NEWSNOTES on SoviET and EAsT EuROPEAN DRAMA cndT HEATRE

Volume 3, Number 2 June, 1983

DEAR READERS

Many thank$ .for your. num~roi.Js .complimentary -letters about this publication. Your continued evaluation and helpful hints for the future are of great interest to us.

I am now starting to put together the fall issue of NEWSNOTES and would be happy to receive material for publication from you. As previously, this would .include announcements, calls for papers, bibliographic data, book and performance reviews, and short articles on relatively contemporary matters connected with Soviet and East European theatre and drama. The countries whose theatre and dramatic arts we are primarily concerned with include the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

Leo Hecht, Editor

1\E.WSNOTES is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts, Graduate Center, City University of New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Graduate School and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of George Mason University. The Institute Office is Room 80 I, City University Graduate Center 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscription requests and submissions shou ld be addressed to the Editor of I'EWSNOTES: Leo Hecht, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030.

CALL FOR PAPERS

I shall be chairing a new panel on "Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre" at the National Convention of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). The Convention will take place in New York City December 26-29, 1983. Since this is the first time this panel will be organized, I would like it to be of particularly high quality. I provisionally envision one paper on the historical background of the Moscow Art Theatre and early influences on Stanislavsky; one paper on his theories of directing; one paper on his theories of acting; and one paper on the impact he has had on Soviet/East European theatre. If you are interested in presenting a paper, I would appreciate receiving your one-page abstract (proposal) as soon as possible. If it is accepted, I shall need to have your completed paper by November IS. Please send your proposals and inquiries to: Prof. Leo Hecht, Chairman, Russian Studies, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

During the first six weeks of the fall 1982 semester, the Wichita State University Theatre hosted guest artist Jaroslav Stremien. Mr. Stremien is Polish born. He earned his actor's diploma in Poland and was a professional actor for ten years in the Polish National Theatre system. In 1970, after I 0 years of study in France, . he came to the U.S., earning his M.F.A. in directing at Yale. He is curr.~ntly on the theatre .faculty at the University of Connecticut at ~torrs. .

WhUe at Wichita State, Mr. Stremien taught a scene study workshop, . performed his one-man show, "Three by Chekhov" and directed the University

Theatre's production of Slawomir Mrozek's Vatzlav. (A play that until last spring had not seen a production in Poland.) The Wichita production received favorable responses, although the allegorical script itself got mixed reactions. The production and Mr. Stremien's work was very well received. The following quote from one reviewer, Judy Dansby, in the Sunflower campus newspaper perhaps best reflects the general reaction to the production-which was performed Sept. 30, Oct. I and 2:

Vatzlav, a shipwrecked slave, is washed ashore in a strange land. He thanks providence and begins the task of understanding the workings of his new home-a truly confusing task.

The audience, mentally adrift in contemporary Polish philosophy, can identify with his confusion.

Vatzlav is clearly an allegory and a political satire; there is a message in it. But its meaning remains just beyond mental grasp, evading understanding.

It is fortunate that this elusive meaning doesn't diminish the humor or finesse of the production.

Vatzlav contains a wide array of humor-some of which occurs when it is least expected.

2

There is the subtle humor of its word play and incongruities, the broad humor of its slapstick action and the bawdy humor of its liberation army leader.

The production is well staged. Stremien has guided his able cast through action ranging from stylized, almost dance-like movement, to a fast-paced chase scene complete with an attack by imaginary dogs.

Vatzlav, played by Larry Kerr, is both philosophical and practical in his intent to make the best of life in a foreign land. His side-show lecture on personal and political liberty, accompanied by an unusual display of the assets of Justice, provides the ultimate blend of these two qualities.

Justice, also known as Justine, is played by Belinda Cargill, who brings a charming naive quality to the role.

Mr. and Mrs. Bat, played by Bill Gutshall and Susy Pollock, exemplify the corruption of the land's ruling. class. Pollock vamps her way through the play with an amusing coquettishness, while Gutshall provides a strange, stern ruler the audience can dislike.

Arden Weaver's set and Joyce Cavorozzi's costumes heighten the sense of being stranded in a world that is alien to our understanding.

Bela Kiralyfalvi . .

Laurence Senelick's book Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet: A Reconstruction (Greenwood Press), a study of the seminal production created by Stanislavsky and Craig at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, has been awarded a George Freedley Award by the Theatre Library Association, as one of the best works on the theatre to be published in 1982. The award was officially presented in May in New York by the actor Alfred Drake.

BOOK REVIEWS Alfreds Straumanis, ed. Baltic Drama. A Handbook and Bibliography. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1981,$35.00.

Baltic drama, little known in the West, is relatively young with most of the major works having been written in the past one hundred years. It began under the Russian tsars and continued to grow during the period of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian independence between the two world wars. It continues to be written and produced in the Soviet Baltic republics, as well as abroad. Many plays by Baltic authors can be seen in Russian translation on the stages of Moscow and Leningrad, including Enn Vetemaa's Monument, a rather pungent allegory about the artist and society, which was presented at the "Sovremennik" Theatre in 1978, directed by Arkadii Raikin. Certainly more of these plays deserve to be known in the West.

For anyone interested in Russian and Eastern European Drama this handbook is an essential reference tool. It lists all Latvian, Lithuanian, and

3

Estonian plays published or produced up to 1980, including plays for children and the puppet theatre. It contains over four thousand six hundred titles; six hundred synopses of the most popular plays; biographies of sixty major playwrights and a very useful and enlightening survey of Baltic drama. Also included are chronological tables of major Baltic dramatists; tables identifying the plays by subject: folklore, history, social change, children; and a bibliography of source materials. In 1973, the handbook is one of the fruits of the Baltic Drama Project, established under the guidance of Alfreds Straumanis at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. It was funded in part by a grant from the NEH.

A.L.

Laurence Senelick, trans. and ed. Russian Dramatic Theor from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology. (University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 5 Austin: University of Texas Press, l981, $37.50. .

This anthology offers a selection of Russian critical writing on the drama and theatre from 1820 to 1914, most of it published for the first time in English. The nineteenth-century selections include writings by Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky and Sleptsov. They are important and revealing as a reminder that many of the social and ethical concerns that play so important a part in Soviet drama and theatre have their roots in a much earlier period.

The anthology is particularly ' vciluabl~ for the light it sheds on .the heated debate in the decade between 1904 and 1914 over Symbol ism and Naturalism. in the theatre as reflected in the polemical writings on the subject by Bely ("The Cherry Orchard"), Annensky (''Drama at the Lower Depths") and Bryusov ("Realism and Convention on the Stage"). Also included are Evreinov's "Introduction to Monodrama," Ivanov's "The Essence of Tragedy," and Andreev's "Letters on the Theatre." Senelick prefaces his anthology with an extensive and very useful introduction to both Russian drama and criticism. The select ions are well-translated, judiciously striking a balance between reflecting the idiosyncracies of the individual authors and making them comprehensible to the modern reader. There are detailed notes for each of the selections and a selected bibliography.

A.L.

Andre Levinson. Ballet Old and New. Tr.. Susan Cook Summer. New York: Dance Horizons, 1982, $11.50 (paperback).

Andre Levinson was born in St. Petersburg in 1887 and grew up in the world of artistic ferment that made this Paris of the North the- center of pre-Revolutionary cultural life. An extremely prolific writer, he began writing on the dance in 1909, the same year Diaghilev opened his first Saison Russe in Paris. When Revolution broke out, Levinson, like many other artists and writers, fled westward. In 1921 he arrived in Paris where he soon established himself as a major voice in French literary and artistic circles and became the first real dance critic in France.

Levinson wrote this collection of articles (Staryi i novyi balet) in I 918; it 4

was his last work to appear in Russia. Included in it are his landmark critiques of Diaghilev's "Saisons Russe," as well as his critical assessments of the ballet masters Fokine and Nijinsky, and of Isadora Duncan's innovative achievements. Of particular interest to the theatre practitioner are Levinson's evocations of such famous productions as Sheherazade, Firebird, and Le Sacre du Printemps, and his discussions of painting and music in the ballet theatre.

A.L.

OTt-ER PUBLICATIONS

Laslo Tikos, Universitiy of Massachusetts, has just published his translation of Yuri Krotkov's Napoleon and the Shark, a comedy in three acts and an epilogue. The play has been entered in a University of Massachusetts Summer Theatre Contest and, if selected, that theatre would have the initial rights to perform it. The play has been published under the auspices of the Program in Soviet and Eastern European Studies-Occasional Papers Series No. 10, and may be ordered (cost: $1 0) through Dr. Tikos, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Herter Hall 438, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 0 I 003.

Holub, Miroslav, Interferon, or on theater, tr. by Dana Habova and David Young. Field Translation Series/Oberlin College, 1982. 158p (The Field translation series, 7) 82-082128. I 0.95 ISBN 0-932440-12-6; 5.95 pa ISBN 0-932440-13-4. CIP. .

Miroslav Holub is a unique combination of eminent scientist and distinguished poet in his native Czechoslovakia. The present collection, translated in close collaboration with the author, shows Holub to be unusual in yet another way: the "Field Translation Series" usually does not present the same writer in more than one volume; this is Holub's second. It contains an impressive combination and interplay of two principal categories of imagery drawn from laboratory science and the theater. Yet countless other metaphors appear as well in the short occasional poems and in the longer and formally more theatrical pieces constituting the collection. A masterful introduction by David Young focuses on Holub's basically impersonal style curiously combined with reminiscences of events in his personal life, on the author's use of metaphor as hypothesis, and on the poet's place among the mid-twentieth-century Central and East European writers whose work was shaped by the disasters of WW II. Though not easy to read or understand, Interferon has the potential of being enjoyed and appreciated by both literati and natural scientists. This in itself is no mean accomplishment. Appropriate for libraries serving students at upper-division undergraduate level and above.

RUSSIAN STAGE DESIGN

The following "Gallery Notes," by John Bowlt were published for an exhibit of Russian stage design which originated at the University of Mississippi, and traveled to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Phoenix Art Museum and the University of Texas-Austin. It is also scheduled for exhibition in New York. Professor Bowlt has kindly given us permission to reproduce the Notes here.

5

Introduction to the Exhibition

Russian Stage Design: Scenic Innovation 1900-1930, consisting of 235 set and costume designs by 73 Russian artists, documents one of the most creative eras in theatre and dance design. During the early decades of the twentieth century an extraordinary ferment swept through the arts of Europe, and nowhere more strongly than in Russia. Pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Russia witnessed not only some of the boldest and most radical movements in the history of Western art but also, as illustrated by the exhibition, a remarkable efflorescence of collaboration between the visual and the performing arts. The names of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, of Nijinsky and Massine, of Ida Rubinstein immediately leap to mind, as do those of Stravinsky, of Benois and Bakst, of Larionov and Gontcharova. Moreover, as represented in the exhibition, independently of Diaghilev, brilliant cadres of avant-garde talents-e.g. Malevich, Lissitzky, Exter, Popova, Rodchenko, Tatlin, and Stepanova-were revolutionizing art and theatre and leading them into uncharted and radical directions.

In addition to presenting the "high" arts (ballet, drama, film) in Russia and abroad, the exhibition also features the "low" arts (circus, cabaret, music hall, puppet theater) and designs for the mass spectacles instituted under Lenin, which, staged outdoors, employed casts of thousands.

The exhibition is drawn from the noted collection of Mr. and Mrs. Nikta D. Lobanov.-Rostovsky. The ctlrrent exhibition was org

the productions of Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater (founded 1898), the actors still overshadowed the decor. Stanislavsky saw stage design as documentation for his actors.

As the 19th century drew to a close, producers, patrons and designers began to question Stanislavsky's concept of two-dimensional surface decoration and a move began toward three-dimensional sets that would orchestrate the efforts of dramatist, composer, actor, and artist. The designer's function would become dynamic, instead of static.

Neo-Nationa I ism

The new attitude arose in part from the Neo-Nationlist or Neo-Russian movement stimulated by the art colonies of Abramtsevo (founded in the 1870s) and Talashkino (founded in the 1890s). Artists there collected traditional peasant artifacts; they recorded and illustrated Russian fairy-tales and legends. This evocation of peasant culture persisted throughout the Silver Age, and its influence was evident in the sets and costumes for Diaghi lev's Ballets Russes ( 1909-1929).

There were others before Serei Diaghilev who sought to refurbish Russian decorative arts. They believed in Russia's own culture; they disliked French art. Mikhail Vrubel (not in this exhibition) of the Abramtsevo group transcended conventional barriers and pushed the boundaries of painting and design farther than his contemporaries. Perhaps only in Leon Bakst did he find kinship. Bakst's use of form, color and sound evoked an emotional. sensuous force almost as astonishing as Vrubel's. Bakst thought of the stage as a relief and the human body as the principle organizational element on stage. His costume designs exposed the body at key points and extended its action outward with trousers, pendants, feathers, etc., as functional devices. He emerges cis a transitional figure who belonged to both the 19th and 20th centuries.

The World of Art

Journals played an important role in the rebirth of Russian art early in this century, the most influential perhaps being the World of Art. The artists, critics and esthetes who supported this magazine were known by the same title. Among them were Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Ivan Bilibin and Konstantin Somov.

The organizational force behind the group was Diaghilev, who became known in the West as director of the Ballets Russes. Much has been written about him by Western and emigre critics. Despite the long prestige he has enjoyed in the West and despite the fact that he was totally Russian, he has still to take his rightful place in his own country.

One of the foremost members of the World of Art was Alexandre Benois. Very erudite and very moderate, he remained outside of the avant-garde movements. He had a passion for the French 17th century (especially Versailles), which was reflected in his designs. However, like Diaghilev, he knew the French expected some "barbarism" from Russia. Diaghilev satisfied this desire with "Petrouchka" ( 1911) and "Le Sacre du Printemps" (1918). Stravinsky's music for "Le Sacre du Printemps" set off a riot when it was first performed in Paris, while Benois' stage designs for "Petrouchka" revealed a spontaneous side, far removed

7

from his usual traditional work.

Toward a New Esthetic of Stage Design

Bakst, Benois and their World of Art colleagues produced remarkable sets and costumes for the Ballet Russes. According to a critic, however, World of Art artists were basically picture-makers. The Symbolist group known as the Blue Rose applied new concepts to stage design. For example, a background of a single curtain provided a rather narrow stage. In such a scenic framework was an attempt to "burn the outmoded devices of the naturalistic stage." It took a new generation of artists to move stage design from surface to space; among these were Alexandra Exter and Alexander Rodchenko.

Neo-Primitivism

The Symbolist theater declined under a new artistic and literary movement: Neo-Primitivism, which existed between 1908 and 1913. It involved the use of primitive forms and subjects. It has kinship with French Fauvism and German Expressionism. Neo-Primitivism was reflected in "The Firebird" production of 1926 with designs by Natalia Gontcharova the backdrop for Scene 2 is a vision of the Christian City and reflects the Neo-Primitivists' and especially Gontcharova's debt to the design of the ancient Russian icon. Here costume plans for the unrealized liturgical ballet "Liturgie" also recall icons.

At this point Gont.charova's life-long

and 16th centuries he found the spiralic and S-form compositions which he used as a structure in many of his designs. Malevich attempted a new artistic language when in 1913, as a backdrop for the opera "Victory Over the Sun," he used simply a square within a square, the inner one divided diagonally in two areas: one white the other black. He used other unorthodox geometric devices: cylinders, cones, spheres on the stage and lighting to create abstract forms.

A distillation of the geormetric forms introduced by Malevich may be seen in Lissitzky's costumes for puppets in the 1920 production of "Victory Over the Sun.". In Lissitzky's costumes, which were never produced, the central axis has been destroyed completely and assymetry dominates.

The October Revolution

The Bolshevik coup of 1917 naturally exerted an effect on Russian art, although, in some cases, ideas that seemed radical had their real origins before 1917. Cultural life was confusing after the Revolution. The central question was what kind of art would reflect the aims of the Revolution. The notion of a proletarian art was discussed. The new artist must be freed from his cultural heritage to work closer to the factory. Proletarian culture must be international, dynamic and mobile.

Constructivism became manifest in theater designs in the 1920's. Precedents for Constructivist theat~r had been established in the teen's by such artists as Exter. Multi-faceted constructions and platforms withir:"~ the whole space of the stage, and mechanically moving components characterized Constructivist productions. Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Goergii and Vladimir Stenberg, Varvaro Stepanova (nos. 232-234), and Tatlin are among the best-known artists in the Constructivist movement who worked for the theater.

However, the austerity of the productions was alien to many theater-goers; what they wanted was either melodrama or an epic movie. They wanted distracting entertainment. By the late 1920s, Soviet stage design had returned to decoration, from space to surface. There were exceptions, of course, but these experiments did not halt the progression back to the classical tradition.

Expanding the Concept of Theater

One of the remarkable developments after 1917 was the trend away from conventional theater to the cinema, cabaret, vaudeville, circus, and open-air mass activities. Many designers turned their talents to these less-esteemed media. Suddenly everyone wanted to laugh and enjoy the spontaneity of the cabaret, the circus, and the variety theater.

The Decorative Revival of the 1920s

Like all Soviets arts of the 1920s, stage design was affected by the mass emigration of artists, critics, and patrons to Berlin, Paris and New York, and by the increasing orientation of the state apparatus toward a simple narrative form that was known as Socialist Realism. Neither in the East nor in the West did Russian artists and producers maintain the elan of the 191 Os and the 1920s.

9

Rather, they restored the decorated surface to the stage.

For the Russian artist at home, his enforced dependence upon the political machine and the code of Socialist Realism, was an inevitable and irreversible process. As Bolshevik power consolidated, private enterprise ended and formal experimentation came under attack as a relic of bourgeois consciousness; it was anti-proletarian and had to be eliminated. With the proclamation in 1934 of Socialist Realism as the universal style of Soviet culture, stage design returned to the picturesque decoration of the 19th century: narrative and obvious.

SERBAN'S THREE SISTERS

This article on the production of Chekhov's play at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from November, 1982, through February, 1983, was submitted by Professor Jerrold A. Phillips, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. We are grateful to him for this excellent review.

Andrei Serban, continuing to work his way through the Chekhov canon, directed a provocative and controversial Three Sisters for Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Using a lively new translation by Jean-Claude van ltallie, it is played with one intermission between the second and third acts of Chekhov's text.

The most striking element _of the production is the. fluid way in which Serban uses the Loeb Promo Center stage. Employing few props and very little furniture, the. stage essentially remains a large, open space through which actors are continually moving. The first three acts represent various interiors in the Prozorov house, and for these Beni Montresor, who designed the settings, lights, and costumes (much of Montresor's work in the past has been for opera), provides variations of a basic setup of a mirrored floor (made up of what appeared to be four by four foot panels of mirrored mylar covered by a rigid clear plastic sheet of the same size) and a brilliant scarlet velour curtain that defines the back of the acting space. A bank of white lights is placed on the floor on either side of the stage, perpendicular to the front, defining the sides of the acting space, and forcing entrances from the sides to be made either far upstage or far downstage. A black masking curtain extends from each bank of lights to the flies. Upstage of the scarlet drapes is a large backdrop, realistically painted to represent a cinder-block back wall of a theatre. In addition to providing a means of upstage exit and entrance for the actors who could disappear around the side of the backdrop (the scarlet drape, which was not always present, did not mask the entire upstage area even when it was used), the cinder-block backdrop also suggested the artificiality of the theatrical presentation.

The setting for the first act has the scarlet curtain extending across approximately two-thirds the width of the stage. Hung from a plainly visible iron pipe, it is not extended to its full height, bunching up in small folds at the bottom. There are two rows of seven simple bentwood chairs facing each other, one row running diagonally from down left center to up left, and the other diagonally from down right center to up center. At various points in the action actors remove chairs from their original positions and carry them to some other place on stage, where they proceed to sit on them. A large, gold-painted

10

gramophone sits on the floor, stage right, with its horn pointing toward center stage. A piano, up left, completes the stage picture.

As the lights dim, military music is heard, and the voices of the three sisters reading the opening lines of the play are broadcast over the house sound system. The sisters enter up right, Masha in black, Irina, carrying flowers, in white, and Olga, in royal blue, also carrying flowers. They hold a pose, a brilliantly lit image, the stage all glittering primary colors with black and white contrasts. Olga begins speaking her lines over the taped dialogue. The sisters move to the front of the stage, where they line up, facing the audience, and begin speaking as the taped sound fades away.

Serban takes full advantage of the open stage space by having actors continually dispersed throughout it. For example, a few moments after the play begins Irina and Masha are sitting in chairs on stage left, Solyony and Tuzenbach are standing right, Vershinin is seated center in one of the bentwood chairs he has carried there, and Chebutykin is upstage, about equally distant from Vershinin and the Solyony-Tuzenbach group. This practice of arranging the characters about the entire playing area results in their being constantly involved in long crosses to speak to another character, providing the stage with constant movement and energy. It also helps to suggest an isolation in which each character exists in this play, each one vitually in a separate world. When characters are grouped together, the grouping is frequently a stylized one, often held as a tableau. Many times two actors speaking to each other are downstage, both facing the audience. There are few times when actors are grouped casually and reali.stically, and even these instances, such as one in which Masha is kneeling next to a seated Vershinin, strike us . a~ "stagy," because they appear : posed, because of their contrast with the isolation and .frontal groupings that predominate, and because they are frequently held for long, turning into a tableau.

Two examples will illustrate how Serban uses his stage. The first involves the handling of the end of Chekhov's first act. Serban has solved the problem of where to put the dining room by simply dispensing with it. Two actresses, servants dressed in black dresses with aprons enter and cross to the center of the scarlet drape, where the curtain is split. Each grasps one side of the split and walks about five feet towards the side of the stage she is closest to, holding the curtain up, forming a graceful, curved opening at the center of the scarlet curtain. Olga invites everyone to dinner, and the actors exit through this opening, leaving Tuzenback and Irina alone on stage for a short scene together. Soon Natasha, in a brilliant pool of light, appears in the opening of the scarlet curtain. Everyone returns, soon forming a straight line across the back of the acting area. Fedotik and Roday enter down right with a large camera, everyone reassembles in the curtain opening as two photographs are shot. Fedotik gives Irina her present, a top, which she kneels down and begins playing with. The scarlet curtain slowly rises until it disappears into the flies, leaving the cinder-block-painted drop as the back of the stage space. All of the characters are in a line at the back of the acting area; most of them are teasing Natasha. Then, with the exception of Natasha, they cross right and exit behind the backdrop. Natasha comes to the front of the stage, where she sits on one of the bentwood chairs; Andrei enters, approaches Natasha, and grabs her around the neck from behind. A lively folk song begins to be sung behind the backdrop, providing a background for Andrei's proposal to Natasha. Andrei and Natasha embrace and sustain a long kiss as all of

II

the characters enter, sti II singing, and cross in a line from the stage right end of the backdrop, across the front of the backdrop and off stage left, each actor smiling as he or she gazes intently at the rapt, wrapped in each other, and oblivious Andrei and Natasha. It is a beautiful, vibrant, and richly comic moment.

The other illustration occurs in the fourth act, which takes place outside the Prozorov house. In this act there is no scarlet curtain, as the cinder-block backdrop defines the upstage limit of the acting area; the mirrored floor is now largely covered with brown, red, and yellow leaves, as if trees has been surrounding the acting area and had shed their Autumnal foliage. Solyony and Tuzenbach have gone off to their duel; a gunshot has been heard but the characters on stage are not aware of what has happened. Military music is playing in the background, as it was at the beginning of the play. Irina, Masha, and Olga are on stage, up center, lined up in a row next to each other facing the front. Chebutykin runs on from down left, he crosses to Olga, who has crossed left to meet him. He whispers something to her, they both rush offstage, quickly followed by Masha. Irina is left alone, the whole stage to herself. Chebutykin yells, from offstage, "The Baron has just been killed in a duel." Irina weaves and collapses to the floor, lying in a fetal position. Masha and Olga rush in, kneel next to her and try to console her as the diaglogue, once again tape recorded, comes over the theatre's sound system. In this production, which has continualy projected images of isolation, Serban has cleared the stage at this point so that the full isolation of Irina's experience can be emphasized. It is a very powerful and strikig moment.

The acti~g in the production is very interesting. It appears as if each performer has sought . to identify and exaggerat~ a .particular aspect of the character he or she is playing. In this production Olga (Marianne Owen) plays self-pity, weeping frequently and dragging herself around, head buried in her chest; Irina (Cherry Jones) plays youthfulness, easily enthused, fascinated by the gift of a set of crayons; Masha (Cherly Giannini) seems to be working off of ennui, unable to pay attention to anything anyone is saying. Vershinin (Alvin Epstein) is pompously lecturing all the time, infused with a gleeful optimism about the future; Tuzenbach (John Bottoms) works on hesitancy and indecision with a sing-song voice; and Solyony (Tony Shalhoub) on playing weirdness, with strange smile and intense stare sustained throughout. Kulygin (Richard Grusin) plays at convincing everyone, including himself, that he is happy as he lumbers about, awkward in movement and intonation. Andrei (Thomas Derrah) is a barrelful of frustration and remorse, speaking to himself and glaring at everybody; Natasha (Karen MacDonald) is all arrogance and stupid haughtiness, storming around and losing her temper at the slightest provocation; Chebutykin (Jeremy Geidt) plays a weariness and hollowness that animate the entire range of his activities, from the puckish affection he lavishes on the sisters to the drunken babbling with his pants fallen down around his ankles during Act Ill. There seems to be considerable work directed towards each character focusing on himself or herself rather than relating to others, and there emerges from the production an impression of so many spoiled children, each isolated in his or her own concerns.

Not everyone found the production to his or her liking. Kevin Kelley, critic for the Boston Globe, for example, found the production terribly wrongheaded, and placed it on his list of the ten worst plays of the year, sharing the opinion of a portion of Boston's rather conservative theatregoing audience. But the production

12

found its audience and was selling out by the end of its run; many younger or less tradition-bound spectators found Serban's work on Three Sisters very exciting.

Serban's production reflects themes traditionally associated with the play. The relentless passage of time is suggested, for example, by highlighting such moments in the text as that in Act Ill when the drunken Chebutykin steps to the front of the stage, raises up a ceramic clock in front of him with both hands, as if showing it to the audience, and then quite deliberately drops it to the floor, watching it smash into a hundred pieces. Serban also presents this idea by such devices as projecting shadows of a virtual forest of leaves on the scarlet curtain at the beginning of the play; these are the leaves that cover the floor in the last act.

Serban, however, goes beyond traditional approaches to this play, and uses his stage and the various elements of the production to add new levels of meaning to the play. With all of its images of isolation, in space and characterization, with the obvious theatricality of its setting, with the frontal arrangement of actors and continued use of tableaux, there is a sense that the text has been broken down into small, discrete units, rather than the seamless web that is the tradition of Stanislavsky. And it is in finding meaning in these individual units, in the way they are related to one another, and in the associations they evoke that the play takes on rich new dimensions. I found Serban's Three Sisters an extraordinary work, beautiful to watch, brightly inventive and imaginative without ever being gimmicky, and fascinating to contemplate. Serban gives us the gift of being able to see Chekhov freshly once qgain.

. .

Tl- ARENA, lSTV AN ORKENY AND ScREENPLAY The Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., is certainly one of the finest

ensemble theaters in the United States. Both the staging and the quality of the performers are superb. Guided by its Producing Director Zelda Fichandler, the Arena has consistently presented a mixture of the traditional and avant-garde which has never failed to satisfy even the most demanding theatergoer. Its performances abroad, including the Soviet Union, have brought the company aditional acclaim and an international reputation.

Fortunately for us, Ms. Fichandler has a strong interest in Soviet and East European theatre and drama. During recent years the Arena Stage has presented a variety of such plays at both the Arena On-the-round) and the Kreeger theaters. Among them were outstanding, innovative productions of Gorky's Lower Depths; Vampilov's Duck Hunting; Mrozek's Enchanted Night, The Police and Emigres; Erdman's The Suicide; and Aitmatov's Ascent of Mount Fuji.

Now let us get to the main subject of this article. Istvan Orkeny's university education, in deference to his father's wishes, was in fields quite remote from his true love-literature. He received degrees in pharmacology and in chemical engineering. After World War II, in which he served, he was imprisoned in the Soviet Union. It was therefore not unti I he reached middle age that he could turn to writing as a full-time profession. He soon became one of Hungary's leading writers of novels, short stories, plays and theatre criticism of the post-war period. He was especially loved by the Hungarian readers for his

13

subtle sense of humor, his political sensibility and for his humanity. He died in 1980, just a few days after having completed Screenplay. Zelda Fichandler introduced Orkeny as a playwright to the American public by producing his The Tot Family at the Arena in 1975. Two years later she produced the American premiere of Orkeny's Catsplay which was subsequently also shown at the Guthrie Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club.

In 1981 Screenplay was first produced by the Vigszinhaz Theater in Hungary and is still in their repertoire. In the summer of 1982, Ms. Fichandler and Arena's Development Director Elspeth Udvarhelyi went to Budapest to see Screenplay (F orgatokonyv) and to discuss the play with the playwright's widow, Susan Orkeny and with the company. The play went into in rehearsal at the Arena in December, 1982, and premiered in March, 1983. The adaptation by Gitto Honegger and Zelda Fichandler was from a literal translation by Eniko Molnar Basa and was directed by Zelda Fichandler herself. For a true understanding of her approach it is necessary to quote from her remarks to the assembled Arena company on the first day of rehearsal, December 21, 1982:

The largest point and the most resonant dialectic suggested by the play, and I am sure sensed either consciously or unconsciously by Orkeny, has to do with the nature of invented human systems in general, and of our capacity (or incapacity) for truth and freedom. The final paradox might be posed this way: in order to understand anything, you have to refuse final knowledge. Knowledge, or dogma, or any Ism, is not truth, it is merely agre.ement. You agree with me, we agree with someone. else, we all have knowLedge, put we get no closer to the truth of the stars. You cannot understand by making defin.itions or programs, only by turning over the possibilities. It is called thinking. If I say I know, I stop thinking; but so long as I think, I come to understand, and I might approach some truth The "duo," duality, dialectic at the root of the play, gives it its hallucinatory, absurdist oscillating tone. The universe that is created is our own, universally-perceived modern universe, a schizoid world where the individual feels threatened and alienated by outward reality and falls back upon such devices as the creation of a false self-system (role-playing), the splitting of selves, or denial mechanism and repression of knowledge about oneself. It is the torment of Barabas not to be able to maintain a constant philosophical or even moral position, and not to be able to feel whole about whom he loves and what he is loyal to; it is a position that anyone in the modern world can understand. In fact, all our modern art springs from this sense of the divided (dual, "duo") self. As the Peruvian poet puts it: "Everything has a master above, everything is locked with a key." We feel powerless, not whole.

But now to the play itself. The original title The Barabas Trial, is quite clear in its implications. The title was later changed by Orkeny to reflect the "Screenplay Trials" or "Show Trials" which occurred throughout Eastern Europe in the early fifties. The audience is immediately faced with a series of historical events which are definitely not common knowledge among the vast majority of American theatergoers and which require rather extensive program notes. Alas, all too many people to read failed before a performance. It was therefore quite possible for many in the audience to have missed many of the central ideas the play was proposing. It concerns itself with a central character, aptly named Adam

14

Barabas, who is loosely patterned after Laszlo Rajk, the Hungarian Foreign Minister who became the primary defendant in the show trials of 1949. Barabas, the Hero of the Revolution, an underground fighter during the Hitler period and presently the ambassador to France, is brought back to Hungary for a special, one-time performance of the Grand Circus, which turns out to be his own trial in the circus arena-the staging in a theatre-in-the-round is, of course, ideally suited. Armed soldiers, clowns and acrobats, quite capable of political flip-flops, are abundant. The trial judge is the hypnotic "maestro"-the circus ringmaster in full regalia, who can change the configuration of any concrete or abstract entity in his domain with a crack of his whip. He is the symbol of power, in total undisputed control of his world. His pronouncements are law, no matter how distorted or ludicrous. The trial proceeds. Barabas is accused of treason against his underground comrades during the fascist occupation. The action shifts from 1949 back to the period of 1944 and then abruptly forward to the short-lived Hungarian uprisings against Soviet occupation in 1956. The shifts are sometimes not too perceptible and require a great deal of concentration by the audience. In the words of one clown: "I told you that art was unpredictable!"

The surrealistic circus setting, the oversized alligator and the bears suspended in mid-air, the dream-like atmosphere accentuated by poisonous greens and ironic pinks, give the stage a Kafkaesque theatricality which is further underlined by hoisting the performers into the air on swings at unlikely monents, where they defy both gravity and logic. It is outstanding theatre and fascinating in both form _and contel")t. The findings of one theatre critic, that "it's not very en.tertainin_g-but it sure gives you a lot to think about" is only half true. The ending, for example, is beautifully contrived. In keeping with the circus motif, Barabas is finally shot down by a firing squad from .a trapeze . He lurches to the ground. which opens up and swallows the body. His presence has been wiped from the earth. He has become a non-person-simply the end of just one of many circus performances.

The political implications of the play are quite clear, but there is a deeper meaning. In the words of David Richards of the Washington Post:

Orkey's precise historical allusions are largely lost on American audiences, but his greater point is not: There is no Truth in this society, merely a succession of temporary, continually revised truths. In such a climate, man cannot only be led to doubt others, he can be forced to doubt himself.

Special mention must be made of Stanley Anderson who was truly outstanding in the role of Barabas. His passage from extreme confidence, to insecure befuddlement, to total resignation, is sharply disquieting. The maestro, as played by John Seitz, is similarly impressive. He is just the right mixture of hypnotist, humorist, sadist and incisive intellectual who bombards us with convoluted logic. All in all it was a superb performance, beautifully staged. It created great controversy among Washington newspaper and television critics ranging from rave reviews to abject panning. I shall resist references to the parable "Pearls before Swine," which would be a bit harsh. I must say for myself, however, that although the evening was mentally exhausting, I enjoyed it immensely. I must also express my admiration for Zelda Fichandler who, no doubt, was expecting mixed reviews, for her courage and commitment to bring this new, fresh material to her audience. Finally, I believe it only fitting to close

IS

..

with a quotation from Istvan Orkeny himself:

What guilt cou ld bring on the wrath of Olympus--except, perhaps, the guilt of being born in an absurd age, an impossible moment of history for the intellect to grow to full flower. A time when the only choices were to become a rebel, or to become Sisyphus.

Leo Hecht

GROTOWSKI'S AKROPOLIS ON FILM

This film records what is now a classic performance by Jerzy Grotowski's company, the Polish Laboratory Theatre. A powerful rendering of the concentration camp phenomenon, Akropolis will remain an important milestone in Grotowski's creative work. The film is essential viewing for anyone interested in the Holocaust or in the history of experimental theatre.

Grotowski devised his play from Stanislaw Wyspianski's drama of the same title, performed in Wawel Cathedral in Cracow in 1904. Seeing the cathedral as "the burial place of the tribes," a holy and haunted ground, Wyspianski sought to evoke from it the essence of European history, to call up personages from Greek epic and the Bible who would re-enact their fata l deeds, persons whose struggles determined who we . are, who remain somehow present in us. Grotowski, .influenced also .by Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish post of Auschwitz, tranferred

Wyspianski's mythic scenes from. Wawel to what he ironically considered the "holy ground" of our century, a concentration camp. The action of his olay consists of inmates building their crematorium and in the end disappearing into it. Throughout the play they turn from their tasks to enact parts of the stories of Jacob and Esau and the Fall of Troy.

Grotowski manages to provide the viewer with the sense of a present, totally perverted world. He accomplishes this through the highly stylized movement and voices of the master-craftsmen who are his actors: It is a spectacle in which human beings-mere bodies in genderless, coarse tunics, heavy boots and berets-accept their subservience to the objects-a metal tub, a pair of wheelbarrows, several tin pipes-which become the means of their destruction. When the significant myths of our civilization are acted out by these figures, the result is a highly unnerving type of theatre-within-theatre.

The piece is performed on and around a small platform with chairs for the audience grouped here and there on different levels within the acting area. At the beginning the materials and implements are piled on the platform, with a pattern of ropes strung overhead. One of two gangly cloth dummies-corpses-lie about. After a perfunctory announcement by one of the actors, the inmates stomp into the playing area, carrying two wheelbarrows. At the end of the play the pipes have been attached to the wires in a crazy pattern. As they hurry about their tasks or slip into their myths, the prisoners converse, sing and chant lyrically or grotesquely. The distorted Polish is only summarily translated in occasional "voiceovers." (The piece communicates powerfully to viewers unschooled in Polish.) The inmates carry corpses-dummies-about, sort the hair of the dead--rolls of rumpled clear plastic-interrogate one of their number, his questioners

16

shoving him back and forth between them, then tumbling him into a tub. They also pray and make love.

Many of the play's most powerful effects derive from the spectacle of human bodies in some unusual distortive relation with objects, especially when the human beings whose bodies are so transformed go on expressing such normal human experiences as love, lust, and hope. A man kneels praying in a crude metal tub shaped like a bathtub, with its rounded end pointing up, suggesting a chapel. A woman rubs her back to his, urging him to hold her. The tub falls, and the man is held prone inside. The woman mounts the tub's rounded end on her knees awkwardly, chanting to the prostrate figure below her. Suddenly they are together in the tub, back to back and trembling, suggesting the act of love. From time to time both human actors and dummies hand on the horizontal ropes. The inmate-Jacob twists his torso into the u-shaped support of a wheelbarrow and kneels, the barrow seeming strapped to his back. The inmate-Angel lies in the barrow, and their wrestling and dialogue proceeds in this posture, the Angel thudding his heavy heels against the barrow's lip, Jacob tilting the barrow repeatedly to strike the Angel's head against the floor.

The disturbing quality of this work is hard to trace, but doubtless some of it comes from the inmates' pathetic acceptance of the crudest objects as focal points for meaningful human emotions. In the wedding of Jacob and Rachel, inmates form a procession led by Jacob who lovingly carries a bent pipe to which he holds the end of a long train of crumpled cl~ar plastic, others in the procession lifting this "veil," chanting joyously in respons~ to Jacob's lead, halting and bowi"ng, winding among the spectators beneath the crossing cords.

The who1e spectacle. is delicately varied in mood. Paris and Helen (both played by male inmates) sit side by side, arms inside their tunics, speaking of love, jeered at by the others. Casandra sings a haunting lyric, the camera holding steady on her dreaming face. A raucous violin (sometimes playing a theme from Sigmund Romberg) divides segments of the Jacob story. Quiet moments between inmates are cut short by sudden returns to work, boots clattering. The whole range of moods climaxes with the final procession: The crematorium is finished; chanting slowly the inmates begin filing round, almost joyous in their relief, following their leader, who holds a limp dummy aloft. They mount the platform, remove the trap and disappear. The trap closes. After a long pause the audience starts to disperse.

At the beginning of the film, before the performance is shown, Peter Brook discusses Akropolis, commenting especially on Grotowski's challenge in rendering in theatre so extreme a phenomenon as the concentration camp. During the performance the camera shifts between general views of the acting area and closeups of actors' faces (often contorted into masks), their hands grasping wheelbarrow handles or bent backward over the ropes or their heavy boots thudding the floor. Spectators are visible throughout the performance, alien among the ritualistic actions occurring at their elbows. Given the interspersing of players and audience, a moving camera was inevitable.

The readiest sources of information on the performance are in T adeusz Burzynski and Zbigniew Osinski, Grotowski's Laboratory (Warsaw: lnterpress, I 979) and Grotowsk i, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon & Shuster,

17

1968). The film is available by purchase or rental from Arthur Cantor, Inc., 33 West 60th Street, Penthouse, New York I 0023; (212) 664-1290. _

Addison Bross

SIBERIADA

The 1978 Soviet film Siberiada which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was recently released in New York, and is now being shown in a number of cities in the United States to excellent reviews. The film, which has English subtitles, was directed by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, one of Russia's best directors. He is particularly effective in an area which is one of the weaknesses of Soviet contemporary film art-lighting techniques. His color shifts, fades and glows; his mystical lights conjure up a fantastic realm of the senses.

As Rita Kempley, a film critic of the Washington Post, so well describes, Siberiada is filled with symbols and sounds. Woods whisper to a road laborer who pets each tree he fells to build a wooden road to Central Russia. There is a menagerie of mataphor: starving baby chicks, mating swans, flying geese and a reappearing brown bear who comes to sniff the progress on the road.

The story takes place in Elan, a remote hamlet in the vast tundra. It is an elegy which spans a period of 60 years of civil and scientific disruption. The plotline follows the development through the generations of two families with opposing philosophies cind idealogies: the Ustiuzhanins, woodsmen and wayfarers; and the Solomins, m~rchants and gentry, who seem to be doomed to marry, murder and misunderstand one another since before the Ci_vll War. The film is broken into four parts, each focusing on a single character.

The enduring metaphor is the Eternal Grandfather, the ancient S_iberian sage, a sorcerer with birds in his hair, who allegorically acts as a catalyst to the occasionally viscious, occasionally highly sensual encounters between the Solomins and the Ustiuzhanins. This is a poetic film which obviously required the total, personal commitment of its director who, incidentaly, himself co-authored the script with Valentin Yezhov.

The romantic, allegorical mood, which is sustained throughout most of the three-hour-long film, is somewhat shattered near the end. A modern oil-driller, extremely well portrayed by the director's brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, comes to Elan to pump its wealth away. The end is shocking in that it destroys the romantic mood and makes one hunger for the sentimentality so well expressed in its earlier reels.

L.H.

OF ANDRZEJ WAJDA AND OTI-ER PURGES

Andrzej Wajda is certainly the best known film director not only in his native Poland, but has similar acclaim throughout the western world. Among his best-known films which were shown prominently in most major cities of the United States and other western countries were Man of Marble and Man of Iron

18

which were highly critical of the Polish political system and totally supportive of Solidarity, and which won several prizes at international film festivals. He was the head of the highly prominent Warsaw film group "Zespol X."

On May 3, 1983, the Polish Government announced the dismissal of Wajda and of two of his closest associates, Managing Director for the past II years Barbara Pec-Siesicka and Literary Director Boleslaw Michalek. The official reason given for Wajda's termination was that his studio "demonstrated a significant concentration of activities which were inconsistent with the policies of a socialist state." Government spokesman Jerzy Urban further stated that a significant number of films produced by the group, which includes many of Poland's most prominent directors, were not suitable for distribution in Poland. He added that "this does not mean that the film group itself will be dissolved. This only means a change in its leadership."

The 57-year-old Wajda was also charged with spending much too much of his time outside the borders of Poland, particularly in the West, instead of attending his duties at home. Wajda spent a great deal of time in Paris in 1982 where he filmed his latest release ''Danton." He is now in West Germany directing the filming of a love story.

Wajda's dismissal is a further manifestation of a hard line against Poland's key cultural, intellectual and artistic organizations and movements. In February of this year the Polish Communist Party ordered the Writers' Union to see. to it

th~t its members openly pledge their loyalty to the Communist system and purge their. organization of subversive elements and foreign spies. The Writers' Union had been suspended in December, 1981, and was thus given no.tice that it could only be ressurrected if it followed these orders. The Union has approximately I ,300 members of which only about 270 are party members.

In April, 1983, the 12,000-member Artists' Union was suspended for refusing to recant resolutions in support of Solidarity, appealing for a general amnesty for politcal prisoners, and criticizing the government for actions against other cultural bodies.

Other former hotbeds of Solidarity supporters such as Associations of Journalists and Student Organizations were dissolved under martial law and were recently reconstituted in tamer forms.

Wajda chairs the Filmmakers' Union. It is unclear at the present time whether he has also been deprived of this function. We also have no knowledge what Wajda's plans are for the immediate future.

REPORT ON TI-E SOVIET TI-EATRE 1\EW PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

L.H.

(This is the second part of a two-part article written by Dr. Alma Law for NEWSNOTES. The first part appeared in the March 1983, issue.)

19

Aleksei Kazantsev, whose The Old House (Starii dom) was such a hit several seasons ago, has a new play, And the Silver Cord Will Be Broken (I porvetsia serebrianyi shnur), currently on the little stage of the Mayakovsky Theatre, directed by Evgeny Lazarev. The play is set at the dacha of a famous writer who during the Stalinist period "wrote what he had to write" and who wishes now to write the truth, but finds that he has lost the ability to do so.

Although on the surface Silver Cord gives the appearance of being a domestic drama, Kazantsev himself warns that this is not the case. Just as with the The Old House, he has structured the play on two levels with the past, symbolized by the dacha, built in the early thirties by a high party official, serving as a background against which the problems of contemporary life are worked out. At the center of the play are Aleksei, the old writer's grandson; Nina, a prostitute Aleksei has picked upon the suburban train, and Aleksei's friend and colleague, Markushev. There's also a younger grandson and a neighbor boy who is dying. None of the many themes touched upon in the play is original with Kazantsev (disaffected youth, bureaucratic chicanery, dying writer who now wants to write the truth, alcoholism, prostitution). In fact the playwright has been accused by at least one critic of merely putting together a pastiche of ideas taken from other playwrights.

Nevertheless, Silver Cord presents an extremely thoughtful, albeit overly wordy, and quite revealing picture of life among the privileged by someone who knows that world from the inside. It's not surprising that the play has evoked strong reactions ever since it was firSt read at Arbuzov's Studiq for new

p'laywrights in 1979, 'and that' it has taken considerable effort on Kazantsev's part to get it staged. According to Vera Maksimova in her perceptive article "The Fate of First Plays" (Sovremennaia dramaturgiia No. 2, 1983), after plans for ci production at the Leningrad Gorky Theatre were dropped, Silver Cord was next offered to the "Contemporary" Theatre where it was again abandoned, this time midway in rehearsals when one of the actors fell ill. Only then was it finally accepted for staging at the Mayakovsky.

A promising playwright, Liudmila Razumovskaia, has recently appeared. Her play, Dear Elena Sergeevna (Dorogaia Elena Sergeevna) has been staged by numerous theatres, including the Lenin Komsomol in Leningrad where it can be seen on their newly-opened Little Stage. It is about four graduating high school students who go to visit their teacher, Elena Sergeevna, to wish her a happy birthday. Two of the students have something else on their minds, however, to get the key to the safe containing their failing exams so that they can replace them with passing ones. Razumovskaia also has a second play, A Garden Without Soil (Sad bez zemli) in rehearsal at the Gorky Theatre directed by G. Egorov.

The works of another relatively young playwright, Victor Merezhko, are also being well-received. Among them are: Ni httime Entertainments (Nochnye zabavy), Beavers (Bobry), and The Windmill of Happiness Mel'nitsa schast'ye). The latter was staged last season by Arkady Kats at the Theatre of Russian Drama in Riga. It enjoyed considerable success when shown in Moscow during the theatre's visit last summer. Set in the country during the immediate post-Revolutionary period, this herioc comedy depicts the conflict between Stepan Bobyl, who builds a windmill of happiness which is supposed to work forever "without wind, water or fuel," and the kulaks who, in order to protect their

20

interests, kill Bobyl and burn down the windmill. The play is also in rehearsal on the Little Stage at the Moscow Art Theatre.

The Georgian playwright Aleksandr Chkhaidze has contributed a number of plays to the Soviet repertory in recent years. His drama about young people, A Free Topic (Svobodnaia tema), has been staged in numerous theatres. It explores the consequences when a girl takes at face value a teacher's invitation to her students to write an exam essay on a subject of their own choosing. Chkhaidze's From Three to Six (S trex do shesti) and The Chinar Manifesto (Chinarskii manifest) have also received wide distribution. The latter is about an eighteen-year-old lad, totally without experience and a non-Party member as well, who applies to the regional Party secretary to become the new chairman of the Chinar collective farm.

In the first issue of Sovremennaia dramaturgiia, a Belorussian playwright, Aleksei Dudarev, makes his debut with Threshold (Porok), a drama about the moral rebirth of an alcoholic, Andrei Buslai, who is rescued from a snowbank by a writer of fairytales. There are some very humorous episodes, for example, the opening scene when Aleksei insists he is a "professional alcoholic," or when he returns to his village and is taken for a ghost by his parents who have just finished burying what they thought was his body. (Aieksei had loaned his coat containing his passport to another drunk who wasn't rescued before freezing to death.) Unfortunately, we never see Andrei's moral transformation take place, we only hear about the long night spent with -the writer (whom we also. don't see) which somehow did the trick. Threshold is scheduled for producton this season at th~ Gorky Thetre~ directed by Vladimir Portnov. Dudarev has two other plays, Evening (Vecher), and The. Choice (Vybor), about a tank driver who sacri-fic.es .the lives of his crew to save a child who is in the way of the tank.

Also in the same issue of Sovremennaia dramaturgiia is Eduard Volodarsky's Run, Run Evening Star (Begi, begi vecherniaia zvezda) about a talented mathemtician and a gambler.

Vladimir Maliagin is an interesting and very original playwright whose NLO (Unidentified Flying Object) has been in the repertory of the "Sovremennik" Theatre for several seasons. He has a number of new works awaiting production, among them Day of Mercy (Den' miloserdiia) and a couple of Volodin-style parable plays. The Gorky Theatre in Leningrad has included A. Chervinsky's Paper Recordplayer (Bumzahnyi patefon) in its repertory plans for the current season. Chervinsky is a very young, beginning playwright, and his plays have received good reports. Paper Recordplay is also scheduled for production at the Malaia Bronnaia Theatre, directed by Aleksandr Dunaev, and his My Happiness (Schast'e moe) has recently opened on the Little Stage of the Theatre of the Soviet Army.

Nina Semenova, a new playwright from Smolensk, is making her Moscow debut on the Little Stage o.f the Mossoviet Theatre where Boris Shchedrin has staged her Stove on a Wheel (Pechka no kolese). Frosia, the heroine of th is contemporary comedy is a harrassed, but indomitable, young married woman with a drunken husband and five children who tends veal calves on a collective farm. When a young soldier arrives in the village, having fallen in love with Frosia after hearing her voice on the radio, the husband burns down the house and takes a bulldozer to Frosia's legendary stove in order to force her to move the family to

21

the city. Mention should also be made of a new woman playwright from Minsk, Elena Popova who made her debut with the staging at the Moly Dramatic Theatre in Leningrad of Quiet Inhabitant (Tikhii obivatel'). The title refers to the heroine of the play, Olga Oreshko, whose well-ordered life is disrupted when her brother, a famous scholar, brings home his young assistant, Aleksandr Prokhorov.

Anna Rodionova is another promising woman playwright who, like Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Olga Kuchkina, is a graduate of Arbuzov's Studio. Her play, Excursion Around Moscow (Ekskurssiia po Moskve) was staged several seasons ago at the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad. After writing a number of film scenarios, including the very popular School Waltz, she has returned to the theatre with a new play entitled, The Cultural Stratum (Kul'turnyi sloi).

Other new playwrights include V. Gurkin, whose comedy Love and Doves (Liubov' i golubi), has been staged, though not too successfully, at the "Sovremennik" by Valery Fokin. A. Kravtsov, a Moscow playwright, has writen Housewarming in an Old House (Novosel'e v starom dome). Set in on old communal apartment in Leningrad, it is scheduled for production this season at the Komissarzhevsky Theatre. Also lined up for this season at the Lensoviet Theatre in Leningrad is Mironer's play, Who's Knocking at Our Door (Kto v dver' stuchitsio k nom).

Not all of these plays will find their way into the repertory this season. Some will be quietly dropped for one reason or another; others will be held over for another season. But even if only a small percentage of them st)rvive, it will still mark a banner year for new plays and play~rights.

* * * * *

The American theatre is frequently criticized by Soviet officials and in the Soviet press for its failure to present more Soviet ploys, especially in the light of the Iorge number of American plays in performance in the Soviet Union.

This charge warrants closer examination, particularly right now on the tenth anniversary of the U.S.S.R.'s accession to the Universal Copyright Convention which took effect May 27, 1973.

At the present time according to Soviet reports there are about 40 American plays being performed in theatres all over the Soviet Union. By far the most popular American playwright is Tennessee Williams. Virtually all of his ploys written prior to 1973 have been staged, and this past season has seen no less than eight of Williams's works on the boards in Moscow alone: A Streetcar Named Desire (Mayakovsky Theatre), The Glass Menagerie (Theatre of Young Spectators), The Rose T ottoo {Moscow Art Theatre), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof {Mayakovsky Theatre), Sweet Bird of Youth (Moscow Art Theatre), Summer and Smoke (Molaia Bronnaio Theatre}, Orpheus Descending (Theatre of the Soviet Army) and The Kingdom of Earth. (Though the latter was recently pulled out of the repertoire of the Mossoviet Theatre where it has been playing since the 1977-78 season).

Next in popularity is Eugene O'Neill, many of whose works were first staged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Edward Albee is also very popular and most of his pre-1973 ploys are being, or have been performed, including Who's

22

Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Zoo Story, both of which were first done in Riga several years ago. Arthur Miller has also been consistently popular, particularly The Price, The Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

Neil Simon's pre-1973 works are now making their way into the repertoire with several of them, including The Prisoner of Second Avenue and The Sunshine Boys either already in performance or scheduled. William Gibson's Two for the Seesaw has been a popular staple at the "Sovremennik" Theatre for many years. Other playwrights represented include: Clifford Odets (Golden Boy), Richard Nash (The Rainmaker), Paul Zindel (The Effect of Gamma Ra s on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds}, and Thornton Wilder (Our Town. Among recent premieres are Dale Wasserman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Colin Higgin's Harold and Maude which after a long struggle finally opened at the Theatre of Comedy in Leningrad.

Added to this Jist are the adaptations of prose works, among them Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper, Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. And finally, there are the American musicals, which have become repertory staples ever since My Fair Lady and West Side Story first premiered in Russian productions in the 1960s. Current favorites include Man From La Mancha, Kiss Me Kate, Hello Dolly!, How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying and Promises Promises.

One thing all of the above works share in common is that they are pre-1973 .. In other words, they are not covered in the Soviet Union by the copyr.ight convention. This means that there is no legal obligation to obtain permission from the playwright to translate and stage them, or .to pay royalties.

The picture is quite different when one begins looking for recent American plays on the Soviet stage, that is, for plays written in the last decade and hence protected by copyright. And it should be pointed out that the Soviet Union has been diligent in its observation of the copyright convention. While Soviet directors, actors and translators have expressed a continued interest in contemporary American plays (and indeed, many of them circulate in Russian translation), only one play written in the past ten years, D. L. Coburn's The Gin Game, has actually been mounted. Following the December 1981 Soviet tour of the American production starring Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, The Gin Game was staged at both the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad and the Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow. Since then, other productions of this popular two-character play have also sprung up around the country.

Why haven't more plays from the 1970s been purchased? There are two reasons. The first is undoubtedly financial. Few American playwrights have expressed an interest in earning rubles for their plays. This means that royalties must be paid in dollars. Understandably, purchasing plays must rank very low on the priority list of necessary goods for which hard currency will be spent. Second, there is the matter of obtaining rights, not only for performance, but also for making changes in the text, a crucial factor in the Soviet theatre, where plays and productions are carefully scrutinized for their ideological and moral suitability. It is instructive, for example, to examine what has happened to Tennessee Williams plays when they have been transferred to the Soviet stage. It's hard to imagine any playwright willingly accepting the happy ending of A Streetcar Named Desire

23

at the Mayakovsky Theatre in Moscow, in which Mitch rescues Blanche from the doctor and nurse who are taking her away to the asylum and carries her off; or to the omission of the sailor from a Leningrad production of The Rose Tattoo; or to the inclusion of a monologue on the importance of art which was plugged into the production of Sweet Bird of Youth at the Moscow Art Theatre. Nor has Tennessee Williams been the only victim of this kind of tinkering.

In contrast to this sorry picture of only one new American drama staged in the Soviet Union during the past decade, a total of eleven Soviet plays from the same period have been purchased for American productions. This is a point that is unfortunately all too often overlooked in discussions by Soviets, and even by some Americans, about the relative number of American and Soviet plays being staged.

In spite of the ups and downs of Soviet-American relations during the past ten years, interest in Soviet plays among American theatre practitioners has not diminished. On the contrary, as the level of Soviet dramaturgy has improved, and there is no question but that it has, this interest has increased, particularly when seen in the light of the limited number of contemporary foreign plays from any country staged in American theatres.

The list of Soviet plays purchased for American productions in the past decade includes Aitmatov and Mukhamedzhanov's The Ascent of Mount Fuji (1973), produced at Arena Stage in 1974; Mikhail Roshchin's Echelon (1975), staged at the Alley Theatre in 1978; Aleksei Arbuzov's, An Old-Fashioned Comedy (1975) staged in several theatre~ in this country under the title DO You Turn Somersaults?; Aleksei Arbuzov's Ev~ning Light (1974), perfo'rmed at the University Theatre, University . of Kansas, iii"'T982; Liudmila Petrushevskaya's one-act plays, .

. Love ( 1979) and Come Into the Kitchen (I 979), both of which were staged in New York in 1982, and her monologue, Nets and Traps (1973) which has recently been performed in festivals of one-act plays at two universities. Mark Rozovsky's popular Strider, the Story of a Horse (1975) has also had several productions since it was first successfully staged in New York in 1979.

In addition, at least two other productions of Soviet plays are currently in the works: Borshchagovsky's The Ladies Tail or ( 1980) to be done in New York under the title Before the Dawn, and Alexander Galin's Retro ( 1980), scheduled for production next season at the Missouri Repertory Theatre. It should also be noted that several other Soviet plays would have been staged had rights been made available by the Soviet Copyright Agency. For example, in spite of Joseph Papp's best efforts in 1980-81, and the desire of the playwright to see his work done in the United States, rights could not be obtained for a production of Viktor Rozov's The Nest of the Woodgrouse at the Public Theatre in New York, nor has permission been given for other productions of this play since then. Requests over the past several years for performance rights to Liudmila Petrushevskaya's plays Cirizano and Smirnova's Birthday have also been denied. One can only speculate as to the reasons for refusing to allow productions of these plays, all of which have been staged in the Soviet Union. No official reason is ever offered aside from the rather weak excuse that "the playwright is still working on the play."

Looking ahead, one can only hope that ways will be found to increase the number of new American plays staged in the Soviet Union. It would be unfortunate indeed if the signing of the Copyright Convention ended up being, as

24

many predicted, a means of restricting the access of Soviet theatregoers to the enjoyment of new American dramatic works. It is also hoped that ways will be found to make it easier for American theatre directors to obtain the rights to those Soviet plays they are anxious to stage. In the past decade, both the Soviet Union and the United States have produced a whole generation of new playwrights, many of them very talented. Their works deserve to be seen, not only for artistic reaons, but because of what they can tell us about the lives of people today in each other's countries. As Stanislavsky pointed out many times, "Theatre is the best means of communication between nations, the best way to reveal and understand their innermost feelings."

Alma H. Law

25

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia 22030

Non-Profit Organization US Postage Paid

Fairfax, Virginia Permit No. 1532