SEEP Vol.9 No.1 Summer 1989

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editorial Policy ... ........................................ ............................................ 4

From the Editors .............................. ................................................... ... 5

Events .................................................................................................... 6

Zygmunt Hubner ...................... ........................................................... 12

"Internat ional Workshop Honoring 110th Anniversary of Meyerhold's Birth." Marjorie Hoover ... · ............................................................................... 13

Pages From The Past "Petition." Vselovod Meyerhold .............................................. .. 19

"Observations on the Moscow Theatre: January, 1989." Marvin Carlson ................... ..................................... 23

"An Economic Appraisal of Soviet Theatre Today." Marvin Carlson ..................................................................................... 27

"Yuri Lyubimov, can't." Alma Law ............................................................................................. 29

"Alternative Theatre in Poland." Kathleen Cioffi. ......................... ............... ........................................ ..... 32

"Glasnost in Film." Leo Hecht ........................... ................................. ................................ 38

Reviews "A Providential Chekhov." Jeannie M. Woods ................. ..... .......................................... .... 43

"Piatonov by Anton Chekhov Hallie Anne White .............. .. ..................................................... 46

"Temptation by Vaclav Havel. • Richard Brad Medoff ............. ................................................... 49

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volume nine number one summer 1989

soviet and

east european

performance drama

theatre

film

SEEP 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 (CASTA), Graduate Center, City University of New York. The Institute Office is Room 1206A, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. All subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to the Editors of SEEP: Daniel Gerould and Alma Law, CASTA, Theatre Program, City University Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 1 0036.

EDITORS Daniel Gerould Alma Law

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Richard Brad Medoff

ADVISORY BOARD Edwin Wilson, Chairman Marvin Carlson Leo Hecht Martha W. Colgney

Copyright 1989 CASTA

SEEP has a very liberal reprinting policy. Journals and newsletters which desire to reproduce articles, reviews, and other materials which have appeared in SEEP may do so, as long as the following provisions are met:

a. Permission to reprint must be requested from SEEP in writing before the fact.

b. Credit to SEEP must be given in the reprint.

c. Two copies of the publication in which the reprinted material has appeared must be furnished to the Editor of SEEP immediately upon publication.

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"Double Takes by Miklos Vamos." Zsuzusa Berger ........................................................................ 52

Contributors ......................................................................................... 54

Playscripts in Translation Series ................. ......... ............................... 55

Subscription Policy ........... .................. .... ...... ...................................... 57

EDITORIAL POLICY

Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no more than 2,500 words; book reviews; performance and film reviews; and bibliographies. Please bear in mind that all of the above submissions must concern themselves either with contemporary materials on Soviet and East European theatre, drama and film, or with new approaches to older materials in recently published works, or new performances of older plays. In other words, we would welcome submissions reviewing innovative performances of Gogol or recently published books on Gogel, for example, but we could not use original articles discussing Gogel as a playwright.

Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from foreign publications, we do require copyright release statements.

We will also gladly publish announcements of special events, new book releases, job opportunitiesand anything else which may be of interest to our dis­cipline. All submissions are refereed.

All submissions must be typed double-spaced and carefully proofread. Submit two copies of each manuscript and attach a stamped, self addressed envelope. The Chicago Manual of Style should be followed. Transliterations should follow the Ubrary of Congress system. Submissions will be evaluated, and authors will be notified after approximately four weeks.

All submissions, inquires and subscription requests should be directed to:

Daniel Gerould or Alma Law CAST A, Theatre Program Graduate Center of CUNY 33 West 42nd Street New York, NY 1 0036

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FROM THE EDITORS

As we begin our ninth year of publication, we are pleased to

introduce a newly-designed cover and a new, shorter title SOVIET

AND EAST EUROPEAN PERFORMANCE (SEEP). While we have

retained "Drama, Theatre and Film" as a subtitle, we feel that the

word, "performance," better expressed the primary purpose of our

journal which is to offer information about current events in the per­

forming arts as they relate to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In the coming year there will be a great number of Soviet and

East European theatres taking part in festivals in the United States

and in Europe (some of which are listed in this issue). We urge those

of you who see these performances to share your impressions of

them with your fellow readers by sending us a brief report for pub­

lication in our next issue.

Daniel Gerould and Alma Law

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EVENTS

THEATRE FESTIVALS

Belgium

Young Flanders Festival in Ghent will present MW 2 from Poland September 17-20.

Canada

Festival of the Americas in Montreal will present the Soviet Union's School of Dramatic Art's production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as directed by Anatoly Vasilyev.

Germany

Theater der Welt in Hamburg will present two productions from the Maly Theatre in the Soviet Union; Brothers and Sisters by Fyodor Abramov and directed by Lev Dodin from June 16-19, and Alexander Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky, also directed by Lev Dodin on June 21. Theatre for Young Audiences from the Soviet Union will also be represented with their production of Heart of a Dog as adapted from Bulgakov and directed by Henrietta Janowskaya from June 24-25. ·

Holland

Holland Festival in Amsterdam, June 1-July 1, will present Uncle Vanya as produced by the National Theatre of Lithuania and the Theatre of the Young Spectators production of Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog.

Scotland

Edinburgh International Festival will present the Soviet Union's Taganka Theatre's production of Pushkin's Boris Godunov as directed by Yuri Lyubimov at the Leith Theatre from August 22-26.

United States

International Festival at the State University of New York at

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Stony Brook will present Cinzano by Liudmila Petrushevskaya as produced by Theatre Tchelovek of the Soviet Union from June 27-July 1.

The last PepsiCo Summerfare at the State University of New York at Purchase, July 6- August 6, presents the Soviet Union's School of Dramatic Art's production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as directed by Anatoly Vasilyev. The Pushkin Theatre in Moscow will be represented by their production of Chek­hov's Ward Six as devised by the director Yuri Yeremin and the actors of the Pushkin Theatre. From the Stary Theatre in Poland come two productions directed by Andrzej Wajda: The Dybbuk and Hamlet IV.

The Actors Theatre of Louisville's Classics in Context Festival 1989 is entitled "Moscow Art Theatre: Past, Present, Future." This festival includes four productions: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov translated by Michael Frayn and directed by Jon Jury; Children of the Sun by Maxim Gorky, translated by Aaron Levin and Zieka Der­lycia, and directed by Gloria Muzio; Theatre Tchelovek's production of Petrushevskaya's Cinzano as directed by Roman Kozak; and Anton, Himself by Karen Sunde and directed by Frazier W. Marsh. There will be two lectures; "A Theatre Finds Its People: Chekhov, Gorky, and the Identity of the Moscow Art Theatre," given by Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University, and "The Visionary Sons of Stanislavsky: Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Evreinov," given by Paul Schmidt. A symposium will be held on "Mos­cow Art Theatre: Past, Present and Future," whose panelists include MAT artistic director Oleg Yefremov, literary manager Anatoly Smelyansky, and an actor with MAT for over 40 years, Vladlen Davydov. The festival will also contain two colloquia; "Theatre in the Revolution and Revolution in the Theatre of Chekhov and Gorky," co­chaired by Dr. Michael Katz and Daniel Gerould and "Stanislavsky and the American Acting Tradition," led by Dr. Mel Gordon and Robert Lewis. There will be the showing of a film, the 1928 adaptation of Gorky's novel Mother directed by V.I. Pudovkin. Three exhibits will be on display; "From the Czars to the Revolution, an annotated phot­graphic display 6f Russian life from 1860-1917, "The Stanislavsky Museum Exhibit," and "When All The World Was A Stage: Russian Constructivist Theatre Designs."

UPCOMING PRODUCTIONS

Center Stage in Baltimore will be presenting The Increased Difficulty of Concentration by Vaclav Havel and translated by Vera Blackwell.

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Another Havel play, Temptation, will be presented at the Mark Taper Forum In Los Angleles, directed by Richard Jordan and running July 13-Aug 27.

Hunting Cockroaches by Janusz Growacki, translated by Jadwiga Kosicka, and directed by Sidney Lynch runs through June 11 at the PLayhouse on the Square in Memphis, Tennessee.

The New Theatre of Brooklyn (TNT) will be producing Jac­ques and His Master by Milan Kundera on October 25-November 19.

NOTE OF PAST PRODUCTIONS

Temptation by Vaclav Havel as directed by Jiri Zizka opened In New York at the Public Theatre and then was performed In Philadelphia at Mr. Zizka's Wilma Theatre. (See review in this issue).

An Altar To Himself by lreneusz lredyflski, translated by Michat Kobiafka with Liz Diamond, and directed by Vir1ana Tkacz ran at New York's La Mama Theatre March 30-April16.

Hungarian playwright Miklos Vamos was represented in New York with two one-act plays, Somebody Else and Mixed Doubles, pdroduced at the Actor's Outlet Theatre under the collected title Dou­bletakes. (See review in this issue)

The Paper Gramophone based on a screenplay by Alek­sandr Chervinsky, adapted for the stage by Yuri Yeremin and Mr. Chervinsky with an English translation by Mary-Helen Ayres was staged by Yuri Yeremin with an American cast at the Hartford Stage.

Mariage Blanc by Tadeusz R6iewicz and translated by Adam Czerniawski was directed by Spencer Golub ran February 23-March 5 at the Isabelle Russek Leeds Theatre at Brown University. Halina Filipowicz gave a paper relating to this production on March 2 "R6zewicz and the Contemporary Polish Theatre.·

FILM

American Playhouse, a PBS series, has agreed to co­produce two feature films in 1989 for release in 1990 in both Soviet and American theatres and to be shown later that year on the PBS series. Both films, which will be about American and Soviet citizens, will be bilingual; characters will speak their own language, with sub­titles int he other. The first, American Exhibition is about a young American guide at the American Exhibition in Moscow in the mid 1950s who falls in love with a Russian Woman. The film is co-written and co-directed by Tom Coles, an American writer who was a guide

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at the exhibition, and Pavel Lungine, a Soviet film maker. The sec­ond film, Odyssey, will be a fictional tale based on the true story of a group of American auto workers who moved to the Soviet Union with their families in the 1930s in the hope of building an automobile fac­tory under the sponsorship of Henry Ford.

It has beena very interesting year for viewing Soviet films in the United States. Along with the commercial release of Little Vera there have been numerous other films entering mainstream theatres.

The Soviet film, Letters from A Dead Man, opened for a limited run at the Public Theatre in New York. Directed by Konstantin Lopushansky, the film depicts the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The film centers around a group of survivors living in a basement bunker of a museum, sharing meals, reflecting on man's tragic fate, dying and burying thier dead in the grimy soil of the cellar. and trying to survive through self delusion in a "void under a cold sky." (See related article by Leo Hecht in this issue). The Public also had show­ings of Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice and Michar Leszczyruwski's 1987 documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

The Biograph Cinema, a Manhattan Film revival house, has started to include Soviet films in their regular schedule. In May they showed Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's 1971 film Uncle Vanya with lnnokenty Smoktunovsky and Sergei Bondarchuk on a double bill with The Inspector General as directed by Vladimir Petrov in 1952. Later that month they showed Siberiade also directed by Mikhalkov­Konchalovsky in 1979.

Gyula Gazdag's film A Hungarian Fairy Tale was shown at the Film Forum 1 in New York. The film begins in a near-magical note, with the romantic, wordless meeting of a beautiful young woman and a handsome stranger at a performance of The Magic Flute, that results in the birth of Andris. There is an Hungarian law that requires that a birth certificate have a father's name and so the mother along with the local clerk invent a name and an occupation for the father. Years later, after the death of the mother, Andreis sets out on a journey to search for his father. The journey on which Andris embarks signals a departure from the mainstream, a break with the restrictive culture. As the boy frees himself, the film breaks loose in its own way. It becomes more and more dreamlike, progres­sing in a breathless and sometimes briskly elliptical style.

CONFERENCES, LECTURES, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Alexandr Rubinshtein, Head of the Economics Lab of the

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Central Institute of Arts Studies and Chief Economic Expert for the All Union of Soviet Theatre Workers gave a lecture entitled, "How Theatre Works in the USSR Today: A Pragmatic View," at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 31. This was sponsered by the American/Soviet Theatre Initiative in cooperation with The Brooklyn College Arts Management Program, The CUNY Graduate Theatre Program, and The Yale School of Drama on March 31. Introductory remarks were made by Benjamin Mordecai, Managing Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre. Other Soviet members of the Managers and Producers Delegation of ASTI that were also present were: Felix Demichev, Managing Director, Stanislavsky DramaTheatre; Peter Polamarchuk, General Manager of the State Bolshoi Opera and Bal­let Theatre (Kishinev) and Secretary of the Moldavian Theatre Union; Mikhail Bukan~ General Manager of the State Bolshoi Opera and Bal­let theatre of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and member of the Minsk City Council; Gatis Strads, Managing Director of the Riga Operetta Theatre and Secretary of the Latvian Theatre Union; and Gregory Nerseyan, Copyright Agency of the USSR, translator of plays and Executive Director of ASTI.

As part of Brooklyn College's Alumni College Day on May 7, the Film Department presented After the Revolution: Soviet Films of the 1920s. The Moderator was Virginia Brooks, professor of film and head of production at Brooklyn College, with the Panelists: Thomas Barran, Visiting Assistant Professor -of Russian at Brooklyn College, and author of articles on Russian and Soviet literature and culture; Mark Liwszyc, professor emeritus of Slavic languages at Brooklyn College; two film students Marc Monte, '91, and Vladimir Solomyansky, '88; and Alexander Yanov, political scientist and author of The Origins of Autocracy and The Russian Challenge in the Year 2,000.

The Working Group on Cinema and Television (USSR and Eastern Europe) held its second annual meeting November 19, 1988 in Honolulu in conjunction with the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. Among the resolutions adopted at the meeting: The WGCTV (for­merly the Working Group for the Study of Soviet Cinema and Televi­sion) intends to expand its membership to include those scholars working in the area of East European cinema and television as well as Soviet; Frantisek Galan (Vanderbilt University) and Richard Stites (Georgetown University) were elected to the Executive Committee with Anna Lawton (Purdue University) being appointed Treasurer; The WGCTV and Amerikansk-Sovetskoe Kino, Moscow, intends to establish a film exchange and members of the MGCTV subcommittee for the exchange are Anna Lawton, James Hayn (University of Vir-

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ginia), and Donna T. Seifer (Lewis and Clark College); and the group voted to apply for affiliation with the AAASS and the Society for Cinema Studies. For information on membership and other group activities please contact the Chair: Denise J. Youngblood, Depart­ment of History, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405; (802) 656-3180.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Benjamin Rifkin will be chairing the AATSEEL 1989 Conven­tion's Panel on Russian Drama--Past and Present. He is trying to put together a panel on Russian Drama of the last five years, but would consider papers on any topic. He can be contacted at Benjamin Rif­kin, Slavic Department, 3040 Modern Languages Building, Ann Arbor, Ml 48109.

The University of South Carolina will be holding a conference entitled Theatre USSR: Revolution and Tradition on December 1-2, 1989. The keynote speakers will be Laurence Senelick and Alma Law and the events include papers, videos and films on early to con­temporary Soviet/Russian theatre, as well as live performances. This conference will be held jointly with the United States Institute of Theatre Technicians-Southwest Conference. The latter will feature the recent Prague Quadrennial Exhibition of international design work. Soviet scene designer Danila Korgosky will lecture and lead a workshop Dec. 1-3. They invite abstracts of two pages or papers of eight to ten pages on the criticism, theory, performance, directing, and design of Soviet or pre-Soviet theatre. They also welcome papers dealing with cross-currents of theatre and film. The deadline for all submissions is September 10. Please send abstracts, papers, and enquiries to Sarah Bryant-Bertail, Department of Theatre and Speech, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.

CORRECTIONS

In Glenn Loney's article" Polish Theatre, 1988," we failed to note that Ida Kaminski had died.

Though listed in the program, James Schlatter was unable to give his paper at the "New Languages for the Stage" conference at the University of Kansas.

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h Zygmunt Hubner

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Zygmunt Hubner died on January 12, 1989 after a prolonged illness. He was 59.

One of the most gifted and important figures in postwar Polish theatre, Hubner was an actor, director, theatre manager, teacher, and writer. He graduated from the State Theatre School of Warsaw in 1952. He was artistic director of the T eatr Wybrzeze in Gdansk from 1958 to 1960 and manager of the Teatr Stary in Cracow from 1963 to 1969. During this period the Teatr Stary became the out­standing repertory theatre in Poland; its directors included Jarocki, Wajda, and Swinarskl. From 1974 until his death Hubner was manager and artistic director of the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw. Under his leadership, the theatre became one of the major Polish theatres, featuring the modern repertory, both Polish and foreign, attracting many of the finest actors and directors. A dean and professor at the State Theatre School, Department of Stage Direc­tion, Hubner served also as Secretary General of the Polish ITI Cen­ter.

Important productions which Hubner directed include the world premiere of Witkiewicz's The Shoemakers (Gdansk, 1957, closed by the censor after one performance), the award-winning version of Joyce's Ulysses (Gdaflsk, 1970), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (YVarsaw, 1977). He wrote a regular column for the drama mag­azine Dialog, and his books include Conversations on Theatre (1978), The Art of Directing (1985), and Theatre and Politics (1988). As an actor Hubner appeared in Conversations with the Executioner by Kazimierz Moczarski (which he adapted for the production at his own theatre), and in the German film of Gunther Grass's The Tin Drum. His play Caesar's Men (1987), has been widely played in Poland.

Hubner was well known and admired in America. He served as guest lecturer at the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute in Contemporary Eastern European Theatre: Poland and the Soviet Union, held at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in the Summer, 1980. He was a good friend to many of us, a complete man of the theatre, and a creative per­sonality of great integrity.

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INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP HONORING 110TH ANNIVERSARY OF MEYERHOLD'S BIRTH

(Penza & Moscow, 2o-25 February 1989)

Marjorie Hoover

Whatever the political, economic and sociological progress of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. the Meyerhold Conference in Penza and Moscow at the end of February 1989 alone demonstrates the epoch-making cultural turnover already at work. Thus the birth 110 years ago of the great Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold was celebrated by the opening of a Meyerhold Museum in the house, renovated for the purpose, in which he was born in Penza, a city some five hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

The foreigners at the conference, about a third of around thirty invited participants, while responsible each for his transporta­tion to and from Moscow, had accommodations and transportation within the USSR arranged and paid for, besides receiving a generous daily allowance for further expenses. Many of the foreign participants had attended a previous international Meyerhold con­ference in Stockholm in 1981, to which, though, of the Soviet delegates invited (Aieksandr Fevralsky and Konstantin Rudnitsky) only one, Fevralsky, had managed to come. Now twice as many Soviet as foreign delegates participated. All participants--academics, archivists, teachers of drama and dance, professional actors and directors, research scholars from institutes at home and abroad, a TV and radio editor, an editor of an art and another of a film journal-­gave a twenty-minute report or demonstration. These workshop pre­sentations in the small auditorium at the Museum were preceded with an opening session in the Penza Hall of Political Enlightenment and concluded by a commemorative evening in Meyerhold's last theatre-­until 1938--in Moscow, the Ermolova. In addition, two dance per­formances and four of plays took place in Penza, and two excursions were organized: a tour of Penza, on the river Sura, where Meyerhold spent his first twenty-one years, and a trip to Tarkany, the estate of the classic Russian author Mikhail Lermontov, whose play Masquerade received Meyerhold's most luxurious staging.

The schedule of events at the Meyerhold Conference, however, quite fails to reflect an intensity of participant involvement and excitement such as in a lifetime of conferences I have never before experienced. A tone of warm and friendly exchange was set upon arrival in Moscow and again in Penza by assistance from repre­sentatives of the Theatre Union, official sponsors of the workshop, translators, and even from our fellow participants, many of whom met

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us as we got off the overnight train in Penza. Our community of feel- -ing arose, though, largely from a shattering experience. We were given on arrival the February 16 number of Sovetskaia Kultura, the arts and culture newspaper published three times a week by the Min­istry of Culture; this number devoted a full-page spread (p. 5) to Meyerhold's arrest, torture and execution, the facts of which had long been rumored but never before published. We were particularly affected by Meyerhold's two official petitions to Molotov, in which the victim himself describes his torment and denies the confessions of treason extracted from him by inhumanly calculating cruelty. We saw three rows of black-and-white photos arranged in a vertical arc from top to bottom of the page. Three serial photos, · dated 1939, at the upper left presented a smiling, vivid director gesticulating at a rehearsal, dapper in his usual bow tie. In the photo at the center of the page Molotov and Stalin appear together, stern, bust-length, backed by three henchmen, dourly reviewing some ceremony. Two photos toward the bottom of the page, gray, expressionless, are the two •mug shots: one profile, one full-face, of a rumpled, tieless Meyerhold, numbered and marked with his birthdate, 1874, and his name; they were taken on arrival at Lubianka Prison, Moscow, after his arrest in Leningrad in June 1939. An article on the page by the theatre historian David Zolotnitsky surveys Meyerhold's career under the Soviets, especially his last activities and plans, and hints at the bloody end of his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh. A black-rimmed box in italics in the center of the spread introduces Meyerhold's own two documents. (See an English translation of them in the Pages From The Past in this issue.)

The high style of the box author's first sentence continues throughout his statement, as he writes, "The death of a genius requires solemnity." Admitting that Meyerhold confessed treason, or rather its synonym, "Trotskyism," after seven months of interrogation and torture, the author quotes in old Russian the similarly hopeless plea for mercy of the Christian martyr St. Gleb. Meyerhold's own two petitions, though, are no tale of martyrs and miracles. Molotov, who then headed the government, made no reply, and Meyerhold was executed by the firing squad in Lefortovo Prison on February 2, 1940. The terrible accusation implicit in Meyerhold's account of his imprisonment earned his chief interrogator (anonymous in Sovetskaia Kul'tura) not dismissal, but promotion to the rank of gen­eral.

The keynote speeches of the Conference in a large municipal hall on the first Monday afternoon drew, beside the participants, a Penza audience of school children, their teachers, and a general public. Probably many were fans of the first keynote speaker, the actor Oleg Tabakov, now of the Moscow Art Theatre, who has played in films, notably in the title role of Oblomov after

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Goncharov's classic novel, shown in the US. While Tabakov played the role of an old man for a long run as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus at the Moscow Art Theatre, he has also kept the reputation of his nimble youth at the "Sovremennik" Theatre and still trains young actors with an emphasis on physical movement in his own Moscow studio. This training made appropriate his mention of Meyerhold's Biomechanics in his speech, "My Road to Meyerhold." Under the one-meter enlargement of Yuri Annensky's cubist portrait of Meyerhold which dominated the stage, a clearly popular Penza Party politician crouched at the lectern cracking political jokes. Con­ference participants were the next speakers: Anatoly Morozov, theatre director, and Fausto Malcovati of the Universities of Pavia and Bari, Italy. In conclusion, five of Meyerhold's biomechanical exercises were demonstrated by pupils of the Moscow Theatre Studio of Plastic Movement, directed by the Conference participant Oleg Kiselev.

The lasting impression of the first day, however, was made less by the speeches in the large hall than by the exhibits in the small rooms of the Meyerhold Museum. The Museum display of objects and photos related not only to Meyerhold's career, but also to a con­text of theatre history during his lifetime. Much that was known to exist but was not formerly allowed to be shown was now openly dis­played. Thus, the Kukryniksi's porcelain caricature head of Meyer­hold stood here in the colored version beside that of Stanislavsky at the Museum entrance. Other material was shown which was not generally known to exist complete. So Meyerhold's drawings in colored crayons of the pose or outline (risunok) he prescribed for the actor's body in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles (Theatre Studio, 1905) proved what an amazing talent for drawing and color the director possessed along with his well-known gifts for movement and music. Of course, mainly visual material was dis­played in cases and on walls, though the Museum is also equipped for film and audio shows, and possess basement recreation and rehearsal space.

While the Museum displays were quite properly historic, the same adjective might unfortunately be used of the theatre produc­tions shown at the Conference, for all lacked the contemporaneity characteristic of Meyerhold's own stagings. Eugene Shvarts' politi­cally allusive play, The Dragon, seemed outmoded, at least as per­formed by the municipal Penza troupe. Nor did Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, acted by members of the Moscow Ermolova Theatre on the same municipal stage, grip the contemporary audiences in Penza. Aleksandr Ostrovsky's The Forest was well chosen for its significance in Meyerhold's career; it was his most­performed production of a Russian classic. To adapt it as if for an amateur all-male cast of men in the military--hence its title Wanted: A

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Dramatic Actress--accorded with his frequent "contemporization" of a text from the past. But this staging by the Moscow Theatre Studio on Krasnoi Presne failed to hold an ever-dwindling audience in the Penza auditorium. The final production, especially staged for the Conference in the small auditorium by the gracious, hospitable Direc­tor of the Meyerhold Museum, Natalia Kugel, was The Fortress by renowned Japanese playwright and novelist Kobo Abe. The con­sistently mean characters, the overly schematic plot and the perform­ance, too melodramatic for the small space, were negative traits of a production which, nevertheless, proved the good will of the volunteer cast and concretely showed off Museum facilities for doing theatre on the premises.

Two demonstrations by dance studios claimed Biomechanics as their source of inspiration. The some dozen mem­bers of the Leningrad group "Terra Mobile" were already known to the Conference from their daily clown and deadpan pantomime pranks in elevators and at our meals at the Penza Hotel. Terra Mobile's performance of difficult dance movements, including break­dancing, climaxed in a core drama "Personal Life" (Lichnaia zhizn1, which, despite its virtuosity, pleased Conference participants less than our everyday contacts and improvisations with the dancers. The Moscow Theatre-Studio of Plastic Improvisation members also showed movements in their own, rather than a recognizably Meyer­hold ian manner, though their director Kiselev defended the provenance of their work from Biomechanics.

The invited participants at the Conference all spoke briefly, though we had not all known in advance that we were to do so. At least one report was read in proof form from a forthcoming issue of Teatral'naia zhizn' (No. 5, 1989), which will be devoted to Meyerhold. New publications and many phases of research related to Meyerhold were covered in the reports. Irina Uvarova-Daniel, a contributing editor of Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, spoke on commedia dell'arte, and Professor Maia Turovskaia, on her biography of Maria Babanova. Dr. Beatrice Picon-Vallin of the National Center for Theatrical Research, Paris, informed us of the voluminous French doctoral dissertation on Meyerhold she has just completed. Marina lvanova, professor of theatre history at the Shchukin Drama School of the Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow, and co-editor of the recently published Litera­turnoe nasledie (Literary legacy) of Mikhail Chekhov, indicated points of tangency between Meyerhold and Chekhov.

Several participants reported the survival of material thought to have been lost. Thus, Sachkurian, an editor of Moscow Radio, announced the existence at the station of a recording of rehearsals and a script for Rusalka, as directed by Meyerhold for radio in 1937. He also maintained that there is at Harvard a transcript of Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest (Kamennyi gostj as broadcast under

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Meyerhold's direction. According to Professor Anatoly Altshuler, Leningrad Theatre Institute, a volume on Meyerhold's production of Tchalkovsky's Queen of Spades (Pikovaia Dama) will be published by the Institute. Olga Kuptsova of VGIK (National Institute of Cinematography) mentioned some six subjects of her research, among them Konstantin Derzhavin, director, scholar and Meyerhold disciple. The richest research themes for further publication came from Maia Sitkovetskaia, archivist at TsGALI (Central Government Archive of Literature & Art). She is at work on the forthcoming six volumes of Meyerhold's works, conversations, etc., and projects a three-volume edition of the director's own letters, unlike the present one volume of letters to and from Meyerhold. She said that TsGALI holds unpublished letters of his actors including Verigina, Straukh, and Garin. She also suggested the possibility of publishing recollec­tions of Meyerhold, and stated that complete rehearsal records exist for certain productions beginning with Bubus and systematically for all Meyerhold's productions from The Inspector General on.

Professor Mel Gordon of the theatre faculty of New York University showed slides and motion pictures taken by foreigners during performance in the 1920s and 1930s--though photography was forbidden--not only at Meyerhold's, but also at other theatres, including, Tairov's Kamerny and the Habima. Professor Gordon donated a complete copy of this material to the Museum.

Not all reports exclusively praised Meyerhold. Jerzy Koenig, theatre critic, chief editor of television theatre, and dean of the theatre history department, University of Warsaw, while unequivo­cally placing Meyerhold first among the 1920s avant-gardists, declared his political stance to have been a mistake. Professor Koenig further cited as capital omissions in Meyerhold's career the Boris Godunov and Hamlet he had rehearsed, but never finished. Finally Koenig suggested that a Meyerhold conference be held every two years to consider new theatre indebted to the master. Indeed, participants at this gathering were asked to write letters in favor of such a proposal and to suggest an amount of their own pledge and other means toward its financial support.

The sponsors of this first USSR Meyerhold Conference asked the participants each to send a copy of his or her report and promised to send us a complete list of all who attended, an account of the proceedings (which were both taped and stenographically recorded throughout) and a communication about how further con­ferences could be realized. A gathering in Moscow on February 2, 1990 was promised to commemorate Meyerhold's death.

The celebration of 110 years since Meyerhold's birth con­cluded with an evening program at the Ermolova Theatre, Moscow, on February 25, 1989. While the first of the evening's three parts paid homage to the past, the other two parts showed contemporary

17

endeavors claiming the precedent of Meyerhold. Three speakers in Part 1, who had to be assisted because of their advanced age to the lectern, testified to a long collaboration with Meyerhold. Valentin Pluchek, since 1950 director of the Moscow Theatre of Satire, studied acting in Meyerhold's Workshop, where in his teens he stepped into a non-speaking role in The Inspector General. Nikolai Sokolov alone has survived of the three Kukryniksi, authors of the porcelain caricature of Meyerhold and set designers of Scenes 1-4 of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug. Alesha Kontsovsky was for many years dresser at the Meyerhold Theatre.

Two important figures of a younger generation spoke. The poet Andrei Voznesensky confessed his deep admiration for Meyer­hold and recited his poem about him. Yuri Lyubimov, the former director of the Taganka Theatre, recently invited back to Moscow to re-stage his Boris Godunov, admitted to having met Meyerhold only once, though a huge photograph of him, one of four such artistic "icons," hangs in the Taganka lobby like a profession of faith. Two admirably performed musical numbers had connections with Meyer­hold: a piano solo by Tchaikovsky and a pascaglio for string trio by Dmitri Shostakovich, who wrote the music for The Bedbug. (The score of Shostakovich's Bedbug music, long said to be lost, is on display at the Meyerhold Museum, Penza.)

The next two parts of the evening were devoted to new directions in culture. A trio of horn-blowing comedians made costume, pantomime, horn blasts, as well as the spoken word, con­vey largely political jokes. They were followed by a deafeningly amplified rock band. Younger poets then recited their work. One of them, Lev Eisenshtein, used cliche word s--"so," "thank you," "at first"--punctuated in staccato rhythm by frequent full stops. Another poet, Eizenberg, made short pronouncements, now a colloquial phrase, "No need to say more ... , " again a near axiom, • Joy is infinite ("Radost' neob'iatna"--with further connotations: "incomprehensible," "unembraceable"). The matter-of-fact hammer­ing of these two poets contrasted with the incantatory high rhetoric half-sung by the poet who had preceded them.

The third and final part of the evening consisted of a per­formance in Estonian entitled Poco a poco ma non troppo. By this time most of the audience had departed, afraid, no doubt, that without knowing the language they would not understand, though they received a Russian summary of the action. Some remained to see the visual art projected on two screens in the lobby by a young Moscow artist, Bogdan Mamonov, who with two cleverly manipulated sets of slides showed crumbling, gradually unfocussing, ever recur­ring, then super-imposed, now black-and-white again neon-colored images; altogether the show created a morbidly disturbing, near­psychedelic experience. In sum, the new art in the celebratory eve-

18

ning had more to do with the freedom of glasnost than with Meyer­hold.

Unmistakably, though, glasnost has opened up amazing knowledge of Meyerhold's past, caused the revelation of materials thought to be lost, brought about scholarly publicat ion and promised more than was dreamed possible. Above all, the Meyerhold Museum now stands as an accomplished fact in his birthplace. The con­ference held there in February 1989 proved the heartwarming cooperation that is possible between old and young, scholars and theatre professionals, foreigners and Russians united in admiration of Meyerhold's genius.

PAGES FROM THE PAST

To: The President of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, Viacheslav Mikhailov Molotov.

From: The prisoner Vselovod Emil'evich Meierkhol'd-Raikh (b. 1874, former member of the Communist Party from the year 1918, ethnicity German).

PETITION

Butyrsky Prison, 2/1 & 13/1 1940

What people show themselves to be in a time of fear, that is indeed FEAR. It is a crack in the acquired conduct of a human being, and through this crack one can see nature as it is.

--Nikolai Leskov

When the interrogators began using on me, the prisoner under investigation, their physical methods 1 of persuasion, and added to them their so-called "psychological attack," the two together aroused in me such monstrous terror that my nature was bared to the very roots . . ..

My nerves turned out to be altogether close to the surface, and my skin, as tender and sensitive as a child's. My eyes (with this-­for me--unendurable physical and moral pain) proved capable of shedding tears in streams. Lying on the floor face down, I showed a capacity to twist, contort my body and squeal like a dog being whipped by its master. The guard who led me away from such an interrogation once asked: "Do you have malaria?"--such was the nervous tremble of which my body showed itself capable. When I lay down on my cot and fell asleep, only to go again an hour later to interrogation after enduring eighteen hours of it before that, I was awakened by my own groan and by being jerked up on the cot like a patient dying of fever.

Fear arouses terror, and terror forces one to self-defense.

"Death (oh, surely!), death is better than this!" the prisoner under interrogation will say to himself. I, too, said this, and launched self-accusations in the hope they would bring me to the scaffold.

19

Indeed, that happened: On the last page of my finished "case," No. 537, the terrible numbers, Paragraph 581, Pts. Ia & II, of the criminal code appear.

Viacheslav Mikhailovich, you know my faults. (Remember what you once told me: "You're always up to some new and original trick!") A man who knows another's faults knows him better than one who admires his achievements. Say now, ean you believe that I am a · traitor to my country (an enemy of my nation), that I am a spy, that I am a member of a rightist Trotskyite organization, that I am a counter-revolutionary, that I furthered Trotskyism [adherence to the theory of Leon Trotsky (1877-1940), who advocated worldwide revolution, as opposed to socialism in one country] in my art, that I consciously did the enemy's work in the theatre so as to undermine the foundations of Soviet art?

I am charged with all that in my Case No. 537. Also in my Case the word "formalist" (in matters of art) is made a synonym of Trotskyite. In my case No. 537 Ilia Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, lurii Olesha (he's even declared a terrorist), Shostakovich, Shebalin, Okhlopkov, etc., are named Trotskyites.

After my arrest in June I did not even partially recover my balance until December 19. I wrote about what was going on in the interrogations to L[avrentii] P. Beria and to the prosecutor of the USSR [attorney general], stating in my complaint and petition that I denied my previous statements made under duress. For example: In my Case No. 537 l urii K. Baltrushaitis, with whom I had been friends since 1889 and whom I knew as a Russian poet who con­sidered the USSR to be his country more than Lithuania, is called an English spy, and I am charged with supplying him with materials after he had recruited me as a spy.

In articulo mortis (at the moment of death)--here is my con­fession, brief, as befitting the instant before death: I was never a spy. I never joined a single Trotskyite organization (1, together with the Party, cursed the Jew Trotsky!). I never took part in counterrevolu­tionary act ivity. An arrant mole like Trotsky, capable only of underhanded diversions and stabs in the back, who had no political program, a cretin, could not give a program to people in the arts. I shall finish my petition in ten days when I shall be allowed another piece of paper. [Doubtless, official paper suitable for notarization, such as must still be bought for a few pennies for use in documents in some countries.]

Vs. Meierkhol'd

Petition continued, p. 2, 13/1 1940

20

My failure to endure physical pain, my loss of every control of myself in my clouded, brain-washed consciousness was abetted by one more terrible circumstance: Immediately after my arrest on June 20, 1939, I was thrown into deepest depression by virtue of the fixed idea, "This Is the way it has to be.· I began to persuade myself that it seemed to the government that the penalty decreed for me (the closure of my theatre, the dispersal of my troupe, the seizure of the new theatre building on Mayakovsky Square under construction according to my plans) was sufficient for my sins, as declared before the tribunal at the first session of the Supr~me Soviet, and that I must undergo further punishment, that which was now put upon me by organs of the NKVD [People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the secret police]. "This is the way it has to be," l persuaded myself. And my Self was split into two persons. The first began searching for the crimes of the second, and when it did not find them, it began to invent them. My interrogator appeared to be my good, experienced helper in my case, and we began to create together in close alliance. When my fantasy was exhausted, my interrogators paired off (Voronin and Rados, Voronin and Schwarzman) and prepared protocols (several were copied three and four times). From hunger (I could eat nothing), insomnia (for three months) and heart attacks at night and hysteria (my tears poured in streams and I trembled as in a fever) with the result that I aged some ten years--became bent and gray--so that my interrogators were frightened. They began energeti­cally giving me medical treatment, (I was then in "the inner prison," which has a good medical department) and giving me a rich diet. But this helped only superficially--physically; my nerves were in the same state, and my consciousness was as before, deadened, clouded. For the sword of Damocles hung over me: The inter­rogator insisted the whole time, threatening, "If you don't write (that is, think up something!?), we'll beat you again; we'll leave your head and right hand alone; the rest we'll turn into a piece of formless bloodied mincemeat." And I signed it all by 16 November 1939. J renounce my own deposition, which was thus beaten out of me, and implore you, the head of the government: Save me, give me back my freedof11. I love my country, and I will devote to it all the forces of my last years of life.

Vs. Meierkhol'd-Raikh

21

ENDNOTES

1They beat me, a sick [Meyerhold had several times undergone treatment at home and abroad for both heart and lung disease], sixty-year-old man, put me face down and beat me on the back and the soles with a braided rubber lash. While I sat on a chair, they beat MY LEGS with the same lash in wide-swinging blows of great force on places from the knees to the upper thighs. And on the following days when these parts of my legs were discolored with profuse internal hemorrhaging, they again beat with this lash on these red, blue and yellow subcutaneous blood spots, and the pain was such that it felt as if furiously boiling water were poured on these painful, sensitive places. I screamed and wept from the pain. They beat me on the back with the rubber lash. They beat me in the face with wide swings from on high . . . . [Meyerhold again refers to this same explanation in this endnote on "physical methods of persua­sion • in the continuation of his petition dated 13/1 1940.]

22

OBSERVATIONS ON THE MOSCOW THEATRE: JANUARY, 1989

Marvin Carlson

In an earlier issue of SEEDTF (May, 1988) I reported on the first meeting of the US-USSR Commission on Theatre and Dance Studies hosted by the ACLS and IREX at Princeton in December of 1987. Among the major on-going projects proposed at that meeting are a series of conferences between Soviet and US scholars on sub­jects of mutual inte·rest to be held alternately in the two countries. The first such conference, tentatively scheduled for the fall or winter of 1989, is to take place in Moscow, and specific arrangements for it were determined at a preliminary meeting in Moscow in January 1989, between Soviet and US members of the Commission. Representing the US at this meeting were Kalman Burnim, US Chairman and President of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Marvin Carlson, a member of the Executive Board of ASTR and Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Representing the USSR were Aleksei Vadimovich Bartoshevich and Anatoly Mironovich Smeliansky, both Secretaries of the Board of the Theatre Union of the USSR.

The dates agreed upon for the upcoming conference were October 22 to November 1, 1989. Its subject is to be "Theatre Studies Today in the USSR and US: Methods, Problems, Perspec­tives." The first day of the Conference is to be devoted to an exchange of information on resource materials and general direc­tions of research in the two countries. The following two days are to be devoted to discussions of methodologies of theatre studies, the next day to the education of theatre scholars, and the final day to a discussion of possible cooperative publications and topics for future conferences. Following the conference, the delegates will have two or three days to visit, if they wish, another Soviet theatre center, such as Leningrad or Tbilisi. Seven scholars will be selected to represent each country, and a limited number of observers may also attend. The sessions will be held in the All-Union Institute of Art Studies in Moscow.

In addition to consulting about the upcoming conference, Professors Burnam and I visited a number of archives and each eve­ning attended the theatre. The productions we saw were about evenly divided between those we asked to see and those most warmly recommended by our hosts. Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog was

23

still considered the most exciting recent production in Moscow (see SEEDTF, Vol. 7 Nos. 2&3, Dec., 1987, p. 17) but it was not presented during the time we were there. Our hosts were almost equally enthusiastic about Edvard Radzinsky's Jogging, now in its third sea­son at the Ermolova Theatre and still one of the most popular offer­ings in Moscow (see the articles on it by Alma Law and Lisa Partes in the Dec., 1987 issue of SEEDTF) . With this as the key work, Rad­zinsky continues to play a major ·role on the Moscow scene. During the time we were there, only Ostrovsky was represented by more works offered.

The old Moscow Art Theatre has finally reopened, restored to its early twentieth century art nouveau elegance, with even the auditorium chairs exactly reproducing those of the original theatre (beautiful in line, but unhappily not very comfortable). This theatre, directed by Oleg Efremov, is now known, we learned, as the "male" Moscow Art Theatre, whi le the company directed by Madame Tatiana Doronina is known as the "female" one. It is now in residence at the theatre on Tverskoi Blvd. built for foreign companies until the second Moscow Art Theatre is repaired. We heard warm praise for Efremov's production of Bulgakov's Moliere and some scorn for the Doronina Cherry Orchard (in each production the director also played the leading role) but, in fact, found them both solid produc­tions, though both a bit ponderous and very deliberately paced. The Cherry Orchard offered detailed and beautiful, if traditional settings, while Moliere offered a visually more experimental approach, with much of the scenery created out of differing configurations of a stage full of theatrical trunks.

Among the other productions we saw, three seemed to me worthy of particular remark. A stage version of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground was arousing mixed feelings of fascination and revulsion in packed audiences at the Theatre for Young Spec­tators. The play is an astonishing tour de force for its leading actor V. Gvozditsky, since the first act is essentially a monologue, lasting well over an hour, and the second provides him with a partner only for about its first third. The range of moods, tempi, and physical actions exhibited by this excellent actor keep the audience con­tinually fascinated, but so do a series of the most grotesque and revolting eating and drinking scenes I have ever witnessed and two nude scenes at the beginning of the second act. Gvozditsky's very attractive partner in these scenes is E. Yurevich, who is also appear­ing as Armanda Bejart in the MXAT Moliere.

The small experimental South-West Theatre Studio is offering a dynamic and powerful experimental production of Hamlet directed by Valeri Belakovich, who plays Claudius, with Victor Avilov as Ham­let. The setting is essentially an empty black space, with occasional scenes played against the stone walls of this simple theatre. Most of

24

the action, however, takes place in downward shafts of light picking up the individual characters. While Claudius remains in charge, he and the other characters move together in a rapid rhythm reinforced by a powerful musical score. As the actions of Hamlet begin to dis­turb this imposed order, both the music and movement rhythms become increasingly jagged and erratic. In the later scenes the whole world of Elsinore seems to have gone mad. Ophelia is alone on stage in her madness, the lines of others are shrieked at her in tones far more mad than her own. The duels and deaths occur in increasing darkness and the coming of Fortinbras brings not order and tranquility, but only new noise, threats, and confusion.

Easily the most powerful and original production I saw in Moscow was Lyubimov's Three Sisters, still in repertoire at the Taganka. The director assumes a fairly intimate knowledge of the play on the part of his audience as he uses Images and elements from the entire play to illuminate or to wryly comment upon each other throughout the production. The duel between the Baron and Solyony, for example, is shown in an extended pantomime near the beginning of the play, and elements of this pantomime are repeated at appropriate moments elsewhere. In the middle of the stage is a small internal stage, often with an audience of many of the characters seated with backs to us as one or more of their fellows present lines or actions as dramatic "turns." Ferapont, a young man in this inter­pretation, serves as a kind of chorus, pointing out special things to our attention, providing Kulygin with his classic quotations, offering symbolic properties when appropriate. A rich musical score accompanies the action, a good deal of it provided by Andrei, who sits with his back to the audience at a floor level piano when he is not on stage. Among the most memorable of the many brilliant touches is the revelation near the opening of the play of the military band (usually heard offstage only at the end). As they play, the stage wall opens beyond them to reveal not the Moscow of the sisters' dreams but the real Moscow as it actually exists--a grim and cluttered court­yard, a clutter of roofs, and beyond, rows of grim apartment houses. Nothing could more effectively undercut the folly of those dreams.

I should also mention that during January the Theatre Union was collaborating with the Ministry of Culture of West Germany to bring to the Soviet Union an astonishing festival of West German theatre, lasting the entire month. More than 750 theatre artists from West Germany were in Moscow, offering major productions by ten leading companies, as well as lectures, symposia, room displays by leading designers, and programs of videotapes. Some of the per­formances also toured to Riga, Vilnius, Kiev, and Leningrad. Among those companies participating were the Wuppertal Tanztheater, directed by Pina Bausch, the Munich Kammerspiele, directed by Dieter Darn, the West Berlin Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, directed

25

by Peter Stein, the Schauspielhaus Bochum, directed by Frank­Patrick Steckel, and the Schauspiel Frankfurt, directed by Klaus Michael Gruber. This astonishing project will be followed later this spring by tours of a number of other leading West European com­panies. Peter Brook is bringing his Cherry Orchard, Patrice Chereau his Hamlet, and Ariane Mnouchkine her lndiade. There will probably be no city in the world with so rich a selection of leading European theatre productions available this winter and spring as Moscow.

26

AN ECONOMIC APPRAISAL OF SOVIET THEATRE TODAY

Marvin Carlson

On March 31, 1989, a group of representatives from the Managers and Producers delegations of the American/Soviet Theatre Initiative visited New York, among them Felix Demischev, Managing Director if the Stanislavsky Drama Theatre, Peter Polamar­chuk, General Manager of the Moldavian Opera and Ballet Theatre, Mikhail Bukan, General Manager of the State Bolshoi Opera and Bal­let Theatre in Byelorussia, Gatis Strads, Managing Director of ASTI, and Alexandr Rubinshtein, Chief Economic Expert of the USSR Union of Soviet Theatre Workers. Dr. Rubinshtein presented an address at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on "How Theatre Works in the USSR Today: A Pragmatic View."

Dr. Rubinshtein began by observing that the theatre is tradi­tionally a center of Russian intellectual life and a force for freedom, so that the theatre is closely associated with the new, more open spirit in the USSR. There are 650 state-supported theatres in the USSR and about 150-200 studio-theatres, with more of them appear­ing all the time. There are also many drama circles, essentially amateur groups. The USSR sees perhaps 300,000 theatrical per­formances a year, involving 150 million spectators and supported by 150 million roubles in state subsidy. Traditionally the subsidy is unevenly distributed, so that theatres like the Bolshoi, the Maly, and the Moscow Art Theatre in the capital get as much subsidy as per­haps forty others, a pattern repeated in each republic. Though some theatres get very large subsidies and others very small ones, the average subsidy makes up about 50% of the theatre's budget. Theatres are very difficult to establish, but almost impossible to terminate once established, and so it may happen that quite inferior theatres gain large subsidies just to keep operating.

Few theatres find their subsidies adequate, even though these have continued to grow. In one republic subsidies have recently tripled, but the theatres became poorer, since the increases were more than absorbed by the creation of new companies, the opening of new buildings, increases in salaries, and increases in the cost of materials. The Union is now attempting to establish a policy of providing two roubles from the government for each rouble earned by the theatre. (France now gives three francs for each franc.) The Theatre Union, now comprising 51,000 members, has introduced a program of pension funds and plans to introduce unemployment pay

27

as soon as a system of contracts can be established. These various innovations are directed toward a major problem in the USSR--that theatre companies, once established, are virtually permanent, and there is no motivation to limit their size. The Moscow Art Theatre has 150 members, the Maly 109, and even a normal regional theatre might have 60. Dr. Rubinshtein spoke of a much honored friend who is a salaried member of the Moscow Art Theatre but who has not appeared on stage there in five years. Increase of funding, better utilization of artists, and less control over the operation of theatres by those who give the money--these were the central concerns Dr. Rubinshtein saw in the USSR theatre today. The audience was prob­ably rather surprised to find how similar these basic concerns are to those in America, under a totally different system of theatre organiza­tion and funding.

28

YURI LYUBIMOV, cont'd

Alma Law

Yuri Lyubimov is back in Moscow again, this time on con­tract with the Taganka Theatre where he will be working until the end of the current season. Lyubimov, who spent ten days visiting his old theatre a year ago in May, arrived in January, just in time to be pre­sent for the performance at the Taganka of his production of Vladimir ~sotsky in celebration of the late poet-bard's birthday on the 25th.

Accompanied by his wife and son, who is attending the American School in Moscow, Lyubimov immediately set to work reviving his production of Alive, based on Boris Mozhaev's novella, From the Life of FyocJr Kuzkin. Lyubimov first directed this produc­tion in 1968, when it was banned by then Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, before it could be shown to the public. That occasion also marked the second time Lyubimov was fired from his post as chief director at the Taganka. Seven years later, in 1975, after Furtseva's death and the appointment of Pyotr Demichev as the new Minister of Culture, Lyubimov once again tried to get the pro­duction passed. At first Demichev agreed to support Lyubimov, but that was before the hard-liners rallied the collective farm lobby to take part in what became one of the legendary post-performance evaluations at the Taganka. As one writer observed at the time, "It was like inviting all the mayors in Russia to judge Gogol's The Inspector General." Now, twenty-one years later, and just short of five years from the date when Lyubimov was fired from the Taganka for the third time, Alive finally had its premiere on February 23.

For Lyubimov and his core of loyal followers, opening night was both a moral and artistic triumph. Regarded by many as Lyubimov's greatest production, Alive (with set design by David Borovsky), is the story of a collective farm worker who find himself thwarted by an ignorant and reactionary bureaucracy when he tries to make ends meet by engaging in some free enterprise on the side. In Lyubimov's view Alive is if anything more timely today than when it was first staged. "It's sad that in all these years so little has changed," he noted in an interview with this writer. Commenting on the numerous gloomy faces in the audience at the performance the night before, he explained, "That means those people are not suffi­ciently restructured, and so they are afraid." And as testimony that feelings still run high about this production, actor Valery Zolotukhin, who plays Kuzkin, told of receiving a phone call after the premiere telling him, ''Too bad they didn't put you in prison back then for Kuz­kin!"

With Alive now ensconced in the repertory, Lyubimov

29

immediately began restaging with the Taganka actors his Stockholm production of A Feast in the Time of the Plague, based on Aleksandr Pushkin's Little Tragedies (seen by American theatre audiences at the 1987 Pepsico Summerfare in Purchase, New York). As for his future plans at the Taganka, "Probably Erdman's The Suicide will be next, " he says, "and then a poetry production including works by and about Pasternak, Mandelshtam, and Akhmatova." Lyubimov has also mentioned Dostoevsky's The Possessed and Bulgakov's Theatrical Novel as other productions he would like to stage at the Taganka. He is also committed to directing Hamlet this year in London, a production that according to him will tour both England and Canada. In addition, Lyubimov will be going to Germany this spring to complete negotiations to stage The Queen of Spades in 1990, in the version he was forbidden to direct at the Paris Opera in 1978, thus redressing yet another grievance against the past.

Meanwhile, the seventy-one-year-old Lyubimov is having the time of his life in Moscow this spring playing the role of, as he put it, "an Israeli citizen and foreign director." Never has he been in greater form than when he spoke at the International Stanislavsky Con­ference held in Moscow in February, at which he stated that he rejects all systems including Stanislavsky's. Later he put on an extraordinary show for the visiting directors and Stanislavsky special­ists who attended an open rehearsal of A Feast in the Time of the Plague. It began with the delegates being told by the Soviet guide on the bus going to the Taganka, "Only 25 persons will be admitted to the rehearsal since it is being held in a small room... The guide went on to explain, "Lyubimov is on a very strict schedule since he is here as a Western director being paid in hard currency, and therefore every minute of rehearsal time counts."

But that proved to be just the set-up for what was to follow. After far more than twenty-five people had jammed into the upstairs buffet and the rehearsal had barely begun, Lyubimov suddenly stopped to say that he understood there were another twenty people waiting downstairs. "I can't leave them out in the cold," he announced, "and so we'll have to move the rehearsal to the auditorium where they can also be accommodated." About twenty minutes were then taken up with moving down to the old Taganka auditorium. Rather than sitting at his director's desk, Lyubimov now took a position in front of the stage where he could both conduct the rehearsal and play to an increasingly confused audience.

After telling the gathering that A Feast in the Time of the Plague seemed to him a very appropriate title given the plague taking place in the world today, he went on to explain that the feast is set on an open square, with the plague all around the guests who have gathered to await their death by each recalling his or her own story. "Those," he announced, "are, in the words of the Stanislavsky

30

system, 'the given circumstances.'" Continuing to poke fun at the Stanislavsky System, he next explained they had just begun working on the production, and so they were still in the "at the table stage" (a Ia Stanislavsky). Lyubimov noted that in his theatre that period is always very short. "But," he added ironically, "since this production takes place 'at the table,' we will nevertheless consider this an 'at the table' rehearsal."

In the end, the rehearsal consisted mainly in the actors and director listening to the songs Alfred Schnitke had composed for· the Taganka's production of Brecht's Turandot, in an effort to find some suitable music for A Feast--thus providing ample opportunity for much joking singing and dancing by Lyubimov and his actors. At one point Lyubimov quipped to the audience, "We're not working according to the System. Tell your organizers they sent you to the wrong place!" Nikolai Gubenko, current head of the theatre, also made his appearance fresh from the Dante Symposium in Italy. Join­ing in the spirit of the occasion he announced with a laugh, "Beginning tomorrow you'll have to pay to see the rehearsals. Every­thing for money!"

In all, the rehearsal was vintage Lyubimov. As he com­mented afterwards, "I really pulled a fast one on them," meaning on all the curiosity seekers who had come to watch "the legendary Lyubimov" rehearse, and who beat a hasty retreat when the dinner break was announced. On leaving, one director noted in dismay, "When do the actors prepare themselves!" and another commented, "No one in the West could ever afford to have the actors sitting around while the director decides what music he'll use!"

Lyubimov, who will be going on tour with the Taganka to Greece before the end of the season, still dodges all questions as to his future status at his former theatre. When asked in response to a question about whether he "wished" to have his Soviet citizenship restored, he answered, "It wasn't my 'wish' that I leave. If it had been my 'wish' to leave then you could ask, 'Have you changed your wish?' I was driven out. That means I hadn't planned to leave. I was driven out, and if those people who did it now consider that it was unjust, then it's up to them to restore my position here." He added, "Probably there will be some decision. But so far I don't know .... "

31

ALTERNATIVE THEATRE IN POLAND

Kathleen Cioffi

In Poland, there is a great deal of controversy these days about what is variously called alternative, student, or "young" theatre. Everyone agrees that it is no longer as vital, active, and influential a phenomenon as it was in the 1970s. Some even go so far as to assert that Polish alternative theatre is dead. Others believe (or maybe just hope) that it still lives and will continue to do so, but is in a kind of re-grouping period, a period where it is groping for its values and, in the case of several theatres, for the very ability to sur­vive. Though the excitement of the 1970s about the alternative theatre movement in Poland has clearly disappeared, some of the theatres themselves still exist and are still doing very interesting work. Clearly, however, the 1980s has been a period of crisis for the alternative theatre movement in Poland. The history of this move­ment reveals a theatre that has been engaged In a dialogue with society throughout the entire period of its existence, and it is this very fact which now threatens it.

The alternative theatre movement in Poland started in the 1950s as part of the amateur student · theatre movement. This beginning stage has been called the "first wave."1 From the first, these student theatres were experimenters, both aesthetically and politically. The two most important theatres both starting in 1954 (two years before a worker's revolt in Poznatl brought about a new regime in Warsaw dedicated to more cultural independence from Moscow) were the Student Satirical Theatre (STS) in Warsaw and Bim-Bom in Gdahsk. STS presented a kind of political cabaret, ridiculing the absurdities of life in Stalinist Poland, especially those aspect of life which most affected students. Bim-Bom, on the other hand, was more ambitious. Though it shared the short skit form and the political orientation of STS, the creators of Bim-Bom, the actors Zbigniew Cybulski and BogumitKobiela (later to become famous in Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds) and the writer Jerzy Afanasjew, tended to value visual elements over textual ones. This idea was to have great influence on many other later alternative groups in Poland.

STS and Bim-Bom, like many other Polish groups around 1956 and like the Czechs in the 1960s, were anti-Stalinist but pro­socialist. They believed in the possibility of "a better form of socialism." Gradually, however, in the period between 1956 and 1968, student theatres became less interested in politics and more interested in aesthetic issues. They introduced into the Polish

32

repertoire the first productions of many avant-garde Western playwrights such as Beckett, lonesco, and Sartre. They also pro­duced the post-war premieres of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz, Polish avant-garde playwrights who had written before World War II.

Then came the second wave of student theatre, which started in 1968 with the regime's brutal suppression of student protests and subsequent official anti-Semitic campaign. These events opened the eyes of many of the young intellectuals of the day to the duplicity of the official government line, and student theatres began to be interested in politics again. According to Tadeusz Nyc­zek, a theatre critic who wrote extensively about student theatre in the 1970s, the new student theatre after 1968 turned against what student theatres represented in the 1960s and against the formal experiments of the era. Grotowski was a great influence on the stu­dent groups, and they whole-heartedly adopted his idea of the "poor'' theatre. At that time, Polish student theatre became part of the world wide alternative theatre movement. They took part in many alterna­tive theatre festivals around the world, and were very popular at these festivals, in part because they were neither anti-Socialist not anti-capitalist, but were "independent theatres," sometimes even called "free Communist theatres. "2

Many of the still-existing Polish alternative theatres started during this period of what historian Timothy Garton Ash in his book on Solidarity calls "a whole opposition counter-culture without paral­lel in the Soviet bloc. "3 The Gierek regime was tolerant, perhaps because it wanted to curry favor with the intelligentsia, perhaps because it didn't want to antagonize the West on whom it was dependent for enormous amounts of loan money, perhaps because it just didn't think ideas were all that powerful. At any rate, alternative theatre companies benefited from this flowering counter-culture. Throughout most of the seventies, they were sponsored by SZSP (the Socialist Organization of Polish Students), which also sponsored huge alternative theatre festivals, at which there were tumultuous public discussions lasting long into the night about the performances and the whole function of alternative theatre in Polish society. The prizes at these festivals were hotly competed for, and many journal­ists and critics attended and wrote sympathetically about the move­ment.

In an article in Index on Censorship, the author, a theatre critic writing under a pseudonym, comments:

The second wave of student theatres produced its best performances in the late 1960s and early 1970s--productions such as Teatr 77's Circle Triptych, [Teatr] STU's Falling, and Polish Dream-book, and In a Breath by Teatr 8 Dnia.

33

These were, without exaggeration, a moral guide for that generation; an avant-garde which created values in student society. And not only in stu­dent society. After a performance of In a Breath­based on the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, the theatre's first literary director--a production which . in dramatic form encapsulated the dramatic port town upheavals of December, 1970, the following comment was made: "It is not a play, it is an out­cry ... an outcry against submissiveness, against the frightening notion of 'drab humanity. '"4

Often these theatres would base their creations on great works of Polish or world literature, sometimes works which were only pub­lished underground in Poland, and develop the ideas in these works through improvisations into something dramatic and uniquely excit­ing for audiences.

Toward the end of the 1970s, many of these theatres became "professionalized." This was good in a material sense for theatres: the actors now began to receive salaries, they had equip­ment, money for scenery and costumes, and sometimes even places to rehearse and perform. But it had a disastrous effect on the artistic output of some of the theatres. Most of them were placed under the auspices of the United Companies of Entertainment (Polish initials ZPR), the same organization which sponsors circuses and other types of mass entertainment. Paradoxically, they were now the financers of avant-garde theatre, and they wanted these theatres, like their other ventures, to be •popular." Therefore, some of the theatres began to do performances which would earn them money but weren't very artistically important.

The theatres faced some other problems in the late seventies. One of them was a change in the perspective of the actors. When they started, they were very young and they were stu­dents; now they were older and professionals. They had to think about being involved in this type of theatre for perhaps their whole lives, they had to think about keeping their jobs, and most important of all, they had to think about what a professional alternative theatre actor should be like. Some of the theatres, like Teatr Kalambur (Pun Theatre) from Wrootaw, Teatr 77 from..t:odz, and Teatr STU from Cracow, solved these problems by becoming no different form regu­lar professional theatres--they began to perform plays written by others and to employ graduates from professional acting schooiS;­Others, like Teatr Osmego Dnia (Theatre of the 8th Day) from Poznan and Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) from Warsaw tried to develop their own aesthetic of alternative theatre. Only those

34

theatres which managed successfully to develop that aesthetic can now still be called alternative theatres.

Then, too, in the late seventies, censorship started to get tougher as the theatres got bolder in their critique of social problems. Parts of plays or even whole plays themselves were forbidden. For example, Our Sunday, by Lublin's Teatr Provisorium was banned in its entirety in 1977, though they managed to perform it some thirty­six times for small audiences of invited guests. Other companies, such as the Theatre of the 8th Day, often had two versions of their plays--one for the censors and the other "real" version with censored parts restored, which they would perform in a given town after the censors had okayed the de-politicized version. This sort of trickery, though it won the 8th Day a special place in the hearts of their audiences, stigmatized them as political and therefore subject to harassment by the authorities.

In 1980, the Solidarity movement swept the country. Many theatres suspended activities because what was happening in the streets, the factories, and the shipyards was more interesting. Others continued, but with mixed results. In the words of Jan Brytbwski, writing in the Catholic monthly Temperance and Work:

Those who continued were giving up politics. They were trying to create a more transcendent reality, which nevertheless contained the actual evolution of events. They realized the dangers of simplification, of too short a distance, of the pres­sure of emotions. They tried to set up a universal perspective to "the present ." ... The audience had different expectations--they wanted journal­ism, simple messages, and especially, political appeals and declarations. The theatres were not able to cope with this situation ... . Alternative theatre was no longer an exceptional phenomenon. This was the price for working in "normal" conditions.s

This dilemma was resolved for the theatres by the declaration of Mar­tial Law on December 13, 1981 . Many of the participants in student theatres were either interned or imprisoned for months: five of the men from Teatr Provisorium, the entire troupe of TWA from Wroclaw, and two of the actors from the Theatre of the 8th Day were silenced in this way. During the Solidarity period, most of the theatres which had not been professionalized had been taken under the wing of NZS, the indepen~ent student union; when this union was banned, they lost the foundations of their material existence, and many of them lost their will to survive.

35

And now, there is the "third wave· of Polish alternative theatre. This third wave consists of some survivors from the second wave who are, financially speaking, barely making ends meet, along with a couple of newer groups, and a lot of very bad imitators of the successful student theatres of the seventies. As the Polish theatre critic Marek Miller says of the latter: "Some theatres believe that it is enough to fall into a fit of convulsions, and shout 'tuck,' 'vodka,' 'informer,' and 'queue,' in order to get to the bottom of things, to understand the essence. "6 On the other hand, the fact that so many of today's student theatres in Poland feel an affinity with alternative theatre is not ent irely without significance. As Lech Raczak, the director of the Theatre of the 8th Day, points out:

One things seems important--and it is a new phenomenon in Poland--and that is that these youth amateur theatres . . . now have a com­pletely different shape. They don't model them­selves in the classical theatre where you play nineteenth or early twentieth century stuff. Now they do theatre the way we do it or the way other theatres which are opposed to the official theatre do it. Which means that our type of theatre has been accepted by these young people as a model. .. . It is meaningful at least in this sense, that there is some wider feeling that the tradi­tional theatre does not suffice as a means of expression for contemporary people in this country.7

Miller contends that this third wave of Polish alternative theatre represents what he calls "the aesthetics of silence:" there are now fewer festivals, fewer journalists interested In the movement, fewer public discussions, altogether less hoopla and to-do. However, there are still some interesting theatres, who quietly, perhaps so as not to arouse the authorities, go about their work and who talk among themselves and privately with interested audience members.

Many others, however, are not so optimistic. After the 1987 START Festival, which is a festival for student theatres making their debut, an article appeared entitled "Student Theatre: It Isn't, It Isn't, It Isn't. ... "8 A director of one of the student theatres which has sur­vived from the 1970s told me that he thinks that if the alternative theatre movement is going to continue to exist, the impetus for it will have to come form some quarter other than the moribund student theatres. 9 This already may be happening with the emergence of -groups such as Gardzienice which have no connection with the stu­dent theatre movement but which are decidedly "alternative" in out-

36

look. In the current political climate, it is difficult to say what the

future prospects of Polish alternative theatre are. The most influential of the theatres that I saw between 1984 and 1987, the Theatre of the 8th Day, has emigrated, and is now performing in Western Europe. Several other theatres have not emigrated en masse but have lost key personnel to emigration. The cultural and intellectual atmos­phere which supported alternative theatre In Poland seems to be draining away. Cynicism Is widespread, and the exhilaration that people once felt at seeing and hearing the falseness of official propaganda unmasked has given way to a feeling of hopelessness in many quarters. On the other hand, the opposition to officialdom that nourished alternative theatre in its heyday still exists, and is support­ing an even greater number of countercultural publications and artworks than in the late 1970s. Perhaps the movement can tap into that reservoir of resentment and transform itself once again into a lively cultural gadfly. One thing is certain: Polish alternative theatre must find new ways to exist and develop if it is not to stagnate fur­ther. I hope it will find those ways if we are not to lose one of the most exciting alternative theatre movements in Europe.

NOTES

1 Marek Miller, "Trzecia Fa/a Czyli Estetyka Ciszy," Radar 37.17 {1986), 6.

21nterview with Tadeusz Nyczek, July 6, 1986. 3"fimothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution Solidarity {1983;

repr. London: Coronet, 1985), 18. 4Agnieszka Wbjcik, "Alternative Theatre," Index on Censor­

ship, Jan. 1985, 11 . ·5Jan Brytowski, ·o Mfodym Teatrze z Niezbyt Daleka,"

Pow"Sci~aliwos6 i Praca, Feb.-Mar., 1985, 15. 6Miller. 71nterview with Lech Raczak, May 5, 1985. Another portion

of this interview appears in The Drama Review, 30.3, (Fall, 1986), 81-90.

8Natasza Zi6H<owska, "Teatru studenckiego nie ma, nie ma, nie ma . . .. , " Radar 38.13 (1987), 4-5.

91nterview with Janusz Oprynski, June 25, 1987.

37

GLASNOST IN FILM

Leo Hecht

Soviet filmmakers, who were playing a "wait and see" game during the first months of Gorbachev's reign, have committed them­selves, with varying degrees of wholeheartedness, to the new era of artistic freedom which they call the "Spring of 1986." This was the time of the Fifth Congress of the Union of Cinematographers which was held in Moscow in May 1986. At that conference, the reaction­ary Soviet film czar, Lev Kulidzhanov, and the entire Secretariat of the organization were, amazingly, ousted by a strong vote of the union members. Film director Elem Klimov, a notorious non-conformist and staunch defender of artistic freedom, was elected First Secre­tary. Among his first acts were the creation of a review committee for films previously banned by the censors, and strong support for art­istically innovative and controversially outspoken films which were presently in various stages of production.

The three major Soviet films to be discussed in this article all fall within these categories. They are said to personify the new era of truth in art. Two have been shown in the Soviet Union to much criti­cal and emotional acclaim; the third has, at this time, been released only for foreign consumption. All three have very recently invaded a select number of American movie houses in major cities. These three examples differ considerably from each other in content and artistic style; they warrant individual treatment.

The first film, completed in 1987, is highly controversial, but is presently being shown throughout the Soviet Union and the West. Entitled Cold Summer of 1953 (Kholodnoe leto piatdesiat tretego) , it was directed by Aleksandr Proshkin and has a strong cast com­posed of both veterans of the Khrushchev era and new faces. The action takes place in a remote Siberian settlement in 1953 immediately after the death of Stalin. The small village houses a number of families and individuals who are very effectively character­ized. One is a well-to-do shopkeeper (Viktor Stepanov) who is only out for his own economic welfare; another is a widow (Nina Usatova). She lives with her buxom adolescent daughter (Zoia Buriak), who is the apple of her eye, her only reason for existence, and for whom she has the most grandiose plans. There is also the local policeman, a man of honor and compassion; and the keeper of the pier (the settlement is on a navigable lake/river system), a typical

38

petty bureaucrat who acts only in accordance with specific para­graphs in written regulations. The most interesting denizens are two former labor camp inmates, one middle-aged (Valery Priemykhov, the star of the film), the other quite old (Anatoly Papanov), both of whom have been exiled to Siberia for the remainder of their term of servitude. It is made clear that both are totally innocent of any mis­deeds. They were victims of Stalin's irrationality and have been deprived of any hope for a decent future.

The news arrives that Valenti Beria, the Chairman of the NKVD, has taken charge of the nation and has declared an amnesty for all felons except political prisoners. There are rumors that gangs of freed robbers and murderers are roaming the countryside plunder­ing and killing. A gang of five "urki" under the leadership of a particu­larly vicious criminal (Yuri Kuznetsov) invades the settlement. He kills the policeman and several others and takes over control of the village, intending to use as a base for further killing and robbery of the shipping route. They are totally ruthless. The settlement appears doomed and totally unable to cope with the five armed men.

Ironically, it is the two exiles who are the only ones capable of action. They are able to eliminate four of the robbers and to wound the leader. The older exile is killed in the attempt. The wounded criminal commits the one overwhelming atrocity in the film: he kills the adolescent girl before he himself is killed by the younger exile. The scene of the mother finding the body of her daughter is truly heartbreaking and ends on a highly pessimistic note. Any hope for a better future for the village has died with this girl. Similarly, the entire film ends on a feeling of hopelessness. The exile is back in Moscow, walking the drab streets, with no real prospect for rehabili­tation. He visits the wife and son of his co-exile who are apparently members of the upper-middle class. The air is heavy when he brings them the news of his friend's death. They have not seen or heard from him in ten years. It seems as if he had not left any traces. The son even expresses his uncertainty whether his father was actually guilty of the crimes with which he had been charged.

In all respects, this is an outstanding film. Technically, it is on a very high level. The photography is excellent, as is the cast. At first glance, the script seems to be just another instance of NStalin­bashing" and a reiteration of sins of the past. But it is not only that. The film does not contain a single iota of optimism for the future. This is its artistic strength. It is not simply a propaganda film to sup­port the present changes, but an intensely human, moral film which stresses individual values and ethics.

The second film to be discussed is the most controversial of the three, namely Commissar. Completed in 1967, it was directed by Aleksandr Askoldov, a man virtually unknown in film circles. Askoldov also wrote the screenplay based on the short story, "In The

39

Town of Berdichev, • by Vasily Grossman. It has a rather Ulustrious cast: the title role is filled by Nanna Mordiukova; the role of her com­mander, by the late Vasily Shukshin. However, the film is stolen by Rolan Bykov, a superb actor and director (e.g. Scarecrow), who portrays Efim Magazanik as the personification of the East European Jew. His mannerisms and language are reminiscent of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof ..

The film opens with the condemnation to death of a deserter by the political commissar of a Red Army unit during the Civil War. The total commitment to the cause by Klavdia, the commissar of the title, is made clear at the outset. Klavdia is in her last month of pregnancy--a fact she has been successfully hiding from ·everyone due to her immense endowment of body fat. She now confesses her state to her commander who arranges temporary lodging for her with the Magazaniks, the nearly destitute family of a Jewish tinsmith, his beautiful wife and six children. The close family life the com­missar encounters is something strange to her and deeply affects her, although her character is rather poorly developed in the film. She gives birth and is then forced to decide between caring for her newborn or abandoning it in order to continue fighting for the victory of communism. I shall not keep the reader in suspense about her choice. She runs, at full speed, to catch up to her unit, to the over­whelmingly blaring strains of the "lnternationale." The last shot of the film is a cameo on a hilltop where she and her troops are posing in a ludicrously heroic manner to martial music.

With all its faults, the film cannot be completely ridiculed. The story is extremely weak, but there are a number of positive ele­ments. At times, the film is quite poignant, particularly in two scenes. In one, the Magazanik boys engage in a mock pogrom during which they tie their frightened sister to a swing and call her "dirty yid" while she is swinging back and forth in slow motion--the personification of the eternal victim. In another sequence, while the Magazanik family is happily dancing, Klavdia anachronistically sees them in her mind's eye wearing yellow stars of David and slow1y moving towards their extermination by the Nazis.

The most effective attribute of the film, which was produced at the Gorky Studios in Moscow, is its camera work that is strongly reminiscent of Eisenstein. It is in black and white using chiaroscura technique. It frequently uses a static camera with the action moving towards It and away from it, sometimes with extremely exaggerated closeups. Some of the scenes are beautifully caught. The film is not a complete loss, but it has more faults than blessings.

The West has received the film with open arms as one more proof that "glasnost'' really works. For some reason, it has been touted in American reviews as a film directed against Russian anti­Semitism. This is an extremely difficult interpretation to support. Of

40

course, it peripherally does concern itself with anti-Semitism. However, the perpetrators are either the Czarist adherents, with their pogroms, or the Nazis in the 1940s, never the Soviets. In fact, the relationship between Klavdia and the Magazaniks is quite good; con­sidering their divergent backgrounds. Some critics have pointed out that the Magazaniks refer to her as "the Russian," to differentiate her from the Jews. It should be remembered that the film is set in the Ukraine and that it was not at all unusual for a Ukrainian to have referred to a Russian as a Russian. Why, then, was the film shelved in 1967, right after it was made, for "Promoting Zionism and Imperialist Chauvinism?" The answer is relatively simple: the film was completed just a few days before the Six Day War during which Israel occupied all of the Sinai Peninsula. This act brought about an even more supportive relationship with certain Arab countries and a general propaganda outcry against Israel which indirectly affected Soviet Jewry in general. Askoldov was unfortunate in his timing.

A special congressional showing of both Commissar and Cold Summer of 1953 was held in the Library of Congress on July 27 and 28, 1988. Simultaneous with the US screenings, members of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR viewed E. T. and Coming Home in Mos­cow. The first American public screening of the two films took place on July 29, followed by two open discussions with the participation of director Aleksandr Askoldov and his star Nanna Mordiukova, and Ale~sandr Proshin and his star Valery Priemykhov. The US Congress-Supreme Soviet exchange was sponsored by the American-Soviet Film Initiative, a non-profit, educational corporation, and its Soviet counterpart, Amerikano-Sovietskaia Kinoinitsiativa.

The final film to be discussed, probably the least con­troversial, is Dead Man's Letters (Pisma mertvogo cheloveka), com­pleted by Lenfilm in 1986, at the very beginning of the "glasnost" era when one of the basic propaganda initiatives was the attempt to paint the Soviet Union as a peace-loving nation that dreads the pos­sibility of nuclear war from a human, non-political perspective. It is quite similar in intent to the American television production of The Day After. The director of the film, Konstantin Lopushansky, also par­ticipated in writing the script with the foremost Soviet science fiction authors Viacheslav Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. Lopushansky came to film rather late, in 1980, at the age of 33. Previously, he had been a concert violinist and had completed his doctorate in music. His first film attempt was a short subject, Solo, 1980, which won several foreign prizes. Dead Man's Letters Is his first full-length fea­ture film.

In the words of the Soviet press release, "this science fiction film is dedicated to the main task of our times--the prevention of nuclear war." The action takes place in an unnamed, highly industri­alized and computerized country. As the film opens, a nuclear

41

catastrophe, caused by a computer error, is in the process of finish­ing its complete destruction of the world. The existence of all the main characters is described as "living after their lives are already over.• The film's central idea, that nuclear war with its monstrous consequences cannot be allowed to happen, is revealed through the story of its main character, a scientist (Rolan Bykov). In the letters he writes to his son, who has already perished, the scientist reveals his inner convictions. He cannot accept the possibility of total destruc­tion of the planet, and he preserves his belief that human intellect and goodness must prevail in the end. As he dies, he passes on his testament to a group of young orphans. The message of the film is clear. The only way a nuclear holocaust can be prevented is through bilateral nuclear disarmament. Otherwise, even if there is no war, the world is in danger of total destruction by accident.

The camera work is in the able hands of Nikolai Pokoptsev; Elena Amshinskaia and Viktor Ivanov are responsible for the art direction. Many of the scenes are beautifully shot, for example, the nuclear explosions, the closeups of dirty, suffering mankind, the last refugees in cellars, and the line of small children on a desolate landscape wearing protective clothing and gasmasks. Yet, although the film is interesting and was positively accepted by the Soviet audience, it seldom rises above banality (except for Bykov's acting ability). It is frequently too slowly paced, bordering on the boring. All scenes have a brownish hue, ostensibly to indicate nuclear fallout, which becomes disconcerting. The propaganda message Is too blatant. The film was shown only at a very few theatres In the United States, and was not at all well attended.

In general, we can recapitulate the definition of the glasnost film today. Actually there are three main categories:

a. Older films that had been shelved for years before glas­nost and are now being released. Although some are excellent, many are of uneven quality and should not be blindly accepted just because they were not previously available to us.

b. The big productions which are strongly supported by the government as propaganda vehicles for glasnost and perestroika. They, also, are of uneven quality and were created principally for political purposes.

c. Those films, which the more courageous directors are producing under the guise of glasnost, that dig more deeply Into the human condition and psyche, and are above the banality of propagandistic didacticism.

In other words, not much has changed substantively in the history of Soviet film-making, although the volume of interesting material is considerably greater.

42

A PROVIDENTIAL CHEKHOV: A REVIEW

Jeannie M. Woods

The twenty-fifth season of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island opened in September 1988 with a produc­tion of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The classic play held special resonance for the artistic director Adrian Hall, his permanent acting ensemble and the Providence audience. Since 1983 Hall had divided his energies between Trinity Rep and the Dallas Theatre Cen­ter in Dallas, Texas where he also held the position of artistic director. However, after guiding the development of the Rhode Island ensem­ble for a quarter of a century, Hall decided to depart from Trinity at the close of the 1988-89 season, Thus, Chekhov's bittersweet tribute to the passing away of the old order brought together a family of art­ists who found themselves on the threshold of a new life. And Hall's production resounded with the personal and professional implica­tions of impending change.

Hall has successfully developed Trinity Rep from a small, 300-seat theatre in a church meeting hall to a $3.5 million institution that has garnered national acclaim and even the 1981 Tony (Antoinette Perry) Award for Best Repertory Theatre in America. But Hall's real achievement has been the cultivation of a peerless American acting ensemble which he has managed to keep together against all odds. And it is this ensemble which was the heart and soul of Hall's Cherry Orchard.

Hall's staging of the play was designed to focus on the players. His setting, designed by his frequent collaborator Eugene Lee, was spare and to the point. Persian rugs blanketed the dirt­covered floor of the three-quarter thrust stage area. A couple of chairs, a table and bookcase set the scene for the nursery. An expansive two-story shuttered wall formed a backdrop which could be transformed by opening up the three double-door entrances to reveal lace-covered glass doors and windows. All scenes were set by alteration of a few set-pieces. Even Hall's lighting was neutral, serving to clearly illuminate the players, but not to impose an atmos­phere. The sense of time, place and mood were created by the actors and their text.

Hall's setting for The Cherry Orchard bore more than a pass­ing resemblance to the setting used by Peter Brook in his production of the same play (which was staged at Brook's Paris theatre, Les

43

Bouffes du Cord, In 1981 and in the New York area in early 1988 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) This similarity will come as no sur­prise to anyone familiar with the careers of these two directors. Peter Brook and Adrian Hall belong to the same generation of stage direc­tors and they both were influenced by the theory and practice of Bertoli Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. Brook and Hall have both developed their styles of direction through experiments into the essential nature of the theatre, disregarding the decorative or pic­torial approach to staging. Moreover, both of these stage directors have worked with designer Eugene Lee, who shares their minimalist aesthetic. So the similarity of their stagings of Chekhov's play is not the result of Brook's influence on Hall or Hall's influence on Brook, but is derived from a shared perception of the nature of the theatre event.

The sixteen actors and musicians in Hall's production included many of Hall's key players. At the center of Chekhov's story is Madame Ranyevskaya-here portrayed by Barbara Orson, who has been with Trinity Rep since its inception in 1963. Orson is in her · prime as an actress and was a perfect choice for the contradictory Lyuba, who loves too well and none too wisely. At her side was Richard Kneeland, also a charter TRC member, as the brother, Gayev. Daniel Von Bargen, now in his fourteenth season, played the peasant-entrepreneur, Lopakhin. These artists all turned in bravura performances, but they in no way eclipsed the smaller roles.

It is a credit to Hall and to his family of actors that each indi­vidual character in the play came across fully-realized and particu­larized. Ed Hall played Simeonov-Pischik, the out-of-pocket neigh­boring landowner, with such verve and Imagination, one felt he really was an old, old friend. He was complimented by Barbara Meek, who, as the governess Charlotta, brought a sensuality to the role that enhanced the mystery and ambiguity of the character. Cynthia Strickland's coarse, sullen Dunyasha was wonderfully matched with Richard Ferrone's brutish Yasha and William Damkoehler's hand­some, hapless Yepikhodov. Anne Scurria played an off-beat Varya-­a whining prude with delusions of religious glory. In her refusal to romanticize Varya, Scurria risked losing our sympathy, but in the final departure scene she evoked deep pathos.

Hall's production was very much like a chamber music con­cert. Each character struck his own rhythm and tone. The text was illuminated and, as one Providence critic noted, Chekhov was allowed to be Chekhov. In the scene transitions Hall purposefully introduced a completely different rhythm to carry us into the next beat: on the cue of a shrill whistle, the set was changed by a brigade of servant factors who waltzed in new set-pieces for the next scene.

In this production Hall also imposed what is now considered the "Trinity style" of performance. Intimate scenes were not played

44

tete-a-tete, with the spectator as voyeur. Instead, Hall's actors played to the house, not really making eye contact, but opening up their intimate moments to share them with us. After decades of ensemble playing, this presentational style is subtle and true. The spectator is made to feel he is sharing in the telling of the story.

The •Trinity style• was especially affective in the ballroom scene, when Lyuba must accept that the cherry orchard and estate are lost. Hall placed her almost centerstage as Lopakhin gyrated about the room in drunken celebration. Orson, her hand clasped over her mouth as if to stifle her grief, silently sobbed, gasping for air and relief. The scene was brightly lit and the ball continued behind the glass doors upstage but the focus was riveted on Lyuba's tear­stained face. In that moment, the actress evoked great sympathy and pity. This scene provides the pivot point for American theatre members because we tend to sympathize with Lopakhin's practical solutions rather than Lyuba's inability to act. But Orson's Lyuba managed, through her combination of charm, shrewd self­awareness, and frivolous abandon, to capture our sympathy and understanding, It was a magical theatrical moment and Hall staged it for full effect--giving Orson a "tight close-up"--that moved us deeply.

Hall made no attempt to Americanize Chekhov, but he took no pains to make the production specifically "Russian" in style or mood, either. Instead, he utilized the strength of his acting ensemble to present very human characters, whose foibles and shortcomings were universal. His minimalist staging suffered only in its inability to capture the progression of seasons of Chekhov's play, which moves from early spring to fall. Yet the production worked because it strongly focused on the subtle interactions between each of Chek­hov's imperfect people.

Hall achieved a cheerful warmth in this production, in spite of the melancholy that lay beneath the surface. The humor stemmed from accepting these characters as they are--knowing that Lyuba will go on throwing money away and Gayev will continue making speeches to bookcases and that's just the way life is. Even in the greatest moments of loss, as the axes began to fell the trees, there was a spirit of hope and new horizons--a job at the bank, the trip to Paris. The spirit emanated from Chekhov's play and from the atmos­phere at Trinity Rep. So, while real tears are being shed as Adrian Hall makes his exit from Providence, Hall's Cherry Orchard focused on the shared joys--past and present--of the family. One dares to hope that the future will be as bright as the past for all the families and friends involved.

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Platonov, by Anton Chekhov. Adapted and directed by Liviu Ciulei. English version by Mark Leib, from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik. Set design by Liviu Ciulei. Costumes by Smaranda Branescu. Lighting by Richard Riddell. Sound by Stephen D. Santomenna. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre, Loeb Theatre, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dec. 16, 1988-Jan. 22, 1989.

Hallie Anne White

It is easy to see how Anton Chekhov's unfinished, untitled and unwieldy first play, here performed under the title Platonov, would present an almost irresistible temptation to a director. The text as it has come down to us appears to be nearly unstageable, espe­cially in the first half. Characters come and go at a dizzying pace, often pausing only for a short speech or exchange; the various intrigues and subplots are extremely complex; the sheer number of characters is daunting.

Unfortunately, many of the qualities which make Platonov so challenging also render it an inferior work of dramatic literature, especially when considered alongside Chekhov's later works. First, it is simply too long. Liviu Ciulei's adaptation eliminates two characters (Abram Abramovich Vengerovich and his son, Isaak Abramovich) and some dialogue, but it follows Chekhov's original text remarkably closely, and the production, even at its fast pace, runs nearly three hours. Second, there are too many characters and too much action. There is enough plot material here for two or three plays; midway through the first act one begins to wish for a scorecard, or at least for a flashlight to follow the program.

In the first half of this production, Ciulei is able to turn this lack of focus to his advantage. The party at the Voynitsev estate, wherein we are introduced to the characters--the inhabitants of what Platonov refers to as "our contemporary zoological museum"--and their various schemes and intrigues, is staged largely as a single dramatic unit. Rather than orchestrate the action by entrances and exits, Ciulei has nearly the entire cast on stage for most of the act, focusing attention by means of moving set pieces and lighting. In addition to the tremendous activity which results, this staging creates an enormous amount of background noise. In fact, if statistics were kept on such things, I would venture to say that this must be the noisiest Chekhov production on record. The effect is stunning; the sense of furious activity generated by stultifying boredom is over­whelming, much more effective, in fact, than the characters constant complaining about how bored they are.

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The second half is considerably quieter and more sparsely populated than the first. Here we see Platonov's decline and fall, his futile and destructive affairs with the wife of his friend Voynitsev and with Voynitsev's widowed stepmother. However, it is here that the textual weakness of Platonov, its reliance on melodramatic effects, also becomes evident. Also evident throughout, and especially In the second half, is the cruelty of the play. Much of the dialogue is very funny, and the actors play it for laughs, but the laughter is not healing or affirmative. Here, we laugh as characters ruin one another's lives simply because they have nothing better to do.

The size of the dramatis personae in P/atonov makes it diffi­cult for director as well as audience to focus on the central character, and it makes it nearly impossible to develop secondary characters in any depth. This is ensemble acting in the fullest sense, and the ART actors rise to the challenge. John Christopher Jones as Platonov avoids the stereotypes of the •oon Juan in the Russian manner." At least in the first act, he shows a self-awareness and self-irony that make him quite sympathetic; however, he does not generate, at least for this reviewer, the magnetism that would allow us to believe that he could be so fatally irresistible to the provincial ladies. As Voynit­sev, Thomas Derrah provides an excellent foil for Jones. His child­like helplessness is at first charming and later pathetic. Both Jones and Derrah interact well with Sandra Shipley as Anna Petrovna, she is extremely convincing in the difficult role of the woman who is appreciably older than most of her suitors, yet still young enough to be attractive to all of them.

The supporting actors must fashion individualized characters out of fleeting and often fragmented bits of dialogue and action, and for the most part they accomplish this task without falling into exaggeration or caricature. The acting is free of the politeness with which Chekhov is so often approached; it is vigorous. natural and funny. Outstanding performances are given by Jerome Kilty, Jeremy Geidt and Alvin Epstein as the representatives of the older gener­ation, and by Bari Hochwald as Platonov's simple-minded but good­hearted wife Sasha; only David Asher is wooden as Osip the thief. In generat, the ensemble work is seamless. The actors function as a unit; one wishes each one had more time as the focus of the action.

The set, designed by Ciulei (who was trained as an architect), is an essential element in the success of the first act. Its sliding platforms and walls allow Ciulei to focus attention on one or another group of characters without the constant entering and exit­ing that a more conventional staging might necessitate. In fact, the set often seems more animate--certainly more graceful--than most of the characters. Its faded yellows and browns (which also dominated last season's production of Uncle Vanya--ART seems to have decided that these are Chekhov's colors, and not without good

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reason) create the proper atmosphere of decaying elegance, and the requisite birch trees are effective but unobtrusive. The costumes, by Smaranda Branescu, are the perfect complement to Ciulei's set. Branescu has created suits and dresses that look like clothes for the characters, not like costumes for the actors. There is no sense of "period dress," no stiffness or self-conscious prettiness, in Branescu's costumes.

As always with ART, the production is outstanding in its attention to detail. For example, when the actors make the sign of the cross, they do it in Orthodox fashion, from right to left. More important, Voice and Speech Coach Bonnie Raphael is to be com­mended for her Oargely successful) efforts in achieving consistent and plausible pronunciation of character names. The vast majority of the audience will never know the difference, but the few Russian­speaking members are spared the needless annoyance of hearing "Mikhail" mispronounced for three hours.

This production, along with the New Stages production of Uncle Vanya last season, offers convincing evidence that ART is capable of presenting well-conceived, well-acted, and unsentimental­ized versions of Chekhov's plays. In the case of Platonov, however, one rather regrets seeing so much talent being used on an obviously inferior text. Considering the shortage of well-staged, well-acted Chekhov in the American theatre, one would hope that ART will set its sights again on Chekhov in the near future.

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REVIEW: Temptation by Vaclav Havel

Richard Brad Medoff

Temptation by Vaclav Havel, presented as a joint venture by The Wilma Theatre and The New York Shakespeare Festival, is an untelling of the Faust myth. The lead character, Dr. Henry Foustka searches for a return to the natural, spiritual, spontaneous side of life. His search leads him to an investigation of superstitions and black magic.

The play begins in a scientific Institute which is populated by cartoon characters, including a Deputy Director who keeps his secre­tary /wife/mistress with him at all times in order to "yes" him (all the women in the play are reflections of the needs of the men). The laboratory becomes the place where science attempts to eliminate superstition through truth. The first temptation in the play comes in the guise of the Director who, in exchange for a homosexual affair, offers Dr. Foustka advancement. Foustka plays along with the flirta­tion.

The second scene takes place in Foustka's apartment where everything has a double existence. A carpet when reversed has a mystical chart on it; a table opens to reveal objects for devil worship. The second temptation occurs when a street person, Fistula, appears. His feet are wrapped and it is implied that the rags cover cloven hooves. Fistula offers to get the virginal office gopher, Marketa, into Dr. Foustka's bed through the use of black magic.

It is after this scene that the play changes. Though the protagonist and his main antagonist resemble Dr. Faustus and Mephistopheles, the plot is not so much involved with the Faust myth or even·temptation (which the title would indicate) but with recanta­tion. The third scene and all those that follow show the character of Dr. Foustka twist and turn. We, as audience, come to distrust our sense of what for Foustka is real and what is feigned. There is con­stant confusion between reality and illusion, truth and lies. Dr. Foustka makes his first recantation in his excuse for studying black magic. Once he is found out at work, he recants his experimenta­tion with the excuse that he. is acting as an investigator to try to learn who is involved in the illegal practice and study of black magic.

The next scene takes place in his mistress's apartment. Their sex play deals with acting out a scene of jealousy, rage, pas-

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sion, and violence only to recant the reality of it and then recant the playing of it. His mistress is a key to the lies. In the first scene at the Institute, Dr. Foustka seems to lie to the Deputy Director to cover her continual lateness--she continues the lie when she enters, leaving the audience unsure of its truth as a lie.

The plot eventually leads to a trial where Dr. Foustka is asked one more time to recant his experiments and his relationship with Fistula and he does; however, truth Is what is on trial in this play. Scientists are in search of truth, and yet in the labyrinth of lies and deception truth disappears. It is nonexistent even in the laboratory, the home of man's rational side, his science. Man's humanity is illustrated through the invention and creation of lies and the display of violence. In this production, during the trial, Foustka is lighted from below lending a devilish appearance to his features. He becomes a visible manifestation of the devil within man. As he testifies and tries to shift the blame outside himself, the audience sees that he is a reflection of what he is recanting.

As the play progresses Foustka appears to begin to feel the passions and violence. Becoming more participant and less observer /scientist, he loses control over his emotions when dealing with his mistress and facing the fact that her other lover may be a reality. Through the devil and the use of black magic he becomes more human and this is dramatized through scenes illustrating the awakening of the dark side of his personality.

The last scene of the play is a Witch's Sabbath in which the other scientists are the celebrants and Dr. Foustka the sacrifice. The costumes comment on the theme of creation with some of the scientists dressed as forms of sea life and a woman scientist dressed as a giant penis. The concept of temptation is visually realized with the reappearance of a mute pair of naked lovers in the guise of Adam and Eve with Fistula as the serpent between them. Fistula recants his role as Devil by exposing the fact that he was the person hired as the investigator of the black magic cult. Marketa has gone mad from her grief at being deceived by Foustka; and in her quoting Ophelia's lines she casts Foustka in the role of Hamlet, another deceiver or player of roles.

This production was directed by Jiri Ziska, the Artistic Direc­tor of The Wilma Theatre of Philadelphia. The Wilma is best known for its multi-media productions such as 1984. This production is no exception. The Laboratory is set with all the details of naturalism including live rabbits and a clock with actual time. On one of the machines hangs a sign 'Time Time Time Is Is Was Past• which is very reminiscent of 1984. Projections between ·scenes trace the develop­ment of life from multi-colored sperm, to embryo, to signs of the development of science and then back to primitive symbols. The music, by Adam Wernick, starts as new age music and eventually

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deconstructs to primitive drums. This production is so over­whelmingly visual It tends to upstage the play. The play itself seems too verbally complex for the actors though a valiant attempt is made by David Schechter as Dr. Foustka. The role of Fistula went through three actors before opening, not because of the usual artistic dif­ferences but because of the actors leaving for more lucrative acting jobs. It is possible that the play might have been better served by a simpler production.

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Double Takes by Miklos Vamos: A Review

ZSuzusa Berger

Miklos Vamos belongs to the middle generation of Hungarian writers and is equally recognized for his numerous novels, award winning television and film scripts, theatre and radio plays, as for his witty essays that appear in the literary weekly in Hungary. Two of his one-act plays for the theatre had their world premiere engagement in New York at the Actors' Outlet Theatre from March 31 through April 22 under the uniting title Double Takes. The theatre's artistic director, Ken Lowstetter directed Somebody Else, while Pamela Karen Billig directed the second one-act, Mixed Doubles.

The two one-acts have a structure in common. Both of them consist of four "etude-like" scenes separated by music and black­outs. Both plays have one main and two subsidiary characters. The plays involve the invasion of one character's "living space" by another character with the first three scenes showing different phases of their developing relationship and a final scene in which a third character is introduced with whom the main character must come to terms.

The characters in Somebody Else are trapped like animals in a cage. Vamos dramatizes their desperate attempts to escape mid­life crises by exchanging partners. L.ala, the main character is both the victim and the instigator of the situation. He moves in with his best friend's wife, Olga. In the last scene there appears a third character, a nameless "Girl," who represents the bizarre and uncon­trollable dehumanization caused by never-ending changes.

Ken Lowstetter, the director, built up comic tension by care­fully orchestrating the characters's speech patterns and by emphasizing the ambivalence of Olga's feelings towards the ever frustrated Lala. The scenery was functional, consisting of a non­descript living room. The gradual moving of the sofa indicated the passing of time.

While Somebody Else is conversational in nature, Mixed Doubles allows for more comic possibilities deriving from physical action. This is mainly due to the fact that the characters are animals. Vamos creates a delicate balance between the animalistic and human behavioral patterns of the cnaracters, which Pamela Karen Billig utilized with great skill in her delicate and playful staging of this comedy.

· Kornis, the Rhinoceros, was played by David H. Sterry, who held the play together with his energetic and well-paced acting. His physical interactions with Kid, the Goat, did not merely serve comic

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possibilities. The back scratching, beard fondling, bathing, juggling, and dancing were all parts of Kornis's transformation from a miserable, frustrated, and unhappy rhinoceros into a happy, well­balanced being, who eventually sets out to change the ever pes­simistic turtle, Babe. The wood frame of the living room for Some­body Else served as the bars of the cage, while objects such as a swimming pool and an animal perch were placed on the otherwise bare stage.

In spite of the differences between American and Hungarian cultures, the production managed to present aspects of life that are accessible to all audiences.

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CONTRIBUTORS

ZSUZUSA BERGER, originally from Hungary, is a graduate student at CUNY Graduate Center finishing her course work In the Ph.D. program in Theatre.

MARVIN CARLSON is a Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and author of many books and articles.

KATHLEEN CIOFFI is a doctoral candidate in the Educational Theatre Program at New York University and an adjunct instructor in the Communication Department at Central University in Ellensburg, Washington. From 1984-87 she directed the English language stu­dent theatre at Gdansk University In Poland. She has contributed to The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and various anthologies.

LEO HECHT is on the Advisory Board of SEEP and is a Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at George Mason University.

MARJORIE HOOVER is the author of such books as Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theatre and Alexander Ostrovsky.

RICHARD BRAD MEDOFF, assistant editor of SEEP, is an adjunct lecturer at City College in the Speech Department and is writing his dissertation on The Dramatization of Paintings.

HALLIE ANNE WHITE is a graduate student In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

JEANNIE WOODS having completed her dissertation entitled The Theatre of Adrian Hall has recently received her Ph.D. in Theatre and In August, 1989, Dr. Woods will join the faculty of Winthrop College in Rock Hill, SC, as Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance.

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PlAYSCRIPTS IN TRANSlATION SERIES

The following is a list of publications available through the Center for Advanced Study in Theatre Arts (CASTA):

No.1 Never Part From Your Loved Ones, by Alexander Volodin. Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

No.2 /,Mikhail Sergeevich Lunin, by Edvard Radzinsky. Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) ·

No.3 An Altar to Himself, by lreneusz lredynski. Translated by Michat Kobiatka. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

No.4 Conversation with the Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarskl. Stage adaptation by Zygmunt Hubner; English version by Ear1 Ostroff and Daniel Gerould. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

No.5 The Outsider, by lgnatii Dvoretsky. Translated by C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign) ·

No.6 The Ambassador, by Stawomir Mrozek. Translated by Stawomir Mrozek and Ralph Manheim. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

No.7 Four by Liudmila Petrushevskaya (Love, Come into the Kitchen, Nets and Traps, and The Violin). Translated by Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

No.8 The Trap, by Tadeusz R6iewicz. Translated by Adam Czerniawski. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

Soviet Plays in Translation. An Annotated Bibliography. Compiled and Edited by Alma H. Law and C. Peter Goslett. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

Polish Plays in Translation. An annotated Bibliography. Compiled and Edited by Daniel C. Gerould, Boleslaw Taborski, Michal Kobiafka, and Steven Hart. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

Polish and Soviet Theatre Posters. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

Polish and Soviet Theatr?J Posters Volume Two. Introduction and Catalog by Daniel C. Gerould and Alma H. Law. $5.00 ($6.00 foreign)

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Eastern European Drama and The American Stage. A Symposium with Janusz Gtowacki, Vasily Aksyonov, and moderated by Daniel C. Gerould (April30, 1984). $3.00 ($4.00 foreign)

These publications can be ordered by sending a U.S. dollar check or money order payable to CASTA to:

CASTA--THEATRE PROGRAM GRADUATE CENTER OF CUNY 33 WEST 42nd STREET NEWYORK, N.Y.10036

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SUBSCRIPTION POLICY

SEEP is partially supported by CASTA and The Institute for Contemporary Eastern European Drama and Theatre at The Gradu­ate Center of the City University of New York. The $5.00 annual sub­scription pays for a portion of handling, mailing and printing costs.

The subscription year is the calendar year and thus a $5.00 fee is now due for 1989. We hope that departments of theatre and film and departments of Slavic languages and literatures will sub­scribe as well as individual professors and scholars. The $5.00 check should be made payable to "CASTA, CUNY Graduate Center" and sent to:

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