seep vo.32 no.1 spring 2012-winter 2013

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volume 32, no 1Spring 2012 / Winter 2013

S P (ISSN 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for ontemporaryEast European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E.Segal Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New YorkGraduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. Allsubscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and astEuropean Performance Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University ofNew York Graduate enter, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.


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EDITORDaniel Gerouldt

GUEST EDITORMargaret Araneo-Reddy

SENIOR EDITORIAL ADVISOR M N GING EDITORChristopher Silsby Stephanie Vella

EDITORI L CONSULTANT ASSISTANT EDITORSShari Perkins Jared R. Pike and Dan Poston

CIRCULATION MANAGERShiraz Biggie

ADVISORY BOARDEdwin Wilson Chair

Marvin Carlson Allen J Kuharski Martha W Coigney Stuart Liebman Leo HechtLaurence Senelick Dasha Krijanskaia

SEEP has a liberal reprinting policy. Publications that desire to reproducematerials that have appeared in SEEP may do so with the following provisions:a. permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP t wntmgbefore the fact; b. credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint; c. two copiesof the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be furnished to SEEPimmediately upon publication.

MARTIN E. SEGAL THE TRE CENTEREXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Frank HentschkerM N GING DIRECTORRebecca Sheehan

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMSLauren DiGiulioSlavic and ast uropean Performance is supported by a generous grant from the Lucille Lor elChair in Theatre of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre

at The City University of New York.Copyright 2013


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DedicationFrom the EditorEvents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REMEMBERING D NIEL GEROULD

Daniel Gerould (1928-2012)Frank HentschkerOn Teaching

Daniel GerouldExcerpts from the Introduction to uick Change

Daniel GerouldIN MEMORI M

Dragan Klaic (1950-2011)Katarina PejovicVaclav Havel (1936-2011)

Edward EinhornLiviu Ciulei (1923-2011)

Moshe YassurRTICLES

Crossing the Divide between Ru ssian and American DramaJohn Freedman

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RaduAfrim:A Queer Look at LifeCristina Modreanu

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Eastern European Playwrights: 53Women Write the NewMarcy Arlin and Gwynn MacDonaldZachary Karabashliev and the Contemporary Bulgarian Theatre: 64

An IntroductionVirginia Hinova-DiDonatoP GES FROM TH P ST

Witkacy's Artwork at Zakopane's Oksza VillaAdrian L.R. SmithSimon Lissim's Early Years in ParisBella Neyman

REVIEWS

Andras Visky's I Killed il MotherLa MaMa in association with Chicago's Theatre YFebruary 10- March 4, 2012Beate Hein BennettDelayed Gratification:2 Chairs at the Belarus National Musical Theatre

Aleksei GrinenkoWord for ord Verbatim and the 'Gypsy Superman '

Anita Rakoczy

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BreakingDown the Bard:Heiner Miiller's Macbeth fterShakespeareDirected by Ivica Buljan, at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart TheatreShari Perkins and Sissi LiuConfronting the Dark Places of History and Memory:Our Class a Play by Tadeusz Slobodzianekat the Wilma Theatre, PhiladelphiaBeate Hein ennettContributors

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DEDIC TION

On behalf of the many contributors to SEEP over the years, the students whoserved in various editorial positions throughout their Ph .D. training, the friendsand colleagues who supported the life of this journal through their hard workand expertise, the dedicated administration and staff at the Segal Center, and,of course, SEEP s devoted readers, we thank you, aniel, for everything youhave given us We hope we can honor you in all the work we still have yet to do.

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All Journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning asabstracts online via ProQuest information service and the

International Index to the Performing Arts.All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and aremembers of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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FROMTH EITOR

Regular readers of SEEP have, no doubt, come to both expect andcherish the insightful and always efficient introduction that Daniel Gerouldpenned for each issue of this journal. Like a warm and welcoming host ata gathering of new friends, he introduced us to the authors and the uniqueperspectives on Eastern European performance they offered. His words helpedframe our reading experience, giving context to events, artists, and projects thatmay have seemed disconnected and distant to us.

At the time of Daniel s passing in February 2012, the preparationfor the Spring 2012 issue of SEEP was underway. He was in the process ofcollecting articles and reviews for inclusion, working with contributors to honetheir essays, training his mentees in the art of editing. In so many ways SEEPcame to a screeching halt with the unexpected loss of Daniel, and it took thosehe left behind several months to reorganize and determine how to move ahead.As a team, we eventually began to pick up the pieces and work together topublish this issue.

Any issue published without Daniel at the helm is necessarilyincomplete: the absence of his voice from this opening only highlights thisfact. With the task of writing the From the Editor now falling to me h isformer student and Managing Editor of the journal from 2005 to 2009 Iwant to both acknowledge Daniel s silence and honor his desire to produce arich and thoughtful publication that gives its readers important insights intothe current state of Eastern European performance. So it is with humble stepsthat I will walk you through the contents of the Spring/Winter 2012 issue ofSEEP.

Volume 32, no. 1 opens with a tribute to Daniel. This includes an InMemoriam written by Daniel s colleague and dear friend Frank Hentschker,who as Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center workedclosely with Daniel for many years to not only publish SEEP (along withtwo other journals and a variety of books), but to program and moderate thenumerous events hosted by the Segal Center each year. The In Memoriam isfollowed by two selections from Daniel s rich body of work. The first is astatement on teaching written in the 1980s, which truly captures the thoughtfuland creative way Daniel pursued his role as educator and mentor. The secondis an abridged version of Daniels introduction to uick Change a collection

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of twenty-eight essays and four play translations he wrote across his career.Published in 2010, Quick Change would sadly be Daniel s last book.Daniel was a scholar, teacher, and artist who deeply respected hiscolleagues and found it important to honor those who have contributed to thefield he so loved. We are, therefore, including three In Memoriams to recognizethe life and work of three influential men of the theatre who recen tly passed.Katarina Pejovic remembers the esteemed scholar Dragan Klaic: a leadingtheatre critic, cultural policy-maker, and intellectual. Ed Einhorn honors theCzech playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel: an extraordinary individual whosuccessfully integrated his theatrical and political ambitions to become a truecultural icon of the late twen tieth century. Finally, Moshe Yassur memorializesRomanian theatre and flirn director Liviu Ciulei: an internationally reveredartist and teacher perhaps best known in the States for his tenure as leader ofthe Guthrie Theatre in the 1980s.

We have included four articles in this issue, essays that demonstrate thejournal s scope and its celebration of international exchange. John Freedman,a long-time contributor and friend of SEEP, reports on the latest projectemerging out of the collaboration between Towson University and PhilipArnoult s Center for International Theatre Development C ITD). CristinaModreanu introduces us to the theatre aesthetics of the Romanian directorRadu Afrim. Marcy Arlin and Gwynn MacDonald discuss the ImmigrantsTheatre Project s 2012 reading series, which focused on the work of eightEastern European women playwrights. We conclude this section with VirginiaHinova-DiDonato s overview of an evening of readings and moderateddiscussion on the work of Bulgarian playwright Zachary Karabashliev, whichwas held at the Martin E Segal Theatre Center in November 2011.

While SEEP has always been focused on contemporary performance,Daniel often liked to include material that considered the history of EasternEuropean theatre in a new light. Calling such pieces Pages from the Past, theircontent helped to contextualize current projects and trends by taking freshlooks at historical figures and events. In this issue, we have two essays that askus to glance back to the interwar period. Adrian Smith gives us insight intothe visual arts of Witkacy by taking us through the collection of his pastelportraits, photographs, and drawings held at the Tatra Museum s Oksza Villain Zakopane, Poland. Bella Neyman examines the Russian-born designerSimon Lissim s life as an expatriate in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s and

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his connection to the avant-garde theatre scene thriving in the city during thistime. We conclude this issue with a collection of reviews. Beate HeinBennett, a frequent and treasured contributor to SEEP, provides two essaysthat serve to bookend the section: a review of ndras Visky s I Killed il{yMotherpresented at La MaMa in New York and a discussion of Our Class by TadeuszSlobodzianek performed at the Wilma T heatre in Philadelphia. First-timecontributor Aleksei Grinenko considers the two-act ballet 12 Chairs that playedat the Belarus National Musical Theatre in Minsk; Shari Perkins and Sissi Liucollaborate on a review of Ivica Buljan s production of Heiner MUller s MacbethAfter Shakespeare at La MaMa; and Anita Rakoczy discusses the successfuldocudrama Word for Word Verbatim by the Hungarian ensemble PanoDrama,which had two separate runs in Budapest in 2011 .

As many of our subscribers may know, this will be the last issue ofSEEP in its current form. Co-founded in 1981 byDaniel and his colleague AlmaLaw, SEEP has served an important function in the arena of theatre studies.It has helped to maintain a significant global dialogue about contemporaryperformance and its place in a rapidly changing political landscape. Beforehis passing, Daniel was in conversation with Allen Kuharski of SwarthmoreCollege regarding the future of the journal. Allen served on SEEP s dvisoryBoard for many years and has a keen understanding of the journal s style andobjectives. Allen has teamed up with Marvin Carlson, an esteemed colleagueof Daniels at the Graduate Center and Editor of Western European Stages (WES)to create a new peer-reviewed journal that combines WES and SEEP. TitledEuropean Stages it will launch in the coming year and will be published by theMartin E. Segal Theatre Center.

This final issue of SEEP would not have been possible without thecommitment of many individuals who deeply loved and respected DanielGerould as a scholar, teacher, artist, and friend. While we are not able toname everyone, I d like to extend a special word of gratitude to the following:Christopher Silsby, who stepped in as Senior Editorial Advisor to help uswork through the volume of material and assist in the completion of layout;Stephanie Vella who continued her work as Managing Editor even past theterm of her fellowship; Shari Perkins who added her keen eye to the reviewof many articles included here as well as contributing her own piece to theissue; Jared Pike who took on the challenge of Editorial Assistant despite very

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little preparation; Beate Hein Bennett who served as a much-needed source ofsupport, always willing to lend a hand; the faculty and students of the GraduateCenter Ph.D. Program in Theatre who, sharing in our grief, provided a homebase for us to work; and, of course, to Frank Hentschker and the staff of theMartin E Segal Theatre Center for their continued administrative, creative,and emotional support to help us meet our deadlines and publish this issue.My deep thanks also goes to Jadwiga Gerould, Daniel s true partner, whoseprofound understanding of his scholarly values and love for the work theyboth shared guided us n our efforts to meet Daniel s high standards.

A final gesture of gratitude must go to you, the loyal readers ofSEEP, who over the last three decades supported this journal and believed inits importance. With Daniel as your consummate guide, one who truly lovedthe landscape he traversed, you traveled together through the shadowy years ofcommunism, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the unique period of discoverythat followed, into a new century. You form a true international community.May its spirit continue to thrive, generating an abundance of new work andcolorful conversation that will ensure Daniel s vibrant spirit stays with us always.

Margaret Araneo-Reddy

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STAGE PRODUCTIONSNew York City:

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The Czech Center New York presented The Wooden Circus a marionettetheatre show by the Prague-based touring company Karromato, on January 8,2012.

The Polish Cultural Institute presented Monica Hunken s soloperformance The Wild Finish from January 25 through February 11, 2012 atABC No Rio. Directed by Melissa Chambers, this travelogue told the story ofa vodka-soaked bicycle journey across Poland.

The State Ballet Theatre of Russia performed Prokofiev s Romeo andjuliet at the NewJersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on February 3, 2012.

La MaMa hosted the New York premiere of Andras Visky s I Killedlv y Mother, a production directed by Karin Coonrod. The production ran fromFebruary 10 through March 4, 2012. See review in this issue.) In conjunction,the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York hosted a conversation betweenVisky, Coonrod, Robert Woodruff, and Andrei Serban on March 15,2012.

Vicror Shenderovich and Vyacheslav Kaganovich starred in thepremiere of Ayedont Understand , a melodrama-comedy by Shenderovich.Directed by Sergey Kokovkin, this tale of a chance meeting between twoimmigrants to the United States ran on March 24 and 25,2012 at the ShorefrontYM-YWHA in Brooklyn.

TR Warszawa s production of Festen, adapted for the stage by ThomasVinterberg and Mogens Rukov and directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, played at St.Ann s Warehouse, April20 to 29 2012.

The Romanian Cultural Institute presented an evening of two newplays:youshinC:JOUarebeautifulby Vera Ion and Famify Offline by Mihaela Michailovon May 24, 2012. The playwrights were present for talk-backs after readingsof the two plays.

The Zagreb Youth Theatre returned to La MaMa from December 6to 9, 2012 to perform Letter to H einer Mii//erby Goran Fercecat.


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The Hungarian puppetry ensemble Vaskakas, with support from theHungarian Cultural Institute, presented two productions, The Shoemaker s Dreamand Metamorphosis, at the Abrons Arts Center, January 7 to 10.

The Bohemian National Hall along with the Czech Center New Yorkhosted the Czech Theatre and Dance Showcase, which included two piecesby Lenka Vagnerova and Company, Mah Hunt and The Riders, and the DrakTheatre s production of Goldilocks on January 12, 2013.

Eight plays from Central and Eastern Europe were included in the2012 Festival ofWomen Theatre Artists in New York, organized by the Leagueof Professional TheatreWomen in conjunction with the Immigrants TheatreProject. (See article in this issue.)

French-Romanian actress Simona Maicanescu appeared in a newFrench production of Wallace Shawn s The Fever, directed by Swedishplaywright/director Lars Noren at La MaMa January 24 to February 3, 2013.

The Czech CenterNewYork presents Out of the Circle, an exhibitionof Czech and American performance art as well as photographs and videosfrom January 28 toMarch 12, 2013. Thework ofAndy Warhol, Bruce Nauman,Vladimir Havrilla, and Jiii Kovanda will be included.

Vit Horejs, the Czechoslovak storyteller, author, and puppeteer, willpresent Katcha and the Devil and Other Czech Tales ith Strings at La MaMa, April27,2013.STAGE PRODUCTIONSRegional:

The opera King Roger by Karol Szymanowski was presented at theSanta Fe Opera from July 2 to August 14,2012.ILMNew York City:

In celebration of Milos Forman s eightieth birthday, the Czech CenterNewYork in February 2012 presented a series of screenings of Forman s films

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along with an exhibition of movie posters from his oeuvre. Forman-directedfilms screened included Amadeus 1 984), Loves o aBlonde (1965), and The Peoplevs Larry F/ynt (1996). A documentary directed by Martin Sulik, Golden Sixties-Portrait o MilofForman was also screened.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a retrospective ofHungarian maestro Bela Tarr's body of work from February 3 through 8, 2012followed by the US premiere of Tarr's The Turin Horse. Films screened as part ofthe retrospective included: The lmanac o Fall (1984), Damnation (1988), Fami/yNest (1979), Macbeth (1982), Satantango (1994), The Man from London (2007), TheOutsider (1981), The Prefab People (1982), and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

The Brooklyn Central Library screened Andrei Zagdansky'sdocumentary A Father Evgeni on February 23, 2013.

The Museum of Modern Art and the Romanian Cultural Instituteco-presented the first complete Lucian Pintilie retrospective in the UnitedStates from March 1 to 12, 2012. Pintilie was at the opening to introduce thefirst fllm, Reenactment on March 1. Two of Pintilie's long-term collaboratorson both film and stage, Victor Rebengiuc and Mariana Mihut, held a publicconversation with Romanian audiences in NYC at the Romanian CulturalInstitute on March 2 as part of the retrospective.

The Polish Cultural Institute presented Hysterical Excess: DiscoveringAndrzej Zutawski, the first complete retrospective of the radical auteur sexpressive ftlms. From March 7 to 20, 2012, screenings at BAMcinematekincluded Possession (1981), That Most Important Thing: Love (1975), and the debutof a newly struck 35mm print of The Third Part o the Night 1971 ).

The Museum of the Moving Image screened Andrzej Wajda's ft.lmAshes and Diamonds on October 13 and 14, 2012.

The Ukrainian Museum presented the documentary The Guardian ithe Past directed by Ma gorzata Potocka, February 17, 2013.

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OTHER EVENTSNew York City:

The Czech Center New York held a celebration of Charter 77,the landmark human rights declaration co-authored by Vaclav Havel inCzechoslovakia in 1977. The free event, held on January 6, 2012, featuredmusic, a public reading of the charter, and a short excerpt of a Havel play, aswell as a new found text based on the events.

The d Street Y presented a multi-disciplinary series exploring thecultural significance of Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp and ghettoestablished in 1941 in occupied Bohemia. The series was titled Will to Create,Will to Live and included four concerts by the Nash Ensemble of London,primarily performing music played and written in Terezin. Other eventsincluded lectures, ilm screenings, dance presentations, readings, and an exhibitof art and artifacts. The event was held from January 9 to February 16 , 2012.

Joe s Pub hosted a concert by Alexander Zhurbin, Russia s preeminentcomposer of musical theatre, ilm sound racks, and popular song, on January15, 2012.

The Romanian Cultural Institute and The Museum of the MovingImage presented Restless an exhibition of video installations, short films, andother works by Mircea Cantor. Cantor s first solo museum exhibition in NewYork City ran from March 3 to May 6, 2012 and included three video works:Tracking Happiness 2009), Vertical Attempt (2009), and Decided Not to Save theWorld (2011), as well as a wall drawing, photographic cliptych, and program ofselected short films.

SPE IAL N OTI EThe May 2013 issue of P I A journal of Performance and rt Vo lume

35, number 2, will include the script of Daniel Gerould s 1965 play CandaulesCommissioner. The play was performed as a staged reading during a tribute toDaniel Gerould in Elebash Hall at the Graduate Center of the City Universityof New York on September 6, 2012.

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NMEMORI MDaniel Gerould

(1928- 2012)With the passing of Daniel Gerould, the Eastern European theatre

loses one of its greatest friends. For the last half century, through his writings,lectures, and critiques, Daniel did much to advance our appreciation andknowledge of the Slavic theatre.

Through SEEP, Daniel provided a forum for a multitude of voicesand genres within the theatre. The journal was a labor of love and somethingthat encapsulated his intellectual passions. Daniel was always interested in thehistory of ideas and how changing intellectual trends affected the arts. Whetherit was a reworked version of a classic or a piece from the avant-garde, Danielwas intrigued by what the theatre could be, finding particular appeal in thoseworks he felt were curious or unjustly forgotten.

Daniel s interestswere eclecticand reflectiveof his background. Havinglived and studied in Boston, Chicago, Arkansas, and San Francisco, as wellas Warsaw, Moscow, and Paris, Daniel brought a global perspective to hisstudies. While Eastern European and Slavic theatre became his focus, hisscholarship was always informed by a broad comparative analysis. In the late1950s, while at San Francisco State University, he helped found the epartmentof World and Comparative Literature. Over forty years later, he continuedto apply this comparative approach, publishing a book on theatrical theory,Theatre/Theory/Theatre that contained primary source material ranging fromthe classical period to the present, from the United States to Japan.With Daniel s passing not only the community of Slavic theatre butthe academic and scholarly world he so loved are left saddened. He was therare scholar that was an excellent researcher, writer, teacher, colleague, andmentor. Not only well versed in his own specialty of theatre, Daniel alsodisplayed an obvious command of literature, poetry, music, and history. Heloved teaching, every semester bringing to the classroom his familiar bowtie and impish smile, which made him a student favorite. Outside of theclassroom, no one was more generous with his time. The door to his officewas always open, and the passion he had for the material was readily sharedwith his students. With Daniel s death, we lose a classic gentleman-scholar; awell-rounded, talented, and lcind person; a true Renaissance man.

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Daniel Gerould

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Until the very end of his life, aniel was consumed by his work. Justan hour before he fell asleep on what would be his last night- February 12,2012 he was made so happy by a recent discovery. Earlier that evening, hiswife Jadwiga found a box with some of Daniel's ol lecture notes in it. WhenDaniel realized how perfectly they would fit into his upcoming class, he waspropelled into what Jadwiga described as just a wonderful mood.

So while we lament the loss of this impressive and dignified man, wecan take solace in the fact that he lived a life in which he touched and inspiredthose around him. Each morning he could not wait to begin his studies, andevery night it was difficult to get him to put down his books and call it a dayWe can also celebrate someone who so generously shared his passions withothers and passed away happy in his thoughts. Further, it is pleasing to ll whoknew him and followed his career to know that in the last year of his life,he derived great pleasure from the publishing of Quick Change an impressivecompendium of his wide-ranging scholarship, containing his plays, essays,critiques, and translations: a true life's work. We are blessed by the fact that intohis eighties we were still able to watch Daniel at the top of his game: sharp,lucid, trenchant, and concise.A friend and a great advancer of the European and Slavic theatre, atrue enthusiast of the arts, and a teacher who genuinely loved his professionand his students, Daniel Gerould will be sorely missed. But as we mark hispassing from the stage, we can celebrate the fact that he leaves the theatreworld a much better place.

Frank Hentschker

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ON TE CHING

Daniel erould

It is only natural that our thoughts always turn to the mystery of thecreative life. All those who are dedicated to the theatre and the theatrical asexpressions of what is most vital in human culture engage in a perpetual questfor the secret of creativity. We are filled with admiration and delight wheneverwe can bear witness to a truly creative life in the theatre. Therein lies the specialpleasure the unbounded joy that the ability to create inevitably calls forth.All creativity is an overcoming of routine an assault on boredomand the status quo of dullness a refusal to lapse into narrow mindedness andthe docile wearing of blinkers. It is an enlargement of possibilities a constanttrying out of the new an exploration of what is brightest liveliest and mostperceptive. Creative life in the theatre whatever the sphere of its activity-has an added element which is inherent in its very nature and that element isplay. It is play that animates even its most serious moments and that keeps frombeing trivial even its least serious ones. Theatre is what is played and play andits guiding spirit playfulness are the source of spontaneity freshness and theunexpected those qualities that we most prize.

We who are teachers study creativity in theatre; we attempt perhapspresumptuously to unlock its secrets.We therefore talk about playing playersplayhouses and playwrights. But as we are talking to our audience we ourselvesare playing. Teachers are actors teaching is a form of theatre and teachingtheatre is thus theatre about theatre. With the seminar room as our stage andauditorium we are always putting on an experimental drama never twicethe same we hope constantly improvised retaining the power to surprisesometimes even to shock. In this theatre of direct audience involvementand intervention our students are co-creators. The drama is scripted andperformed by an ensemble even while the format may appear to be the theatreof one actor. We rehearse exercising our voices stretching our minds butwe only block out a few moves plan a gesture or two work out an openingtag. Essentially the performance itself is commedia Although we sometimesmasquerade as learned doctors and pretend that our discipline is a science thisis simply part of the show.

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Creativity n the theatre is not only the subject of our scholarship;it must be its method as well. Should not we who are teachers of this artconsider ourselves doubly fortunate n having a profession education thatis theatrical and a chosen field of study that is theatre itself? Our work is play.It is thus an extension of the collective life of the theatre and its creators.And we gratefully recognize the bonds that tie our endeavors to those of theprofessional stage.

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EX ERPTS FROM THE INTRODU TION TO QUI K CH NGEDaniel Gerould

Theatre and drama find their natural place in the history of thearts. Theatre history, intellectual history, and history of the arts should, I amconvinced, go hand in hand. Tadeusz Kantor, the subject of two of my essays,declared his goal to be placing theatre within the realm of the totality of art.Could anything be simpler, and at the same time as all-embracing?

My first contacts with theatre came about through magic, at whichI dabbled as a child. I watched sleight-of-hand artists demonstrate tricksto one another at magicians' conventions and I went to performances ofmaster illusionists like the Great Thurston, who staged spectacular acts withlarge casts, fancy props and costumes, and elaborate stunts dependent oncomplicated technology. At home I created a life-size dummy with a carvedcoconut head, who wore a hat, coat, shirt, tie, and trousers and had a concealedtube running from the basement up his leg to his mouth that enabled me tocarryon conversations and make jokes with my parents' guests at dinner parties.

I also regularly attended the circus, rodeos, and stunt car shows, sincemy father, a newspaperman, was the regular recipient of free tickets. At ll ofthe spectacles, the self-extolled daring and skill of the performers were sourcesof wonder and delight, and I relished all the hyperbole, hoopla, and razzmatazz.I attended the stage shows accompanying the films at large movie houses andfeaturing big bands, such asJimmy Dorsey Bob Crosby, and Cab Calloway (thelatter constantly changing flamboyantly colored zoot suits- was himself aquick-change artist). I went to jazz concerts to hearJames P. Johnson and WildBill Davison at Sunday matinees where teenagers were tolerated, although stillthe exception, not the rule.

By the late 1930s and early '40s I started attending the legitimate stagewith my mother. At that time many Broadway-bound productions tried outftrst in Boston, and I remember Ethel Barrymore in The Corn Is Green by EmlynWilliams and Arsenic and Old Lace with Boris Karloff. I felt myself a seasonedspectator, was at home among audiences, and was always ready to applaudbravura displays of \'irtuoso acting. The seed had been planted, although itwasn't until the 1954-55 season n Paris (where I was an exchange student)

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that I again became an intensive spectator, followed by a similar stint in 1967 inMoscow (where I was on a faculty research grant).

For the most part I have chosen to write about the underrated,the ignored, and the forgotten rather than the overexposed and universallycelebrated. I have never been much concerned with whether an artist was amajor orminor figure, a canonical ornon-canonical artist, since these valuationsare constantly shifting and highly unreliable. Witkacy is a case in point, havinggone from controversial outsider to classic of the avant-garde in three decades.My essays are open to writers of all provenance. Shakespeare and Moliere aswell as Shaw and Ibsen, also put in frequent appearances.

The functions of comedy and the qualities of different kinds oflaughter have been at the forefront of my inquiries, which investigate howlaughter can combat what is backward, and how it can dispel fear and eventhrive in oppressive regimes. The relation of art to ideology, seen from theviewpoint of the artist, is a question that recurs in my essays, which are oftensituated against the background of life in Eastern Europe during the cold war.My initialencounterwith Eastern European drama came about thanksto Tom Lantos, then the director of overseas programs at San Francisco StateCollege, who arranged for me to go to Poland for five weeks in the summer of1965 as part of a faculty travel program underwritten by the State D epartmentand paid for in counterpart funds. Tom was a Hungarian Jew who along withhis young wife to be had been saved by Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest in 1944;he subsequently became an influential US congressman from 1981 until hisdeath in 2008.

t that point modern Polish theatre was terra incognita in theUnited States and in most of the rest of the world. This was five years beforeGrotowski s theatre first appeared in New York and fourteen before Kantorbrought he Dead lass to La MaMa. That I discovered Witkacy and got tomeet many of the principal figures in the Polish theatre was a matter of goodfortune. Witkacy was for me a found object that I came across by chance.

On my first full day in Poland, a meeting for me had been arrangedwith a bureaucrat in the thearre section at the Ministry of Culture in Warsaw,not far from the hotel where I was staying. I walked to the ministry and enteredthe office. Beneath a small picture of Lenin on the wall behind his desk, the

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D NIEL GEROULDQUICK CH NGE28 THEATRE ESSAYS N D ~ PlAYS IN TRANSlATION

over o f Danid Gerould s Quick Change (2010),Witkacy s Double Self-Portraits as Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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official, Jerzy Sokolowski (later one of the editors of the journal Teatr , andI conversed in Russian because at that time I did not know Polish. After afew perfunctory remarks about the organization of the Polish theatre and itsrepertory, the official grew animated as he told me about a remarkable Polishplaywright active during the 1920s and 30s who was in the process of beingrediscovered, and he explained to me that the productions of his plays, manybeing staged for the first time, were the most exciting events taking place in thePolish theatre.

At that point he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk anddrew out two compact gray volumes of plays (eight-by-five, more than fivehundred pages each), which he proudly displayed. Thatwas how I first becameacquainted with Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.

Later, I learned that this was the precious edition of all of Witkiewicz splays that had recently been published (1962 in a drastically limited editionafter several years of hard bargaining between the authorities and the editor,who had turned down the option offered by the censor, of a larger printingwith some discrete cuts of remarks that could be offensive to the Soviets),choosing instead an edition of only three thousand copies with no omissions.Eagerly awaited, this edition was sold out even before the day of its release;copies in bookstores were kept beneath the counter for those in the know whohad the right contacts.

Within a few days after my first encounter with Witkiewicz, I metKonstanty Puzyna, the editor of that two volume edition, who suggested theidea of translating the playwright into English. That s how t all started. Now,some forty years later, I have translated nineteen of the twenty-one plays inthose two compact volumes.

Living in the USSR in 1967 on a faculty exchange at Moscow StateUniversity and then spending two years in Poland as a Fulbright lecturer atWarsaw University from 1968 to 1970 enabled me to observe firsthand howtheatre functions in totalitarian regimes. As I became acquainted with writersand theatre artists in both Russia and Poland, I learned how their careers wereshaped by ideology and saw the roles that they were forced to play.

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Finally, a few words about the craft of translation, to which I havedevoted much time and thought. The translator is a medium at a seance,possessed by and speaking for the author. In my translations of Witkacy, I havetried to find a voice for a highly idiosyncratic playwright who was in search ofa new autonomous stage language. Translation can also be a political weapon.A controversial and subversive author whose plays in performance were oftensubject to censorship in communist Poland, Witkacy gained posthumousprestige and security at home by being recognized abroad. Translation andsubsequent foreign production and publication in the West helped assure theplaywright s ultimate triumph over those who tried to suppress him

What has been the domain of these essays? Nothing vast, and yet, Ihope, something substantive and coherent the roughly one hundred years ofmodern European performance stretching from the founding of the MoscowArt Theatre to the death of Grotowski with a few excursions back in time toantecedents and ancestors). This epoch saw the flowering of modern theatre-and its eventual end. My essays have touched on a few of the theatrical eventsand issues- both big and small occurring within that panorama, and theyhave raised questions about the power of the theatrical arts which transcendthe particular incidents that occasioned my inquiries.

This epoch is now over and complete almost all its majorpractitioners are either dead or inactive. These essays are in praise of the art,and in remembrance of the artists, of that past time.

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NMEMORI M

Dragan Klaic1950-2011)

In his extraordinarily rich, versatile, and dynamic career, Dragan I Jaicheld different posts and was active in various fields as a highly esteemed expert:from contemporary performing arts, European cultural policy and culturaldevelopment to interculturalism and international cultural cooperation. Heauthored numerous books and several hundred texts and essays, as well asinitiated and led many significant international research projects, conferences,and symposia.

Born in 1950 in Sarajevo, I Jaic obtained his B.A. in Dramaturgy fromthe Faculty of Dramatic Arts former Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Belgrade1971) and his Ph.D. in Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism from Yale

University 1977).Between 1978 and 1991, he taught courses in world drama and

theatre at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. I Jaic was a lecturer,who will be fondly remembered by generations of students for his erudition,pedagogic enthusiasm, and lecturing innovativeness. I Jaic was also one ofthe most important theatre critics in the former Yugoslavia during the 1980s,a long-time moderator of roundtable discussions at the renowned BelgradeInternational Theatre Festival BITEF), and a dramaturg who worked withsome of the most esteemed theatre artists, including among others LjubisaRistic and his company KPGT. Together with the Slovenian theatre directorand playwright Dusan Jovanovic and graphic designer Matjaz Vipotnik, he cofounded the European theatre quarterly Euromaske which ceased publicationat the outbreak of the war in 1991, the same year I Jaic left Yugoslavia.

Between 1992 and 2001, I Jaic was the Director of the NetherlandsTheatre Institute. During his mandate, the Institute underwent radicaltransformations and became a modern and dynamic cultural institution, opento international projects and collaboration. From 1998 to 2003, he taughtat Amsterdam University. n the past ten years, he was a regular lecturer atuniversities in Leiden, Budapest, Istanbul, Belgrade, and Bologna. Fluent n ninelanguages, he developed and taught in numerous workshops and summer schoolsworldwide.

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Klaic was the President of the European Network of InformationCentres for the Performing Arts (ENICPA) and the European Forum for Artsand Heritage (EFAH), a Permanent Fellow of the Felix Meritis Foundation, aswell as a member of various boards and networks, including the Open SocietyInstitute (OSI), International European Theatre Meetings (IETM), EuropeanCultural Foundation (ECF), and Erasmus. He was a tireless instigator ofinitiatives and projects aimed at promoting intercultural competence, thepreservation of material and immaterial cultural heritage, and the developmentof cultural policy on a local and European level.

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NMEMORI M

Vaclav Have l(1936-2011)

Vaclav Havel first came to world attention as a playwright. Eventsand the power of his ideas launched him into the role of dissident, politicalprisoner, revolutionary, and finally the president of Czechoslovakia (and laterof the Czech Republic). Yet through all the shifts in the political winds thatplaced him in the center of history, Havel felt that his essential calling was stillthe same: he was a man of the theatre, a writer of absurdist drama.

Havel was born in Prague in 1936 to a wealthy family, yet his privilegeswere quickly stripped away by the communist regime that took power afterWorld War Il. His family's property was confiscated, and he was forced toattend trade school. After a stint in the army, Havel began his theatre career asa stagehand at the ABC Theatre in Prague. From there, he moved to Theatreon the Balustrade, where he saw his work onstage for the fust time: first a fewcomic sketches, and then his first full-length productions, The Garden Party andThe Memorandum

These early plays established his international reputation as aplaywright. He briefly thrived during Prague Spring in 1968, a program ofreform whose slogan was socialism with a human face. During that time,he traveled to New York for the premiere of The Memorandum at the PublicTheater. t was to be his last chance to leave Czechoslovakia for more thantwenty years. In Prague, Russian tanks were rolling in and with them came afar more repressive regime. Havel found his work banned and himself isolated.He also came into legal conflict with the anti-parasite laws which stated thatone could be jailed for not working. Havel eventually chose to take a job at abrewery, which he preferred as an alternative to his new isolation.

D uring this time, Havel's plays were performed in friends' livingrooms instead of on stages, but their influence was undiminished. They weredistributed via the underground publishing movement, samizdat A recordingof Havel and his friend Pavel Landovsky reading Havel's playAudience a semiautobiographical account of his time in the brewery-became so popular thatpeople could be heard in cafes quoting it. Essays followed, including his seminalPower of the Powerless, which articulated his credo that living in truth

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would contribute to the fall of Czechoslovakia's post-fascist government.His political profile grew when he co-authored Charter 77, a humanrights document inspired by the Helsinki accords. This soon led to his arrest

and imprisonment. He remained in prison for four and a half years, with hisonly respite being the opportunity to write weekly, tightly proscribed letters tohis flrst wife, Olga. Those letters, with coded references to obscure philosophythat Havel included to slip his ideas past the censors, were gathered andpublished in a book called Letters to Olga

After his release, Havel continued to be monitored by the police, attimes in almost comical ways. During one vacation across Czechoslovakia, thesecret police car that was trailing him got stuck in a ditch, and Havel stoppedto help. After they were rescued, the police followed him to his friends' house,arrested him, and took him to the local j il for rwo days before releasing him.

In the meantime, Havel's writing continued. He produced a stringof works on the state of CzechosloYak society, including LArgo Desolato andTemptation His work became a key partof a strong dissident theatre movement.

By the end of the 1980s, communism in Czechoslovakia wascollapsing. On November 17, 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, whatwould be known as Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution began. Havel quicklybecame its de facto leader.The revolutionaries established their headquarters inthe Magic Lantern Theatre. Within rwo months the old regime was overthrownand Havel found himself suddenly, and by his own account reluctantly, in therole of president. In Wenceslas Square, he famously declared Truth and lovemust defeat lies and hatred, and indeed, it seemed at last to be so.

Havel served both as Czechoslovakia's last president and, when in1993 Slovakia chose to secede, as the Czech Republic's flrst. While in office, herefused to be connected to any political party or movement. Inevitably, he hadhis detractors as well his supporters. His style as president was unconventional.He surrounded himself with artists even having a costume designer create newmilitary uniforms and asking Frank Zappa to be a political consultant.

After his wife Olga died, Havel grew ll with lung cancer. Part of hislung was removed, and he was nursed back to health by the actress D agmarVdkrnova, whom he later married. This too was the cause for some publicdissatisfaction, as his flrst wife was well loved.

Throughout his presidential career, he continued to advocate livingin truth, that is flnding a way to combine the moral and the political. He

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helped dissolve the Warsaw Pact, and he was a champion of human rightsworldwide.His work on human rights continued after his presidency, but he alsoreturned to his artistic work. During the 2006 Havel Festival n New York,he revisited his complete works, and soon after he wrote his first new play intwenty years, Leaving about a man forced to leave political office. A ftlm ofLeaving followed, which he directed. In what turned out to be his final work,he took an old dialogue, The Pig and in collaboration with Vladimir Moravek,combined it with Bedrich Smetana s Bartered Bride to create a full productionfor the 2010 Theatre World rno festival.

Havel was planning to write yet another play in December 2012when he passed away at the age of seventy-five Three days of mourning wereobserved in the Czech Republic, and artists and politicians again mixed as bothpaid tribute to his lasting legacy.

Edward Einhorn

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NMEMORI M

Liviu Ciulei(1923-2011)

With thoughts and images plentyhave blackened many an emptyPage of life, with bookish truthFrom the very dawn of you th .

Mi hai EminescuLiviu Ciulei was born into a well-to -do family in Bucharest. His

father, an engineer and builder, wanted him to follow in his footsteps andsent him to study architecture. Ciulei obeyed his father, but it was the theatrethat attracted him. While he was studying architecture, he also attended TheRoyal Conservatory of Music and Theatre in Bucharest. He completed bothdegrees and joined his father s flrm working as an architect, but not for long.The theatre called him, and it was there that he began a life-long career, first asan actor, later as a director, eventually becoming the most influential figure inRomanian theatre and film of his generation.

In an interview with Horia-Roman Patapievici in February 2010for Romanian Cultural Television, Ciulei told stories about his theatricalbeginnings.2 t the age of fourteen or fifteen, he used to go into the bathroom,turn on the water, and recite monologues he chose from plays he had seen.His mother noticed and sent him to study diction with a famous Romanianteacher. Later, he registered at the Royal Conservatory clandestinely so that hisfamily would not know. As he was about to deliver his audition speech for theentrance examination, however, his father came into the room and requestedpermission to attend. When young Liviu saw his father, he at first went blankbut recovered and delivered a monologue from Pirandello s nricoWforwhichhe received the highest grade. Later at lunch with his family a tense silenceenve.loped the room. After the second course, his father broke the silenc e andannounced that if his son was serious and chose the theatre as his way in life,then he would build him a theatre. nd indeed a year later, a new theatre calledthe Odeon opened in the heart of Bucharest, premiering George Marcovici s

Strange Story with Ciulei as director and set designer. The year was 1946. Thetheatre building, still in existence, is now called the Notara.

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Ciulei came into his own during communism, but as the son ofrich bourgeois parents, he did not have an easy time. It was only due to hisunusual talent that he was able to overcome the many obstacles pu t in his wayby the regime. In the same interview, he told of how his father was arrestedas a Free Mason and died in prison at the age of fifty-six; his mother, too,was arrested for possession of foreign currency. He also recounted how hiscommunist examiner failed him in the last exam for his diploma in theatre andthat he was barred from directing for the following eleven years. However,he was allowed to act and design sets since those were deemed ideologicallyless responsible functions. He worked as an actor in films and on stage whilesimultaneously developing his drafting talent and beginning a successful careerin scenic design, designing some of the most spectacular and creative sets seenin Romania at that time.

As Artistic Director of the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest from 1963to 1972, Ciulei put the theatre on the international map and produced anddirected courageous productions, such as Georg Buchner s Danton s Death(1967) and Shakespeare s Julius Caesar (1968). He also opened the doors toyoung directors who went on to receive prestigious prizes at internationaltheatre festivals. As he gained an international reputation as a director, hecontinued to design the sets for some of his most famous productions, such asShakespeare s Hamlet (1978) and the Helen Hayes Award winning productionof Pirandello s Six Characters In Search of an Author (1988), both seen at ArenaStage in Washington, D C

After leaving Romania in 1980, he became Artistic Director of theTyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis where he directed and designedShakespeare s The Tenpest in his first season. The critic Frank Rich wrote in TheNew York Times:

Prospera s island is surrounded by a moat of blood .Man s noble attempts to create a beautiful and humanecivilization have always, finally, been drowned in the bloodof wars Ciulei fills his Tempest with the stuff of dreamand then, with equal force, cracks Shakespeare s fantasy opento show us the bottomless melancholy that lies within.3

He remained at the Guthrie until1985.

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During his long creative life, Ciulei worked in many parts of the world.He accumulated more than thirty-five awards and honors for outstandingand groundbreaking work from such countries as Australia, Canada, France,Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, and the United States. He was comparedto the legendary directors Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Giorgio Strehler.H e made his mark as an actor in the theatre, interpreting more than thirty partsin a career that spanned from 1945 to 1974. In cinematography, Ciulei directedand acted in award-winning ftlrns, the most notable internationally being TheForest i the Hanged for which he received the award for Best Direction atCannes in 1965.H e dedicated his last years to his work as a theatre educator andteacher. He taught at Columbia University, Juilliard, and especially at NewYork University s Tisch School of the Arts, where he directed more thantwenty-seven student productions between 1986 and 2003.

In 1991, after the collapse of communism, Ciulei returned to theBulandra Theatre in Romania to direct Shakespeare's Midsummer igh sDreamand Frank Wedekind's SpringAwakening His final productions at the Bulandra,the theatre he helped to build, were Six Characters in Search i an Author andEnrico W both by Pirandello. The year was 2005. He died in a hospital inMunich, Germany at age eighty-eight.

I have one indelible memory of a personal encounter with LiviuCiulei while I was assistant director at the Haifa Municipal Theatre. Afterhaving received a top Romanian state prize in 1963 for his movie Danube Waves,Ciulei became a kind of cultural ambassador for Romania and attained the rareprivilege of moving more freely in and out of the country. In 1964, the annualInternational Theatre Institute [ITI] conference was held at the Haifa MunicipalTheatre in Israel; Liviu Ciulei and Radu Beligan, a well-known actor, came asthe Romanian representatives. Josef Milo, the Artistic Director of the HaifaMunicipal Theatre and host of the conference, introduced me as his assistantand, because I spoke Romanian, he placed us at a table together so that theywould feel at home. During the meal, seeing that they kept their noses intheir dishes and did not utter a word, I tried my best to initiate a discussion.Finally, Ciulei turned to me and said that Mr. Milo had introduced me as aRomanian director but that he had never heard of me although he knew all

the theatre people in Romania. I told Ciulei, that it was no wonder since I hadleft Romania in 1950 as a boy of fifteen and that my only theatre experience at

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that point had been as a child actor at the National Theatre in Iasi. Both star tedto laugh and the ice was broken. I remember Ciulei being a very charming andelegant man.

Moshe YassurNOTES

1. Liviu Ciulei, Cugandiri [i cu imagini (Bucharest, Romania: lgloomedia, 2009).Liviu Ciulei chose this verse, translated by Adrian George Sahllean, as the epitaph ofthe book. Much of the professional biographical information in this article has beengleaned from this comprehensive volume.

2. Liviu Ciulei, interview by Haria-Roman Patapievici , Argument RomanianCultural Television, February 18, 2010. YouTube video, pos ted by magiclamp122,February 18, 2010, http:/ /www.youtube.comwatch?v=dlgNLSyvllU.

3. Frank Rich, Theater: Ciulei Stages 'Tempest' at Guthrie, New York TimesJuly 4 1981, 12.

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CROSSING THE DIVIDE BETWEENRUSSI N ND MERIC N DR M

John reedmanI have long thought it strange that Russian theatre, with all its desire

and ability to soakup outside influences, has virtually no practical understandingof American drama after the 1960s. Ask someone in Moscow what they knowabout American drama and they'll say enthusiastically, I love O 'Neill I loveWilliams I love Albee " Somebody else might toss in, "Arthur Miller " Thenthe conversation falls flat.

I can turn this around. Ask most anyone in the American theatre whatthey know about Russian drama, and in their excitement they'll cough blood, ifyou'll pardon the dicey expression, over Anton Chekhov. Somebody else mightsay something about Gorky. And then the conversation falls flat.

I'm exaggerating to make a point. Bu t the point is legitimate. Theatrepractitioners in Russia and the United States are woefully ignorant of eachother. I find it fascinating because each culture has been so heavily influencedby the other-consider Chekhov's impact on American drama and EugeneO'Neill's on Russian.

Between 2007 and 2010, I was part of a team that broughtcontemporary Ru ssian drama to the United States. The project was calledNew Russian Drama: Voices in a Shifting Age and was conducted by the

D epartment of Theatre Arts of Towson University and Philip Arnoult's Centerfor International Theatre Development. Robyn Quick and Stephen Nunns,who were instrumental in the seeding and running of the project, have writtenabout it in these pages. As such, there is little reason for me to say more aboutthat now, although a bit of the philosophy behind the project bears repeating.

When Philip Arnoult and I began discussing the possibility ofshowcasing contemporary Russian drama in the United States, we were movedby a few key notions First, the focus must be on the practical concerns oftheatre, not on scholarly interests. We wanted to see Russian plays producedon American stages. Second, the texts must be in American English, becauseBritish English does not "translate" well to American stages. Third, wemust avoid the usual path of academic translations that may (or may not) besufficient for classroom study but which often cannot be spoken by live actorson a stage. We set ourselves the goal of bringing the living Russian word to lifeon American stages No more, no less.

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Cut to the Holiday Inn near the Belorusskaya train station in Moscowin April of 2010. I sat in a conference room with PhilipArnoultand Yury Urnov,a Russian director who was another of the moving forces in the Towson-C ITDproject. All plans were in place for a big project-ending national conferencethat CITD would host at Towson the second week in May.2 Aside from somefinal tinkering, our three-year project was at an end. These are moments whenthe only obvious topic of conversation is, What next?

I had always seen the Towson-CITD project as a beginning, not anend. I wanted it to start a dialogue, not be an isolated point in time. So Philip,Yury, and I talked about dialogues, cycles, exchanges, and reciprocal acts. Whatwould encourage American theatres to continue exploring Russian drama? Well,that's easy. You get them involved. We had taken Russian drama to Americantheatre; now let's get American theatres to take American drama to Russia.Within minutes, Philip was ticking off play development organizations CITDhad worked with over the decades. Moments later, we had a list that includedNew York Theatre Workshop NYfW), the Sundance Theatre Insti tuteProgram, the E ugene O'Neill Theatre Center, and the Humana Festival ofNew American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.To give the project anumbrella tide, I think I tossed out the rather obvious phrase New AmericanPlays for Russia and we were in business.

O f course, business implies money, and here serendipity played itscustomary role. Out of the blue, I received a call from Michael]. Hurley atthe US embassy in Moscow. As the embassys Minister Counselor for PublicAffairs, he was charged with executing a major new venture that had comeabout as a result of the reset button pushed in 2009 by US Secretary of StateHillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.3 He wonderedif I had any ideas for cultural programs that could be conducted withinthe American Seasons in Ru ssia program under the aegis of the US-Ru ssiaBilateral Presidential Commission, or the Obama-Medvedev Commission. Ioudined our idea for New American Plays for Russ ia , and in a matter of dayswe, indeed, were in business.

The idea was to come up with a digestible number of plays thatrepresented American drama over the last decade. We immediately rejecteda potentially media-friendly program presenting modern masters like SamShepard,David Mamet, David Henry Hwang, TonyKushner, and the like. Yes,they are virtually absentonRussian stages, but there was a matter of competition

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that I felt was crucial to address. Many countries have conducted important,useful projects promoting their national traditions in Russia. France, Germany,England, Poland, and Finland are just a few of those who have worked hardand successfully to place their contemporary playwrights on Russian stages. Icould not imagine coming to the Russian public with a cache of plays from the1980s and 1990s no matter how great they were, when the rest of the worldwas focusing on the present day.

Thus, we decided we would enlist specialists from our Americanpartner organizations to suggest what writers and plays might best representAmerican drama today.Jim Nicola of NYTw, Christopher Hibma of Sundance,Preston Whiteway of the O'Neill, and Amy Wegener of the Humana Festivalvisited Moscow in early October 2010. We took them to important Moscowproductions, including the Valery Fokin/Alexander Bakshi adaptation of TheOvercoat at the Sovremennik Theatre and Dmitry Krymov's The Cow at theSchool of Dramatic Art; introduced them to important contemporary writersand directors, such as Maksym Kurochkin, Yevgeny Kazachkov, RodionBeletsky and Georg Genoux; and arranged for them to meet and speak withthe Moscow public in the loose format of a press conference/lecture. On thefinal day of the group's week-long sojourn, Philip and I huddled with everyonein a hotel lobby and put the question to them: You have seen shows; you havetalked to people. Based on that experience what American plays do you thinkwould have the best chance of being understood here today?

This last phrase was key. Never did we set ourselves the goal of findingthe best new American plays. Our program, as Philip said repeatedly was nota competition. t was a process by which we hoped to ferret out a number ofAmerican plays that would reflect American cultural diversity but that couldalso have resonance in Russian culture . As we had done in the New RussianDrama program at Towson, we would seek practical results. We wanted Russiantheatres to stage the plays we would translate.

At least one hundred plays we re discussed that day in October, fromwhich a long list of twenty-five was chosen for consideration. These texts wereshared among six Russian readers (I was a seventh), who commanded Englishwell enough to read the originals. In December, the readers' recommendationsmade it clear to me that we had seven texts-more than expected tha t couldbe included in the final translation stage.

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This caused us to make a quick change in plans. Originally, we intendedto commissionline-by-line translations o f eight plays,which were to be evaluatedby a second group of Russian experts. From those eight, a final four would bechosen to be adapted professionally by major contemporary playwrights. But,Philip asked with irresistible logic during one long phone conversation, ''Whyproduce four usable texts when you can produce seven? So we retained ouroriginal idea of having translators do line-by-line translations of four plays,from which writers would create Russian adaptations. ut we also turned threeplays over to Russian playwrights whose command of E nglish allowed them tocreate performable texts directly.4

By September 2011, we had seven new Russian texts to offer to theworld. Suzan-Lori Parks's The Book of Grace translated by Maria Nikolaeva, wasadapted by Yury K.lavdiev. Annie Bakers The Aliens translated by YekaterinaRaikova, was adapted by Mikhail D urnenkov. Eric Bogosian's Talk Radiotranslated by Anna Shulgat, was adapted by Ivan Vyrypaev.5 Adam Rapp'sNocturne was adapted by Maksym Kurochkin in collaboration with me. CharlesMee's Big Love was translated by Sergei Task. Deborah Zoe Laufer's EndDqyswas translated by Nina Belenitskaya with the assistance of her sister, AlexandraBelenitskaya. Nilo Cruz's nna in the Tropics was translated by YevgenyKazachkov.

The translation and adaptation process was this project's fulcrum.Philip and I always believed this is where we would make or break our goalof reaching Russia's stages. I matched American to Russian playwrightsthinking about their individual sensibilities, outlooks, and styles. It seemedobvious to me that the violent and tender Klavdiev suited Parks beautifully.Baker's playfulness slipped like a hand into the glove of Durnenkov's talent forunderstatement. Bogosian's monological structure matched Vyrypaev ideally.Who could I tum Rapp's symphony of language and images over to if notto Maksym Kurochkin? The promising young writers Nina Belenitskaya andYevgeny Kazachkov had the right approach to humor, history, and cultureto take on Laufer and Cruz. Task, in my opinion, is the finest translator ofEnglish-language drama into Russian and is capable of inhabiting any writer'sstyle. In short, I made my decisions; others would pass judgment on them.That process began in late October when the Fifth Theatre of Omsk hostedpublic readings of three plays as part of their bi-annual Young Theatres of

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:::J)( )

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Russia festival. The Book o Grace was done as a table reading; nd ~ s and TheAlienswere performed as fully staged readings with costumes, props, and stagebusiness. Responses from actors, spectators, and directors were encouraging.Most of the deeply American aspects in Grace and nd Dqys now had Ru ssianequivalents that revealed their inner workings. TheAliens directed by the youngKsenia Zorina from Moscow, simply knocked people back in their seats. Thisstaged reading, which was rehearsed over a five-day period, was a full-blown

performance. In Durnenkov's adaptation, Baker's back-lot losers were Ru ssiansat heart without ever losing their American underpinnings. By the time I leftOmsk two days after this reading, the theatre had resolved to ask Zorina tocomplete her production. Three days of public presentations and we alreadyhad one production scheduled.

We presented staged readings of four plays in Moscow from November21 to 22, 2011. Olga Galakhova, who coordinated the event for the Playwrightand Director Center, had an interesting suggestion. She wanted Americansliving in Moscow to bring their understanding to the plays. Therefore, RobynQuick, in Moscow on a Fulbright grant, directed The Book o Grace 6 AdamMuskin of the Moscow Art Theatre School and New York's Studio 6 directedThe Aliens. I had the mad hubris to direct myself in Nocturne (and was dulypanned in at least two reviews), while Odin Lund Biron, an American actor inthe company of the Satirikon Theatre, staged Talk Radio Halls were packed tooverflowing. Post-performance discussions were lively, especially with AnnieBaker and :tv1ikhail Durnenkov in attendance following the reading of TheAliens. Baker was hailed as the modern, female Chekhov, and it was not longbefore an agreement was struck between Baker and the Pushkin Theatre for afall2012 production of the play. Two events and two future productions underour collective belts.

:tv1ilena Avimskaya, the founder of the feisty new ON.TEATR in St.Petersburg, jumped at the opportunity to host readings from November 25to 27, 2011. They were timed to coincide with a conference called ''AmericanDrama: New Discoveries, organized byYulia Kleimanand Nikolai Pesochinskyof the St. Petersburg Theatre Academy. Avimskaya, a woman of extraordinaryenergy and vision, resolved to present all seven plays during the three daysof the conference. In fact, it was one of the first big events ON.TEATR hadhosted since moving into its new space on Ulitsa Zhukovskogo in August. Asn Moscow the theatre was a beehive of activity as scholars, spectators, actors,

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directors, and journalists jockeyed for seats in the two halls where readings tookplace. Virtually all were more than mere readings, butwere actually minimalistproductions, replete with costumes, props, blocking, and lighting.

In St. Petersburg we had the ideal opportunity to examine thedifference between scholarly and practical approaches to theatre. Someacademics were distrustful of the criteria for selection and dismissive of theproject's adaptation aspect, believing that the texts needed to be translatedmore faithfully. Some scholars were concerned that instead of translating

word-for-word, adaptors supplied cultural equivalents for such Americanmanifestations as little-league baseball parks or that they employed slang wordswhich some of the older commentators perceived as being too contemporary.On the other hand, St Petersburg's young theatre community embraced thetexts with almost voracious enthusiasm. When I departed St. Petersburg, Itraveled with the news that three of the plays were being added to the repertoryat ON.TEATR. These included Big Love directed by Georgy Tsnobiladze; TheBook o Crace directed by Denis Shibaev; and nd Dqys directed by RicardoMarin, a United-States-bornMexican now based in Russia. Subsequently it wasdecided to add still another to the theatre's repertory: The Aliens directed byMaria K.ritskaya.

A reading of Anna in the Tropics was staged at the Tomsk DramaTheatre in December and, as I write at the end of February 2012, stagedreadings are being prepared of ndDqys and The Book o Crace at the VologdaYoung Actors Theatre More such events are planned in other cities. Itwill takea few years to see just how much of an impact this program will have. But Ican't help but be encouraged by the fact that, just four months after the firstpublic presentation, we have six productions in line at theatres n three cities.O'Neill, Williams, and Albee are already moving over to make room for Baker,Mee, Parks, Laufer, Cruz, and Rapp in Russia.In memory o Daniel C e r o u ~ who was a constantpresencefor me throughout the twenty-fouryears o my collaboration with thispublication.

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The ook of Grace directed by Robyn Quick Playwright and Director Center Moscow 2011


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NOTES1 Robyn Quick and Yury Urnov, Bringing New Russian D rama to the

United States, Slavic and East European Performance 31, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 39-52.Stephen Nunns, The Natasha Plays : Yaroslava Pulinovich at Towson University,Slavic and East European Performance 30, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 43-54. Quick oversaw thecreation of a valuable, fact-filled website that details the project: http:/ www.towson.edu/theatre/russia/index.html.

2. See Kathleen Cioffi, New Russian Drama: The Familiarity of theStrange, Towson University, May 2010, Slavic and ast European Performance 30, no. 3(Fall2010): 35-41

3. For one of the hundreds of reports of this well-known event, you may seeMichelle Keleman, Clinton Says She'll Hit 'Reset Button' With Russia on the site ofNational Public Radio, posted March 6, 2009: http:/ www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld= 01532912

4. To follow the process in more detail go to a page on my website thatchronicles the project's development and provides links to informative articles andvideos: http:/ johnfreedman.webs.com/americanplaysproject.htm.

5. It is worth noting that Talk Radio was o riginally written in 1987 and thus,technically, fell out o f our self-imposed time range. However, the American partners,noting that the play was reworked for a Broadway run in 2006, felt strongly that its topiccould strike a cho rd in Russia. We agreed that even the best rules are best violated whennecessary, and included it.

6. Quick produced a Russian-language website of dramaturgical materials forThe Book o Grace: https:/ /sites.google.com/site/russ ianbookofgrace/.

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RADUAFRIM A QUEER LOOK T LIFECristina Modreanu

An artist builds his signs, he builds a garden of signs and hewaters it, he takes care of it, he admires it, he walks throughit, and he eats the garden's fruits. Radu AfrimThe Romanian director Radu Afrim's favorite case studies are theunknown heroes of everyday life, whose destinies may not be glamorous

but are filled with a poetry found in their simple gestures and painfulpowerlessness to embrace life in a world for which they are unfit. Gettingup from the table of life in the sense theorized by Sarah Ahmed in QueerPhenomenology -Afrim s characters can suddenly see the world from a different,oblique angle, and they show us what they discover, guiding us to the unseencorners of our own sensitivity. Speaking about his favorite type of character,Afrim often mentions the vulnerable, 2 their vulnerability transformed intosublime transparency a vulnerability which helps him] build powerful,credible, and full-of-life new worlds. 3

Afrim is not interested in the dynamics of power as seen in the worldor on stage, but rather in deepening his queer look on life. He explains, Ipass over powerful characters because am not able to understand power.choose strong texts about weak people instead of the weak plays about strongpeople. 4

Afrim is one of the most popular directors to rise on the Romanianstage after the fall of the Berlin Wall Born on June 2, 1968 in Beclean, a verysmall city in Transylvania, he likes to remember how he once spent an entiresummer looking at the Tudor History o Painting in 1000 Color Reproductions anddeveloped a true passion for painting and photography Later on, he studiedliterature and then theatre, and in 2000, he directed his first production. Itwas called BluEscape and he declared it was inspired by Laurie Anderson'smusic and performances. Since then, he has staged an ever-growing numberof productions, moving rapidly from small, independent venues and cafesstraight to the major urban stages of Romania, including the National Theatresin Targu M u r e ~ Cluj, T i m i ~ o a r a and Bucharest. The capital was conqueredin 2010.

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By that time, Afrim had already achieved rock star status with youngaudiences, and his sold-out productions were included in major festivals bothacross the country and internationally. After being awarded the Coup de Coeurde la Presse for the best production at the Avignon Off Festival in 2008 andthe European Culture Award in 2009, Afrim's production of The Disease ofM Fami y was included in the Odeon (Paris Theatre's 2009- 10 season. Hismost recent production, When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bowell at theRezidenztheater MUnich (November 2011), is a fresh sign that only ten yearsafter his debut, Afrim's career has become an international one.

Afrim has achieved success in a short time without any exteriorhelp or protection and has remained free of all socio-political influences,making his trajectory in Romanian theatre quite unusual. His theatre itself isequally exceptional. From his earliest productions, Afrim decided to breakwith tradition, openly abandoning the Stanislavskian influence that is still apowerful presence in Romanian theatre. By choosing to speak about a marginalworld rarely observed by other Romanian director the world of homeless,aging, abandoned human beings or the world of hidden or suppressed desiresand proclivities-Afr im builds a parallel universe that enriches our lives. Hischaracters-woven ou t of the fabric of dreams rather than realiry a re deep,complex human beings, full of imagination and creative impulses, often drivenby their unconscious, the embodiment of everything contemporary beingshave lost over time by living in a perpetual state of fast-forward. Afrim'scharacters have the time to dream, to collect old things, to engage in long andslightly absurd conversations, to dance, to eat and drink together, and even toskate when they feel like it. They fiercely undergo complex metamorphoses,sometimes turning into strange animals, leaping over thresholds to otherdimensions, breaking free from all temporal and spatial limits. Meanwhile, theyremain creatures driven by impulse and feeling, in constant search of that innerpart of themselves that they hope to express by interacting with others.

Afrim's characters attempt to embody our own subjugated, hiddendesires and, therefore, reveal a never before seen truth. They often do so bysinging; many of Afrim's productions include songs presented in a Brechtiansryle. H e works with composers such as Ada Milea or Vlaicu Golcea, comingfrom the world of theatre or jazz, in order to add one more dimension tohis very particular universe. He also works closely with talented young setdesigners in order to bring to life his world of imagination. For The Disease of

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Paul Cezar Antal) n err Paul directed by Radu Afrim, Youth Theatre, Piatra Neamf, 2009: :J


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The Pi/lowman directed by Radu Afrim Maria Filotti Theatre Bdila 2008

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M Fami JI by Fausto Paravidino (National Theatre, i m i ~ o a r a 2008) he workedwith Velica Panduru to create a grove in which the characters could playhide-and-seek, take walks, or ride bicycles. Having a set with multiple planesenables him to employ cinematic techniques, playing with close-ups andlong-shots at his (and the spectators') will. For Roosevelt Plaza by D ea Lober(National Theatre, T i m i ~ o a r a 2009) and So Much Hope by Hanoch LevinOdeonTheatre, Bucharest, 201 0 he worked with JulianaValsan, using different

planes on which the action could develop. For some of his productions he alsoinvented a type of cellular set, consisting of three, four, or more separatelittle boxes in which different scenes are played, sometimes simultaneously.He used this set design for Cheek to Cheek by Jonas Gardell (Nottara Theatre,Bucharest, 2005), Krum by Hanoch Levin (National Theatre, i m i ~ o a r a 2006),and most effectively for The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (Maria FilottiTheatre, Bd.ila, 2008) where he and set designer Cosmin Florea built the smallboxes into a spectacular vertical wall.

Afrim's favorite kind of performance space, however, is one in whichspectators are placed very close to the actors. Sometimes Afrim himself placespillows for students in front of the first row in order to bring the audienceeven closer so that a true exchange of energy can take place. In these cases,the set design takes on a claustrophobic aspect. For example, in err Paul byTankred Dorst (Youth Theatre, Piatra Neamr, 2009), Paul's room is ull ofstuffed animals and old objects, like an intimate museum of his life aboutto be destroyed by the agents of the new world. In Lucia Is Skating by LauraSintija Cerniauskaite (Andrei M u r e ~ a n u Theatre, Sfantu Gheorghe, 2008),the spectators face a small skating rink, the place where the story unfolds. InThe Avalanche by Tuncer Ci.icenoglu (National T heatre, Bucharest, 2010), allthe rooms in a family house are brought together in the same space, its wallscovered with white cotton to stop the noise which could provoke the fearedavalanche; like the characters in the play, the audience feels trapped in a whiteprison where their voices cannot be heard.

For a long time after the fall of communism, the Romanian stagewas almost exclusively a text-based theatre. The main characters had to beportrayed sympathetically as heroes of some sort, good people able to fightfor their ideas or at least recognize their faults and try to correct them, andthus become an example for others. Aside from realistic plays with this typeof good-bad dichotomy built into them, the audience's favorites were often

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the classical characters of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Moliere, whose ability toembody all human typologies allowed spectators to read between the lines andfind the hidden message.

In the very personal universe built by Afrim, all boundaries areblurred, characters seem to come not from reality but rather from a dreamland:they seem not to know the difference between good and evil. They can be cruelin a beautiful, direct way but they have the excuse of being only in search ofthemselves, not in search of power. Their gender is sometimes uncertain, asis their age. Afrim works with his actors to distort the realistic approach, nomatter what play he is staging. It can be a physical distortion (one actor playingon his knees, an actress with an over-sized bust, another with a deformed heador wearing an animal mask) or a distortion of behavior (an unexpected burstof dance or a sudden change of the rhythm of movement) so as to induce theuncanny sensation of another reality. Uncanny describes the atmosphere ofalmost all of Afrim's productions. The feeling arises from the use of smallobjects that sometimes ill the performing space or from the omnipresence ofstuffed animals that often seem to take over the live beings: a recurrent imagein Afrim's productions is the half-animal/half-human creature coming fromouter space to distort the straight lines of people's lives.

The fabric of Afrim's productions directly assaults the senses: hisexquisite sense of composition rules over the visual dimension, and music isusually present in one form or another, as is dance. The built-in poetry of hiscreations is a quality rarely seen in Romanian theatres today. nother of Afrim'ssignature devices is his sense of humor informed by contemporary practicesand realities, from which he never strays far. In fact, his very contemporarysense of irony helps Afrim translate any kind of play for an audience raisedin the age of television and new technologies.

Afrim also re-imagines the classics. His approach to Chekhov's ThreeSisters or Federico Garcia a ca's House ofBernardaA/ba (retitled Bernarda HouseRemix or, more recently, his resuscitation of the almost forgotten Romanianplaywright Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) with Holiday Games were successfulattempts at cultural translation for a new age and audience.

Afrim deftly uses his garden of signs to revive the classics as well asto bring new plays from all over the world to the Romanian stage.

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NOTES1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations Objects Others (Durham, NC:

uke University Press, 2006).2. Susan Sontag associates vulnerability and queerness in her journals: Being

queer makes me feel vulnerable. It increases my wish to hide, to be invisible. SusanSontag, Reborn. journals Notebooks 1947 1963 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,2008), 221.

3 Afrirn. Presentation. Montaj Alex Condurache/Roftlco/Bogdan Stanga,interview posted to Radu Afrim's website, 3:12. March 20, 2011. http://www.raduafrirn.ro/afrirn-presentation-montaj-alex-condurache-rof.4. Ibid.

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E STERN EUROPE N PLAYWRIGHTSWOMEN WRITE THE NEW

MarcyArlin and Gwynn MacDonaldThe societal shifts of post-communist Eastern and Central Europe

posed new artistic and philosophical questions for artists about content andstyle. We are always interested in the new issues affecting a society in tran sition.On the thirtieth anniversary of the League of Professional Theatre Women,we wondered how this period of change has affected women playwrights inparticular. Has it influenced their language, the style in which they write, theirchoice of subject matter? Are they focusing their attentions on what might beperceived as women s issues? nd how clearly are their voices being heard?Ourimpulse derives from a general concern in the League, and in theatre nationally,with the visibility and viability of women playwrights both in the United Statesand on stages abroad.

Since 2003, Immigrants Theatre Project has been presenting EasternEuropean plays in translation to an American audience, stimulating both interestin the work and a cross-cultural dialogue about contemporary performance.For 2012, we narrowed our focus to the work of women playwrights. Inemailed discussions with the dramatists and in reading over twenty plays, wefound many common themes and concerns written in distinctive styles. Theplays selected for the yearlong reading series, held at the Bohemian NationalHall, Romanian Cultural Institute, and Bulgarian Consulate, represent a crosssection of content and form. We made our choices based on the artistic qualityof the plays, the accessibility of the translations, and whether we felt thematerial best represented women s writing from the respective region. We werefortunate to work with international theatre colleagues who helped locate theplays and illuminate the social contexts in which they were written.

For this article we sent a series of questions to the playwrights VeraIon and Mihaela Michailov (Romania), Radmila Adamova (Czech Republic),Virag Erdos (Hungary), Yana Borisova and Theodora Dimova (Bulgaria), EvaMaliti-Fraiiova S lovak Republic), and Milena Markovic (Serbia), asking abouttheir careers, their plays, how they thought of themselves as women artists,and how gender might affect their writing. Some have had success with theirplays; others feel that their themes and style are too outside the mainstream

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and, therefore, have not been staged. We also found that although there islittle overt acknowledgement that women s issues are a mainstay of their work,there is a realization that as women playwrights they face particular obstacles tohaving their work produced by theatrical institutions often dominated by men.Several hinted that their personal lives (childcare, relationships, etc.) might bemore difficult because they are women.

The more successful of the playwrights have had their work translatedinto several Eastern and Western European languages and have had theirplays produced outside of their native countries, including some in nationsas culturally and geographically distant as Japan. To some of the playwrights,their plays are written with a local audience in mind; for others, they feel thattheir subject matter has a universal appeal and is not specific to any particularcountry or culture.

Whatever their perceptions about theirworkandwhom their audiencesmay be, these playwrights are neither objective about their subjects, nor dothey want to be. Several of the plays are full of scenes of domestic violenceand sexual abuse, and include portrayals of drunken degraded relationships.Others explore the modern experience of alienation exemplified in seekinglove through personal ads or in misguided romances. A few deal with lingeringlegacies of corruption and social unease, vestiges of life under communism.

What the plays all have in common is an almost cinematic close-upof their subject matter: we are dropped smack into the middle of a family,housing block, police station, ar t studio, cafe. The playwright as observernever holds back. There is an intense examination of social ills and societalstratification with outrageous humor and wit. They give a voice to those leftoutof mainstream theatre: women (rarely made central characters), drug addicts,victims of abuse, new immigrants, abandoned children, damaged souls.

Czech playwrigh

seep vo.32 no.1 spring 2012-winter 2013

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