SEEP Vol.18 No.3 Fall1998

volume 18, no.
3
Fall 1998
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0018) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CAST A), Graduate Center, City
University of New York. The Institute is Room 1306A, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Slavic and
East European Performance: CAST A, Theatre Program, City University
Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Jennifer Parker Starbuck
EDITORIAL ASSIST ANTS
Lars Myers
Melissa Gaspar
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Susan T enneriello
CIRCULATIONS ASSIST ANTS
Ram6n Rivera-Servera
Melissa Gaspar
Patricia Herrera
Bruce Kirle
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
Allen J. Kuharski
CAST A Publications are supported by generous grants from the Lucille
Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in Theatre in the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 1998 CASTA
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that
desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared
in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in
writing before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the ~ p r i n t
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furnished to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 18, No.3
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In Memoriam: Wanda Jakubowska 1907-1998
In Memoriam: Zbigniew Herbert 1924-1998
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
5
6
7
8
9
15
"Somewhere in Europe: The History of Hungarian Cinema" 16
Eszter Szalczer
"Kauno Maiasis Teatras (The Little Theatre of Kaunas)" 24
Jeff Johnson
"The American Studio at the Moscow Art Theatre, Spring 1998" 28
Toni Hull
"Theatre Criticism Conference in Pula, Croatia" 37
Marvin Carlson
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz: Photography 1910-1930 39
Metaphysical Portraits
Daniel Gerould
Polish Avant-garde, 1920-1945 at the Ubu Gallery 50
Daniel Gerould
REVIEWS
"Resurrecting Monsters: Witkiewicz's Metaphysics
of a Two-headed Calf in Philadelphia"
MarciaL. Ferguson
"Stephen Koplowicz and Company Present
Karel Capek's War with the Newts at New York
Dance Theatre Workshop" .
Lars Myers
51
57
3
"U.B. U. I I'll Be Me: From Bydgoszcz to the Bronx"
Susan T enneriello
Contributors
Publications
60
66
68
4
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 18, No. 3
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama and
film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works,
or new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome
submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogo! but we cannot use
original articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements. We will
also gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else which
may be of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully
proofread. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Trans-
literations should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should
be submitted on computer disk as either Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS or
Wordperfect 6.0 for Windows documents (ASCII or Text Files will be
accepted as well) and a hard copy of the article should be included.
Photographs are recommended for all reviews. All articles should be sent
to the attention of Slavic and East European Performance, c/o CAST A,
CUNY Graduate School, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.
Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after
approximately four weeks.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The current issue opens with a farewell to the filmmaker Wanda
J akubowska and the poet and playwright Zbigniew Herbert, who died
recently. Both helped to shape the Polish cultural scene during the early
years of the cold war era, the first a dedicated communist to the end, the
second an unswerving opponent. Their deaths are another reminder of how
few of the major artists from those days still remain. Newer generations are
now molding what will soon be the Eastern European theatre and cinema
of the twenty-first century. This issue has a range of articles examining
different aspects of the transition taking place in Croatia, Lithuania,
Hungary, and Russia. Marvin Carlson reports on the Theatre Criticism
Conference in Pula, Jeff Johnson discusses the Little Theatre of Kaunas,
Eszter Szalczer samples a comprehensive survey of Hungarian cinema, and
Toni Hull looks in on a joint enterprise between the American Studio and
the Moscow Art Theatre. Our reviewers, Marcia Ferguson, Lars Myers, and
Susan Tenneriello, cover a Polish Calf in Philadelphia, Czech Newts in
Manhattan, and U.B. U.II'll Be Me that traveled from Bydgoszcz to the
Bronx.
SEEP now has an E-mail address, seepjour@email.gc.cuny.edu and
we urge readers to contact us in this fashion.
-Daniel Gerould
6
In Memoriam: WandaJakubowska 1907-1998
WandaJakubowska, the first important Polish woman filmmaker,
died in Warsaw on February 25, 1998 at the age of ninety-one. Her career
spanned more than fifty years during which time she directed a wide variety
of films. J akubowska is best known for The Last Stop, her 1948 film about
life in the Nazi concentration camps, which she herself knew firsthand from
her incarceration in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. The first feature film ever
made about the extermination camps, The Last Stop had worldwide
distribution and became a major influence on subsequent Holocaust cinema.
See SEEP 16.3 for Stuart Liebman's review of The Last Stop and related
documents and SEEP 17.3 for his interview with the filmmaker.
Jakubowska's other films include:
1953 Soldiers of Victory
1954 Atlantic Story
1956 Farewell to the Devil
1958 King Mathias I
1960 Encounters in the Dark
It Happened Yesterday
1964 The End of Our World
1965 The Hot Line
1972 At 150 Kilometers an Hour
1978 Ludwik Wary.ris'ki
1985 Invitation
1987 Colors of Love
Obituaries in the Polish press, while taking note of the filmmaker's
unwavering dedication to communism, praised Jakubowska's artistic
achievements and deep sense of engagement that led her to support
generously her younger colleagues.
7
In Memoriam: Zbigniew Herbert 1914-1998
The Polish poet, playwright, and essayist Zbigniew Herbert died
in Warsaw on July 28 at the age of seventy-three. A frequent candidate for
the Nobel prize, Herbert is one of Poland's outstanding contemporary
poets, celebrated for his precise, ironic style and his probing reflections on
the individual confronting society, history, and the world. Less well known
is his work for the stage, which occupied an important place in his career in
the 1950s and 60s when he wrote a number of poetic dramas that
contributed to the flowering of the modern Polish theatre after the cultural
thaw in 1956. There follows a partial list of Herbert's plays with
information about their productions:
1958 Drugi pok6j (The Second Room), one act. Kielce, Teatr
Zeromskiego, directed by Tadeusz Byrski. In an unpublished translation by
Halina Carroll, the play was broadcast on the BBC Third Program 2 August
1962.
1961 ]askinia filozof6w (The Philosophers' Den), three acts (written
and published 1956), Warsaw, Teatr Dramatyczny, directed by N. Korsan.
On the same program with Herbert's Rekonstruckcja poety (Reconstruction
of a Poet), one-act radio play (written 1960) and Drugi pok6j. Translated by
Paul Mayewski, The Philosophers' Den was published in The Broken Mirror,
A Collection of Writings from Contemporary Poland, New York: Random
House, 1958. It was broadcast on the BBC Third Program, 2 April1963. In
an unpublished translation by Magdalena Czajkowska, Reconstruction of a
Poet was broadcast on the BBC Third Program 14 October 1964.
1963 Lalek, a play for voices, Tarnow, Teatr Solskiego.
1964]askiniafilozof6w, Gorz6w, Teatr Osterwy, directed by Irena
and Tadeusz Byrski.
1974 Si6dmy AnioJ (The Sroenth n g e ~ poetry, L6di, Teatr Nowy,
directed by Kazimierz Dejmek.
1975 Lalek, Jelenia G6ra, Cyprian Norwid Theatre, directed by
Ryszard Major.
1981 Powr6t Pana Cogito (The Return of Mr. Cogito), poetry,
Cracow, Stary Teatr, directed by Tadeusz Malik.
1983 Raport z oblrionego miasta (Report from the Besieged City),
poetry, Poznan, T eatr Osmego Dnia, directed by Lech Raczak.
1984 Pan Cogito szuka rady (Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice), poetry,
Warsaw, Teatr Powszechny, directed by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
Dusan Kovacevic's recent play, Larry Thompson: Tragedy of a Youth,
translated and directed by Milos Mladenovic was performed at the Access
Theatre from July 15 to August 15.
Cymbeline, directed by Romanian emigre Andrei Serban with
costumes designed by Marina Draghici and lighting designed by Michael
Chybowski was presented by the Joseph Papp Public Theatre/ New York
Shakespeare Festival at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park from August
4 to 30.
U.B. U. I I'll Be Me, based on Jarry's Ubu Enchained, is a new
collaborative piece created by the director of Teatr Polski of Bydgoszcz,
Wieslaw Gorski, and American director Steven Sapp of Live From the Edge
Theatre. In 1997 T eatr Polski toured a version of the piece in Poland. This
new version was performed at The Point C.D.C in the South Bronx from
August 21 to 27 (See a review of this production on page 60).
Stavrogin's Confession, a play based on a chapter of Dostoyevsky's
The Possessed, was presented by the Storm Theatre Company at the
Redroom at KGB as part of the NY International Fringe Festival in August.
Nijinsky Speaks, a one-man performance written and performed by
Leonard Crofoot, was presented at the Harold Clurman Theatre from
September 2 to 14.
The Square Theatre of Warsaw performed Morgi in Polish at Bronx
Community College on September 18.
In the first weekend of October, Iza, an ensemble from the
a r a m u r e ~ region of Romania, performed folk dances, music and song at
the Symphony Space.
9
"Caught in the Act," the annual festival of international one-act
plays presented by the Threshold Theatre Company, was held at the Here
Theatre from September 10 through October 4. Eastern European
playwrights included: Carl Llszl6, Siawomir Mrozek, Geza N.skandi, Valerii
Briusov, and Konstanty lldefons Gakzyll.ski.
The Expanded Arts company held a "Chekhov Festival" in October
and November. Four plays were presented in repertory: Uncle Vanya,
directed by Bart Lovins, The Cherry Orchard, directed by Jerry McAllister,
The Seagull, directed by Jennifer Spahr, and The Three Sisters, directed by
Frank Pisco.
Martin Fried adapted and directed a version of Chekhov's The Three
Sisters at the Stella Adler Conservatory, running from October 13 to 17.
Stage One Theatre presented Dead Bird, an adaptation of Chekhov's
The Seagull, at Altered Stages. The production ran from October 15 to 31.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Regional U.S.
The Double Edge Theatre premiered The Song Trilogy, a
performance cycle created from sources that included European artists
Brecht, Tadeusz Borowski, Witkacy, Anna Akhmatova, among others.
Performances were held September 18 to 26, and October 2 and 3 in
Ashfield, Massachusetts. The trilogy, directed by Stacy Klein, was presented
along with video documentation of the troupe's European expeditions.
Double Edge Theatre also hosted the U.S. premiere of Gardzienice's
Metamorphosis, or The Golden Ass According to Apuleius, directed by
Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Performances were held at Bennington College on
November 6 and 7, Central Connecticut State University on November 13
and 14, and SUNY-Buffalo from November 17 to 22.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
Europe
T eatr Ludowy from Cracow presented Macbeth at the Pleasance
Theatre in London from June 23 to 27.
10
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 18, No.3
The Eighth International Theatre Festival, Malta '98, was held in
Poznan, Poland, June 25 to 29. Teatr 6smego Dnia and Bialostocki Teatr
Lalek, both of Poland, were represented in the main program. Also featured
was a musical-theatrical project, "The Sounds of Malta" with harpsichordist
Elzbieta Chojnacka and composer Jan A. P. Kaczmarek.
Two performances included in the London Festival of Central
European Culture (June 21 to July 12) were Teatr Biuro Podr6zy's Carmen
Funebre on June 21, and Teatr Rozmaitosci's Tropical Madness, based on two
works by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and directed by Grzegorz Horst
d'Albertis, on July 6 and 7. Both productions were held at the Bloomsbury
Theatre.
The Policemen by Mrozek was presented by Chamber Theatre 55
from Sarajevo at the Etcetera Theatre in London from July 7 to 12.
Teatr KTO organized The 11th International Street Theatres
Festival in Cracow running from July 7 to 13.
The Scarlet Theatre presented Princess Sharon, an adaptation of
Gombrowicz's Princess Ivana, at the Traverse Theatre as part of the
Edinburgh Festival from August 12 to 23. The production was directed by
Katarzyna Deszcz with scenography by Andrzej Sadowski.
The Communicado Theatre Company from Edinburgh toured
Czech playwright Pavel Kohout's Fire in the Basement: a Fiery Farce, adapted
by Bill Findlay, through Scotland from August 8 to October 10.
. Olga Sawicka and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz ofT eatr Stu from Cracow
presented Kochany Kfamca, a Polish version of Jerome Kilty's Dear Liar,
based on the Shaw-Ellen Terry letters, at the POSK Theatre in London from
October 16 to 18.
Miasto, directed by Piotr Borowski and performed by Theatre
Studium Teatralne from Warsaw, was presented at the POSK Theatre in
London on October 13 and 14, with performances at various colleges
throughout England between October 8 and 21. Accompanying the
production were workshops and discussions.
11
The Wrodaw Puppet Theatre hosted an International Puppet
Theatre Festival in October.
OPERA
The Czech Consulate General and Elysium presented Iheresienstadt
a version of Viktor Ullmann's opera Ihe Emperor of Atlantis, written during
his internment at Theresienstadt concentration camp, at the Stephen Wise
Free Synagogue in September.
DANCE
Marta Renzi and her ensemble collaborated with Slovakian artists
Anna Sedlackova, Peter Groll, and Eva Gajdosova to create a piece called
Long Distance Dialogues/ Rozhovory na dial'ku, which was performed at the
Danspace Project in New York from October 14 to 17.
FILM
Ihe Curse of Gold {1996), a short film set in Romania, directed by
Eugen Leahu with photography by Veaceslav Cebotari, was shown at the
Museum of Modern Art on June 8 as part of their "New Documentaries"
program co-sponsored by the New York Film/Video Council.
Brother, written and directed by Russian filmmaker Aleksei
Balabanov, opened at the Film Forum in New York on July 8.
K rzysztof Kiedowski: I'm So-So, a documentary portrait of the Polish
filmmaker written and directed by Krzysztof Wierzbicki was shown at the
Film Forum in August.
Khroustaliov, My Carl, Alexei Guerman's sequel to his My Friend
Ivan Lapsin (1981), was shown on September 28 at Lincoln Center in
Manhattan as part of "The 36th New York Film Festival."
The International Puppet Film Festival at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, in conjunction with the Jim Henson Foundation,
included an evening of puppet animation from Estonia. Films shown
included Little Peter's Dream by Elbert Tuganov, Fly in Spring and Ihe War
by Riho Unt and Hardi Volmer, Papo Carlo Theater and Noblesse Oblige by
12
Rao Heidmets, and Brothers and Sisters by Jan no Poldma. In an evening of
political parables, The Hand by Jif1 Trnka and Tale of the Fox by Wladyslaw
Starewicz were screened. Other works by Starewicz that were screened were
Cameraman's Revenge, The Insect's Christmas, and The Voice of the
Nightingale. Jan Svankmajer's 1971 Jabberwocky was shown in an evening of
shorts on the topic of visual play. Also screened was Street of Crocodiles by
the Brothers Quay, inspired by Bruno Schulz. The festival ran from
September 11 to 20.
The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan showed a series of films
by Sergei Eisenstein in September in a celebration called "Eisenstein: The
Centenary Year." Films screened included Strike (1924), October (1927), and
Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1943) and Part Two (1946).
Voices of the Children, a documentary about the imprisonment of
children in Terezin, was screened at the Czech center on September 10.
One of the survivors was present for the panel discussion that followed.
Black Cat, W1lite Cat, a film set along the Danube in Yugoslavia,
written by Gordan Mihic and Emir Kusturica and directed by Mr.
Kusturica, was shown as part of the 36th New York Film Festival on
October 3 and 4.
Three films by Adrzej Zulawski, The Shamaness, The Third Part of
the Night, and Possession, were shown at the Cine Lumiere of the Institute
r a n ~ a i s in London, England on October 2 to 4.
Mother joan of the Angels, by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, was shown at the
Polish Cultural Institute of London, England on October 8.
ARTS, CULTURE, NEWS
An exhibit of sixteen paintings and portraits by Stanislaw Ignacy
Witkiewicz from the National Museum in Warsaw (organized by Anna
Zakiewicz) was shown in St. Petersburg from May 20 to June 5 at the
Branch of the Theatre Museum/ Residence of the Samoilov Family as part
of the Festival "Warsaw in St. Petersburg."
The Polish Cultural Institute of London, England marked the
bicentenary birth of Adam Mickiewicz with an exhibition (September 11 to
13
October 28) of illustrations by contemporary artists based on Mickiewicz's
Pan T adeusz and Ballady i Romanse, as well as a conference, held September
9 to 12, entitled "National Identity and the Mythology in the Making:
Mickiewicz and Messianism."
"Aleksandr Rodchenko: Konstruktor," a exhibition of
photographs, collage, and other graphic design work by Rodchenko was
held at the Ubu Gallery in Manhattan in September and October.
Oberon Books held an event on October 20 in London to launch
the publication of a new English translation of Stanislaw Wyspianski's The
Wedding, translated by Noel Clark with a forward by Jerzy Peterkiewicz.
The event was introduced by a panel including Peterkiewicz and Clark, and
scenes from the play were read.
The Keith de Lellis gallery in Manhattan had an exhibit of Czech
photographer Jan Lukas's work from his first visit to New York in 1964.
The exhibit closed on November 7.
CYRK, an exhibition of Polish circus posters was shown at the
Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in New York City from
November 21 to 29. There were several events organized in conjunction
with the exhibit, including a panel discussion entitled "Posters as Art."
Canadian composer Jean Derome has released a new CD titled "3
musiques pour UBU" which includes a track titled "Luna Park," a collage
piece including industrial noises, Soviet martial music, and texts by Blok,
Gouro, Khlebnikov, Kroutchonykh, Mayakovsky, and Malevitch.
Works by four Russian composers were featured together at the
Thursday lunchtime concerts at Trinity Church in August. Performed by
Continuum were Sofia Gubaidulina's "Dancer on a Tightrope," Edison
Denisov's "Ode," Alfred Schnittke's Expressionist Piano Quintet, and
Galina Ustvolskaya's "Fifth Symphony: Amen."
"Romanian Avant-Garde 1916 to 1947," an exhibition of books,
collage, drawings, graphic design, paintings, periodicals, photography, and
posters was held at the Ubu Gallery in Manhattan from October 24 to
December 5.
-Compiled by Lars Myers and Melissa Gaspar
14
BOOKS RECEIVED
Luzhina, Jelena. Teorija na dramata i teatarot. Skopje, Macedonia: Detska
Radoct, 1998. 500 pages. Includes an introduction by the editor and
thirteen articles on the theory of drama and theatre by Marvin Carlson,
Marco De Marinis, Franco Ruffini, Sved Eric Larsen and Ane Grethe
0stergard, Keir Elam, Tadeusz Kowzan, Evelin Ertel, Anne Ubersfeld, A.
Helbo, A. Ubersfeld, and P. Pavis, Peter Szondi, Jaques Lacan, Roland
Barthes, and Dietrich Schwanitz. Biographical notices and index.
Kwartalnik filmowy. Nr 19-20 (79-80), 1997-1998. Special issue on film
animation. Warsaw: Pracownia Antropologii Kultury, Filmu i Sztuki
Audiowizualnej Instytutu Sztuki PAN, 1997. 382 pages. Includes sections
on the history of animation, the theory of animation, the work of the
following animators: Piotr Dumala, Daniel Szczechura, Piotr Kamler, Jerzy
Kucia, Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Svankmajer, Stephen and
Timothy Quay, Zbigniew Rybczynski, the Zagreb School of Animation,
animation and computers, independents, plus varia, notes on authors,
summary of the table of contents in English and French, and many
illustrations and photographs.
Notatnik teatralny, 15/ 1998. Special issue on Jerzy Jarocki. 206 pages.
Twenty-one articles about the life and career of Jarocki, including memoirs
and interviews with the director and with the playwrights and theatre artists
with whom he has worked most closely. Includes a chronology of Jarocki's
productions, pp. 171-205. Many photographs and illustrations.
Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy. W malym dworku. Szewcy. {Country House.
The Shoemakers.) Edited with an introduction by Lech Sokol. Warsaw:
Paristwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998. 186 pages. Introduction, pp. 5-35.
Afterword by Janusz Degler, "W laboratorium Czystej Formy, czyli o nie
dostrzezonych :lrodlach W malym dworku" (In the laboratory of Pure Form
or on unnoticed sources of Country House}, pp. 159-84. Editorial note, pp.
185-6.
15
"SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE: THE HISTORY OF HUNGARIAN
CINEMA" AT LINCOLN CENTER, NEW YORK
Eszter Szalczer
Forty-six Hungarian feature films and shorts made up the
impressive and illuminating selection presented by the Film Society of
Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theatre this winter. The screenings
represented the main epochs of Hungarian cinema from the beginnings up
to 1997 and the basic issues-whether political, artistic, or existential
ones-that filmmakers typically addressed during these periods.
Although far from encompassing the full range of styles or
experimentation, the program reflected a basic paradigm that the films have
in common, namely, an all-pervading sense of history as a compelling force
that no one who shares the East-Central European experience can escape.
In different ways, these films all revealed how profound a role the hectic and
mostly tragic turns of history have played in informing (and often
deforming) identities and their representations. At the same time, historical
narratives provided filmmakers and audiences with a shared language which
could conceal and simultaneously express political criticism and resistance
in times of censorship and oppression.
This shared language of history is best exemplified by the
beautifully choreographed and photographed historical allegories of Miklos
J ancs6, made during the so-called "Golden Age" of Hungarian cinema
(1963-75). His films of this period ritualized power relations prevalent in
contemporary Hungary, embedded in quasi-historical narratives which
created the surface-story accessible to the censors. The Round-Up
(Szegenylegenyek, 1965) , for example, seemingly deals with the aftermath of
the 1848 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence against Habsburg
rule and the regime of terror following the uprising. But the allegorical
representation of a sophisticated and sly apparatus of inquisition clearly
delineates and critiques the mechanism of repression that followed the 1956
uprising in Hungary.
The film constructs a model which lays bare oppressor-oppressed
relations and shows how coercive strategies manipulate, corrupt, and
ultimately destroy the people. A group of farmers and shepherds are held
captive in a fortress in the midst of the Hungarian Great Plains. In various
cunning ways they are abused, humiliated, and tricked into betraying
themselves and their comrades, which makes them into collaborators and
accomplices in the oppressors' crimes.
16
17
In the film, shot in black and white, both setting and action are
highly stylized. The open landscape of the Plains which traditionally (and
in the widely known revolutionary poetry of Sandor Petofi, a hero of the
1848 uprising) has been a symbol of freedom, is turned into a hostile and
barren space as it encompasses the hellish circles of confinement. The solid
walls of the fortress enclose the inner circle of the courtyard, into which the
prisoners are crowded during the day, and the almost non-spaces of the
individual cells that can accommodate only one person in a crouching
position.
Power-games are played out in the stunningly choreographed
movement of groups of actors, combined with fragments of sparse and
enigmatic dialogue. Rather than a linear narrative structure, these sequences
create a musical rhythm, one, however, which is deliberately heavy, slow,
and painful. For example, we see from a high camera angle the prisoners
lined up side by side outside the fortification, awaiting the approaching line
of women who bring food for their husbands and sons. Armed guards on
horseback watch the well-drilled exchange during which the two lines must
not meet. The women place their little bundles on the ground in a row,
turn around and go back to watch the men from a distance, whose line now
approaches to pick up the food. The choreographed pattern is suddenly
disturbed when one young prisdner breaks out of the line and rushes
towards the women who turn and start running away; order is re-established
as soon as the prisoner is hunted down. Another powerful sequence occurs
when the peasants' wives are forced to run the gauntlet, naked, flogged by
uniformed soldiers who form two parallel lines. When the first woman
collapses dead, we hear the sound of bodies hitting the ground as the
prisoners, ordered to watch from the roof of the fortress, hurl themselves
down as their only means to protest and break their silence.
The tracking camera movement often draws a parallel between the
motionless and featureless lowland and the silent faces of the prisoners. A
deeply felt compassion is reflected in the image of the naked landscape which
contains these atrocities and in the close-ups of the faces, revealing a voiceless
suffering and indelible scars on the dignity and souls of the people.
Jancs6's Red Psalm (Meg ker a nep, 1971; the original title The people
still demands is a quote from a revolutionary poem by Petofi from 1847)
makes use of an elaborate musical structure, evolving into a sweeping
oratorio in which themes of heroism, martyrdom, and unquenchable desire
for freedom unfold through stunning visual calligraphy and acoustic
metaphors. The film is a ritual enactment of collisions between striking
farm workers and the army, transcending concrete historical time, yet
evoking the clashes between the post 1956 regime and the youth of the 60s.
Choral recitations of revolutionary poetry and manifestos, ritual games
accompanied by folk-tunes, and troubadour-chronicles of historical events
give rise to hieratic dance-patterns, interwoven with a visual iconography of
earth, blood, water, and fire, and with a culturally encoded soundtrack of
snaps of whips of Hungarian horse-herds, clatter of hoofs, gunshots, church
bells, and cattle-bells, that embody the main themes. The orchestration and
the musical flow, created by the long takes of the endlessly moving camera,
amounts to a truly cathartic experience.
Gabor Body, who committed suicide in 1985, was one of the most
original and talented filmmakers of the generation following the "Golden
Age" period. His debut-film, American Postcard (Amerikai anzix, 1975), is
a brilliant experimental work that explores philosophical possibilities of
filmic language and perceptual dimensions. The film follows the fates of
three Hungarian revolutionaries forced into exile after the failed 1848-49
War of Independence, who continue fighting for the cause throughout
Europe, ending finally in the American Civil War on the side of the Union.
The historical narrative frames an investigation of three alternative
ontological modes represented by the characters. The three different
perspectives that they project on the same segment of historical time cut out
and frame the "postcards" as the characters are driven across the world.
Major Janos is a geodesist; he imposes order on the world by
looking at it through the telescope he has invented. He cannot tolerate any
arbitrary force; his vision measures everything, controls space, distance, and
gravity. Lieutenant Vereczky, on the other hand, is a fatalist for whom life
is a game, and after having survived wars and executions he now leaps onto
a giant swing suspended on a tree, and we see only his shadow fall, through
janos's telescope, who is about to measure the amplitude of this awesome
pendulum. The third character, Balogh, represents the emotional
perspective; he is a patriot who suffers from exile; his uprootedness is
symbolized by his stammering.
Body deliberately eliminates any trace of a coherent narrative, and
conveys the characters and their perspectives by manipulating both the
physical conditions and metaphoric qualities of image and sound. The filmic
flow is fractured, shots are faded and ghosted; the film is scratched, burned,
or torn. Metafilmic devices, such as the constant and repetitive framing do
not permit any single narrative or spectatorial position. Many sequences are
seen through the lens of the telescope, upside-down, traversed by the
measuring scale or overlapping with blueprints. Thematic devices, such as
19
the glass eye of an old soldier telling stories, accentuate the subjectivity of
both vision and memory. Speech is made incomprehensible, by diegetic
background noises or extra-diegetic distortions. Bodies and voices are
dissociated as the actors speak with other well-known actors' voices.
Over-hearing, eavesdropping, and the mixing of languages are devices that
are constantly used. By deconstructing the filmic medium on all levels Body
renders both image and story (as well as history) frustratingly fluid and
elusive-and utterly subjective.
Through the use of an opposite filmic strategy of a
quasi-documentary, hyper-realistic style, When Joseph Returns (Ha megjon
]6zsef, 1975) by Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs (who had earlier been Jacs6's assistant)
is just as revealing. Kezdi-Kovacs explained in an interview that he was
interested in taking a close look at the everyday life of working class people
who were declared by the regime to be the ruling class. The film discloses
an immense discrepancy between the myth of the proletariat-upon which
the whole communist system was based-and the desperate reality and actual
deprivation of the "ruling" class, the laborers.
The revealing "still lives" are framed by a very simple story (which
helped to avoid the censors' suspicion): after her merchant seaman husband
sailed off, a young wife (who works at a shipyard by the Danube until she
gets herself into trouble and is laid off) stays with her mother-in-law (also a
laborer at the assembly line of a drug-factory), awaiting her husband's
return.
Much more telling than the story is the dreary environment shown
with all the details: the Soviet-type housing project the women live in,
where the TV set functions as brainwashing device pouring out re-assuring
images and news concerning the Warsaw Pact, the progress of the five-year
economic plan, May Day parades, and soccer games. This world is in total
contrast with the living standards of a Party functionary who owns a
luxurious Western-style apartment, household servants, and a chauffeur.
The visual universe and the superb acting (by Lili Monori and Eva
Ruttkay) reveal an exploitative, feudal order of relationships on which the
communist power-system thrived. The main character, a working class
orphan woman, belongs to those most destitute and marginalized in the
social hierarchy. After having been raised in "the institute," the state
asylum, and receiving no schooling beyvnd the compulsory elementary
level, she works as an untrained laborer. She does not have the slightest
means to define or express herself; and knows only self-destructive ways to
signal even her frustration. If she talks at all, she uses the formal second
person address, while others who for her represent power, including the
21
men who use and abuse her, relate to her in the familiar mode (as it was
customary between servants and masters in the past, between children and
adults still today). She is not even a separate person for her own husband
who addresses his letters to "Dear Mother and Marika." The seaman
husband, on the other hand, ironically represents one of the triumphs of a
system which boasted of securing the right to education for the proletariat
for the first time in history. Without being didactic for a moment, the film
sharply reveals how ideology served the concealed perpetuation of
feudal-patriarchal, coercive practices.
From the post-communist era perhaps the most fascinating film was
Bela T arr's black and white epic Satantango (1994), based on a contemporary
novel by Imre Krasznahorkai. The film depicts the events surrounding the
dissolution of a farming cooperative, set in a gray, muddy landscape
shrouded in fog, where the rain never stops and the sun never seems to be
able to rise.
The movie, which mesmerized audiences throughout the seven
hours of its duration, is structured by an intricate narrative layering which
includes the repetition of sequences of events from several perspectives. One
perspective is that of an extra-diegetic narratorial voice and observing eye
which then blends with those of a narrator within the film, the alcoholic
doctor who watches the members of the collective from his window
through a spyglass and keeps a separate journal on each of them. Additional
layers are created by the points of view of the different characters, unfolding
in long takes that occupy real time. Further narrative perspectives on the
same span of time; events and characters are constructed by the reports of
two former inmates to the police. Their grotesque descriptions are then
trimmed and reformulated by the police officers in a ludicrous operation
that stresses the total arbitrariness and absurdity of any "objective" point of
view. Yet the many partial perspectives and fractured visions captured by
the camera amount to an elevating experience that reinforces the vital
significance of storytelling in order for us to remain human, and stresses the
artist's responsibility in letting the speechless be heard, the obscured be seen,
and the benumbed pain be felt.
Even the darkest of these films emphasizes the remarkable resilience
of the individual and the community under the most trying circumstances.
Defiance of dehumanizing conditions, even if doomed to failure, is upheld
as one of the highest moral values. One can only hope that Hungarian
filmmaking will survive in the same spirit that is conveyed in these films,
despite crippling economic hardship and the unequal competition with a
globalized commercial film industry.
22
23
KAUNO MAZASIS TEATRAS
(THE LITTLE THEATRE OF KAUNAS)
Jeff Johnson
Kauno Maiasis Teatras was established in 1992 by Rolandas
Atkoaunas, one of the post-perestroika "New Wave" of Lithuanians who,
after studying directing in Moscow, wanted an alternative, independent
theatre which stressed experimental, non-traditional works by international
writers. So, in 1991, Atkociunas returned to Kaunas and convinced the
municipality of the need for an innovative theatre which, according to its
directive, would '"approach' the spectator and the actor ... and evolve in
the direction of cafe-theatre."
Funded on a shoestring budget (currently about $1,400 US
annually), Ma2asis Teatras occupies a three story brick and mortar building
off a cobblestoned shop-lined street in the old-town section of Kaunas. The
first floor features a cafe, which serves as a cozy artistic hub for local actors
and students. The second floor houses administrative offices, and the third
floor serves as the stage, an intimate loft-style space with seating for seventy.
In 1994, Arvydas Lebeliiinas assumed the job of artistic director and
continues to develop Maiasis Teatras in the direction set by Atkociunas.
Lebeliunas prefers expressionistic plays with minimalist staging, especially
ones that mix genres and appeal to students and young people eagerly
challenged by experimental work. All jobs are done "in house." The actors,
drawn from open-casting in Kaunas and Vilnius, create the sets, costumes
and props. Four productions, developed during two months of workshops
and rehearsals, run simultaneously during the season. "It's a matter of
pragmatism," says Lebeliunas. "We have no promotional budget," so, in a
nifty bit of strategic self-promotion, they run the shows long enough for
word to get around.
"It's an actor's theatre," he says. "Stress is placed on acting, on the
physical." A recent production of Charlie (Karolj by the Polish writer
Slawomir Mroi.ek offers a good illustration of what Lebeliunas means. The
play centers around a visit by a gangster and a soldier to an ophthalmologist
who has just cured a young woman's blindness. In the course of the
interrogation of the doctor by the two men, Lebeliunas creates a simple
Manichean context framing insight and blindness, knowledge and
ignorance, within a dramatic chiaroscuro. His engrossing treatment-relying
on the symbolic use of music, metaphorical lighting, and a surrealistic sense
of minimalist staging-visually and seamlessly welds the past and present,
24 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 18, No. 3
Slawomir Mrozek' s Charlie (Karol}. Directed by Arvydas Lebeliiinas
at the Kauno Mai.asis T eatras
IJ')
( ' ~
demonstrating both within the action of the play and the staging under his
direction the insidious abuse of symbols as weapons. In one particularly
haunting moment, underscoring Lebeliiinas's deft minimalist's touch, the
young woman, with her newly restored vision, dances, as if in memory,
behind the black back drop flooded in light, while the three other characters
are frozen in a potential murder. Playing to the audience, mixing drama and
farce, the stock characters manage to attain a psychological depth beyond
their archetypes, effectively revealing the absurdity of terror, the intrinsic
comedy of desperation.
Aside from the iconoclastic bent of its material, what sets Mazasis
T eatras off from other theaters in Kaunas is evident in its eclectic seasonal
programs. This past year, for instance, the ensemble invited Norwegian
Ingve Si.indvor to direct a play, presented puppet shows by Lithuanian artist
Valdis Aleksaitis, and produced three short plays by the French writer Jean
Michelle Ribes and 1he Sad Ballad of johnny Reb and His Pretty Wife Cecilia
by the American playwright Scott Turner. Lebeliiinas concedes that he is
not averse to producing traditional pieces-Chekhov's one-act comedies, for
example-but he insists that they be staged with "a new twist, and an
emphasis on action."
Lebeliiinas's passion for new forms and cross-genre productions
results, he admits, from an early involvement with experimental theatre and
his visit to LaMama in New York City. A graduate of Vilnius Conservatory,
he majored in acting and cinema directing, crediting his teachers, directors
Andrei Tarkovsky, Larisa Sepitko and Vytautas Zalakeviaus, with the most
influence on his aesthetics. While he enjoys acting and directing, Lebeliiinas
also works in cinema and has lately been making short films for the
commercial network Lithuanian TV and directing programs for LNK,
Lithuania public television. Typically, he cites Peter Brook, Steven Spielberg
and Ingmar Bergman as directors whose work he most admires, the blend
of diverse styles and the confluence of cinematic and dramaturgic techniques
perfectly exemplifying the tenor of Lebeliiinas's approach.
Theatre Manager Alma Buksnaityte explains that the philosophy
of Maiasis Teatras has evolved in response to the sense of disruption
following Lithuania's independence from Russia. Before independence, she
says, there was a cause, a purpose, a unifying sense of relevancy in "a theatre
of resistance. " Ironically, according to Buksnaityte, during the occupation
the Soviets not only t olerated and approved of a subversive theatre but they
encouraged it, as if by sanctioning political dissent they could contain it.
"But what are the subjects now?" asks Buksnaityte, "and how does the
theatre respond? The society is evolving and theatre needs to evolve with
it. We don't have a new language for the new time. With so much Western
influence, ideas are open, but Lithuanian theatre lacks the language which
can investigate the problems of today." She complains that many theatres,
responding to Western trends and a market economy, are ineluctably
moving away from a theatre of ideas towards popular entertainment, and in
an attempt to retain an audience risk becoming irrelevant. "Nowadays," she
says, "it's Shakespeare as can-can."
Both Buksnaityte and Lebeliiinas are determined that Mazasis
Teatras will resist that kind of devolution. In fact, next season's agenda is
as ambitious and progressive as ever. Along with a mix of new international
works, joint musical projects and guest directors, plans include a Little
Theatre Festival running for five days during Easter. Along with
Lebeliiinas, Latvian director Modris T emison will serve as the idea organizer
for the project. Ternison, who lived in Kaunas from 1968 to 1972, will invite
his former students to Kaunas (who include Giedrius Mackevicius from the
Dance Theatre of Moscow) to perform a series of works of various styles in
different theatres around the city. Lebeliiinas says the purpose of the festival
is "to combine ideas of the millennium with general ideas of the history of
the human situation."
The season at Kauno Mazasis Teatras runs from October through
May. The Little Theatre Festival is tentatively scheduled for Easter 1999.
For information contact Kaunas Maiasis Teatras at Dauksos G. 34, Kaunas,
Lithuania. Telephone +226090.
27
THE AMERICAN STUDIO AT THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE,
SPRING 1998
Toni Hull
To reach their seats, the audience entered from upstage, crossed
through a dimly-lit hall, walking along a wide strip of black carpet that
bisected the narrow space in a zigzag diagonal. At the far end, the spectators
took their seats on a bleacher-like construction holding about twenty-five.
Seen from the perspective of this make-shift auditorium, the dark carpet
flowed ominously and dominantly through the space, suggesting a murky,
muddy river. Surely this was the Volga River, which factors so centrally in
Alexander Ostrovsky's 1he Storm (Groza, 1859). But then several members
of the company, who had been haunting the edges of the stage area, came
forward and rolled up the carpet and carried it behind some screens,
revealing that it had been nothing more than a sensible device to protect the
playing floor from unwanted dirt and debris from the spectators' shoes.
And that was the last we ever saw of the Volga in this production of
Ostrovsky's tragedy, performed in repertory throughout Spring 1998 by the
American Studio at the Moscow Art Theatre, the resident acting company
comprised of the students of Carnegie Mellon University's graduate acting
program at the Moscow Art Theatre School (CMU/MAT).
1
The publicity for the Studio's Storm promised a "re-examination"
of this classic in the Russian canon, making it one of many such claims for
productions of Ostrovsky in Moscow today. Among the more notable
ventures have been Pyotr Fomenko's production of Wolves and Sheep and
Guilty without Blame at the Vakhtangov and Studio Chelovek's A Cat Has
Not Always Carnival. In February 1997, Genrietta Yanovskya premiered
1he Storm on the backstage of the Teatr Yunogo Zritelya, with the Volga
reduced to a metal irrigation trough running the width of the playing area
and the actors defying spatial and sometimes dramatic logic as they ascended
into the rafters of the flyspace via the theatre's spiral staircase. Yanovskya's
production dwelt on the ignorance and violence of Ostrovsky's Volga town,
highlighting the national context with painted Russian folk dolls encircling
the playing area, plaintive native songs, and an emblematic birch tree center
stage.
In Alexander Marin's production at the American Studio, the
(unseen) river running thematically through the play may have been called
the Volga, and the evil city that the pilgrim Feklusha condemns may have
been Moscow, and the characters may have had difficult-to-pronounce
names like Marfa Ignatieva, but for all intents and purposes the story no
longer took place in Russia, which was evidently the goal of the production.
The American Studio's staging reduced the story to its generic soap-opera
elements: a despotic mother, her pathetic son, a desperate daughter-in-law,
and a conveniently willing lover. The goal may have been to evoke any
typical place where cruelty and lust fester, but the result felt an awful lot
like the Mississippi ala Tennessee Williams.
That is, if there were orange groves along the Mississippi, which
there certainly aren't along the Volga. Oranges were a central scenic
element in this production of The Storm, used repeatedly to lubricate the
orgasmic writhing of the actors in the love-making scenes Ostrovsky did not
bother to write. As the young actors who played Katya and Boris devoured
and squeezed one orange after another, pulpy juice running down their
chins and elbows, one had to wonder if the director thought audiences
wouldn't understand what Ostrovsky meant when he had Katya say, "I have
been out walking with Boris these nine.nights."
2
As played by Laura Emanuel, Katya was over-the-edge and ready
to jump from the opening moments of this production. With the truncated
text, it seemed that every other line Katya uttered was a premonition of her
own death, making it a foregone conclusion and robbing the story of
dramatic tension. However, Emanuel's suffering was palpable. Her final
scene was played in blackout, with just the burning end of a cigarette butt
illuminating, metaphorically rather than literally, Katya's descent into
madness and despair. Jeremy Menekseoglu made the son Tikhon so
exceedingly cowardly in front of his mother and so brutal with his wife that
it was impossible to believe that Katya could ever have loved him, though
it made her desperation all the more understandable. Heidi Landis was a
truly despicable over-bearing mother, a prerequisite for this interpretation,
but she did sound a bit too much like one of those wretched matrons on All
My Children, making the situation seem rather banal at times.
The Storm was the American Studio's third and final production
working as a repertory company in the 1998 season, and the luxury of such
an intensive artistic interaction paid off. The actors were as comfortable
performing simulated sex together as they were with emotional skirmishes
for each other's souls. Unanimously, the students of the CMU/MA T
program agreed that one of its best aspects was being able to work as a
company in a rotating repertory situation. Equally important was working
with the Russian (MAT) faculty members, who, while not better than the
American (CMU) professors in the program, still added an element to the
actors' training that the students insisted was unique. In a lively discussion
29
following one of their final performances last May, they tried to explain
what made the Moscow Art Theatre School teachers different. Jeremy
Menekseoglu said that here in Moscow they "learned a method of acting that
you only dream about; you know it exists somewhere, but no one is ever
really teaching it." Most of them had clearly had very bad experiences with
the Stanislavsky system-and its various mutations-back in the States,
either in undergraduate programs or studio classes. They related horror
stories about the violently competing Stanislavskian methods, with the
actors-professionals and students alike-getting caught in the cross-fire.
Here in Moscow, the students explained, teachers could hold differing
priorities (emotional vs. physical) and orientations (Meyerhold vs.
Vakhtangov), but without the back-stabbing, and the result was a more
"organic" approach to the System, as Lulu D'Agostino put it.
Alexander Popov, Director of the American Studio and Program
Manager of the CMU/MA T program, emphasized that the Russian
professors in the program are first and foremost practitioners, all of them
currently working as actors or directors in Moscow and abroad. Only
secondarily are they teachers, and theoreticians not at all. The Russian staff
included: for acting, Yuri Y eremin, Alexander Marin, and Alla Pokrovskaya;
for movement, Andrei Droznin and Natalia Fedorova; for dance, Larisa
Dmitrieva; and for theatre history, Anatoly Smeliansky and Alexander
Popov. (In particular, the students could not praise Droznin enough; several
expressed the desire to return to work with him further.)
Marin, the director of both 1he Storm and The Shadow, the two
plays reviewed here, has worked with the CMU/MA T program throughout
its four years. He is a graduate of GITIS and founding member of the
Tabakov Studio. He is the Artistic Director of the Theatre Deuxieme
Realite in Montreal, Quebec, and frequently works in Canada, the States and
Moscow, where he is a "zasluzhennii artist" (distinguished artist). His other
current work in Moscow includes Sublimation of Love by A. De Benedetti
(co-directed with Oleg Tabakov), and upcoming is a production of 1he Idiot
at the Tabakov Studio.
Popov pointed out one important difference that he sees between
actor training programs in the States and in Russia: Russia has only eight
conservatory programs for acting and directing, as opposed to the many
hundreds of programs in the United States. Using simple mathematics, it is
easy to see that the number of students and graduates differs enormously
between countries. Popov recalled once hearing an American professor
boast of graduating thirty acting teachers. "It's nonsense," Popov said,
"because how do you graduate acting teachers? This is not a profession, it's
30
a job. You graduate actors and directors. They acquire some practical craft,
and then some of them have a talent to pass this craft on, some of them
don't."
Learning a "practical craft" was also the aspect the students
emphasized when praising the program and their experience in Moscow.
Caroline Treadwell admitted that only "now I realize I have a craft,
something to constantly work on, and I can't get away with what I used to
anymore." The goals of the craft-getting to the truth, really listening and
answering, character development-don't sound very different from what
you would find in any number of other Stanislavsky-based acting programs
all over the States. And the exercises that make up the actor's preliminary
and day-to-day training don't sound different either, and indeed they aren't,
as the company members eventually confessed. But the context is different
and that is the difference that counts. Monica Read explained that "I had a
wonderful teacher back home. What I'm learning here justifies everything
he taught me." Jeremy Menekseoglu added, "I did all the same exercises as
an undergrad, but this is different: working in a company, the intensity of
it, 9 a.m. to 11 p.m." Daniel Funk summed it up by saying, "in Pittsburgh
we felt like we were just a class, but now here we're a company."
In this case, the company that acted together also went to the
theatre together, and the CMU/MA T students were deeply impressed by
the theatre they saw in Moscow. On one hand, they had the remarkable
good fortune to be in Moscow during the Third Chekhov International
Theatre Festival, where they had the opportunity to see productions by
Mabou Mines, Suzuki Tadashi, Robert Sturua, Robert Wilson and others.
But they also frequently went to Russian productions. Several performances
that particularly impressed them were Romeo and Juliet at the Satirikon,
Klopomor, by Sergei Bodrov and Hanna Slutski, at the Studio Chelovek, and
Another Van Gogh, idea and composition by Valery Fokin, at the Tabakov
Studio. They were equally struck by the Russian audiences. Echoing a
sentiment expressed by many of them, Rebecca Lincoln said, "There's not
just a respect for actors here, there's a respect for all artists, and I feel like
here I learned to become an artist because I see the respect that they get here,
and that's not anything I could have learned in America in a million years."
Just being in Moscow, in Russia, impressed most of the company,
though not all thought coming to Moscow was absolutely necessary (as
opposed to working with the acting teachers from the Moscow Art Theatre
School, which everyone insisted was crucial). A few spoke of the almost
spiritual experience of seeing the Moscow Art Theatre itself for the first
time, and then of actually walking out on its stage (their own performances
31
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Evgenii Shvans's Tbe Shadow. Directed by Alexander Marin
at the American Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre
were held on the MAT School student stage and rehearsal space). And they
all had gained a new appreciation for Russian dramatic literature and were
going home with the desire to perform Russian plays in the States.
Only eight members of the eighteen-member company performed
in The Storm, but the full company appeared in Alexander Marin's staging
of Evgenii Shvarts's The Shadow (Tyen, 1940), which was as cerebral as The
Storm was emotional. In the primarily reactive role of the Scholar, Cory
Walter projected an appropriate mix of callow naivete and ironic
bemusement, but both the character and the performance became interesting
only when the Scholar began to suffer. Walter worked particularly well
with the three leading female actresses. Annunziata, the hotel keeper's
daughter who loves the Scholar, was played by Sally Randa with just the
right amount of wide-eyed ingenuousness and natural savviness. In the
opening scene Annunziata's costume suggested she was a modern-day
version of the French maid in a boulevard farce-mini-skirt, bare midriff,
fishnet stockings-but Randa quickly. overcame this impression, easily
conveying Annunziata's fervor and honesty. The Scholar's recognition in
the final scenes that Annunziata has infinitely more character and fortitude
than the Princess came rather suddenly, but the audience knew it all along,
largely thanks to Randa's feisty, impassioned performance.
Sheila Gordon played Julia J uli with enough femme fatale
mannerisms to be amusing, but not tedious. From the beginning, there was
an edge to Gordon's performance that made the character always interesting,
even while being thoroughly predictable. While there was never any doubt
that Gordon's Julia could give up her salon life in order to do the noble
thing (i.e. save the Scholar's life), it was fascinating to watch her struggle
with the idea of sacrifice, which she made appear a quite sexy notion.
Caroline Treadwell was a lovely, sad and confused Princess, and her
fickleness, which takes the Scholar completely by surprise, was perfectly
comprehensible in Treadwell's spirited performance. She first appeared on
the balcony across from the Scholar's room in pig-tails and dark glasses,
voraciously chewing gum and flying paper airplanes (the latter for no clear
dramatic purpose but pleasantly amusing all the same). The melancholic
innocence behind the Princess's official jadedness was quite touching, and it
was easy to see why the Scholar would want to save her, a desire often
enough confused with love.
Shane Covey's performance of the Shadow was frustratingly
dissatisfying. It was difficult to discern between the Shadow's feigned
cowering as the court lackey jockeying for position, and his unwilling
subordination to his corporeal master, the Scholar. Covey's monotone
33
delivery made his key speeches (tricking the Scholar into renouncing the
Princess, persuading the Princess of the Scholar's duplicity, begging the
Scholar to stay) dull and unconvincing. The weakness in his performance
only served to underscore the production's reliance on extra-textual
contrivances to tease some meaning out of the play.
The costumes, by Valentina Komolova, were a mix of modern-day
street clothes and indeterminate period accessories (capes, pantaloons). The
effect had no conceptual clarity, but nor did it hinder the action or the
actors. The central component of the set by Maxim Osvetimsky was a series
of four wires running the width of the stage with hanging drapes that
became longer the deeper they moved upstage. The drapes were used
effectively for the creation of locale and were convenient, but overused, as
the screens for shadow imagery.
Weighing down the entire production was an oppressive mantle of
violence and sex that exceeded anything either explicit or implicit in the
text. While Shvarts's play is seriously concerned with the conflict between
the honest and the "shadow" sides of life, there is still a lightness in the text,
or at least a playfulness between light and dark, that this production lacked.
Marin established the level of violence that would permeate the rest of the
production in the final scene of the first act. When the Scholar tells his
Shadow to go and woo the Princess on his behalf, Shvarts's stage directions
suggest that the Scholar laugh several times during the short speech, falling
down only after the Shadow has separated itself, effectively causing the
Scholar to lose his balance. In this production, no sooner did the Scholar
address his Shadow, than he crashed to the floor in pain. Pulsing lights
throbbed, casting looming, threatening figures on the backdrop. As the
music reached its crescendo, the Scholar writhed in agony on the floor.
Throughout the production, whenever a verbal admonition was
made, it was accompanied by someone being thrown against a wall, onto the
floor, or behind a screen to be pummeled. Those with power, or wanting
power, do indeed make a lot of threats in Shvarts's play, but Marin added
a physically violent element to them all. The lackeys who carry the
Minister of Finance around were reincarnated here as henchmen. They beat
up the Shadow, the Scholar, the Health Resorters. While this is a feasible
interpretation of the world of the play, it overemphasizes the physical
incarnation of evil and downplays the effect on the soul, which arguably is
Shvarts's greater concern.
Marin's excessive use of sexual imagery, as a complement to the
violence of this fairy tale world, sometimes worked in direct conflict with
both the spirit and the words of the text. When the Master of the Guard
34
complains to his Corporal about thetownspeople's disrespectful behavior
on the eve of their Princess's nuptials, he specifies a couple caught kissing by
the palace walls, a woman who dared to give birth, an old man who
presumed to die. In this production, as the two characters talked, shadow
figures backlighted on the upstage drapes performed various sex acts, some
of which the Playboy channel might blush to exhibit. The mundane
notions of everyday childbirth and dying seemed not to have held any
interest for Marin.
The idea that sex and the shadow side are one and the same was
ultimately reinforced with the arrival at Court of the Princess and her soon-
to-be Consort. Here the performance of the sex act was even more
gratuitous and seemed to suggest that sexuality is exclusively an attribute of
the dark side, rather than a human characteristic sometimes manipulated for
evil's benefit. As the courtiers stood by, the couple copulated on the throne
(fully-dressed, mind you, but the actors were quite convincing in making
that point irrelevant). Sex, the Shadow, death: the three were constantly
entwined in this production. The Scholar does indeed say, "On one side,
there is life, and on the other, the shadow," but he doesn't mention sex as
part of the equation.
3
Finally, the Shadow is exposed, and he manages to escape. As the
Scholar and Annunziata prepare to leave together, the Scholar assures the
court that the Shadow is just "hiding, but he'll meet me on the road again
and again. And I'll recognize him, I'll always recognize him. "
4
In Marin's
production, the Scholar and Annunziata left together (after the entire
company sat down for a few moments in silence in a cute wink to its
Russian audience). But while the members of the court waved goodbye, the
Shadow sneaked in among them and smiled slyly at the audience, back again,
inexplicably, in the catbird seat. Marin's direction effectively left the
synthesis in Shvarts's conclusion unrealized, denying the Shadow and the
Scholar their reunion in the world beyond the fairy tale.
While I may have questioned some of the director's choices in the
American Studio's production of The Shadow, it was still an energetic, highly
disciplined, and engaging piece of theatre. The overall effect of the three
productions presented by the CMU/MAT company was of a polished and
professional repertory company working with skilled directors. This young
troupe learned what it was like to play Shakespeare's clown one night,
Ostrovsky's tragic heroine another, and an abstraction of evil the third. It
is an acting experience that is rare in the States but which is still the heart of
the acting system in Russia.
35
NOTES
1. 1997/1998 was the fourth and final year of this one-year MFA acting program: in
the future, Moscow Art Theatre School is expanding its existing relationship with the
American Repertory Theatre and the Harvard Institute for Advanced Theatre
Training, and Carnegie Mellon will take some time off to restructure its graduate
acting program. CMU /MAT's intensive conservatory program included three full
productions, the first premiering in Pittsburgh, and then moving, set, costumes, and
all, to Moscow to run in repertory rotation with two productions staged there. The
first production in the 1997-98 program-a crisp, imaginative and disciplined
Midsummer Night's Dream-was directed by Elisabeth Orion of Carnegie Mellon,
who shared the title of Director of the American Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre
with Oleg Tabakov, Anatoly Smeliansky, and Alexander Popov. The other two
productions were Evgenii Shvarts's The Shadow and Ostrovsky's The Storm, which
are reviewed here.
2. A.N. Ostrovsky, Plays (Moscow: Pravda, 1979), 195 (my translation).
3. Evgenii Shvarts, Plays (Leningrad: Soviet Writer, 1982), 227 (my translation).
4. Ibid., 243.
36
Slavic and East EuropeAn Performance Vol. 18, No.3
THEATRE CRITICISM CONFERENCE IN PULA, CROATIA
Marvin Carlson
On August 7 to 9, 1998, the Croatian Centre of ITI and the
International Theatre Youth Festival of Pula collaborated in sponsoring a
seminar on "Theatre Criticism Today," inviting theatre critics from a
number of countries to discuss the current state of theatre criticism
internationally and the duties and responsibilities of criticism with younger
critics from Croatia and the surrounding region.
The program began the morning of August 7 with a reception for
the participants held in the elegant early renaissance town hall of Pula
organized by the mayor of Pula. Following this the opening sessions were
held at the lstrian National Theatre, recently revitalized under the direction
of Davor Lovrecic. Here presentations were given on the functions of
criticism by Marvin Carlson of the City University of New York, on the
relationship between theory and criticism by Manfred Pfister of the Freie
U niversitat in Berlin, on the education of theatre critics by Boris Senker of
the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, and on differences
between American and European theatre criticism by Sanja Nikcevic, a
Croatian theatre critic. This was followed by a presentation of theatre
magazines in Croatia-Glumiste, Frakcija, T & T, and Luka.
In the afternoon, after a tour of the historic city of Pula, two world
theatre networks were presented, UNESCO's ITI (International Theatre
Institute), whose current president, Jeong Ok Kim of South Korea and
General Secretary Andre Louis Perinetti from France introduced this
organization, and AICT (The International Association of Theatre Critics),
introduced by Ian Herbert from England, the AICT director of training
seminars for young critics. Darko Lukic, the artistic director of the Istrian
National Theatre then presented a new publication Pandur's Theatre of
Dreams, dealing with the work of Croatian theatre artists Livija and Tomai
Pandur.
In the evening the participants attended a production by one of
Croatia's leading young experimental directors, Branko Brezovec, held out
of doors in a courtyard next to the School of Music. The production, Cezar,
put together actors from theatre organizations in Croatia (Putakaz), Slovenia
(MGL) and Macedonia (MKC) to perform a text that was also an
international collage, its first third drawn from an early twentieth-century
Slovenian expressionist drama by Slavko Grum, An Event in the City of
Goga, the second part based on a contemporary text by a Macedonian
37
dramatist, Biljana Garvanlijeva, and the third part drawn from Shakespeare's
julius Caesar, with some additions from Brecht, and performed in all three
Balkan languages.
On Saturday the participants were taken by bus to the beautiful
Istrian mountaintop town of Motovun, where they were treated to another
international theatre project, this a scene from Garda Lorca's El Publico,
performed by a company of young theatre artists from Croatia, Turkey,
Spain, Bosnia, and Slovenia, who had gathered at this spot under the
organization of the International Theatre Youth Festival for a seven-day
workshop on performing Lorca. George White, the director of America's
O'Neill Theatre Center, which is planning a collaboration with the Festival
and with the Croatian ITI at Motovun, spoke on the work of the Theatre
Center.
Back at the National Theatre in Pula that afternoon, the
participants heard a presentation by Alexis Greene, a theatre critic from
New York, on criticism in different media from paper to internet and from
Ian Herbert on young theatre critics today. Following this, the newest
publication of the Croatian Center of ITI was presented, a Croatian
translation of Manfred Pfister's Das Drama. Remarks were made by
Professors Pfister, Carlson, and Senker, as well as by the publisher Sanja
Nikcevic and the translator, Marijan Bobinac.
In the evening the participants attended a program in the
magnificently preserved Roman amphitheatre which is the most famous
sight in Pula. The program was a regional rendition of the popular Three
Tenors, with tenors Jenez Lotric, Krunoslav Cigoj, and Gianluca Zampieri
from Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. All were enthusiastically received, but
each also clearly had his own national cheering section, as clearly observable
in the responses as if the occasion were an international soccer competition.
Sunday contained no formal meetings, but the participants
continued informal discussions along with recreation and sightseeing on an
all day boat ride through the nearby Brijuni islands and up the Istrian coast
to the lovely renaissance town of Rovina. In the evening they returned to
Pula to attend an annual carnival festival coproduced by the lstrian national
theatre and the Teatro del Mediterraneo of Naples, an exuberant series of
commedia-style scenes carried out in various locations on the popular Pula
beach by a large crowd of youthful actors in ,elaborate and fanciful costumes.
The antique popular quality of the performance seemed a bit odd among the
ultra-modern hotels that cluster around the Pula beach, but the performance
was scheduled to be repeated the following evening in the ancient streets of
the old town, surely a far more suitable venue.
38
STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ: PHOTOGRAPHY 1910-1930
METAPHYSICAL PORTRAITS 1998
Daniel Gerould
Eighty-eight of Witkiewicz's photographic portraits have recently
been featured in a traveling exhibition presented in both Germany and the
United States. Co-produced by the Fotomusem im Mi.inchner Stadtmuseum,
Munich, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle, the exhibition, curated
by T. 0. Immisch, opened in Halle, where it was shown from January 16 to
March 15. For the opening Ines Gartner, Horst Gunther and Frieder Simon
staged a puppet play based on Witkiewicz's The Cuttlefish.
The exhibit next moved to New York, where it was featured at the
Robert Miller Gallery from March 31 to May 2, under the curatorship of
Olivier Renaud-Clement, director of photography, assisted by Amy Wanklyn.
On May 1, a program of staged readings, "Alien Hands Are Writing: Readings
from S.I. Witkiewicz," was presented by the Liquid Theatre, directed by
Richard Nash-Siedlecki.
The final showing of the exhibit (in cooperation with the Robert
Miller Gallery) was at the Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue
Galleries, from July 18 to September 13. In connection with the Chicago
showing there was a reception at the Polish Museum of America on
September 11 and a Symposium at the Chicago Cultural Center on September
12, moderated by Bohdan Gorczyriski, Associate Curator of the Museum.
The title of the symposium was "Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy) and
the Polish Avant-garde-an international symposium on the artist and his
impact on 20th century art." Participants included Gregory Knight, Director
of Visual Arts, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Olivier
Renaud-Clement, Robert Miller Gallery, and four visiting scholars who
lectured on the following topics: T.O. Immisch, "Witkacy's Portrait
Photography and its Position in the History of Photography," Anna
Zakiewicz (Chief Curator, Department of Contemporary Prints and
Drawings, National Museum, Warsaw), "Witkacy's Portrait Firm," Lech
Sokol (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw),
"Witkacy-Conservative Avantgardist," and Daniel Gerould, "Witkacy and
Popular Culture."
Critics and public alike reacted favorably to the exhibit, discovering
in Witkacy a photographic pioneer who uncannily anticipated a number of
present-day trends. It was noted that half a century before Cindy Sherman
39
Self-Portrait
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1913
40
Portrait of Jadwiga (Unrug) Witkiewicz
by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1923
41
Portrait of Stanislaw Witkiewicz
by Stanislaw lgnacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1913
42 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 18, No.3
and her peers, Witkacy-obsessed with role-playing, self-presentation, and
doubles-created his own staged self-portraits, featuring himself as cowboy,
madman, robber, and vampire. For most viewers it was in the series of
close-up "soul" portraits taken of friends, relatives, and himself between 1911
and 1913 that the blurred focus and luminous eyes seemed best to capture
inner psychic essences.
What do we know about Witkacy the photographer, and how can
locating him in his own time and place help us to understand his work? In his
essay, "Metaphysical Portraits" in the exhibit catalogue (see SEEP, 18.2,
Summer 1998, page 12), Stefan Okolowicz-from whose collection most of
the pictures in the exhibition are taken-explains that both Witkacy and his
father, a celebrated painter and author, became passionate about photography
at the turn of the century. Witkiewicz senior considered that the camera
enlarged the range of imaginative possibilities for the artist and that far from
being coldly objective and mechanical, the photograph clearly bore the mark
of the photographer's personality. He. owned an album by the British
photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), whose innovative work
both father and son admired.
Encouraged by his father, Witkacy began taking pictures of himself
(many of these comical and self-mocking) and his family and surroundings in
1898-9 when he was fourteen. From this point on the future artist
experienced the need to have a full photographic record of his life and work.
He photographed all his paintings, portraits, and drawings. In his wife's
apartment in Warsaw Witkacy kept over a dozen big albums containing
photographs of all kinds. These included the self-portraits in bizarre poses and
situations, impersonations, and disguises that enabled the artist to pretend to
be someone else. These "faces" constituted a private theatre in life that
Witkacy was constantly staging. It was essentially a one-man show, although
friends and acquaintances were given minor supporting roles.
He used the camera as a mirror in front of which he assumed poses
and made faces. Witkacy played various characters, such as Opium Smoker,
Cowboy, Good Uncle from California, or Monster from Dusseldorf, masking
and unmasking to create a composite portrait.
All these albums were totally destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising
in 1944 when the city was burned by the Germans, and the bulk of Witkacy's
photography is forever lost. The small proportion that has survived was
preserved in the form of copies given to friends.
Witkacy's photographic collection was purely private, an intimate
record of the artist's evolving creative identity, of his experiments and
expenences. Witkacy never exhibited his photographs and showed them only
43
Portrait of Artur Rubinstein
by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1913-14
Portrait of J adwiga J anczewska (fiancee) by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1913
lL)
"<t-
46 Slavic arul East European Performance Vol. 18, No.3
Portrait of Tadeusz Langier by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, 1912-13
"
-t"
to his close friends.
As a psychological portrait painter, Witkacy confessed to being
"uncommonly interested in the human mug." Fascinated by physiognomy,
he sought to use the human face to unveil the inner self and reveal
metaphysical states. Witkacy's trademark was the facial close-up and the serial
study of a single model. Witkacy often did a long series of photographs of a
single model, feeling that only multiple perspectives could form a complete
portrait (he did the same with his pastel portraits) .
The Polish artist was one of the first to do intensive close-up portraits
in the history of photography. Witkacy revealed depths of the human psyche
by focusing on parts of the face, particularly the eyes. He had a precedent in
the self-portraits of Munch and Strindberg (who experimented to capture the
innermost personality) .
Initially Witkacy produced these "soul" portraits in which the face
filled the entire frame by cropping the background and reducing the picture
to eyes, mouth, forehead. Later he altered the camera by attaching a piece of
water pipe to the lens so that he could focus at close range.
Engaged in a life-long process of self-observation, Witkacy made all
his work a quest for an elusive identity. But he is split into multiple selves
and pursued by alien alter egos, and his pre-1914 self-portraits are marked by
a sense of crisis, alienation, and anxiety.
All Witkacy's photographs express the fragility and mutability of the
inmost self. Rather than the social mask, Witkacy catches the look of
existential fear on the face of the individual stripped bare of all protective
covering. The photographer sought the tragic features beneath the mask. In
prolonged sessions, with the camera prominently displayed, Witkacy would
coax his sitters into states in which they could experience the mystery of
existence that produced metaphysical feelings. All his models have similar
facial expressions. Their eyes are mirrors of the soul. Their inner selves have
come to the surface as if they were hypnotized. Like spirit photography, these
portraits rendered visible the invisible presence of ghosts.
The camera played a central role in the formation of Witkacy's
sensibility. An essential part of his upbringing consisted of being
photographed and photographing himself and others. The Polish artist
exemplifies Roland Barthes's postulate in Camera Lucida that "Photography
is the advent of myself as other-a cunning dissociation of consciousness from
identity." Witkacy learned from the camera to observe his own, and others',
shifting identities.
Self-Portrait: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Zakopane, c. 1914
0'>
'<t'
POLISH AVANT-GARDE, 1920-1945 AT THE UBU GALLERY
From April9 to May 16, 1998, the Ubu Gallery (in Association with
Galerie Berinson, Berlin, and Gilles Gheerbrant) presented an exhibit of
books, graphic design, paintings, photography, collages, periodicals, and
posters, representing the many avant-garde movements that flourished in
quick succession in Poland from the 1920s to 1940s, such as Formism,
Constructivism, Unism, and Functionalism.
Except for a brief association with the Formists after he returned
from Russia in 1918, the slightly older Witkacy (1885-1939) refused to join
any of these movements and remained a skeptical outsider mistrusting the
various avant-gardes, perhaps because he could not share their utopian dreams
about the future or their belief in technology and machinery.
Among the many talented artists on display at the Ubu outstanding
were Wladyslaw Strzemiriski (1893-1952) and his wife Katarzyna Kobro
(1898-1951), who founded the Constructivist journals Blok and Praesens, and
Mieczyslaw Szczuka (1898-1927) and Teresa Zarnower (1895-1950), who edited
the communist publication D.iwignia (fhe Lever).
Many of the artists represented in the exhibit were inspired by the
cinema and worked in film. Under the influence of Walter Ruttmann's
Symphony of a City (1927), Kazimierz Podsadecki (1904-1970) created
cinematographic collages. In 1932 Podsadecki organized with Janusz Maria
Brzeski (1907-1957) the Film Studio of the Polish Avant-Garde. Brzeski's
work shown in the exhibit includes two witty satirical photomontage cycles,
Sex (1930) and The Birth of the Robot (1933), each of five pictures. Starting as
a technocrat, Brzeski-under the influence of Capek, Zamyatin, J asieriski, and
Huxley-ended as a catastrophist. The writer and experimental filmmaker
Stefan Themerson (1910-1988) (See SEEP Vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 91-3) created
collages of frames from his films Pharmacy (1930) and Europa (1932), based on
a poem by the Futurist Anatol Stern.
Also featured in the exhibit are graphics by Henryk Berlewi
(1894-1967), creator of "Mechano-faktura," painting based on abstract
geometry; and book illustrations, woodcuts, and typographical design by the
Expressionist Jerzy Hulewicz (1888-1941) and the painter and poet Tytus
Czyiewski (1880-1945).
The exhibit at the Ubu Gallery conveys the vitality and variety of the
Polish Avant-Garde during the inter-war and war years, a darkening period
that made it increasingly difficult for these artists to work in their homeland
and scattered many of them to Berlin, Paris, London, and New York. Their
accomplishments are all the more remarkable.
so Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 18, No. 3
RESURRECTING MONSTERS: WITKIEWICZ'S METAPHYSICS
OF A TWO-HEADED CALF IN PHILADELPHIA
Marcia L. Ferguson
The eponymous calf in Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz's Metaphysics
of a Two-headed Calf is in fact a young man named Patricianello, whose
bovine qualities include a calf-like demeanor and a constant bleating. In an
excellent recent production of this rarely produced play in Philadelphia, at
the Arts Bank of the University of the Arts, the animalistic (read: sexual and
violent) aspect of Patricianello's life was explored and emphasized, while its
metaphysical dimensions provided ironic counterpoint, lending balance and
visual trickery to the performance. The lively translation by Daniel Gerould
was directed by Paul Berman, and innovative set and lighting design (by
Nick Embree and Juliet Hampel respectively) and a fine performance by a
capable cast brought Witkiewicz's dreamplay to life by fully exploiting the
surreal in Witkiewicz's dramaturgy. Highly critical of the theatre of his
own time, Witkiewicz would nonetheless be pleased that his demanding text
has now found its equal in Paul Berman, whose grasp of the staged interplay
between logic and insanity makes him an ideal interpreter for Witkiewicz's
project. Witkiewicz himself eventually abandoned playwrighting, having
never found a practical niche for or critical comprehension of his work.
Therefore this nuanced performance constitutes the kind of thoughtful
production which was denied in his own time, an important legacy which
speaks all the more compellingly to the play's themes of permanence and
loss in having been dismissed by the playwright's own contemporaries.
The play follows the story of Patricianello's coming of age, which
never finally happens, the grotesque maneuverings of the adults in his life,
who alternately vie for guardianship over him, and for the right to
psychically kill him, and the interwoven tale of a Papuan tribal chieftain,
whose devout animist belief in the Great Golden Frog Kapa-Kapa
paradoxically lends him spiritual strength and superiorit y over the
Europeans who clinically observe him.
The production's chief strength lay in its staging, which mingled
recognizable elements from American culture with elements that derive
strictly from the poetic (and often grotesque) imagination of Witkiewicz.
For example, Dr. Mikulini-Peckbauer, a bizarre Professor and one of many
menacing father figures to Patricianello, was conceived as a combination of
Groucho Marx (complete with cigar and acrobatic eyebrows) and the
ghostly sadist of Witkiewicz's text. His pronouncements were staged with
51
52
........................

.. ..... .. ..
Witkiewicz's Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf
at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia
t<)
li)
a variety of accompanying vaudevillian shticks: in one instance, the heads
of all cast members turned downstage, as he announced his name as "Dr.
Edward Mikulini HYPHEN Peckbauer." Again, a dialogue in act one with
Patricianello was performed as corny showbiz ventriloquism, with
Patricianello-as-puppet perched on Mikulini-Peckbauer's lap, the Dr.
controlling him with obvious, overstated movements. The effective
vaudevillian motif continued into Act III, when a car driven into the desert
became a minstrelsy act, set off from the action by chaser lights and an old
vaudevillian tune about automobiles, "I'm wild about horns on
automobiles," lip synched by the chauffeur and passengers.
Lip-synching and musical rhythms were, in fact, recurring elements
in the production, which served to invite the spectator into an otherwise
chaotic world. Patricianello and other characters were frequently
choreographed into parodic musical acts, often using bodies as instruments
(strumming bellies like basses, thumping heads like drums). In Act I a fly's
amplified buzzing was answered with stylized, individual syncopated slaps
of a fly swatter, which climaxed in a thunderous slap delivered by the whole
on stage cast at once. This amusing, inventive approach to the staging
created a kind of tempo, a rhythm which underlay the entire production,
lending it continuity and anchoring it in contemporaneity, without which
it might well have floated away from the cognitive grasp of the audience.
Patricianello's quest indeed challenges traditional Western models
of the same tale. It is the inverse of most twentieth-century coming-of-age
stories, in that he seeks to resist forming any identity at all, preferring
instead to morph into the shape of others who attract him (which include
his demonic mother, his Dr. Mengeles-like father, a demented uncle, and a
prostitute among others) or, failing that, to be left alone to pleasure
himself-to play with his "thingamajig." This deeply Freudian play, with
a mother-figure derived from your worst Freudian nightmares, addresses
questions of identity, the death of the love object, perverted libido and racial
difference. Under Paul Berman's direction, all these disparate elements,
which without firm guidance would threaten to fracture the play into
incomprehensible bits, were neatly woven into a coherent expression of the
abstract and fascinating universe of Witkiewicz's mind. Freudian motifs
wound into the action in a variety of ways: the setting of Act II, for
example, was an enormous bed (upon which Patricianello's mother took an
extremely long time to expire), and tongue-in-cheek sexual coupling took
place randomly at regular intervals, seemingly without any bearing on the
unraveling of plot. Sex was centrally positioned in this production as a basic
physical urge, and was treated in the same matter-of-fact manner as was
54
Witkiewicz's Metaplrysics of a Two-headed Calf
at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia
li"\
li"\
violence and death.
The opening scene described the kind of harmony in disunity
which perfectly characterizes the production's overall approach. Mother
and son were sitting in an elaborate colonial-style parlor, exchanging
dialogue that accomplished the exposition and set the play's sinister (yet
slightly ridiculous) tone, while upstage, tribal warriors marvelously
decorated in body paint looked on, through a kind of jungle netting wall
studded with flowers. Their visual vibrancy, even hidden in shadow,
emphasized the flat, ghost-like whiteness of Patricianello and his mother,
who were brightly lit and dressed in a sailor suit and a shroud-like dress
respectively. Their deathly pale make-up suggested ghosts, cadavers or
negative space, while their African counterparts, paradoxically cut off from
the light, radiated vitality and presence. In this way the lighting design
augmented and made distinct each act's overall mood: flat, hostile light in
the first act gradually dimmed and grew mysterious for the bed scene in the
second, and was particularly inventive in the third, representing the desert
sky with a scrim upon which light ebbed and flowed, waning and waxing
with the passage of time and life.
The monstrous dominated the action to the very end, as characters
believed dead were resurrected to forever haunt young Patricianello, and to
prevent his growth to maturity. Only Kapa-Kapa and his tribal followers,
who virtually disappeared from the action after Act II, maintained the
dignity of their beliefs. Patricianello's fragile world view was exploded with
the arrival of his dead parents at the end of Act ill. Their appearance served
only to demonstrate their complete indifference to Patricianello, who was
last seen weeping and bleating as he was carried off by a Vaudeville routine,
swept along in an entertainment he was forced to perform. It was a fitting
final image for a production that staged a delusional young man's inherently
false journey towards identity as a kind of grotesque entr'acte. This
performance fulfilled the dictates of Witkiewicz's metaphysical vision by
substituting the debris of high and low culture for all meaningful human
interaction, by debunking expectation, and by rewarding the audience wit h
a coherent theatrical tempo.
STEPHEN KOPLOWICZ AND COMPANY PRESENT KAREL
CAPEK'S WAR WITHTHENEWTSATNEWYORKDANCE
THEATRE WORKSHOP
Lars Myers
On a bare stage lay twisted bodies bathed in a cool blue light. On
the back wall an image of rippling water is projected on to a large scrim as
the sound of dripping water gradually becomes the sound of a rushing
torrent. The newts have taken over the world, submerging our terra firma
to provide their own Lebensraum. Despite the doom-laden image in the
opening scene, Stephen Koplowicz and Company's presentation of Karel
Capek's War with the Newts was predominantly a light-hearted production.
The ten-day run of the production was part of DTW's Public
Imaginations series, designed to strengthen ties to the community. In the
spirit of this program, Koplowicz, director and choreographer, cast a wide
variety of talents, from professional actors to local high-school students,
creating an ensemble of thirteen performers who played some forty different
roles. Although Koplowicz is primarily known for his choreography, this
production was decidedly more theatrical than dance-based. Dance and song
elements were interwoven throughout the spoken text, but were definitely
secondary forms of expression.
The adaptation, by David Lindsey-Abaire, focused op the more
sensational parts of Capek's satirical novel, connecting the disparate parts to
create a more cohesive plot-line. As a result, the script lacked the subtlety,
complexity and much of the irony found in the novel. Lindsey-Abaire
moved the central plot from Europe to America and deleted many of the
segments containing scenarios of political negotiations between the
European countries, omitting the sense of historicity in the book that forms
the main critique of the novel. All the same, the script was whimsical,
clever, and entertaining.
War with the Newts (Valka s mlok:y), written in 1937, is an
anti-fascist commentary that lampoons the political climate of the first third
of this century, notably the rise of Nazism and the ineffectual fumbling of
the European community in response to it. Capek, who was already an
accomplished writer and playwright by the time War with the Newts was
published, was a candidate for the Nobel Prize and might have received it if
not for Sweden's sensitivity to Hitler's opinions and political power.
1
Capek was also a journalist and uses War with the Newts as a critique of the
journalistic scene, satirizing the whims of the press and what they deem as
57
news-worthy.
Capek is often thought of as a science-fiction writer and is perhaps
best known for coining the word Robot, taken from his play R. U.R.
(Rossum 's Universal Robots), published in 1922 and performed at the
National Theatre of Czechoslovakia in Prague that same year. Whereas
Capek did have a keen interest in science, his focus is mostly on the political
and ethical issues attached to technology rather than the technology itself.
Much of his work was not so much fiction as prescience, writing about
robots, genetic engineering, and the production of an atomic weapon before
the advent of the nuclear age.
The basic plot in Koplowicz and Company's production is the
same as the novel. The weathered, sea-faring, and pearl-loving Captain van
T och discovers a race of human-like newts in the remote islands of
Indonesia; selling his idea to the industrialist, G.H. Bondy, the newts are
then bred and sold like slaves to the various nations of the world to be used
as underwater workers; as their numbers increase they revolt, submerging
the world bit-by-bit to accommodate their increasing population.
Much more conspiratorial than the novel, this adaptation has Wolf
Meynert Games Sasser) plotting the assassinations of van Toch (Gordon
Grey) and Bondy (Lorree True), the former by gunfire and the latter by
poison. Meynert, recast as one of Bondy's board-members rather than
reclusive philosopher, takes control of the company and uses his position to
assume leadership of the newts after his revelation of their superiority.
Although many of the changes made in adapting the novel to the
stage were to tie the various parts of the book together more cohesively,
others were perhaps motivated by actor availability. G. H. Bondy becomes
a business-matron surrounded by a bevy of board-members rather than the
oligarchic, cigar-smoking Jew that van T och teased in their childhood days
back in Jevicko. Pavondra's son Frantik is instead his daughter, Frannie,
played by Samantha Ross.
The sub-plot of the aspiring Hollywood actress Lilly Valley
(Frances Anderson) and Abe Loeb Gohn Ponzio), the son of a Hollywood
producer, was given more prominence. Their discovery of the newts after
van Toch and their desire to make movies of and with the newts provided
several amusing scenes. The character of Judy (Meyung Kim), the eventual
wife of Abe Loeb in the novel, was reassigned the profession of scientist and
head zookeeper, furnishing an outlet for much of the scientific data reported
in the novel.
Pavondra Gay Longan), Bondy's steward, is given the central role
in the production. As in the novel, he shoulders the burden of being
58
responsible for the tide of events in the story by allowing van Toch to sell
his idea to Bondy. He is also the collector of newspaper articles on the
newts, obsessed by his silent role in history. As an added burden of
responsibility, Pavondra teaches the first newt in captivity-Andy-to speak
and read English, unlike the novel that has a zookeeper performing this task.
Andy (Katie Workum) does not die from a stomach catarrh brought about
by being fed chocolate from excited zoo visitors, but lives on to join the
masses of newts taking over the world.
The newts were the main vehicle for Koplowicz's choreography,
as they were portrayed much more through movement than speech. They
swayed and bobbed jerkily with blank looks on their faces, flicking their
tongues and whispering "ts, ts, ts." In a recurrent motif, the newts danced
in a circular pattern, fell away from the circle to the floor, lifted their upper
body with their arms, and gave a quick left-to-right with their head.
Although the production was not fully able to capture every
element within Capek's novel-as if any adaptation can live up to that
task-the elements that were chosen were imaginatively conceived. One
scene combined the elements of a 1930's Hollywood musical with a
simulation of old Movietone newsreels, involving the entire ensemble and
several costume-changes, which successfully incorporated many of the
incidents and reports in the book. While the performers acted the news
segments and intermittently switched to the Hollywood song-and-dance
number, slide projections on the scrim flashed sensational headlines about
the latest rage in Newt-mania.
Koplowicz is more successful as a choreographer of many than a
director of few-his past productions that have brought him the most
acclaim have involved large ensembles. There were a few slow segments
involving one or two person scenes with only dialog. However, the energy
of the full-ensemble scenes more than compensated for these moments. One
could sense that the performers enjoyed performing the show as much as the
audience enjoyed watching it.
NOTES
1. Peter, Kussi, Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader (Highland Park,
NJ: Catbird Press, 1990), 11.
59
U.B. U. I I'LL BE ME: FROM BYDGOSZCZ TO THE BRONX
Susan Tenneriello
The most recent phase of The Ubu Project, U. B. U. /I'll Be Me,
was presented in New York from August 21 to 27. The three year
collaboration brings together Poland's Teatr Polski of Bydgoszcz, directed
by Wieslaw Gorski, and the Bronx, New York's Live from the Edge
Theatre, directed by Steven Sapp.
1
The last performance was to be held on
a ferry, cruisingaround Manhattan, but producer Carey Clark was forced
to cancel due to Hurricane Bonnie's impending arrival. Instead, the
performance moved to The Salon on New York's Upper East Side where
the atmosphere rippled with its own storm of youthful energy as the Polish
and American casts mingled with the arriving audience in the open
performance space. Once underway, they unleashed a powerful tidal-surge.
How do you survive "emancipation"? The urgency of the question
asked by these young white, black, and Latino performers from Bydgoszcz
and the Bronx forms the heart of their multi-media, bi-cultural performance
piece based on Alfred Jarry's Ubu Enchained. The last play in J arry's trilogy
following the infamously grotesque reign of King Ubu finds Poland's
tyrannical couple, Pa and Ma Ubu, refugees in France.
In the spirit of Jarry's theoretical mainspring, pataphysics or the
science of opposites, contradiction fuels its own logic as Ma and Pa Ubu
achieve the pinnacle of power exploiting their new found freedom by
choosing to become imprisoned as galley slaves. Exploring the darker
dimensions of the play's subversive action, the Ubu Project divides the
descent into personal and political freedom between two experiences: the
Polish cast sifts through the chaos of being suddenly "imprisoned" by
unlimited opportunity in post-communist society, while the Bronx cast
moves to extract their dreams, aspirations, and individuality from minority
enslavement. "You be you, I'll be me," repeat the black and Latino
American performers as one by one they take off the "uniform" of white
coveralls they first appear in, walking away from the white-suited majority
that marks them with "sameness." In the attempt to articulate two
conditions of slavery, the two versions partake of a quest that boldly rattles
the chains of freedom.
A long developmental process underlines the Ubu Project. It began
in 1995 when a meeting among directors Wieslaw Gorski, Steven Sapp and
producer Carey Clark in Poland supplied an opportunity for both theatre
companies to observe each others work. Since beginning the project, Gorski
60
The American cast of U.B. U./ I'll Be Me,
directed by Steven Sapp
61
and Sapp have held different visions of U.B. U. Gorski views the play as
addressing the ideological legacy of communist life which still holds Poland
captive in a "slave mentality." Sapp has largely rewritten the play in an
attempt to interrogate the historical conditioning of race in America. Over
two years of workshops, separate rehearsals, and a joint performance last
summer at the Teatr Polski have evolved into a two-sided inquiry which
explores oppression and slavery from different cultural perspectives. Last
year, Jarry's text enabled Gorski and his actors to explore parallels between
slavery and communism, while Sapp and his performers created a
commentary on American slavery which featured a black-faced Ubu and a
stage lynching. This summer the Polish cast arrived in the Bronx for three
weeks of rehearsal before presenting their latest work on the piece. In this
most recent phase of the project, the purpose was to integrate the two
versions, although much of what the casts have created is new.
From the start, the pulse of the hour-long performance is driven by
the actors. Appearing one by one out of the shadows surrounding the
playing area, the performers introduce themselves in their native language:
Polish, Spanish and English. The attitude of self-exposure and risk allowed
no escape. The audience becomes part of the journey as we move with the
assistance of slide projections from images of Poland before and after the fall
of communism to the streets of New York. In the first half of the piece,
speaking English, the Polish Ma and Pa Ubu (Magdalena W oiniak and
Witold Szulc) lose themselves in the transition from totalitarian control to
free choice. Unable to be free, yearning for "sameness," Pa Ubu believes
America offers similarities to a slave regime. Trailed by a small army and the
shoeless canteen girl, Eleutheria (Anna Bonna), these immigrants find
themselves once again dependent on a system. This time it's free enterprise.
Economic necessity turns into a beggarly assault on the audience as material
servitude propels the exiles to wade through the spectators soliciting them
to "count your money" or "bite your nails." At one point the dancing
Eluetheria realizes she has no shoes, which instigates a shoe shining frenzy.
Ma Ubu furiously huffed and buffed one shoe after another, grunting with
disgust when the dollar she demanded was not immediately produced.
In the second half, the mood shifts to the inner city as a living
tableaux begins to shape visions of urban violence and brutality. The bells
and chimes of Tomasz Gwinciri.ski's and Paul Thompson's musical score
give way to mainstream rhythms of pop, jazz, and rap. The physically
sculpted groupings and gestures of Gorski's actors flow into the stylized
choreography of Sapp, whose directorial touch is more dance oriented.
Here, Ma and Pa Ubu (Mildred Ruiz and Michael Vasquez) emerge from the
63
An American rehearsal of U.B. U./ I'll Be Me
64
struggling community assaulted from within and without. Twirling a
parasol and donning a top hat, the celebrated couple stroll around an
entangled mass of bodies whose eyes follow them with individual hope and
despair. Distinctions which identify oppressor and oppressed become
blurred. Led by a preachy talk show host (Leighton Wynter), who practices
faith healing on individual spectators, the scene shifts to bring us backstage
a performance of U.B. U. and into American entertainment and media hype.
The enthroned Ma and Pa Ubu wallow in fame, while their Free Army
obediently rehearses disobedience.
The dialectic of resilience and defeat, of hardship and triumph, of
individuality or slavery is woven into the performance and resonates in the
one set piece, designed by Waldemar Malak, a standing red screen with a
series of profiles, each one different, the whole covered over with meshed
wire netting. Where the Polish Ubu desires the constraint of slavery, the
Bronx Ubu challenges us to see such slavery as a construct; the performers
challenge each other to tear down structures which enslave the expressive
potential of individuals.
I eagerly await the next phase of the Ubu Project. The hard-edged
dualities of this performance combined to shape an exchange of experiences
and imprisonments. The multiplying voices of protest raised a resounding
cry that was loud and clear. In this case, resistance and defiance stimulate
pressing cultural questions. As Pa Ubu says, "it's our duty to be free."
NOTES
1. Wieslaw Gorski has been working as a freelance director in Poland since 1997.
65
CONTRIBUTORS
MARVIN CARLSON is the Sidney C. Cohn Professor of Theatre at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of
many articles on theatrical theory and European theatre history and
dramatic literature. The 1994 recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award
for dramatic critisicm, his most recent book, Performance: A Critical
Introduction, was published last spring by Routledge.
MARCIA L. FERGUSON teaches at Swarthmore College and is writing
her Ph.D. dissertation about Blanka and Jif1 Zizka's Wilma Theatre in
Philadelphia.
TONI HULL is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre History, Literature and
Criticism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She currently resides in
Moscow, Russia, where she is completing her dissertation about the
development of commercial and private theatres in Tsarist Russia following
the end of the state monopoly in 1882.
JEFF JOHNSON has received numerous awards including two Fulbright
teaching assignments, the Florida Governor's Screenwriting Award, and a
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His plays have
been produced in New York City and Manchester, England. He is
currently teaching at The Technical University of Budapest.
LARS MYERS is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
ESZTER SZALCZER teaches drama at Marymount Manhattan College and
is working on a book on contemporary Hungarian theatre.
SUSAN TENNERIELLO teaches in the Fine and Performing Arts
department at Baruch College and is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation
on Interculturalism on the American stage.
66 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 18, No.3
:ehoto Credits
The Round-Up
Courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Satantango
Courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Charlie (KaroQ
Courtesy of Jeff Johnson
The Shadow
Mikhail Guterman
Witkiewicz Photos
From the collection of Stefan Okolowicz
Courtesy of The Robert Miller Gallery
Metaphysics of a Two-headed Calf
Juliet Hampel
American Cast of U.B. U./ I'll Be Me
Eboni Beartree
Polish Cast of U.B. U./ I'll Be Me
Mildred Ruiz
American rehearsal of U.B. U./ I'll Be Me
Vanessa Navarro
67
PUBLICATIONS
The following is a list of publications available through the Center for
Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):
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).
Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A symposium with
Janusz Glowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C.
Gerould (April 30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign).
These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money
order payable to:
68
CASTA-THEATRE PROGRAM
CUNY GRADUATE CENTER
33 WEST 42nd STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10036
Now in its I 5th year, this journal, edited by Daniel Gerould,
hrings readers lively, authoritative accounts of drama, theatre, and
111m in Russi a and Eastern Europe. Includes features on important
new plays in performance, archival documents, innovative
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film. Outstanding interviews and overviews. Published three
times per year - $ 10 per annum ($15.00 foreign).
Plco.Jsc send me the following
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Winter, and Fall - and edited by Marvin Carlson, each issue contains
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productions, including reviews, interviews, and reports. Winter
issues focus on the theatre in individual countries or on special
themes. News of forthcoming events: the latest in changes in artistic
directorships, new plays and playwrights, outstanding performances,
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The widely acclaimed journal devoted solely to drama and theatre
in the USA- past and present. Provocative, thoughtful articles by
the leading scholars of our time providing invaluable insight and
information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its
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arts. Edited by Vera Mowry Roberts and Jane. Bowers. Published
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Please send me the following
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33 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
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