volume 21, no.

2
Summer 2001
SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York Graduate
Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. All subscription requests
and submissions should be addressed to S lavif and East E uropean
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Theatre Program, The City University of New
York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
:MANAGING EDITOR
KurtTaroff
CIRCULATION MANAGERS
Lara Shalson
ASSISTANT CIRCULATION MANAGERS
Hillary Arlen Celia Braxton
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Alma Law
Martha W. Coigney Stuart Liebman
Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick
Allen J. Kuharski
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Publications are supported by generous grants
from the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre and the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the City University of New York.
Copyright 2001 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters that desire
to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials that have appeared in SEEP
may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:
a. Permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact;
b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint;
c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has
appeared must be furni shed to the Editors of SEEP immediately upon
publication.
2 Slavi.- and East European Performan.-e Vol. 21, No.2
Edltorial Policy
From the Edltor
Events
Books Received
ARTICLES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5
6
7
11
"An Interview With Sergei Nikulin, Russian Publisher" 12
Maria Ignatieva
"Post-Traumatic Theatre Syndrome: Croatian Theatre at the Crossroads" 17
Dubravka V rgoc
"Directing in Two Cultures: The Oeuvre of i'v'Iilos Lazin" 29
Allan Graubard and Caroline McGee
PAGES FROM THE PAST
"Meyerhold's 1936 Visit to Prague"
Jarka Burian
"l\Iodjeska: Some Basic Truths"
Kazimierz Braun
REVIEWS
"Slovak Performance at La 1fama:
Armageddon on the GRB Hill-
The End of the World as She Knew It"
Kurt Taroff
34
49
68
"An Interview With Wlodzimierz Staniewski of Gardzienice" 75
RogerBabb
"The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre: 84
Faust and the Fool"
Lars Myers
3
"Orbit Milktooth Festival: Children's Theatre in Croatia"
Deborah Stein
Contributors
Publications
90
94
96
4 Slavic and East European Peifonnanre Vol. 21, No. 2
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves either with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East E uropean theatre, drama and film,
or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works, or new
performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions
reviewing innovative performances of Gogol but we cannot use original
articles discussing 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 Sryle should be followed. Trans-literations
should follow the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted
on computer disk, as Word 97 Documents for Windows and a hard copy of
the article should be included. Photographs are recommended for all reviews.
,\ll articles should be sent to the attention of Slavic and East European
Peiformame, c/o Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of New
York Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after approximately
four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and East E11ropean
Peiformance by visiting out website at http/ / web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc. Email
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc. cuny.edu.
5
FROM THE EDITOR
The Summer Issue 2001 contains a wide range of articles and reviews
exploring how Slavic and East European theatre are faring in the early twenty-
first cennu-y, with some emphasis on efforts to preserve the past. Maria
Ignatieva interviews the director and founder of a publishing house of Russian
theatre books. Dubravka Vrgoc looks at Croatian drama in transition at the
new turn of the century, while Deborah Stein considers the participation of a
Croatian children's theatre at an international festival. Caroline McGee and
Allan Graubard talk with Milos Lazin, a director from former Yugoslavia, as
he fashions a new career in France. In two articles comprising our feature
PAGES FROM THE PAST, Jarka Burian investigates Vsevolod Meyerhold's
visit to Prague in 1936, and Kazimierz Braun, author and director of a play
about Modjeska, considers the challenging task of writing about the famous
Polish-American actress, about whom so many legends have grown up. Roger
Babb, Kurt Taroff, and Lars Myers write reviews of recent performances in
New York: of Polish and Slovakian guest appearances at La Mama and of the
Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre resident in New York. Finally, in
BOOKS RECEIVED for the first time we include a CD; in the future we shall
include both videos and COs, as well as internet websites.
6
Slavi<' a11d East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City
EVENTS
On Your Gravu by Jan Durovcik, a collaborative production by the
J.A.N. Agef\cy, a dance company, and the Nova Scena from Slovakia, was
presented at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center on February 28.
Scenes from Tumor by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz,
directed by Brooke O'Harra with music by Brendan Connelly, was presented
as part of The Stage '01 Festival by Singularity on April 10 and 13.
Silence Silence Silence, directed by Vito Taufer, was presented by
Theatre I\11adinsko from Ljubljana, Slovenia, at La Mama, E.T.C., from March
15 to 25.
"Diary of One Who Vanished," poems by Ozef Kalda set to music
by Leo Janacek and translated into English by Seamus Heaney, sung and acted
by Ian Bostridge and Ruby Philogene, accompanied by Julius Drake on piano,
was presented at the John Jay College Theatre, from May 31 to June 2.
Just As If . . . :Life and Cabaret From Paradise Ghetto Theresienstadt, a
show composed by Shelly Berc and i\ndrei Belgrader based on the diaries of
inmates of Theresienstadt, with original music and music direction by Sergei
Drezhnin, was presented at the 78<h Street Theatre in April and May.
Performances by Marjana Sadovska, Sanda Weigl, Lefteris Berneris,
and others were fearured as part of the Balkan Cabaret Series, presented at
Exit Art from February 2 to March 2.
Prague's Archa Theatre presented Sec-ond Hand Twilight, a performance
by Petr Nikl,Jana Hrabova,Jaroslav Koran, and i\:lichael Delia, at the Kender
International Drawing Space in Brooklyn on June 15.
The Polish Emigri Cabaret in London, with texts by Hemar and others,
was presented by Nina Polan and the Polish Theatre Instirute at the Polish
Consulate on i\farch 4.
7
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
In tern a tional
The Card Index by Tadeusz Rozewicz, directed by Peter Czajkowski,
was performed at The White Bear Theatre Club in London from May 29 to
June 17.
The Third International Theatre Olympics, showcasing nearly 150
productions from thirty-five countries, was held in Moscow from April 21 to
June 29. Featured performances included The Po!Jphotry of the World, created by
Aleksandr Bakshi and Kama Ginkas and performed by celebrated violinist
Gidon Kremer, and Apoca!Jpse, by Vladimir Martynov and Yuri Lyubimov, a
work for boy's and men's choirs.
Kitchen by Maxim Kurochkin, directed by and starring Oleg
Menshikov, was recently presented by Menshikov's production company, the
814 Theatrical Association, at the Mossoviet Theatre in Moscow. John
Freedman, in a June 10 New York Times article, cites the success of the
production as evidence of a resurgence of contemporary drama on Russian
stages.
Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, in an English version by Allan
Kuharski will be performed in a collaboration between the Provisorium
Theatre and the Kompania Theatre of Poland at the Edinburgh International
Festival, from August 2 to 3.
William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, directed by Krzysztof Kopka, will
be performed by Teatr Stary from Cracow at the Edinburgh International
Festival from August 11-21.
STi\GE PRODUCTIONS
.Asia
Vladimir Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, directed by Meng Jinghu.i, was
recently presented at the Beijing Children's Art Theatre. This highly successful
production was the play's Chinese premiere.
8
S!avit"attd EaJI European Vol. 21, No.2
FILMS
New York City
One Dqy in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich by Chris Marker, an homage to
Andrei Tarkovsky, was presented at Anthology Film Archives from June 14 to
20. The film was shown with outtakes and material eliminated from the final
version ofTarkovsky's last film, The Sacrifice.
The Last Bolshevik, by Chris Marker, an homage to Alexander
Medvedkin was presented at Anthology Film Archives on June 16 and 17.
FILMS
Europe
A retrospective of the work of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk
will be held at the Lux Center in London from July 12 to 14. The following
ftlms will be shown: 011ce Upon A Time, Requited Sentimmts, House, and Sztandar
Mlotfych Quly 12); and Story of Sin Quly 14), introduced by Borowczyk.
OTHER EVENTS
"Body and the East," a survey of four decades of body art from
Eastern Europe, was presented at Exit Art from January 20 to March 10. The
exhibit included video and photographic documentation of performances
using bodies as a starting point for art. As part of the exhibition, Peter l\flakar
and Slaven Tolj performed live on January 21. In addition, also on January 21,
a panel discussion was held featuring Zdenka Badovinac, Else Gabriel, l\Wena
Kalinovska, Egle Rakauskaite, Renata Salecl, and Magda Sawon.
The exhibit, "Touring West: 19h-century Performing Artists on the
Overland Trails," at the New York Public Library from April 6 to July 7,
included many photographs, programs, and other illustrative documentation
connected with Helena Modjeska. Included were twelve formal portraits and
cartes de visite taken in transcontinental photographic studios showing
Modjeska in a variety of roles; three Shakespearean, from King john, The
Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It, and five modern roles, from Schiller's
Mana Stuart, Dumas ftls's Camille, Sudermann's Magda, Maurice Barrymore's
Nac!Jezda, and Estelle Anna Lewis's Sappho (all from the Billy Rose Theatre
9
Collection of the New York Performing Arts Public Library). [See Page 49 for
Kazimierz Braun's article on Modjeska.]
l\lel Gordon lectured on the GOSET, the Moscow Yiddish State
Theatre, on l\'fay 14 at the Jewish Museum as one of the programs for the
Exhibit, "Marc Chagall: Early Works From Russian Collections," which runs
through October 14.
The International Michael Chekhov Workshop and Festival, featuring
classes and performances utilizing the Michael Chekhov Technique, was held
in Wallingford, Connecticut from June 9 to 20.
Janusz Opryri.ski, Witold Mazurkiewicz, directors of the Provisorium
Theatre and the Kompania Theatre, and Allen Kuharski, were
nominated for the 2000 PasrPorl Poli!yki Award. The nomination praised Allen
Kuharski's translation of Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, noting: "The
English captured unusual and surprising meanings in Gombrowicz's text,
illuminating with its interpretation many of the novel's canonical scenes. In
addition, Gombrowicz heard in a foreign language is paradoxically even
funnier." [See SEEP, Volume 20, no. 2, Summer 2000, for a feature on
Ferdydurke.]
10 Slavi<" and East European Performam-e Vol. 21, No.2
BOOKS RECEIVED
Blonski, Jan. Witkary: SztukmiJ!iiJ Filozoj; Este(Yk. (\'V'itkacy: Conjurer
Playwright, Philosopher, .Aesthetician). Part Two of Stanislaw Ignary Witkiewicz
(See SEEP, Vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1997). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
2001. 392 pages. Includes 22 photographs, an extensive bibliography by
Janusz Degler, an index of names, an index of works by Witkiewicz, and an
index of characters in Witkiewicz's works.
Borovsky, Victor. A T ripryth from the Russian Theatre: The Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2001. 485 pages. The artistic biographies of
Fyodor Petrovich Komissarzhevsky, Vera Fyodorovna Kornissarzhevskaya,
and Fyodor Fyodorovich Kornissarzhevsky. Includes 80 photographs and
illustrations and an index of names.
COl\fP.ACT DISK
Cubo-Futunst Kle'{!"er (1922-1938). 15 Songs, Dances, and Dialogs from the
Moscow GOSET (Moscow Yiddish State Theatre). A joint project of Mel
Gordon and J. Hoberman. Notes and design by Mel Gordon. Includes 3
songs from Koldut!Ya (1922), music by I. Akhron; 3 songs from Two-Hundred
Thousand (1923), music by Lev Pulver; 1 song from Three jewish Raisins (1924),
music by Y. Kukles; 1 song from Travels of Benjamin III (1927), music by Pulver;
2 songs from The Lujimensch (1928), music by Pulver; 3 excertps from
Mikhoels's King Lear (1935), music by Pulver; 2 excerpts from Terye, the
Milkman (1938), i\likhoels as Tevye.
Information available from: mgordon@uclink4.berkeley.edu
11
AN INTERVIEW WITH SERGEI NIKULIN, RUSSIAN PUBLISHER
Maria Ignatieva
ART (the Russian acronym for "-\ctor. Director. Theatre) is a small
publishing house, which has not only stoically survived the ups and downs of
the Russian economy, but also managed to publish fifty- five books in the ten
years of its independent life. Most of the books are about theatre. And such
books! About contemporary theatre and theatre history, ballet and musical
theatre--every book is a little discovery, or a long expected gift.
For example, after the decades of gossip and unbelievable stories
about the feud between Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko over the
Moscow Art 1beatre, ART published three priceless volumes by Olga
Radishcheva about forty years of theatre relations between the founders. The
three volumes are the indispensable desk-copies of every scholar of the
Russian theatre not only because they offer insightful explanations of the least
known moments of Stanislavsky and Nernirovich-Danchenko's mutual
devotion and misunderstandings, but also because they read like thrillers!
On the shelves of the small bookstore, one can find another
invaluable source for scholars, Mryerhold in Russian Criticism, containing
everything written about his productions in newspapers and magazines from
the beginning of the twentieth century. Here too are Nizhinski's Diaries, and
Mryerhold Rehearses, as well as Ilia GiWov's latest revelations about William
Shakespeare (which the author tried in vain to introduce to Shakespeare
scholars in the United States, but which no University Press would accept),
.-\natoly Smeliansky's survey of the Russian Theatre in the second half of the
twentieth century, theatre anecdotes and recipes from plays, and
autobiographies of contemporary Russian actors and directors.
ART not only publishes books, it preserves the monuments of
Russian theatrical cuJture from being covered by the dust of the past. Russian
theatre history is not profitable these days, and making books about it is even
less so.
ART is really a team of six. They are enthusiastic, intelligent, live on
modest salaries, and spend six days out of seven in their cozy little bookstore.
The bookstore and office are situated in the heart of Moscow, on Strastnoi
Boulevard, at the same place where a small bookstore, Knizhnaia Lavka, once
12 Slavi.- and East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No.2
stood in the first half of the nineteenth century; Alexander Pushkin used to
drop by to browse while in Moscow.
What follows is a conversation I had with Sergei Nikulin (S.N. from
now on), the director of ART, at the bookstore in December 2000.
MJ.: So, please tell me a few words about yourself.
S.N.: I graduated from GITIS (the State Theatre Institute) in the sixties, and
became an editor right away: first at the journal Theatre (Ieatr) during the best
years of the Thaw; then I edited books at the publishing house I skusstvo, then
at the publishing house of the VTO (Russian Theatre Society), later the
Theatre Union. In 1990, I suggested the publishing house become
independent Now we celebrate ten years of our independence. I never wanted
to write books myself, but from my early years I have always known how to
make books and how they should be written.
M.L: Sergei, pardon my curiosity, but in your cozy place I don't see any
modem equipment. Where are your computers? Your fa.x? Your mobile
telephone?
S.N.: We don't have any of those. We live without e-mails, computers, we
make books in an old-fashioned manner. You know, it seems to me that if we
become just like the rest of the world, something would change our book
business for the worse. Well, I take it back: my lady friend gave me a fax
machine as a gift. We may even use it one day ...
M.L: How did the dollar crisis affect you in 1998?
S.N.: It did not.
M.L: Forgive me, I don't believe it. Everyone was hit by it, every business
venture was harmed ...
(Nikulin laughs)
S.N.: Well, there is a secret to it: we don't operate in dollars and don't have our
account in hard currency.
13
Sergei Nikulin, Founder and Director of .-\RT
14
Slavit" a11d East European Petformance Vol. 21, No. 2
M.I.: ???
(Nikufin stiff laughs)
S.N.: Yes, believe it, or not, we operate only in rubles.
M.I.: It is hard to believe. Most of your books are printed on excellent paper,
with color pictures and illustrations . . . And I know that the Theatre Union
donates about 36,000 rubles a year, which is less than 2,000 dollars a year. How
do you manage?
S.N.: This place belongs to the Theatre Union, which does not charge ART for
renting it. We don' t pay for electricity, gas, telephone bills. It really helps. As
for money . . . There will always be more money than books in our country,
and money will always be available to buy a good book. We never ask for
money in advance: we make a book first, and then we sell it. We have a
bookstore in St. Petersburg, I go there myself every month. Our books are
popular abroad, but we don't sell them directly, only through "in-between"
firms.
l\LI. : Sergei, there is a popular Russian anecdote: "Where did you get your
money? From the cupboard. How does it get to the cupboard? My wife put it
in there. Where did your wife get money? I gave it to her! Where did you get
it? From the cupboard!" It seems to me you are a man who knows the secret
of the cupboard.
S.N.: We have gradually gotten great support from the Mayor of Moscow and
from the Russian Government. \Ve have received many grants. This year we
were nominated for a State Prize. We usually publish about five books a year,
we edit them here, meet with the authors here, sell our books ourselves Ul
Moscow and St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, lately we got serious attention
from the press, and had to attend presentations in all the fashionable places.
just between us, I hate it.
l\I.I.: How do you find your authors?
S.N.: I have always had clear ideas about the books I wanted to publish. Plus,
the authors come here themselves.
15
M.I.: Well, that's our story. I stepped in with a book proposal, we talked, and
the next thing you said, "That's a deal, bring your book, I'll publish it."
ART is one of the most popular places in Moscow among the theatre
intelligentsia: these days, you wouldn't think you' d meet old-fashioned,
intelligent and smiling people who work for rubles, who are infatuated with
theatre and do all they can to preserve it. For many of the ART's readers and
authors, this small publishing house is not only a paradox: ART is a hope for a
Renaissance in Russian ways of doing things with dignity, culture and spirit.
16
5/avit" 011d East European PerformatJt"e Vol. 21, No.2
POST-TRAUMATIC THEATRE SYNDROME:
CROATION THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS
Dubravka Vrgoc
In his earliest play Brick (Cig!a), first performed in 1998 in the
devastated Hotel "-\mbasador in Split, which before the war had belonged to
the Yugoslav National "-\rmy, the young Croatian playwright and actor, Filip
Sovagovic, dealt with the destiny of young people who were facing personal
and historical tragedies, whose prospects had been blighted and whose life
solutions had been devastated by the war in Croatia. The Split production of
Brick had some very successful guest appearances at theatre festivals in Nice,
Bonn, Fribourg, Liege and Brussels, and the play was translated into German,
French and Italian.
However, if in Bn.tk Filip Sovagovic presents the Croatian war reality
awash with anxiety and its pernicious influence on the lives of the generation
born in the 60s, in his most recent play, Birdies (Pti'ice), the playwright asks
himself what has happened to the heroes of Brick in the period of transition, at
the misty crossroads of a precarious future. Birdies is set in a prison. From the
perspective of prison, it is easy to detect social traumas. A prison is a suitable
framework for bringing out obsessions and impotence. As a metaphor for the
world, prison becomes an ideal backdrop for SovagoviC's post-traumatic
dramatic syndromes. In the case of Birdies, this background is a meeting-place
for characters who have lost their own and other people's games in advance,
and are condemned to face their failed past, grim present, and impossible
future.
The characters include a gentle brute from the Sibenik-Knin County
(a very poor area, destroyed in the war); an intellectual who has always wanted
to become a tram driver, but, due to family pressure, has to become a critic; a
Gypsy who, in search of a nomadic life, ends up as a victim of urbanization;
and a Serb who is in prison for some petty tax evasion-all convicts. These
men all become members of the prison band "Birdies", and dream of
performing at weddings following a quite imaginary escape. For them, as the
author says, it is always too late.
The director, Paolo Magelli, selected a neglected courtyard behind the
Croatian National Theatre in Split as the place to perform Birdies as part of the
Splitsko Ljeto (Split's Summer) Theatre Festival in July 2000. This open space
suited the scattered images of reality contained in the play. Magelli, who also
directed Brick in Split, recognised the playwright's directness of speech and
17
situation, the need to deftne reality from the borders of realism and reveal the
comic-poetic-tragic prospects of the characters. This is why in SovagoviC's
plays the scenes are documentaries; just like ftlms, they show what happens to
us or near us, in our bedrooms, in our kitchens, on empty staircases, across the
road in the street, behind prison bars.
Croatia's reality today is burdened with its past heritage, neurotic
memories, daily political frustrations, social stress, and the sheer hopelessness
of existence. For this reason, Sovagovic does not want to cover it in symbols,
lyrical emphasis, parodic relief or cynical comments. Instead, he lists fragments
of chaotic events, while Magelli, as the director of the play, in an effort to
present the daily chaos in which we incessantly participate, erases the borders
between the serious and the trivial, the supreme and the cynical, the dramatic
and the pathetic, the tragic and the comic, the impressively theatrical and the
lightly entertaining. His direction jtL'<:taposes images of light entertainment and
themes permeated with anxiety from the prison's social reality, down-to-earth
realistic quotations and poetic passages, in order to stress even more
suggestively through this confrontation the aggression which targets everyone
and spreads beyond the theatre walls, revealing the violence to which we are
exposed every day of our lives . \s a director, Magelli seeks to protect neither
the actors nor the audience from the direct influence of reality in the space of
the theatrical game. The team of actors also functions as a dynamic rock band,
maintaining \vith impressive energy the tension of the playwright's truculent
ripostes and expressing the claustrophobic unrest of those who are prisoners
of their own illusions and social impotence.
Magelli's vision of SovagoviC's Birdies enters into polemics with what
is around us through a painful review of the position of the individual in
transitional times. The director conceives of theatre as a place where questions
which directly affect us and which determine our fate will once again be raised.
Birdies sets the course for a new and different political theatre, a theatre that is
no longer interested in the great pathetic themes, in messages that are read
between the lines, in signs derived from grotesquely distorted situations, in the
impossibility of expressing one's own position within the scattered landscapes
of reality. Birdies is interested only in what is happening here and now; it
presents this in quite a diffuse manner, through the recognizable language of
our disorientation, by bringing together the dramatic characters (that is,
ourselves) and reality which, due to its very realism, crosses the borders and
captures the theatre with the same passion with which it conquers the streets.
This is a kind of theatre that speaks about a lost war generation and speaks
directly to it, imitating reality on stage in order to better critique it.
18 S Ia vi, and East European Peiforma!l<"l! Vol. 21, No. 2
19
The scattered fragments of reality in SovagoviC's play correspond to
the fragments of the Croatian theatre today. Nothing in it can any longer be
anchored to an idea, or to common interests, similar obsessions, clear
guidelines or even common delusions. Since the time when it lost its strong
political reference points-which coincided with the historical changes that
accompanied the Eastern European euphoria and disappointments at the end
of the 80s, and the Croatian war reality at the beginning of the 90s-the
Croatian theatre forfeited its continuity, that is, the recognizable thread of a
coherent view, and became dispersed in different styles and poetics. This
scenic openness, resembling a schizophrenic disintegration of reality, can be
read as a post-traumatic theatre syndrome in an environment that seeks new
social and cultural models, while at the same time continuing to bear painful
war memories. When does this scenic pluralism turn into chaos, which, unlike
theatrical dynamism, resembles the uninspiring freedom of a mere succession
of different theatrical adventures that exhaust the spectators? Such a question
remainS open.
In recent Croatian drama, Sovagovic does not have any followers. At
the beginning of the 90s, the young playwrights Asja Srnec Todorovic, Ivan
Vidic, Pavo Marinkovic, Lada Kastelan, and i'vfilica Luksic just like their often
absent-minded characters, faithfully witnessed in their texts the disarray of the
ideological system and the disintegration of great declarations, bravely stepping
back from the long tradition of political rebellion in post-war Croatian drama.
By the end of the 90s Croatian drama showed a tendency towards many very
different genres, styles and poetics. This open concept of dramatic art, which
is exclusively dominated by the principle of being different, has become
influential in shaping present-day Croatian theatre and is still a dominant force.
~ e can detect its impact in a wide range of projects, including those of authors
who attempt to copy reality directly on the stage, inviting the audience into
kitchens and living rooms, while the actors call one another by their real names
and present impressive fragments of their own biographies. There are also
extreme deviations from reality that move into artificial theatre language and
often forced experimentation with the possibilities and boundaries of theatrical
experiences, including the staging of classical dramatic works which transpose
the authentic period of the dramatic event into our own contemporary reality
in order to emphasize and compare the common obsessions of the two
periods .
-\n example of the latter was the striking staging of Cjrano de Bergerac,
Edmond Rostand's "heroic comedy," in autumn 2000 at the Croatian National
Theatre in Split. The young Slovenian director, Toni J anezic, with the Split
company, evoked on the bare space of an empty stage, with only a few chairs
20
Slavil" and East European PerformaJhe VoL 21, No.2
21
and a table, not only the personal drama of Rostand's hero, but also a
seventeenth century social drama. Instead of a spectacular production of the
kind often used for this play, the director offered the audience a chamber
presentation of Cyrano's destiny that also portrayed the longings of a period,
skilled in defending itself from everything, even from love, through a display
of conventions.
The Split staging of Cyrano does not hide behind a historical screen of
glittery scenic reconstruction, but rather emphasizes its universality by
connecting different periods and their sensibilities in order to bear witness to
the importance of love in a world that constantly stresses its impossibility.
JaneziC's approach as a director is characterized by a reduction of the means of
expression, a bareness not only of the space of the play (in which nearly
everything is evoked solely through light), but also of all the relationships; the
psychological pressures driving the characters were almost reduced to signs.
The concept was one of clean lines where everything external seemed
superfluous; the actors, by using their powers of concentration and
imagination, had to define the impossible tasks confronting their characters in
a web of humorous ingenuity and tragic, never-expressed, inner conflict.
Although the scenes also take place in the theatre boxes, in front of
the curtain and on stage, so that the stage is extended throughout the
auditorium in order to include the audience in the unfortunate tale of Cyrano
and Roxanne, Janezic, at the same time, by creating images of the characters
unable to recognize or find one another, presents very clearly the impossibility
of human contact in such a large, fragmented, and deserted space. Escape into
love or poetry offers no relief. This is the message of the Split performance.
Cyrano de Bergerac is abandoned to a world without support and to a theatre
without spectacular mechanisms. Cyrano's loneliness, like the loneliness of the
other characters, whose number is reduced here to six, is so transparent that it
almost makes them observers of their own destinies, placing them at those
dangerous crossroads that are much more evident in our time than in
Bergerac's or Rostand's. This inexpressible loneliness, which colors all events,
was best presented by i\Wan Plestina in the role of Cyrano de Bergerac,
showing his inner shifting of "gears" in repressing passions and in revealing
them, in the tragic essence of an unhappy love and an unfortunate time placed
within the framework of comedy.
The young director, Dario Lorenzi, in his production of The Marriage
by Nikolai Gogo! on the stage of the Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka,
revealed another approach to the presentation of classic dramatic literature.
Instead of using reduction and minimalism in the stage presentation of a
famous text, Lorenzi decided upon the seductive appeal of the grotesque, a
22
S Ia vi, a11d East E11ropea11 PerfomltJII<'e \' ol. 21, No. 2
Nikolai Gogol's The Wedding directed by Dario Lorenzi
at the Creation National Theatre in Rijelu
<'")
N
stage filled with props of exaggerated dimensions, and characters whose
caricatural features made the audience laugh. The opening scene of the Rijeka
production struck a deliberately realistic tone, like a meticulous game with
humorous details and a slowed-down rhythm, which sought to evoke the
boring routine of provincial Russian life. However, the director soon
abandoned this realistic comic literalness and increasingly entered the realm of
the fantastic where the characters assume distorted features and where the
language of the theatrical grotesque can be recognised. Following postmodern
principles, Lorenzi attempts to establish miraculous relations through the
destruction of the logical sequence of scenes; he introduces the actors and the
audience to a game of disempowered conventions, dominated by the
inconsistencies of the genre and an ironical replication of scenes.
In the first part of The Marriage, elements of slapstick, comic strip,
Monty Python humour, and absurd gags are used in order to highlight the
grotesque image of an alienated bureaucratic society represented by a hysterical
marriageable woman and her two resigned suitors. The bride-to-be welcomes
the potential grooms by dancing on an enormous table, which stretches from
one side of the stage to the other, or rides a scooter among the men during the
scene in which she first meets them. The second part of the production
attempts to mute these neurotic signs of a tattered reality and to approach an
intimate drama whose protagonists are the future bride and groom-the
merchant's daughter, .\gafya, and the court advisor, Podkolyolsin. Red, the
color of love, framed in black borders (announcing the future tragedy)
dominates the stage where the two try in vain to conduct a conversation, or to
establish any kind of communication in order to draw closer together. This
attempt at closeness is further impeded by the huge red armchairs placed at
either end of the stage. The characters appear lost when seated and seem
prisoners of the armchairs, because they cannot pull themselves out of them.
When fUlally, after a great deal of effort, they manage to slide out of the
armchairs, they come into direct conflict in a sword-fight scene which
humorously warns us that harmony between the sexes is impossible.
The comedy ends with the mute presence of the bride (dressed in a
long white wedding gown) on the bare stage, trying to reach the wedding
bouquet, an ominous dramatic symbol that, as it has moved toward the very
front edge of the stage since the middle of the play, has directed the stage
events and tantalized us with an imaginary happy ending. In the end, the bride
leaves the stage as snow starts to fall, and an upside down birch hangs in the
air, both poetic comments and symbols of purification after tragedy.
Branko Hojnik's imaginative stage design, consisting of long tables,
oversized chairs, empty door frames and other enlarged and unreal objects of
24 Slavic a11d EaJt Eurvpeal/ Vol. 21, No. 2
everyday use, succeeds in surprising the audience in each scene. Bjanka
Ursulov's costumes, also parodically detached from the clothes worn in
Gogol's period, suit the atmosphere of the grotesquely humorous events on
stage.
The image of absurd reality was strikingly portrayed by the actress
Nina Violic in the role of Gogol's marriageable girl. By highlighting the
unreality of the humorous situation in which she found herself, she actually
expressed its tragedy and emphasized that there was no way out, not only for
1\gafya, the merchant' s daughter, but also for all the characters involved.
Podkolyolsin, the court advisor and potential groom, standing on the far side
of the stage, was portrayed by Goran Navojec as a resigned bureaucrat for
whom marriage was as important as any one of his numerous flies. The
director, Dario Lorenzi, seems to have placed a distorting mirror in front of
Gogol's drama, so that all its actors acquired a grotesque appearance, and the
spectators were invited to laugh at these funny apparitions, only to question
themselves-when the mirror is removed and they leave the theatre-about
the tragic directions of the characters' lives, and their own destinies.
The young director, Mario Kovac, a student director at the Academy
of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, who is also the leader of a very provocative
alternative theatre group called Smrtz, presented the grotesque aspects of our
world in the play Excellent Lap Time (Sjqjno prolazno vrijeme), first performed this
winter on the stage of the Mammoth Dramatic Theatre Gavella in Zagreb.
Kovac did not select a classic dramatic text, but instead chose three of
fourteen one-act plays by the ,-\.merican playwright David Ives published in the
book All in the Timing. Kovac admitted that he was captivated by Ives's
absurdly grotesque text, which deals with trivialities while at the same time
playing with language and literary conventions.
In the f1rst scene of Extellent Lap Time, Ivo and Ana meet accidentally
in a cafe. They attempt to come closer to one another by using words, but
instead they distance themselves, lose themselves in language, and then f1nd
themselves again. By uttering a multitude of worn-out phases, they succeed
neither in expressing their feelings nor in articulating their yearnings. In the
second part of the play, Leon Trotsky, with a mountain climber's pick stuck in
his head, tries to plan the last twenty-four hours of his life. He thinks about
whether to complete his life's masterpiece, eat his favorite dish, enjoy the scent
of forget-me-nots, or spend the time waiting for his own death with his loving
wife. The third part of the performance proceeds in a probing mood: Can a
monkey, left alone with a typewriter and given indef1nite time, write Hamlet?
The protagonists of this scene are three chimpanzees called Kafka, i\:Wton, and
Swift.
25
Exa:llelll Lap Time directed by Mario Kovac
at the 11ammoth Dramatic Theatre Gavella in Zagreb
26
5/avio- and East EuropeaN Vol. 21, No. 2
The first part-the first one-act play called "There's no blues"
("Nema beda")-is conceptualized as a succession of improvisations on a
theme, realized as a collage of verbal fragments loaded with trivialities in the
words exchanged by two young people sitting opposite one another at a table.
The second scene called "Variations on the Death of Trotsky" ("Varijacije na
smrt Trockoga") closes on a pronouncedly absurd tone, with obvious surrealist
features that recall the linguistic games of the Russian writer, Daniil Kharms.
The (im)possibilities of literary creation and a world that permanently rejects
interpretation are the themes of the third one-act play, "\'\lords, Words,
Words" ("Rijeci, rijeci, rijeci") in which the actors take possession of the stage
with fascinating energy, while they imitate monkeys pecking at the typewriter
in a futile attempt to record the famous "To be, or not to be."
The director, i\fario Kovac, who, after his rebellious exploration of
alternative theatre, found himself working in a theatrical institution for the first
time, sets up the miraculous atmosphere of Ives's unusual situations which do
not stem from psychological portraits of characters, nor from tedious
explanations of their actions.
The neutral stage design, with several essential props on a gray
background, does not disturb the dynamics of the scenes, while the attractive
costumes by Marita Copo imaginatively emphasise the bizarre situations and
the topsy-turvy image of a world in which David Ives's famous and
anonymous heroes feel equally ill at ease. The characters were portrayed with
exceptional concentration and energy by the actors who followed the
inexorable logic of absurdity in departing from realism, abandoning the
stereotype in favor of the grotesque. Because of its unpretentiousness, its
psychic surpassing of reality, and its striking acting, Excellent Lap Time revealed
how seductive theatre ephemera can be in a performance at a theatre like the
Dramatic Theatre Gavella, which previously in the last few years obsessively
dealt with "great and important themes."
Another example of a theatrical ephemeron was presented this
season at the alternative Theatre ITD in Zagreb. A Man. A Chair (Coi!Ji:k.
Sto/ica) by Damir Bartol Indos is a reminder of the famous performance from
the end of the 70s bearing the same title. "If I broke all the chairs, I would
have to invent a new body, another form, or perhaps wander like a nomad
without residence. If, in an undefined future, my chair was to become anarchic
and without a function, I would know that I ceased to be a man. Therefore, I
move and stop according to the arrangement of chairs in the world," the
author notes in the program to the play. In snatches, Indos attempts to
reconstruct not just parts of the first performance, but also fragments of his
own memory of it. The director, Goran Sergej Pristas and the dramaturg,
27
Ivana Sajko, are interested in the relationships between bodies and space,
unprotected subjects in their clash with the environment, searching for inner
and outer landscapes, which are, in this case, framed by chairs. The chairs
determine the contacts between the actors, and thanks to them, the
perspectives and relations between the characters seem broken. The
fragmented movements are caught in a game of changeable outcomes, in a
web of uncertain meanings where everything is abolished as soon as it is
established, and the very implied relationships, which should connect two
subjects on the stage, actually divide them. Besides Damir Bartol Indos, the
performers Nikolina Bujas and Pravdan Devlahovic attempt to evoke the
connections that have been worn out in the futile attempt to collect the
scattered material. With broken movements during the one-hour performance
of A Man. A Chair, they show the vulnerable nature of the body that always
searches for an object to confirm its presence, not only inside the theatre, but
also in the world.
These examples of the modern Croatian theatre represent scenic
studies which attempt to reproduce at least the outlines of the period, and
raise, in snatches, questions to which, even after so many historical
misunderstandings and tragedies, we still cannot find answers. This is the kind
of theatre which, in the shadow of the recent great theatrical events of the 80s
(now already part of the previous century), is in search of new forms and new
directions. The most interesting task of the Croatian theatre at the moment is
the search itself, the impossibility of finding security and a clear point of
orientation, the expectation of something that has no name and is utterly
undetermined, the dispersion of energy in different directions, the standing at
the crossroads and being absolutely incapable of deciding where to go.
28 SlatJti; a11d East EuropeaN Vol. 21, No. 2
DIRECTING IN TWO CULTURES:
THE OEUVRE OF MILOS LAZIN
Allan Graubard and Caroline McGee
'"You are from Yugoslavia?
Yes.
But where .. ?
Yugoslavia.
It does not exist! You must be Croatian or Serbian."
(from a private conversation with Milos Lazin)
?vWos Lazin is a theatre director from the former Yugoslavia who has
been living in Paris since 1989, now as a French citizen. He is the founder and
director of Mappa Mundi Company, based in Paris, which carne to notice
during the second half of the 1990s via two theater creations concerning the
Balkan wars: Hotel Europe and Ines & Denise. Taking as his point of departure
the condition of the emigre artist, issues of cross-cultural encounter and the
place of the Balkans within European history, Lazin maneuvers through
contexts of conflict that speak as much to individual as to cultural-political
values that we continue to struggle with.
Prior to his emigration to France, Lazin gained recognition as a major
theater director, also working in radio and television while holding a
professorship at the School of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and Novi Sad. He
currently supports himself as a journalist for Radio France International.
After a recent period of self-imposed silence, Lazin has re-emerged
with Mappa Mundi Company in response to the new "democracy" in Belgrade
and the ongoing rebuilding of Sarajevo. In October 2000, he organized a major
conference on contemporary theater in the Balkans at the Center Andre
Malraux in Sarajevo, and is now developing a new theater work as a possible
co-production between Mappa Mundi and the Center for Cultural
Decontamination in Belgrade.
Lazin prefers to create original works based on a sense of personal
urgency. His major ?\.lappa Mundi creation, Ines & Denise (a French-Bosnian
co-production), for instance, derived from an intimate problem that he faced
in daily life, which he then developed in collaboration with a writer and actors
29
into a dramatic performance that received critical praise for its human and
historical resonance both in France and in Sarajevo.'
As Lazin put it: "Here in Paris I speak French, which I never studied
in school. I'm not quite sure how to write it correctly. I'm not French, but I'm
speaking French. I speak French but I think in Serbo-Croatian, my native
language. I wanted to escape that kind of double situation. What is it that I
translate in my head automatically? What does it signify? That's what I wanted
to explore dramatically. So I engaged a writer, and took a Bosnian actress and a
French actress. They would explain it to me. I had to know what I was living
by staging it."
2
Thus, in the spring of 1996, Lazin began to create a performance in
two languages to explore "the possibilities and limits of communication
between two cultures."
He engaged his friend, the playwright from Zagreb (Croatia),
Slobodan Snajder, and two actresses: Denise Bonal (French) and Ines Fancovic
(Serbo-Croatian). He then secured a space in Avignon, La Chartreuse, for the
writing to begin via intensive discussion between writer and director.
For his part, Snajder contributed an intriguing plot line concerning a
story he overheard during a train ride, which the teller claimed was true .
c ~ German woman went to Bosnia in search of her son's grave; the
fellow died there in 1943 as a Wehrmacht soldier. She met a Bosnian woman
whose son died in about the same place but as a Tito partisan, the enemy of
the German woman's son. In order to make peace with \XI\VII and their grief,
which had never left them, the mothers of the two ex-enemies decided to live
together.
\Vith a cast and story now in hand, and with the first scene set (the
arrival of the German woman in Bosnia), Lazin invited his two actresses to La
ChartreuJe to begin the work on stage. As Lazin describes it: "Their actual
confrontation was indispensable for us to continue to create. Neither spoke the
other's language. Each actress agreed to receive only her own part of the text
to identify only with her character's situation."
He continues: "During the work in .\vignon and in Sarajevo, we
spoke little or nothing about character. I observed Ines Fancovic's and Denise
Bonal's attitudes in particular situations, looking for their understanding of
how the story was developing. They were invited to react from their own point
of view with no knowledge of the other's point of view but all within a
common context. Their blind spots and their openness to this blind contact
30 Slavic and East European Peiformame Vol. 21, No.2
became the content of our production and the way for future spectators to
ftnd their way through it. We wagered that the public in Bosnia-Herzegovina
would identify with Ines and the public in France with Denise. Each actress
had to serve as a guide over the bridge to an unknown language and meaning.
".Among other things, the work brought us up against differences in
the theater cultures that the two actresses came from. Denise depended on the
text, on the meaning of what she said; Ines on what was happening. The fust
acted with her head, the second with her body . . As I didn' t want either
approach to dominate, we had to take advantage of this difference within the
context of a functioning duet. Each actress had to contribute to the creation of
a common space. This upset the actresses' habits and reflexes. Each had to
invent her own role but also the other's role by evaluating her (foreign) text
and (present) gestures.
"Ultimately, it was a liberating process. The setting also militated
against falling back on cliches, either linguistically or behaviorally.
"In the two countries where we performed the audience attention
was complete. The story is told through words, yes, but its real weight is
transmitted via body language, emotion, gestures, and the presence of a
stranger who, by giving us a look at ourselves, becomes understandable, close
and indispensable."
\ ~ e must also remember when Ines & Denise first played to audiences
in France and Sarajevo. The Balkan war had just ended; here was a
performance in two languages with the full possibility of complete
misunderstanding, but based on a common ground of shared grief and a desire
for reconciliation within a world just torn apart by ethnic hatred and genocidal
attack. The political resonance was immediate, the link from the previous to
the present war transparent.
.A Sarajevo critic, Vojislav Vujanovic, added: "t.'fost fascinating is the
way that the two women come to understand each other speaking, as they do,
two different languages . .As each speaks in monologue, the other replies in her
language. The mysterious flow of their interaction allows them to
communicate and arrive at perfect understanding. What grows inside them is
their sorrow, and it matters little in what language they express it."
Vujanovic continued: "The scenery, with its exceptional stylization, is
balanced between two wooden sets: on the one side a poetic image of a village
house, on the other a stylized ritual: when the heroines lie down, they face a
mirror tilted above them allowing the audience to see their expressions ....
Nothing separates the two women any longer. They are only mothers, two
31
mirrors reflecting the same image of motherhood."
1
Lazin' s first work in France, Hotel Europe,
4
named after the actual
hotel in Sarajevo, also dealt with issues of cross-cultural encounter corrupted
by war. Situated at the border between the .Austro-Hungarian and Muslim
sections of the city, "the semantic center of Sarajevo," as one critic called it
(Dzevad Karahasan, Editeur Maren Sell, Calmann-Uvy, from his book Un
Hotel Europe was a place where local and visiting artists,
diplomats, journalists and world travelers met and mingled. According to
Lazin, the hotel sported an Austrian design with ornamental motifs in an
oriental style, an apt metaphor for the city as a cultural bazaar. That, at least,
was its prestige prior to hostilities, after which it housed war refugees. In 1992
the hotel was partially destroyed by a Serbian artillery shell.
For Lazin, the hotel became the symbolic arena where he could best
explore the emergence of an antagonism that has already burst into war. Two
men and their women take over the now empty hotel where they live and
relive on stage the dream of their shattered country. The men, in a final chess
game, possess and dispossess a Europe they have lost. Here, amidst the
detritus of history, the "check mate" resonates and dies away against the events
that consume them. In Hotel Europe, it seems, there is only one coda possible if
fed from two sources: the barbarism of war and our humanity within it:
32
"You live for a dead future."
"Behind us there is nothing."
From Hotel Europe
Slavic and East Europea11 Peiformame Vol. 21, No. 2
NOTES
1
Premiered October 1997 in Sarajevo for an extended run at the International Festival
of Theater, MESS. Presented from winter 1997 to spring 1999 in Le Mans, Rennes, and
tours to the Festival of European Theater in Grenoble, then to Tours, Strasbourg,
Avignon, Nimes and Montpellier.
2
Interview with Milos Lazin, Spring 2000, Paris.
3 Oslobotmjt, November 2, 1997.
4
Adapted by Lazin from the Vidosav Stevanovic's novel, L'llt des Balkans, with Denise
Bona!, Renaud Danner, Jacques Giraud, and Nathalie Villeneuve. Music by Stevan
Kovas Tickmayer. Set design by Franc;ois Bouchdaudy. A coproduction with Lcs
Federes, Montluc;on, and le Theatre de !'Union, Limoges.
33
MEYERHOLD'S 1936 VISIT TO PRAGUE
Jarka Burian
Four major European theatre artists-one Russian and three
Czech-met against a backdrop of increasing international tensions in the fall
of 1936 in Prague. The great Russian director V sevolod Meyerhold was
traveling back to Moscow from Paris, whereas Czech director E. F. Burian and
the distinctive team of ]iii Voskovec and Jan Werich were fully engaged in
their respective Prague theatres. Although the visits of Meyerhold to Burian's
D 37 Theatre and to \'oskovec and Werich's Liberated Theatre were not of
extraordinary significance to theatre in global terms, they were charged with a
special importance in the lives of these highly creative theatre people whose
paths intersected at a critical time in their respective lives, on the broader stage
of world events.
Depending on our age and inclinations, we may have various
associations with 1936. In the United States, the second presidential election
victory of FDR was concurrent with the midpoint of the great Depression.
Sport fanciers may recall the fourth subway World Series that fall between
New York's two teams, the Giants and Yankees, won by the latter, four games
to two. Others may remember that 1936 was probably the last year when an
Ivy League football team had two players chosen as All .c\mericans, Clint Frank
and Larry Kelley of Yale. Broadway theatre was having one of its brighter
seasons, as marked by productions of Winterset, DearJ'End, Idiots' Delight, On
Your Toes, and the John Gielgud Hamiel, while the Federal Theatre had notable
hits in Orson Welles' Ma.-beth and the Living Newspaper's Triple A Plowed
Under.
In Europe, the exploits of Jesse Owens at the 1936 summer
Olympics in Berlin were unsettling to Adolf Hitler and his notions of Aryan
superiority. But other things, far from sport or theatre, were doubtless more
important to Hitler and other European leaders. Openly defying the Treaty of
Locarno, Germany had militarized the Rhineland in March. In May the
occupation of :\ddis Ababa victoriously concluded Mussolini's seven-month
war of aggression against Ethiopia. And on July 18th began the Spanish Civil
War, a mihtary and political action that would dominate Europe's attention for
more than two years and serve as prologue to \Vorld War II.
34 Slavic and East E11ropean Peiforma!lce Vol. 21, No. 2
In the Soviet Union, other special tensions were impacting society
and art in 1936. A symptom of Stalin's increasing harshness in achieving
monolithic power, the process of cleansing the Party of all potential diversity
had already begun in 1935, but a most significant escalation occurred in
August of t 936: the first of the great public show trials began, involving Party
veterans Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others, all of whom were found guilty and
executed. The arts, too, were inevitably affected: Shostakovich had come
under critical attack earlier in the year for his opera L:Jtfy Macbeth of Mtsrnsk and
the ballet Bright Stream. Meyerhold himself, despite his enormous reputation,
had already been criticized for "Meyerholditis"-i.e., paying more attention to
subjective, individual matters of form than to the criteria of socialist realism,
which prescribed ideologically approved subjects readily intelligible to the
masses. In March of 1936 he was still able to resist such attacks, if not openly
defy them. In two speeches he defended Shostakovich as well as his own
practices, reminding his critics of the debt owed by others to his work--such as
Okhlopkov and even the Moscow Art Theatre. His last major successes had
been The L:Jtfy of the Camelias in 1934, and The Queen of Spades in 1935.
Thereafter he was primarily working on plans for staging Boris Godunov, a
production which never materialized.
1
In the late summer and early fall of 1936 Meyerhold was also still free
to travel. Accompanied by his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, he visited Paris,
where Meyerhold met with Pablo Picasso to discuss prospects of a production
of Hamlet, which Picasso might design. During their return to Moscow in
October, Meyerhold and Raikh visited Prague, and a number of meetings,
casual as well as planned, occurred between Meyerhold and the most
important of the Czech avant-garde theatre artists, E. F. Burian and the
enormously popular duo of Voskovec and Werich, known together as V+W.
In a week's time, Meyerhold attended three of the Czechs' productions, paid
backstage visits, gave a public lecture, and met for several hours with the
collective of E. F. Burian's D 37. A closer look at these events provides an
interesting footnote to modem theatre history, as Meyerhold, an aging,
renowned artist under fire in his own state, mingled with young artists who
were fortunate to practice in a land as yet free of coercive pressures.
All three of the Czechs had been colleagues and came to prominence
in the late 1920s. V + W's Liberated Theatre was established after the duo's
great success in comic reviews with music beginning in 1927 under the aegis of
the original Liberated Theatre. V+W's appeal was so pronounced, however,
that they took over the theatre under their own names. Sole authors and
producers as well as the leading performers, they worked with excellent
composers, directors, choreographers, designers, and actors in a permanent
35
ensemble. By the mid 1930s, reacting to increasingly difficult times affecting all
of Europe, their revues had shifted from an emphasis on sheer entertainment
to increasingly sophisticated political satire, though without any political party
alignment.
2
Emil Frantisek Burian, a multi-talented artist and Communist Party
member since youth, was formally educated in music and was a colleague of
Voskovec and Werich in studio productions of the late 1920s. Subsequendy, in
addition to his purely musical work, he worked with a variety of theatre
companies in and beyond Prague before opening his own Prague theatre in the
fall of 1933. Naming it D 34 for the year to come3, he dedicated it to explicidy
Marxist, Communist ideals, although he chronically experienced significant
inner struggles between his instinctive need for artistic freedom and his strong
commitment to the political Left. His productions were also marked by his
innate musicality, his fondness for folk themes, and surprisingly sophisticated
techniques of staging, especially a projection system (Theatergraph) combining
live performers and projected images.
4
Producing in much smaller, less
adequate facilities than those ofV+Ws Liberated Theatre, his work by 1936
had attracted as much international attention as theirs. Mounting more
productions, for shorter runs, than Voskovec and Werich (who normally did
only two productions a year), he also developed a cultural center of socially
conscious, politically dedicated, mainly young people to support the work on
his own theatre "collective."S
As distinct from V+W, Burian had long been an avid admirer of
Meyerhold and his theatre. They had in fact met in Prague during an earlier
visit by Meyerhold in 1934, although it is not clear whether Meyerhold saw any
productions in D 34 at that time; moreover, Burian had seen some of
Meyerhold's productions in Moscow in 1934. By 1936, Burian had already
heard of the pressures on the arts in the USSR, and it seems dear that
Meyerhold informed him more fully of his problems during the October visit
to Prague.
In 1936, V+W ran two productions: in the spring, The Rag Ballad,
based on the figure of Fran<;:ois Villon but updated to the present as a play
within a play, blending poetic imagination and aggressive social criticism; and
in the fall, Heaven on Earth, a more broadly comic piece based on a Beaumont
and Fletcher play, which they adapted to a classical Greek context.
6
On the
other hand, E. F. Burian's theatre produced more than a dozen works in 1936,
chief among them Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, which made use of the
Theatergraph system, and Burian's version ofBeaumarchais' The Barber of
36 Slavic a11d EaJt Europw1 Perjorma11ce Vol. 21, No. 2
Kresli l A. Hoffmeister
A 1936 caricature of Meyerhold and Burian by Alfred Hoffmeister, with
the caption: "In Spain there is revolution, women and children are
dying-and where are the plays?"
7J
r---
<')
Seville, which Burian adapted into a strong anti-Fascist comment on the
Spanish Civil War.
Available records in Czech and English indicate that Meyerhold's first
encounter with theatre in Prague that October was in Burian's D 37. On
Wednesday the 28th, Meyerhold and his wife attended a performance of
Burian's The Barber of Seville in D 37. On Thursday evening, October 29th,
Meyerhold gave a lecture at the Urania Club. I believe it is significant that in
discussing modem theatre, Meyerhold was still putting explicit emphasis on
purely poetic, artistic values. The following is a selection from that lecture:
Theatre is an institution with an educational mission in the
best sense of the word, and if it cannot resolve relevant problems it
must not stop trying to deal with them.
In modem theatre, poets must once again come to the fore.
Poetic imagination, which works with metaphors and compression,
can resound fully only on the stage. Modem theatre must have the
courage to work with the element of pathos and heroism, which it
should draw from folk ideals of heroic deeds and people who achieve
these deeds for the well being of all.
In theatre architecture it is necessary to return to the
original form of the Greek theatre-amphitheatre, where it's possible
to see equally well from all seats, and establish a single admission
price, low enough to make the theatre accessible to the broadest mass
of people.
The time is coming for the birth of a truly international
theatre, understandable to all. A special theatre speech will be created,
superior in delicacy and sensitivity; movement, color, architectonic
line, dance, music--all that will join on stage in one mighty scenic
display of international appeaJ.7
Friday, October 30th, was particularly busy for Meyerhold. In the
afternoon he met with Burian's ensemble for several hours, during which he
viewed their facilities and listened to some excerpts of audio recordings of
other Burian productions. Then in an informal discussion with Burian's
collective, he spoke for an hour and a half on the theme of his work with
actors, and made a brief, explicit reference to Burian's work. Again, a number
of his remarks touched on matters closest to Meyerhold's heart as an artist;
38
Slavic a11d East Europea/1 Perjorma11ce Vol. 21, No. 2
Burian and Meyerhold, perhaps during Meyerhold's afternoon visit
with the D 37 collective on October 30, 1936.

)
they also form an interesting supplement to his artistic credo as expressed
elsewhere in other sources:
40
Between the actor and the playwright lies the director's
essential preparatory work. If I get the text of a play in my hands, I
must transform it into a director's score, and only then may I present
it to the actor. It is up to the director to take the individual elements
of the play, the individual figures, each drawn distinctively, and
compose them into an organic entity according to his unified sense of
the play as a whole. . . . As a director, it takes me many years to
recompose an author's text in order that I might begin working with
an actor on the stage. I reflected on Gogol's &vizor for ten years. On
Push.kin's Boris Godunov, which I shall stage in the very near future,
for fifteen years.
The director must not read an author's text many times. He
doesn't have to know all the details of his next production. He
doesn' t have to fall in love with one scene at the expense of a clear
sense of the whole .... The director must have an absolutely clear
idea of his next production, an iron skeleton, thought through in its
implications, in its fundamental forms. But not only that: like a
composer, like one who hears how this or that instrument reproduces
individual passages of the composition, so too must the director--in
the very process of shaping the entire conception of the play--have a
sense of how each actor will be the interpreter of this or that
component of that conception ... . [and} which instrument in the
director's score each actor will be.
Only after such initial work does the director approach the
actors, and now begins the second phase of the director's work,
which can proceed only together with the actor. Only in this way
does the initial skeleton become clothed with flesh, muscle, and skin,
and its blood begin to circulate ...
If I come to the stage with a plan precisely composed in
advance, I am able to orchestrate the score only in tandem with the
actors, the live instruments of my composition. The pages of my
director' s thoughts look like musical notes, and verbal comments are
accompanied by musical notations . . .
Directors who operate as I do are often criticized for
overpowering their actors. Those are fairy tales and empty phrases!
... A modem actor ... is well aware of the legitimacy of the director-
Slavic a11d East Europea11 Performal/ce Vol. 21, No.2
composer' s function and knows that it is the only right path for the
modem theatre. The actor's abilities are not restricted; on the
contrary he is constandy prompted toward his own fertile initiatives.
Rehearsals for the director actually begin on the day of the
opening performance, the day the audience first appears in the
theatre. Until then irs merely been a mutual becoming acquainted
and arriving at the best instrumentation for the director's creative
composition-production. Only the thirty-fifth performance might be
considered the opening night ....
The entire work of the director and actors is dependent on
the presence of the public, and the production can resound fully only
if it has experienced the mutual effect of stage and audience on each
other .... Theatre has the great advantage of being a live form, its
creators able to test their efforts and perfect them in constant contact
with those for whom they work.
I can see from the way you react to my comments that my
thoughts are familiar to you, which is understandable--if you work
with E. F. Burian, with a director-musician who composes his
productions. I saw this in The Barber of Seville in every step even
though I don't understand your language. Just for the record: I come
from a musical family. From childhood I learned to play the piano
and then for many years studied the violin. Originally, I was to
dedicate myself to music, but then I left it and came to theatre. I
regard my musical training as the foundation of my work as a
director.
8
On the evening of that same Friday, October 30th, Meyerhold
attended a performance of V +W's Heaven on Earth and visited backstage. He
also left a poignant note composed for the theatre's guestbook. It pays a
special tribute to Voskovec and Werich and their theatre, but also indirecdy
reveals again Meyerhold's na/111?/, that which placed him in irreconcilable
opposition to the ideological forces governing theatre in his native land:
In 1913, my friend, the late poet Apollinaire, took me to the
Cirque Medrano. After what we'd seen that night, Apollinaire
exclaimed: 'These performers--using the means of the commedia
dell'arte--are saving theatre for artists, actors, and directors." Since
then, from time to time, I would return to the Medrano, hoping to
intoxicate myself again with the hashish of improvised comedy. But
Apollinaire was gone. Without him I could no longer find the artists
41
it
<.-,
.,...
~
~
trJ
~
trJ
"

~
~
~
~
,.
:;:
<
~
~
z
9
N
From left to right: Jan Werich, Meyerhold, Jili Voskovec, and
Jindiich Honzl, director ofV+Ws productions; after the
performance of Heaven 011 Earth, October 30, 1936.
43
he had shown me. I looked for them with a longing heart but the
Italian "lazzi" were no more. Only tonight, October 30, 1936, I saw
the "zanni" again in the persons of the unforgettable duo of
Voskovec and Werich, and was once more bewitched by performers
rooted in the Italian commedia ex improviso. Long live commedia
dell' arte! Long live V oskovec and W erich!
9
Meyerhold's final theatre visit in Prague was again to V+Ws
Liberated Theatre. As the following newspaper account indicates, it was an
exuberant event:
On Monday [the 2nd of November] occurred a special
performance of Balada z hadrii [The Rag Ballad} for Soviet theatrical
director V sevolod Meyerhold, who came to the theatre accompanied
by his wife, the celebrated Soviet actress Zinaida Raikh, Mrs.
Tretiakov, and Minister Alexandrovski and his wife. The theatre was
sold out to the last seat, and the performance took place in a very
festive and friendly atmosphere. During intermission the Soviet
guests visited the greenroom, and after the performance ended with
an ovation by all those present, the public still insisted on a reprise of
"pochod proti vetru" ["The March Against the Wind," the agitational
song hit of the play] which all joined in to sing. Then, with chanted
cries, the audience urged director Meyerhold onto the forestage. He
shook hands heartily with the performers and then embraced
Voskovec and Werich, which the audience welcomed with more
stormy applause and outcries. Upon leaving the stage, Voskovec,
Werich, and Meyerhold were besieged by autograph hunters.
10
It may have been one of the last occasions when Meyerhold received
such open, unreserved acclaim from an audience.
A few subsequent details are necessary to complete the story. Clearly
agitated by what he now had heard about the persecution of Meyerhold,
Burian launched a number of public and private projects protesting restrictions
of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union, an action that led to numerous direct
conflicts with the Communist press in Prague. On stage, one of Burian's next
productions, Hamlet III (March 1937), became an open attack on any form of
artistic repression. It took more than a year before tensions eased and Burian
became mollified (or resigned). By that time, world events also provided
distraction: the Munich capitulation in September 1938, the full occupation of
44 Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
the Czech lands by the Germans in March 1939, the Berlin-Moscow pact that
August, and the start of World War II that September. Burian's theatre
remained open until1941, when it was closed by the gestapo and Burian was
placed in concentration camps, where he spent the war.
Voskovec and Werich's theatre was closed shortly after the Munich
capitulation, and within a few months its two leaders emigrated to the USA,
where they spent the war years. Their Liberated Theatre was effectively
flnished, despite their attempt to revive it after the war.
Meyerhold's story after the 1936 visit to Prague is the best known. In
brief, his own theatre was liquidated in January 1938. He was temporarily
saved by his old mentor, Stanislavsky, who offered him work as teacher and
associate in the latter's Opera-Drama Studio, and, in May 1938 a position as a
Director of Stanislavsky's Opera Theatre. Stanislavsky died in August 1938,
but Meyerhold succeeded in completing Stanislavsky's production of Verdi's
Rigoletto in March 1939. By then Meyerhold was Chief Director of the Opera
Theatre, but although he also became involved in other theatre projects
Meyerhold's days were numbered. At the fust All-Union Conference of
Theatre Directors in Moscow in June 1939, Meyerhold made his last speech on
June 18. It has been reported in various ways, from an idealistic account of his
defying the forces ranged against him, to other accounts that speak of his
complete recantation of his own work and principles. The consensus today is
that the latter version is closer to reality. In any event, he was arrested a few
days later in Leningrad and returned to Moscow. Less than a month after that,
on July 14th, his wife, Zinaida Raikh was brutally murdered in their Moscow
apartment. On February 2nd, 1940, one day after being sentenced, Meyerhold
was shot to death.
11
A flnal echo of these events lies in E. F: Burian's own recantations in
the early 1950s, by which time Burian held the army rank of Major as head of
his reconstituted theatre, the Army Art Theatre. It had been established in
1951, a few years after- the Communist putsch of February 1948 had seized
power from the short-lived Czechoslovak (Third) Republic, which had lasted
less than three years after the war. By this time Burian had committed himself
completely to Communist ideology and practice in the arts, although he also
intermittently exhibited many signs of uncertainty and inner stress.
12
Nevertheless, in remarks made to his new collective, he renounced his former
folly in supporting Meyerhold, attributing it to his own naivete and to
Meyerhold's misleading him about political and ideological realities in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s.
An especially pungent irony lay in Burian's claim that the Meyerhold
productions he saw in the 1930s were essentially inferior to Burian's own. As
45
one statement encapsulates it, "I never adopted a thing from Meyerhold's
theory or practice. Documents exist that attest to his own learning from
performances at my Theatre D, [for example] how to operate within a small
stage space, with lights, with music and choreography. It isn't true that I
persisted in Meyerhold's path after learning of the true state of affairs; rather
the truth is that once I learned the reasons for the criticisms of Meyerhold I
turned my back on him as an enemy of the beloved Soviet land."13
46 Slavic a1Jd East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
NOTES
I Two books are very useful in providing an overview of Meyerhold's activities in the
1930s: Edward Braun's The Thtatre of Mrytrhold (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979); and
Alma Law's edition of Mrytrhold Speaks Mryerhold Rthearses, by Aleksandr Gladkov.
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997). Law's introduction is particularly
valuable.
For a full description of V+W's theatre activity before World War li see Jarka
Burian, "The Liberated Theatre of Voskovec and Wench," Educati011al Theatre jouma/29,
2 (May 1977), pp. 153-175.
The "D" in D 34 and subsequent years stands for the Czech word "divadlo," i.e.,
"theatre.''
" Theatergraph was a prototype of what later appeared as Laterna Magika. In the late
1950s, Alfred Radok, a former assistant of Burian, along with scenographer Josef
Svoboda, developed a more sophisticated, hi-tech version of Burian's pioneering
projection technique for the Czechoslovak exhibit at Brussels Expo 58. Latema Magika
is still a successful producing organization in Prague today.
s For a fuller account of Burian's pre-war theatre $ee Jacka Burian, "E. F. Burian: D34-
D41 ," The Drama Review, 20:4 (December 1976), pp. 95-116.
6 The Beaumont and Fletcher play was The Spanish Curate, into which Voskovec and
We rich introduced Jupiter and other classic myth elements.
"Uryvek z piedn:isky V. Meyercholda o modernim divadle, piednesene 29. iijna v
"Uranii" v Praze (A selection from a lecture by V. Meyerhold on modern theatre
presented on October 29 in the Urania in Prague], Program D 37, no. 5 (19 December
1936): 72-73.
M. Bergmannova, "Kolektivni interview s V. Meyercholdem v D 37" (A collective
interview with V. Meyerhold in D 37), Program D 37, no. 5 (19 December 1936): 74-77.
9 Quoted in Desetlet Osvoboze11iho divadla [Ten Years of the Liberated Theatre) (Praha:
Fr. Borovy, 1937), p. 105.
IO "Meyerchold v O$vobozenem divadle"(Meyerhold in the Liberated Theatre), Rudi
Provo, 4 November 1936, p. 4.]
47
11
Sec Mryerhold Speaks, above, pp. 42-49, for a more detailed account of Mcyerhold's
last years.
12 Burian's postwar career is described in Jarka Burian, "The Dark Era in Modem
Czech Theatre: 1948-1950," Theatre History Studies XV (1995), 41-66.
13 "E. F. Burian a Meyerchold, Kro11ika Armtid11iho Umi/eckiho Divadla (Praha: a ~ e
Vojsko, 1955), 277-280. r\ useful summary of the reporting of the events of the
Meyerhold visit may be found in Artur Zavodsky, "Mejercholdova a v ~ t c v a v Prahc
Oeami Dobovej Ilace [Meyerhold's Visit in Prague Through the Eyes of the
Contemporary Pressj," Slovwski divadlo 25, 4 (1977), 529-542.
48 S/avit" a11d East Europea11 Peiformallt"t Vol. 21, No.2
MOD JESKA: SOME BASIC TRUTHS
Kazimierz Braun
Theatre is mortal, as humans are. Productions vanish. Actors pass
away. Theatre, the most humane of all arts, shares the human condition in all
its aspects and dimensions. We can read a book again, all we need to do is
reach for it on the shelf at home, or at the library; we can return to the Louvre
and sit on that small red sofa in front of Mona Lisa; we can listen to Bach,
played by an orchestra, either live or on disc. But we are not able to return
again to a theatre full of spectators, and experience with them the thrill at the
rise of the curtain and hold our breath stunned by actors.
There are, of course, records of productions of the past known to
historians: drawings and paintings of scenes and portraits of stars, reviews and
private letters, memoirs and diaries. From the second half of the nineteenth
century we have photographs, first taken in studios, then on stage. From the
second half of the twentieth century we have films and videos. We can study
dramas and imagine what the scenery looked like and how the actors played.
We can visit ruins of old theatres: we can sit in the orchestra of the Theatre of
Dionysos in Athens (326 B.C.) or buy a ticket to the La Scala in Milan (1778
A.D.). We can envision shows which were played there. These resources
provide certain clues about what the theatre of the past was, but at the same
time, we are so overwhelmed by so much blank space. No wonder that actors
of past performances are difficult to imagine, and their lives even more
difficult to reconstruct.
And because acting has had always two dimensions- first, the human
and private, and second, the artistic and public-writing about performers is
especially risky and perilous. We know theoretically from Stanislavsky,
Grotowski, and others, and practically from constant media attempts to
intrude on the private lives of stars-that the two dimensions of acting
intertwine, mingle, and mutually condition and will continue to do so. An
actor's personality is the raw material on which the role is built, and thus the
role is built out of a living person's biology, physicality, emotions, sensitivity,
intelligence, creativity, and soul.
We are also aware that, in a natural way, we treat actors as we treat
other people: we like them or hate them, we frequently try to manipulate and
control them. If they are performing, we support or oppose them by
purchasing tickets for their shows or movies or by staying home. If they are no
longer alive, we also tend to use them for our own purposes: to explain, justify,
or support our own ideologies, views, or life styles, using them as intellectual
49
constructs of our own design. \'\!hen writing on actors, we may be guilty of
various sins, such as excess of love or excess of criticism, lack of empathy or
humility; laziness in doing research, asking experts, and studying somces, or
eagerness to present them as we fancy them, not as they were. \'\fho is this
"we" I am talking about? All of us writing on and about actors: first of all,
theatre historians, secondly critics and reviewers, but also novelists, screen
writers, and playwrights, such as Cyprian Norwid, author of the play, The Actor
(ca. 1864), or Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Kea11, (1953).
As author of Emigre Queen, a play on Helena l'vfodjeska (1989), I am
aware that I may be culpable of the same offenses. So, when I run across a
new study, article, play, or novel on Modjeska and I see or suspect errors,
misinterpretations, or distortions, I try to understand how and why they
occurred- not to judge, evaluate, or criticize. Recently there have been several
occasions to think again about Modjeska, thanks to new writings about her. I
decided not to argue or agree with those works, but rather to try, once more,
to draw a true picture of that great woman and great artist, recalling and
reevaluating what I know about her.
I said "a true picture" for two reasons. First, I believe that truth
exists, that it differs from a lie. Even if the "complete truth" (especially in
historical or biographical matters) can be elusive, honest efforts should be
made to search for it, and approach it as closely as possible. Second, although
the "truth" about a person belonging to the past is always conditioned by the
culture of both the object (the person written about) and the subject (the
person who writes), there are objective facts referring to the object which are
true or not: the person's deeds and words, others' accounts, statements,
testimonies, as well as various records, statistics, data, etc.
A note should be inserted here: There is a perennial question
haunting theatre historians as to whether reviews of theatre productions,
including descriptions of actors' performances, can be treated as truthful
somces. The answer is not simple, because, on one hand, reviews are always
culturally and personally conditioned; they express the reviewer's own feelings
and tastes. They may be politically or financially manipulated by directives
from the authorities or monetary bribes. On the other hand, reviews usually
contain some objective descriptions and, even if obviously biased, may provide
some factual information on a show.
After all these necessary preliminaries, let us establish some essential
truths about Helena Modjeska. By themselves, these truths will demystify the
myths and legends about her, rectify injustices done her, correct
misinformation, set the record straight, or simply repeat known facts.
50 Slavic and East European Peiformaltt"e Vol. 21 , No. 2
Portrait of Helena Modr"{!jewska, Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz, 1880
51
52
Emigri Queen by Kazimiea Braun
Stary Teatr, Cracow, Poland, World Premiere, May 1989
Directed by Jan Maciejowski, Anna Polony as Modjeska
Slavic and Etl.ft European Performaflce Vol. 21, No. 2
53
Helena Modjeska's life (1840-1909) can be divided into three unequal
periods of time. In each of these three periods she found herself in a situation
in which she could either fail and give up, or overcome the difficulties, better
her character, enlarge her acting range, and eventUally transform her whole life
and career. She always moved on. I should mention that Modjeska was her
American stage name; in Poland she used the stage name Modrzejewska; her
mother's name was Misel; her father was unknown. Her precise date of birth is
not certain.
The first period ofModjeska's life lasted more than twenty-five years,
from approximately 1840 to 1868. She spent about ten years of childhood as
the neglected daughter of a single mother in a typical, lower middle-class
environment in Cracow. She went to work very young as a waitress in her
mother's cafe. Also quite early, she had her first relationships with men and
bore a son out of wedlock. At the age of about twenty, she made. her first
appearance on stage, and for five years she was an actress in small amateur and
semi-professional traveling companies playing in provincial towns. She also
had a relatively successful, although short (about three months), professional
engagement in the City Theatre in Lw6w, one of the biggest Polish cultural
centers at the time. Still unmarried, she had another child (a daughter), who
died at the age of three.
As a young, beautiful, and talented actress, she rose above the caliber
of the provincial companies in which she performed. Living with a much older
lover-impresario, she, it is said, did not spurn other men. She could have
frittered away her talent and exploited her body, she could have become lazy
and abandoned her aspirations. Or she could plunge into the unknown and the .
uncertain, and strive for more and better. She chose to break away from
fourth-rate theatre, and from the morally dubious situation in her personal life.
She left her lover forever and went to Cracow, where she managed to be
engaged by the famous City Theatre in 1865. Her talent, will, persistence,
ambition, and hard work on each role resulted in the rapid furthering of her
career. She soon became one .of the two ''leading ladies" in Cracow. She
started to appear in Shakespeare and many other classical plays. Modjeska also
transformed her personal impulsive lavishness and charm into a carefully
calculated feminine strategy. She gave herself to her ne.xt suitor without
scruples or a promise of marriage, because he was an aristocrat. Nevertheless,
once having ascertained the generosity of his soul and his usefulness for her
career, she led him to the altar and remained strictly faithful to him. till death.
Charles Chlapowski (in Polish: Karol Chlapowski) paid her back with devotion
and absolute subordination of his own life to her theatre life. Thus, within
three years in Cracow, she attained noted success on stage and through
54 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 21, No. 2
marriage she entered upper class circles. 1bis allowed her to successfully apply
to the leading Polish theatre in Warsaw, Teatr Rozmaitosci, which was in fact
the Polish National Theatre (the name National Theatre-Teatr Narodowy
was prohibited by the Russian occupation authorities ruling at that time in
Warsaw). Modjeska was employed as a permanent member of the company of
the National Theatre in 1868.
The second period of Modjeska's life and career extended from 1868
to 1876: the seven years of her reign in Warsaw. There Modjeska obtained the
unquestionable position of a star, she had the right to choose her roles, and
she received a generous salary. She added many new roles to her stock
repertoire, both contemporary and classical. She mastered and refined her
acting, which became a convincing and cohesive blend of her personal
characteristics (beauty, sensitivity, delicacy, intelligence, wit, elegance) with
stage means of expression (internal motivation of actions, voice control, sense
of tempo, measured movement, expressive gesture). In a very short time she
accomplished everything there was to be accomplished theatrically, socially,
and financially. And because there was so much of everything and it all came
so quickly-she started to be threatened by a spiritual emptiness.
Such an internal feeling of bareness often arises when one no longer
sets for oneself harder goals and, also, does not receive from the surroundings
new challenges, stimuli, and inspiration. At the same time, the combination of
Modjeska's high earnings and sudden theatrical and social successes earned her
the dislike and even the hatred that the mediocre always bestow upon the
great; she focused upon herself the jealousy of the theatrical community and
the enmity of some journalists. She started to suffocate in Warsaw. For two
reasons, indivisibly interconnected, she decided to leave the country. First, she
desired to advance her career, to conquer stages in other countries, to follow in
the footsteps of other actors and actresses who, with great success, performed
on foreign stages and in foreign tongues. As we know, at that time there were
quite a few such actors, as well as singers, and among the latter were several
Poles as well. Modjeska would see them from time to time performing in
Warsaw and heard about them quite often. She even played with some of
them. Second, her personal life in Poland had become unbearable. She was the
object of the love of the public, as well as of the passion of many individual
admirers, but, at the same time, she was surrounded by envy and was the
subject of spoken and printed insults. At every possible opportunity she was
reminded of every one of her sins, both present and past, actual and
fabricated.
The third period of Modjeska's epic story is her thirty-three years as
an emigre (1876-1909), including thirty years on stage (1877 -1907).
55
Overcoming enormous difficulties thro1,1gh hard work, laboriously learning the
English language, mercilessly overtaxing her strength, Modjeska made her
American debut on August 20, 1877, in San Francisco, roughly a year after her
arrival in America. She quickly attained the status of a star in the American
theatre, and later on, in the international theatrical world. She enriched her
acting with new means of expression indispensable for communication with a
new public: without losing her inner power and delicate acting shades, she
developed more appealing and penetrating external expression. Abroad she
made gains not only . theatrically but socially as well, establishing new
acquaintances in the highest American, British, and French social and artistic
spheres. Henry Longfellow, the prince of American poets, and Alfred
Tennyson, the prince of British poets, became her dear friends. She was
received in Buckingham Palace.
She advanced financially as well. Her earnings, measured according to
today's pay scales, would be comparable to b o u ~ three million dollars for one
tour (at a rough calculation). Such an income permitted quite an opulent life
style. Her husband, however, squandered much of it on poorly planned
investments. Their residence in Arden in California (built in 1888) absorbed
massive sums of money. She frequently toured America, and also performed
successfully in Britain, Ireland, as well as in Prague (then, under Austrian rule)
where she played in Polish. As a star of world renown, she made guest
appearances in Poland, where she was always welcomed with enthusiasm and
pride, and was bid farewell to with regret, though-by some-with relie
This brief look at Modjeska's life and career reveals that it is a saga of
constant growth, change, and transformation-always for the better, always
for something higher, brighter, more refined. It is fascinating to see how this
woman and this actress labored on her own character and did not cease to
work on the new roles while bettering the old ones.
At the beginning of her career she was not required to work too hard.
When she first went on stage, Modjeska had to learn a new' role, some of them
rather small, every two weeks. Today this may seem a lot, but it was norma:l in
small nineteenth-century traveling companies. But when she was engaged in
Cracow, the number of new roles jumped to average of one per week,
including many leads. In a season of about forty weeks (from September to
June), she played about forty roles. It was an enormous challenge, and
Modjeska rose to the occasion. The number of the parts diminished in
Warsaw, but included revisions of those already played, in which she was
improving nuances and developing new interpretations; in all her parts she
strove for perfection.
Already in Poland, hard work became a characteristic of her
personality. But she was to be really tested in America. Her struggle with the
56 Slavic aJJd East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
English language was a heroic venture. She had learned some English in
Poland, but upon arriving in America she discovered that she practically could
not speak the language. She hired a tutor, Joanna Tuholski, and worked with
her for up to sixteen hours per day-determined, obstinate and stubborn. An
anecdote recounts special diction exercises devised by Tuholski for Modjeska:
"11urty- three thirsty thieves-thick though thin, throw the thrift." The actress
would repeat one word four, six, ten times, one line of Adrienne Lecouvreur
(which she prepared for her audition and than debut in America) for five, or as
many as twenty times.
In her lifetime she played about 260 roles, among them were sixteen
Shakespearean roles, including her favorites: Rosalind, Viola, and Lady
Macbeth. All together, she appeared in Shakespeare 2250 times, most
frequendy as Lady Macbeth-more then 500 times. She played about twenty
roles in both Polish and English. She made twenty-three tours all over the
United States, ranging from a couple of weeks to more than thirty weeks in
length, perfornling about 200, sometimes 300 performances per year, on
hundreds of different stages, during different seasons of the year, in different
climates and temperatures. She travded no less then fifteen times back to
Europe and toured Poland and Great Britain.
Hard work went together with an iron will. Not from the very
beginning, though. As a young "ingenue" on stage, she was naive and
imprudent in life, especially in her contacts with men, drifting as emotions
would steer her, changing traveling companies, moving from town to town.
After her separation with her lover-impresario and engagement in Cracow, that
changed. She started independendy and responsibly to forge her life style and
career. When she married-legally and formally-she became an unblenlished
wife, faithful to her husband. Despite the passionate love. offered her by
Henryk Sienkiewicz, an aspiring Warsaw journalist, and later famous writer
and Nobel prize winner, she did not enter into a love affair with him. She
probably reciprocated his feelings, but there's not the slightest evidence that
she had any sexual relationship with him. Of course, as an actress, for long
periods of time on tour, constantly bombarded by expressions of adnliration
and even blunt and potentially profitable offers, Modjeska had endless
opportunities for cheating on her husband. But, again, there's not even the
slightest evidence that it ever happened. She proved the strength of her will in
life. She proved it in theatre. Without such deternlination she would not have
succeeded either in Poland or in America.
Beautiful, charnling, and graceful, she gradually acquired total control
of her means of expression. As a mature actress she molded her own style: it
combined realism with romantic stylization, natural speech with elevated tone,
57
although always subdy modulated, and both authenticity and an idealization of
the characters presented. She was one of the first great stage masters who
promoted "truth" as a new model of acting. She used psychological processes,
emotions, voice, and body with naturalness and ease, as well as discipline and
control. She combined and/ or intertwined maiden weakness and tenderness
with queenly strength and domination. Famous were her lowered tones of
voice and her seldom used abrupt raising of her voice to a scream. Also
praised were her unexpected collapses, her faintings, her scenes of madness
(Lady Macbeth), of poisoning (Adrienne Lecouvreur), of preparation for death
(Mary Stuart), and of death itself Ouliet).
In her youth she probably did not take care of others much, but once
she began to be paid well and, very soon, to earn exorbitandy, she generously
supported her mother, many members of her extended family, and very often
strangers who wrote to her asking for help. She gave significant sums to
different charities, including the founding of a school of folk art for girls in
Zakopane, Poland. Her own education ended on a level comparable to a
contemporary American middle school. In later years she read extensively and
became very knowledgeable, especially in the dramatic literature of the world,
both classical and contemporary. Probably because of her lack of more
extensive and profound studies, she deliberately surrounded herself with highly
educated people, writers, intellectuals, painters, musicians from whom she
could learn through conversation.
In her school, run by Roman Catholic nuns, she acquired the basic
tenets of a religious and moral education, but it seems that as a young woman
she did not follow these instructions. Her interest in faith and religious
practices was, most probably, instigated by unusual and dramatic development .
.One of her Warsaw's admirers, a talented painter, Adam Chrnielowski, who
was even supposed to go with Modjeska and her party to America, informed
her in a letter that he had renounced the world and entered a monastery; he
took the name of brother Albert. He devoted himself entirely to serving
homeless people, created a special order specializing in this ministry, and
attracted many followers. The austerity and sanctity of his life were widely
known and after his death was confirmed by his elevation to sainthood in
1980s. [See SEEP, volume 20, no. 3, Fall 2000, for a review of Wojtyla's Our
God's Brother.] Brother Albert wrote letters to Modjeska containing spiritual
guidance. On a visit to Poland in 1884, she met him and listened to his
teachings and advice. Her later life indicates that she took much of it seriously.
An additional thread, not existing in early years, began to appear in
Modjeska's life in the 1880s: her patriotism and devotion to the cause of her
oppressed nation. For years she had lived in the world of art, enclosed by the
walls of the theatre. She was not a "political woman." Gradually, she started to
58
Slavic and Ea.st E11ropean Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
learn that in Poland no one could escape from politics, and that an artist could
not be politically indifferent, even an actor, because just one step off the stage,
just beyond the foot-lights, there was the real world of the oppressed country,
the everyday life of the nation subjected to a hated foreign rule.
Modjeska's patriotic and later clearly political involvement was
probably triggered by a tragic event during her guest appearance in Warsaw in
1880. At the end of one of her performances, during the endless curtain calls, a
group of high school students approached the stage, throwing flowers. Amidst
the applause and acclamations a wreath with two sashes--one white, one red
(the Polish national colors)--fell at the actress's feet. She picked it up from the
bed of flowers covering the stage and pressed it to her bosom. The audience
rose. The clapping was deafening. The group of students near the stage loudly
chanted her name. There was no end to the ovations. The following day all of
these students were expelled from their high school by the Russian authorities,
with an additional punishment, a "black ticket," prohibiting them from ever
attending any other school. The next day one of them shot himself. Modjeska
participated in his funeral, amid the innumerable crowd, carrying the same
wreath with national colors she had received on the stage. We may only guess
what she thought and felt.
In 1885, Modjeska played for a week in Dublin, received
enthusiastically by the audiences. This was especially the case when she played
Mary Stuart, the deposed Scottish monarch. Her every word, directed against
Queen Elizabeth and the English government, evoked tremendous
acclamation and frantic applause. After her last appearance Modjeska gave a
speech from the stage, stating that the predicaments of Poland and Ireland
were similar in both nations' misfortunes and oppression, and likewise in their
hopes and constant prayers for freedom. The public responded with a patriotic
manifestation. To calm down the excited Irish, the British police kidnapped
the actress and removed her from Dublin for several hours. When she
returned, she gave another speech from the balcony of her hotel, purportedly
saying: "I love Ireland! I pray for your freedom! I beseech you to pray for the
freedom of Poland!" That instigated the crowd's ovation and riots-brutally
suppressed by the police and soon denounced by the London press, which
fiercely attacked the actress.
In 1891, reciting poetry at a concert in Warsaw raising funds for
students, Modjeska delivered a patriotic poem of the playwright and poet
59
60
Emigri Queen at The Project Arts Center Theatre,
Medea Productions, Dublin, Ireland, 1990
Directed by Kazimierz Braun,Teresa Sawicka as Modjeska
S /avic a11d East Europe all PerformaNce Vol. 21, No. 2
Emigri Quem at The Polonia Theatre, Toronto, Canada, 1992
Directed by Jan Kopczewski, Maria Nowotarska as Modjeska
61
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Emigri Q11m1 at Teatr im. Slowackiego, Cracow, Poland, 1993.
Directed by Jan Kopczewski. Maria Nowotarska as Modjeska.
very funny to see Beshaw's head appear from below the stage, but her own
face, pouting and grimacing, is also better equipped to express Mefystofl's
considerable consternation at the impossible tasks Faust asks of him than the
permanently grinning marionette.
Beshaw's head is not the first to appear on the stage. In the first
scene, we ftnd Faust sitting in his study, recounting his interest in the dark arts.
As he continues to explain his desire to go beyond all earthly boundaries of
propriety, he stands up to reveal that he has been sitting on Hoi:ejS's head.
Hoiejs, whose head resembles Faust's without modification, continues to
speak his lines as Faust paces back and forth, either indicating that Faust is of
two minds in his struggle to decide which path to take or that he has lost his
head altogether.
A scene titled "In the Depths of the Sea" shows Faust's underwater
travels to Wittenburg from the land of the Portugaliens, where he had
sununoned Helen of Troy and Alexander the Great at the bidding of the
lustful King and Queen. Although this scene is completely superfluous to the
plot, it contains a very memorable, humorous, and rather repulsive image. A
real chicken carcass, fully rigged with marionette strings, flies by the other
denizens of the deep, flapping its featherless wings. It is, of course, the
chicken of the sea.
Faust is eventually whisked away to hell after the agreed lapse of
time, even though he attempts to prevent the devil from gaining entrance to
his house by his stationing two neighbors, Dumpling (performed by James
Bowen) and Bigcheez (performed by Molly Parker), both of whom meet their
demise at the hands of Mefysto1. The painted backdrop of Faust's study falls
to reveal the legs of the performers, who are all dressed in red shorts. A. single
devilish hand reaches up from the trap while all of the devil marionettes used
in the show descend from above to carry Faust away, and as the moral of the
play sung by the cast.
Johannes Dokchtor Faust is a staple of the CA?YIT repertory, first
performed in 1990 and periodically revised ever since. Billed as a show for
ages 6-106, it truly is entertaining for children and adults. Perhaps a little scary
for the smaller children and a little slow during Faust's longer philosophical
speeches, it is nonetheless an interesting production, creatively utilizing a blend
of innovation and convention to continue a tradition that deserves life. It is
far preferable for the stars of the show, including the 150-year old black devil
marionette made by Mikulas Sychrovsq of Mirotice, a village in South
Bohemia, to continue being active participants on the stage rather than
languishing in a display case.
88 Slavic and East Europtan Pnformance Vol. 21, No. 2
the script and makes many modifications, adding topical lines that refer to
contemporary issues, such as Rudy Giuliani's battle with the Brooklyn
Museum. Following the Czech marionette tradition, Horejs mi..xes the old with
the new in this "Petrifying Puppet Comedye" in order to continue the "living
tradition" of puppetry.
1
Highlighting the comic nature of the play, Faust is often upstaged by
his comic servant Pimprle, a squat, toad-like marionette with red pants,
suspenders, and peaked hat. Theresa Linnihan, a CAMT regular, gives him a
squeaky voice with a decidedly New York Yiddish accent. His main concerns
are, of course, food and money. The characterization of Pimprle is based on a
staple character of the Czech marionette theatre, the trickster figure Kasparek.
The marionette itself, however, is not a traditional Kasparek puppet, but is an
original invention of Dusan Petran, a self-taught puppet-maker. Linnihan
moves him with a side to side motion that accentuates his bodily physique-
the marionette's legs are bent and jut out from his sides. When he is not
capering about, he is squatting on the floor, his paunch preventing him from
rolling forward. Perhaps as an indicator of his mental abilities, Pimprle's head
is only loosely attached and often lolls about, corning off completely in some
scenes. Typical of the CAMT style, the puppet's bodily quirks are taken
advantage of rather than being compensated for. If an ann comes off, that's
just a hazard of puppetry and simply becomes part of the show.
Pimprle's big scene is in the forest after Faust has signed his deal with
the devil. Utilizing the protective power of Faust's magic circle and two words
("Padluke" and "Pidluke") he has learned from a quick perusal of a book of
magic, Pimprle summons and banishes Mefystofl repeatedly until the devil is
exhausted and pleads to return to hell for a comfortable night's sleep.
Mefystofl is portrayed by a number of devil marionettes, similar in
appearance- a bald head with horns, a hairy body, and one cloven foot- but
varying in size from approximately one to three feet. The main Devil
marionette is 80-100 years old and was made by Karek K.rob from the town of
Vyssi Brod Qater Kladno), a mason and a cobbler who worked for
Munzberger, a company that manufactured marionettes and published puppet
plays. A smaller copy was made by Dusan Petran and two larger copies were
made by Vaclav Krcal. Oftentimes Horejs experiments with multiple
representations of the same character and differences in scale to create
humorous and visually captivating moments.
Deborah Beshaw, another CAMT regular, plays the role of Mefystofl
with just enough menace as befits a prince of hell and enough buffoonery to
prevent the small children in the audience from being completely frightened.
In one scene Beshaw's head, with bald cap and red plastic horns, pops up
from the stage trap when summoned by Faust to do his bidding. Not only is it
87
johan11es Dokchtor Faust, translated and directed by Vit Horejs
86
Slavic a11d East Europea11 Performmrce Vol. 21, No.2
Vit Hoiejs and the puppet l\lefystofl
85
THE CZECHOSLOVAK-AMERICAN MARIONETTE THEATRE:
FAUST AND THE FOOL
Lars Myers
Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre (CAM1) productions
are playful and irreverent, with a great deal of tongue-in-cheek. Besides
tongues and cheeks there are also heads, arms, and legs--body parts abound.
Some belong to puppets, others belong to actors, and all burst forth from
various parts of the stage, flying hither and thither. Dismemberment and Limb
intervention are recurring themes in CAMf productions (Twelve Iron Sandals,
Rusafka, and Go/em). CAMf productions highlight the visibility of the
puppeteers, often costuming the performer in the same garb as the marionette
they manipulate, foregrounding the relationship between the two. However, in
CAMf's latest production of Johannes Dokchtor Faust, the puppeteers are mostly
hidden behind the marionette-sized proscenium stage. Mostfy. Head's pop up
from stage traps. A forest scene is represented by the legs of the puppeteers
who wear pants resembling trees.
Vit Hoiejs, CAMf founder and director, does not deny the existence
of the manipulator, nor does he ever disguise that what we are watching is a
show. Johannes Dokchtor Faust is unabashedly silly and humorously self-
referential, completely lacking in any pretension. Although the marionettes are
all beautiful, many of them antique treasures, the performance is not about
how pretty they are, nor is it about how well the puppeteers manipulate them,
even though they are all quite skilled. The performance is replete with
marionette tricks-of-the-trade as well as imaginative twists that undermine old
rules of puppet propriety.
Horejs introduces the play in typical fairground fashion, hawking his
wares as he stands in front of the puppet stage. He sells the audience on the
story by giving us an idea of what we are about to see: resurrected rulers and
magnificent maidens, magical marvels and dastardly devils, terrible tricks and
Faust's frightful fate. The Faust story, one of the best known and most
frequently reworked tales in the western canon, is here presented as "A
Petrifying Puppet Comedye Starring 100-year old puppets." Despite the
Elizabethan language in the title, this version of Faust is not based on
Marlowe's "lamentable tragedy."
According to Horejs, Faust is a staple of the Czech puppet tradition,
going back several hundred years. Not until the nineteenth century was a
puppet-version of the script committed to writing, since puppeteers before
that time were for the most part illiterate. Hoiejs utilizes the basic structure of
84
Slavic and East European Peiformam-e Vol. 21, No.2
NOTES
1 Allison Hodge "WiodzimierL Staniewski: Gardzienice and the naturalized actor"
Twentieth Century Actor Training ff--ondon: Routledge, 2000) pg.227.
83
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Metamorphom, Part IT-Demonstration,
directed by Wlodzimierz Staniewski.
Pictured: Joanna
allowed to see it from an other side." Then I take this vase and I
throw it down on the ground -- that's the second part.
Then we walk around and pick up the parts. Maybe Tomasz
Rodowicz, (a principal actor and collaborator with Gardzienice) says,
"Perhaps, we should choose this part." Usually, I do the picking up
and choose what to show to the public. "Oh! Look at that! What is
this part here, this dance? Dorota Porowska(another principal
collaborator), what is this?"
In this way, the second part, the theatrical essay, is a formalized
gathering.
Staniewski would prefer to perform in people's homes and
neighborhoods but the logistics of making such arrangements on a tour to
New York are formidable. After the New York performances, the company
left for New Mexico where they did a gathering at the Zuni Pueblo in a
presentation that was more suited to Gardzienice's performance objectives.
Staniewski: Performing in people's homes would be the best New
York experience. This is what we do when we are on expeditions in,
what I call, hidden territories, villages, settlements. That is what
happened in Zuni. We were invited to a home. The house was big
enough for us to do our play, or part of our play, our songs, our
dances and they would bring in theirs. It is not a question of
exchange. It is a question of one's own feelings and energy and of the
coincidence of one's spirit and the spirituality of that house. Ellen
Stewart's theatre, La Mama, was somehow like someone's house.
81
Babb: It reminds me of the stage assistant in the Japanese theatre
who is both absent and present at the same time.
Staniewsk.i: On a theoretical level, yes.
The performance of Metamorphoses was followed by a brief " theatrical
essay" in which Staniewski and the actors demonstrated some of the
techniques that the company used to revitalize the ancient musical sources of
Greek theatre. This section of the evening's theatrical event was very different
from the highly charged and focused performance. Here, the actors were
relaxed and loose, and Staniewski lead the demonstration in a charming yet
masterful manner. The spectators were shown, with the use of slides and
projections, how movement sequences were generated out of the static stances
painted on pottery or carved into stone reliefs. A small papyrus fragment of
Euripides's Iphigenia in Au/is was displayed on the back curtain and the
company demonstrated how they used irregular rhythms to energize the
dynamics of the verse. Many spectators remarked on the interpenetration of
the two parts of the evening and were as appreciative of the theatrical essay as
of the performance. The performative styles of the two parts of the evening
were intriguing in their differences and engaging in the ways in which they
complimented each other. It would not be inappropriate to contrast the
Dionysian aspects of Metamorphoses with the more Appolinian qualities of the
"theatrical essay."
Staniewski refers to the second part of the evening as a "formalized
gathering". Gardzienice has spent more than twenty years in the remote parts
of Poland and other countries investigating indigenous or "native" cultures.
Expeditions to rural communities to share performances and encounter the
remnants of folk culture resulted in the concept of gatherings. Allison Hodge
in Twentieth-Century Actor Training writes: "These gatherings became encounters
where song, myths, dances, rituals and oral histories of the Eastern Polish
villages could be enacted or retold and in which Gardzienice also sang and
presented fragments of their work."
1
In an urban setting like New York City,
where this type of interchange is almost impossible, the "formalized gathering"
1s a comprorruse.
80
Stanicwski: Let us use another metaphor. You have a vase, which is
structured beautifully, properly executed, finely painted, a beautiful
artifact. You show it to the public. You put it in a museum. You put
it on a shelf. That is what you see. "Oh, what a flne structure. What
flne painting, but I only see it from one side because I am not
Slavic and East European Petformante Vol. 21, No.2
back sang into each other's ears and mouths and then this singing was sent
forward to the figures in front who sang out to the audience.
Mouth singing, in which two performers sing into each other's
mouths, is a practice inspired by Greenland Intuit singing and developed by
the company in Poland. On a technical level, the actors create dissonance by
singing at short intervals. The result is a strange but attractive overtone. This
technique also creates a strong image of connection between two performers
that illustrates another of Gardzienice's key principles, mutuality.
Staniewsk.i: Our work is profoundly devoted to two persons, what we
call mutuality. This technique serves to amplify the state of being of
the partner and expand it. I often say, " Forget about yourself. Create
your partner or enlighten your partner. Be a double, as Artaud would
say, reveal your partner from those sides, that would be invisible,
unheard, imperceptible, if on stage alone. Although this begins to
sound like a metaphor, in actual practice it is very hard and
sometimes causes suffering. This is what we call constellation. I
believe neither in ensemble work nor in solo work. I do not believe
in theatrical theories that ideologize the strength and power of acting
in groups. I believe in constellations because ~ creation of energy
and proper chemistry depends on the way people are linked together.
The exact relationship of the partners is what counts, it must be just
this person, at this particular time, confronting that particular task .
Babb: Is it always two people? Could it be three?
Staniewsk.i: There is another mystery of three, just as there is the
mystery of two. The third one, the one who protects the energy,
behaves as a guardian angel. The third person offers assistance at all
times, moving and dancing around. The third person is like a servant
who helps very practically, watching to see that nothing wrong
happens and that all the incidents are safe. (Another theory that I
have is about incidents. One has to direct in a way that provokes
incidents or unexpected acts, but they must be safe.) The third
person, who constantly circulates around the two actors or singers, is
the figure d'amore, the player of love. The third person protects the
very mysterious, fragile act in which he and she, or he and he, or she
and she, are the players. Often I am that person and later I replace
myself with someone else on the stage. The third person is a very
important link.
79
In Metamorphoses, the actors perform at extreme levels of
concentration and intensity. We often see the performers singing into each
other's mouths, creating compelling overtones as well as riveting visual images.
Circuits of energy pass between the performers and then are funneled to the
audience. The electric analogy is useful in that it brings to mind the concept of
flow; it also suggests the potential power and danger in Gardzienice's
performance. At one point, it seemed to me that the piece was being
propelled by the furious pumping of the harmonium with which the
remarkable actress Marianna Sadowska accompanies the choral singing. I was
particularly interested in the energy of the performance and asked Staniewski
how it was harnessed and directed.
Staniewski: Energy is the crucial task for every work, but because
this term is so devaluated, it is easier to talk about it from an
industrial or technological point of view than from a human point of
view. Energy is a great challenge for us. The problem is not with the
sources of energy but rather with the way energy is dispersed, the way
of concentrating energy, of focusing it like a laser.
I always tell the actors: "Decide what you are working with. What are
the means of expression and what is the purpose in using these
means of expression." The main purpose should always be to
accumulate the energy and make it function.
The performance is structured from small pieces that are like small
dramas; in every small part, you have an actor (visible or invisible on
the stage) whose task it is to accumulate the energy of others.
Babb: There is somebody who is responsible.
Staniewski: That's right. For that small fragment of the performance,
this actor is like, let us say, a medicine man or sorcerer, someone
whose task is to serve, so that energy is prevented from being
dispersed.
In fact, I was able to observe in the performance of Metamorphoses,
actors who were visibly conducting the singing or separate groups of singers
who seemed to be driving the pace of a particular section. The role of
conductor or chorus leader shifted from section to section, creating different
focal points of energy as well as subtle changes in the mood and tempo of the
piece. At times, there was a sense of the singing being aimed; the singers in the
78
S lavi.- and East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No. 2
Metamorphoses, directed by Wlodzimierz Staniewski.
Pictured: Tomasz Rodowicz and l\lariusz Gotaj
77
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Metamorphoses, directed by Wlodzimierz Staniewski.
Pictured: Mariusz Gotaj, Elzbieta Rojek,
Britta Forslund, Joanna Holcgreber
AN INTERVIEW WITH
WLODZIMIERZ STANIEWSKI OF GARDZIENICE
Roger Babb
After attending two performances of Gardzienice's Metamorphoses at
La Mama in New York City, I interviewed Wlodzimierz Staniewski, the
company's founder and director on February 9, 2001. I had previously seen an
earlier version of the same piece at Central Connecticut State University in
1998, in the company of a group of interested theatre artists from New York.
[See Susan Tenneriello's review in SEEP, Volume 19, no. 1, Spring 1999.]
Gardzienice had not performed in New York since 1988 and for Metamorphoses,
La Mama was sold out during the week of its run. Audiences included
distinguished theatre artists and scholars such as Joseph Chaikin, Andre
Gregory and Richard Schechner but also, most encouragingly, many younger
artists and students. The performances I saw were fully charged and
committed, performed at a level of energy that is rarely seen these days in New
York. One remembers other performances at La Mama's famous Annex
theatre: Tadeusz Kantor's Dead Class; Peter Brook's Ubu Roi and Les Iks;
Andre Serban's Greek Trilogy. It was exiting and encouraging seeing a new
generation of spectators once again moved and excited by a theatre event.
Metamorphoses is loosely based on Apuleius's The Golden Ass, a second
century A.D. satirical romance that allows Staniewski to examine the interplay
between the older Greek deities of Apollo and Dionysus and the newer god
Christ. Images from The Golden Ass provide a structure on which Staniewski,
the company's composer, Maciej Rychly, and company members arrange
sixteen songs and hymns based on ancient Greek music from the fifth to the.
second century B.C.
Singing lies at the heart of Gardzienice's work. Much of the action
and movement in their pieces is generated from group singing, and
"musicality" provides a key principle to their aesthetic. Metamorphoses is driven
by singing and music; the performers seem to be fuelled by the dynamics of its
choral structure. The music often proceeds at an urgent, irregular pace with
occasional lyrical interludes. The singers, intensely focused, appear to be
willing to offer up some psychic portion of themselves in the evocation of the
music. The company speaks of the songs as being "brought into being". These
songs and hymns are often in praise of Apollo or Dionysus, adapted from
papyrus fragments and stone stellae; Gardzienice's great gift is to provide the
audience with a connection to the fundamental power of the sacred music.
75
NOTES
1
Presented at La Mama E.T.C., February 14 and 17,2001.
2 Barborn Dvorakova, review of Armageddon on the GRB HiU in Sme a Smma, January 23,
1999. Quoted in the program notes to the La Mama performance.
74 Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 21, No.2
they relate to Sloboda's (or perhaps, more appropriately, Klara's) story, but
seems to wish to unite them in the spectator's subconscious. It may, in fact,
be more accurate to suggest that reality, fantasy, and memory are not only all
present, but are intertwined and indistinguishable in the story-unified not by
the spectator's subconscious, but by Klara's.
The success of Divadlo Astorka's production is due in large part to
the fine direction of Juraj Nvota as well as several very impressive
performances by the theatre's ensemble cast. Vladimir Hajdu (Rudi), Marian
Zednikovic (Vinco), and L'udovit Moravcik Ooze), all deftly move between
the serious and comic modes in the play and lend humanity to charcters who
at times seem to be intentionally one-dimensional. Without doubt, however,
Armageddon on the GRB Hill owes the largest debt to the work of Zita Furkova
in her portrayal of Klara. Furkova, for whom the role was written, gives a
remarkable performance in portraying the many moods and personalities of
Klara through the play and is largely responsible for maintaining the unreal
atmosphere of the play as we view it through her psyche. While it may well be
the case that what we see on stage is at times fantastic, it is crucial that Klara
always see the world as completely real. Furkova effectively conveys just how
real this world is to Klara, while at the same time, reminding us that the eyes
through which we see the play are quite prone to flights of fancy.
Rudolf Sloboda's own suicide in 1995 reinforced a theory popular
among many Slovak critics that the play was in large part autobiographical,
based in large part on the experiences of Sloboda and his mother. This idea
was already prevalent at the time of the play's premiere in 1993, and Sloboda is
known for a tendency toward autobiography in his work. But Sloboda's
suicide by hanging, the same method used by Arthur in the play, made the
connection all the more poignant, as life suddenly seemed to painfully imitate
art. As Barbara Dvorakova noted after the play's one-hundreth performance,
"Today, after the author's voluntary death, the work reveals the playwright,
unfortunately, in other ways than at the premiere. At that time the play was
speaking about his world, his vision of life. Today it better betrays his
imaginations and thoughts of death."
2
Interestingly, however, Sloboda seemed
to suggest that the play reflected a vision that was neither exclusively about life
or death, but rather about both, for as I have already noted, while the title may
invoke armageddon, its subtitle ensures that it is indeed full of life.
73

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71
70
Slavic and East European Petformam-e Vol. 21, No. 2
Armageddon is not, however, neatly divided into scenes of reality and
scenes of Klara's dreams and imaginings. Instead, the entire play has an unreal
quality in which it becomes difficult to discern just what reality is.
The unstable ontology of the world onstage becomes particularly
clear with the entrance of Vinco, who will ultimately become Klara's third
husband. Vinco is distinguished by the two horns protruding from his head.
"Normal men don't have such horns," remarks K.lara, to which Vinco retorts,
"I don't have a conscience, I have horns instead." This exchange, as well as
the horns themselves, seem to establish Vinco as something of a devil figure,
an impression only reinforced by his offer to K.lara of a vial of poison for her
to use to kill Jozef in order to escape their loveless marriage. And yet, this
impression is strikingly undercut as the first act ends with the entrance of a
strikingly beautiful angel in a shroud of mist. As the angel walks out of Klara's
room she is accompanied by Vinco, throwing his devilishness into question.
Finally, the subjectivity of the world we have been shown is emphasized by
Klara's admission, with which the act closes, that she is insane and needs
treatment.
The play's climax comes in the middle of the second act as Klara
accidentally shoots Vinco with his own revolver. Vinco had already warned
earlier in the scene of the coming Armageddon, but with this action, the events
that he had told of come to pass and the stark, bare realism of Klara's room is
replaced with an equally stark, but remarkable (and very
Beckettian) landscape of one bare red tree and a white slope. Inhabiting this
world are Klara and her three husbands, and K.lara is informed by the angel,
who seems to have been given a mission to make sense of these wayward lives,
that to love all of these men is impossible, and that she must ultimately choose
the one whom she truly loves. Klara quickly realizes that missing from the
ensemble is her son, Arthur, and she is informed that he committed suicide
and so cannot enter the "heaven" in which Klara and her husbands now live.
Throughout the comic scenes that ensue, in which the three
husbands each jockey to be Klara's eternal mate, Arthur's absence clearly preys
on Klara, until she ultimately realizes that it is indeed he whom she truly loves.
With this revelation, the angel returns to announce that Arthur will be
resurrected. At this moment, "heaven" disappears, and according to the
program notes, "We are back to the real world," which seems to mean that we
have rejoined Klara, passed out drunk on her floor once again. Was this all a
dream; a drunken vision? The program notes (indispensable for those who do
not understand Slovak) end with the statement: "Reality, fantasy, memories are
all present in Sloboda's story and they try to touch our subconscious." This
editorial note in an otherwise straightforward recounting of the events of the
play is interesting in that it chooses to separate reality, fantasy, and memory as
69
SLOVAK PERFORMANCE AT LA MAMA:
ARMAGEDDON ON THE GRB HILL-
THE END OF THE WORLD AS SHE KNEW IT
Kurt Taroff
Performed in Slovak by Divadlo Astorka Korzo '90 Theatre from
Bratislava at La Mama, E.T.C., Rudolf Sloboda's Armagedthn on the GRB Hill
presents two funerals and a post-apocalyptic afterlife as a unique perspective
from which to examine a woman's life.
1
Klara, the play's protagonist, may also
be considered its author, as the play takes us on a monodramatic journey
through her world. Intriguingly subtitled ''Requiem Full of Life," Sloboda's
play explores the troubled existence of a woman in her final years.
Armagedthn reflects an uncertain world in which things are often not
what they seem on the surface. Ultimately, it becomes clear that what we see
before us onstage cannot necessarily be taken as objective reality, but rather as
a mentally subjective landscape, emanating from the mind of the play's central
character, Klara. By and large, the setting emphasizes the proximity of Klara's
vision of the world to the "real" world by keeping most of the play inside her
small apartment. This does not, however, mean that everything that we see
within the apartment is to be taken as "real," as dead men, devils, and angels,
all seem to appear in Klara's reality. Even near its end, when the play seems to
move outside of Klara's apartment, we find that this change in scenery was
indeed more mental than physical.
While the program notes state that the play opens with a requiem for
Klara that also functions as a funeral for Klara's first husband, Rudi. Klara
seems to move on rather quickly after Rudi's death, as in the very next scene
she is preparing to sleep with the man who will soon become her second
husband, Jozef. It is here that the unreal nature of much of the play first
becomes apparent. Time in particular is brought into question, as the passage
between Rudi's funeral, Klara's initial discussions with Jozef and their marriage
takes mere moments, with no scene changes to suggest the passage of time.
Furthermore, Rudi's appearance onstage several scenes after his funeral leaves
the audience wondering just what is going on. We soon begin to realize that
Klara's drinking habit (in one early scene Klara's son and granddaughter walk
in to Klara's apartment, only to find her passed out on the floor), as well as her
dreams and lonely imaginings, leave her subject to visions and hallucinations to
which we are witness.
68
Slavic at1d East Europeatl Perfomlall<'e Vol. 21, No.2
Terlecki, Tymon. Pani Helena. Opowieft biograficzna o Helenie Modr.(!jewskitj
London, 1962.
67
SELEC1ED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arthur, George. From Phelps to Gielgud. London, 1936. (Chapter V: Moo/eska].
Bojarska, Anna. Modrz!iewska: OpowiefC filmowa. Warszawa, 1990.
Braun, Kazimierz. Hekna: Rzecz o Modrz!iewskiej. Toronto, 1993.
Coleman, Marion. Fair Rosalind: The American Career of Helena Mor!Jeska.
Cheshire, CT, 1969.
Coleman, Prudden and Marion Coleman. Wanderers Twain, Mor!Jeska and
Sienkiewict a View from California. Cheshire, CT, 1964.
Colins, Marbel. The Story of Helena Mor!Jeska. London, 1983.
Gerould, Daniel. "Modjeska Helena." International Dictionary ofThealre, 3.
Actors, Directors and Designers. New York, 1996.
Granowicz, Antoni. Mor!Jeska: Her Life and Loves. New York, 1956.
Hekna Modrz!iewska no scenie krakowskiej 1965-1969. Album. Red. Maria
Dobrowolska. Cracow, 1956.
Kompondenga Heletry Modrz!iewskiej i Karola Chlapowskiego. Red. Jerzy Got,J6zef
Szczublewski. Warszawa, 1965.
Kydrynski,Juliusz. Gwiazda dwoch kontynen!Ow. Warszawa, 1989.
Modjeska, Helena. Memories and Impressions. An Autobiography. New York, 1910.
Payne, Theodore. Life on the Moo/eska Ranch in the Gt!J Nineties. Los Angeles,
1962.
Szczublewski, J6zef. Hekna Modrz!iewska. Warszawa, 1959.
Szczublewski, J 6zef. Zywot Modrz!iewskiej. Warszawa, 197 5.
66 Slavic and E aJI European Performanu Vol. 21, No. 2
of Arc. Among Polish artists, before Modjeska, such a lofty role was assigned
to the Romantic "poet-prophets" (as they were called), Adam Mickiewicz,
Juliusz S1owacki, and Zygmunt Krasinski. During Modjeska's lifetime it was
only Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of epic novels that helped to restore national
pride and strengthen national spirit, who was elevated to this status. Later the
role belonged to the pianist-virtuoso, composer, politician and philanthropist,
Ignacy Paderewski.
It is worthwhile to return to Modjeska for inspiration, strength, and
advice. Her life and art prove that truth and beauty still exist and are possible.
Both on stage and in life.
65
Krasinski, whose works were prohibited by censorship. For this act of bold
defiance of the Russian authorities she was fined a large sum (200 rubles) and
reprimanded by the police. In 1893, at an International Women's Convention
in Crucago, Modjeska delivered a long speech, which was a blunt and
uncompromising condemnation of the foreign powers oppressing Poland. She
said: ''Being deprived of its political independence, Poland is hampered in
every manifestation of its vitality. Those who have taken away from us our
national existence try to make the whole world believe that there is not, that
there never was, such a tl:llng as the Polish nation. They endeavor to obliterate
from the annals of humanity the history of Poland; to restrict, if not entirely
prohibit, the use of our language; to hinder the development of every progress,
be it economic, intellectual, or social. Three neighboring monarchies formed a
so called holy alliance in order to crush and tear to pieces our unfortunate
country, which was then the only representative of self-government and
personal liberty; when not satisfied with the annexation and division of
Poland, they robbed and pillaged our land from end to end, stabbing the very
heart of our national life, destroying our institutions, persecuting our language
and religion, shutting all gates of civilization and progress." Her speech,
translated into Polish, started to be circulated underground in handwritten
leaflets throughout Poland. As a consequence, when she arrived for a planned
tour in Poland two years later (1895), she was first prohibited to play in Kalisz
(a town under Russian rule), and than expelled by the police from Warsaw.
From then on, she was never able to return to the part of Poland governed by
the Russians.
She earned her position of prominence by incredibly hard work.
Thanks to her endurance, nobility, generosity, and courage, Helena Modjeska
became a truly great actress-transgressing and enlarging boundaries of stage
styles and conventions-and an equally great human being--'.! person full of
goodness, generosity, and an unusual uplifting and edifying appeal. Both in life
and on stage, she radiated tremendous energy; her very presence was strong,
intriguing, and captivating; her acting was a blend of profound truth and rugh
beauty. In her case, truth and beauty must be understood as both ethical and
aesthetic categories.
As a result, Modjeska eventually became one of the great American
stars and one of the greatest interpreters of Shakespearean roles. She was
respected, admired, and loved. Her farewell ceremony in Metropolitan Opera
House in New York in 1905 was a testimony to the place in the history of
theatre that she achieved. In addition to her universal success, Modjeska
attained a special status known only in Polish culture: that of artist as spiritual
leader of the nation as well as Poland's spiritual ambassador to the world. She
became an exceptional authority, an oracle. She was spoken of as a Polish Joan
64 Slavic and East European Peiformantt Vol. 21, No. 2
Modjeska's house in Arden, California.
63
N01ES
1
Vit Horejs, Program for Johannes Dokchtor Faust, La Mama, E.T.C., March 23-
April9, 2000.
89
ORBIT MILKTOOTH FESTIVAL:
CHILDREN'S THEATRE IN CROATIA
Deborah Stein
From October 24--29, 2000, the youth of Zagreb were treated to the
second annual Orbit l\.Wktooth Festival of children's theatre. Thirteen plays,
with a total of 30 performances, were presented over the course of five days to
groups of school children ranging in age from 5 to 15. The Zagreb theatre
Mala Scena hosted ensembles from across Croatia (Zadar, Osijek, and Split) as
well as guest ensembles from Denmark.
The pairing was an inspired choice, reaching across divisions both
geographical and aesthetic. Both Croatia and Denmark have strong traditions
of respecting children's theatre as its own genre; however, the two traditions
could not be more different in style. Juxtaposing so many performances in the
span of just a few days was a thrilling lens through which to contemplate the
tradition of children's theatre in Croatia, as well as to look towards its future.
The very existence of the festival heralds a new era for the arts in
contemporary Croatia: sponsored by Wrigley Orbit, manufacturer of chewing
gum, and organized by Mala Scena, the first privately-owned children's theatre
in Croatia, the festival stands at the intersection of art and commerce. Ivica
Simic, festival organizer and founding director of Mala Scena, has spent a great
deal of time working and traveling in the west, as well as establishing a strong
base for the development of Croatian children' s theatre by serving as country
director for .Assitej, the international organization devoted to networking
children's theatres both internationally and within each member country.
Given its international bent, the festival is best understood as a series
of comparisons. The intimate, portable Danish performances played in small
rooms with limited seating, while the Croatian groups were scheduled
primarily in large halls with a capacity of hundreds. The large spaces demanded
that actors play to the last row, and performers often chose broad humor and
gesture over subtlety. Many of the Croatian pieces were raucous and
boisterous, amplifying voice, gesture, and staging. Audiences responded
accordingly; at a few performances kids hooted and hollered in the dark.
.A case in point is Bodnjak 11 goraf! (Christmas Eve in o Garage),
presented by the Children's Theatre of Osijek. The broadest and funniest
production, its pre-teen audience could have been mistaken for a crowd at a
rock concert. Every joke was played for laughs, or even better, screams.
90 Slavic and East European Peiformal/ce Vol. 21, No. 2
Geared to the humor of its target audience, this show was loose, messy and
lots of fun. The thin plot concerned a vampire who descends upon a sleepy
town; disguised as a Don Juan figure, he easily seduced the bored villagers,
satirized as two klutzy guys and two dolled-up Betty and Veronica types, a
black-clad vamp and blonde airhead. The fun really began when the
townspeople became vampires: ''Thriller" played over the loudspeakers, and
the entire 8-person cast danced a rousing send-up of the classic 1980s Michael
Jackson video. The kids went wild. For the rest of the show, bulky plastic
vampire teeth impeded the actors' speech, but the audience didn't seem to
care. The performance was a fun, almost interactive experience, translating the
Croatian tradition of performative acting into effective entertainment. Purely a
crowd-pleaser, the joy of it was the crazy lengths the company was willing to
go to ensure that everyone had a good time.
More subtle was ]a sam ja (I am Me), directed by Simic at Mala Scena.
SimiC's work benefited enormously from the lovely black box space he has
built for his company in the heart of Zagreb's Kaptol district. In ]a sam ja, a
performance for very small children, Larisa Lipovac was winning as a sweet,
ingenuous clown trying on various identities before realizing that the only true
identity is that "I am me." Lipovac provoked big giggles from her young
audience by playing joyously with a set of imaginative props and costumes.
The highlight was her brightly colored sweater with five tubes hanging from
the torso: as she "tried on" different identities, the tubes morphed into necks
and sleeves invested with transformative properties. A beautifully athletic
dancer, Lipovac moved with precision and control. The kids adored her
clowning, especially the opening bit where she played with a wooden chair,
discovering all possible uses and inventing new ones: the chair became as a
hat, a cave, a weapon, or a friend.
The joyous response of the audience to ]a sam ja was similar to the
responses of children at two Danish-language performances. The detailed
stylization of the Rio Rose and La Balance ensembles sent sighs of "wow!'
rippling through the audience, despite the language barrier. (Ihe Danish
ensembles performed in either Danish or English; most Croatian children
begin English language studies at a young age, and are accustomed to watching
English-language entertainment on television and at the movies.) These
groups guaranteed the intimacy of their shows by capping the number of
children in the audience at 80 and restricting the ages. By precisely tailoring a
performance to children of the same age (for example, ages 3-5, 6-9, etc.), the
Danish ensembles are able to speak directly to that age range and thus make a
specific, affecting work. One feels as if one is part of a privileged space, and
witness to a special, unique event.
91
A trademark of Danish children's theatre is its portability: rather than
having their own theatre buildings, these troupes travel &om school to school,
building their sets anew each day. The resulting aesthetic is at significant
counterpoint to the Croatian aesthetic. They used minimal sets and props to
great effect, making sure that everything was both multi-use and invested with
mearung.
The stage at the Mala Scena theatre is a new Croatian attempt to
achieve intimacy similar to the Danish style. This was die smallest permanent
stage I saw in Zagreb; even the young experimental troupe Tea tar Exit has a
much larger space. The plush intimacy of SimiC's new space does wonders for
his work.
The most complex of SimiC's pieces, Ojelijino kazalifte sjena (Ophelia's
Theatre of Shadows), both utilized and played against the intimacy of the Mala
Scena stage; this dissonance might be due to the fact that Simic directed the
piece for a guest company, The Virovitica Theatre. The haunting tale, based
on a story by German writer Michael Ende, follows a woman named Ophelia
who was born to parents desiring theatrical offspring. Plagued by shyness, she
instead finds employment as the person who sits in the wings feeding lines to
actors. Ophelia begins collecting a group of shadows who have lost their
owners, which she keeps in a bag. Eventually, she organizes them into a
Shadow Theatre touring group. \'<!hen Ophelia dies and goes to heaven, she
meets all the people whose shadows she rescued. SimiC's greatest innovation
was the use of shadows as characters, a simple but inventive trick that one
wishes he had taken further, rather than taking the idea of shadow-play so
literally. Nonetheless, Simic creates a magical world. The only distraction was
too much hoopla: an abundance of scene and costume changes risked
dwarfing the beautiful, sad central plot. While not risky or experimental
theatre, Ophelia's Theatre of Shadows must be admired for taking the bold step of
respecting its young audience to follow a play that is complicated both
logistically and emotionally.
The aesthetic differences between the Croatian and Danish
performances result from the different space occupied by the institution of
theatre in the two national cultures. In both countries, children's theatre is
recognized and respected as its own genre and art form; both countries
allocate various resources to the production of such shows. A weekend-long
conference of artists and producers following the festival highlighted the ways
that the arts can be determined by a wide range of cultural experiences, both
artistic and political: even the innocent realm of children's theatre cannot be
extricated from the political history of a nation. Danish children's theatre,
92 Slavic and East European Performance VoL 21, No. 2
with its origins in 1960s radicalism, receives abundant support from the
government and travels between schools because of its roots in experimental
education. Croatia's tradition of children's theatre is long-standing, and while
there are exquisite theatres in almost every city and town, these theatre
companies have received practically no government support in the 1990s.
This situation led to the involvement of Wrigley, whose "Orbit Sugarless
Gum" logo was as large as the festival title on posters and programs, and who
gave out free apple-flavored gum to all children after each show.
93
CONTRIBUTORS
ROGER BABB is the artistic director of Otrabanda Company. He teaches
theatre at Princeton University and is a doctoral candidate in the Theatre
program of the City University of New York Graduate Center.
K.i\ZIMIERZ BRt\UN is a director, writer, playwright, and scholar. He
received his Ph.D. at Wrodaw University and has published many books on
theatre history, novels, poetry, essays, and plays. He was formerly artistic
director of Wrodaw's Contemporary Theatre and is now professor of theatre
at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
JARKA BURIAN is Professor Emeritus of the Theatre Department of the
University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of The
Scenograplry cif Josif Svoboda and other studies of Svoboda, Czech theatre, and
international scenography. His Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a
Nation was recently published by the University oflowa Press.
AlLAN GRAUBARD is a poet, playwright, and critic whose works appear
frequently in art and literary magazines internationally. He has previously
collaborated with PEN Center, Zagreb, Croatia.
MARIA IGNA TIEV A is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre,
The Ohio State University (Lima Campus). Before coming to the US, she was
Assistant Professor at the Moscow Art Theatre School Studio. She co-
organized and catalogued (with Joseph Brandesky) an International Exhibition
of the Theatre Designs of Boris Anisfeld (1994-97), served as consultant on
the exhibition, Spectacular St. Petersburg, at the Columbus Museum of Art
(1999), and published an essay, ''Three Hundred Years ofTheatrical St.
Petersburg" in the CD-Rom catalog for the exhibit. She is currently working
on The Era cif Stanislavsky and Female Creativity, co-authored by Sharon Carnicke.
CAROLINE McGEE directs the 1VfF A acting program at The Catholic
University of America in Washington, DC, and tours nationally with her one-
woman performance Lache pas Ia patate, chronicling three generations of Cajun
women. She has performed at Yale Rep, Williamstown Theater Festival, and
various New York venues.
LARS MYERS is a student in the Ph.D. program at the City University of
New York Graduate Center.
DEBORAH STEIN is a writer and theatre artist working in New York and
Philadelphia. She is currently writing for the Pig Iron Theatre Company, with
94
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 21, No.2
whom she created Anocfyne, a site-specific piece about art, representation and
violence. She is working with Pig Iron on a collaboration with director Joseph
Chaikin which will premiere in Philadelphia in September 2001 and then tour
to the Theatre Confrontations Festival in Lublin, Poland.
KURT TAROFF teaches theatre and literature at York College and
Marymount Manhattan College. He is a student in the Ph.D. program at the
City University of New York Graduate Center, where he is writing his
dissertation on applications of Nikolai Evreinov's theory of monodrama.
DUBRA VKA VRGOC is a theatre critic for Vjesnik, the main daily
newspaper in Zagreb. Her articles and reviews have appeared in national and
international theatre journals and cultural magazines. She works as dramaturg
and translator.
Photo Credits
Nikulin
Maria Ignatieva
Croatian Theatre
Dubravka V rgoc
Meyerhold & Burian
Alexandr Paul (page 42)
Jarka Burian
v..!jeska
W. Plewiri.ski (pages 52 and 53)
K Romanowski (page 60)
Armageddon on the GRB Hill
Jonathan Slaff
Staniewski
Zbigniew Bielawka
Johannes Dokchtor Faust
Orlando Marra
95
PUBLICATIONS
The following is a list of publications available through the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center:
Soviet Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Coslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign).
Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated bibliography. Compiled and
edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Taborsk.i, 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:
iYlARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
THEATRE PROGRAM
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK GRADUATE CENTI
365 FIFTH A VENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10016-4309