volume 10 no.

3
winter 1990
soviet
and
east european
performance
drama
theatre
film
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Con-
temporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre under the auspices
of the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA), Graduate
Center, City University of New York. The Institute Office is Room
1206A, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New
York, NY 10036. All subscription requests and submissions should
be addressed to the Editors of SEEP: Daniel Gerould and Alma Law,
CASTA, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West
42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
7
EDITORS
Daniel Gerould
Alma law
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Edward Dee
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chairman
Marvin Carlson
Leo Hecht
Martha W. Coigney
CASTA EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Richard Brad Medoff
CASTA Publications are supported by generous grants from the
Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University
of New York.
Copyright 1990 CASTA
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters
which desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials
which have appeared in SEEP may do so, as long as the following
provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact.
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint.
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editor of SEEP Immediately upon
publication.
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy ........................................ ........ .................... ....... ............ 4
From the Editors ............................... .......... .. ......................................... 5
Events .... ..... ....... ....... ........... .................................... .... .......................... 6
''The Mrozek Festival : Cracow, Summer 1990"
Daniel Gerould ........ ................... .............................. ......... ......... .......... 12
"New Battlegrounds or Peace in Our Time:
The Theatre and Literature after
John London and Joanna Harris ...... ...................... ......... ................... 19
'The Return of Hellcat, or
The Timeliness of Witkiewicz ................................. ........... ................. 21
"Leaving a Sinking Ship:
wtadys(aw Zawistowski's
From Here to America"
David Malcolm ................................... .... ............ .................................. 22
"A New Prologue to Brecht's
Caucasian Chalk Circle
at Arena Stage"
Laurence Maslen ....... .................... .......... ............................................ 26
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Meyerhold, Blok, and Uraneff:
The Show Booth (1923)
James F. Fisher ....... ............................... ........... ..................... 36
REVIEWS
"St. Petersburg/ Irondale Collaboration"
Marvin Carlson ....... ............... ...... .............. ............................. 43
"Hungarian Theatre and Drama at the
Avignon Festival, 1990"
Zsuzsa Berger ....................... ............ .. ................. .................. 48
3
"Gogel's Inspector General
by the Katona J6zsef Theatre of Budapest
Third Biennial International Theatre Festival
Chicago Spring, 1990"
Olga F. Chtiguel .......................................................... ........... 51
"Havel's The Garden Party at the Theatre
Goose on a String in Brno"
Olga F. Chtiguel ................................................... .................. 56
"Book Review: The Theatrical
Instinct by Sharon Carnicke"
Daniel Gerould .................................................................. ..... 59
Contributors ........................................................................... .............. 61
Playscripts in Translation Series .............. ........................................... 62
Subscription Policy ............................................................................. 64
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 of submissions must concern themselves either with contemporary
materials on Soviet and East European theatre, drama and film, or with new
approaches to older materials in recently published works, or new performances of
older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions reviewing innovative perform
ances of Gogel but we cannot use original articles discussing Gogel 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. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be
notified after approximately four weeks.
4
FROM THE EDITORS
With our final issue of 1990 we wish to remind readers to
renew their subscription and continue their support of Soviet and
East European Performance. In the coming year we shall continue to
cover the difficult period of transition faced by the theatres of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union and we urge our readers to send us
articles and Information on this subject.
Daniel Gerould and Alma law
5
EVENTS
CURRENT AND UPCOMING PRODUCTIONS
A Light From the East, which had a workshop performance in
March, 1990, will be given a full production in New York at La Mama
E.T.C. from November 23 to December 10, 1990. The production
conceived and directed by Virlana Tkacz is based on the experiences
of Les Kurbas, the innovative Ukranian director of the 1920s. It uses
the poetry of Taras Shevchenko and Pavlo Tychyna, selections from
Kurbas' diary and memoirs of his actors. it will be presented in
English and Ukrainian by the Yara Arts Group, a new group that
sponsors performing arts events with a special focus on the Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union. This group will also be performing the
North American premiere of a latvian play, Year of the Jubilee by
Yuris Zvirgzdins and Gatis Gudets; Gudets will also direct the pro-
duction. Performances will run from November 15 to December 8 at
Our lady of Vilnius Church in Manhattan.
The Magic Theatre of San Francisco will produce Havel's
Temptation, directed by Harvey Seitter from February 6 to March 17.
Also in California, the South Coast Repertory Theatre in
Costa Mesa will present The Russian Teacher adapted by Keith Red-
din from a play by the Soviet playwright, Alexander Buravsky from
March 12 to April 14.
Arena Stage in Washington D.C., is presenting Viktor Slav-
kin's Cerceau translated by Fritz Brun and Laurence Maston and
directed by Liviu Ciulei from October 12 to December 2. From May
17 to June 23, Arena Stage will present The Seagull by Anton Chek-
hov directed by Zelda Fichandler.
The New York State Theatre Institute in Albany will present
Vasilisa, the Fair with book by Sofia Prokofieva and Irina Tokmakova;
translated by Sabina Modzhaievskaya and Harlow Robinson;
adapted by Adrian Mitchell ; music by Alia Lander, and directed by
Patricia Snyder from May 6 to 26.
Tenatively scheduled for La Mama E.T.C. from June 11 to the
23 is a visit by Tadeusz Kantor in performance with Dead Class the
first week and Today's My Birthday the second week. The perform-
ances will run from Tuesday through Sunday.
6 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
NOTES OF PAST PRODUCTIONS
Vatzlav by Slawomir Mroiek was presented from April 24 to
May 20 at the Duke's Head Theaterclub in Richmond, England. The
production was directed by Susanna Freitag.
This summer the River Arts Festival at Woodstock, New
York, was host to a number of Russian plays, playwrights and per-
formers. The Festival began on August 25 with a showing of the film,
Lyubimov's Return to the Taganka.The other film on the schedule
was Michael Shvldkol's The Moscow Art Theatre. Plays performed at
the Festival Included The Group by Aleksandr Galin and The
Jazzman by Vitaly Pavlov. There were also discussions held on
Stanislavski and his influence on Lee Strasberg; and a discussion
about the similarities and differences in staging on a play in the
United States and the Soviet Union with Galin and Pavlov and the
American playwrights Eric Overmeyer, Tom Cole, Len Jenkins and
Emily Mann participating. The Soviet artists Komar and Melamid per-
formed on the last day of the Festival, September 8.
Mabou Mines presented Franz Xaver Kroetz' s Through the
Leaves adapted by Roger Downey and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis
at the New York Shakespeare Festival Newman Theater during
October.
New York's Threshold Theatre Company under the direction
of Pamela Billig presented Star at the Stake by Hungarian playwright
Andras SOto (see SEEP 1 o, no. 2 pp 12-13) at the First Unitarian
Church of Toledo, Ohio on October 4.
The Yale Repertory Theatre produced two plays from East-
ern Europe this season: Ivanov directed by Oleg Yefremov with Wil-
liam Hurt in the title role from September 18 to October 13, and
Havel's Largo Desolato with Jan Triska directed by Gitta Honegger
from October 23 to November 17.
During October and November, the CSC Repertory Com-
pany presented a series of staged reading entitled, "Old Plays From a
New Europe: Eastern European Classics. The four plays included
were: The Morality of Mrs. Dulski, by Polish playwright Gabriela
Zapolska, translated by Wiesfflwa and Victor Contoski; Judgement
Day by Odon Von Horvath, translated by Martin Esslin; The Matriarch
(Vassa Zheleznova) by Maxim Gorky, translated by Alexander Gel-
man; and The Country House by Stanistaw lgnacy Witkiewicz, trans-
lated by Daniel Gerould.
7
A one-man show by Andrew Harris, Rapping with Repin, with
David Coffee, about the 19th century painter, llya Repin, was pre-
sented at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of an exhibition on the
"Wanderers" of 19th century Russian realist art. The show was also
performed in Dallas and Fort Worth schools during October and
November 1990.
The Puppetmaker of t.6di by Gilles Segal was presented by
both The Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., directed by Joy
Zinoman through November 18, and at the Wilma Theater in Philadel-
phia. directed by Paul Berman through November 11.
A Traveling Jewish Theatre of San Francisco toured Eastern
Europe this year with The Last Yiddish Poet by Corey Fischer, Albert
Greenberg and Naomi Newman.
FILM
This fall the Museum of Modern Art presented Krzysztof
Kieslowski's Decalogue (1988), a series of ten one-hour television
plays each highlighting one of the Ten Commandments. The individ-
ual films are self-contained, but all are set In the same housing
estate in Warsaw. Each film has a different cast and director of
photography, so that all the stories differ in style. Also included in
the series were two other Kieslowski films: A Short Film About Killing
(1987) and A Short Film About Love (1988).
Pavel Lungin's new film Taxi Blues, about the relationship
between an alcoholic Jewish saxophone player and a bigoted Rus-
sian taxi driver, starring Pyotr Mamonov and Pyotr Zaichenko had its
first American screening at the New York Film Festival in October.
The film is expected to be released commercially later in the year.
Taxi Blues won the best director prize for Lungin at the Cannes Film
Festival in May.
Also being released commercially in New York is Russian
director Vitaly Kanevski's Freeze. Die. Come to Life. The film won the
1990 Cannes Camera d'Or Best Debut Film Award.
Hungarian filmmaker lldiko Enyedi's My Twentieth Century,
which won the Cannes Camera d'Or in 1989 and was presented at
the New York Museum of Modern Art last year, opened for a com-
mercial run throughout the United States in November.
8 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 1 0, No. 3
Film Forum Three in New York began its season in Septem-
ber with the uncut version of Andrei Tarkovsky's Safaris (1972) based
on Stanistttw Lem's science fiction novel. This season Film Forum
will also be showing From Russia with Rock (1988) directed by Mar-
jaana Mykkanen (Dec. 19 to Jan. 1), and Solovki Power (1988), a
documentary about the Soviet Gulag directed by Marina
Goldovskaya.
During the summer, Leonid Maryagin filmed scenes for Buk-
harin: Enemy of the People in Hollywood, the first Soviet film to use
an American film studio. The film is to be released by Mosfilm either
late this year or in early 1991.
CONFERENCES, LECTURES AND ORGANIZATIONS
From March 17 to 21, New York University and the Interna-
tional Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) sponsored a "Con-
ference on Czech Literature and Culture" with over 50 Czech
novelists, columnists, scholars, screenwriters, dramatists, publishers
and critics taking part. Playwright Arthur Miller was the featured
American speaker. In conjunction with the conference, the Anthol-
ogy Film Archives presented a series of Czech films.
The University of Washington held its summer program,
Preparing the Acting Teacher: East European Theatre from July 16
through July 27, 1990. The faculty included Joachim Tenschert,
Intendant of the Berliner Ensemble, Oleg Tabakov of the Moscow Art
Theatre, and Igor Kvasha of the "Sovremennik" Theatre in Moscow.
In conjunction with their exhibition, Russian Painting 1965-
1990: The Quest for Self-Expression, on October 12 and 13, 1990,
the Columbus Museum of Art, and The Ohio State University, co-
hosted a symposium to provide students and a general audience
with an overview of the state of the arts in the Soviet Union during the
last twenty years. Keynote addresses were by Dr. Frederick Starr of
Oberlin College and Dr. Maria Carlson of the University of Kansas,
Lawrence. Other speakers included Dr. Anna Lawton, Dr. Alma Law
and Anna Kisselgoff.
In conjunction with their productions of The Caucasian
Chalk Circle and Cerceau,on October 21, Arena Stage in Washing-
ton, D.C. held an NEH-sponsored symposium on the future of the
politics of theatre and the theatre of politics in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union entitled "Walls of Ideology: Destruction and
Reconstruction. The panelists included Vassily Aksyonov, Martin
9
Esslin, Daniel Gerould and Alma Law. The discussion is scheduled
for publication.
The European Humanities Research Center of the University
of Warwick in Coventry, England held a conference from December
14 to 16, 1990 entitled "Under Eastern/Western Eyes: British and
Polish Culture." Among the scheduled participants are Polish author
and filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki, poet and playwright Tadeusz
R6zewicz, and Tadeusz Bradecki, the new artistic director of the
Stary Theatre in Krakow. Filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof
Kieslowski were also tenatively scheduled to attend.
In July 1990, the Stanistaw lgnacy Witkiewicz Foundation
was established as an international research center with head-
quarters at ul. Promyka 17, 01-604 Warszawa, Poland tel. 011-48-22-
39-37-85. Membership is open to all interested in the life and work of
the Polish playwright-artist-philosopher. The co-founders are Soh-
dan Michalski and Daniel Gerould. A newsletter will appear yearly in
English and Polish.
The first issue (No. 1, Fall 1990) of a new European theatre
quarterly Euromaske features a special 45 page "Dossier: Eastern
Europe in Turmoil" covering recent developments in Poland, East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the U.S.S.R.
Dusan Jovanovic and Dragan Klaic are the editors of Euromaske,
with offices at DELO/ REVIJE, Titova, 35fVIII YU 61000, Ljubljana
Yugoslavia.
NEWS
Ryszard Cieslak, a leading actor in the Polish Laboratory
Theatre, died June 14 of lung cancer at the Burzynski Research
Institute in Houston. He was 53 years old and lived in Manhattan.
In 1962, Mr. Cieslak joined the Laboratory Theatre, founded
by Jerzy Grotowski in 1959 as a vehicle for experimental drama.
After the Lab's dissolution in 1977, Mr. Cieslak and Mr. Grotowski
worked together on numerous dramatic projects. Mr. Cieslak
recently appeared in Peter Brook's Mahabarata.
Theatre critics cited Mr. CieSlak in 1969 as Off-Broadway's
most outstanding creator and the actor with the greatest promise.
For the past four years, Mr. Cieslak taught acting to advanced stu-
dents at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
He Is survived by a daughter who lives in Poland.
For four weeks this past summer, 22 students from the
10
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No.3
Shchepkin Theatre School of the Maly Theatre in Moscow came to
New York to study at the school of the Circle in the Square Theatre
as part of an exchange program. In May 1991, 22 Circle students will
attend the Maly Theatre School.
CORRECTION
The English language premiere of Aleksander Galin's Stars in
the Morning Sky took place at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, not
the Los Angeles Repertory Company as was reported in our last
issue.
prepared by Edward Dee
11
.
THE MROZEK FESTIVAL: CRACOW, SUMMER 1990
From June 15 to 29 the ancient city of Cracow was trans-
formed into an exuberant scene of international theatrical revelry as
Poland celebrated the sixtieth birthday of its most famous living
playwright, stawomir Mrozek. No expense was spared on pageantry
and entertainment at a time when the country faced a deepening
financial crisis. Was this the moment to put on such a lavish show, a
humorless spoilsport might have asked, recalling that two-thirds of
Poland's state-supported theatres were in the process of losing their
subsidies? Was the idea of such a monster event merely another of
those madcap gestures for which Poles are noted, endearing them to
foreign guests with a love of the histrionic but hardly reassuring as to
future economic well-being?
As a participant in the proceedings, I discovered that there
were good reasons for "putting on" this boisterous and high spirited
festival. Mrozek's return on his sixtieth birthday was an anniversary
with much symbolic meaning for Cracow and Poland. The
playwright, a local son who during more than a quarter century of
exile had earned an international reputation, was truly "home" at last
for a brief visit to his newly reborn country--before starting life afresh
on the American continent where Mrozek had recently settled with
his new Mexican wife. Thus the festival was both a hail and a
farewell--and a real celebration was in order whatever the cost. The
welcome home proved to be a heady celebration of freedom.
Censorship was abolished in June. officially ending forty-five years of
state control of the arts, although with the fall of Communism in 1989
the media had already achieved nearly complete independence.
Now all of Mrozek's work could for the first time be publicly shown
and honestly interpreted without recourse to the Aesopian sub-
terfuges and forced hypocrisies of the previous decades.
In staging the Festival, Cracow seemed determined both to
honor Mroiek and at the same time congratulate itself. Unlike the
harried and hurried Warsawites. Cracovians prize sly urbanity and
the leisurely enjoyment of life, relishing adolescent pranks and
capers. The tone of the Festival was accordingly characterized by
drollery and irreverent humor well suited to the ironic spi rit of the
playwright laureate.
Images of Mrozek--silhouetted as a bird of prey, wearing his
characteristic steel-rimmed glasses, carrying a svelte umbrella--could
be seen everywhere on placards, billboards, banners, and lapel -
buttons. All the city's stages, professional and academic, indoor and
outdoor, were utilized for the twenty productions by a dozen theatre
companies from Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, France, Italy,
Germany, Switzer1and, and the United States. The complex but effi-
12 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3.
cient scheduling of activities provided for two performances of most
of the offerings, presented on different days and at contrasting hours
to facilitate the carnivalesque ebb and flow of spectators. Festival
activities constantly spilled over into the colorful galleries, museums,
cafes, clubs and cabarets that make Cracow, which prides itself on
its Hapsburg heritage, the most stylish and hedonistic of Polish
cities.
The entire event was sponsored by three of the most
prestigious local institutions: the Stary Theatre, the Jagellonian
University, and the State Theatre School. Financial help came from a
variety of sources including the City of Cracow's Department of Cul-
ture, the American and Austrian Embassies, and the French and
Italian Institutes. As the host of the Festival, the Stary Theatre
mounted a comprehensive exhibit covering all of Mrozek's career,
and the Cracow Theatre Museum displayed costumes and stage
designs from past productions. Lectures, exhibitions, film and televi-
sion showings, press conferences and panels paid tribute to Mrozek
as a multitalented artist, showing his work as a cartoonist, short story
writer, essayist, scenarist, film director, and actor as well as
playwright. There were workshops and open rehearsals with theatre
school students conducted by the celebrated actor Tadeusz tom-
nicki. A handsomely printed four-page newspaper entirely devoted
to the Festival was published daily, containing photographs,
cartoons, interviews, play reviews, reminiscences and documentary
material about the author, as well as jokes and hoaxes.
From these varied sources there emerged a full and vivid
biographical account of Mrozek, the man and the artist. His father, a
postal employee, moved the family from a nearby village to the city in
1933 when Slawomir was three, and it was in Cracow that the future
playwright received his schooling and first worked as a journalist,
theatre critic, and cartoonist for local newspapers in the mid-1950s
before leaving for Warsaw. Since 1963, Mrozek has lived abroad,
becoming a French citizen in 1968. During the period 1968 to 1973
his work could not be published or performed in Poland because he
publicly denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although his
plays were immensely popular in the Polish theatre throughout the
1970s and 80s, Mrozek's refusal to make any accommodation with
the Communist regime remained unchanged, and a number of his
outspoken essays and stories as well as several dramas could be
published only abroad--in France and England. Shortly after military
take-over and imposition of martial law in December, 1981, Mrozek
wrote an open letter to the International Herald Tribune protesting
Jaruzelski's dictatorship and ridiculing the spurious rationalizations
used to justify it. At the Festival, Poles were able to explore this once
forbidden past and to read Mroiek's uncensored account of his own
brief deluded enthusiasm for Stalin from 1950 to 1953 that led
13
directly to his subsequent revulsion against the follies of fanatical
ideology.
Thanks to the exhibitions and displays of cartoons, the Festi-
val gave participants a chance to savor Mroiek's talents as a
graphic artist. Further acquaintance with Mrozek the satirist was pro-
vided by two new paperbacks recently brought out by the private
Cracow publisher "Oficyna literacka": Rysunki, a selection of draw-
ings, and Msre Prozy, a book of prose pieces previously available
only in the West. The Festival itself produced two special volumes:
one, a collection of essays by and about Mrozek, including his early
work as a theatre reviewer and an important autobiography
(originally written in English in 1988 and published by Gale
Research); the other, an extensive bibliography of Polish and foreign
productions of Mrozek's plays. But I am sorry to report that none of
the plays themselves can be found in print in Poland, and it Is
impossible to say when the "free market" will respond to this need.
There was a rare and welcome opportunity to see
Mrozek's four experiments with cinema: Rondo, a short surreal film
made bv Janusz Majewski in 1958 in which Mrozek appears as the
principal actor and dances the tango; and three West German pro-
ductions: Island of Roses, an allegorical tale of isolation and domina-
tion from 1976, for which Mrozek wrote the scenario; Cupid, a story
of adolescent sexual awakening during the Nazi occupation from
1978 and The Return, a fin-de-siecle story of exile and homecoming
from 1980, for both of which the dramatist wrote the screenplay and
directed. Strangely solemn, contemplative, and stately for a writer
known for his fast pacing and impeccable comic timing, the films
offer insight into the personal obsessions that inform all of Mroiek's
work.
In the theatre, spectators were offered a comprehensive
retrospective of the playwright's art from The Pollee (1959) to Portrait
(1987) in a wide variety of interpretations. The most acclaimed for-
eign productions were undoubtedly those from the Soviet Union.
Mrozek, whose works could not be legally staged in the USSR until
recently, is an exciting "new" author for Russian theatre artists and
audiences, capable of playing the same exhilarating and liberating
role in the Soviet theatre that he once did in Poland twenty or thirty
years ago. The Ulyanovsk Dramatic Theatre's Repeat Performance,
translated and directed by Vadim Klimovsky, transformed one of
Mrozek's lesser known works into a brilliant display of acrobatic
clowning that had its roots in Eisenstein and the early Soviet avant-
garde, while in Strip- Tease by the Moscow Studio Theatre
"Chelovek." directed by Ludmila Roshkovan, the performers' sheer
inventiveness made the author's brief parable into something more
substantial.
Other well-received productions were a stark, violent staging
14 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3.
; ..
of The Party by the Mulatsag Theatre of Budapest, directed by Arpad
Arkosi, a delightfully zany version of Fox Hunting by the Miniature
Puppet Theatre of Gdat1sk, directed by Piotr Tomaszuk, and a simple
and direct Out at Sea given by the students of the Theatre Depart-
ment at the University of Milwaukee.
Mrozek's most recent play, Portrait, received the most stag-
ings at the Festival--five--and was seen to particular advantage In
three major productions: by the Moscow Art Theatre, directed and
designed by W.N. Kozmienko-Diedlindie; the Stary Theatre, Cracow,
directed by Jerzy Jarocki, and the Teatr Polski, Warsaw, directed by
Kazimierz Dejmek. The popularity of the work was due to its timeli-
ness in dealing with the fatal legacy of Stalinism and the human costs
of its liquidation. A fitting obituary for the death of communism,
Portrait demythologizes the rationalizations used to justify submis-
sion to historical necessity. The title refers to a picture of the Soviet
dictator, but more figuratively the playwright paints the picture of an
entire generation crippled by fanaticism in the cause of utopian
abstractions.
Dejmek's lavish production of Vatzlav was also on view.
Although almost ten years old, it was still a pleasure to see this bril-
liant pastiche of eighteenth-century staging, with gorgeous sets by
Krzysztof Pankiewicz, that served to stress the affinity of Mrozek's
philosophical tale with Voltaire's Candide. The most unusual setting
for a performance was several hundred feet underground, deep
within the fabulous salt mine Wieliczka where an operatic version of
The Distressed Kynologist took place in a huge hail otherwise used
for tennis. Presided over by the ubiquitous master of ceremonies
Piotr Skrzynecki, Cracow's premier literary cabaret "At the Sign of the
Ram" (see SEEP 7, nos. 2&3 pp.44-45) put on a special Mrozek night
that featured not only the usual program of song and satire, but also
a recreation of Mrozek's very first dramatic sketch, The Professor,
which had originally been given in 1956 by the Gdansk student
theatre Bim Bom (see SEEP 9, no. 1 pp.32-37).
The high point in hilarity was reached with a colorful excur-
sion in a fleet of chartered buses to Mrozek's birthplace, a
small village forty miles from Cracow. Conventional road signs along
the way had been replaced with special new ones bearing the word
"Mroiekland. All guests were issued Mrozekland passports which
border guards in fantastic uniforms demanded when they entered the
buses for a customs search. On the cover the blue passports dis-
played an elegant crowned turkey in gold (alluding to Mrozek's play
The Turkey) and inside contained a "Transit Visa for the People's
Republic of Poland," good for 45 years and stamped Annuled.
At the local fireman's band played marches, an
actor from the Stary Theatre dressed in a tuxedo and mounted on a
prancing steed harangued the throngs awaiting playwright laureate,
15
and little gins in folk costumes sang songs of welcome. Upon arrival,
Mroiek was installed upon a throne and listened intently to speeches
of eulogy which were comically interrupted by a rowdy car1oad of
hecklers who claimed to be partisans of Gombrowicz. After a noisy
banquet in the local cultural center, the caravan of buses set off for
the picturesque seventeeenth-century town of Wisnicz, where an
elaborate outdoor performance of On Foot was scheduled for 10 P.M.
One of Mrozek's most fascinating dramas, On Foot presents an
apocalyptic panorama of the vast displacements and collapse of
values that took place in Poland during the last years of Wor1d War II
when Nazis were being replaced by Communists as the imposers of
a new order. The production from the Ludwik Solski Theatre of
Tarnow was daringly staged by the director Michai"Pawlicki as a
piece of Italian neo-realism featuring motorized German units, horse-
drawn wagons, fleeing refugees, exploding shells, and burning build-
ings. The terrors of war were so powerfully rendered that the
audiences sometimes feared for the actors' safety.
Back in Cracow the next day, the Festival entered its second
week and moved into the home stretch. The playwright laureate's
power of concentration and endurance were remarkable; always
accompanied by his gracious and attractive wife, Mrozek was pre-
sent throughout the entire Festival , attending all the theatrical pro-
ductions, films, and special events, and even sitting in on the first of
three days of the academic conference devoted to his work held at
the Jageilonian University. Perhaps the comic writer found the dis-
cussions of his sources of humor boring and pedantic, or perhaps he
remembered that the University had recently turned down a request
to award him an honorary doctorate, pointing out that he was "just a
comic writer" not to be taken too seriously. The proposal to make
Mrozek an honorary citizen of Cracow had not fared much better at
first; the city fathers resisted the idea until a special formula was
devised to grant the writer citizenship in the ancient Royal City of
Cracow. An appropriate ceremony and reception took place at the
ornate town hall. The Polish press and television were omnipresent.
Thus exalted, the writer was entitled to preside at various
civic functions. For example, Mroiek--wearing a jaunty officer' s
cap--stood at attention and saluted as the annual parade of Cracow
dachshunds (said to number two hundred) filed by the reviewing
stand. One had the impression of meeting the playwright every-
where. Rumors of a "double" began to circulate and finally the
presence of an amazing Mrozek look-alike was confirmed when the
author and his "twin" posed together for photographs.
The final day of the Festival, June 29, was the writer's
birthday. Dressed in high boots, a black cape and sombrero, Mroiek
sat on a wooden horse on a float pulled by a truck and "rode"
through the cobblestoned streets of the old medieval town of
16
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3.
Cracow. In a style befitting a Mexican lady, Susana Osorio
Rosas followed behind her husband in a horse-drawn carriage. The
night was given over to a Parisian ball with a luxurious banquet,
gigantic cardboard Eiffel Tower, and non-stop reveling in the streets.
The next day the merry-makers returned to Polish reality.
With all its amiable excesses and eccentricities, the Mrozek
Festival offered an unparalled opportunity to immerse oneself in the
life work of a single artist and to assess his contribution. It enabled
me to understand why Mrozek has been the pre-eminent dramatist of
Eastern Europe for the past thirty years. His entire oeuvre--stories,
cartoons, films, and plays--gives a powerful collective self-portrait of
an age scarred by war and communism. With uncommon incisive-
ness Mrozek has dissected the power game, showing how human
beings terrorize one another and themselves. His witty and sardonic
analyses of the various manifestations of totalitarianism have had
great resonance--political and moral--for audiences in Eastern
Europe during the more than three decades when public discussion
of those issues was possible only in the theatre. What will be the fate
of these parables in a free society?
After a new production of Mrozek's early masterpiece Tango
(1964)--again by Dejmek's Teatr Polski--some critics wondered
whether the pessimistic mood of the drama clashed with the marked
optimisim of recent times when "the Edeks have stopped dancing
with us; using the name of the play's crude bully to symbolize the
old communist ruling class. What meaning, they asked, is left to this
now classic drama that seems so tied to a specific moment in Polish
history for its political and philosophical meaning? Others--and I
count myself among them--felt that Mrozek's fable was still valid; new
Edeks, alas. are always waiting in the wings to replace the old power-
wielders. Tango and the other plays seem absolutely contemporary
in their obsessive concern with conspiracy, terrorism, paranoia, and
all the complex interrelations among art, culture and power.
Although most immediately applicable to the victims of
Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism from 1950 to 1990, Mrozek's
studies of tyranny will scarcely lose their significance for Eastern
European audiences even when the old communist regimes are
totally dismantled (and this may take some time) --unless of course
humanity can finally escape from history and eliminate the
mechanisms of dominance and subjection. Like all effective parables
his plays are cast in universal forms that leave the determination of
particular meanings to the spectator.
I came away from the Festival struck by the fertility and vari-
ety of Mroiek's imagination, by his artistic and intellectual independ-
ence, and the hidden personal dimension to his work. In his thirty
theatrical compositions, he displays great mastery of dramatic form
without ever committing himself to any single style. Rather he plays
17
with diverse conventions, modes, and traditions; through parody and
pastiche he avails himself of the entire cultural heritage but refuses to
be enrolled under any fashionable banner whether it be black humor,
the grotesque or the absurd. By asserting the primacy of the word in
the theatre and allowing l ittle freedom of invention to the director,
Mroi ek goes against the current of late twentieth-century stage prac-
tice. Despite that, several of Poland's finest contemporary directors-
Erwin Axer, Kazimierz Dejmek, and Jerzy Jarocki--have given his
theatre much of their best work.
A rationalist and a moralist, Mrozek defends the individual
against the state and takes aim at social norms and cultural
stereotypes. Rejecting the notion of total theatre and theatre of
cruelty as subjugation by paroxysm, he has created a drama
addressed to the mind and is cognitive In function, that which is thus
spectators to draw conclusions and make decisions. Perhaps such
a theatre is needed now more than ever In Eastern Europe.
dcg
18 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3.
NEW BATTLEGROUNDS
OR
PEACE IN OUR TIME:
THE THEATRE AND LITERATURE
AFTER
John London and Joanna Harris
The political prominence of cultural personalities such as the
poets Mircea Dinescu and Ana Blandiana, or the actor Jon Caramitru
does not necessarily mean that art has been injected into the political
realm. Instead, writers and actors have taken a practical role in
politics, often at the expense of their creative activity. The playwright
Paul Cornel Chitic is one of the many who have been pushed into
journalism by the turn of events. He is now editor of Mesager, and
finds relatively little time for writing drama, although he is also
involved in founding Teatrul Azi, a new theatre magazine.
The theatre may well suffer in the long term, since it has to
compete with a more immediate version of the "truth" in the press
and on television. "Nobody goes to the theatre", the dissident
playwright Lucia Verona explained. 'The theatre is on the streets and
in parliament." Such statements are exaggerations, but may
accurately prophesy the fate of live drama in Romania. At the
beginning of March, the theatres began to fill again, after two months
during which Romanians were either too scared to leave their homes
or remained mesmerized by what they could see on their television
screens. Now they are no longer search on entering, and full houses
are thrilled to see new plays and older pieces in their uncensored
forms.
The importance of the theatre for life before the revolution
cannot be emphasized too strongly. Faced by limited television and
radio, an anachronistic cinema network and a blindly subservient
press, the theatre was the only arena within which a form of reality
could be acknowledged and shared in public. Nicolae and Elena
went to the theatre only once. (It is rumored that they left
after twenty minutes.) Drama therefore did not come under a direct
authoritative eye and was regularly employed for cover political mes-
sages.
In the later years of the regime, the screws were
tightened from all angles. There were cutbacks in subsidy after the
earthquake of 1977. From 1982, foreign authors could be paid only
in lei. A limit of 20,000 lei per author was imposed and this change
understandably hit the theatre severely. (It is a problem with which
the present government will have to deal on a big scale if it is to
enact, instead of merely promote, full cultural contact with the rest of
the world.) Two thirds of the 600 million lei budget allocated for cui-
19
ture was designated for the Cintarea Romaniei, an annual celebration
of folklore, reinvented to eulogize the Communist system and its
supreme leaders. By the late 1980s, theatres were practically self-
financing. As well as increasing the number of performances and
cutting wages, almost all found other means of supporting their con-
tinuing productions. The workshop in the National Theatre of
Craiova was used to make coffins. In lasi, they made bird-cages.
Many of the plays which were so popular in pre-revolutionary
Romania are still in the repertoires of the major companies.
Caramitru's Hamlet drew obvious analogies with the contemporary
state of the Social ist Republic of Romania. One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest depleted the radical brain operations by which, it was
believed, e a u ~ e s c u was eliminating his most hated opponents. The
initially-intended production of Goethe's Torquato Tasso is at last on
stage and, by means of directorial additions to the original text,
underlines the poet's tormented dilemma under the pressure of
authority.
Now that censorship has disappeared, the enemies are less
sinister, but perhaps ultimately more effective. Freedom of express-
ion may mean that the thrill of referring overtly to past tyranny will
soon lose its frisson. A healthy sign to the contrary is the fact that
the present political situation is being satirized. (In the space of two
shows, I heard one reference to Silviu Brucan and two jokes about
strikes.) Meanwhile, three private theatres are being set up (two in
Bucharest and one in Galati), so widespread commercialism may be
just around the corner.
Consumer literature is also a subject which worries some
writers. Grete Tartler (whose Orient Express was recently published
in English) is afraid of the full strength of market forces. Because of
less state subsidy and rising inflation, she fears that the cost of books
will rise rapidly and that there will be a flood of pulp fiction. Good
writers will lose their readership to newspapers and the television.
Constanta Buzea has a less pessimistic attitude. She thinks that
Romanians will return to good literature in the end, out of necessity.
When questioned on the subject, Mircea Dinescu rejoiced In what he
claimed was a total absence of censorship. He does not believe that
the descent in poor quality literature is inevitable and points to the
Writer' Union as a body which will actively support serious writing.
He himself has no immediate reason for concern: his next book of
poetry has an edition size of over 200,000.
(Reprinted with permission from Index on Censorship 7, 1990)
20
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
THE RETURN OF HELLCAT, OR
THE TIMELINESS OF WITKIEWICZ
As the campaign between T adeusz Mazowiecki and Lech
W ~ s a for the presidency of Poland grew heated in the final weeks
before the election (November 25), a drama by Stanist'aw lgnacy Wit-
kiewicz, (known as Witkacy, 1885-1939) became a subject of con-
troversy and even raised the specter of political censorship, as had
happened so often before with the playwright's works under the
repressive communist regime. In the July/August 1990 issue of the
Wrooraw monthly Odra, the essayist and playwright Jan Hreczuch
cites a long passage from Act II of Jan Maciej Karol Hellcat (Jan
Karol Maciej Wscieklica) to demonstrate the prophetic nature of Wit-
kacy's art. Written In 1922, Hellcat tells the story of a primitive
megalomaniacal peasant with a big black mustache who rises to be
president of the Republic. The greatest success of Witkacy's career,
the play was produced in 1925 at the Fredro Theatre in Warsaw
where it ran for thirty-four performances and then was taken on tour
throughout Poland. Despite the author's disclaimers, Hellcat was
perceived as a topical satire on a real politician of the time, Wincenty
Witos of the Peasant Party who became Prime Minister in 1920-21.
After quoting the passage in which Hellcat rants about his popularity
and is persuaded to run for the presidency, Hreczuch exclaims, "So
may years had to elapse for Witkacy's work to become widely
understood! What an incredible visionary! How could he have
thought of it!"
In the October 20, 1990 issue of the weekly Polityka the actor
Jerzy Mat<Mtlwski reported on further developments in his response
to a public opinion poll about what viewers liked best on last week's
TV. "The election campaign on TV is slowly gaining momentum.
Recently The News presented a 15-second clip of a new production
of Witkacy's Hellcat (done at the regional theatre in Opole). The next
day the chairman of Polish Radio and TV (Andrzej Drawicz) appeared
on television and explained that the production was in no way
intended to ridicule W ~ s a since the play is already a classic. But it
is no secret that several weeks ago the wojewoda (district adminis-
trator) of Opole dismissed the director of the theatre for doing
precisely what Drawicz had denied. It is possible that a decree will
soon be issued in Poland (as is already the case in the U.S.S.R.)
making it illegal to ridicule the president, but even in the Soviet Union
the decree does not say that a candidate for the presidency cannot
be subject to ridicule.
dcg
21
LEAVING A SINKING SHIP?
wt:ADVS(A W ZAWISTOWSKI'S
FROM HERE TO AMERICA
David Malcolm
A warm June evening in Gdahsk, 1988. The Teatr Wybrzeze
in the center of the old town. The first night of wradystaw
Zawistowski's new play From Here to America do Ameryki) .
After the standing ovations, it was clear that we had seen one of the
most important and controversial theatrical productions of the post-
martial law period, and that with it Zawistowski had emerged as one
of the most prominent playwrights of his generation. In retrospect,
indeed, the play and its production also assume a considerable
political and sociological significance, inasmuch as the performance
of such a manifestly realistic, critical, political piece in a state theatre,
in a virtually uncut version, was a clear indication of the fragility of the
PZPR (Polish United Workers' Party, i.e. the Communists) regime in
Poland. This fragility was to be confirmed, of course, by events out-
side the theatrical world: by the strikes of 1988 and the elections of
1989.
Zawistowski was born in 1954 in Gdaflsk where
he studied Polish philology at Gdansk University. During his studies
and afterwards he published poetry and essays in numerous
journals, including the celebrated Punkt. Since 1976, he has pub-
lished numerous volumes of verse. His play Wieloryb (The Whale)
was produced in 1976 in the Teatr Kameralny in Sopot (near
Gdansk) . The historical drama Wysocki was first performed in
Szczecin in 1984, and then later in Krakow, Poznan, and .root. Two
of his plays, Podroi do krafica mapy (Journey to the Edge of the
Map) (1980), and Wysocki were published in 1988, and From Here to
America has also appeared in print. From 1977 to 1981, and then
again from 1982 to the present, Zawistowski has held the post of
literary advisor to the Teatr Wybrzeze in Gdansk. His career
illustrates an important and complex feature of intellectual and art-
istic life in Poland during the late 1970s and 1980s. Some
intellectuals and artists did not restrict their activities to samizdat,
underground performance or exhibition, but they could by no means
be described as supporters of the PZPR regime. This is an aspect of
Polish cultural and intellectual life In the last decade which needs to
be much better understood in the West (although many Poles
understand it well).
Although Wysocki, as is often the case in Polish historical
drama, is full of contemporary political echoes (as is the meta-
phorical action of Journey to the Edge of the Map), it follows what
Zawistowski describes as the fashion for historical pieces which was
22 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
dominant when he began writing plays. From Here to America,
however, marks a new departure--a "realistic," undisguised treatment
of contemporary social issues and problems, a "Condition-of-Poland"
play (Zawistowski, Interview). The play is set In Gdansk between
1978 and 1987, and its characters belong predominantly to the city's
intelligentsia. It revolves around the experiences of Ewa Rabska, an
artist, and her friends. particularly the men in her life: her husband,
Marek (a physicist and university professor), and her lovers, Mariusz
Bromiecki (a painter and emigrant to the U.S.A.), and Jacek Smulski
(a physicist like her husband who abandons his career for trade
union activities with Solidarity, and later for emigration to Italy). Like
a macabre leitmotif, the theme of emigration runs throughout the
entire play. At the end of the play almost all the principal and many
of the minor characters are scattered all over the world, and Ewa her-
self Is preparing to emigrate to California. The play is divided into
four acts (precisely dated by Zawistowski), each of which tries to
capture certain vital features of particular periods of Polish experi-
ence in the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s--from the
repressive absurdities of the last years of the Gierek regime, through
the hopes and failures (and calculations) of the Solidarity interlude, to
the moral/immoral compromises and despair of the mid to late
1980s.
From Here to America is clearly an overtly political play
which through its dating makes direct reference to contemporary
political issues and events. Although in the program notes to the first
performances of the play Zawistowski insists that "I have not written a
political, social, or journalistic play, the play's direct reference to the
ways in which a group of characters experiences the political events
of a decade of Polish history makes his claim valid only in the sense
that he has clearly not written an overtly propagandistic piece. "I
have written a personal play," Zawistowski argues in the same
program notes. This is certainly true. but it is also an attempt to
depict the political experiences of a whole decade, of an entire gen-
eration. This was made quite clear in the original Gdansk production
by having the stage crew, who were frequently visible to the
audience, wear hard hats and overalls like the workers in the Lenin
Shipyard (which is, incidentally, just around the corner from the Teatr
Wybrzeie).
This was only one of the ways In which the political dimen-
sion of the play was emphasized in Mikotaj Grabowski's Gdansk pro-
duction. The stage was bare, with wing space and stage crew clearly
visible. Action proper took place on movable platforms which were
shifted around the stage by the shipyard workers/stage crew, some-
times manually, sometimes using small fork-lift trucks (again part of
the "scenery" of the Lenin Shipyards). These small mansions (as in
the Elizabethan theatre) contained naturalistic representations of
23
everyday Polish interiors--Ewa's apartment, Marek' s parents' apart-
ment, the interior of Party headquarters in Gdaflsk, the press office of
the shipyard strike committee. They were at once cramped and
bare, shabby and oppressive, very much in accordance with
Zawistowski's bleak vision of the Polish everyday. The production
made extensive use of recorded sound. The first half of the play
ended with a loud rendition over the theatre's sound system of a
well-known Polish patriotic hymn. (According to one commentator,
the singers seemed to be singing slightly different versions of the
song simultaneously. Patriotic unity itself seemed fragmented here).
The Voice of the Author which ends each act also spoke through the
sound system into darkness, producing a thoroughly melancholy,
lost impression. The only occasions which involved a breaking out
from the claustrophobia of the mansions were during a sleazy strip-
tease scene (which seemed to implicate the audience in its con-
demnation of mid 1980s tawdriness), and at the end of the produc-
tion. Here Ewa and Mariusz, about to depart for the U.S.A. were set
against an open backdrop of light. But in case we might have gone
away at all uplifted, we had the Author's melancholy roll call of lost
friends, and the image, as the lights go out finally, of shipyards
workers sitting on the bare stage passing around a bottle of vodka
(again a scene from the Polish everyday) . Despair, inertia, stagna-
tion, darkness.
The reception of From Here to America has been mixed and
has also altered with the passage of events. The immediate
response of reviewers in the official press was quite positive. (See,
for example, Powszechny 11 (1988}, Teatr 9 (1988}, and
Polityka 8 Oct. 1988.) It was seen as a vital and exciting treatment of
contemporary issues, although one clearly very critical of the regime.
The present writer vividly recalls the excitement of the opening night
of the play (In fact, I had lost a bet that it would never be performed) .
The mere fact that certain things were being said in public, certain
moments of recent history depicted, certain attitudes expressed
seemed itself important. Since that time, however, negative, doubt-
ing voices have been heard. In an article in the literary magazine
Autograf, Margorzata Czermiflska objects to the play's even-
handedness, its "fifty-fifty" presentation of history. "The second half
of the play seems now to me to be trying to convince us that the man
who has is watch stolen is just as mixed up in the theft as the thief
himself . . ."(68). In private discussion, other commentators have
expressed themselves even more negatively. Zawistowski's anti-
heroic vision and his even-handedness are seen in the context of the
late 1980s as deeply compromised. It must be said that Zawistowski
seems aware of this himself. He insists that one must remember the
play was written In 1987, at a time quite different from the earth-
shaking years of 1989 and 1990. But he robustly defends himself by
24 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
acknowledging that what he set out to do was "szargac swifi.toscr
(to desecrate sacred things) by telling the truth about them
(Zawistowski interview).
From Here to America is an important play in the recent
Polish theatre. It Is so because In its attempt to deal with con-
temporary social and political issues within a realistic set of conven-
tions, rather than through symbol, metaphor, or historical parable, it
marks a substantial departure within theatre produced in Poland. Its
performance itself in substantially uncensored form is a political fact
of some interest in that it was a sign, if we had heeded it then. of the
fragility of the normalization of post-martiallaw Poland. Furthermore,
it is a vision of Polish experience in the 1980s which needs to be put
against the more triumphalist hindsight of the present. If nothing
else, it might help explain, for those who know it, the undertow of
sadness in some emigre Polish homes in Detroit or London suburbs.
What is certain, however, is that any future work of Zawistowski in
whatever form will be of considerable interest. Perhaps the new free-
doms artists enjoy will allow him to write the realistic pieces about
the Polish present and the immediate past which he has considered.
He has discussed with the present writer the necessity of a direct
treatment of the Stalinist past.
WORKS CITED
Czermiflska, Malgorzata. "Fifty-fifty." Autograf 1 (1988): 66-68.
Majcherek, Janusz. "Krytyk z lustrem: Tu jest Polska." Teatr 9
(1988) : 19-20 .
. "Z 'Wybrzeia'." Przeglid Powszechny 11 (1988): 310-12.
wradystlw. Podr6i: do kranca mapy and Wysocki.
Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988.
. Personal interview. 2 June 1989.
---
25
A NEW PROLOGUE TO
BRECHT'S CAIJCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE
AT ARENA STAGE
Laurence Maslon
In 1961, while the Berlin Wall was going up halfway across
the world, Arena Stage opened its new theatre by presenting the
professional American premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk
Circle in our nation's capital. The choice struck some local critics as
inappropriate; why, In the heat of the Cold War, was Arena producing
the work of an avowed Communist? Wiser heads prevailed--the play
was regarded as a masterpiece In most of the reviews and the
Washington Post even thanked Arena for sharing Brecht's work with
Washington, so that the audience could make up Its own mind about
this East German writer.
In preparing for Arena's current season--its fortieth--the art-
istic staff cast about for plays that would not only celebrate the
theatre's milestone, but would say something about our world. The
season planning took place in the late fall of 1989 and the early
winter of 1990, just as all the remarkable changes were occurring in
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was important to find a play
that commented on these changes, and Brecht's play, which essen-
tially addresses the question of ownership and self-determination,
seemed a natural discourse on world events. The Caucasian Chalk
Circle was chosen to open the fortieth anniversary season. Implied
in this choice was the question. "What would Brecht have made of
this brave new world?"
Brecht's play, although its status as a masterpiece is beyond
reproach, does have its problems. The largest of these is his
prologue to the play. Set in Soviet Georgia, in the aftermath of the
recently-ended struggle against the Nazis, the prologue frames the
play's central inquiries Into the rights of ownership with a con-
temporary perspective. There is a dispute between two groups over
the rights to a valley. The first group, a kolkhoz, or collective farm,
had the land for grazing before the war. During the war. they were
moved off the land. Now a group of agronomists has drawn up a
plan to irrigate the valley, which will make the valley more prosperous
for all. An official from the government is called in to mediate the dis-
pute. Should the land rest with those who own it by tradition or with
those can make the best use of It for the greatest number of people?
Showing a great deal of common sense, everyone agrees on the lat-
ter. In order to celebrate the wisdom of this decision, the assembled
group brings in a storyteller to relate the tale of the Chalk Circle. The
play itself begins.
The prologue has been interpreted in a number of ways. It
26 Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No.3
has been seen as a paean to Stalin (Brecht set It In the dictator's
homeland), a criticism of Stalin, a plea to the Soviets to revise their
communist system, and a rosy-hued idyll of what Communism might
be capable of if cooler head prevailed in the Soviet Union. (I am
inclined to endorse this last suggestion.) Brecht was not able to see
the play staged until he did It himself in East Germany In 1954, but he
asked Eric Bentley to omit the prologue when Bentley staged the
play at Carleton College In 1948. Things were getting rather hot for
Brecht politically in America in the forties--he didn't need a rosy-hued
portrait of Soviet agronomists to fan the flames. Since then, the
prologue has been omitted routinely In most productions. There are
viable reasons for performing the play without It since the basic story
Is self-contained. But the prologue does give a contemporary weight
to the proceedings.
Yet how does one perform the prologue In 1990, when the
very values that Brecht endorses have been smashed to pieces?
How can a production promote a system that has been rejected by
its most devoted adherents? It was clear one had to find a new way
to approach the material. Eastern Europe seemed a logical setting
for a new prologue; It was a recent battleground for self-
determination. Besides, Arena Stage had always supported the work
of Eastern European artists. It had done several American premieres
of work by Mroiek and Orkeny and had produced many play
directed by Liviu Ciulei and Lucian Pintilie. It was an opportunity to
celebrate our colleagues' political achievement. But what would be
the prologue's dispute? What would people In Eastern Europe be
arguing about? If anything was on their minds, It was privatization,
not socialization. Furthermore, any portrait of Eastern Europe would
have to be made relevant for Americans, if It was going to transcend
being a mere tribute.
The key to unlocking this problem came out of Washington
itself. At the same time as its Eastern European neighbors were
enjoying artistic freedom, American artists were confronting the pos-
sibilities of real restriction on what they could say on their canvases
and on their stages. They were also facing the possibility that they
could no longer administer artistic funding according to their own
standards. Like an M. C. Escher drawing, the perspectives seemed
oddly reversed; Eastern European theatres could now say whatever
they wanted, American theatres feared losing their basic rights to
express themselves. Arena's Caucasian Chalk Circle would have its
prologue set not only in Eastern Europe, but in a theatre, a theatre
that had once been a brewery. It seemed a good forum to raise
issues that mattered to an acting company in Washington In 1990.
Arena itself had Its home In an abandoned brewery in the fifties and,
to make matters more allusive, those readers familiar with Vaclav
Havel's short play Audience would notice a t ip of the hat to the
27
Czech playwright/president.
The prologue does suggest some common ground between
ourselves and our colleagues in Eastern Europe who are undergoing
their own problems with their artform and its future. I think it also
raises the previous question, "What would Brecht have made of this
brave new wor1d?' I find asking what Brecht would have made of just
about anything a very healthy question to ask. The following
prologue had, regrettably, only one public performance In previews
this past September. The production ran close to four hours and the
easiest thing to amputate was that which had been amputated by
precedence.
28 Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No.3
PROLOGUE
THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE
CHARACTERS:
Brewers
Older Brewer
Vice-president Brewer
Young Brewer
The Deputy Minister
The Singer
THE DISPUTE OVER THE BREWERY
The Scene: Czechoslovakia
Company
Old Actor
Older Actress
Company Leader
Character Man
Ingenue
Actors
(In the middle of a small provincial town, there is an old brewery
dating from the late 19th century: Brick walls, scaffolding, perhaps
vats. The space has been turned into a theatre: there are rows of
seats, a suggestion of costumes, a fly-system. There are two
groups: one, from the Brewing Company; men with shirts and ties
and briefcases. The other a group of actors, men and women, sitting
on folding chairs, smoking and laughing. With them is the Deputy
Minister of Finance from the Capital.)
OLDER ACTRESS: Up the block, by the post office, is where they
tore down the statue of that bastard.
YOUNG BREWER: The only decent sculpture in twenty kilometers--
reduced to nothing!
INGENUE: I helped tear it down.
(pause)
DEPUTY: Now let me review the minutes: since its founding in 1878,
this brewery was in the hands of the Urquell family. By order of the
authorities some four decades ago, the company was forced to give
up several of its breweries in this province and turn over the buildings
for the use of the state. It was briefly used as a warehouse, but for
the last seventeen years, has been used as a theatre. Now that the
present government no longer sees the need to restrict the growth of
private enterprise, the Urquell Company would like to reclaim the
brewery. (The brewers, right, nod.) The Illusion Theatre Company
performs plays. (He turns back to the brewers.) Under the current
29
economic crisis, every theatre company has come up for a subsidy
reevaluation. With capital being scarce and money needed to help
our newly elected government establish itself at home and abroad,
the funding of every subsidized theatre has been open to question.
As a deputy minister of finance, I have been sent from Prague to call
on the Urquell Brewing Company and the Illusion Theatre Company
to decide if this building should be converted back to a brewery and
be given to Urquell Company and reopened as a business.
OLD BREWER: First, I'd like to register a complaint about the lack of
proper discussion time. It's taken the board of directors and myself
over half a day to come down here from Pilsen, and now we're told
the discussion will only be an hour.
CHARACTER MAN: Well, you know how it is--these days everything
is in short supply, even hours of the day.
INGENUE Everything is rationed: gas, cigarettes, discussion time.
OLD BREWER: (with a sigh) Very well, I'll get straight to the point
and explain why we want the building back. There are many
reasons, but I'll start with the most obvious. Jan, bring in the barrel.
(His son rolls In a barrel of beer with a spigot and glasses. There is
laughter and applause.) Help yourselves, friends, take some.
OLD ACTOR: (distrustfully) Are you trying to get us drunk?
OLD BREWER: (amid laughter) Prochazka, I've seen your Faust--if
you can perform that on what you drank that night, I don't think one
glass here is going to make much of a difference! (Laughter) All I
want from you is an honest answer: do you like the taste of this
beer?
OLD ACTOR: Honest answer? Yes.
OLD BREWER: Uh-huh, uh-huh. (Bitter1y) I should've known you'd
like anything you can swallow down.
OLD ACTOR: What's the matter? I've told you I like it.
OLD BREWER: But you can't like it! Because it's not the same as
the old days. And why not? Because it's not made the same way-
it's not made in the traditional way, it's not made from where it was
supposed to be made since over a hundred years ago. Maybe you
can replace the equipment, but you can't replace the love, the
caring, the family. Will you please put that in the minutes?
30 Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No. 3
OLD ACTOR: But your beer is perfect.
OLD BREWER: It is not perfect, it's only passable. The new equip-
ment is no good, no matter what the Western advisors say. We need
this brewery. We've got the family name on the outside of the
bottle--we need the family touch inside the bottle.
(Several laugh)
DEPUTY: They can laugh, but they know what you mean. There are
traditions which can never be defined, but they make a difference.
Am I right?
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: The building has always belonged to
us.
CHARACTER MAN: What do you mean, always? Nothing has
always belonged to anybody. Back in the middle ages, we all
belonged to some sort of maniac prince. Then, for a while, we
belonged to ourselves, then we belonged to the state, now ourselves
again. Back and forth, back and forth--so what's with "always"?
OLD BREWER: The brewery belongs to us by tradition.
INGENUE: Traditions are made to be broken.
OLD BREWER: I guess It doesn't make a difference what kind of tree
grows outside the house you were born? Or who you have for a
neighbor? Why do you think we want to come back to this town?
You theatre people are our best customers! Now laugh at that.
OLDER ACTRESS: Why don't you listen to what your customer
Karola Kopecka, our company leader, has to say about your build-
ing?
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: But the building's not even really the
question. We are living in desperate times--not as desperate as
before, I grant you, but desperate nonetheless. We're offering this
community a chance for enterprise, to get some much needed
money in this town, jobs--prominence, perhaps. Shouldn't there be
some pride in that? This is the kind of improvement our new
government needs. How can anyone compare playacting to that?
INGENUE: You've probably never been in a theatre before! You
probably wouldn't understand a word of it!
31
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: That's not true, not true at all. But how
can you be so selfish? We could get this brewery started again, offer
jobs to a hundred people who could use them. How can you take
food off their plates you haven't put there?
INGENUE: We offer food for thought instead!
DEPUTY: Now, let's remain calm here. We must recognize that, in
its present state the building has fulfilled a very useful function, but
it's equally true we have to recognize not only tradition and a family's
pride for the quality and excellence of their product, but the practical
financial questions as well. Before going any further with this discus-
sion, I suggest you tell the brewing company what you are planning
to do with the building.
OLD BREWER: Fine.
OLD ACTOR: Right, give Karol the floor.
DEPUTY: Company leader!
COMPANY LEADER: (stands up) Friends, for the last seventeen
years, the Illusion Theatre Company has been dedicated to providing
the best theatre we are capable of for our loyal local community. But
beyond the quality of our performances, we have given them more.
We have said things behind these footlights that could not be said on
the streets. We have performed plays that kept our audience's faith
in a future. Our theatre has been crammed full of people grateful for
every nuance of meaning, frantically applauding every knowing smile
from the stage. Now, during the last few months, we have witnessed
a great performance on our national stage, in which our country was
the hero, choosing freedom over oppression. It has brought
together not just a small theatre audience, but an entire nation. But
in the flush of victory and freedom, we must not forget that the fight
for this theatre's existence is not over--we have traded the tyranny of
censorship for the tyranny of economic uncertainty. We are now
forced to choose between our community's economic wealth and its
spiritual wealth. Do we overdramatize the case for drama? Are the
arts a flourish, an "added attraction" we can live without? Is not cul-
ture, in itself, an equal part of the common good? Is not "improve-
ment" --in the most general and deepest sense of the word--exactly
why we call culture culture? I have here a plan for our coming sea-
son, and for the seasons to follow. We must nourish our storytellers,
for without them we will have lost our childhood and with our child-
hood, who we might become. (She gives the young brewer a
32 Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No.3
notebook.)
(Applause on both sides)
OLD BREWER: Our thanks to the Illusion Theatre Company for all
they've brought to this town and to our community!
(They all shake hands and embrace)
YOUNG BREWER: Qooking at the season plan) It's very impressive,
father. Some political plays, some funny one, very ambitious.
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: Nothing obscene, I hope.
OLD BREWER: I'm not going to look. I knew It would be impressive.
I just don't want my back put against the wall.
OLDER ACTRESS: Don't worry, we only want your back against a
front row seat.
(Laughter)
OLD BREWER: (flips through the season book) The trouble with
these actors is that they know nobody can resist a good show.
OLDER ACTRESS: Josef Urquell, you're the worst sucker or all for a
good show, everybody knows that.
DEPUTY: How about my report? Can I say that you'll go back to Pil-
sen and recommend that they relinquish the brewery in the interest
of the theatre?
OLD BREWER: I'll recommend it. How about you, Pavel?
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: I'll need a copy of the document to
take back with us.
YOUNG BREWER: Well, then that's settled. I know the rest of the
board. Once they hear what happened and take a good look at the
plan, they'll go along with it.
(The two sides embrace each other, laughing)
OLD ACTOR: Three cheers for the Urquell Brewery! And In your
honor, I'll order a case personally!
33
OLDER ACTRESS: Friends, in honor of the directors from the
brewery and our deputy minister, we have rehearsed and arranged
for a special performance related to our problem
OLD BREWER: Friends, your play had better be good--it's costing
us the best brewery we ever had!
COMPANY LEADER: You'll enjoy it--it celebrates the wisdom of our
decision here today. And because it is the cause for celebration, we
have invited the great Die Sangerin to take part.
(applause)
OLD ACTOR: Die Sangerin is a hard woman to get. She doesn't
often do theatre, but she agreed to just for us. You people in the
ministry of finance should have her do a concert in the capital.
DEPUTY: Economics is more in our line.
INGENUE: (smiling) You organize the redistribution of buildings and
commerce, why not songs?
(The singer enters. She is accompanied by musicians. The artists
are greeted with applause.)
INGENUE: Sangerin, this is the deputy minister.
(The singer greets those around her)
OLD BREWER: I'll never forget your concert in Wenceslas Square
during the spring of '68--it was an inspiration.
YOUNG BREWER: It's an honor.
VICE-PRESIDENT BREWER: (starry-eyed) I've got all your records.
SINGER: Now it will be a play with songs and everyone in the com-
pany will take part.
OLD BREWER: Is it a classic?
COMPANY LEADER: Of a kind. It is called The Caucasian Chalk
Circle written by Bertolt Brecht when he was in America and it comes
from the Chinese. He stage a famous production of it in Berlin after
the war, but we here will do it in a different way. It is a premiere for
our company, as the play had been forbidden by the authorities.
34
Soviet and East European Performance Vol 10, No. 3
OLDER ACTRESS: There were certain characters who seemed, shall
we say, too familiar to them, but we'll let you guess who they are.
SINGER: My friends, It is an honor to entertain you after this difficult
debate. I hope you will find the poet's voice still has something to
say to you, even after so many walls have come down. It may be
wrong to mix different wines, but old and new wisdom make an
excellent mixture. Well , I hope we all get something to eat before the
play begins. That always helps.
VOICES: Of course, everybody to the canteen.
OLD ACTOR: And break out he Urquell!
(All go laughingly off to dine. As the leave, the deputy turns to the
singer.)
DEPUTY: How long will the story take? I've got to get back to capi-
tal tonight.
SINGER: (offhand) Actually there are two stories. A couple of hours.
DEPUTY: (confidentially) Couldn't you make it shorter?
SINGER: No.
35
36
The Fairground Booth by Aleksandr Blok
Director: Vsevolod Meyerhold. Artist: Nikolai Sapunov. Music: Mikhail Kuzim.
Vera Komissarzhevskaya's Theatre
St. Petersburg, December 1906
The Show Booth by Aleksandr Blok,
translated by Padraic Colum and Vadim Uraneff
"The Mystics Scene"
Booth Theatre, New York, April 1923
Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No. 3
MEYERHOLD, BLOK, AND URANEFF:
THE SHOW BOOTH (1923)
James Fisher
Commedia dell'arte, which had become dormant In Euro-
pean theaters after the attempts of Goldoni and Gozzl to revitalize it
in the late eighteenth century, reawakened in the early twentieth
century on the avant-garde stages of Europe. Nowhere was the
modern revival of commedia more influential than in Russia, where
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, Aleksander Tairov, Eugene
Vakhtangov, and many others, turned to its traditions, characters,
and performance techniques for inspiration. Russian commedia also
found its way to America through some of the many Russian artists,
poets, playwrights, and novelists who emigrated following the Rus-
sian Revoiution.1
Although American playwrights had tentatively explored the
use of commedia traditions and characters in a few plays. In 1914,
young playwrights Ben Hecht and Kenneth Sawyer Goodman wrote
a commedia-lnspired one-act play, The Wonder Hat, which was suc-
cessfully produced in Detroit, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1919
one-acter, Aria da Capo, was well-received and has since become a
perennial favorite.
Meyerhold's brand of commedia arrived on the American
stage in 1923 via his seminal production of poet Alexander Blok's
play The Fairground Booth. It was directed by his former pupil,
actor and director Vadim Uraneff, one of many Russian expatriate
artists who crowded into New York in the early 1920's. As an actor,
Uraneff had appeared on Broadway in 1920 opposite Blanche Yurka
in Musk, and as Lucianus in the celebrated 1922 Arthur Hopkins pro-
duction of Hamlet with John Barrymore.2 Uraneff supplied the
energy for a forcefully stated commitment to bringing commedia,
Russian-style, especially its performance techniques, to the American
stage through his founding of a producing organization, "American
Commedia dell'arte, Inc. (The Theatre')."3
Their first , and apparently last, production was a bill pre-
sented in the "non-representational" manner which included The
Song of Songs, based on the King James text and arranged as a
drama by Patrick Kearney, and Blok' s The Fairground Booth,
re-christened The Show Booth. Uraneff explained his notion of the
"non-representational" method as "not a 'representation' of life, but a
'spectacle' or 'show.' Originated by Meyerhold, in Petrograd, as a
revolt against the naturalism of the Moscow Art Theatre, it is really a
return, in principles, to the methods of the earlier theatres, notably
the Commedia dell'arte of Italy. "4
In an article, "Commedia dell'arte and American Vaudeville,
37
published in Theatre Arts Monthly later that same year, Uraneff
quoted Edward Gordon Craig's call for a revival of commedia, which
"gave to future generations a hint as to the possibilities of the Art of
the Theatre: s Certain conditions must exist in a particular culture
for such a revival to occur, Uraneff believed that all that was required
was "native American productions with scenarios constructed from
the material now in use in American vaudeville stylized to meet the
stylization of character and supplied with a stylized mise-en-scene in
the spirit of the whole. "6
He proposed five fundamental concerns clearly drawn from
Meyerhold's theories, including an emphasis on the actor (who never
steps out of character), stylization in all aspects of the production,
and an emphasis on interaction with the audience. More specifically
about the acting, he noted that the acting style "does not aim to give
the illusion of life on the stage,"
7
but is "in a style of exaggerated
parody".s
Uraneff pointed to stage and film comedians James Watts
(his leading actor in The Show Booth), Eddie Cantor, Bert Williams,
Fred Stone, James Barton, and Charlie Chaplin as embodiments of
American commedia types, and he believed it was necessary to
develop other contemporary characters that paralleled commedia
masks in all forms of popular culture.
The Show Booth opened for what turned out to be a run of
ten special matinee performances at the Booth Theatre on April 3,
1923,9 with Uraneff directing and translating with the assistance of
Irish poet and playwright Padraic Colum, one of the prominent mem-
bers of the younger generation of the Irish Revival. Borrowing
heavily from his memory of Meyerhold's work, Uraneff also con-
ceived the mise-en-scene.
Although the program indicates that the distinguised
American scene designer Robert Edmond Jones only designed the
costumes for the production, he was apparently also responsible for
the arrangement of the scenery within the confines of Uraneff's
recollections of the Meyerhold production. In The Theatre of Robert
Edmond Jones, Ralph Pendleton writes that Jones' "designs were
accidentally destroyed, and no other information seems to be avail-
able."10 In fact, the New York Public Library has a file on Uraneff and
his production The Show Booth which, although missing Jones'
actual designs, does include a set of interesting production
photographs. Jones led American designers after World War I in
turning to the techniques of Europe's "New Stagecraft" as epitomized
by the concepts of Craig, Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and espe-
cially French actor and director Jacques Copeau, when he wrote that
the stage "will be presented frankly for what it is, a stage."11
Jones clearly adhered to this principle in his designs for The
Show Booth. A small stage platform, similar to both the flat-bed
38 Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No. 3
wagons used as stages by commedia performers and, in the modern
theatre, by Copeau whose treteau was startlingly similar. It was
placed in the center of the Booth Theatre's proscenium stage and
decorated along the front with a drape of lightly colored triangles and
capped with a gauzy fabric suggesting the inside of a small circus
tent. The platform stage was framed to create a small false pros-
cenium, and two sets of steps on either side of the front of the plat-
form led from the actual stage floor to the top of the platform stage.
A light curtain inside the false proscenium could be opened (as it was
for the mystics scene) to reveal an inner stage shaped by two angled
side walls and a back wall. Few props and furnishings were used, in
acknowledgement of the visual simplicity typical of commedia. Sur-
viving photographs of the actors in the setting show a startling
similarity to illustrations of Nikolai Sapunov's design and Meyerhold's
staging of the original Russian production.
The critical and box office response to The Show Booth was
less than enthusiastic, however. Although The New York Tribune
critic "B.F." found the production to be "exceedingly well done,"
12
The New York Times critic John Corbin's response was,
unfortunately, more typical :
Seldom has any ostensibly radical movement been more
backward looking. Alexander Blok's 'Show Booth' centres in
a revival of the ancient Commedia dell 'arte. Its modernity
consists in the fact that the supposed author of the play
rushes on the stage from time to time to protest that his
piece was written as realism and has been metamorphosed
by the non-representational producers. He is an exponent of
Stanislavsky's school, and is eventually lynched by the
Clown and hurled bodily off stage.
1
3
James Watts, in the role of The Clown, garnered the most
positive reactions. Watts had made something of a name for himself
in musical comedy, appearing in The Greenwich Village Follies
(1921), Vaudeville (1922), and Spice of 1922 before The Show Booth.
But his presence seemed to have little effect on the production's
popularity with audiences. The other actors in the cast were hardly
mentioned, including Edna St. Vincent Millay in a small role.
The Show Booth seems, at least in part, to have been a vic-
tim of a nationalistic backlash against the excessive hype surround-
ing the numerous Russian artists working in New York in the early
1920's. Corbin cynically added that "having had the Moscow
players, it is well to have also 'The Commedia dell'arte, Inc.' At least
the Inc. is modern."
14
More importantly, Uraneff was undoubtedly no
Meyerhold and the production seems to have been a faithful but pale
imitation rather than a freshly conceived creaton. In the Russia of
39
40
The Show Booth by Aleksandr Blok
"The Pink, Blue and Medieval Lovers"
Booth Theatre, New York, April 1923
The Show Booth by Aleksandr Blok
Buford Hampden as "The Author" and James Wattes as "The Clown"
Booth Theatre, New York, April1923
Soviet and East European Performance Vol10, No. 3

1906, The Fairground Booth had caused a near riot in its audience
over the social and artistic implications it represented, but in America
seventeen years later the play offered no vivid connection to con-
temporary concerns and seemed, at best, a quaint novelty.
The production was, however, something of a forerunner.
Occasional antiquarian commedia-style productions appeared on
America's stages after The Show Booth, and, in the 1960's, an explo-
sion of politically-inspired commedia groups such as The San Fran-
cisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, and others, insured that
Blok's vision of The Fairground Booth as a "battering ram" for artistic
and social change would continue to inspire actors and audiences
alike on the contemporary stage.
NOTES
1
The first modernist Russian commedia play to appear in
New York was Evreinov's one-act harlequinade, A Merry Death, pro-
duced by the Washington Square Players on October 2, 1916, under
the direction by Philip Moeller with settings by Robert Edmond
Jones. It was hardly noticed, with critics regarding it as merely a
light novelty. A Merry Death was revived November 9, 1959, at St.
Mark's Theatre for one performance.
2
Uraneff also appeared as an actor in numerous films,
including The Sea Beast (also with Barrymore), Once and Forever,
Siberia, The Blond Saint, The Silent Power, The Flame of the Yukon,
The Sea Hunt, The Magic Flame, Little Mickey Grogan, Midnight
Madness, The Medicine Man. and Fazil, among others. He also
directed the failed 1939 New York production of Clean Beds.
3A producing organization that boasted a board of directors
including Arthur Hopkins, Robert Edmond Jones, Nicholas Roerich,
Padraic Colum. Ruth Draper, Serge Prokofiev, and Uraneff, who also
served as General Director, "American Commedia dell'arte, Inc." set
out to introduce Russian modernist commedia to the New York
stage.
4
Program, The Show Booth and The Song of Songs, April,
1923, 4 pp. New York Public Library.
5Gordon Craig, "The Commedia deii'Arte Ascending," The
Mask. Vol. V, No. 2, p. 104.
6Vadim Uraneff, "Commedia deii'Arte and American
Vaudeville," Theatre Arts, October 1923, p. 328.
7 Ibid., p. 325.
8
1bid.
41
9'fhe cast included musical comedy performer James Watts
as The Clown, Burford Hampden as The Author, E.J. Ballantine as
Pierrot, Edna James as Columbine, William Kirkland as Harlequin,
Mary Corday and Romney Brent as The Pink and Blue Lovers, Edna
St. Vincent Millay and Denis Auburn as The Medieval Lovers, and
Marshall Vincent, James Carroll, Jacques Cartier, and Brent as the
Mystics (here called Occultists).
ioRalph Pendleton, ed. The Theatre of Robert Edmond
Jones. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958, p. 162.
11Robert Edmond Jones. The Dramatic Imagination. New
York: Theatre Arts Books, 1941, p. 143.
1
2B.F. , song of Songs' and 'The Show Booth' at Matinees,"
The New York Tribune, April4, 1923.
13John Corbin, "Barrieized Pinero," The New York Times,
AprilS, 1923, Section VIII, p. 1.
14
1bid.
42 Soviet and East European Performance Vol 10, No. 3
THE ST. PETERSBURG/IRONDALE COLLABORATION
Marvin Carlson
During the period between October 10 and October 28,
1990, an unusual and highly entertaining example of contemporary
Soviet-American theatrical collaboration was on display at the RAPP
Arts Center in New York City. The two companies involved were the
Irondale Ensemble of New York and the St. Petersburg Theater Salon
of Leningrad. Irondale, recently hailed by New York magazine as one
of the two leading experimental theatre groups in the city, has for a
number of years been offering its own radically reworked versions of
such classics as Peer Gynt, As You Like It, and Peter Pan, freely
mixing traditional literary texts with improvisation and parody, and
with a wide variety of elements drawn from popular culture--
vaudeville routines, TV talk shows, commercial advertising, popular
song and dance routines, gangster films, radio variety shows, and so
on. The results have been enormously entertaining, and often moving
and enlightening re-readings of familiar material, definitely post-
modern in the mixture of high and low culture, the playful parodic
tone, and the delight in the constant shifting of stylistic approach.
The St. Petersburg Theater Salon, founded in 1988 by
Evgeny Lukoshkov in response to a feeling of disillusion with the
highly formalized and traditional style of the large institutional
theatres in Moscow and Leningrad, produces little-known or forgot-
ten Russian plays, previously banned plays, and the work of such
Western artists as Albee, Pinter, and Cocteau. In April of 1990 they
opened a permanent home on Liteyny Street in what used to be in
the Lermontov Library. Their performances often draw upon the art-
istic styles, trends, and ideas of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and like Irondale they have a strong interest in both the
classic and popular tradition. Their current repertoire, which they
have been performing during a three-month tour across America,
includes Lermontov's Two Brothers, performed in the passionate
style of the romantic theatre, a collection of jokes, songs, and skits
from early 20th century Russian vaudeville, and a concert of tradi-
tional and romantic Russian songs.
The culminating event of the Theater Salon's tour was the
October festival organized in New York with Irondale. On October 24
and 26 the Irondale company, directed by Leningrad director Evgeny
Lukoshkov, presented a rather free English-language adaptation of
Chekhov's Ivanov, reduced to seven characters. The action flowed
freely off the stage into the auditorium, and the scenes were often
elaborated with extra dialogue or with gymnastic or choreographic
turns that were far from conventional Chekhovian interpretation.
However, the main line of action and much of the dialogue remained
43
44
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
generally true to the original, and the changes often had the effect of
opening up sequences and relationships to fresh perspectives.
The week of October 15 was entirely devoted to offerings in
Russian. On October 16 the Russian company offered an evening of
poetry, including selections from Pasternak, Pushkin, and
Dostoyevsky. The following five evenings were devoted to St.
Petersburg vaudeville, light comic entertainment from the 1912-1914
repertoires of St. Petersburg's theatres. On October 25 Irondale pre-
sented in English The Marriage Proposal(s), an entertaining collage
of several Chekhov pieces intertwined with renditions of popular
songs such as "Careless Love" and familiar light classical selections
like "Clair de Lune" or the "Blue Danube." The same evening the
Salon Theatre offered in Russian several songs, short dramatic
pieces, and vaudeville selections from their Leningrad repertoire.
The central event of the festival was the performance of The
Uncle Vanya Show, a "radio vaudeville" utilizing members of both
companies and containing sections both in Russian and English. It
opened the festival with performances the week of October 8 and
closed it with performances on October 27 and 28. The text and
events of Chekhov's play served as an organizing framework for this
complex and highly entertaining production, but, unlike Ivanov, The
Uncle Vanya Show used Chekhov only as a framework, developing
within it a constantly shifting collage of vaudeville routines, dance
numbers, direct conversations with the audience about the play, the
production, and Russian-American relationships.
In the past, Irondale often has achieved striking effects by
carrying out an extended conflation of a classic dramatic text and
some structure from popular culture, as in combining As You Like It
with the images of mobsters in general and the pursuit of Pretty Boy
Floyd in particular. The first half of The Uncle Vanya Show showed
this influence most clearly. Although constantly interrupted with
other images and other concerns, it was essentially set in a "Russian"
broadcasting Studio, radio K.I.E.V. which was presenting a kind of
Monty Python-esque version of the popular American radio show of
the 1940s, the "Breakfast Club," complete with guest stars, commer-
cials, and an onstage "Walter Thompson Radio Orchestra.
Many, but by no means all the routines, musical numbers,
and dramatic interchanges (in both English and Russian) can be
traced back to specific passages and situations in Chekhov. A plot
summary In the program provides some help in spotting these. And,
fairly early in the performance, an actor steps forward to Inform the
audience where they now are in Chekhov's script and to suggest that
the spectators may wish to orient themselves from time to time by
relating key words in the performance to those in the synopsis. The
actor points to the sentence, "Vanya enters half asleep," and recalls
that a scene in the radio station we have just observed had to do with
45
46
The Uncle Vanya Show The Irondale Ensemble/St. Petersburg Salon Theatre
RAPP Arts Center, New York
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
an actor sleeping there overnight. This apparently helpful advice Is
in turn undermined however, as the actor goes on to note that the
associations are of various kinds, and may Include such connections
as alliteration. As the audience attempts to come to terms with this
bizarre information, the next scene begins. By being conducted
entirely In Russian, it defeats all efforts by the audience to apply the
strategies just given .
On the whole the American actors speak English and the
Russian actors Russian, but there is shifting back and forth, and In
one memorable sequence Josh Broder, the American Vanya, delivers
his lengthy late second act monologue entirely in Russian (though
with an obvious American accent). Part way into it, another actor,
speaking English with a thick stage Russian accent, comes on stage
to explain at some length (as the monologue continues in the back-
ground) that this section Is so famous and so beautiful In the original
that translation of it would have been impossible. Nevertheless, after
speculating on Its effects In a variety of other languages, he begins
trying to translate it, offering the most outrageous fractured Russian
interpretations of various phrases.
Often, as in this case, various lines of action, sometimes
involving the two languages, overlap each other, providing multiple
areas of focus and a circus-like dispersion of interest, until a main
line again emerges, not infrequently after a company dance number.
The dance routines, also in the parodic and popular vein, are
ingeniously designed by choreographer Annie-8 Parson and mar-
velously executed by the company.
The Irondale Ensemble has been working on various ver-
sions of The Uncle Vanya Show since the spring of 1986, when they
presented a workshop version at the Cooper Square Theatre.
Obviously their work with the Salon Theater, beginning last winter,
has had an enormous effect on the evolution of this production,
although this reviewer had the impression that the dominant
influence is still the Irondale one (certainly the majority of the piece,
at least three-quarters of it, is in English). Further assimilation and
interplay will surely take place, however, as the companies continue
their collaboration in preparation to tour The Uncle Vanya Show to
Leningrad, Minsk, and Kharkov in March of 1991. It seems very likely
that by this time the English and Russian elements may be reversed
in importance, or at least more evenly balanced.
In any case, The Uncle Vanya Show, complex and success-
ful as it is, Is conceived by the companies as only a first step In an
extended program of intercultural exploration. After the Russian tour
next spring, the companies plan an official merger to form the first
permanent Soviet-American Theatre Company, a continuing focus
for intercultural experiments.
47
48

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Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
HUNGARIAN THEATRE AND DRAMA
AT THE AVIGNON FESTIVAL, 1990
Zsuzsa Berger
Along with a wide array of Far Eastern theatrical events of all
genres, it was the representation of Eastern European drama and
theatre that accentuated the international nature of the Avignon Festi-
val this summer.
The intense atmosphere of the discussion with the audience
entitled, 'Theatre in the East: the beginning, or the ending of the
Golden Age, showed a growing interest in East European theatre
and culture in general. The various countries were represented by a
panel of politicians and artists who analyzed the relationship between
the current state of theatre and the recent social and political
changes.
Thanks to Alain Timar's intellectual curiosity and support, the
Hungarian theatre found an outpost in his two theatres and became
an integral part of the prestigious main program of the Avignon festi-
val. A series of readings of the most prominent contemporary
Hungarian plays took place in the open-air Cour de Ia Chapelle
Sainte Claire. The selection included Punishments by Mihaly Kornis,
Chickenhead by Gyorgy Spir6, Hymn by Gyorgy Schwajda, and
Cleaning by Peter Nadas.
The ruins of Sainte Claire also served as the stage for Zsig-
mond M6ricz Theatre from Nyiregyhaza's production of School for
Geniuses, directed by Peter Lener. School for Geniuses, a two-
character one-act play reveals two alternatives for coping with being
confined to a prison cell. Sandor Keresztes, as the active prisoner
gives an emotionally charged performance. As the second prisoner,
Bela Gados served as an excellent foil to Keresztes.
As part of the Festival program, Alain Timar directed
Encounter by Peter Nadas and staged it in the closed auditorium of
Theatre Des Hailes. The encounter takes place between Maria, a
woman preparing to end her life, and a young man, who has just dis-
covered his. The connecting link between the two is the young
man's father who is also Maria's lover. It is a painful puzzle they both
must solve in order to go on living.
Alain Timar's direction is based on contrasting effects. At the
beginning of the performance, the brightly lit white tile floor hurts the
eyes. At the same time it serves as an excellent backdrop to Maria's
black gown. The narrow triangular space of Timar's design; the
purple-gray abstract paintings on the walls; the white bed, chair, and
end table add up to a nondescript stylized world where every ges-
ture, every word, every sound, even the red wine spilled on the white
tiles, takes on a heightened significance. In Alain Timar's
49
meticulously calculated universe, the rhythm and the melody of the
human voice serve as a juxtaposition to the disjointed sounds of the
percussion Instrument and the contrabass that form an Integral part
of the production. If Peter Lener makes a conscious attempt in his
production of School for Geniuses to be emotionally engaging, the
painter-sculptor-director Alain Timar, on the other hand, works on
distancing all the elements. Francine Berge of the Comedie Fran-
yaise, creates an elegant, vibrant Maria, who reveals her vulnerability
step by step. Jerome Rigaut, who initially seems completely lost and
helpless gradually reveals a hidden, inner strength.
50 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
GOGOL'S INSPECTOR GENERAL BY
THE KATONA J6ZSEF THEATRE OF BUDAPEST
THE THIRD BIENNIAL INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL
OF CHICAGO
SPRING, 1990
Olga Chtiguel
The production of Nikolai Gogol's classic, The Inspector
General, with which the Katona made its North American debut, pre-
sented the theatrical tradition of Central and Eastern Europe at its
apex. When seen in London as part of the 1989 London International
Festival of Theatre, the production was praised for its visual ingenuity
and collaborative work.
The Katona was originally founded In 1982 by Gabor Szekely
and Gabor Zsambeki as an alternative studio of the Hungarian
National Theatre. Before coming to the National Theatre In 1978,
Szekely and Zsambeki had established themselves as directors in
provincial theatres. When they left for the Katona, they took a sig-
nificant number of actors and designers with them. Since then, the
Katona J6zsef Theatre has gained critical acclaim throughout
Europe. With other leading theatre companies, Including the Milano
Piccolo Theatre, the Schauspielhaus of Berlin and the Paris Theatre
National de I'Odeon, the Katona originated the European Theatre
Union, headed by Giorgio Strahler.
In staging The Inspector General, numerous Central and
East European directors have linked pre-Revolutionary, corrupt Rus-
sia with the realities of Communist rule. For his production, Gabor
Zsambeki, up-dates Gogol's play to a contemporary. yet backward,
small town where the 1950s blends with the 1980s.
Csoraz Khell's set resembles a dirty locker room in a half-
abandoned factory. A convex ceiling sloping to the rear of the stage,
conveyed the claustrophobic feeling of a basement, the last stop of a
broken-down elevator placed on the right side of the stage. On the
left of the stage, there were three rows of metal lockers above which
rotated a fan. The furniture consisted of a long, shabby table, a torn
couch, a small table, and a few chairs. The actors entered either
through the left metal door or from behind a wall, which occasionally
shifted. In the bribery scene and in the scene in which the letter is
received announcing the arrival of the real Inspector the lockers also
served as peep holes.
The costumes designed by Gyorgy Szakacz convey the
shabby tastelesness of a provincial town. Janos Ban as Khlestakov
shone with cheap elegance. His wrinkled yellow shirt matched his
yellow shoes. J6zsef Horvath's Osip, on the other hand, had the
51
52
The Inspector General Katona J6zsef Theatre
International Theatre Festival of Chicago
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
look of a drunken beggar. The police resembled the infamous Militia
in their dull gray uniforms with red-striped pants. The Governor,
played by a short, balding Peter Blask6, wore an ill-fitting clerical suit.
The robust, red-haired Judge of Laszlo Vajda wore a heavy hunting
coat, while the Charity Commissioner, played by the boyish Geza
Balkay, wore a black leather jacket and dark sun-glasses. Dob-
chinsky and Bobchinsky, (Tamas Vegvari and lilszl6 Szacsvay,
respectively,) were dressed in cheap workers' jackets and caps.
Zsambeki carefully scored his mise-en-scene to project the
vulgarity and stupidity of the characters by vivid physical actions.
Osip moved in a duck-like fashion, scratching his posterior and
urinating in a sink. His Master moved about, gesticulating broadly
and twisting his tall body into mock-elegant postures.
Storming across the stage, Khlestakov suddenly prostrated
himself on the couch, leaned forward across the chair, fell on his
knees, jumped over the table or sat down with an energetic swing of
his long legs. In the bribery scene, Khlestakov leaps about in
increasing euphoria over the growing amount of money handed to
him. Spitting on paper bills, he glued them on his bare chest, making
himself look like a strange money tree.
The Governor, In contrast, lacked Khlestakov's contagious
self-confidence. He moved in a nervous fashion, jerking his
shoulders and protecting himself with his hands. Grabbing his head
and shaking it in despair, he looked like a puppet. He frequently
engaged in long speeches accompanied by rapid gestures and vivid
facial expressions, while his cronies remained in frozen postures at
the table. The Governor's Daughter (Agnes Bretalan) and Wife (Juli
Basti) displayed laughable vulgarity as they alternately seduced
Khlestakov on the shaky couch and fought between themselves.
They wore kitschy dresses from the 1950s, heavy make-up and
unflattering snoods.
The enormous vitality, energetic acting and harmony of the
ensemble resulted in a farcical, yet grim depiction of a deteriorating
society, bleeding from the loss of ideals, decency and self-respect.
The spiteful and boorish crooks of Zsambeki's production strikingly
resembled not only the Communist officials, but also the ordinary
citizens who allowed the regime to exploit and deform them. At the
end of the play, Zsambeki brings onstage the real Inspector, a
young, clean-cut fellow. As he announces, "I'll see the gentlemen
one by one," his fate is sealed. He s ushered into the elevator and
destroyed with the silent acquiescence of the entire town.
Zsambeki's reading of Gogel's text presented to Chicago
audiences a powerful example of the interpretation of classics in
accordance with contemporary issues and acting style. Zsambeki's
production is both comic and chilling in its impact. It seems as if
53
54
The Inspector General Katona J6zsef Theatre
International Theatre Festival of Chicago
Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
Khlestakov's "unreal" wor1d Is about to engulf the entire auditorium at
any moment. Yet, while laughing at farcical scenes, the audience
never escapes the sense of human corruption.
55
HAVEL'S THE GARDEN PARTY
AT THE THEATRE GOOSE ON A STRING IN BRNO
Olga F. Chtiguel
On March 29, 1990, The Theatre Goose on a String (Divadlo
Husa na provazku) opened its production of Vaclav Havel's play The
Garden Party (Zahradnf s/avnost) . Its director, Peter Scherhaufer,
thus add another production to the current wave of Havel's plays in
Czech theatres. This is the first Czech production of this play since
the 1960s when it was originally staged by Jan Grossman in The
Theatre at the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zabradlij, where Havel func-
tioned as a dramaturg and a playwright in residence.
The 1990 production of Largo Desolato by Havel, also
staged by Grossman at the Balustrade, proved that Havel's texts
require a careful and unique approach. Indeed, Grossman, with a
completely different ensemble than in the 1960s, made his Largo
Desolato a triumphant celebration of his return to the Balustrade. A
strong personality himself, Grossman mobilized the stage to
theatricalize Havel's seemingly over-structured, repetitious and even
didactic text. Almost ritualistic repetitions of perfectly scored actors'
movements and speech enhanced the humorous as well as chilling
aspects of Havel's play.
Scherhaufer, on the other hand, bases his production of
Havel's The Garden Party, on the established acting style of his
ensemble. Aiming for an anti-psychological and playful theatre, the
String derives its style from such sources as commedia dell'arte, the
grotesque, silent motion picture, Baroque marketplace theatre and
ballet as well as acrobatics, athletics, judo and karate. The acting
style of the String is therefore profoundly anti-illusionistic, energetic
and somewhat unpolished.
Written in 1963, The Garden Party is still strikingly con-
tempory. Almost three decades after its appearance, the Czechos-
lovak reader/spectator finds the themes of the play uncomfortably
familiar. The Garden Party is an ultimate demonstration of the power
of phrases and slogans. The hero of Havel's play, Hugo Pludek, is
an arch-example of the power of ideology over people's lives. Like a
chameleon, he utilizes a basic set of empty slogans filled with cliches
to advance himself in an absurd bureaucratic society. First servile
and then aggressive, the slogans gradualy gain power as Hugo
repeats them. Hugo successfully climbs up the hierarchic ladder to
the bizarre Liquidation Office. He learns to imitate his superiors with
such perfection that his own parents do not recognize him.
Scherhaufer's production begins with stage directions read
aloud, followed by a scene in the Pludek family apartment. Alena
Ambrova's Mother Bozena and Jirf Pecha's Father Oldrich move
56 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No. 3
about energetically. They speak in creaking voices, making
exaggerated facial expressions during their repetitive conversations.
There costumes are ill-fitting, and Ambrova wears a cheap artificial,
wig. The cartoonish portraits of the parents contrast with the
intellectual son, Petr (Jan Leflfk) and the unemotional son, Hugo
(VIadimfr Javorsky). While the bespectacled Petr recites his ideals
about love, Hugo plays chess with himself,ignoring the entire world.
The drastically grotesque and seemingly painful acting of
Ambrova and Pecha is pleasantly balanced by the joyful Ferda Plzak,
played by a star of the String, Miroslav Donutil. A star of the String,
Donutil's Ferda radiates magnetism, he is energetic, fencing with his
hands and pausing after each punch line, triggering the audience's
laughter.
Javorsky's Hugo, on the other hand, seems flat. He mum-
bles Hugo's lines while standing still, gesturing only with his thin
hands and his blond head. As gray as his shabby suit, Javorsky's
portrayal does not project Hugo's ability to dominate the Liquidation
Office through his verbal terrorism. However pathetic the clerks of
the office, they appear as stronger personalities than Hugo.
Dita Kaplanova's Secretary of the Liquidation Office, an
amusing "Amazon of Communism" marches onstage, snatches her
boss for sex, and fears liquidation. The scene in the Liquidation
Office, indeed, is one of the most delightful moments of the perform-
ance. While Hugo rather unpersuasively conquers/liquidates the
Liquidation Office, the employees of the Liquidation Office, including
its director (Ivan Urbanek), display various entertaining strategies to
either thwart or succumb to Hugo.
The Liquidation Office is furnished with a huge chair and
table, placed on the left side, artificial plants in big baskets and a
large wicker box. To the audience's amusement, the box reveals var-
ious surprises, including the Director in his checkered underwear and
the Secretary with her omnipresent note pad and thick eyeglasses.
Like the Pludek's furniture, all the pieces are painted in white except
for the box.
Returning in the final scene to the Pludek apartment, the
stage is partially closed off by a curtain, thus reducing the depth of
the performance space. The Pludek's, wearing pajamas, and
Ambrova with cur1ers in her hair, are increasingly stunned by Hugo's
stream of words. Losing themselves in Hugo's slogans, cliches and
ideological phrases, the Pludeks move with even more difficulty and
with even more drastically expressive faces. Hugo militantly
manifests his final victory by donning a helmet and a red circus nose.
He is named head of a liquidation committee to liquidate the
Liquidation Office.
Notwithstanding a powerful text and delightful moments,
Scherhaufer's production falls short of expectations. As if signaling a
57
temporary crisis in the theatre, because of the departure of its
dramaturg Petr Oslzly to join the Presidential Cabinet, the production
projects a certain amount of uncertainty and hesitation. Although the
ensemble of the String is composed of several outstanding per-
sonalities, they seem unable to offset the lack of a directorial con-
cept. Only the future will show whether The Garden Party represents
the decline of a highly successful theatre or only a temporary period
of disorientation. One hopes the ensemble will regain its strength in
order to meet the new economic and social conditions facing Czech
life.
58 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No.3
BOOK REVIEW
Sharon Marie Carnicke. The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov
and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century. New York:
Peter lang, 1989. pp. 247.
Nikolai Evrelnov was one of the most versatile and original
theatrical innovators of the early twentieth century, a product of the
remarkable ferment in Russia at the turn of the century that produced
so many outstanding artistic personalities. A musician and painter as
well as a complete man of the theatre, Evreinov excelled as a
dramatist, actor, director, manager, teacher, historian, and
theoretician. It is perhaps in this last capacity, as a theorist of
theatricality and a proponent of theatre In life that Evreinov seems
most contemporary. In his preference for parody, in his playing with
the theatrical styles and conventions of different periods, in his
explorations of the interactions between actor and audience as co-
creators of productions, and in his search for the ritual origins of
drama, Evreinov points ahead to our own postmodern sensibility.
"Genuine theatrical ity consists precisely in theatrically presenting
theatrical performances, he declared.
Evreinov was a man of boundless curiosity, intent on reveal-
ing the death-defying and life-transforming power of what he called
the pre-aesthetic theatrical instinct. He discovered performance
everywhere, even in the animal kingdom and public executions. He
believed above all in the theatrical mask; a devotee of the circus, he
could juggle and walk a tight-rope. In 1911 he edited a book on
nudity in the theatre that included photographic Illustrations. He
stage-managed the huge mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter
Palace in 1920. He was a director of the cabaret theatre, The
Crooked Mirror, that featured parodies of Stanislavsky's realism; he
founded The Merry Theatre for Grownup Children that put on his har-
lequinades and commedia scenarios; and he established the Antique
Theatre that reconstructed medieval mysteries and Spanish Golden
Age dramas, using staging in the round and other unconventional
spaces.
After Evreinov emigrated to France in 1925, it was inevitable
that the Soviets would ignore and downplay the importance of such
an eclectic creative spirit who could only seem decadent to the
enforcers of socialist realism.
Now is the time for a revival and reassessment of Evreinov.
This process has al ready begun in the West. Sharon Carnicke In her
study The Theatrical Instinct has given us a comprehensive and
insightful survey of Evreinov's life and work, explicating his theory of
monodrama and theatre in life and analyzing in detail his major expe-
riments with commedia. Along with Spencer Golub's Evreinov:
59
Theatre of Paradox and Transformation (1984) , Carnicke's work
makes an Important contribution to the rehabilitation of this precur-
sor of many vital currents In contemporary theatre. Carnicke's biblio-
graphy of works by Evreinov includes more than 25 plays and 50
books and articles, none of which until very recently has ever been
reprinted in the Soviet Union. It Is to be hoped that soon much of
Evreinov will be made available both in Russian and in translation,
and that further research will follow the lead of these American
studies.
dcg
60 Soviet and East European Performance Vol. 10, No 3
CONTRIBUTORS
ZSUZSA BERGER, a native of Budapest, writes on the Hungarian
theatre. She is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. program in theatre
at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
OLGA F. CHTIGUEL a native of Moscow, lived and studied in
Czechoslovakia, and moved to the United States in 1984. She
received her M.A. and Ph.D. at New York University.
MARVIN CARLSON is a Distinguished Professor of Theatre and
Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University
of New York and author of many books and articles.
JAMES FISHER is chairman of the Theatre Department of Wabash
College, Wabash, Indiana. He was the recipient of the
Mclain/McTurnanjArnold Research Scholarship, and is presently
book review editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.
DAVID MALCOLM is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Olivet
College in Michigan. He taught at the English Institute of the
University of Gdansk from 1984 to 1988.
LAURENCE MAS LON is literary manager /dramaturg of Arena
Stage. He has directed several plays by Brecht and has written a
book, The Arena Adventure: The First Forty Years, which will be pub-
lished in December.
PHOTO CREDITS
"Irondale/St. Petersburg"
Gerry Goodstein
"The Show Booth"
New York Public Library
Alma Law Archive
"Avlgnon Festival"
Georges Meran
Agence Contrepoint
"The Inspector Generar
International Theatre Festival
of Chicago
61
PLAYSCRIPTS IN TRANSLATION SERIES
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A) :
No.1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin.
Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.2 /, Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated
by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.3 An Altar to Himself, by lreneusz lredyrlski. Translated by
Michal Kobialka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski.
Stage adaptation by Zygmunt HUbner; English version by
Earl Ostroff and Daniel Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.5 The Outsider, by lgnatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter
Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.6 The Ambassador, by Slawomir Mrozek. Translated by
Stawomir Mrozek and Ralph Manheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the
Kitchen, Nets and Traps, and The Violin) . Translated by Alma
H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
No.8 The Trap, by Tadeusz Roiewicz. Translated by Adam
Czerniawskl. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Soviet Plays in Translation. An Annotated Bibliography. Compiled
and Edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00
($6.00 foreign)
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated Bibliography. Compiled
and Edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Taborski, Michal
Kobialka, and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by
Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)
Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters Volume Two. Introduction and
Catalog by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00
foreign)
62
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A Symposium
with Janusz Gfowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by
Daniel C. Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign)
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or
money order payable to CAST A to:
CASTA--THEATRE PROGRAM
GRADUATE CENTER OF CUNY
33 WEST 42nd STREET
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10036
63
SUBSCRIPTION POUCY
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