "The young
audiences today expect video," as if they might trust the play and be more
inclined to accept its theatrical truth as long as it included some aspect of
electric media.
The Latvian theatre has become cleft by desire, the older generation
craving Stanislavskian realism, evoking a golden era of actors superbly
trained in the Russian tradition, the younger generation demanding new
forms and experimentation, driven by a disdain for tradition but aware of
their own appropriation of postmodernity without necessarily contributing
anything wholly original to the mix. Luckily, festivals such as Spelmal}U
Nakts continue to frame the issue, allowing traditional artists and the avant-
garde to argue their cases in performance before an appreciative audience
actively engaged in the ongoing cultural debate.
33
THE ADVENTURES OF VOSKOVEC AND WERICH IN
AMERICA, 1939-1945
Jarka M. Burian
They were without a doubt the most popular theatre performers in
Czechoslovakia in the first twenty years of the Republic's life. But they were
not only theatre performers. They wrote all of their own material, except for
the music. Their productions grew from revue-type skits to full-length
productions with sustained plots, songs, and chorus dancers. Within a few
years of their first production in 1927-Vest Pocket Revue- they took over their
sponsoring organization and established their own theatre: the Liberated
Theatre of Voskovec and Werich. Their chief collaborator became Jaroslav
Je:Zek, a classically trained musician in love with American jazz. They made
several successful films, and their songs were best-sellers.
The enormous popularity of the Liberated Theatre ofVoskovec and
W erich was due not only to their talents as writers and comedic performers
but also to the nature of their productions, which were rollicking satires that
caught the fresh spirit of the newly independent Czechs but also echoed
current entertainment trends in the West, above all in American films and
popular music. Their essential roles were as clowns in the tradition of the
commedia dell'arte, but they added keen wit and sophisticated, at times
absurdist, wordplay.
What gave their work lasting importance, however, were the times
and their response to them as the relatively carefree twenties gave way to the
darker days of the thirties-economic depression, increasing militarism, and
the growing threat of fascism. In addressing such challenges while retaining
their special gift for high-powered comedic entertainment, they enriched
their art and also rallied the spirits of their audiences with their highly topical
productions.
In their final season of 193 7-193 8, they were at their best in two
productions, Tlikd Barbara (Heavy Barbora) and Pest na Oko (A Fist in the
Eye), which resonated with the period of increasing crisis that culminated in
Munich, the capitulation to Hitler, and the loss of Czech territory bordering
Germany. Rightist Czech authorities closed their theatre in early November
1938, just as they were about to open a new production. Knowing that they
were in grave danger because of their long-standing anti-fascist stance, they,
along with Jezek, decided to immigrate to America.
34
]iii Voskovec and Jan Werich arriving in New York from Cleveland, 1941
35
For the next six years, until the end of World War II, they
experienced a variety of adventures in trying to "make it," or at least
survive, in American show business while learning an alien language and
adjusting to a new cultural environment. High expectations and occasional
stage successes alternated with setbacks and periods of frustrating
inactivity. Werich's later reflection on their life during their American years
captures the essence of the situation in which they found themselves:
When I look through our American journal, I am astonished how
back then we swarmed, how we went from one meeting to another,
how we wrote our plays into the morning and revised our old
plays-and how it all didn't lead to anything .... I am surprised
that that we didn't stop trying our luck again and again, that we
didn't throw the towel in. I
On the other hand, with rare exceptions, they kept their spmts high,
persevered, and ultimately achieved their goal of performing on Broadway
to favorable reviews. Almost with poetic justice, their breakthrough not
only made up for six often discouraging years in American theatre but also
paralleled the victorious final months of the war in Europe and the
liberation of Czechoslovakia, from which they had fled in the winter of
1938-39.
Documentation of their years in wartime America is fragmentary.
Both Voskovec and Werich wrote about some of their activity, often
vividly and with insight, but with many gaps, understandably. Werich was
a masterful raconteur and anecdotist, but he is often very sketchy with
dates and other specifics, and although Voskovec was generally more
detailed in his accounts, chiefly in his letters to his relatives in
Czechoslovakia, such letter writing dealing with their American activity
during the war years seems to have ended with the entry of the United
States into the war, when such communications from the United States to
Czechoslovakia were no longer possible. I have tried to pull together a
more complete story of their wartime activity devoted to theatre and film
by consulting additional sources to be found in the United States, such as
Czech-language newspapers and especially the George Voskovec archive in
the Gottlieb Library at Boston University.
They did not leave Prague together. A scant week after the death
of Karel Capek, Voskovec flew from Prague to Paris on New Year's Eve,
36
1938; his French wife remained behind. Similarly leaving family and loved
ones behind, W erich and J e:lek flew from Prague on January 9 and reached
Paris by way of Zurich. A few days later, after a visit with Jean Renoir and
the Fratellini brothers, the trio embarked together from Cherbourg on
January 14 aboard the liner Aquitania, which brought them to New York
Harbor eight hours behind schedule, Friday, January 20, after encountering
stormy seas.2 They were greeted by a cluster of acquaintances they knew
from Europe, including Herbert Kline, an American who had filmed a
documentary, Crisis, in Czechoslovakia in 1938. The film dealt with the
tensions preceding the Munich crisis but also included a sequence of
Voskovec and Werich performing for a group of schoolchildren in the
summer of 1938. Kline was later to prove instrumental in putting them in
touch with an important regional professional theatre, but at the moment,
he persuaded them to stay at a luxury hotel, as befitted their star status.
After two days at the St. Moritz, however, they realized their limited funds
couldn't bear the burden; they had come with only one hundred dollars
each, their limit as visitors on a visa. Facing reality, they managed to find
a small, drafty, but reasonably inexpensive furnished apartment on
Riverside Drive into which all three moved.
How did they expect to survive? They weren't fools, and they
weren't utterly naive. Of course, as victims of fascist oppression, they had
the sympathy and goodwill of many people in America (some of whom
helped them financially), but that was not enough to get them here or to
sustain them for very long. They had obtained their visas only through a
stratagem by William Morris, the head of the major entertainment agency
that is still functioning today. What led Mr. Morris to befriend them?
Apparently it was through the efforts of Lotte Goslar, a talented German
mime and dancer who became well known in America. She had performed
in one of their prewar hits, Balada z hadru (The Rag Ballad, 1935), and
persuaded Morris of their reputation and talent. Morris sent them a generic
contract and promised to try to help them once they were ready to perform
for American audiences.3 This meant, however, learning the English
language, of which they had only the sketchiest knowledge. Luckily for
them, a good Samaritan literally knocked on their door.
Tony K.raber, a neighbor in their building, had heard of them
through word of mouth. He offered to give them lessons in English
without charge. Besides being a likeable and generous person, K.raber was a
sometime actor and folk singer who had worked with the celebrated Group
37
Theatre. He was to prove a valuable friend with whom they stayed in touch
long after the end of their American adventure.
To supplement their dwindling resources, and to get back on stage,
they began a series of appearances for Czech audiences in the New York
metropolitan area. The performances, billed as "An Evening of Cabaret,"
were organized by one Max Raym, a local Czech-American who became
their manager. The first performance took place on March 9 in the T.J.
Sokol Hall on East Seventy-First Street in the heart of the Czech
neighborhood. There was considerable advance publicity, especially in the
Czech daily, New Yorski Listy (New York Pages) .
4
Although many Czech-
Americans knew of Voskovec and W erich, especially through their films,
which were shown in Czech communities, other Czechs, especially older
ones, were unaware of them. In any case, their first performance in the new
world was sold out and a complete success, largely because many in the
audience were recent emigres who had seen their work in Prague.s
The basic format of these performances was a series of semi-
improvised sketches and songs from their repertoire, plus some solo piano
numbers by Jezek. I was a twelve-year-old member of the audience (with
my parents) at one of their first New York performances and still recall one
sketch in which they played tourist strangers who meet on the deck of a
ship and try to communicate in several languages-before realizing they're
both Czechs. One of Jezek's crowd pleasers was asking the audience for
four musical notes and then improvising various musical forms on the
basis of those notes.
Several other performances for Czechs in the New York area took
place in the next few weeks, during which time-ironically- the Germans
completed their seizure of what was Czechoslovakia on March 15. The
performances took place in Newark (March 19), Astoria (April I), and
Yonkers. The Yonkers matinee performance, on March 26, was memorable
in that only one person bothered to come but insisted that they perform
for him. They complied, but he had enough after a few of their routines
and then offered to take them out for a beer.6 A lack of expected turnout
from Czech-American audiences came to be a fact of life during their stay.
They began to realize that many Czech-Americans were not only unaware
of them but also not used to their contemporary idiom and allusions.
Their next performance, on April 14 in the Narodni Dum on East
Seventy-Third Street, was billed as a "Farewell Performance" prior to their
touring west to other Czech-American audiences. By this time their
38
publicity referred to their "New American Program"- presumably routines
based on their experiences and observations since their arrival.
In the meantime, they had also been seeing many films and plays,
occasionally meeting with William Morris and other contacts, learning
English, and working over their Tiikd Barbara script to make it more
accessible for American audiences, since their goal remained a Broadway
production. Equally important to their first one-hundred days in America,
Werich's wife and four-year-old daughter had managed to leave
Czechoslovakia. They arrived in March, staying in New York while
Voskovec, We rich, and Jefek went on their tour west.
Having bought a used twelve-cylinder 1933 Lincoln for $240,
which turned out to have been owned by gangsters, the trio toured from
mid-April to mid-May to Czech-speaking audiences in Baltimore,
Binghamton, Cleveland, and Chicago. Details of this tour have been scarce
except that it was less successful than they had hoped, even though reports
in local newspapers were often enthusiastic. Little is known about their
performances in Baltimore and Binghamton except that they had to have
occurred before April 25 when they arrived in Cleveland. Three days later,
on the evening of Friday, April 28, they performed before an audience of
some seven hundred in Cleveland's Czech National Hall, where the
admission charge was fifty and eighty cents. The program's title was Take
It Easy, a very American idiom. A review in the local Czech-American
newspaper the next day spoke of them as:
extraordinary interpreters of healthy humor. They will be with us
for many years and will accomplish more than our newspaper
articles. They give us an essential part of life. And they are capable
of telling us everything so sharply and not only about dog muzzles
but also about ourselves. And believe us, this is what we need most
of all. In the end, common sense wins after all , and whoever has a
brain, has more than money. The performance was great and
unique and the attendance was excellent by our standardsJ
Equally important during their stay in Cleveland in 1939, they met with
key personnel of the Cleveland Playhouse, who most likely saw their
performance. The meeting was probably arranged by Herbert Kline, the
man who included Voskovec and W erich in his film Crisis and who had
previously been associated with the Playhouse. The Voskovec-Werich-
39
Kline-Cleveland Playhouse connection ts indicated in a Cleveland
newspaper clipping the following year, when Voskovec and Werich
returned to Cleveland to perform at the Playhouse: "Voskovec and Werich
were 'discovered' by Herbert Kline, a former Playhouse attache, who made
a name for himself by making documentary movies in Spain,
Czechoslovakia, and Poland."8 Another clipping from 1940 refers to the
Director of the Playhouse, Frederick McConnell, meeting with Voskovec
and Werich the previous spring during the the team's Czech National Hall
appearance. At this meeting, McConnell went on reportedly to "suggest
that he would be interested in one of their new plays."9
The tour culminated in Chicago, a city which they found
unattractive and not very responsive to their efforts, despite their opposite
hopes and despite their brief reunion with Lotte Goslar, who joined them
in their performances there. Although the Cleveland paper had referred to
five performances being assured for Chicago,lO a Chicago daily paper,
Denni hlasatel (Daily Herald), later reported on only two performances. The
first was in a large auditorium at Morton High School in Cicero, a suburb
of Chicago, heavily populated by Czechs, on the evening of Wednesday,
May 3, 1939. The auditorium held about a thousand seats, two thirds of
which were filled. The newspaper review was very favorable: "Every
number on the program was echoed by explosions of honest laughter and
a storm of grateful applause."ll The review listed nineteen numbers in the
program, including three dance-mimes by Goslar, a piano improvisation by
Je:Zek, and one or more selections from their plays Golem, Osel a stin (An Ass
and a Shadow], Tiikd Barbora, Pest na oko, and Panoptikum (Funhouse). The
performance was also attended by Czech president Eduard Bend, who was
in Chicago at the time. His entrance coincided with the end of one of Lotte
Goslar's numbers. Thinking the storm of applause was for her, she kept
taking bows before realizing that the audience members had their backs
toward her as they faced Bend in the balcony.12 Werich attributed the less-
than-capacity audience to Voskovec and W erich being associated with
Eduard Bend, whom many Czechs resented for his recognition of the
Soviet Union and for having capitulated to the Germans.13 The larger
reality behind the Benes issue was the many divisions among Czech-
Americans, as noted by Werich: "Our countrymen were divided into
groups, subgroups, tiny groups, ideological militants, submilitants, and so
on. This one wouldn't speak to that one, while that one wouldn't speak to
some other."1
4
Later in the year they had to deal with this antagonism
40
during their appearances at two Sokol organizations m Manhattan, the
members of which had no use for each other.
Nevertheless, another performance by Voskovec, Werich, and
Jeiek (and now Goslar) in Chicago received good publicity and, according
to the review, an enthusiastic audience. It occurred in a pavilion in Pilsner
Park, in a Czech section of Chicago, on Wednesday evening, May 10.
Admission was sixty cents, and about six hundred people attended.
According to the reviewer, the program was almost entirely new, and it was
even more effective than the one a week earlier:
Already the introductory number, "Prague Cream of Society,"
captivated the audience and created a fertile ground for jokes,
anecdotes, tongue lashings, and grimaces in the rest of the
program. Voskovec and Werich achieved a maximum effect in the
fifth number called "Water Lice."IS
Despite enthusiastic audiences and good reviews, they barely covered their
expenses on the tour. W erich was aware of the essence of their larger
theatre problem:
It was becoming clear that our fortune would not blossom in the
so-called Czech America. A carpenter needs to know wood; an
actor needs to know language. Until we master English enough to
try to play in a language spoken and understood by an American
audience, we can't continue with our craft16
Nevertheless, they had initiated a relationship with the Cleveland
Playhouse, which was to flower a year later. In the meantime, they returned
to New York in mid-May.
Voskovec's wife was to arrive in early June. With the aid of Tony
Kraber, they arranged an extended rental of a summer home in Point
Pleasant, Pennsylvania (some 120 kilometers from NYC), where they all
stayed until late in November, a stretch of time that of course included the
invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. During those months in
the country, with the encouragement of William Morris and some others,
they kept working over their Barbara script and also a new but unnamed
play built around their talents and designed for an American public. There
is also evidence that that they had begun negotiations with the directors of
41
the Cleveland Playhouse, who at first expressed interest in another of their
works, Osel a stin. And they kept in touch with contacts in New York and
made the round trip from Pennsylvania a number of times for meetings,
which at the time seemed promising but actually had no positive results.
On one such trip, however, they met the theatre couple Howard Lindsay
and Dorothy Stickney, who were much later to become good friends of
Voskovec. It was Blanche Yurka who introduced them.J7 Lindsay was a
successful playwright, director, and actor; his Life With Father- in which he
starred with Stickney-ran for years on Broadway.
Voskovec, Werich, and Jezek's next public performance, again "An
Evening of Cabaret," was on November 11 in the D.A. Sokol Hall on East
Seventy-Second Street, even while they were still living in Pennsylvania.
The publicity stressed virtually all new material, with references to some
specific titles: Sure-Polka, Zftraje den taky (Tomorrow Is also a Day), and
Pisen Ndrodu (The Song of Nations).
1
8 The newspaper review, like the one
for their very first showing in New York, was a rave,l9 suggesting that their
talents had not diminished, even though the quantity and quality of
audiences were unpredictable.
By December of 1939, back in Manhattan, having sold the
Lincoln and still very short of cash, the three comrades found themselves
happy to accept three engagements for New Year's Eve, performing three
quarters of an hour at each site, including the two Sokol Halls previously
mentioned.
In the meantime, still another source of irritation was noted by
Voskovec in late December. Speaking of their ostensible patron, William
Morris, Voskovec noted in a letter:
Meanwhile, our boss ... to hell with him, the blockhead ... took
our product and sent it to Hollywood to Warner Brothers to see
if they would buy it. Well, that sounds beautiful, but we wanted
him to take it to a theatre company on Broadway, which was a
more advantageous way to proceed. But nothing is guaranteed,
and again the decision was postponed till January.zo
The New Year's Eve performances culminated their first year in America,
and were characteristic of their mixed experiences, as Voskovec's
comments indicate:
42
The evening of three performances. The first in the Sokol Hall
on Seventy-First Street. According to the agreement ... we were
to perform for about three quarters of an hour for fifty dollars.
The hall was packed with countrymen of the "supper class,"
which is to say philistines ... sitting at tables, drinking beer, and
looking unusually well fed. We started, and one dialogue more
or less went well, but then we had to shout so that at least the
first row of tables could hear us .... Finally about two thirds of
the hall simply ignored us, chatted, and blew their paper horns.21
They gave up after twenty-five minutes, and then were reprimanded by a
functionary for shortchanging the audience and not really being funny.
They were even given a smaller fee than promised, but eventually the
matter was resolved. The second performance was in the Sokol Hall on
Seventy-Second Street. "There the people were wonderful, remarkably
quiet, and reacted beautifully. In short, they were working people ..... We
received our agreed-upon thirty dollars immediately. They call the
members of the other Sokol Hall hooligans. "22
The third performance was in the Dllnickj dum (Workers'
Building) on Seventy-Second Street. Voskovec's terse diary comments even
included a nod to the New Year:
A big success, even though some people there were already in high
spirits. And here ends our first year of emigration. And what to
wish for? That the second be as lucky, because actually- what have
we to complain about if we think of the people in Prague? There
could be a more positive side to our work. And politically
speaking, may it all hurry ahead according to all our wishes for
universal well being.23
If 1939 was a year of becoming acclimated to a foreign land and
mastering its language, seeking varied contacts, and performing only in
Czech for Czech audiences, 1940 brought them before an English-speaking
theatre public in two of their own translated plays, which also took them
away from New York for most of the year. They had been in
communication with two of the leaders of the Cleveland Playhouse for
much of 1939, discussing two of their plays for possible production in
Cleveland. Both Frederick McConnell and K. Elmo Lowe had been with
43
the Playhouse for almost twenty years and made it into an outstanding
regional theatre that produced about eight to ten plays each season, each
play running serially for several weeks. The two Voskovec-and-Werich
plays under consideration were Tlikd Barbora and Osel a stin, both of which
Voskovec and Werich, with the aid of others, had translated during 1939.
In early February of 1940, Werich wrote they were short of money
and were very happy to receive a check for $100 from Amy Douglas, a
wealthy Cleveland widow and associate of the Playhouse, who had most
likely met them the previous year during their several days in Cleveland
and thought they might welcome a little extra money.24 Indeed, once they
had finished their performances for Czechs on New Year's Eve, they had
no other firm prospects, despite many dealings with agents and potential
producers. In the meantime, however, the communications with
McConnell and Lowe had evolved to the point that Lowe wrote to
Voskovec on February 3 saying that of the two plays under consideration
by the Playhouse, Tlikd Barbora seemed preferable to Osel a stin.25
Furthermore, a Cleveland newspaper clipping from February 14 states that
McConnell and K. Elmo Lowe spent the previous week in New York
"completing negotiations for the exiles' appearance in Cleveland next
month."26 Coincidentally, another letter to both Voskovec and Werich was
also written on February 3. It was from Paul Kohner, an important
Hollywood film agent who introduced himself as originally from the
T eplice region of Czechoslovakia, asking them to send him their plays now
in English as well as any film scripts, and hoping that they might have
brought a copy of their film Hey RupP Kohner was to play an important
part in Voskovec and Werich's later adventures in Hollywood, but in the
meantime, he was yet one more person with whom to keep in contact.
Other Cleveland newspaper clippings reveal that Voskovec and
Werich, but not Je:lek, arrived in Cleveland on February 15-their train
delayed by a snowstorm. (It is clear that Jezek felt wearier from the
previous year's activities and found satisfaction in his personal and
musical involvements in New York's Czech quarter. Newspaper
clippings and other items in the scrapbook of the Tlikd Barbora
production (now called Heavy Barbora) refer to various social events at
which Voskovec and Werich were the honored guests, to the arrival of
Werich's wife and daughter as well as Voskovec's wife in mid-March, to
a request from MGM in Hollywood for a copy of their Heavy Barbora,
to the fact that Heavy Barbora would have one of the largest casts in
44
Slavic and East European PeifOrmance Vol. 26, No. 1
Playhouse history, and to the Playhouse's admission prices, $1 and $1.25
on Saturdays.
Heavy Barbara opened on Wednesday evening, March 27, 1939.
Je:Zek and other friends from New York came to the premiere. The program
reveals that Tony Kraber and Voskovec and W erich were the translators,
and K. Elmo Lowe as adaptor and co-director with Frederic McConnell. H.
Gunther Gerzso was the designer. All of]e:Zek's music was used, except for
two songs composed by Crawford Wright. All the music came from two
pianos. New lyrics for all the songs were written by various people,
including Amy Douglass. The program listed fifty people in the cast.
Heavy Barbara was a genuine hit, with both the play and Voskovec
and Werich as performers getting positive reviews, although the stage
artistry and clowning of Voskovec and W erich drew most of the praise.
One review stated: "I found the play as refreshing as a bucketful of water
from an old spring . ... It is the one piece of the Playhouse season you dare
not miss. "28 Voskovec referred to another reviewer William F. McDermott,
who wrote: "They have the undeniably rare skill and genius of a born
clown in creating a strange, pleasantly dim world of nonsense."29 The
production finished its run on April 28, according to Voskovec.30
During the next half year, during which France fell, they remained
in Cleveland, savoring their success and working on many projects and
contacts with optimism. They were especially pleased by a fund 0f oskovec
called it a "corporation"that was established for them by Lowe and well-to-
do patrons of the theatre.31 It guaranteed them a wage for five years and
support for future productions, including the possibility of a Broadway
production in the fall, with Lowe as their agent. In the meantime, they had
been working on a "new" play, which turned out to be a version of their
Osel a stin, now called An Ass and a Shadow, which Amy Douglass had been
translating with Voskovec. Among modifications to the script was a new
scene at the beginning involving the ghosts of Napoleon and Caesar, as
well as Dionysus. Occasional trips to New York to keep up various
contacts, some lectures and peformances at regional colleges,
communications with people in Hollywood (including Paul Kohner), a
performance at the Cleveland Sokol, and relaxation at Lake Chatauqua in
New York were some of the activities that marked what was probably their
most extended, essentially agreeable, sojourn in America- even though
Cleveland as a city was never to their liking. Nevertheless, their attitude to
the people at the Playhouse was very appreciative: "We had the marvelous
45
46
luck of running into excellent people from Cleveland, especially K. Elmo
Lowe and our guardian angel Mrs. Amy Douglas. These excellent people
are absolutely devoted to us."32
Although they hoped that their "new" play, An Ass and a Shadow,
might be produced directly on Broadway, or perhaps first in Hollywood,
circumstances finally led to its being done in Cleveland at the Playhouse,
hopefully as a showcase for eventual transfer to Broadway. The premiere
was Wednesday evening, November 6, 1940. The program lists K. Elmo
Lowe and Amy Douglas as "adaptors" of the script, Lowe as director, the
stage design again by H.G. Gerzso, with songs (nine are cited) by Harold J.
Rome, a young American composer who had already written music for
several Broadway productions. This time, the music was scored for two
pianos plus percussion.
The repeated essence of the critics' reviews was that the
performing ofVoskovec and Werich was perhaps even better than in Heavy
Barbara but that the play- as a play- was a failure, despite its effective
production values. One critic who had praised Heavy Barbara said of An
Ass and a Shadow: "I'd have thrown the play away almost any time to make
room for another vaudeville number by Voskovec and W erich. When they
were off the stage the lights figuratively went out, and there was no sense
in the nonsense."33 The reviewer for the celebrated national entertainment
paper, Variery, was equally negative: "The two Czech refugees are better
comedians ... than playwrights .... Their clowning seems refreshingly
vivid and original as long as they are slapsticking a nutty piece of horseplay
... but their vehicle is about as disconnected as a vaudeville skit."3
4
Broadway and Chicago producer Mike Todd came to see the production
but was frank in telling Voskovec and Werich that they didn't interest
him- they weren't American enough.35 Hopes for a Broadway production
were postponed and eventually cancelled, although both Voskovec and
W erich continued to receive payments from the fund.
The next months extending into 1941 were again a time of
rethinking their situation, making trips to New York, keeping in touch with
agents and potential producers, and writing the frame for a new "musical
extravaganza" (unnamed) based on many of their tried and true pieces from
the past, hoping that they might interest a New York producer.36 Most
important among these many activities and incidents were the involvement
with the Hollywood agent, Paul Kohner, and the British Broadcasting
Company (BBC). Still living in Cleveland in early 1941, Voskovec and
47
Werich decided to put off their attempts at a breakthrough in New York
and instead go to Hollywood; it was to prove the most significant of their
adventures in 1941. Kohner liked their new script and reinforced their
decision to go west. By March of 1941, they had contracts signed with
Kohner to represent them in Hollywood. The second significant
development was that the BBC originally contacted Voskovec and Werich
in December of 1940 regarding some propaganda broadcasts to be beamed
to Czechoslovakia. They obliged with a sample recording, which pleased
the BBC. In May 1941, they asked for five more recordings, and then six
more, for which they paid $50 each. The point of the broadcasts was to
ridicule the Axis forces and support the morale of the Czechs. These
broadcasts proved to be a welcome source of income for Voskovec and
W erich for the next several years.
The expedition to Hollywood occurred in two stages. First, the
W erichs departed in a small, used Plymouth on May 20, accompanied by
Adolf Hoffmeister, a more recent Czech emigre who had been living with
the W erichs in Cleveland since February. Because of serious dental
procedures, Voskovec had to delay his trip, but he, his wife, and Tony
Kraber departed Cleveland weeks later in June, in a new auto loaned to
them by Amy Douglas. By July 17, Voskovec, W erich, and their friends
were together in Hollywood. Since both Voskovec and W erich have
written valuable accounts of their travel to Hollywood and their
experiences there during the next five months, I shall touch only on the
main incidents.37 Thanks to Paul Kohner, they had several interviews with
people in important positions, perhaps the most important being with Hal
Roach, who seemed interested in their possibilities as comic types but
never communicated with them after their interview. More satisfYing was
their performance before a group of students and others at the Max
Reinhardt Studio in late July. On the basis of the reactions to this
performance, they organized another presentation in the same studio
theatre on August 12, this time to a much more powerful gathering of
Hollywood producers, directors, and stars, among whom were Harold
Lloyd, Walter Wanger, Walter Huston, Frederic March, top executives
from Paramount and RKO, and Orson Welles with Dolores Del Rio. They
were a great success, especially in the eyes of then-young Orson Welles,
who had achieved a major reputation with his film Citizen Kane and was in
the process of directing another. He was so taken by Voskovec and W erich
that he personally set up a special screen test for them to be directed by
48
Welles himself. Voskovec's description of it captures the special tension of
their waiting for weeks for the specific appointment and then the
memorable evening itself, which lasted from ten o'clock at night to seven
or eight the next morning. Regarding the improvised, stressful quality of
the effort, Voskovec speaks of "that splendid smell of total chaos, where
beneath its hysterical surface beats an exact rhythm of irrationally reliable
work. It was like in the Liberated Theatre before the premiere."38
Everyone who saw the test thought it was splendid, but, alas, like
so many other projects that seemed so promising, the screen test led
nowhere, chiefly because a major RKO executive took offense at references
to St. Bernard dogs in the skit, thinking that Voskovec and Werich were
mocking St. Bernard and his order. Already hostile to Welles, he ordered
that the test as well as other Welles material be thrown out. As far as is
known, the screen test was never seen again. Aggravating the
disappointment was the length of time that had been taken up with the
project- at least three months.
The departure ofVoskovec and W erich &om Hollywood and their
return to New York was triggered by a thorough misunderstanding. Kohner
informed them in November 1941 that the producers of a Broadway
musical, Viva O'Brien, wanted their services in New York. They flew to
New York, met with the people involved, and discovered that the show,
which opened early in October and was elaborately produced, was a failure
with audiences, but the producers and others did not want to close it
because it was considered important to American-Mexican relations. Why
were Voskovec and Werich brought into the picture? Because someone
came across photos of them in their 1934 Prague production of Kat a
Bldzen (The Executioner and the Fool), which was set in Mexico, and
thought they might be experts on Mexican musicals. Once they saw a
performance of the musical, Voskovec and Werich realized the production
couldn't be saved in any case, and the play closed a week later.39
Once back in New York, the two Czechs decided they really didn't
want to go back to California, so they called their families back to join
them in December. In the meantime, reinforcing their decision, the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war. Once back
in New York, Vokovec and Werich launched into additional projects in
their efforts to reach their goal of a Broadway production. One involved a
contract involving Lowe and some potential backers in New York.
Voskovec and Werich were to come up with a script in four weeks for a
49
play with a working title of "Unknown from Coast to Coast," for which
they would be paid $100 a week during the four weeks, and the producers
would make all efforts to get the work produced.
4
0 In an effort to help
them, both Walter Wanger and Orson Welles wrote highly favorable
recommendations of them to the producers. Welles's letter, sent December
1, is worth quoting:
I had the rare privilege of seeing them at a private performance in
Hollywood. Under the most adverse circumstances they held the
stage and got the most hard-boiled audience one could imagine as
enthusiastic about them as I have been ever since. Subsequently, I
made a screen test of them during which I was able to observe their
unusual talent and ingenuity to a fuller extent. I hope for your sake
you will be able to use them.41
Two other notable events occurred in the next month or two.
Most deeply affecting them was the death ofJeiek, who died on January 1,
1942 after a long period of illness, even though he kept working with local
Czech music groups almost to the end. On the positive side, they were
offered work with the Office of War Information (OWl) that paralleled the
work they had been doing with the BBC: creating and producing fifteen-
minute broadcasts to be beamed to Czechoslovakia. Voskovec referred to
the offer being made in February 1942 by John Houseman, who was
heading the special project; Houseman had been Orson Welles's closest
associate in the 1930s. The OWl work, which continued even after the end
ofWWII in 1945, supplemented the BBC income. It meant that they were
not as pressured to find stage work, even though that was still their prime
objective.
In a letter to Lowe written on February 3, 1942, Voskovec
describes a new plan in relation to the project they had been working on
since December. Not satisfied with what they had written, he and
Werich-now that Jeiek was gone-contacted Kurt Weill with the play in
question. Weill suggested that they needed to have some major figure
rewrite it. He suggested Moss Hart, a highly successful playwright with
many Broadway hits to his credit, the latest being the 1941 Broadway
musical, Lady in the Dark, with a psychoanalytic theme. Hart became
enthusiastic about the project. Voskovec then goes on to say that he wishes
that Hart would take over, regardless of who gets the credit. The following
so
passage reveals Voskovec's state of mind after so many frustrated hopes and
plans, three years after their arrival:
We're sick of being stubborn and of trying to get our idea over. .. .
We still know we're right about our theatre-only you can't prove
this unless you can do it once. And you can't do it unless you can
prove it to money. Consequently, if Moss Hart keeps on being
excited, we'll let him do whatever he wants to as long as it is not
completely against our line .... If it could be done this way, we
don't give a damn about who signs the show or whose merit it is if
we happen to be successful. If only we could hit once, that's all that
counts. Then, maybe, we could do it our way .... I begin to believe
what I always refused to up to now, that there is a difference
between American and European thinking after all. Or else we got
cockeyed in our way of thinking, being out of theatre for all those
long years .... I feel that I'm going sort of discouraged and bitter,
which is very unpleasant and silly- so I'd better leave it there and
pray for Mr. Hart's favorable psychoanalytic reactions.42
Voskovec's prayers went unanswered. Nothing came of the entire project,
and little is known ofVoskovec and Werich's professional activities for the
rest of 1942 other than that they continued their radio work for both the
BBC and the OWL Otherwise, it is clear that by June 1942, when Heydrich
was assassinated in Prague and the village of Lidice was demolished in
retaliation, the Werichs were living in Mt. Kisco, a suburb of New York,
and the Voskovecs in Jackson Heights, a section in the NYC borough of
Q!leens across the river from Manhattan.
In my research I came across references to two one-performance
productions involving Voskovec and Werich in 1943, suggesting that their
broadcasting work was temporarily taking them away from their attempts
at getting one of their own plays produced. The first of these productions
was dedicated to the Lidice horror. It was a play written by Adolf
Hoffmeister, Slepcova Pfftalka aneb Lidice (The Blindman's Whistle or
Lidice), produced by the District Committee of the International Workers
Order of New York, and performed on the afternoon of March 7 at Hunter
College Theatre in Manhattan. Voskovec was the director and Werich
acted in it; the stage design was by Antonin Pelc. The only review I found
was in the German-language newspaper Aujbau, which referred to the
51
performance as "a successful production of the Hoffmeister's piece."43
The other 1943 production in which Voskovec and Werich
participated was also directly related to the war effort. It was a "concert" of
dramatic and musical pieces titled, We Fight Back, presented in the Hunter
College Concert Hall on Saturday evening, April 3. The performance
commemorated the tenth anniversary of the book burning in Berlin and
included appearances by Lotte Lenya, Josef Schildkraut, Herbert Berghof,
and others in addition to Voskovec and Werich, with texts by Stephen
Vincent Benet, Brecht, Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Kurt Weill, and Fritz von
Unruh. Voskovec and Werich appeared in their own new sketch titled
"Schwejk's Spirit Lives On." The Azifbau review described it as, "a
delicious, humorous representation of the brave Czechslovak spirit of
sabotage." A critical study of Bertolt Brecht referred to this Voskovec-and-
W erich performance as motivating Brecht (who witnessed it) to pursuing
his own version of Hasek's work, Schweyk in the Second World War.45
In the fall of 1943, as a foreshadowing of Voskovec's later
difficulties in the early 1950s with accusations of being a communist,
Voskovec and Werich were similarly accused by the Constitutional
Educational League, a right-wing organization. Both Voskovec and Werich
had to sign an official document denying this and other equally lurid
charges. It would seem that the trouble blew over, only to surface years
later when Voskovec was held at Ellis Island when returning to America
from Europe.
In 1944, Voskovec and Werich continued to work for the BBC
and the OWl but also looked for opportunities to act in the plays of others.
Moreover, they did not restrict themselves to having to work together. In
March 1944, Werich was almost cast in a play that became a big hit,
jakobowsky and the Colonel, written by Franz Werfel and directed by Elia
Kazan. Earlier, in February, both Voskovec and Werich had been cast in
Thank You, Svoboda, but both withdrew from the cast after two rehearsals
when it became obvious that the director, H.S. Kraft, who was also the
author, did not know what he was doing.
4
6 The play closed on March 4.
Werich referred to still another production in which he was offered the
leading role, Tucker's People (based on a novel by Ira Wolfert); the
dramatization written by the well-known playwright Elmer Rice was to be
directed by the equally established director Jed Harris. Once again, there
was much frustration, because the play never went into rehearsa1.47
Some of these aborted or miscarried opportunities were probably
52
compensated by a non-theatrical reality of having their broadcasting
salaries raised. Voskovec's collected papers include a personnel form dated
September 1 stating that Voskovec's salary for the OWl was then raised
from that of a script editor ($3,800 annually) to that of a writer-announcer
($4,600). It is not clear if Werich's salary was raised as well.
In early November, shortly before their fateful interview and
audition-as a team-for Shakespeare's Tempest, Werich was offered a role in
another play that ultimately was a failure, Sophie, an adaptation of a novel
dealing with a Czech woman in Chicago. When W erich raised some
questions about the dialogue, he was let go.48 But then came the fateful day
in late fall when Voskovec and W erich were interviewed and auditioned by
Cheryl Crawford and Margaret Webster, the producer and director of
Shakespeare's Tempest.
Almost thirty years later, in a letter to Cheryl Crawford dated
November 17, 1972, Voskovec recalled their meeting on a cold day in
Webster's flat in November 1944 and went on to say,
After five hard years of fruitless efforts, suddenly, we made it to
Broadway-pleasantly, with no fuss whatsoever. ... Two absurd
clowns finally did get a break in the USA thanks to two glorious
dames and one Bard.49
In their own subsequent publications, both Crawford and Webster recalled
their experience with the "two absurd clowns." In her autobiography,
Margaret Webster wrote:
We were lucky in getting an ideal Stephano-Trinculo team, two
brilliant Czechoslovakian actors, Jan Wierich [sic] and George
Voskovec .... They had been reared in the same ancient and
honorable tradition of"clowns" that Shakespeare's own men must
have followed, with the same flexibility and invention plus that
touch of fantasy that present-day comics too often lack ....
Voskovec and Wierich were the type of actors who can transform
your ideas instead of merely translating them, and I was very
grateful. so
Cheryl Crawford, in her own autobiography, speaks of her concern about
casting the clown roles to avoid their comedy scenes being "flat and
53
boring." She goes on to say that she had heard ofVoskovec and Werich's
background, and once she met them, "we immediately took them on, and
they fulfilled our hopes, contributing inspired improvisation," such as
Voskovec's idea for a specially prepared cloak that contributed to
wonderful comic effects in the scene involving the creation of a strange
beast formed by Caliban and Trinculo, played by Voskovec.Sl
The Tempest rehearsed through December before opening for a few
preview performances in Philadelphia, followed by a two-week pre-
Broadway run in Boston on January 8, 1945. Well received in both cities,
it opened on Broadway in the Alvin Theatre on January 25, received mostly
favorable reviews, and ran for a record-breaking one-hundred performances
before closing on April21. The wartime context of this period included the
Battle of the Bulge, the Yalta Conference, MacArthur's landing on Luzon,
and the death of President Roosevelt. The New York reviews ofVoskovec
and W erich were gratifyingly positive, with the one by Joseph Wood
Krutch, an eminent drama scholar, being perhaps the most outstanding:
"George Voskovec and Jan Werich, the Czech clowns, are sublime, and ...
I saw nothing to reprehend in the antics which made the Trinculo-Stephano
scenes high points in the performance."S2 Their success on Broadway was
evident in feature stories about them in the New York Times and the Herald
Tribune shortly after the premiere.53
Almost exactly six years after their arrival in New York as Czech-
speaking immigrant comedians, they finally achieved what they had hoped
for from the beginning, success on Broadway in nothing less than
Shakespeare. Undoubtedly increasing their satisfaction must have been the
conclusion of the war in Europe, capped by the liberation of Prague on
May 8, shortly after the end of The Tempest's run, events they commented
on in their radio broadcasts for the BBC and the OWl, which they had
continued even while performing all that winter and spring. The total
number of their programs from 1941-1945 ran into the hundreds. Werich
and his family returned to Prague in September, 1945, Voskovec a year
later, during which time he still kept on with the broadcasts.
In retrospect, it is interesting to note that success came to them as
actors rather than playwrights (or even as actors performing their own
material) despite their many elaborate efforts and near successes. This is
understandable because acting is more readily "translatable" than language
or socio-cultural topics and allusions.
Undaunted, they forged ahead in 1940, but the trio became a duo
54
Voskovec and Werich as Trinculo and Stephano
(above seated right of stairs) in Margaret Webster's production of
The Tempest at the Alvin Theatre 1945
when Jefek decided to stay in New York,5
4
while they went on to a
residency in Cleveland, where in 1940 they did productions in English at
the Cleveland Playhouse of two of their 1930s works. But rising hopes and
good reviews were offset by repeated letdowns and fai led promises.
Highpoints of the following years were near-misses in Hollywood involving
Hal Roach, Max Reinhardt, and Orson Welles; broadcasting several
hundred radio transmissions for the BBC and the Office of War
Information back to Czechoslovakia; and, finally, "making it" on
Broadway when they appeared together as the two clowns, Stephano and
Trinculo, in Margaret Webster's production of Shakespeare's Tempest in
1945, just as the war was ending. But all those incidents are subjects for a
longer essay.
55
NOTES
1 Jan Werich, jan Werich vzpomind Qan Werich Remembers) (Prague: Melantrich,
1982), 117.
2 Voskovec refers to their arrival on January 21, but the New York Times indicates
January 20 in their January 21, 1939 edition, 31.
3 W erich, 117. See also ]in Voskovec, Voskovec & Wachsmanni (V oskovec and the
Wachsmanns), ed. Adriena Borovickova (Prague: Lidove noviny, 1996) 126f. No
salary was involved; that would happen once they were professionally employed.
4 New Yorski Listy, March 4, 1939, 3.
5 New Yorski Listy, March 11, 1939, 1. The headline of the review read, "Slava
umelecke trojici Voskovec, Werich a Jezek!" (Hurrah for the Artistic Trio of
Voskovec, Werich, and Jdek!)
6 Werich, 112
7
Cleveland Svlt, April29, 1939, 6. Informative articles about Voskovec, Werich, and
Jezek also appeared in this newspaper during the five days preceding the performance.
8 "The City, " March 13, 1940, no. 28.
9 Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 14, 1940.
10 Cleveland Svlt, April 13, 1939, 6
11 DennE hlasatel, May 4, 1939, 2.
12 Goslar described the incident in a manuscript in the Voskovec Collection in the
Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
13 Werich, 113.
14 Werich, 114.
IS Denni hlasatel, May 11, 1939, 6.
16 Werich, 114.
1
7
Letter from Voskovec to Dorothy Lindsay, February 14, 1968, m Voskovec
Collection, Boston University.
18 New Yorski Listy, October 31, 1939, 3.
19 New Yorski Listy, November 15, 1939. The review was headed "Skvely Ospech
Kabaretniho Vecera" (Cabaret Evening a Splendid Success).
20 V oskovec, 141
21 Voskovec cited in Werich, 116.
22 Ibid.
23 Voskovec cited in Werich, 116f.
2
4
Werich, 118
25 Lowe's letter is in the Voskovec Collection, Boston University.
26 Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 14, 1940. See also Werich, 18-19.
27 Letter in the Voskovec Collection, Boston University.
56
28 Jack Warfel, "'Heavy Barbara' on 'Must-See' List," Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 28,
1939.
29 Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 7, 1940.
30 Voskovec, 144.
31 Ibid., 148.
32 Ibid. For details of their Cleveland stay during 1940, see also Voskovec, 143-171
and Werich, 119-126.
33 Wlliam F. McDermott, Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 7, 1940, 12.
34 Pullen, Variery, November 13, 1940, 60.
35 W erich, 132.
36 Voskovec, 169.
37 See Werich, 134-174 and Voskovec, 169, 179-192, and 281-287.
38 Voskovec, 286.
39 Werich, 174-186.
40 The contract is in the Voskovec Collection, Boston University.
41 The letter is in the Voskovec Collection at Boston University.
42 The letter is in the Voskovec Collection, Boston University.
43 F.C.W. "Wieder Voskovec and Werich, "Aujbau, March 12, 1943.
44 "We Fight Back," Aujbau, April9, 1943.
45 James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980), 113.
46 Werich, 255-256.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Voskovec to Cheryl Crawford, November 17, 1972, Voskovec Collection, Boston
University.
50 Margaret Webster, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage (New York: Knopf, 1972),
121.
51 Cheryl Crawford, One Naked Individual, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 147f.
52 "Drama," The Nation, February 10, 1945, 165.
53 See Bill Doll, "Prague's Bad Boys on Broadway," New York Times, February 11,
1945, II, 1; Bert McCord, "Ex.its and Entrances: Czechs Unchecked," Herald Tribune,
February 11, 1945, IV, 1.
5
4
JeZ.ek died in New York, January 1, 1942. He married a Czech woman in New
York and had been training singing choruses in the Delnickj dum.
'' *Special thanks to Veronika Tuckerova for the English translation of some
quotations and titles. Jarka Burian's article first appeared in Czech, and at the
time of his death, he had not quite completed editing the English version.
57
LUNACHARSKY ON REVOLUTIONARY LAUGHTER
Daniel Gerould
Anatoly Lunacharsky first set out his ideas on revolutionary
comedy in his essay, "We Are Going to Laugh," published in early 1920
(Vestnik Teatra, No. 58, 23-28 March), at the height of the civil war, just
as the tide was beginning to turn in favor of the Bolsheviks. For the
Commissar of Education laughter is the expression of the triumph of
progressive values over reactionary enemies.
Thus laughter-Lunacharsky argues-is a major weapon of class
warfare in the battle of the Soviets for control of Russia, and in his view
it has always played a key role in the struggle for the liberation of
humanity from the shackles of the past. When the new world conquers a
dying old order, the laughter of victory rings out as an expression of
strength.
The sources for Lunacharsky's ideas in "We Are Going To Laugh"
are many and complex. The Commissar of Education had read widely in
the theory and practice of comedy, and he drew upon the classics,
medieval and Renaissance masters, enlightenment philosophers, and
nineteenth-century Russian social thinkers. While arguing for a distinctly
new Soviet form of comedy, Lunacharsky stresses continuity with earlier
humanist concepts, going back to the notion of release from constraint
found in Roman Saturnalia and in medieval and Renaissance festive
holidays. Carnival is at the heart of his theories. He offers a vigorous
defense of the Russian popular culture of festivity.
Lunacharsky argues that markedly social and satirical nature of
Russian popular culture is a legacy of the traditional Russian buffoons
(skomorokhz), known for their allusive jests and pointed witticisms. The
Commissar of Education is firmly committed to the world of merriment
represented by the clown, who was always scorned by the Orthodox
church and Tsarist state, but will be acclaimed-Lunacharsky hopes-by
the new Soviet republic. His concept of victorious laughter has its roots
in traditional notions of the contest between summer and winter in the
seasonal cycles of the year, the generational battle between impetuous
young lovers and repressive aging parents, and the clash between
freedom and ritual bondage. Lunacharsky also finds inspiration in
Marxist theory, particularly the commentary on history and comedy by
58
Anatoly Lunacharsky, 1928
the twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx based on his reading of the Greeks:
History is thorough and goes through many phases as it conducts
an old form to the grave. The final phase of a world-historical
form is comedy. The Greek gods, already tragically and mortally
wounded in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, had to die again
comically in Lucian's dialogues. Why t his course of history? So
that mankind may part from its past happily.!
Throughout the 1920s Lunacharsky in his position as Commissar of
Education spoke out in favor of Soviet satire, including the plays of
59
Mayakovsky. He encouraged festive holiday celebrations (sports, games,
shows, and pageants) and mass spectacles on revolutionary anniversaries
re-enacting historic events, and he actively promoted popular culture in its
many forms: circus, clowning, musical hall, cabaret, ballroom and modern
dancing, song, and film.
In 1929 during an acrimonious debate over the supposed demise
of humor and satire, the opponents of laughter- doctrinaire party hacks
supporting Stalin and the monolithic state-called for the eradication of
satire as something useless and even harmful in the new Soviet society
where there never were-and never could be-any vices or foibles. Although
no longer Commissar of Education, Lunacharsky came to the defense of
satire, and, at the end of 1930 under the auspices of the Academy of
Sciences, he established a Commission for the Study of the Satiric Genres,
which was to prepare monographs on individual authors and topics as well
as a general bibliography.
Stanislavsky, Lunacharsky, and Shaw, 1931
60
In January 1931, Lunarcharsky read to the Commission at the
Academy of Sciences his lecture on "Laughter," in which he discussed the
comic culture of the new society and analyzed the special place of satire.
Lunacharsky's projected but never written book on the social role oflaughter
was to include the following topics: the philosophy and psychology of
laughter; the concept of the risible; the comic, its aesthetic and philosophy;
the theory of satire and humor; the history of the satirical genres in their
historical development; the problem of wit; and the problem of irony.
2
In his lecture on "Laughter," Lunacharsky includes a short section
on carnival and its importance in the history of satire as "open mockery."
Mikhail Bakhtin was thinking along similar lines at the same time and may
have been encouraged by Lunacharsky's essay to make his own in-depth
study of carnival in The World q[Rabelais. The Commissar would later defend
Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky. For Lunacharsky carnival is a time of
abundance and equality for all, in which the lower classes are temporally
liberated.
Carnival is a custom that goes back to the distant times of the
history of Babylon and comes up to our own days. Carnival plays a
huge role in Roman and pre-Roman culture. In carnival there can
be found both magical disguise and also the replacement of a more
ancient custom-human sacrifice-which represents a cultural
phenomenon of immense importance. It is not only a question of
replacing a precious sacrifice by a less valuable one, but it also a
question of replacing a sacrifice that formerly the aristocratic class
made by a sacrifice that the plebeians make. Moreover, carnival
served the ruling classes as a kind of safe-valve, since during carnival
a certain public freedom was given to the oppressed classes. In
ordinary times the lower classes could laugh at the upper classes
only on the sly; during carnival open mockery became possible. The
organizers of carnival felt that, on the one hand, this was an outlet
for feelings of mounting class dissatisfaction, and, on the other, that
this outlet was not serious)
Lunacharsky sees revolutionary laughter as a healthy and joyous reaction to a
lowering of tension when obstacles are overcome. It is a physiological
response of the human mechanism to dissipating pressure. Channeled in an
ideologically progressive direction, laughter purges the nightmares of the past.
61
NOTES
I "Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction," in Writings of
the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, translated and edited by Lloyd D. Easton
and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1967), 254.
2 "Laughter has always been an extraordinarily important part of social progress.
The role of laughter is also great in our struggle, the final struggle for humanity.
Therefore we will be happy and proud if we succeed in tracing and in analyzing in
concrete examples the historical development and thus sharpen the weapons of our
humorists and satirists." From "0 Smekhe," a lecture first given in 1931 and
published in 1935. Reprinted in A.V. Lunacharsky, Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 8
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1967), 538.
3 Ibid., 535.
62
Slavic and East European Perfonnance Vol. 26, No. 1
WE ARE GOING TO LAUGH
(Vestnik Teatra, 1920, No. 58)
1
Anatoly Lunacharsky
I often hear laughter. We live in a cold and hungry land, which
recently was being torn to pieces. But I often hear laughter, I see laughing
faces in the streets, I hear t hrongs of workers and Red Army men laughing
at entertaining shows or at an amusing film. I have heard booming peals
of laughter even at the front not far from where blood is being spilt.
That shows that we have a vast reserve of strength, for laughter is
a sign of strength. Laughter is not only a sign of strength, it is strength
itself. And since we have it, we need to direct it in the right channel.
Until now, despite several attempts, we have not succeeded in
creating a satirical literary magazine. Individual caricatures in the ROST A
window series or in the form of placards have been successful, but even
here we have not found our own style or a scale worthy of the revolution.
Perhaps Demian Bedny is our best laughter-crafter, but he is somewhat of
an isolated case in this respect and only gradually and in very small
measure is beginning to leave the half-dead columns of t he newspaper for
the living stage.
All this is nothing compared to the great task of directing the
elemental force of popular laughter into a worthy channel.
Laughter is a sign of victory. A subtle thinker says: "There is
nothing more festive, sacred, and joyful than the first smile of a child; it
means that its psyche is beginning to dominate its organism and
surroundings, it indicates the triumph of the first ray of consciousness."
Spencer, Sully, Bergson, and others have maintained with
absolute certainty that laughter signifies the discharge of inner tension as
the result of a feeling of one's own superiority, as the result of a simple
solution to some sort of problem in real life.
As long as man is weak in the face of his enemy, he does not
laugh at him, he hates him; if at times a sarcastic smile full of hate appears
on his lips, it is laughter poisoned by bile, l aughter that rings uneasily. But
once what was bowed down grows up straight, laughter rings out louder
and stronger. That is indignant laughter, that is irony, biting satire. In this
laughter can be heard the crack of the whip and at times the peal of the
approaching thunder of the struggle. That is how Gogol began laughing,
63
before he started drying the tears in his eyes, and that is how Saltykov
laughed, trembling with indignation.
And what comes after that?
Mter that laughter becomes more and more contemptuous as the
new feels its strengths. This contemptuous laughter-defiant, cheerful,
already sensing its victory, already signifying relaxation-is indispensable
as a very real weapon. It is the stake that is driven into the freshly killed
dark wizard ready to return from the grave, it is the hammering of strong
nails into the black coffin of the past.
When you have defeated a vile but powerful enemy, don't think
that it is final, especially if what's involved is an entire class and an entire
civilization. The enemy entangles you from all sides with a thousand toxic
threads and has flung some of those tentacles into your very brain, into
your very heart, and, like other hydras, can come back to life. Such threads
need to be torn out, need to be extirpated. It cannot be done
mechanically, it cannot be done by force, it cannot be done by an
operation, which would mean tearing the entire body of a living being to
shreds and even then nothing would be accomplished. But it can be done
chemically. There is such a substance, such a disinfectant that causes the
evaporation of all that noxiousness-it is laughter, the great sanitizer. To
do something by means of the comic means to inflict a wound in the vital
nerve itself. Laughter is audacious, laughter is blasphemous, laughter kills
with the venom of poisoned arrows.
And in our time, when we have overthrown the gigantic enemy
only in Russia, when we are indeed entangled by the threads of the former
civilization, still poisoning all our air, when on all sides that same enemy
exults and awaits the moment to land a new blow-at such a time, without
letting go of the sword in one hand, we can take in the other hand a subtle
weapon-laughter.
Will we find among us actors for the great social comedies, will
we find among us satirists who could anew shake off all the detritus of the
past? Will it be enough to revive the old laughter from Fonvizin to
Chekhov?
We shall not immediately set our sights on doing something great
and at the same time we shall not content ourselves only with foreign
works, only with our former literature-we are alive and should create; if
we are not immediately up to creating on a grandiose scale (remember: we
are creating the grandiose in another theatre-the theatre of military
64
operations and international relations, we are creating the grandiose in the
field of national economy), then we shall start on a small scale.
If we already have among us interesting, successful attempts at
parodies, vaudeville couplets, satirical jabs, caustic diatribes, why wouldn't
satiri cal theatre simply be an extension of that?
Long live the jesters of his majesty the proletariat! If even their
fool s sometimes, with a grimace, told the truth to czars, they remained
slaves all the same. The jesters of the proletariat will be the workers'
brothers, their beloved, joyful, smartly dressed, lively, talented, vigilant,
eloquent advisers.
What's to keep that from actually happening? At fairs, in the
squares of cities, at our political rallies, why shouldn't there appear, as a
beloved figure, the figure of some kind of Russian Petrushka, some sort of
popular town crier, who could make use of the inexhaustible treasures of
Russian facet ious sayings, of the Russian and Ukrainian languages wit h
their t ruly titanic strength in the realm of humor? Why shouldn' t there
ring out such a catchy, danceable tune, such a rousing Russian humorous
song, and why shouldn't all of that run through the revolution, shaking
everything with acerbic laughter?
A satire studio, a satire theatre is what we need. This will enable
us to begin to bring together the best of the young professionals with the
people and to begin a selection of the best popular amateur forces in this
guild of artists from the people, which we must organize.
Comrades, organize a brotherhood of rollicking red buffoons, a
guild of truly popular jesters, and let help be provided to you by even our
party publicists, in whose essays there sometimes sparkles such splendid
laughter, and our party poets, writers and proletarian poets, as well as
those of the old generation, whose hearts have already begun to beat in
unison with the thunderous heartbeats of the revolution.
Let visual artists help, by devising special costumes, special kinds
of compact, movable scenery, platforms, wagons for strolling buffoons.
Let musicians help, by creating in Russian cadences, in the Russian
manner new humorous, satirical, dance-inflected, easi ly memorized
couplets.
The Russian church paved the way for the autocracy and hated
gudok-players and rollicking buffoons. They represented ancient,
republican, pagan Rus, free of asceticism, and now it should truly go back
to that, only in a totally new form, having passed through the crucible of
65
much, much civilization, possessing factories and railroads, but equally
free, communal and pagan.
The French kings and Cardinal Richelieu once trembled upon
hearing beneath the windows of their palaces the vaudevilles of olden
times, the biting tales of bards from the common people. The Italian
revolution gave birth to carnival masks like the Turinese marionette
Gianduia.
Russian revolutionary laughter will have excellent precursors.
Embark boldly on this course, young artists of the stage, of the
word, of the brush. The shades of Swift and Henrich Heine bless you;
somewhere in the grass beneath the hedge, forgotten, lies the heroic
whistle of Dobroliubov [editor of the satirical journal Svistok, or Whistle].
Find it, and may it emit ringing trills above the heads of the awakened
people and of their enemies who, just barely overthrown, still nourish evil
hopes.
Translated by Daniel Gerould
NOTES
I "Budem Smyat'sya," in A.V. Lunacharsky, Sobranie Sochinenii, vo!. 3 (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1964), 76-79.
66
EXPLORING NEW TERRITORIES WITH ANCIENT TOOLS:
GARDZIENICE'S ELEKTRA IN NEW YORK
Margaret Araneo
In April 2005 at La MaMa's Annex Theatre in New York, the
experimental Polish theatre company Gardzienice, headed by
director/theorist Wlodzimierz Staniewski, presented Elektra, a distinctive
adaptation of Euripides' tragedy, performed in Polish, English, and
ancient Greek.! The performances, offered along with an intensive two-
day training workshop for actors and a film series, Territories of
Gardzienice,2 provided a unique opportunity for New York audiences to
experience the many dimensions of the company's work. This month-long
occasion, which faci litated both a practical and theoretical engagement
with the aesthetics of Gardzienice, embodied, on many levels, the
powerful potential often associated with such intercultural theatre
experiences)
Gardzienice's Elektra can be understood as the continuation of a
project Staniewski began with his production of Metamorphoses or The
Golden Ass, which was also presented at La MaMa in 2001.4 Both projects
are what Staniewski describes as "expeditions back to the Ancient Times,"
in which the company returns to ancient Greek and Roman culture for
both content and form of a production. With Metamorphoses, Staniewski
engages the text of the Platonist Apuleius of Madaura primarily through
ancient Greek music dating from the fifth century B.C.E. to the second
century C.E. The work takes as its subject that transitional point in
Western history where the classic cultures of Greece and Rome
encountered, and subsequently succumbed to, the increasingly more
dominant traditions of Christianity. Just as the group's earlier work
involved studying and exploring traditional Polish folk music to grasp
more fully Polish culture and history, its more recent projects employ a
similar methodology applied to ancient cultures. The ancient songs used
in the artistic process of staging Metamorphoses, however, did not come
from encounters with living human beings, as in earlier projects, but
instead from what Staniewski calls the "living stones" of ancients: those
artifacts from the classical period that offer contemporary artists a glimpse
into ancient aesthetic practices. Though preserved in stone, these artifacts,
for Staniewski, are very much alive. They are, as he explains, "at least as
67
alive as nature." Once these living stones are gathered together, the work
itself becomes an invitation "to hear . .. most of all contemporary voices
singing the ancient melodic lines in the ancient keys."5
While music was clearly at the core of Gardzienice's work on
Metamorphoses, the company's most recent production, Elelura, uses
ancient songs as only one element within a larger set of cultural tools
taken from classical Greek aesthetics. In addition to music, gesture
becomes an integral part of the Elektra project-in particular the gestural
poses affiliated with the Greek cheironomia. The cheironomia are so essential
to the Elektra project that the subtitle of the piece has been aptly named:
"Cheironomia: A Theatrical Essay."
Cheironomia is generally understood as a set of formalized gestures
(usually limited to the hands and arms but sometimes extended to the legs
and feet) employed by the Greek chorus in the presentation of the
tragedies. These gestures are believed to have been an integral part of the
tragic Greek chorus's expression. Any broad comprehension of the
movements, especially with regards to a larger sequence or dance, has been
highly contested due to the fragmented nature of the available evidence.
Since the gestures have been gathered from still images painted on ancient
vases, many scholars believe it is impossible to determine how the gestures
flowed within a longer choreographed sequence. As the classical historian
F.G. Naerebout explains: "These so-called medial moments cannot be part
of a movement at all, but must be an initial or final moment or a sustained
pose."6 Additionally, the artists painting the vases had particular artistic
perspectives when rendering the images, which add a profoundly
interpretive dimension to the discussion. Staniewski, in his use of the
cheironomia in Elektra, however, seems to intrinsically understand the
fragmented nature of the material and the debate surrounding their
evidentiary status. In incorporating the gestures into the production, he is
careful not to lose the "still shot" nature of the forms. Instead, he is able
to present the gestures as isolated shapes presented within a broader
semiotic system.
Cheironomia plays an important role throughout the entire
performance of Elektra. The gestures become more than just inspiration
for the actors' movement; instead, the very process of modeling the actors'
movements on the ancient cheironomia is exposed to the audience through
a consciously semiotic approach. Early in the presentation, the ensemble
positions itself in a straight line downstage. Simultaneously, on an upstage
68
Gardzienice's Elektra at La MaMa, 2005
screen, images of classical Greek artwork (painted vases) displaying specific
gestures are projected. With each gesture, the ensemble copies the pose
and pronounces for the audience its title. For instance, assuming a
position of strength, with arm muscles flexed, an actor says, in English,
"Muscles." After the series of gestures are presented, the narrative of
Elektra resumes and the audience begins to see these very gestures
incorporated into the storytelling. Once the semiotic language is
presented clearly, the signs can then become more recognizable within the
play, their function more apparent. In turn, the gestures of the cheironomia
become the major tools by which the performers express their characters.
Staniewski's work with cheironomia, in addition to his use of
ancient melodies and texts, should in no way suggest that the production
sought to "reconstruct" the tragedy of Elektra. In fact, Staniewski is very
clear that his proj ects are not about reconstruction (an impossible task in
69
itself), but they are about modifying, or to use an appropriate musical
term here, fine-tuning material for the contemporary moment. He
explains that in his work:
Everything has been slightly adjusted, e.g. tempo, rhythm,
dynamics . . . And perhaps 'not adjusted,' perhaps put in
agreement with The Spirit of Time organically, because no one
can recreate the lifeline of rhythm. One can only follow one's
intuition. 7
The intuition of Staniewski and the ensemble of Gardzienice definitely leads
to a stimulating and innovative theatrical place- a unique understanding of
theatrical expression, which was powerfully embodied in the production of
Elektra.
One way in which Gardzienice achieved its unique interpretation of
Euripides' play was through the nonlinear presentation of the work. Instead
of presenting the piece in accordance with the order prescribed by the
playwright's plot development, the company fragmented the work, playing
with the "scene" order. This disruption of the narrative, this thwarting of the
traditional Aristotelean privileging of plot, clearly marks Gardzienice's
project as distinctive, positioning the work more solidly within its own
contemporary frame. While this nonlinear approach appeared to be difficult
for some members of the audience (in particular the New York Times reviewer
Phoebe Hoban, who characterized the disjointedness of the work as "a group
grope" that was "virtually unrecognizable as the tale ofElektra,"8), I, like may
other spectators, found the nonlinear presentation riveting-a truly visceral
theatrical experience.
While being already very familiar with the Elektra myth and
knowing the particularities of Euripides' version may have more adequately
facilitated a "letting go" of the need to "make sense" of the stage action
rationally, audience members who did not know the story could easily have
consulted the detailed program, which provided information in English on
the twenty-nine scenes presented. Once this need to rationalize was
surrendered, the audience could then begin to engage the piece on a much
more physical level, allowing the gestures, rhythms, and melodies to wash
over them in a truly Bacchanistic fashion.
While Staniewski's conceptual genius and experimental process
greatly shaped this exceptional production of Elektra, the Gardzienice
70
SW.vic and East European Performance Vol. 26, No. 1
performers must also be cited for their powerful artistic contributions to the
project. Individually, and as an ensemble, the cast provided a high level of
technical talent accompanied by a palpable energy that resonated from the
stage. Since the Gardzienice approach is not marked by any Western notion
of the "star," I am reluctant to call out any particular actor as more notable
than the rest, and yet my personal experience as an audience member
compels me to give special attention to Anna-Helena McClean, the actor
playing Elektra.
McLean's presence on stage was both illuminating in its grace and
harsh in the extreme physical limits that she adroitly pushed. Her work in the
rape scene, in particular, moved me to tears during two separate
performances. As McLean's body was passed savagely among the ensemble,
71
her vocal expression in song crescendoing with the ensuing physical action,
the dialectical nature of the theatrical presentation became almost painfully
evident: dance-like fluidity accompanied by spontaneous un-choreographed
surges of primal energy.
An appreciation of McClean and the entire company's technique
was furthered by the film series and the actor-training workshop offered by
La MaMa as part of Gardzienice's short New York tour. These occasions
provided opportunities for audiences not familiar with Gardzienice's artistic
process to gain greater insight into the troupe's work. Several films, shown
over the course of two days, introduced (and perhaps re-introduced)
audiences to the history of the company and its past projects and processes.
Similarly, the performance workshops, offered through La MaMa and the
Double Edge Theatre Company, gave actors interested in Gardzienice's work
an opportunity to experience firsthand the practical elements of the group's
training. During these actor-training sessions, Staniewski and the ensemble
worked with students, teaching them several of the training exercises the
72
company uses at its center in Poland. Always demanding the actors work in
pairs and small groups, the company taught the required acrobatic and
musical skills while always underscoring the ethic of its work: No actor
performs alone. True artistry requires working together and community.
Gardzienice's brief stay at La MaMa offered a unique opportunity
for a truly powerful intercultural event: a contemporary Polish theatre
company engaging ancient Greek cultural artifacts before a cosmopolitan
audience in the United States. It is important to note how this collective
experience, marked by a hybrid of aesthetic principles, took place amidst a
very significant global event of 2005, an event which had particular
resonance for the Polish troupe performing. On April 2, five days before the
New York opening of Elektra, Pope John Paul II (born KarolJ6zefWojtyla
in Poland) passed away. The pontiff's funeral was held early on in
Gardzienice's run, on April 8. At the April 7 opening, before the
performance began, Staniewski walked on stage, greeted the audience, and
requested, on behalf of several members of his ensemble, for the evening's
event to be presented in honor of the late pope. He asked that in lieu of
applause at the close of the piece, the audience offer only a respectful
moment of silence. When the piece ended, none of the performers returned
to the stage. The houselights came up, and the New York audience sat in
abject silence for several moments. This abrupt silence, however, did not
seem out of place; instead, it seemed to stand in harmonious relationship to
what had just preceded it. The silence, more than just an absence of sound,
was not contingent on whether audience members revered the pope or not;
it was a communal act of respect for others whom one may or may not
always understand. This seemed the most appropriate punctuation to a work
of art gesturing across borders and through time, a work of art that
understands and respects the space of difference while passionately
journeying toward community.
NOTES
I Gardzienice's Elek.Jra was presented at La MaMa's Annex Theatre, New York, from
April 7 to 27, 2005.
2 It seems apparent that the title of the film series alludes to Staniewski's most recent
book, Hidden Territories, which he co-authored with former company member Allison
Hodge. See: Wlodzimierz Staniewski and Allison Hodge, Hidden Territories (London:
Routledge, 2004).
73
3 Placing Gardzienice's Ekktra within the framework of intercultural performance
requires a short explanation of how I am employing the term, a clarification that I
hope will further illuminate the uniqueness of the April 2005 New York run.
Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert in their essay "Toward a Topography of Cross-
Cultural Theatre Praxis," define "intercultural theatre" as "a hybrid derived from an
intentional encounter between cultures and performing traditions." See Jacqueline
Lo and Helen Gilbert, "Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,"
TOR 46.3 (2002): 36. The intentional hybrid nature of Gardzienice's Ekktra- its
conscious engagement with ancient Greek theatre practices, its tri-lingual
presentation (Polish, ancient Greek, English), and its efforts to cultivate an
international audience-appropriately place its work within this frame.
4 See Roger Babb, "An Interview with Wlodzirnierz Staniewski of Gardzienice,"
SEEP 21.2 (2001): 75-83. Gardzienice recently presented both Metamorphoses and
Elektra as one evening of theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican
Theatre, London, from February 1 to February 11, 2006.
5 See: http:/ /www.gardzienice.art.pllen/spektakle2.html. Last accessed on
0210712006.
6 F.G Naerebout, Attractive Performances as cited in Graham Ley, "Modern Visions
of Greek Tragic Dancing," Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 479.
7 See: http:/ /www.gardzienice.art.pllen/spektakle2.html. Last accessed on
02/07/2006.
8 Phoebe Hoban, New York Times, 13 April2005: Section E, Column 4, 7.
74
"SACRED AND PURE LIKE FIRST LOVE"
GOMBROWICZ'S MARRIAGE,t STAGED BY ELMO NUGANEN
Aneta Mancewicz
There is only one country where a Pole can find a little happiness, the land
of childhood years! It will always remain sacred and pure like first love.
Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, Epilogue2
In his conversations with Dominique de Roux, Witold Gombrowicz
boasts of having always written in the company of great authors.3 In the case
of his play Marriage, he points to Shakespeare's Hamlet and Goethe's Faust
as models. At the same time, the Polish author readily confesses to indulging
in mockery and the grotesque when approaching the classics. This
ambivalence toward the European masters reveals the identity struggle of an
emigre author representing a minor literature. It is this problematic
association of Gombrowicz with the classics that becomes one of the main
motifs in a recent adaptation of Marriage at the Wilam Horzyca Theatre in
T oruri, Poland.
The Estonian director Elmo Ni.iganen builds his production of
Marriage out of cultural allusions, the most distinctive contributions coming
from Adam Mickiewicz and Marc Chagall. The selection of artists is not
accidental: both were emigres from Eastern Europe. While in Paris, the two
expatriates lovingly reconstructed their provincial home towns and cultures,
so fragile when exposed to time and history: Mickiewicz wrote an epic in
which he described Soplicowo and Chagall, portraying characters and
landscapes from Vitebsk. By evoking these artists, Ni.iganen's production
emphasizes the notions of loss and nostalgia, destruction and restitution,
emigration and deprivation.
When Gombrowicz wrote Marriage in Argentina during the Second
World War, the Poland he left in 1939 was already gone. The loss was not
only sentimental; by the time Marriage was finished in 1946, the borders of
Poland had been moved to the West, and the whole region was deprived of
its multicultural richness as a consequence of the Holocaust, wartime
destruction, border shifts, and Stalin's policy of ethnic cleansing and
population resettlement, which forced cultural groups and families to move
far away from their "little homelands." The play, then, grew out of a feeling
of displacement and deprivation; Gombrowicz's experiences and
75
76
Elmo Nuganen's production of Gombrowicz's Marriage
at the Wilam Horzyca Theatre
observations shaped the protagonist's struggle with the chaos and absurdity
that had annihilated the pre-war world.
The plot of Marriage revolves around the theme of irrevocable loss.
In the trenches of wartime France, Henry (Slawomir Maciejewski) dreams of
his parents and Molly, his fiancee (Maria Kierzkowska), only to realize that
a true homecoming is impossible; the house and its inhabitants became
grotesque. Hoping to re-establish the sacred character of the family, the
protagonist decides to marry his fiancee. His noble intentions, however, fail ;
the action leads to the degradation of Henry's parents (Vladas Badgonas and
]olanta Teska), humiliation of his beloved, and finally, the death of his best
friend, Johnny (Tomasz Mycan). Despite his efforts, the protagonist cannot
control the events in his dream; instead, he falls victim to the absurdity of
his vision.
The play reflects the irrational, disordered nature of a dream,
replacing mimesis with fantasy. In Niiganen's Marriage, an oppressive
atmosphere is created through the use of cultural allusions on many levels of
performance, such as language, music, costumes, the movements of
characters, and the use of props. The stage world appears to be constructed
on the basis of specific cultural models, recognizable to the audience, yet
distinct from the traditional notion of verisimilitude. Since the stage is
organized according to the modes of magic and imagination rather than
physics and mimesis, the discovery of meanings in the play proceeds through
associations that are both cultural and individual.
Polish and probably also Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Russian
audiences will likely recognize in the performance allusions to Mickiewicz
and his great epic poem Pan Tadeusz. The language and social habits in
Marriage owe much to this oeuvre, which depicts the picturesque life of the
Lithuanian nobility in the wake of Napoleon's war with Russia. Mickiewicz
described Polish hopes for independence connected with this campaign, yet
he wrote the poem while in exile in Paris, not only following the failure of
the Napoleonic project but also after the defeat of the Polish forces in the
uprising of 1830. Pan Tadeusz evokes, therefore, lost hope and freedom, the
lost country of childhood and of first love. When a century later
Gombrowicz undertakes these themes in Marriage, he writes "in the
company" of Mickiewicz.
Emphasizing Mickiewicz's contribution to Marriage, Niiganen not
only brings out references to Pan Tadeusz present in the original drama, but
he also builds new associations. The most striking mark of Eastern nostalgia
77
Elmo Niiganen's production of Gombrowicz's Marriage
in the performance is the participation of the Lithuanian actor, Bagdonas.
His behavior epitomizes the values of honor and dignity, typical of
Mickiewicz's epic world. Bagdonas confidently performs the type of pater
familias, demanding obedience and respect as a guardian of a threatened
order. He is also a tragic hero, defeated by the absurdity of the changing
reality, which becomes even more clear when the audience recalls Bagdonas's
recent stage triumph as Othello in Eimuntas Nekrosius's production (Vilnius
2000). At Kontakt, the international theatre festival in Torun, Othello was
awarded the Best Production prize, with Nekrosius as the Best Director and
Bagdonas as the Best Actor. Performing the father, Bagdonas evokes his great
Shakespearean creation to present an individual who challenges the world
and fails.
In confrontation with Bagdonas's gravity and authority,
Maciejewski as the son appears as a skeptic intellectual in search of certitude
78
and love. The central conflict of the play concerns these two characters-the
father and the son, who, simultaneously, represent God and Man. Bagdonas
and Maciejewski interact convincingly with the help of other actors. Teska
performs a respectable, sentimental Mother, contributing to the imagery of
an old-fashioned world in the spirit of Mickiewicz's epic. Kierzkowska as a
neurotic, melancholic Molly emphasizes the dreamy atmosphere of the play;
moreover, she builds this role similarly to her role of Ivona in Andrzej
Rozhin's Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (Torun, 2001). Mycan's portrayal of
Johnny is natural and subtle; the actor situates his character at the threshold
of reality and dream.
In a performance suspended between order and chaos, Henry's
parents strive to save the old world of values, distinguished by social customs
reminiscent of Pan Tadeusz. The affinity with the epic is particularly visible
in the dinner scene when the characters proceed to the table, in an orderly
fashion, dancing to Chopin's "Military" Polonaise in A Minor. The episode
directly evokes a similar scene from the last book of Mickiewicz's epic, yet
the parallel with the happy ending of Pan Tadeusz only accentuates the sad
beginning of Henry's return home.
The reference to Mickiewicz in the dinner scene heightens the
atmosphere of nostalgia and expatriation throughout the performance. It,
moreover, contributes to the oppressive nature of the play, which is
dominated by music with Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March serving as the
leitmotif. The world on stage, however, is not only melodious, but also
pictorial. The presentation of characters and objects in Ni.iganen's Marriage
evokes the poetics of Chagall's paintings.
As in the visual art of Chagall, some figures and objects in the
production lean slightly to one side, as if exempt from gravity. This posture
distinguishes individuals familiar to Henry-his parents, Molly, Johnny, and
even the Drunkard (performed by two actors, Pawel Tch6rzelski and Jaroslaw
Felczykowski)- from other characters in the play who do not belong to the
sphere of Henry's immediate experience, such as the high political and
religious officials.
Furthermore, the characters familiar to Henry wear modest
costumes in a pre-war style, which not only contrast with the fancy apparel
of the court attendants and the nobility, but also in their simple fashion
mark their affinity to the individuals portrayed by Chagall. Even when the
father as the King puts on a red cloak, his royal costume is rather plain and
does not hide his ordinary clothes, while the mother wears the same simple
79
dress throughout the performance. Molly, on the other hand, wears her
wedding dress in two variants: a ragged and an ordinary one; Johnny is
dressed either in military or in civilian clothes. It is Henry who changes his
apparel most often- he is fust clothed as a soldier, then a Hamlet-like prince,
and finally as a military dictator, revealing his extraordinary development
during the play.
The simple dress and slanting posture of the few familiar figures in
the play make them similar to individuals in Chagall's works. Among
Chagall's characters depicted in this slanting posture, the most prominent are
those of lovers identified as the painter and his wife; occasionally this mode
of painting appears in the images of local musicians or folklore characters.
The slanting posture is thus a mark of familiarity and intimacy both in
Chagall's art and Niiganen's production. Moreover, in both cases, this shape
invests the characters with an imaginary existence.
The slanting figures appear as beings from the world of memories
and dreams; they seem to be dancing or flying, absorbed in their own
thoughts and feelings. In the paintings, their portrayal, suggesting past
happiness, arouses nostalgia and sadness in the viewers. In the performance,
however, these individuals call forth mostly compassion and pity, which
becomes particularly apparent on two occasions.
One example occurs in the first act of the play when Henry's fiancee
passes slowly across the stage with the characteristic inclined movement.
Although she is wearing a ragged wedding dress, her light steps emphasize
the lyrical atmosphere of the scene, in which the protagonist in the family
circle recollects the engagement evening. As the girl moves, the lamp
hanging from the ceiling follows her steps. The physical reality is
transformed, while the characters and viewers are put under the spell of past
bliss and tranquility. The scene promises to restore order in the family; it is,
however, immediately followed by an outburst of violence and vulgarity, in
which the father and the fiancee are attacked by drunkards. The characters
and objects return to their natural position; the magic disappears.
Another striking reference to the slanting posture in the
performance appears in the third act. Henry as a tyrannous king harasses his
mother and father, who seem to be almost floating like the lovers in
Chagall's paintings. The unrealistic, sentimental appearance of the parents
contrasts with the unemotional, rigid posture of the protagonist. The
contrast, however, is misleading. As the son abuses his royal authority, the
parents are cruel in their control over the child's psyche. They accuse Molly
80 Slavic and East European Peifi>rmance Vol. 26, No. 1
Elmo Niiganen's production of Gombrowicz's Marriage
of sexual encounters with Johnny and other men, destroying the memory of
the girl's chastity. The act of marriage becomes, therefore, utterly
superfluous- there can be no restoration of love and order, as even their
recollections are violated. The parents adopt the familiar postures,
reminiscent of Chagall's sentimental art, to exercise their power over the son,
poisoning his memory and love. The loss of innocence is unredeemable;
despite Henry's efforts, the play is bound to end tragically.
Like the actors, some objects in Niiganen's performance also bend
the rules of probability, as in Chagall's paintings. When Henry's father
proclaims himself king in order to defend himself against the drunkards'
assault, the whole stage freezes, allowing the protagonist to analyze the
situation. At this instant, the swaying lamp is stopped halfWay through its
trajectory, visibly marking the suspension of reality. Only after Henry
chooses his stance in the conflict do the actors and objects start moving
again. The stage, nevertheless, does not return to its earlier state. The
81
atmosphere dramatically shifts-the father becomes king, and the setting is
transformed into a court scene.
The Chagall-like presentation of slant or floating objects on stage
suggests, however, not only the dreamy, anti-realistic character of the
performed world, but also its profound, poetic significance. The symbolic
quality of the space and props can be illustrated by two examples. The most
striking instance of prop symbolism involves a bed, which appears in
different contexts, acquiring various meanings. Pulled by the parents with
labor and gravity, the bed signifies home; as a stage of Mary's sensual dance,
it evokes lust. When drunkards or court attendants threaten the father, the
bed becomes their vehicle as well as weapon-they advance on it, ready to
attack. Toward the end of the performance, the bed accumulates all its
previous associations. Exposed on a column, the furniture seems to be
levitating, like objects in Chagall's canvasses. It then turns into a symbol of
regained purity by means of the highest sacrifice-Johnny's suicide. Another
important example concerns the presentation of the palace, in which the
royal columns are swinging in the air, challenging the laws of physics. Their
appearance is ominous and grotesque; it indicates the insecurity of royal
power as well as the chaos in the kingdom:
The presentation and choice of props also stresses ideas present in
Gombrowicz's text. The bed, for example, reminds the audience that they are
observing a dream; moreover, it evokes themes of love, sex, and marriage,
which are intricately interwoven in the drama and in the performance. The
characters' behavior determine the meaning the bed acquires, which brings
out contradictory values: dignity and vulgarity, security and menace,
marriage and death. The columns, on the other hand, suggest power and
authority- the issues that affect relations between the characters, particularly
between Henry and the father. The presentation of props, similarly to the
appearance of characters, depends, therefore, on the immediate stage context
and the cultural references that abound in the play.
Niiganen's Marriage oscillates between opposite themes and
conventions, but one mode dominates throughout the production: the
grotesque, typical for Gombrowicz's work. Both Mickiewicz's epic nostalgia
and Chagall's poetic imagery are distorted to create a collage of cultural
allusions. Their presence in the play reinforces the artificiality of the stage
world, which appears as a metamorphosis rather than a mimesis of real life.
Most importantly, the cultural references strengthen the
relationship between the characters and the viewers: Henry is dreaming not
82
only his private memories from childhood and youth, but also universally
recognizable references from the East European cultural heritage. Both these
spheres appear strangely dislocated and disfigured, creating a sense of
estrangement and anxiety, which is accessible not only to the protagonist,
but also to the audience. The viewers participate in Henry's dream, because
they share the cultural experience it evokes. Niiganen's performance offers
the possibility of revisiting "the land of childhood years," however
desacralized and impure it may be.
NOTES
1 Marriage by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Elmo Niiganen, Wilam Horzyca
Theatre, Torun, Poland, October 15, 2004.
2
Translation from Anita D ~ b s k a Country of the Mind. An Introduction to the Poetry of
Adam Mickiewicz (Warsaw: Burchard Edition, 2001), 102.
3 Witold Gombrowicz, Testament. Rozmowy z Dominique de Roux (Cracow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1996), 96.
'' *For another review ofGombrowicz's Marriage see Helena White's article about the
Lublin festival in SEEP 25.1 (2005).
83
WHrTE BUTTERFLIES, PLATTED CHAINS:
A LIVE METAMORPHOSIS
BY THEATRE-IN-A-BASKET FROM LVIV, UKRAINEl
Larissa M. L. Z. Onyshkevych
In October 2005, Theatre-in-a-Basket took part in the First International Theatre
Festival, "Best if European Solo Acts,'' in Chicago. On the way home, while
stopping in New York City, the company staged the above performance at the
Shevchenko Scientific Society and a presentation if Taras Shevchenko's poem "The
Dream" (1844) at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery of Columbia University.
The text for this performance consisted of excerpts from five
novellas by leading Ukrainian writer Vasyl Stefanyk (1871-1936), as well as
from stories that he wrote in letters to a friend in Poland. Stefanyk
mentioned once that whatever people in a village create, they call it life,
while people outside call it poetry. Stefanyk's prose is actually poetry in
prose form, portraying the vicissitudes of rural life and the "pain at the heart
of existence," as one scholar (Danylo Struk) described it.
Stefanyk's stories are rendered here by a single performer, the
actress Lidia Danylchuk. She recites the texts as if living in/with them, as if
flowing from scene to scene, from one type of emotion to another. Stories
and songs. Songs and stories about women, women's lives and loves, their
small children, their lonely deaths. About the cruel fate that women often
face, with hardships forcing them down on their knees.
These texts somehow manage to undergo a metamorphosis into
melodies and choreography, into parallel folksongs and carols, into fine-
tuned dance movements. The whole performance is actually a living
presentation of these metamorphosed texts, with the texts augmented by
songs, lullabies, and laments. The "butterflies" in the title of this
performance also hint at a metamorphosis of the spirit, of the soul; they
hint at a constant rebirth. But death is also present in the symbol of the
black butterflies mentioned in one story, as something to be avoided at all
cost.
The stage, or the floor that is to serve as the stage, is almost empty.
There are four suspended strings: two with small bells on them, one with a
reed pipe attached to it, and one a kalatalo (a small wooden twirling
instrument used only on Good Friday and on the Saturday before Easter).
84
Theatre-in-a-Basket's production
of White Butteiflies, Plaited Chains
at the Shevchenko Scientific Society
85
Also suspended on another string is a long, white embroidered shirt-dress
on a hanger; on the floor there is a child's small wooden rocking horse.
The actress enters, holding a basket with all her props, including the small
instruments. The hanging shirt reminds one of its symbolic, archetypal
meaning: protection and individuality. An embroidered Ukrainian shirt has
added historic and cultural significance as well. By the end of presentation,
the shirt undergoes a metamorphosis too.
At first, we hear a gentle tune from a Jew's harp, a miniature
mouth-organ; the delicate vibrations are just like butterfly wings flapping
around the stage. This is how one can actually experience synesthesia.
Dressed in a black coat, the actress makes various circles with her
arms in the air. Threatened by a black butterfly? The butterflies that she
brings to life fly around the four suspended strings with tiny bells, then
around the embroidered shirt-dress, which almost becomes a live
participant. One starts to wonder whether there is a live person inside, and
then again, perhaps it is acting as a scarecrow? To scare away the black
butterflies? The actress stands behind the hanger and sets the background
for the story itself: white sleeves flying up and down, just like a butterfly. She takes
qff her black coat and puts it over the suspended white shirt. She rocks it like a baby,
and then she floats toward each of the bells, touching them gently. They respond as
if singing and humming, as she does too, singing "On Saturday morning." She sings
and floats along the stage, as if on the waves of the sea, as if on the waves of life.
The actress recites a woman's reminiscences about her little son, about how
she loved to wash his hair . . .. And we hear (again, we can almost feel it!) a
song, and a story about a little boy, Andriyko, and how his parents adored
and indulged him in all they could.
Then there is wintertime. The actress sits on a small toy horse,
rocking. Rocking and talking of babies and women. One can almost
visualize how she rocks a real baby while singing an old Ukrainian carol,
"Beyond the hill, Virgin Mary gave birth to a Son." She was another woman,
another lonely woman. Lonely women have to face life on their own. All of life's
hard knocks. An old woman relates how she is lift alone after her husband's death-
how hard her life is and how she has finally left her husband's house with a bag to go
begging. She can fie/ how embarrassed and hurt her dead husband must be in his
grave. The actress keeps on rocking on the toy horse, facing fate as she rocks,
with her knees loudly and rhythmically hitting the floor. Hitting
mercilessly, just as life does. Rocking and rocking on the horse, as life keeps
knocking and knocking her down. The actress stays low, close to the
86
ground, repeatedly knocking it with her knees. Then she leaves the stage
with a large bag slung across her shoulder.
She takes out a reed pipe, plays it, and frantically turns round and
round-just like the Earth, just like life-until she hits the rocking horse head
on and falls on her knees again. This is where and what life has sent her. It has
set her on the ground, kneeling and weaving. She seems to weave with her
arms-we can almost see and hear the weaving movements. The invisible
woven tapestry is life, and it keeps growing and getting longer, as the
actress's hands continue to work on it. Her arms swing up and down, and
then make circular motions, around and around. Life goes on.
And then another story. We hear an Easter greeting, "Christ has
risen." And joyous folk tunes and folk dances greet spring. The words and
tunes are from ancient spring folk dances, hahilky-khorovody. One of them
is the kryvyi tanets'. Just how does the actress convince us that there are so
many people dancing with her? She manages this most skillfully, all to the
Theatre-in-a-Basket's production of White Butterflies, Plaited Chains
at the Shevchenko Scientific Society
87
music of her reed pipe. It's the magic of spring, it's the magic of the spring
sun. The actress lifts her arms and keeps making a large circle in the air. We
are witnessing the sun getting larger and larger. Yes, it is spring. And then
the actress becomes a willow, that symbolic Ukrainian willow, the lonely
woman, withstanding the wind, the events that life brings. But a willow also
represents the sun, rebirth, and renewal. Definitely, it must be spring.
Then there is a story about a young boy threatened by nature,
since they were envious of the attention he was getting. The sun, the wind,
the air, a lake, and a willow tree were trying to decide when to let spring
come down from the sky. In the meantime, a little boy caught their
attention, and they all played with him, making spring await their decision.
Spring was ready to come down any minute, while Earth wanted so much
to be crowned by spring, ready for their wedding day. Because their time to
be adored was delayed, spring wanted to poison the little boy, and Earth
wanted to devour him. And so they did. Now his mother is left to grieve
for her child. And again, she is left alone, to cry for little lvanko. The
actress silently folds and rolls her whole body into a ball, and then rocks
and sobs quietly.
And another story, from another life: Old Tymchykha is left
without any family. She regrets the hard life she has had. The life of hard
knocks. However, there are no tears. We hear folksongs again, kolomyiky,
which in four short lines can provide a story or life's wisdom appropriate to
a given situation, describing Old Tymchykha' s past. The actress
accompanies her own singing with a stark rhythm, her knees beating hard
on the floor.
Baba, another old woman, is dying in her bed. Flies surround her,
crawling over her body and over her eyes, while she can barely shoo them
away with her hand. The actress hops on her knees, round and round while
we hear the fateful sentence: "She was like a great sinner, suffering from the
beginning of time until the end of time." And the knees work faster and
faster, and harder. It isn't just life that is after the old Baba. Now even the
devil and his brood are making trouble for her, jumping behind her head
or in front of her, so that she can't make the sign of the cross in order to
make them disappear. The little demons are all over the old Baba, trying to
get into her mouth. They have surrounded the poor Baba so well that they
finally pick her up and fly around with her until she hits her head on the
table. The actress increases the rhythm. The hard knocks of life are heard
not just from the hands beating on the floor, they also come from the
88
Slavic and East European Peifonnance Vol. 26, No. 1
elbows, and the knees again. The rhythm continues: we hear her fingers
knock, then her palms, her arms and elbows, and the knees again. She
crawls on her hands and knees. But the story is merciless. After Baba dies,
the flies begin to drink her blood until their wings become all red.
And then it's winter again. A story about children sitting around a
table at a late hour. There is no food. The twirling instrument keeps
swinging round and round, and squeaking, as if knocking on doors. An old
man comes reminiscing to his mother's house; he tries to remember how to
sing her song- but has forgotten how to. The actress makes this effort so
painfully visible. Then she puts on her black coat, ready for an exit. As the
lights dim, reminiscences come about the song "Stork, Do Not Mow the
Hay." His mother tells him about his sister Maria's death. They go to visit
her grave. Petals of cherry blossoms cover the grave. Soon his mother dies
and is buried next to Maria. White petals from their tree near one grave
keep crisscrossing over the grave of the other woman. The actress kneels
down as if at a grave, her fingers flutter in the air: petals falling down, petals
dying too. She repeats the song "Stork, Do Not Mow the Hay."
The actress embraces the embroidered shirt on a hanger, as if
dancing together with all the women she has depicted, all the lives she has
lived. She holds the shirt up to her body, twirling it fast on a hanger-just
as fate twists one's life. Holding little bells in her hands now, she
flirtatiously hits the rocking horse on the forehead.
And again, we hear the sounds of the Jew's harp producing softer
and softer music. Her story is complete. However, the shirt dress remains
suspended, holding all the stories about life and pain of the women
depicted. The stories have somehow been woven into the embroidered
shirt, which now seems to hold all of their stories, all of those lives, and all
of their suffering.
Just like that shirt, the novellas by Stefanyk described above were
interwoven with folksongs, spring songs, and funeral laments. All those
songs add another dose of insight into the lives lived. The most touching
depictions of the travails of the human soul, of "the pain at the heart of
existence," that Stefanyk described in his stories, came to life through the
words, movements, and songs rendered by Lidia Danylchuk. They were felt,
they were experienced, and finally the tapestry of all of the lives depicted
remains reflected only in the embroidered white shirt left behind,
suspended on a string.
89
NOTES
I Theatre-in-A Basket was founded in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1997 by lryna Volytska
Zubko and Lidia Danylchuk. Since 2004, Theatre-in-A Basket is now affiliated with
the Les' Kurbas National Center for Dramatic Arts in Kyiv as a Creative Theatre
Workshop. Theatre-in-A Basket stages mostly performances for a single actor (with
Lidia Danylchuk in the role), as well as works for two or three actors. The theatre
has won international recognition and several awards, including the 2004 Grand
Prize in Wrodaw, Poland. Lidia Danylchuk has appeared on the stages of several
leading theatres in Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv, and abroad, and was awarded the Ivan
Kotliarevsky National Theatre Prize. Iryna Volytska Zubko holds a doctorate in
theatre arts. As a scholar, she is the author of two books and many studies on
Ukrainian theatre.
90
THREE OF VACLAV HAVEL'S PLAYS OFF-OFF BROADWAY
Veronika Tuckerova
Vaclav Havel's three one-act plays, Audience, Unveiling, and Protest,
were produced by the Endeavor Theater and performed at the John
Houseman Studio in New York, NY, March 23 to April2, 2005.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president, wrote
Audience and Unveiling in 1975 and Protest in 1978. The three plays are
loosely connected by the central character of a dissident writer: called Vanek
in Audience and Protest and Bedrich in Unveiling, a character based on the
author's own experiences.
1
The first of the three plays, Audience, takes place
in a brewery and consists of a conversation between the Head Brewer and his
employee Vanek, Havel's alter ego. During the "audience," the Head Brewer
asks Vanek to help him write reports on himself to the secret police. The
Head Brewer agrees to submit these reports, but he doesn't know how to go
about writing them, and so he now comes up with the idea that the
"intelligent" and "political" Vanek knows best what "they" want to hear. In
exchange for this "help," he will move Vanek from the manual labor of
rolling beer kegs to a clerical position in the warehouse. Vanek is astounded
that he should assist in informing on himself and replies that he cannot take
part in a practice with which he disagrees. The Head Brewer explodes in an
angry speech in which he extols what Vanek sees as hypocrisy: unlike the
"intelligentsia," a working man, such as himself, cannot afford to have
principles.
A similar tension between the exceptional position of a dissident
and that of an "ordinary man" is raised in the last of the three plays, Protest.
Here, the tension is between Vanek and Stanek, a writer who writes for
television and often has to compromise his artistic integrity. Stanek's
position, as he explains, is a difficult one: as a disappointed idealist, he
despises the opportunism around him. Stanek admires his dissident former
friend and expresses empty sycophantic praise: the moral reform of the
nation depends on a few people like Vanek. Stanek's reason for contacting
Vanek after their not having seen each other for many years is Stanek's
concern for a young musician who was arrested; he would like to have a
protest petition written and published abroad. Vanek, however, has the
petition already written and in his briefcase, and upon producing it, he
expects Stanek to sign it. But Stanek becomes evasive; in a long monologue
91
he muses about the "subjective" and "objective" sides of his signature, just as
he previously mused about how even a "fairly intelligent and decent fellow"
like himself could get used to the "perverse idea that common decency and
morality are the exclusive domain of the dissidents," of "local specialists," or
"professionals in solidarity''2 When he finally decides not to sign the
petition, a phone rings and we learn that the musician has been released and
the petition is no longer necessary: this phone call presents an artificial and,
therefore, humorous resolution of Stanek's dilemma.
Unveiling is perhaps the most universal of the three plays, and was
performed by the Endeavor Theater most convincingly. The dissident writer
(called Bedrich in the text of the play) visits his two excessively fashion-
minded friends who have made a comfortable life for themselves within the
system; Michal has kept his job and can travel to the West. They show off
their newly redecorated apartment, which pretentiously combines a baroque
confessional with a rococo clock, a sandstone statue of an angel with a
modern sofa. The stylish Vera cooks an elaborate seafood dish and Michal
offers drinks and wants to play recordings he brought from Switzerland. Vera
and Michal show off not just their apartment, but also their life, their
marriage, child, sex life, and implore Bediich to fix his own life. The couple
presents their life as faultless and meaningful, but all this starts to fall apart
when the quiet and alienated Bediich decides to leave his patronizing hosts.
Unless seen through Bedrich's eyes, their efforts and achievements are
meaningless.
All three plays are very funny. The basic situations or premises are
absurd: an informer asking his victim to help write reports on himself; a
couple imploring a friend to change his life while their own lives need
substantial "repair"; a writer asking for a petition to be written but, by
complicated "political" reasoning, managing to convince himself that his
own signature would be harmful. The humor of the plays is partly based on
repetition, and in that sense, they resemble Beckett's theatre. The dialogue
consists of the repetitions of everyday social situations and conventions. The
same phrases come up and are repeated again and again. For instance, the
hard drinking Head Brewer repeatedly offers to pour Vanek more beer while
the sober Vanek repeatedly declines. The Head Brewer repeatedly asks
whether Vanek is married, whether he has children, and whether he has
already taken his break. Michal and Vera repeatedly offer to light the fire and
play the records brought from Switzerland. It is humorous how often-no
matter the seriousness of the topic under discussion-the characters return to
92
a phrase that we have already heard. The writer is shy and polite, and his lines
are curt and courteous (among his typical answers are: "Mmn," "yes," and
"oh"); he serves as a foil for the other characters' exchanges and long
monologues.
Some of the faults of the production stem from a misunderstanding
of certain cultural norms. While it is a Czech convention of politeness to
refuse an offered drink, Vanek does so too vehemently, and it leaves the
viewer wondering why Vanek refuses a drink in Audience and Protest. A
similar confusion occurs in Protest. In Havel's text, the guest stands in
Stanek's study in his socks, because he has taken his shoes off upon entering
the house, a typical instance of polite behavior. A little bit later, the host
notices Vanek's socks and insists that his guest wears slippers, a polite gesture
on his part. In this production, Vanek enters the study in tall boots, which
were appropriate in the brewery setting of Audience. Stanek after a while
notices his guest's boots and starts pulling them off his legs, creating a
grotesque and confusing situation. On the other hand, the American
audience, unfamiliar with Czech good manners, could have been puzzled if
Vanek had come on stage barefoot.
The weakest point of the otherwise lively and amusing production
was unfortunately the performance of the actor who played Vanek, Gregg
David Shore, who, as we learn from the program notes, usually performs
eccentrics: "This marks the sanest role Gregg's played in some time." Shore's
expertise unfortunately seems to have carried over to Vanek. Where the role
asks for a shy and overly polite behavior (after all, we see Havel behind the
character), Shore is loud and makes excessively violent gestures. This
behavior was most disturbing in Audience, which should present two
opposite types: a loud working-class man and a thoughtful, shy writer.
Shore's behavior was often exaggerated, making it hard to sympathize with
the person he portrayed. His most conspicuous gesture is that of contempt:
Shore often retorted condescendingly, in an annoyed voice, expressing
disregard for his interlocutors- showing that he was right and that he knew
that the others knew that he was-a gesture that goes against the polite and
awkward behavior of Vanek so powerfully rendered in the text of the plays.
The question remains how American audiences understand Havel's
plays. Unveiling elicited the liveliest response from the audience, and it is
indeed the most universal of the three plays: it could easily be stripped of its
political undertones and its target could become any style-minded, obsessive
couple, whether from 1970s Prague or 2005 Manhattan. More problematic is
93
the reception of the moral and existential dilemmas of Vanek and Stanek.
Can an audience without a direct experience of totalitarian society fully
understand these characters?
Each play in this production was introduced by the live
performance of the rock band Devola. Although a young folk musician is
mentioned in Protest, these loud performances seemed a bit out of place in
Havel's plays. They hint that Havel's plays may be understood in the
American context as an expression of an alternative subculture. One of the
musicians wore a red t-shirt with the face of Che Guevara, a Cuban
totalitarian revolutionary turned after his death into a martyr, whom we
would not quite associate with Havel's politics.
NOTES
1 In the production of Unveiling, the same actor plays Vanek and Bedrich, and only
Vanek is mentioned in the playbill. These three plays became known in the West as
the "Vanek plays."
2 All the quotations from Protest are from: Vaclav Havel, The Garden Party and Other
Plays, translated by Vera Blackwell (New York: Grove Press, 1993.)
94
CONTRIBUTORS
EUGENE BROGYANYI is editor and translator of Drama Contemporary:
Hungary (PAJ Publications) and Moment of by Geza Paskandi (Polis
Books), and a contributor to the Cambridge Guide to Theatre and the
forthcoming Grolier Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. His translation of Still Life,
a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar, was performed at the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center in 2002 and is published in SEEP 22.2.
JEFF JOHNSON is the author of Pervert in the Pulpit: in the Works of
David Lynch (McFarland, 2004) and William Inge and the Subversion of Gender
(McFarland, 2005). He is currently writing a book on post-Soviet Baltic
theatre.
ANETA MANCEWICZ teaches English literature at Kazimierz Wielki
University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. For almost ten years she has been
performing on an amateur and professional basis; since 2004, she has been
interpreting at the International Theatre Festival Kontakt in T orun, Poland.
Her articles on theatre and translation have been published in Poland, Great
Britain, Germany, and Ukraine.
VERONIKA TUCKEROV A is a native of Prague and a graduate student in
the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She
received her M. Phil. degree in Comparative Literature at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. She is a regular contributor to
the Czech art and literature journal Revolver Revue.
LARISSA M. L. Z. ONYSHKEVYCH is a literary scholar specializing in
modern Ukrainian and comparative drama. She is the author of numerous
articles and the editor and compiler of two anthologies ofUkarainian drama.
She has taught drama at Rutgers University and Lviv University (Ukraine).
95
Photo Credits
Hay and
Gabriella Gyorffy, gimagine.com
Giza-boy
Andras Mathe
Frankie Herner's Old Man
Umberto Pezzetta
Blow. Wind!: Penelope and Dick: The Blue
Spelmal)u Nakts
V oskovec and W erich
Kultura, June 25, 2005
Lunacharsky
Natalya Lunacharskaya-Rozenel', Vospominaniya (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965).
Elektra
Gardzienice
Marriage
Wilam Horzyca Theatre
White Butterflies. Plaited Chains
Theatre-in -a-Basket
96
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Comedy:
A Bibliography
Editor
Meghan Duffy
Senior Editor
Daniel Gerould
Initiated by
Stuart Baker, Michael Early,
& David Nicolson
This bibliography is intended for scholars,
teachers, students, artists, and general
readers interested in the theory and
practice of comedy. It is a concise
bibliography, focusing exclusively on
drama, theatre, and performance, and
includes only published works written
in Engli sh or appearing in English
translation.
Comedy is designed to supplement older, existing bibliographies by including new areas
of research in the theory and practice of comedy and by listing the large number of new
studies that have appeared in the past quarter of a century.
USA $10.00 plus shipping $3.00 USA, $6.00 International
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to:
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Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
The Arab Oedipus:
THE ARAB OEDIPUS
FOUR PLAYS
Four Plays
Editor
Marvin Carlson
Translators
Marvin Carlson
Dalia Basiouny
William Maynard Hutchins
Pierre Cachia
Desmond O' Grady
Admer Gouryh
With Introductions By:
Marvi n Carlson, Tawfiq AI-Hakim,
& Dalia Basiouny
This volume contains four plays based on the
Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the
Arab world: Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali
Ahmad Bakathir's The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali
Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus, and Walid
L---------------' Ikhlasi's Oedipus.
The volume also includes Al-Hakim's preface to his Oedipus, on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a
preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general introduction by Marvin Carlson.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modem Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the
Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited
by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of
Witkiewicz's most important
plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar,
The Anonymous Work, The
Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and
Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub
Sonata, as well as two of his
theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words
about the Role of the Actor in the
Theatre of Pure Form."
Witkiewicz . . . takes up and
continues the vein of dream and
grotesque fantasy exemplified by
the late Strindberg or by
Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and
Anton in Artaud which culminated in the masterpeices of the dramatists of the
absurd- Becket/, Jones co, Genet, Arrabal-of the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties. lt is high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the English-speaking world.
Martin Esslin
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THE HEIRS OF
MOLIERE
+
POUR FRENCH COMEDIES OP THE
17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES
@
@ Deotoucb.es: The Conceited Count
@ LaO........ee:Thel'ashiouohlePrejudloe
@ La1J4: Thel'rieado!tl.el..aws
TRANSI.ATEO AND EDITED BY
MARV IN CARLSON
The Heirs of
Moliere
Translated and Edited by:
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four
representative French comedies of
the period from the death of Moliere
to the French Revolution: Regnard's
The Absent-Minded Lover,
Destouches's The Conceited Count,
La Chaussee's The Fashionable
Prejudice, and Laya's The Friend of
the Laws.
Translated in a poetic form that
seeks to capture the wit and spirit of
the originals, these four plays
suggest something of the range of
the Moliere inheritance, from
comedy of character through the
highly popular sentimental comedy
of the mid eighteenth century, to
comedy that employs the Moliere
tradition for more contemporary
political ends.
In addition to their humor, these comedies provide fascinating social documents that
show changing ideas about such perennial social concerns as class, gender, and
politics through the turbulent century that ended in the revolutions that gave birth to
the modern era.
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THt DoG OF MOI'HAIIGIS
TRI\NSLAT 0 ANU EUITHl BY
01\ I I G ROl LD & MAMVI CARl SON
Pixerecourt:
Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by:
Daniel Gerould
&
Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of
Pixen!court'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."
"Pixerecourt furni shed the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and
brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the
structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century ...
Pixerecourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements
of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his play."
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
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Contemporary Theatre in Egypt contains the proceedings of a Symposium on
this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999 along with
the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian play-
wrights who spoke at the Symposium, Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, and
Lenin El-Ramley. It concludes with a bibliography of English translations and
secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
(USA $15.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $12.00 plus S6.00 shipping)
Zeami and the No Theatre in the World, edited by Benito Ortolani and Samuel
Leiter, contains the proceedings of the "Zeami and the No Theatre in the World
Symposium" held in New York City in October 1997 in conjunction with the
"Japanese Theatre in the World" exhibit at the Japan Society. The book contains
an introduction and fifteen essays, organized into sections on "Zeami's Theories
and Aesthetics," "Zeami and Drama," "Zeami and Acting," and "Zeami and the
World."
(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 $15.00 plus $6.00 shipping)
-
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most comprehensive cata-
logue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars, including
public and private librari es, museums, historical societies, university and college
collections, ethnic and language associations, theatre companies, acting schools,
and film archives. Each entry features an outline of the faci li ty's holdings as well
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(USA $10.00 plus $3.00 shipping. Foreign $10.00 plus $6.00 shi pping)
Please make payments in U.S. Dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
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