SEEP-Vol. 30 No.3 Fall 2010

SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary
East European Drama and Theatre under the auspices of the Martin E.
Segal Theatre Center. The Institute is at The City University of New York
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309. AJJ
subscription requests and submissions should be addressed to Slavic and East
European Performance: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The City University of
New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309.
EDITOR
Daniel Gerould
MANAGING EDITOR
Shari Perkins
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Maria Mytilinaki
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Barrie Gelles
ADVISORY BOARD
Edwin Wilson, Chair
Marvin Carlson Allen J. Kuharski Martha W Coigney
Stuart Liebman Leo Hecht Laurence Senelick Dasha K.rijanskaia
SEEP has a liberal reprinting policy. Publications that desire tO reproduce
materials that have appeared in SEEP may do so with the following provisions:
a.) permission to reprint the article must be requested from SEEP in writing
before the fact; b.) creclit 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 SEEP immecliately upon publication.
:i\1ARTlN E . SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
EXECUTIVE D IRECT OR
Frank Hentschker
DIRECTOR OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS AND PUBLICATIONS
Daniel Gerould
D IRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATION
Jan Stenzel
Slavic and East European Performance is supported by a generous grant from the
Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre of the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at The City
University of New York.
Copyright 2010. Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Slavic and East European Performance Vol 30, No. 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial Policy
From the Editor
Events
Books Received
5
6
8
20
INMEMORIUM
"El:i:bieta Czy:i:ewska, 1938-201 0"
Daniel Gerould
23
"Zygmunt Molik, 1930-2010"

Paul Allain
29
ARTICLES
"New Russian Drama: The Familiarity of the Strange
Towson University, May 2010"
Kathleen Cioffi
35
"The Natasha Plays:

Yaroslava Pulinovich at Towson University"
Stephen Nunns
43
PAGES FROM THE PAST

"'Czuwanie' (fhe Vigil) and Vigilance in the Paratheatrical Work
of Jerzy Grotowski"
Dominika Laster
55
REVIEWS
"Left in Translation:
The US Premiere of Vaclav Havel's Leaving'
Cole M. Crittenden
67
"Yara Arts Group's Scythian Stones"

Donatella Galella
75
"The Concretes Abstracted: Vladimir Sorokin Translated and Staged

by Monday Theatre @ Green Hours"
Brad Krumholz
81
"Spotlight Croatia: New Voices in Croatian Drama"

Margaret Araneo
89
Contributors
94
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 30, No. 3
EDITORIAL POLICY
Manuscripts in the following categories are solicited: articles of no
more than 2,500 words, performance and film reviews, and bibliographies.
Please bear in mind that all submissions must concern themselves with
contemporary materials on Slavic and East European theatre, drama, and film;
with new approaches to o lder materials in recently published works; or with
new performances of older plays. In other words, we welcome submissions
reviewing innovative performances of Gogo!, but we cannot use original
articles discussing Gogo! as a playwright.
Although we welcome translations of articles and reviews from
foreign publications, we do requi re copyright release statements. We will also
gladly publish announcements of special events and anything else that may be
of interest to our discipline. All submissions are refereed.
All submissions must be typed d ouble-spaced and carefully proofread.
The Chicago Manual of Style sho uld be followed. Transliterations should follow
the Library of Congress system. Articles should be submitted on computer
disk, as Word D ocuments for Windows and a hard copy of the article should
be included. Photographs are recommended for all reviews. All articles should
be sent to the attention of Slavic and East European Performance, c/o Martin E.
Segal T heatre Center, The City University of New York Graduate Center, 365
Fifth Avenue, 1 ew York, NY 10016-4309. Submissions will be evaluated, and
authors will be no tified after approximately four weeks.
You may obtain more information about Slavic and E ast European
Performance by visiting our website at http//web.gc.cuny.edu/metsc. E-mail
inquiries may be addressed to SEEP@gc.cuny.edu.
All Journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as

abstracts online via ProQuest information service and the
International Index to the Performing Arts.
All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are
members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
FROM THE EDITOR

Volume 3, no. 3 of SEEP begins with the obituaries of two major
Polish figures in the performing arts, Elzbieta Czyzewska and Zygmunt Molik.
The focus of the fall issue then turns to the New Russian Drama Festival at
Towson University in Baltimore. Kathleen Cioffi presents an overview of
the festival in "New Russian Drama: The Familiarity of the Strange," while
Stephen Nunns offers an insider's perspective on "The Natasha Plays." In
PAGES FROM THE PAST, Dominika Laster investigates vigil and vigilance in
Jerzy Grotowski's para theatrical work, continuing SEEP's ongoing exploration
of the Polish master's legacy.
The issue concludes with four reviews. Cole Crittenden is an
intellectually curious spectator of the American premiere of Havel's Leaving at
the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. Donatella Galella views with delightSrythian
Stones by the Yara Arts Group at La MaMa. Brad Krumholz probes the many
meanings of a Romanian staging of a postmodern text by the Russian Vladimir
Sorokin which was presented in the UndergroundZero Festival in Manhattan.
Margaret Araneo discusses the work of two leading female playwrights featured
in "Spotlight Croatia," an evening of readings and discussion at the Martin E.
Segal Theatre Center.
We have had a major reorganization at SEEP about which I wish
to inform our readers. Because of new regulations governing university
fellowships at the CUNY Graduate Center, last year's managing and assistant
editors-as current recipients of teaching assistantships-are now ineligible
to continue their editorial work. I should like to thank Christopher Silsby for
his outstanding service to SEEP as managing editor during 2009-2010 and
also express my gratitude to Srefanie Jones and Donatella Galella for their
dedicated work as assistant editors.
We are fortunate in having an excellent new editorial team, consisting
of Shari Perkins as managing editor and Maria Mytilinaki as assistant editor,
whom I wish to introduce to our readers.
After earning her M.F.A. in dramaturgy from American Repertory
Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in 2006, Shari spent over
a year in Moscow studying Russian language and literature and attending
rehearsals at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. She has worked as a
production assistant, assistant director, and dramaturg for shows both on and
Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 30, No. 3
off-Broadway and writes theatre reviews for several online publications. Shari
is a doctoral student in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center researching
adaptation, contemporary Russian drama, and the chernukha aesthetic.
Maria Mytilinaki studied theatre at Aristotle University of Thessalonik.i,
Greece, where she earned a B.A. and an M.A., and she pursued translation
studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she earned an M.A. She has
worked as a dramaturg for the National Theatre of Northern Greece and as a
freelance translator for the stage. Maria has translated drama from English and
French into Greek for theatres in Athens, including the Theseum E nsemble.
She is a Fulbright graduate scholar in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the
CUNY Graduate Center, as well as the recipient of an Enhanced Chancellor's
Fellowship.
EVENTS
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
New York City:
The Czech Center's European Book Club, in association with Untitled
Theater Company, presented excerpts from Vaclav Havel's most recent play,
Leaving, followed by a discussion at the Bohemian National Hall on September
30.
The Romanian Cultural Institute New York, the Austrian Cultural
Forum New York, and the Martin E . Segal Theatre Center presented an
evening with Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanovic at the Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center on October 12. Ana Marginean directed a staged reading of
SrbljanoviC's most recent play, LOCUSTS, followed by a discussion with the
playwright and a Q&A with the audience. The event was part of the city-wide
symposium, "FAQ SERBIA: Frequently Asked Questions About Serbia."
La MaMa, in association with The Polish Cultural Institute in New
York, presented Chopin-An Impression by the Bialystok Puppet Theatre as
part of "La MaMa Puppet Series IV-Built to Perform" from October 21 to
November 7. They presented Broken Nails: A Marlene Dietrich Dialogue by actress
and puppeteer Anna Skubik from November 11 to 21.
The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) presented The Memorandum
by Vaclav Havel, directed by Jenn Thompson, at the Beckett Theatre from
October 25 to November 27.
The Czech Center in New York presented the Czech and Slovak Fairy
Tales with Strings, marionette theatre for children, on October 30.
The Arlekin Players Theatre performed a composition of three
Chekhov shorts entitled Three jokes ry Anton Chekhov at the Shorefront YMYWHA of Brighton-Manhattan Beach on November 7.
Target Margin Theater presented The Yellow Sound by Wassily

Kandinsky at the Brick Theater from November 4 to 8.
The Russian American Cultural Center presented R Spotlight, a night
of Russian-American comedy with Vicky Kuperman, on November 21.
The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thom as Richards presented
a series of performances and workshops as part of its US Fall 2010 visit:
An opening dialogue with Andre Gregory, Thomas Richards, and
Mario Biagini at PS122 on October 24.
The premiere of I Am America, which was hosted by Andre Gregory
at Ramscale Penthouse on November 3. Further performances were
held at St. John's Lutheran Church and the Lava Studio, Brooklyn,
from November 4 to 19.
Electric Parry Songs at the Bowery Poetry Club on November 9, at

Nuyorican Poet's Cafe on November 16, and at St. John's Lutheran
Church on November 18.
Not History's Bones-A Poetry Concert at St. John's Lutheran Church on
November 20.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
US Regional:
The Romanian Cultural Institute New York and the Gold Mine Saloon
in New Orleans presented The 1001 Nights Story-telling Festival at the Gold Mine
Saloon and the University of New Orleans from September 22 to 24.
The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards presented
a series of events at Yale University (New Haven), including a workshop with
Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini on October 21 and a screening of Action
in -1Ja lrini with a discussion on October 22.
The Chekhov International Theatre Festival presented Declan

Donnellan's Russian productions of Chekhov's Three Sisters and Shakespeare's
Ttvelfth Night at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, on October 22 and 23.
STAGE PRODUCTIONS
International:
The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards performed
in the Scena Contemporanea Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Modena,
Italy; the Teatro Era Festival 2010 in Pontedera, Italy; and in Belgium. They
presented:
I Am America on October 11 (Vilnius) and 16 (Modena).

The Living Room by the Workcenter's Focused Research Team, October
8-10 (Modena), October 30- 31 and November 4-6 (Pontedera),
November 10-12 (Brussels), November 22- 25 (Liege), and December
2- 4 (Charleroi).
Electric Parry Songs by the Workcenter's Open Program on October 15
(Modena).
The Polish Institute UK presented the play TE. O.R.E.MA. T by
T.R. Warszawa at the Barbican Centre, London from October 14 to 17. They
presented Ivan and the Dogs, starring Polish actor Rad Kaim, at the Soho Theatre,
London, from October 12 to November 6.
FILM
New York City:
The Czech Center New York and the Austrian Cultural Forum New
York organized the Cinema Belgrade Film Series from October 13 to 17,
accompanying the exhibition "FAQ- Serbia" at the Austrian Cultural Forum
which remains on view until January 11, 2011. The ftlm screenings included:
10
Slavic and East European Performance VoL 30, No. 3
Of parents and children ( 0 rodi!ich a detech), directed by Vladimir :Michalek

(2007).
The documentary Eye over Prague (Oko nad Prahou), directed by Olga
Spatova (2010).
The documentary The umvelcome (Nevitam), directed by Tomas Sk.rdlant
(2009)
The documentary It's spring in Prague everyyear, it's the Prague spring every
year (Kazcij rokje v prazejaro, kaijj rokje prazskejaro), directed by Pavel
Koutecky (2005).
Romanian films shown at the Lincoln Center as part of the New York
Film Festival (September 24-0ctober 10) included:
Tuesdqy, rifler Christmas (Marfi, dupa Craciun), directed by Radu Muntean

(2010).
Aurora, directed by Cristi Puiu (2010).
TheAutobiograp~ of
Nicolae Ceaufescu, directed by Andrei Ujica (2010) .
The Third Annual Russian Documentary Film Festival presented

the world premiere of Jose.JJ Brodsk:y: Landscape 1vith a Flood, directed by Sergei
Kokovkin, at the Brooklyn Public Library, October 4.
The Russian American Cultural Center, in collaboration with the
Office of Cultural Affairs Consulate General of Israel in New York, presented
the First Israeli-Russian Film Festival at the Tribeca Film Center on October
31. Screenings were followed by a panel discussion and reception.
Feature films:
Yana's Friends (Ha'Chaverim She/ Yanna), by Arik Kaplun (2001).
11
Five Hours From Paris (Hamesh Shaot MiParis), by Leonid Prudovsky

(2009).
Short films:
Dark Night (Lay/a Aft~, by Leonid Prudovsky (2006).
Pinhas, by Pini Tavger (2008).
Weitzman #10, by Pini Tavger (2006).
Documentaries:
Diplomat, by Dana Goren (2009).
Thieves I!J Law (Ganavim ba Hok), by Alexander Gentelev (2010).
The Czech Center New York, BAl\kinematek, and Film Forum
presented the eleventh annual New Czech Films series, which included three
North American premieres, special events, and Q&As with directors Tomas
Masin and Jan Hrebejk. The series was presented at three venues: at the Czech
Center New York, November 4-7, at BAM Rose Cinemas on November 9,
and at Film Forum on November 27. Films screened included:
Tomorrow there will be ... (Zitra se bude), directed by Jan Hiebejk (2010).
Forgotten transports to Poland (Zapomenute transpor!J do Polska), directed by
Lukas Pribyl (2009).
Winners of 2009 FAMU Fest: Aida, directed by Viera Cakanyova
(2009), and Roma Bqys, directed by Rozalie Kohoutova (2009).
Dreamers (Zoufalct), directed by Jitka Rudolfova (2009).
Special events at other venues:
3 Seasons in hell (3 sezof!Y v pekfe) followed by Q&A with director Tomas
12
Masin, at BAMcinematek, BAM Rose Cinemas.
Kawasaki's Rose (Kawasakiho nlze) followed by Q&A with director Jan

Hrebejk, at Film Forum.
FILM
US Regional:
The Telluride International Film Festival (September 3-6) screened
the Romanian Film If I want to whistle, I whistle (Eu cand vreau sa jluier, jluier),
directed by Florin ~erban.
The 46th Chicago International Film Festival (October 8-21)
presented If I 1vant to whistle, I whistle and another Romanian film, Tuesdqy, after
Christmas, directed by Radu Muntean.
FILM
International:
The Toronto International Film Festival (September 9-19) screened
the Romanian Films The Autobiograpf?y of Nicolae Ceaurescu, directed by Andrei
Ujica, and Outbound, directed by Bogdan George Apetri.
The British Film Institute presented the London International Film
Festival October 13-28. Film screenings included:
Essential Ki//ing, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland-NorwayIreland-Hungary (2010).

The Magic Tree, directed by .Andrzej Maleszka, Poland (2009).
13
The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow presented the

Document 8 International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. Films
about Poland screened on Friday, October 29 included:
Left Behind, directed by Fabian Daub and Andreas Grafenstein,

Germany (2009).
Peking 2008, directed by Dagmara Drzazga, Poland (2009).
LECTURES AND BOOK PRESENTATIONS

New York City:
The Romanian Cultural Institute New York presented Literature in
a Closed and Open Socie!J-The Romanian Case, a conversation between Norman
Manea and Claudiu Turcu~ at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New
York, on September 1.
The Czech Center New York hosted the launch of the anthology The
Return of Kral Majales: Prague's International Literary Renaissance 1990-2010 by its
editor, Louis Armand, on September 23.
The Romanian Cultural Institute New York organized the book
presentation Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory with
authors Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer at the Gallery/Carruresti Book
Exhibition on October 6.
The Lkhachev Foundation, the Russian Cultural Center, and United
Airlines organized the seminar and poetry reading event Brodsjg's Places: The
Life and Poetry of Joseph Brodsjg at the Russian Cultural Center on October 12.
The Russian American Cultural Center presented the book The Jewish
Conundrum in World History by Alexander Militarev at Russian Bookstore No.
21 on October 22.
A literary festival was organized by the Cultural Services of the French
14
Slavic and East European Peifonnance VoL 30, No. 3
Embassy, the Goethe-Institut New York, the I stituto Italiano di Cultura, the
Institute Cervantes New York, The Czech Center New York, the Austrian
Cultural Forum, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Polish Cultural
Institute, in the framework of the European Union National Institutes of
Culture (EUNIC) in NYC, and in partnership with Words Without Borders, the
Center for Fiction, CUNY Graduate Center, and McNally-Jackson Bookstore.
Haunting the Present New Literaturefrom Europe, with Romanian novelist Gabriela
Adamestcanu, was presented November 16-18.
The Russian American Cultural Center will present Molotov's Magic
Lantern: Travels in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky on January 14.
LECTURES AND BOOK PRESENTATIONS

International:
The Polish Cultural Institute presented the book launch of lgnao
Pademvski: Poland by Anita Prazmowska, chaired by Professor Mary Fulbrook,
at Topolski Century, London on October 21 and organized a public lecture
by Prai:mowska, "The Polish Question at the End of First World War," at the
London School of Economics on October 28.
EXHIBITIONS
New York City:
The Czech Center New York launched the new public art project
Windows on Madison from September 15 to October 10.
The Czech Center New York and FUTURA organized the exhibition
Seeing New York from September 16 to Novcm ber 11.
The Czech Center New York and the Hudson Valley Center for
Contemporary Art organized After the Fa// at Hudson Valley Center for
Contemporary Art. A discussion with the artists took place on September 24.
The exhibition will be open from September 19, 2010 through July 2011.
15
The Russian American Cultural Center presented the photography

exhibition From the Annals of Our Past: Artist and his Time by Max Penson at the
Harriman Institute of Columbia University from October 21, 2010 through
January 2011.
The Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association organized 3 More
Apple Bites, which showcased the work of three contemporary Czech artists, at
the Bohemian National Hall, November 3-22.
EXHIBITIONS
US Regional:
The Mihai Eminescu Trust, in collaboration with the Embassy of
Romania to the US, the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and with the
support of the Ratiu Foundation, presented the exhibition Transylvania: Heritage
and Future in the Romanian Embassy in Washington, D C, October 14-31.
The Mingei International Museum in San Diego presents the
exhibition Between East and West-Folk Art Treasures of Romania, featuring Mingei
International Museum's Lucia Ionescu Kanchenian Collection, from August 1,
2010 through April 3, 201 1.
EXHIBITIONS
International:
The Liverpool Biennial presents Magdalena Abakanowicz's sculpture
exhibition Touched for the first time in the UK at Tate Liverpool from September 18 to November 28.
The Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park, London presented two galleries
from Warsaw, the Foksal Gallery Foundation (FGF) and Raster Gallery, from
October 14 to 17.
South London Gallery presents Michal Budny and his new exhibition,
16
Author, at South London Gallery from October 1 to November 28.

The Russian American Cultural Center organized the solo exhibition
Lazar Markovich Khidekel-The Rediscovered Suprematist in Europe, at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, from NoYember 10, 2010 through January 30,
201 1.
OTHER EVENTS
The Austrian American Forum, the Czech Center New York, the
Musical Information Center of Austria and the Argento New Music Project
organized the Moving Sounds Festival, an event focused on sound, space and
contemporary music, September 2-5. A site-specific project of young Czech
and Slovak artists and guests from New York City on the topic ''A Journey of
an Emigrant" was also organized by and presented at the Czech Center New
York on August 26.
The Ukrainian Museum presented Imagining Mazeppa: From the Sublime
to the Ridiculous, a multimedia event of performance, film clips, slide show,
readings, and music on September 24 and the lecture "Why Did Sophia Let
Her Hair Down? Representations of Divine Wisdom in the Age of Mazepa, "
by Natalia Pylypiuk at the UniYersity of Alberta-Edmonton on September 26.
They were offered in conjunction with the exhibition Ukraine-Sweden: At the
Crossroads of History (XVII-XVIII Centuries), which was open until October 31.
The Czech Center New York organized the 12th Czech Street Festival,
featuring live music, marionettes, and food at 83rd Street between Madison and
Park Avenue on October 2.
The Gerald W Lynch Theater at John Jay College presented the US
premiere of SKRIP Orkestra, a concert and performance in Slovenian and English with English supercities, at the Gerald W Lynch Theater, October 22-24.
Cultural Bridge and the American Literary and Historical Society held
a fundraiser to benefit an opening of the Russian Lyceum in New York City at
17
Le Chateau Artistique, Staten Island, New York, on October 28.
CONFERENCES
La MaMa hosted Acting Together on the World Stage: A Conference on Theatre and Peace Building in Conflict Zones-featuring artists from Belarus, Romania,
and Serbia-at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, September 23-26.
Columbia University hosted "Eisenstein-Cinema-History," a seminar
and conference featuring the world premiere of Sergei Eisenstein's unpublished
Notes for a General Histor)' of Cinema at the Faculty House on September 30 and
October 1.
CALLS FOR PAPERS

The 34th Annual Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference,
a regional conference of ASEEES, will be held at LaGuardia Community
College, CUNY in New York City on March 26, 2011. Panel proposals and
papers on any appropriate scholarly aspect of Slavic and East European
Studies will be accepted until December 15. Proposals must include the paper's
title and a very brief abstract, requests for technical support, the postal and
e-mail addresses of the presenter, institutional affiliation, and professional
status. Send proposals to Dr. Mary Theis (theis@kutztown.edu).
The 49th annual meeting of the Southern Conference on Slavic
Studies (SCSS) will take place in Alexandria, Virginia, April 7-9, 2011. Papers
from all humanities and social science disciplines and on all topics are welcome,
but the conference will have two special themes: "Twenty Years After the
Collapse," to mark the anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union, and ''Vasily
Aksenov, His Work and Times." Deadline for submission: January 14, 2011.
Whole panel proposals (chair, three papers, discussant) are preferred, but
proposals for individual papers are also welcome. For information or proposals,
please contact Sharon Kowalsky (sharon_kowalsky@tamu-commerce.edu).
18
"Gender in Conflict," the fifth biennial conference of the Association

for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), will be held April 1- 2 in Austin, Texas.
Conference organizers welcome proposals from scholars of all disciplines
who are working on themes related to gender and conflict broadly defined in
Eastern Europe and Eurasia by January 15, 2011. For more information, visit
http://www.awsshome.org.
"Recognizing and Imagining the Slavic in Culture, Society and
Language" will be hosted by McGill University and Universite du Quebec
a Montreal, Montreal, Canada, March 24-25, 201 1. Proposals for papers in
French or English on the topic of the creation and assimilation of literary,
intellectual and popular notions and images of the Slavic world are welcome
until January 15, 2011. For more information, visit http:// rqes.wordpress.com.
Compiled by Maria Mytilinaki
19
BOOKS RECEIVED
Braun, Kazimierz. Ce/a Ojca Maksymiliana, Dramat d/ajednego aktora, Oraz Epilog:
Tekst d/a aktorki. Father Maximilian's Cell, A Playfor one actor, with an Epiloguefor one
actress. Bilingual edition. Introduction by Stanislaw Kardynal Dziwisz. Cracow:
Bratni Zew Wydawnictwo Franciszkan6w, 2010. 165 pages. Includes author's
notes and forward by Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, Archbishop of Cracow.
- - - . Pani Scenograf jad1viga Po:?:flkowska na Scenach Polskich. Wyb6 r material ow,

dokumentacja, ikonografia Piotr Pozakowski. Gdansk: Muzeum Narodowe w
Gdari.sku, 2010. 346 pages. Includes list of set and costume designs, produced
and not produced (in Polish and in English); list of individual and group
exhibitions; bibliography; list of 138 illustrations (many in color); English
summary; index of names; index of play titles; and notes on authors.
Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard, translated, with an introduction
and notes by Sharon Marie Carnicke. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2010. Sixty-four pages. Includes notes on the translation,
introduction, select bibliography, and five photographs.
Goddard, Michael. Gombrowi~ Polish Modernism, and Subversion of Form. West
Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University P ress, 2010. 154 pages. Contains an
introduction, fo ur chapters, a conclusion, list of works cited, and an index.
Osir\.ska, Katarzyna. Teatr Roryjski XX Wieku wobec Tracfygi. Gdansk: slowo/
obraz terytoria, 2009. 396 pages. Contains an introduction, six chaptersevolution of the studio and laboratory theatres in the twentieth century; avantgarde in the Soviet and Russian theatre of the twentieth century; eccentricism,
biomechanics, pantomime (from circus to dance); weight of inheritance, or how
to stage Chekhov in Russia?; Lev Dodin: between studio and director's theatre;
Anatoly Vasiliev: innovator in dialogue with tradition-and a conclusion.
Includes notes, selected bibliography, index of names, and many dozens of
black-and-white photographs.
20
Slavic and East European Peiformance VoL 30, No. 3
Savarese, Nicola. Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and lmst
from Classical Antiqui!J to the Present. Translated by Richard Fowler, revised
and edited by Vicki Ann Cremona. Holstebro-Malta-Wrodaw: Icarus: The
Grotowski Institute, 2010. 640 pages. Pages 521-60 contain an extended
discussion of Eisenstein, Meyerhold, Tairov, Grotowski, and of their work in
relation to Asian theatre. Includes a biobliography and index.
21
Elzbieta Czy:i:ewska as Maggie in Arthur Miller's After the Fall,

Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw, 1965
22
IN MEMORIAM
Elzbieta Czyzewska (1938-201 0)
The Polish-American actress Elibieta Czyzewska was a star performer
in the theatre, film, and television both in Poland and the United States. Born
in Warsaw on May 14, 1938, Czyzewska belonged to the talented generation
of Polish theatre artists who came of age after the Thaw of 1956 in the
exciting new period of liberalization in the arts that followed the break with
Soviet enforced socialist realism. Graduating from the State Higher School
of Theatre in Warsaw in 1960, Czyzewska first acted in the Warsaw student
theatres in 1959-60 and then began her professional career at Warsaw's Teatr
Dramatyczny where for the next six years she appeared in the international
repertory of modern European plays that dominated the Polish stage in the
1960s. She soon achieved celebrity status in ftlm and television and was at the
height of her popularity when she married the American journalist David
Halberstam in 1965. They emigrated to the United States in 1966 after he was
expelled for writing critical articles about the regime. Czyzewska died in New
York on June 27 after a long battle with cancer.
The following documentary tribute is devoted exclusively to
Czyzewska's career on the Polish stage and to her work in the theatre abroad
with Polish directors and in Polish plays. Her career in Polish film and television
and as an American actress are better known and well documented; they
constitute separate stories.
Teatr STS (Student Satirical Theatre), Warsaw
1959
Smiling Face of Youth (Ufmiechnir_ta Twarz Nlodziezy)
1960
Artistic Section (Cz{Ii Arrys!Jci!za)

PWST (State Higher School of Theatre), Warsaw
1960
Jan August K.isielewski's Caricatures (Karykatury)
23
Teatt Dramatyczny, Warsaw

1960
Alice in Andrzej Wydrzyriski's Murderers' Feast ( Ucifa Morderc6w)

directed by Wanda Laskowska
1960
Witch in Shakespeare's Macbeth directed by Bohdan Korzeniewski
1961
Zina in Leonid Zorin's Youth (Czas iVf.lodoicz) directed by Wanda

Laskowska
1961
She in Zbigniew Herbert's Second Room (Drugi Pole6j), directed by

Lucyna Tychowa
1961
Kurrubi in Diirrenmatt's An Angel Came to Baf?ylon directed by Konrad

Swinarski
1961
Daisy in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, directed by Wanda Laskowska
1962
Nervous Girl in Euripides' iVf.edea directed by Jerzy Markuszewski
1962
Sonia in Chehkov's Platonov directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz
1962
Lena in Buchner's Leonce and Lena directed by Wanda Laskowska
1963
Ill's daughter in Diirrenmatt's The lhsit directed by Ludwik Rene
1964
Sheila Mooreen in O'Casey's Red Roses for Me directed by Aleksander

Bardini
1964
Miranda in Frisch's Don juan directed by Ludwik Rene
1965
Maggie in Arthur Miller's After the Faii directed by Ludwik Rene
1966
Laura in Krzysztof Gruszczynski's Quiz directed by Jan Bratkowski
24
Elzbieta Czyzewska as Sonia in Anton Chekhov's P/atonov,

Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw, 1962
25
26
Slavic and East E11ropean Performance Vol. 30, No. 3
Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut

1974
Maria Lebyadkin in Dostoevsky's The Possessed directed by Andrzej

Wajda
1977
Mother in Tadeusz R6zewicz's White Marriage (Biale Mal:{pistwo)

directed by Andrzej Wajda
Rivers Arts Repertory Company, Woodstock, New York
1987
Anka in Janusz Glowacki's Hunting Cockroaches (Polowanie na karalucf!JI)

directed by Larry Sacharow (premiere)
Teatr Dramatyczny, Warsaw
(guest appearance)
1994
Louisa in John Guare's Six Degrees

Cieslak
of
Separation directed by Piotr
Czyzewska was a formidable actress because of her strong personality,

keen intellect, and independence of mind. She brought to all her stage roles
the technical skills that she had learned at the Warsaw State Higher School of
Theatre and the deep understanding of modern European theatre that she
acquired at the Teatr Dramatyczny, where she worked with the best Polish
directors of the time, including three productions with Wanda Laskowska, an
outstanding twentieth-cenrury female director. Although Czyzewska's career in
the Polish theatre was short, it led to the recognition of her talent and helped
make possible her more spectacular success as a film star. 1
Daniel Gerould
NOTE
1. Images provided by Teatr Dramatyczny, http://www.teatrdramatyczny.pl.
Special thanks to Julia Asperska, International Relations, Teatr Dramatyczny, and to
Agata Grenda, Polish Cultural Institute New York.
27
28
IN ME MORIAM
Zygmunt Malik (1930-2010)
Trained initially as a professional actor, Zygmunt Malik was a longterm actor and collaborator with Grotowski over a twenty-five year period,
and was renowned especially for his musical work and explorations of the
voice and its resonators in training and in performance. This was most notable
in his role as Jaco b, "leader of the tribe," in Akropolis, where in addition to
performing some extraordinarily rousing vocal work towards the end of the
piece, he played the violin that called the concentration camp inmates together
for roll call. After 1968, when Grotowski stopped making theatre pieces to
embark on para theatre and subsequently Theatre of Sources, Malik developed
his own individual work as an actor trainer, teacher, and director, leading
workshops and practising all over the world, first with Teatr Laboratorium and
then independently after 1984. Some of his approach was captured in two
films, one shot during paratheatre in 1976 in Wrodaw, and the other in his final
years in Brzezinka, after the lamb barn, where the paratheatrical work took
place, had been restored.
Malik was a man of few words and did not relish speaking about his
time with Grotowski, but in the many conferences and symposia he attended
he always spoke in very clear and pragmatic terms. His work endures not just in
the ftlms and publications which continue after him-the most significant of
which was published by Routledge ten days before his death- but in the many
teachers, actors, directors, and students who worked directly with him and
were inspired by his technical insight and pedagogic empathy. This network
has spread across the world. By reshaping our thinking about the voice and the
body, Malik was instrumental in reconfiguring twentieth-century theatre and
its training and performance practices.
1930
April 4, born in Cracow
1948
Finishes secondary school
1949-51
Studies law in Cracow
29
1951-53
Works as a compere and reciter for the Song and Dance

Ensemble of the Cracow Military District during his military
serVIce
1953-57
Studies in the Acting Department of the Aleksander

Zelwerowicz Theatre Academy, \'V'arsaw
1955
First meets Grotowski on a student field trip
1957
Works as a professional actor in Lodi and then for the Teatr

Zierni Opolskiej (Opole Regional Theatre)
1959
September, is invited to join Grotowski's Theatre of the

Thirteen Rows, which later becomes Laboratory Theatre and
moves to Wrodaw
1959
Plays in his first production with Grotowski in Jean Cocteau's

Orpheus
1959-79
Performs significant roles in all Grotowski's productions
1960
Cain, A[ystery-Bou.!Je, and Shakuntala
1961
The Idiot and D ziac!J
1962
Kordian and Akropolis 0acob)
1963
Faustus (a guest)
1965
The Constant Prince (farudante)
1969-79
Apoca!Jpsis cum Figuris Gudas)

In the rnid-1960s, he spends two years away from the
company, resting and working with Teatr Bagatela in Cracow
30
Zygmunt Molik (with violin) as Jacob in Akropolis, Opole, 1962
31
Zygmunt Molik as Doctor in Kordian, Opole, 1962
32
1970-84
Continues playing in Apocafypsis cum Figuris (until 1979) while

also working in para theatre, initially as a driver taking care of
logistics and transport and then as workshop leader
1976
Acting Therapy, a film of Molik's workshop, is made. It is

produced by Cinopsis and directed by S. Sejaud and Pierre
Rebotier
1982-3
Directs Peer CiJnt in an art school in Berlin
1984--onward
Continues his own training workshops independently after

the Laboratory Theatre's dissolution. Develops his "Body
Alphabet" sequence of exercises. Takes part in numerous
symposia and conferences around the world, speaking about
his work and his time with Grotowski. Directs performances
in drama schools and professionally, including Macbeth in
Toronto in 1985 and /(jng Lear in \X!rodaw in 1990
2006
Dyog,ent (Conductor), a f.tlm of Molik's "Voice and Body"

workshop, is made, produced by the Department of Culture
of \X!rodaw City Council and The Centre for Cultural and
Theatrical Research of Jerzy Grotowski (now the Grotowski
Institute); it is directed by Tomasz l\1ielnik
2010
May, publication of qgmunt Malik's Voice and Boc!y Work: the

Legacy of jerzy Grotowski by Giuliano Campo with Zygmunt
Molik (Routledge: London & New York, 2010). This book
includes a DVD of the aforementioned ftlms and the "Body
Alphabet" exercises
2010
June 6, dies in \X!rodaw

Paul Allain
33
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Francis Cabatac (above) and Anthony R. Conway in Martial Arts by Yury Klavdiev,
directed by Yury Urnov, Towson University, Baltimore, 2010
'<!"
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NEW RUSSIAN DRAMA:

THE FAMILIARITY OF THE STRANGE
TOWSON UNIVERSITY, MAY 2010
Kathleen Cioffi
It's often said that Russia and America are very similar- huge, multiethnic, somewhat unsophisticated nuclear powers that have more in common
with each other than with the smaller and more cosmopolitan countries of
Western and Central Europe. The plays presented at the New Russian Drama
Conference, held May 7-9, 2010 at Towson University in Baltimore, both
confirmed and refuted that contention. The purpose of the conference,
according to the New Russian Drama Project's website, was to help "[promote]
the Russian plays for potential professional productions, by allowing invited
theatre professionals to meet with Russian artists and to view student
productions of select plays." 1 Attendees saw five productions, two of which
portrayed a gritty, crime-filled world reminiscent of American television drama,
and several others which clearly reflected American influences. Nevertheless,
all five displayed elements of a kind of satiric/fantastical whimsy that could
only have come from the Russia of Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Zamyatin. It was
this combination of a familiar-yet-strange sensibility that made all five plays
striking, each in its own way.
Interestingly, the two most American-seeming of the productions
both concerned children and their plight in post-Soviet Russia. One-in my
opinion the most successful of all the productions at the conference, i W.artiaf
Arts by Yury Klavdiev- relates the story of a ten-year-old boy who comes
home one day to find his drug-dealer parents have been murdered. He is
joined by a neighbor girl, who befriends him and provides a kind of childish
normalcy to counterbalance his extremely abnormal life. Their innocent idyll
is interrupted by the intrusion of a corrupt policeman and his companion
from the Russian mafiya who are looking for heroin that the boy's parents left
behind. Threatened, the children hide in an upstairs crawl space and conjure
up the Queen of Spades, a figure from Russian folklore, who, like a madcap
deus ex machina, allows them to escape into her own world. Klavdiev's play,
deftly translated by David M. White with Yury UrnoY, combines a Tarantinolike depiction of a violent underworld with a fantastic element reminiscent
35
of Russian works like The Master and Margarita. Urnov's casting of African
American and Asian American actors brought the American pop culture roots
of the story to the fore, while his swift pacing, incorporating music and strobe
lighting, gave the production a contemporary, cinematic feel.
The other play that portrayed the hard lives that some children lead
in Russia was Natasha's Dream by Yaroslava Pulinovich. In this monologue,
translated by John Freedman and directed by Stephen Nunns, a teenage
tough girl tells the audience about her life in an orphanage, her friends and
the mischief they get into, and her encounter with a young journalist who
stirs feelings and hopes of which she hadn't realized she was capable. When
she acts on those hopes, she finds that the journalist already has a girlfriend,
leading to tragic consequences for both of them. The dramaturgy is skillful:
until she reveals that she committed a crime, the audience doesn't realize that
Natasha is telling her story because they are a jury who must pass judgment
on her. By this time the audience has developed so much sympathy for her
that the deed seems almost inevitable, given the dehumanizing conditions in
which she's been raised. Despite the specificity of the depiction of the Russian
orphanage system, the play's ripped-from-the-headlines quality recalls the
plight of Baltimore ghetto children in Season 4 of HBO's The Wire. Moreover,
the upper-midwestern accent that Julia M. Smith, in a bravura performance,
uses as Natasha brings to mind countless news stories about real-life American
children shunted in and out of our own inadequate foster care system while
also accentuating the fact that the play takes place in the Russian equivalent of
flyover territory.
A third play, Frozen in Time by Vyacheslav Durnenkov, was similarly
rooted in the economic realities of post-Soviet Russia. It is set in a small town,
called Ragweed in John Freedman's translation, where entrepreneurs propose
to the inhabitants that they dress like nineteenth-century peasants and become
living museum exhibits for busloads of tourists. One family, prosperous
shopkeepers who are doing well in the new capitalist reality, agrees to dress
up and aid in the scheme. Another family, poorer but prouder, resists what
they consider a demeaning exploitation of their poverty. The play shows three
generations of the two families: grandparents born under Stalin, who have
been so traumatized by the many events Russia has experienced within their
own lives that they are now speechless; parents born in the Brezhnev era, who
are disoriented by the change from the safe stagnation of the Soviet economic
36
Slavic and East European Performance r?oJ. 30, No. 3
'-
-J
Roman Qesse Herche) and Valya (Maddie Hicks) in Frozen in Time by Vyacheslav D urnenkov,
directed by Peter Wray, Towson University, Baltimore, 2010
system to the new Wild East of Russian capitalism; and children born at the
time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, who are freer to take advantage of
what capitalism has to offer or simply to escape the stifling atmosphere of
a small town. The sprawling plot investigates conflicts and interconnections
between the parents' generation. It is also a love story between two of the
children: Roman, the dreamy son of the resistant family, and Valya, the
practical daughter of the shopkeepers. The production at the conference did
not succeed in malcing all the plotlines compellingly theatrical: the staging,
which placed each family's home (furnished with appropriately folk-artsy
decor) on opposite sides of the stage, failed to capitalize on the element of
waclciness that made the script interesting. The playwright evocatively explores
the effect of the prolonged transition from communism to capitalism in
a manner that in some ways recalls David Lynch's off-kilter black humor in
Twin Peaks; a production that could effectively capture that quality would be
interesting indeed.
Less obviously rooted in the realities of contemporary Russian life
was the staged reading of the absurdist science fiction play The Schooling of Bento
Bonchev by Maksym Kurochlcin and translated by John Freedman. The play takes
place in the "not-too-distant future," when humans no longer engage in sexual
relations, viewing them as subjects for academic study, like dead languages.
Bento, a graduate student at "a typical American university," breaks with his
advisor over the question of whether humans ever engaged in sex. He believes
that the myth of this preposterous practice is a marketing tool invented to
sell useless products, and he unmasks the fakery of two famous television
celebrities who pretend to be sweethearts for the TV audience. Although his
theory that sex never existed is disproved by the discovery of an Amazonian
tribe which "does it," Bento tenaciously clings to his belief and loses his job
at the university. His only remaining student, Sandy, becomes an actress and
hires Bento-the expert on love who doesn't believe in it-to coach her on the
best way to portray ardent women in romantic plays. They move in together in
order to rehearse more often and somehow find themselves with six children,
all the while declaring that sex is a myth. This entertaining play, in the best
tradition of Russian satiric science fiction such as ~' slyly comments on a
phenomenon of contemporary society: its tendency to believe what it wants to
believe despite all evidence to the contrary. The author probably had Russians
in mind when he wrote it -notwithstanding its American setting-but the
38
Slavic and East European Peiformance VoL 30, No. 3
theme applies equally elsewhere.

The most Russian-seeming of the plays presented at the conference
was Taf!}a-Taf!Ja by Olga Mukhina, adapted by Kate Moira Ryan. In it, a group
of educated youngish people, twenty- to forty-somethings, live together in a
house in the Moscow suburbs. They flirt, have love affairs, and break up, all
the while studiously ignoring what is happening in the outside world, which,
in Yury Urnm"'s production, threatens to break through. Mukhina is often
compared to Chekhov, and in this play she deliberately acknowledges that fact,
setting it amid the stumps of a once-vast orchard (although it is an apple, not
a cherry, orchard), and calling two of the characters Uncle Vanya and Ivanov.
Nevertheless, there is also more than a trace of the absurd in Mukhina's writing,
with such dialogue as the following:
OKHLOBYSTIN: Isn't life nice!
IVANOV: It is nice.
OKHLOBYSTIN: No one's fighting.
IVANOV: It's nice.
OKHLOBYSTIN: It's nice to sit here.
IVANOV: Everything is nice.
OKHLOBYSTIN: We live nicely.
TANYA: I love when e\erything is nice.
ZINA: They say it's not so nice in America
OKHLOBYSTIN: Oh, I imagine it's nice there too. 2
Urnov tried to fmd a visual analogue for this combination of Chekhovian
dreaminess and poetic absurdism by inviting two of his long-time collaborators,
choreographers Albert Albert and Sasha Konnikova, to co-stage the play with
him. They attempted to physicalize Mukhina's ideas in an interesting way and
at many points the production resembled a dance theatre piece with characters,
for example, having whole conversations while pushing a bathtub around the
stage. But the effort to make Mukhina's ideas dance diverted attention from the
work that Ryan had done to streamline and make Mukhina's language accessible.
The result was a production that at times overemphasized its absurdity, and as a
result lost some of the delicacy of Mukhina's distinctively female voice.
Since the Center for International Theatre DeYelopment, the sponsor
of the conference, wants to circulate English translations of contemporary
39
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Okhlobystin Qoseph Ritsch), Ivanov (David Gregory), Tanya 2 (Shannon McPhee), and Zina (Caroline Reck)
in Ta'!Ja-Tanya by Olga Mukhina, directed by Yury Urnov, Towson University, Baltimore, 2010
Russian plays to American theatre companies who might be interested in

producing one or more of them, it is perhaps not surprising that the plays chosen
for presentation at the New Russian Drama Conference had aspects that would
appeal to American audiences. Yet it was the glimpses of Russianness that were
the most fascinating in the plays we saw-the love of the fantastic in MartialArts
and The Schooling rif Bento Bonchev, the intensity of em otion in Natasba's Dream
and Tatrya-Tatrya, the satiric sensibility in Bento Boncbev and Frozen in Time. What
the attendees saw at the conference should, I think, be enough to intrigue them
and perhaps impel them to produce some of the plays developed, translated,
or disseminated through the New Russian Drama Project. For people of the
cold war generation, Russia was the "evil empire," endlessly fascinating for its
strangeness and seeming malevolence; it's heartening that now that the empire
has fallen, the Russians, without completely losing their otherness, are revealing
themselves to have a g reat deal in common with us.
NOTES
1. "The Project," New Russian Drama: Voices in a Shifting Age, accessed October 29,2010, http://www.towson.edu/theatre/russia/project.html.
2. Olga Mukhina, Tanya-Tatrya, adapted by Kate Moira Ryan, in nventysix
Scripts (New Russian Writing) l?J Fourteen Live Russian Plcrywrights (Baltimore: Center for
International Theater Development, 2010), 70-71. CD-ROM.
41
42
THE N ATASHA PLAYS:

YAROSLAVA PULINOVICH AT TOWSON UNIVERSITY
Stephen N unns
During the 2009-2010 academic year, Towson University, in
association with Philip Arnoult and the Center for International Theatre
Development (CITD), embarked on an ambitious undertaking: producing
seven American translations of New Russian Drama. This essay tracks the
inclusion, translation, development, and production of two last-minute
additions to the project, the one-act monologues Natasha's Dream and I Won by
Yaroslava Pulinovich, which were presented under the rubric of "The Natasha
Plays." This essay offers a discussion of the playwright and the plays, and an
account of the practice of bringing the translations to the stage.
The two pieces by Pulinovich stood out from the rest of the offerings.
This was partly due to their dramaturgical structure: unlike the rest of the
pieces, which had a Chekhovian, ensemble approach, Natasha's Dream and
I Won are hour-long monologues. However, the differences go far beyond
structure. They also diverge from the themes typically explored by New Russian
Drama. Unlike the other writers presented by Towson and CITD, who critique
post-Soviet culrure from a privileged viewpoint-they experienced the Soviet
Empire as children, were adolescents during its fall in a moment of seemingly
endless possibilities, and cynically watched the systematic obliteration of those
possibilities, iVatasha's Dream and I Won are byproducts of a "post-democratic"
world. 1 Pulinovich does not look nostalgically-or cynically, for that matterat past political moments. At twenty-two years old, Pulinovich was ten when
Vladimir Putin became acting president. Her viewpoint is specifically postglastnost, post-Soviet, post-Yeltsin, and post-democratic. In a sense, she knows
nothing else.
There is also a quality of otherness in Pulinovich's writing that is
deeply connected to her provincial perspective. In a country where art and
culture have historically been shaped by two urban centers, Pulinovich has an
outsider status, thanks to being born in Omsk and moving at age eight to an
even more remote area (her parents "left for the far north and took (her] with
them'').2 This outsider perspective may have been encouraged by the two years
she studied with Nikolai Kolyada, the famed playwright and educator, most
43
known for his dogged commitment to the development and embracement of

theatre in provincial milieu.
Natasha's Dream and I Won are companion monologues. 3 There are
obvious similarities between the two pieces: Both the main characters are
sixteen-year-old girls. Both are dealing with peer pressure, negotiations of
identity, and the rustlings of first love. There are similar textual references:
Both pieces' climaxes take place in public parks. Both characters refer to long
walks with the objects of their affections. Both characters allude to pop music,
dances, and rock concerts. And, of course, both characters are named Natasha.
D espite these structural, textual, and dramaturgical similarities,
Pulinovich's characters are worlds apart. Natasha Banina, the main character in
Natasha's Dream, is parendess and has spent a fair amount of her young life in
an orphanage. Her life has hardened her: when a reporter who has decided to
write a human interest story for a local newspaper asks about her parents, she
responds by telling him that her mother referred to her as an "abortion that
went and survived."4
The reporter is the only person who has ever really taken an interest
in her life. When he asks what her dream is, Natasha-who fantasizes about
fmding true love-becomes obsessed. When she fmds out that the reporter
already has a girlfriend, she organizes a posse of teenage girls. Things get out
of hand and the other girl ends up in a coma. By the end of the play, it becomes
apparent why Natasha has been telling us her story: she is in the witness box,
pleading to the jury to show leniency.
I Won features a very different character. Natasha Vernikova is part of
Russia's up-and-coming middle class. She has a kind of existence--complete
with "helicopter parents"-that is similar to that of middle-class American
kids. She is an A student, confident and over-scheduled, and hosts a local
television program for teens. The narrative gist of the play is her account of
how she got the job and how she discovered her first boyfriend through it.
There is, however, a darker side to the story involving a neighbor of
the same age-yet another Natasha. This girl is everything the main character
is not: a failing student and a party girl. She is also eventually homeless,
drug-addicted, and infected with HIV Despite this, she becomes Natasha
Vernikova's main rival both romantically and professionally. Much of the
piece is about Natasha Vernikova's obsession with this girl, and how she
systematically ruins her. In both Natasha's Dream and I Won, the audience is
44
Slavic and Ea.rt European Performance VoL 30, No. 3
put in an uncomfortable place-slowly seduced, yet finally critical of the main

character. As Pulinovich put it in an e-mail to the translator, John Freedman,
these plays are "about how not to bring up young people."5
Pulinovich's involvement in the Towson New Russian Drama
program was accidental. Over the two years that lists were made by CITD's
Russian partners of possible playwrights to include in the translation/
production project, Pulinovich was never brought up. The decision to include
her in the Russian season was entirely pragmatic. It came through a necessity to
find projects for two M.F.A. candidates, Julia M. Smith and Sarah Lloyd. Both
had initially been cast in a workshop production that Fulbright Scholar-inResidence Yury Urnov was slated to direct, but because of scheduling issues,
the project was shelved.6
This left the two students without projects. A flurry of e-mails and
trans-Adantic telephone calls ensued between Freedman, the chief translator
on the project, and myself. On November 11, 2009, Freedman mentioned
two relatively new plays that he could translate quickly, one of which was
Pulinovich's Natasha's Dream. A day later, Freedman sent another e-mail:
Yaroslava Pulinovich has given me permission to translate Natasha's
Dream. She's sending it now.
News on that front: turns out there is a second part to the play (not
performed in Moscow) that consists of a similar "monologue" of a
different young woman in a different situation. 7
The following day, Freedman wrote a review for the Moscow Times
of the Moscow production, directed by Georg Genoux and presented at
the Playwright and Director Center. While Freedman claimed that Genoux's
production was "about as barebones as it gets," he also inadvertendy
demonstrated how much directorial intervention took place:
Genoux enlivened the monologue by adding a peripatetic guitarist,
who constandy serenades Natasha, and a series of episodic characters
who pass through Natasha's life almost- but not quite-without
leaving a trace. These include her drunken mother, the journalist
Valery, several policemen on the beat, an affectionate stray dog,
45
classmates and friends, a pair of doctors and even a fireman who

stops to listen to Natasha briefly before he presumably moves on to
fight his fire.8
The irony of the situation is that the play is actually a monologue. Freedman
noted this in an e-mail the following day:
Now that I've seen the texts [/ Won and Natasha's Dream], I can see
they are both actually written as one-woman pieces. It was the director
of the show I saw who expanded things.9
I knew that Noah Birksted-Breen, artistic director of the Londonbased Sputnik Theatre, had don e a translation of Natasha's Dream, and in order
to get a sense of the play I read a copy of his text. Regarding Birksted-Breen's
translation, Freedman asked, ''What if Noah's translation works for us? Then
why not just use it?" 10 However, upon reading the translation, the reasons
behind Freedman and Arnoult's interest in American translations came into
focus. Birksted-Breen's \'ersion, though more than serviceable, was without
a doubt a British translation. It is worth comparing the first few sentences of
Birksted-Breen's translation to Freedman's. Birksted-Breen's reads:
\X1ell, to cut a long story short, that's bollocks, wot you just
said ... None of that fuckin' happened ... Huh? Tell you how it was?
And what else? And then take everyfink off for you too huh? I didn't
swear, there's no thin' wrong with that ... (She's silent, looks straight ahead,
then quiet!J) . Ok. It 'appened ... H uh? I'm not mumbling, this is how
I always speak ... 11
Compare this to Freedman's American version:

See, that's all a bunch of crap that they're saying. None of that shit
happened. Huh? You wanna hear what did? Anything else you want?
Maybe you wanna quick fuck while we're waitin'? I'm not cussing.
Those are regular words. (Silent. uoks straight ahead. Quiet sudden!J.)
All right. It happened ... Huh? I'm not mumbling. I'm telling you
normal.12
46
Julia M. Smith in Natasha's Drea111 by Yaroslava P ulinovich, directed by Stephen Nunns,

Towson University, Baltimore, 2010
A comparison between these two scripts makes the justification for American
translations abundandy clear.
The pieces went into rehearsal at Towson University in December 2009.
Freedman was present at the initial read-throughs and worked closely with the
two actresses, taking suggestions from them and me on slight adjustments to
language and colloquialisms. After a break for the winter holidays, the actresses
and I came back into rehearsal, and the plays were initially performed at the
beginning of February 2010. Because of the historic snowstorm that brought
much of the Eastern Seaboard to a standstill, half of the performances were
cancelled. As a resul~ the pieces were remounted in May, and Natasha's Dream
was performed once again as part of the CITD conference. 13 The cancellation
was fortuitous, since it offered the company a chance to revisit and re-rehearsc
the pieces.
One conceit the company embraced early on was the monologue
form. Though we had initially thought about taking Geroux's approach and
theatricalizing the pieces, this approach seemed arbitrary and self-consciously
experimental. These were just a couple of adolescents telling a couple of
stories. We believed that we should embrace the simplicity of it.
During the ftrst read-throughs, Freedman described to the company
how important he believed Pulinovich's provincialism was. After considering
this, we decided to try to indicate this through the performances. During a
rehearsal, I threw the idea of using a Minnesotan or North Dakotan accent at
Julia M. Smith, the performer in Natasha's Dream. It had an interesting effect,
making the character familiar and distant at the same time. As I wrote in a
program note:
We're not trying to set the plays in the Midwest. I t's not an adaptation
or anything like that ... It's just about trying to make some kind of
connections for an American audience. Those connections might be
fairly fast and loose, but we hope they are a way in for people watching
the plays. 14
While the accent seemed to work in Natasha's Dream, it was more
problematic with Lloyd's performance in I Won. This probably had to do with
a young and relatively inexperienced actress's discomfort with using an accent.
But perhaps more importandy, it seemed inappropriate since it emphasized the
48
-l>-
Julia M. Smith in Natasha's DreafJl by Yaroslava Pulinovich, directed by Stephen Nunns,

Towson University, Baltimore, 2010
50
character's provincialism in a way that didn't make sense. Natasha Vernikova
is a sophisticated young woman. If anything, she would be covering up her

accent. When we returned to the piece in April, Lloyd performed without the
accent, which helped her establish a kind of naturalism that was missing in the
original performance.
I WOn gained a tremendous amount from having a second round of
rehearsals. It is, in some ways, a more difficult piece than Natasha's Dream.
The circumstances surrounding the monologue are not clear. Unlike Natasha's
Dream, there is no logical reason that the girl is speaking to the audience./ WOn is
also less linear than Natasha's Dream. While the latter play has a straightforward
narrative, I WOn takes a far more circuitous path-going down blind alleys and
culminating in an odd, almost-trick ending.
Another issue with the first version was that M.F.A. candidate Andrea
Crnkovic and guest artist Eric Nightengale, who collaborated on the physical
design of the production, had created a series of projections that appeared
on a scrim behind Lloyd, unders coring what she was talking about at various
moments in the piece. Although the projections were imaginative, they were
ne,er truly integrated with the actress's performance.
For the May performances, the company decided to embrace both the
technology and the theme of the re-presentation of self. Rebecca Eastman,
who designed the costumes for the two pieces, completely abandoned her
original design and instead worked with Lloyd to create a costume and makeup
design that showed the metamorphosis of the character: she began the piece as
a naive schoolgirl and ended it as a highly sexualized adolescent. Lloyd affected
this change with minor adjustments-adding some thick blush and eyeliner,
taking her hair out of a ponytail, removing a school uniform jacket, and
hiking up a skirt to show her garters and stockings. Having these .Meisnerian
independent activities freed the actress and offered her psychological and
physical through-lines for the character.
Nightengale, Crnkovic, and I rethought how the audience should watch
Lloyd's transformation take place, and radically reimagined major elements of
the set, projection, and lighting design. In the final version, Lloyd spent the
entire play with her back tO the audience-with the exception of two short
moments at the beginning and end of the piece. The viewers voyeuristically
watched the actress either through her reflection in three mirrors hung around
a small makeup table or via a live video projection of her face. This live feed
51
was integrated into already extant still photograph projections. In the end, a
variety of disparate elements came together, offering a small-scaled multimedia
extravaganza-a stark contrast to the Spartan design of Natasha's Dream, which
consisted of four light cues with Smith sitting in a chair talking for the whole
prece.
Philip Arnoult once said in an interview, " In five years, I want to hear
the voices of these [Russian) playwrights on American stages, in Americans'
mouths, and listened to by American audiences. This is going to be the first
step." 15 Though it sounds simple enough, it is a tall order. The United States is
a country where, according to the last collection of Theatre Communications
Group data, all but one of the ten most produced plays in regional theatres were
originally written in English.16 American jingoism and suspicion of the foreign
other does not only run rampant at Tea Party rallies-it manages to infiltrate
the professional theatre as well. And the history of the Cold War-with its
prevalence of mistrust and animosity-is never far behind us, as evidenced by
the Russian-American spy-swap that unfolded last July.
While there was genuine enthusiasm from the various attendees of
the CITD conference, it is difficult to say whether that interest will translate
into actual productions. Despite the passion of the young performers and
faculty directors, much of the material-Olga Mukhina's dacha culture, Yury
Klavdiev's obsession with the Queen of Spades (a Russian cultural reference
that means nothing to an American audience), and Vyacheslav Durnenkov's
presentation of the tension between a small-town provincial populace and
Muscovite capitalists-all seemed rather foreign. Whether a play such as
Mukhina's Tarrya-Taf!J!a could find a home in the LORT theatre world is very
much an open question.
Nevertheless, the world is becoming a smaller place. Despite its loud
death pangs, the age of the nation state is clearly coming to an end and it
seems that it will be replaced either by globalization and internationalism
or, alternatively, by tribalism, cultural xenophobia, and the Balkanization of
current international constituencies. If the world heads down the former
path, it seems likely the next generation of young writers-and Yaroslava
Pulinovich is a perfect example- will take on the themes that mean something
to themselves. Their generation's themes will not connect with the kind of
privilege, cynicism, and nostalgia that her older counterparts' work radiates.
As such, this subject matter may transcend national and cultural borders and
52
Slavic and East European Peiformance l/tJL 30, No. 3
resonate 1n the contemporary post-democratic pluriverse (to use William

James's term). It may be an unfortunate byproduct of this otherwise happy
narrative that those "pluriversal" themes may be fundamentally bound up with
popular culture and capitalism. 17 Still, it's better than the alternative.
NOTES
1. Colin Crouch, Post Democrary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
2. "About the Playwright," New Russian Drama: Voices in a Shifting Age,
Towson University, accessed September 6, 2010, http://www.towson.edu/theatre/
russia/ natashaplaywright.htrnl.
3. In September 2010, the Molot Theatre in Perm, Russia, staged a production of the "Natasha Plays" which included a new Epilogu~in essence, a third play in
the series. This piece is very short (approximately two pages long), and takes the form
of a letter written by another Natasha, this one a 16-year-old fan of the Russian pop
star Dima Bilan. An English translation of the piece was completed by John Freedman
in October 2010, and the piece is slated to be presented at Towson University in the
spring of 2011.
4. Yaroslava Pulinovich, " latasha's Dream," trans. John Freedman (unpublished manuscript, December 3, 2009), l'vlicrosoft Word fl.le.
5. John Freedman, inten"iew by Cat Hagner, ''A Conversation with the Translator," New Russian Drama: Voices in a Shifting Age, Towson University, accessed
September 6, 2010, http:/ /www.towson.edu/theatre/russiajnatashatrans.html.
6. The piece, Maksym Kurochkin's The Schooling of Bento Bonchev, was eventually presented as a reading during the CITD conference at Towson University.
7. John Freedman, e-mail to the author, November 12, 2009.
8. John Freedman, "Young Talent's Dreams Come True at Premiere," review
of Natasha's Dream by Yaroslava Pulinovich, directed by Georg Genoux, MoscoJV Times,
November 19,2009.
9. Freedman, e-mail to the author, November 13, 2009.
10. Ibid.
11. Yaroslava Pulino\ich, "Natasha's Dream," trans. Noah Birksted-Breen
(unpublished manuscript, November 11, 2009), Microsoft Word file.
12. Pulinovich, "Natasha's Dream," trans. Freedman.
13. The Towson University production of Natasba's Dream was subsequendy
performed at the International Theatre Festival-Varna Summer in Varna, Bulgaria
and at the Istropolitana Projek 2010 in Bratislava, Slovakia, in June 2010.
14. Stephen Nunns, ''An Interview with the Director," program for The Natasha Plays, February, 2010.
15. John Barry, "Drama Splice: Recent Towson University Theatrical Confer-
53
ence Wants to Break Contemporary Russian Playwrights onto American Stages." Baltimore City Paper, May 10,2010, http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id= 20216.
16. The only exception was Marc Camoletti's French farce, Boeing-Boeing, unless you include a five-actor story-theatre version of Jules Verne's Around the World in
80 Dt!Js. "Top Ten Most Produced Plays," Theatre Communications Group, accessed
September 6, 2010, http://tcg.org/publications/ at/ ATtopten.cfm.
17. Many audience members were surprised to find that Pulinovich's references to Britney Spears and Nirvana were in the original Russian texts and were not
Americanized substitutes inserted by Freedman.
54
"CZUWANIE" (THE VIGIL) AND VIGILANCE

IN THE PARATHEATRICAL WORK
OF JERZY GROTOWSKI
Dominika Laster
In the beginning of the 1970s, Grotowski embarked on a phase
of research which became known as Active Culture. This ten year long
post-theatrical phase of research, alternately called paratheatre or Theatre
of Participation (1969-1978), was characterized by the dissolution of the
conventional separation of actors and spectators. This shift is clearly a
development of Grotowski's earlier attempts at unsettling of the actor-audience
divide.1
Paratheatrical events varied widely in their location, structure, duration,
and themes. The connective thread binding various paratheatrical events was
the attempt to rediscover modes of being with oneself and others which would
depart from ordinary, everyday encounters typified by cliched behavior, hiding
behind social masks, and moving within routinized structures of interaction.
The paratheatrical phase retained Grotowski's pursuit of an authentic meeting
formulated during the Theatre of Productions, but altered the methodology of
research to expand the possibilities for a more acti,-e participation by the group
heretofore known as the spectators?
While Grotowski employed the term "vigil" and "vigilance" in the
context of various paratheatrical projects, here I will concentrate on the
events with the word vigil in the title-Night Vigil and The Vigit-which make
the association explicit. These projects were conceptualized by Grotowski and
Jacek Zmyslowski and carried out by Zmyslowski with an international team
of collaborators. 3
In 1973, Zmyslowski4 was invited5 by Grotowski to take part in a
meeting in the Laboratory Theatre's forest-base near the village of Brzezinka.
This meeting, which lasted three days and nights, was provisionally referred
to as the first "Holiday'' and later became known as the first Special Prqject.
On January 2, 1974, Zmyslowski joined the Laboratory Theatre as artistic cocreator, specializing in paratheatrical research. From then until his sickness
and death in February 1982, Zmyslowski was very active in the Institute's
paratheatrical activities. Among others, he took charge of the Ule (Beehives) 6
55
56
under the framework of the University of Research of the Theatre of Nations

(1975). 7
Nocne Czuwanie (Night Vigil) is the name applied to a series of
paratheatrical events. Led by Zmyslowski, night vigils were open work sessions,
regularly conducted a few times a month in 1976 and 1977. These were held
in the rooms of the Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw and consisted of a
fluctuating number of participants ranging from a few to a few dozen. Most
of the participants answered an open call announced in Polish newspapers and
posters, inviting all those interested in active participation to join.
Night Vigil exemplified the stance of other paratheatrical events in
that they did not seek participants with certain skills or predispositions, but
instead demanded only a readiness for active participation. 8 But even this
broadly-based criterion was dropped in later iterations of Night Vigil, which
became known simply as The Vigil (Czuwanie).
An unsigned and undated Laboratory Theatre internal document
describes the program of Czuwanie in the following manner:
The Vigil is an attempt to go beyond routinized modes of being
with others, an attempt to build a meeting among others-beyond
demographic data about the other, beyond the narrative of oneself
or one's affairs. It is a filling of space with one's own meaningful
presence, mutually, together-through action, movement, sound, and
at times silence-so that almost every act were it stillness, sound or
silence is not inessential. The Vigil is a creative attempt, whose work is
a livingprocess, a becoming, a flow. 9
The main thrust of The Vigil, as described above, is the attempt to create a
heightened state of awareness, beyond those experienced in everyday life. The
striving for and potential attainment of these states, with and among others,
are in turn directed toward a "meeting" with the other, a being together which
constituted a recurring and central theme of not only the paratheatrical work
but also preceeding and subsequent phases of Grorowski's research. 10
Katharina Seyferth, one of The Vigifs team leaders, states that the
main task of the international team in the preparatory work on The Vigil was
for each member to find their own "individual movement or way of moving." 11
The idea behind this embodied research was for each team member to actively
57
explore territory which was not previously known. It was an active search
for the non-habitual conducted through physical work with the body. This
heightened state of attentiveness or readiness is intimately connected with the
embodied exploration of the non-habitual or the unknown. The participant is
continuously waiting, ready and vigilant in the face of the unknown.
Most of the preparations for The Vigil took place in Wrodaw.
However, the team would occasionally also conduct work at the theatre's
forest-base in Brzezinka. Preparatory work did not follow a regular schedule.
Team members would usually work for 12-14 hours daily, 2-4 days a week.
Looking back, Seyferth speculates that this irregularity may have been dictated
by Zmyslowski's already declining health, although collaborators did not know
about it at the time. 12 Seyferth also offers an alternative explanation for the
irregularity of work schedules:
It might have been a strategy to find a way towards something inside
of us, which we had to discover and which we didn't know. It was
research work which was leading to some unknown place and because
of this maybe it was some sort of tactic to proceed in an irregular
way. 13
In The Vigil (1981), a fllm documentation of one of the iterations
of Czuwanie, directed by Mercedes (Chiquita) Gregory and filmed by Jill
Godmilow in November 1979 in Milan, Zmyslowski roots the notion and
practice of czuwanie within traditional Polish culture. He connects czuwanie with
Slavic rituals that take place on the occasion of a birth or death. Zmyslowski
offers his personal connotations of Cif<Wanie, which to him implies "to be
attentive in front of ... to take care of ... to be present before something." 14
Zmyslowski's emphasis is on that which happens bettveenpeople in non-quotidian
or extra-daily contexts.
In the Polish tradition, czu1vanie is considered an expression of a
continuous readiness, a state of acti\e waiting or anticipation closely aligned
with Christian practice but extending beyond to folk, pre- and non-Christian
rituals. In the tradition of Polish Catholicism, the vigil is a prominent practice
of ritual anticipation or waiting for a holiday. This practice undoubtedly derives
from the long-standing Christian religious observance of the vigil practiced
on the night, the eve, and sometimes by extension the day before a holiday.
58
Slavic and East European Perforlllance VoL 30, No. 3
Christmas Eve vigil, the most prominent holiday of Polish Catholicism,

commonly referred to as wigiiia, like other rites of vigilance is associated with
fasting practiced on the day preceding the holiday as well as a night-time vigil
culminating in a midnight mass.
Nocne czuwania, or night vigils, are also associated with wakes in the
Polish tradition. These usually involve keeping watch over a corpse. Polish
ethnologist Adam Fischer argues that night vigils were one of the pagan
rituals against which the medieval Christian Church struggled.15 The practices
of "excubiae [watching; keeping of a watch or vigil] Juneris" involved spending
time with the dead body accompanied by activities such as drinking, laughing,
dancing and singing of "carmina diabolica." 16 These practices are still prevalent
in Polish night vigils for the dead, albeit in a syncretic form, melding pagan
practices with Catholic prayers and hymns.
\X'hile Zmyslowski's conceptualization of the paratheatrical vigil may
be rooted in traditional Polish practices, the techniques that he proposed for
the attainment of heightened states of awareness, readiness, or vigilance-such
as the prohibition of talking-clearly diverge from the practices mentioned
above. However, both Zmyslowski's The Vigil and traditional Polish vigils
provide loosely delineated structures which allow the participants to enter
into a liminal realm. Both provide frameworks within which participants can
approach the unknown.
While Ct~lwania were inextricably positioned within the context of
Polish and Eastern European practices of vigil and vigilance, these practices
have a wider transcultural grounding and resonance. Vigils connected to
various traditions and even within a single religion or cultural context vary
in length and structure. Nevertheless, certain features bind these disparate
practices together. The intention of the vigil is to raise the participants' level
of attention, awareness, or wakefulness. The event is not quotidian. It often
takes place on the eve of a holy day or in conjunction with a special event or a
rite of passage. It is an active preparation for something extra-ordinary.
The state of sustained attention, characteristic of the vigil, is achieved
in various ways depending on context. However, a broader consideration of
vigilance practices reveals certain commonalities. For instance, while some
vigils in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions require the use of speech
(such as the recitation of prayers), it is usually restricted to formalized speech.
Although formalized speech constitutes part of night vigils, it is within the
59
context of the night, which is usually associated with silence and quietude.
The calm and stillness of the night facilitates the redirection of one's attention
to matters which fall outside the purview of worldly concerns. This implies a
potential freeing up and conscious directing of one's attention.
In Zmyslowski's elaboration of The Vtgil, complete silence was
observed, to the exclusion of nonverbal vocalizations. The restriction placed
upon ordinary modes of verbal communication created an opportunity for
the participants to explore other means of contact. The elimination of verbal
communication can be seen in the spirit of the via negativa: as a removal of that
which is not absolutely necessary for a "meeting" to take place.
First hand accounts of The Vtgil point to correlations berween some
of the underlying intentions and outcomes of traditional rites of vigilance
which allow the participant to encounter the unknown, with and in relation
to an Other in an extra-daily context. Jennifer Kumiega observes a remarkable
cohesion of consciousness and awareness which developed among the
paratheatrical participants, given the relative lack of a code of behavior or
guiding instructions. 17
Speaking of the Mountain of Flame Project more generally, Grotowski
deploys the terminology associated with vigilance to describe the intentions
underpinning the work:
Because our task, ours meaning the group who is vigilant [on the
Mountain], ought to be to recognize each newcomer and to find a
natural, simple way of allowing him not to be a spectator. The mountain
is a place in which when something is happening, it is happening
continuously--day and night. On the mountain there burns a flame,
like a column of fire, whether this consists of flammable material or
in a completely different sense, a flame of something invincible, still
continuously alive (living) in each newcomer, each day and at every
hour changing, because constantly adapting to that which people bring
by the mere fact of their presence and take with them by departing.
Over this flame we are vigilant. We are vigilant, also, so the one who is
tired can rest. So that the one who wishes may depart. 18
In this context, vigilance takes on an explicitly social and communal dimension,
60
Slavic and East E uropean Peiformance Vol. 30, No. 3
,....
Andrzej Paluchiewicz, around the time of a paratheatrical event in

Brzezinka, 1974
as an activity which ensures the keeping alive of a quality which is ensured

not by a single individual but by the rotation of those keeping watch. This
understanding of vigilance as collective watch-keeping in anticipation of a
coming holy day reverberates with Grotowski's famous formulation of the
program Swieto (Ho/idqy).
While Grotowski refrains from explicitly defining Holiday in his
seminal article entitled Hoiidqy: The Dqy that is Ho!J, he gestures toward the
meanings that this notion carries for him. It is an active search for meaning
which, for Grotowski, is inextricably tied to courage. 19 Holiday is envisioned as
a profoundly collaborative effort-inextricably bound to Grotowski's notion
of meeting-in which "togetherness" assumes a completely new dimension.
As opposed to understanding the word "together" as the conformism of an
individual to a group--a leveling or giving in to the pressures of the collectiveGrotowski is interested in togetherness as "something like a second birth, real
overt [sic], not furtive, not complacent about one's seclusion."20 Of paramount
importance in relation to this notion of "together," is the other-or to use
Grotowski's term-"brother," the person through whom one discovers
oneself. Again, Grotowski ties this notion of brother and meeting to Holiday:
Man as he is, whole, so that he would not hide himself; and who lives
and that means-not everyone. Body and blood this is brother, that's
where "God" is, it is the bare foot and the naked skin, in which there
is brother. This, too, is a holiday, to be in the holiday, to be the holiday.
All this is inseparable from meeting: the real one, full, in which man
does not lie with himself, and is in it whole. \'X'here there is none of
that fear, none of that shame of oneself which gives birth to the lie
and hiding, and is its own grandfather because it is itself born of a lie
and hiding. In this meeting, man does not refuse himself and does not
impose himself. He lets himself be touched and does not push with
his presence. He comes forward and is not afraid of somebody's eyes,
whole. It is as if one spoke with one's self: you are, so I am. And also:
I am being born so that you are born, so that you become. And also:
do not be afraid, I am going with you. (Emphasis in the original) 21
Holiday, it follows, is not only a time set apart from the ordinary, the routinized,
the habitual, it is a way of being in the world. Grotowski's previous interest
62
in meeting and disarmament are clearly discernable in this formulation of

the notion of H oliday. But whereas earlier practices of "meeting" involved
an encounter between two sets of people (actor-director, actor-actor, actoraudience) in which disarmament was enacted only by the actor, during
Active Culture the parameters of the meeting were loosened. Therefore, the
quest toward disarmament, as well as "the meeting," which had been part
of Grotowski's research all along, no longer had to be contained within the
theatrical context.
Grotowski's question formulated in Holiday-"what is possible
together?"- resonates with Z myslowski's focus in The Vigil on that which
takes place between people during rites of vigilance. Drawing on vigilance
practices of traditional Polish and Slavic holidays, Grotowski and Zmyslowski's
paratheatrical work was an active attempt to rediscover human relationality
in a non-quotidian context. The emphasis in The Illgil on that which takes
place between people when their attention is directed in particular ways is
the quintessence of Grotowski's notion of "meeting." While functioning as
a utopian practice contesting and expanding the boundaries of contemporary
theatre, Grotowski's articulation of Ho!idqy was concurrently an attempt to
reanimate and make one strand of the tradition at the source of The Illgil
personally meaningful.
REFERENCES
"CzJ(Jvanie" 2v Teatrze Laborat01ium. An unsigned and undated Laboratory Theatre

internal document.
Fischer, Adam. ZJJ(Jczqje i obrzft!Y pogrzebouJe ludu polsleiego. Lw6w, 1921.
Godmilow, Jill. Vigil. Atlas Theatre Company, 1981. (Film)
Grotowsk.i, Jerzy, and Boleslaw Taborski. " Holiday." The Drama Ret1ie1v: TDR 17, no. 2
(1973): 113-135.
Grotowski, Jerzy. "Przesi~wzi~cie G6ra- Project: The Mountain of Flame." Odra no.
6 (1975).
Seyferth, Katharina, interviev; with author, February 17, 2010.
Wolford, Lisa, and Richard Schechner. T/Je Crotmvski Sourcebook. (New York: Routledge,
2001).
63
NOTES
1. A process which can be traced as a gradual progression back through Apocafypsis cum Figuris to Kordian and other productions. In Kordian, which premiered February 13, 1962, Grotowski set one scene in an insane asylum. The set, designed by Jerzy
Gurawski, placed the audience members on metal bunk beds dispersed throughout the
performance space. The spatial arrangement, in effect, situated them in the position
of "patients."
2. Later, Grotowski would critique this period of paratheatrical activity for
reproducing the very cliches which it intended to surpass (1987).
3. The international team leading The Vigil was comprised of Rick Feder
(USA), Sen Yamamoto Qapan), Katharina Seyferth (Germany), Zbigniew Kozlowski
(Poland), Franc;:ois Kahn (France), and Jairo Cuesta-Gonzalez (Colombia).
4. Jacek Maria Zmyslowski was born on May 3, 1953 in Warsaw. He died on
February 4, 1982 at the age of twenty-eight at the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Hospital
in New York, where he was being treated for Hodgkin's disease.
5. At a talk given at New York University on February 12, 2009, Andrzej
Paluchiewicz described how young people were "recruited" for the paratheatrical work.
This process was informal and entailed the older members of the theatre travelling to
various cities within Poland and speaking to university students and others about their
work. If common interests were found, Laboratory actors would invite their interlocutors to take part in the paratheatrical work.
6. Beehives were loosely structured nightly work sessions usually conducted
in the main room of the Laboratory Theatre in Wrodaw. These events were open to all
interested participants and while guests were sometimes invited to devise a beehive, the
activities were usually led by members of the Laboratory Theatre.
7. The University of Research of The Theatre of Nations was held in
Wrodaw under the sponsorship of the Laboratory Theatre. Over 4,500 people participated in classes, seminars, workshops, performances, public meetings, ftlms, demonstrations, and paratheatrical events.
8. Active participation meant that one could not sit passively and observe and
tacitly implied that the participant was expected join the activity initiated by the leaders.
9. "CzuJIJanie" 1ll Teatrze Laboratorium.
10. Beyond the single internal Laboratory Theatre document outlining the
program of The Vigil cited above, the Grotowski Institute archive has scores of letters
and postcards from interested participants. The length of inquiries vary widely from
64
letters several pages long to postcards containing only a sentence or two. A reading of
the letters of application underscores the open nature of admission to the events: "I
don't know if I am well suited for The Vigil, but I feel that I would like to try." Or else,
"I am completely green, but I adore poetry and theatre."
11. Katharina Seyferth, interview with the author, February 17, 2010, transcript.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Vigil, directed Jill Godrnilow (1981; Atlas Theatre Company), film.
15. Adam Fischer, Zu;yczaje i obrzt!J pogrzebowe ludu polskiego (Lw6w: 1921),
206.
16. Ibid.
17. Kumiega, quoted in Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner, The Groto1JJski
Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2001), 244.
18. Jerzy Grotowski. "Przesi~wzit;;cie Gora-Project: The Mountain of
Flame," Odra 6 (1975): 2. While the Biblical parallels of Moses and the burning bush,
may present themselves here, it is also hard to overlook the correlation between
Grotowski's ,Wountain of Flame and the Indian mountain of Arunachala, which denotes
"Fire Mountain" in Sanskrit and the site where Grotowski requested to have his ashes
scattered after his death.
19. Jerzy Grotowski and Boleslaw Taborski, "Holiday," The Drama Review.
TDR 17, no. 2 (1973): 114.
20. Ibid., 119.
21. Ibid.
65
"'~
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David Strathairn (Vilem Rieger) and Leonard C. Haas (Dick) in Leaving, directed by Jifi
at the Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, 2010
~
~
LEFT IN TRANSLATION:
THE US PREMIERE OF VACLAV HAVEL'S LEAVING
Cole M. Crittenden
If poetry is what gets lost in translation, to use Robert Frost's
formulation, then drama is what must survive it. Translatability is a
fundamental requirement of the genre; the very fact of performance means
that for a dramatic work to be successful it cannot live on the page alone, but
must survive the translation to the stage to become compelling theatre. Great
plays go eyen further in their translatability. Theatre is a visual art form that
can speak across languages (one need only think of the Moscow Art Theatre's
legendary New York performances from the 1920s, performed in Russian, for
confirmation of this claim). Indeed, for a play to be successful as world drama,
it cannot speak to its home audience alone, but must haw meaning for other
peoples at other times -and, often, in other languages.
Vaclav Havel's Leaving had its US premiere this past May at the Wilma
Theater in Philadelphia. Havel and his wife, Czech actress Dagmar HavlovaVeskrnova, attended, as did former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Yet
the attention that the play and its premiere garnered here, while significant, was
small when compared with its Czech premiere in 2008. There it was a major
cultural event and a lens through which to view the Czech populace's competing
views on art, politics, and society. 1 Here it was a small triumph for a regional
theatre in Philadelphia; premiering the first play in twenty years by a major
playwright-turned-political-leader-turned-playwright could only be viewed
as a victory for the Wilma-and, by extension, for the Philadelphia theatre
scene in general. The production received plenty of media coverage, and not
just in Philadelphia: USA Todqy, the New York Times, the Wall Street journal, and
National Public Radio covered or reviewed it. In other words, the historical
significance of a former world leader returning to playwriting translated very
well. But the artistic significance of the play seemed Jess obvious.
If the play did not translate as a popular and artistic triumph, this was
not the fault of the translator or the director. Paul Wilson, the translator, has
an admirable ability to make foreign worlds understandable but not any less
foreign. He also knows the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia well,
having lived there ten years and having been expelled by the former Communist
67
government for his associations there with dissidents. 2 ]iii Zizka, the director
of the production (and, along with his wife, Blanka, artistic director of the
Wilma), was forced to emigrate from Czechoslovakia in 1976, and he has been
a major force in the Philadelphia theatre scene for almost thirty years.3 His
understanding of the play's origins and of an American audience's sensibilities
would be difficult to match.
Both translator and director, then, are talented artists in their own
right who also understand the political context in which Havel's play appeared
in the Czech Republic: Havel, the former president who was replaced by his
political opposite in Vaclav Klaus, has written a play about an ex-chancellor,
Vilem Rieger, who is replaced by his political opposite in the character of
Klein. Rieger is not Havel, and the unnamed country where the play is set is
not the Czech Republic (Rieger at one point in the play mentions other world
leaders whom he has known, and Havel's name is there, along with Tony Blair
and, improbably, Chiang Kai-shek). But the temptation to read the play as a
form of political biography has proved overwhelming for Czech audiences.
Wilson, in his translation, does not work the text to draw attention w the
similarities that Czech audiences were most interested in, nor does he substitute
misplaced English or American parallels or idioms. The characters speak in a
language that is intelligible but not local. Similarly, Zizka fills the stage with
props, actors, and a pace and style of life that feel unfamiliar yet true; this is
just how things would look and people would sound in an unnamed Eastern
European country. Perhaps the only misstep was the accent and demeanor
of Klein, played by Trevor Long as a frenetic combination of apparatchik,
1920s mobster, and South Philly tough guy. Wilson and, for the most part,
Zizka made the right choices as translator and director, thereby revealing the
limitations of the play. American audiences do not know Czech politics and
society the way Czechs do, and the play feels small if the audience does not
have home-grown preoccupations to attach to it.
To be sure, Leaving offers insights on the state of politics that do
translate, and, regrettably, many of the inanities spoken by and to the character
of Vilem Rieger ring true. David Strathairn was a near perfect match for the
role of Vilem. Strathairn, who appears frequently in Wilma productions,
trained and worked as a clown before becoming a stage and film actor, and in
the role of Vilem he drew on that training by summoning a clown's ability to
be confronted by and take active part in nonsense while maintaining a sense
68
of resigned composure. When a reporter from Keyhole, a fictional journal

of questionable taste, interviews him about leaving office, Vilem offers as a
summary of his political philosophy the sort of political slogan with which
Americans are all too familiar: "The government exists to serve the people;
the citizen does not exist to serve the government." Vilem then goes a step
further: "I've always wanted our country to be safe and secure. And not just
our country. The whole world. And safe and secure not just for humanity, but
for all of nature. Not, however, at the expense of industrial development."
Empty aphorisms and contradictory claims stand in for real thought,
and they only seem like studied wisdom because they are surrounded by other
observations and references that are more prurient than politically relevant.
In the same interview, the Keyhole reporter asks Vilem how often he and Irena,
his companion, have sex. Vilem obligingly answers. It is never entirely clear
which is worse: the facile slogans, his sexual behavior with those enraptured
by them (besides telling reporters about his sexual life with Irena, Vilem has a
sexual encounter with a star-struck political scientist named Bea, played in this
production by Mary McCool), or the media's interest in his sexual behavior. Art
reflects the sorry state of political life, even for an American audience.
If politics is the content, then Absurdism is the form that Havel
attempts to engage and comment on in Leaving. Havel has long cited Beckett
and Ionesco as influences, and he names Beckett's Endgame as a source text for
Leaving, although Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard,
also named as source texts, are more easily traceable in the play. Havel's earliest
works, such as The Garden Par!J and The Memorandum, draw heavily on Absurdist
theatre, but all of his plays (especially those written after 1968, such as the
"Vanek" trilogy) seem to invite a political reading. 4 Indeed, Leaving is a play
about politics in which absurd things happen, but it cannot be called Absurdist
by Martin Esslin's influential definition. According to Esslin, Absurdism
is a strain of drama that not only engages existential questions but extends
this exploration of life's meaning (and meaninglessness) to include the play's
very structure and language, both of which themselves become absurd and
nonsensical. 5
There are plenty of absurd things about Leaving, both in the action
and in this particular staging of the play. Why does Vilem's daughter Zuzana
even appear in the play when she seems to serve no purpose? Why is she on a
swing, with headphones and a laptop? What in the world does the interpolated
69
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Peter DeLaurier (Hanus) and David Strathairn (Vilem Rieger). Leaving, directed by ]iii
at the Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, 2010
r-
scene where Vilem rushes around, seemingly half mad, in a fur coat during a
downpour of rain, have to do with anything else? To what purpose is the scene
lifted from King Leaf? Havel retreats from full-fledged Absurdism, however,
by offering a simple answer to all of these questions: the playwright wanted
it so. This is an answer acrually given voice within the play. In the original
production Havel himself recorded the authorial voice-overs that interrupt
and comment on the play, but here it is F. Murray Abraham who takes on the
role of "The Voice." Sometimes this voice from above (the director's booth?
the page? the great beyond?) offers amusing commentary on certain authorial
challenges or choices. He notes, for instance, that it is difficult to keep track
of who is coming and going with so many characters and so many entrances
and exits. Other times, the voice gets lost in his own absurd digressions (one is
about cinnamon). But whatever the tenor of the interpolation, the device of
the author's voice is the organizing force for the world presented in the play.
Life may or may not be arbitrary, but Leaving sidesteps that question by directly
telling the viewer that there is ultimately an author in charge here. The effect is
often funny and occasionally poignant, but it is a retreat from the powerful and
unsettling forms of Havel's earlier works.
One way in which the Wilma's production translated successfully
from literary work to compelling theatre was the set, designed by Klira
Zieglerova. The action takes place in the garden of the chancellor's villa. For
the production, the garden space was simple, with a table and chairs and a
swing off to the side. The set-up was typical of a Chekhov play-the opening
act of Uncle vt11rya is almost always staged just this way, although it is dialogue
from The Chero Orchard that Havel occasionally samples throughout Leaving.
The surroundings of the garden, however, were anything but simple. On the
sides and back of the space were walls of the villa that were broken up by
thirty-six differe nt doors, from the ground level up into the higher stories of
the residence. At the back were the two largest doors, gold in color, two stories
in height, and resembling the type of storybook artificiality seen in facades
at amusement parks. Of these, the one on the right was the only one opened
during the main action of the play, and it functioned as the primary entrance
to the villa. The rest of the doors were of varying sizes and were painted in
various bright colors. The doors on the upper floors seemed to be unusable,
placed as they were above the ground level and with no outside access.
Occasionally a line would be delivered in a space that became visible
71
when one of the many doors- including those on the upper levels-opened.
Each briefly glimpsed interior was different; one looked like an office, another
a nursery, a third a bordello where Vilem's trysts occurred. The final image of
the production was Vilem, exiting for good through the previously unopened
grand gold door on the left side of the upstage wall. Beyond was nothing but a
lonely, beautiful space of dimly lit sky. The image captured the possibilities and
risks of translation that are central to the text of the play, and to any theatrical
production of it: Vilem crosses a threshold, leaving a known and controllable
domicile for an unknown, uncontrollable destination.
The possibility of successful artistic translation from one language
to another must have been on Havel's mind while writing Leaving, since two
masterpieces of world drama, King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, are sampled
throughout. Interestingly, in Paul Wilson's text we hear lines from King Lear
translated back into English from Havel's Czech. If Beckett's Engdame is also
an influence, as Havel has claimed, then traces of the Irishman's French drama
are somewhere to be found as well. The translation from page to stage at the
\X'ilma was also a concern for Havel, and he was consulted for the production
and was by all accounts very happy with it. Indeed, the Wilma's production
seemed to do well by the play. The larger question this production's audience
was left to consider, then, was not how well the production introduced the
play to an American audience. Rather, the larger question was about the merits
of the play itself. Even the best translators- linguistic or artistic-must start
with what they are given. With Leaving, Havel has given the world a passably
entertaining and clever enough play. Whether audiences will search out future
productions of it, however, is uncertain.
72
Slavic and E ast E uropean Performance Vol. 30, No. 3
NOTES
1. For a review of the Czech premiere of Leaving and a discussion of the popular and critical responses to it, see Stepan Simek, "Circus Havel: Vaclav Havel's Leaving
and its Reception," Slavic and East European Performance 29, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 39-49.
2. From Walter Bilderback, "Interview with Translator Paul Wilson," Website of the Wilma Theater, accessed October 27, 2010, http://www.wilmatheater.org/
blog/ interview-translator-paul-wilson.
3. For a history of the Wilma Theater and its founders, see Marcia Ferguson,
Blanka and}ifi Zizka at the Wilma Theater, 1979-2000: From the Underground to the Avenue
(Saarbrlicken: VDM Verlag, 2008).
4. For an overview of Havel's Absurdist roots and the political content of
his earlier plays, see Stanislaw Baranczak, "All the President's Men," in Critical Essqys on
Vticlav Havel, eds. Marketa G oetz-Stankiewicz and Phyllis Carey (New York: G. K Hall
& Co., 1999) 44-56.
5. Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), xixXX.
73
Nina and Tonia Matvienko in Scythian Stones at La l\IaMa,

staged by Virlana Tkacz and \Xi"atoku Ueno, Yara Arts Group, New York, 2010
74
Slavic and East European Perjor111ance VoL 30, No. 3
YARA ARTS GROUP'S SCYTHIAN STONES
Donatella Galella
An epic journey told through music, movement, and multimedia,
Srythian Stones by the Yara Arts Group was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The title refers to the ancient stone figures that crop up all over Ukraine
and Central Asia. Thought to be burial monuments, they have become silent
with age, though they have witnessed many stories. Yara gives voice to these
stones and stories, tracing the parallel tales of two young women who leave
their mothers and village life for the ciry. The urban, however, opens the door
to the underworld, bringing mythic proportions to the narrative. Srythian Stones
ultimately explores how traditions and stories are passed from mothers to
daughters, and how they can ascend to a higher plane.
To create Srythian Stones, the Yara Arts Group went on its own journey.
The company made several trips to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan for their research.
Under the leadership of founding director Virlana Tkacz and production codirector Watoku Ueno, they developed the musical play in Kiev last March and
premiered it the next month in I ew York at La MaMa, where Yara is a resident
company. Yara has previously drawn inspiration from Ukrainian poetry as well
as from a Kyrgyz epic about the woman warrior Janyl Myrza, and the company
regularly collects folk songs from various Slavic cultures to fuel their work.
But this is the first time that the Yara Arts Group has combined Ukrainian and
Kyrgyz artists and songs in one theatrical piece.
Srythian Stones features several performers who have collaborated with
Yara on past productions. Nina Matvienko, who is known as the ''Voice of
Ukraine," appeared in Waterfall/Riflections, and here portrays the Mother to her
own daughter, Tonia Matvienko. Kenzhegul Satybaldieva and Ainura Kachkynbek kyzy comprise the Kyrgyz mother-daughter pair, and they have performed
in Yara's ]af!Jl Afyrza and Er Toshtuk respectively. Two musicians, one Ukrainian
and the other Kyrgyz, accompany the actresses on traditional instruments, including the..zYgach ooz komu~ a single-stringed wooden harp native to Kyrgyzstan, which was a delight to hear and see for the first time.
The dramatic structure of the show encompasses bildungsroman,
journey, and epic narratives, as the focus alternates between the Ukrainian and
Kyrgyz stories. Trading off Ukrainian and Kyrgyz ritual songs, the Mothers
75
initially transport the audience to their timeless musical worlds, while each of
the Daughters sings of her longing for the city. Embodying the Moon, Cecilia Arana serves as the narrator and observes all the action, which often occurs in a lighting palette dominated by blues. In modern dress, she is also the
bridge between past and present, performers and audience, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and mother and daughter. When the Mothers advise the Daughters
not to leave, the Moon sings on behalf of the young women in English in a
pop-inflected style that contrasts with the classic folk music. Throughout the
theatrical piece, the Moon reflects just enough light or meaning for those who
do not understand the Ukrainian and Kyrgyz languages. While I wish I could
have grasped the poetic nuances of the folk songs, the Moon's pithy translations, the language of movement, and the emotive renderings of every song,
especially those by Nina Matvienko, allowed me to grasp the story easily on a
simple, almost intuitive level.
In addition, the performers draw their familial relationships with
warmth and precision. In her profile on Virlana Tkacz, Olena Jennings notes
how Tkacz read aloud Ukrainian poetry during rehearsals for a different artistic project, and the actors read the English versions, "creating a dialogue that
was similar to a mother and daughter talking to each other." 1 This exercise
may have been a jumping off point for Srythian Stones, though the Mothers and
Daughters share the same tongue. In poignant moments of intimacy, Nina
Matvienko brushes her daughter Tonia's hair, while Satybaldieva spins yarn
with Kachkynbek kyzy. After the Moon urges the Mothers to let go, they come
to terms with their children growing up. They help to prepare their Daughters
for the journey to the city by dressing them and giving them personal gifts that
symbolize the continuation of tradition; Matvienko removes her necklace and
drapes it on her daughter, just as Satybaldieva wraps up the spindJe and yarn
for Kachkynbek kyzy. The simple parallel stories accordingly intertwine and
reinforce each other.
Weaving becomes one of the main ideas of Srythian Stones. Aside from
Satybaldieva's literal weaving and the interwoven stories, the theme also resonates with the choreography, set, and songs. Carrying red threads-the threads
of life, the threads that connect family-the Daughters spin in circles, and ribbons hold together their traditional garb. The set, designed by Ueno, who was
also responsible for the lighting and traditional costumes, is a raised wooden
platform constructed almost like a figure eight. One path starts upstage and
76
divides into two, though the paths intersect to create an intricate, yet clean
and swooping space. Tkacz and Ueno generally staged the mother-daughter
pairs on separate paths and separate sides of the center circle, crafting balanced stage pictures. D uring the families' interactions, the Moon sings repeatedly of ACTG, letters that denote the amino acids of DNA. The theatrical
piece thereby stresses the significance of passing down not only heirlooms and
traditions but also family blood. This could not be clearer, since Daughter Tonia, who truly is Nina Matvienko's daughter, is carrying on the musical legacy
of her mother and her grandmother. The set physically manifests ail of these
connections, the intertwining threads as well as the double helix structure of
DNA, such that every step taken on the wooden paths is guided by tradition
and family.
With an impish grin and a glint in her eyes, Arana utters "city-citycity," signaling the transition to the young women's journeys. Now on their
own, Kachkynbek kyzy and Tonia Matvienko set out on their new paths. The
Kyrgyz Daughter lingers center stage, poised in front of the empty circle or
abyss before her. When the projector shines on her face, her body stiffens and
her eyes gloss over, seeming to comment on how technology and the lights of
the city can deaden the viewer. Already, the Daughter has begun to transform
into a stone.
But first, the D enizens of the Great Below, portrayed by Susan Hwang
and Maria Sonevytsky of the eclectic New York-based band The Debutante
Hour, make their eerie entrance. In tights and heels, they slink into the space
and play a catchy vamp, "This Is the Underworld, Baby," on their accordion
and ukulele, introducing new sounds and a new world. Playful, seductive, and
sinister, they entrance the Daughters, and I too felt caught up in the spell of
their wicked charm and more familiar language and music. The music, however, soon devolves into loud noise, and the Denizens of the Great Below strip
the Daughters of their traveling garments and gifts, forcing them into a spinning frenzy unlike the silky movements they performed earlier.
This underworld narrative draws from the 3000-year-old Sumerian
epic of the goddess Inanna's descent, which some scholars believe to be the
oldest piece of literature in the world. Like the young women, Inanna wore
symbols of her strength and power, of which she was stripped once she descended to the underworld. According to Tkacz, "Epics are usually male stories about growing up, but not this one. We wanted to do an epic story about a
77
woman, and examine how quickly so many cultures are disappearing today. The
piece imagines an alternative ending, linking the past with a future in which
poetry would carry the familial into the cosmos." 2
Signifying these disappearing cultures, white sheets unroll from above
and divide the lamenting Mothers from their Daughters. The sheets also act
as screens for the projector, which shows images of barren woods, perhaps
barren family trees. When the Denizens of the Great Below encourage the
Daughters to stay quiet, the young women lose their way and their voices. Full
sentences devolve into vowel sounds and finally silence. The Daughters sit
back-to-back, mirroring a picture of two stones on the sheet behind them.
Upstage, the Mothers are silhouettes, apparently unable to breach the boundary. But when the projections become upside-down branches, the Mothers
discover their stony children, and they can reclaim history and culture in the
optimistic "alternative ending" Tkacz described.
The final songs are mostly in English, and the projections display old
photographs of families, as if reconciling modern language and personal history. Reanimated, the Daughters join their Mothers and the Moon, who narrates a dramatic poem about a child. The performers hold hands in a circle,
the symbol of the eternal, and images of grassy hills and the hea\ens create
a peaceful, transcendent scene. Meanwhile, the Denizens of the Great Below
return to the unifying concept of weaving and sing a lullaby about DNA along
with Ukrainian and Kyrgyz lullabies in heartwarming harmony.
While I appreciate Tkacz's hopeful conclusion and message about the
timeless nature of tradition and family, I found the transition from stony despair to transcendence dramatically unmotivated or at least unclear. This could
have been further developed, yet I realize that the Moon's musical poetry was
meant to be endowed with magic, and that could be enough to make the stones
sing again.
What I admired most about Srythian Stones was its surprising universality. Tkacz employed specific women's ritual songs, whose meanings I understood because of the excellent direction and performances. I also related to
the touching mother-daughter stories, which were well-framed within familiar
structures that illuminated their relationship arcs.
Reviewing Yara Arts Group's Circle ten years ago, Kristina Lucenko
wrote, "Tkacz incorporates different cultural elements tha t interrupt and echo
each other, seamlessly blending in such a way that it's hard to pinpoint where
78
---J
'.!:>
Cecilia Arana, Nina Matvienko, and Tonia Matvienko in Srythian Stones at La MaMa,
staged by \'irlana Tkacz and Watoku Ueno, Yara Arts Group, New York, 2010
one ends and the next begins."3 Successfully weaving songs and stories in Srythian Stones, Tkacz maintains this artistic tradition today, and her work will have
extended life. Gogo!FEST, an international festival of contemporary art in
Kiev, invited Yara Arts Group to perform Srythian Stones on September 9, 2010.
Yara also presented the show September 11-16 at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and later at the B'Art Center in Bishkek. Like the Daughters on
their journeys, Sc)'thian Stones comes full circle, returning to Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, where it developed and drew inspiration.
NOTES
1. Olena Jennings, "In a Different Light: Virlana Tkacz," Slavic and East European Petjom1ance 29, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 37.
2. Quoted in La MaMa, "Scythian Stones," La MaMa, accessed June 17,
20010, http:// www.lamama.org/archives/2010/ScythianStones.html.
3. Kristina Lucenko, "Creative Recycling: Yara Arts Group and Circle," Slavic
and East European Peiformance 20, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 71.
80
THE CONCRETES ABSTRACTED:

VLADIMIR SOROKIN TRANSLATED AND STAGED BY
MONDAY THEATRE@ GREEN HOURS
Brad Krumholz
"This country swallows almost anything," quips director Alexandru
Mihaescu about his native Romania. 1 The Concretes, a multimedia performance
presented by his Monday Theatre @ Green Hours as part of East River
Commedia's UndergroundZero Festival, presents a gang of hungry, anarchic
youth as they give free reign to their violent, insatiable appetites in a virtual
world of holographically rendered Western texts. 2 The piece is adapted from
"Concretnye" ("ConcretHI>Ie"), a play by controversial Russian author Vladimir
Sorokin, who has been called a "Russian de Sade" because of the unconstrained
violence and sexuality portrayed in his writing. 3 In this staged interpretation
of the text, three characters calling themselves "The Concretes" inhabit a
virtual world in which they can enter into the realities of works of literature
and have their ways with the characters, copulating with them, tearing them
apart, and devouring them, not always in that order. Ultimately, The Concretes is
about consumption, and this consumption, whether it be of food, literature,
products in the marketplace, or sexual objects, always runs the risk of ending
in overstimulation and malnutrition.
The set in the small downstairs space of PS 122 is sparse. A projection
screen is situated upstage, there is a table stage left, where ''VJ Cinty" sits and
runs the tech, and hanging above her is a supertitle screen. In the course of the
performance the projection screen is constantly active, displaying everything
from ambient background images to digitized footage of the characters' faces
to pornography superimposed with advertising messages. The supertitle screen
keeps a running tab on the translation, which is only partially in English; much
of the projected text is ostensibly the transliteration of an unspecified Chinese
dialect. The small leaflet that serves as a program for the show has a "Dictionary
of Chinese Terms" on the back, which translates twenty-three terms-only
a portion of the full number used in the play. The scenography, combined
with costumes (designed by Carmen Sedireanu) that call to mind cult films like
Blade Runner and Mad Max, gives the impression of a retro-futuristic world, a
technological landscape that is rough, well-trod, and somewhat impoverished.
81
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Monica Sandulescu in The Concretes, directed by Alexandru Mihaescu,

Monday Theatre@ Green Hours, New York, 2010
N
00
The performance begins in silence with a roll of the dice, apparently

to set up the idea that what follows is both governed by chance and subject to
the conventions of a dice-based role-playing adventure game. While the roll of
the dice appears at various points in the ensuing narrative, the action is anything
but improvised. This is not to say that the play is static or in any way dead. On
the contrary, as soon as the main characters (played with almost unsettling
earnestness by Marius Damian, Karia Pascariu, and Monica Sandulescu) are
introduced, the performance begins to bristle with an impressive, non-stop
manic energy and vitality; but for all the boisterousness and freneticism of the
performances, the unfolding action is strictly controlled and focused toward its
ultimate aim of social critique.
The Concretes is not a performance that does anything singly. The
focus is always split. Certain moments, if they were isolated, might seem
banal or didactic, but because of the montage style a tension is always drawing
simplicity into multiplicity. For example, one of the most memorable images
of the play is that of an actress in a seventies porn film squatting up and down
on a digitized bottle of Coca Cola, with the words "your product here" flashing
on the screen. Such an image might seem to be a simplistic commentary on
the power of sex in advertising, but because the projected image is so out
of context with the action of the narrative, it forces the audience to make a
conceptual leap. What does sexy product placement have to do with virtual
reality or great works of literature? Only when we begin to think about forced
insertion can we make a connection to the forced insertion of the Concretes
into the world of Lterature and the forced insertion of these "great works"and the dominant ideology in general-into our Western consciousnesses.
Our processing of the arguments of the performance is made difficult
on purpose, because any move toward simplification would not be doing justice
to the almost impossibly tangled (worldwide) web of virtual, global commerce
upon which the critique of the play is trained. In this territory, translation
itself becomes subject matter. The audience is confronted with a Russian text,
which itself contains Chinese terms, translated into Romanian and then again
into English.4 The majority of the actors' lines are in Romanian (hence the
supertitles), but the long passages of literary texts are spoken in English. I
will get to this in more detail a bit later, but for now what is important is that
on a fundamental level this play is about translation, or rather, the (growing)
intersubjective chasm between individuals in a world in which not only are
83
identities performed, but in the virtual world (of online gaming, etc.) avatars
are composed of any number of component parts from multiple origins, and
the voices of said avatars are anything but univocal. Even before the subject
matter of the play is properly introduced, we are faced with a translation
problem (here, "problem" is not meant to infer a negative obstacle, but rather
a conundrum, something to be solved, worked through toward understanding)
which has the effect of leveling the audience's playing field. If I spoke
Romanian, perhaps I could understand the language more readily, but even a
native speaker of Romanian would not be able to understand everything, since
not only is a good portion of the text in Chinese, but the usage is also highly
idiomatic. Take the following dialogue as an example:
KOLIA: You wanna have some mega-fun, Concretes?
MASHA: What do you mean?
KOLIA: We'll have an exit to aye zong hui location, and then we'll have
a sweet ba-lei. I'm plus-plus in the mood.
MASHA: You're out of rhythm, guy. Minus-positive.
MASHENKA: This guy just made a shitty proposal.
KOLIA: Hei, the "Black Black" is not shitty, fuck!
MASHA: Does basha want a plus-shitty evening?
KOLIA: I made a mega-correct proposal, kogeru-doll. Why have
minus-fun?
MASHENKA: I just want a mega-good proposal, let that be clear!
Mega-true plus-good! I've got plus-direct in my archive, shit, don't
need a dvingo-dance-60, I've got orient-plus food-providing, I'm in for a
mega-good evening. Now you know. 5
We can learn (if we stop reading the supercities and manage to steal
quick glances at our mini-dictionaries) thatye zong hui means "n ight-club," bafei means "ballet," and kogeru means "model, crazy about fashion," but does
this really help us understand what is going on in this scene? What do "Black
Black," "basha," and "orient-plus food-providing" signify? To understand what
is transpiring we must pay attention to context and make high-speed educated
guesses. We can figure out that these characters are trying to determine how
best to spend their time out on the town, that there is some resistance to going
to a night club, and that Mashenka is very serious about having the best time
84
00
V1
Marius Damian, Karia Pascariu, and Monica Sandulescu in The Concretes, directed by Alexandru Mihaescu,
Monday Theatre @ Green Hours, New York, 2010
possible. Complete understanding in this scene, in any scene in The Concretes,

is just not possible. This is not a mistake on the part of the director, though;
it is a clear and effective choice, intended to make real for the audience the
problematics of signification and communication.
The definition of character is also intentionally troubled in this
performance. We are not simply dealing with actors playing characters, but
the characters are outfitting themselves with new bodies, made up of syncretic
amalgamations of "mega-righteous equipment"-jaws of saber-tooth tiger,
shark, and stag beetle; hands of Asiatic lobster, panther, and mole; legs of
kangaroo, locust, and road-runner; and wings of golden vulture, bat, and
dragonfly. We do not see these physical additions, but are rather invited to
imagine them, just as we do not see the characters performing their acts of
evisceration in front of us. As they enter a work of fiction (Moty Dick, The Trap,
War and Peace, and D une, in that order), the Concretes take turns positioning
themselves in the audience, vigorously delivering the text of the novel in English,
as the other two remain on stage reacting with condensed, violent gestures to
their imaginary adventures. When all three have had a chance to give voice to
an excerpt, they gather together on stage for th.e attack and feast. These gorging
segments are made up of almost minimalist caricatures of sound and motion
(small clawing and gnashing actions made while facing the audience, emitting
vocal effects like "yep-yep-yep!" and "krr-krr-krr!") simultaneously enacted as
the narration elaborates the gory details of cannibalism and virtual necrophilia.
All that remains at the end of each of the four main literary encounters is the
"blood and fecalia" of each book's devoured characters.
Because the conventions we are asked to accept in these scenarios are
so removed from any possible sense of existing material reality, we immediately
assume that these are characters in a virtual game world; however, the play
text clearly states that the Concretes are actually entering into the holographic
reality of each book in the archive, inviting us to accept that these characters
are somehow real, existing in a world whose rules allow for this type of activity.
Even the behavior of the actors urges us to take the reality of the scenarios
seriously. As I mentioned, they are not enacting full-blown representations
of swimming, flying, tearing, and the like, but the psychophysical investment
of the perfor mers during these stylized action sequences does not allow the
audience to see them as two-dimensional on-screen avatars. At one point, the
actor playing Kolia runs offstage and audibly vomits what he has just "ingested."
86
Slavic and E ast European Perjom1ance VoL 30, No. 3
At another point, after having recited a passage from one of the great works
of fiction, he walks among the audience members, touching them as if to
ascertain their reality and thereby verify his own. These performer-characters
are very much alive in front of us, and we believe that they are experiencing,
not merely indicating, hunger and blood lust and nausea and jubilation. In a
word, the actors are consumed by their characters.
This play on the word "consumption" is not accidental. The final
image of the performance is the following text message projected across the
upstage screen wall: "Be Happy - Consume." At first glance this text seems
to be directed toward the audience as an ironic moral, as if to say, "If you
want to be like the Concretes, if you want to participate in the devaluation of
interpersonal relationships, of the intellect, of art, of life itself, you know what
to keep doing." The question arises, though, is all consumption necessarily
bad? What is the difference between what the Concretes are doing and what
the artists of Monday Theatre @ Green Hours are doing? Our attention has
already been drawn to the difficulties of communication and translation. Is
not any attempt to read also an act of interpretation, and does not any act
of interpretation necessitate a certain process of selection and loss, and thus
a certain violence? The material of The Concretes is itself partially the works
of fiction whose texts it contains. It takes these texts and pulls them apart,
chews them up, ingests and digests them, and ultimately refigures them in a
new context for others (the audience) to consume.
Furthermore, is not the activity of the audience members just this: to
enter the theatre/archive for their own night on the town, engaging in violent
acts of (mis)translation, assembling bits and pieces of their own associative
worlds in an attempt to understand and enjoy the virtual world into which
they have entered? Perhaps, then, the final message projected for audience
consumption is less a warning than a bit of helpful advice: "The best you can
do, your ultimate chance at happiness in life, is to consume as fully as possible
this world. As a matter of fact, you have no choice but always to do just that,
so equip yourself well, and choose your food and contexts wisely."
Given the already noted resistance of the performance to providing
singular declarations, it would be a mistake to take either of these two
interpretations of the final image-warning or advice-as gospel. In some
supplemental notes on the performance provided by the director, Mihaescu
ruminates on "problems that exist in traditional Western society" and how
87
they might be "exposed and solutions ... be implemented." He also, however,

luxuriates in the "fun" of Sorokin's ideas of "virtual anarchy" and "youngsters
... blessed by technology with unlimited possibilities for consumption."6 The
beauty and the fun of The Concretes lies in its ability to embrace contradiction, to
accuse, to interrogate, and to transform some fundamentally abstract concerns
into a theatrical experience that feels-almost inexplicably-concrete.
NOTES
1. Alexandru Mihaescu, publicity document e-mailed to the author, July 20,
2010.
2. The performance was presented in New York City at PS122,July 14-18,
2010.
3. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, "Heterogeneity and the Russian Post-A,antGarde," in Russian Postmodernism: Neu; Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. l'vlikhail N.
Epstein et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 273-74. Quoted in Joseph Mozur,
''Viktor Pelevin: Post-Sovism, Buddhism & Pulp Fiction," World Literature Todqy 76, no.
2 (2002): 60.
4. Mihaescu began his work on The Concretes not from Sorokin's original
Russian, but from the German translation by Dorothea Trottenberg, adding another
layer of complexity to the question of translation in this performance.
5. All quotations from The Concretes are from the unpublished text proYided
by Alexandru Mihaescu on September 9, 2010.
6. Mihaescu, publicity document e-mailed to the author, July 20, 2010.
88
Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol 30, No. 3
SPOTLIGHT CROATIA:
NEW VOICES IN CROATIAN DRAMA
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
Margaret Araneo
Until recently, US audiences have only been afforded limited
opportunities to experience Croatian theatre. Over the last few years, however,
prominent theatre spaces in New York have invited Croatian theatre artists to
share their work. The success of such projects as the Zagreb Youth Theatre's
recent production of Garage at La MaMa in January 2010, which played to
sold-out houses, demonstrates the New York theatre community's interest
in the innovations emerging out of the contemporary Croatian theatre. 1 On
May 13, 2010, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center built upon this interest
and presented, as part of its International/World Theatre program, Spotlight
Croatia: New Voices in Croatian Drama. The evening centered on the work
of two of Croatia's leading playwrights: Ivana Sajko and Tena Stivicic. Both
women are part of a recent US-Croatia artist exchange program organized
by Ivan Talijancic, co-founder and co-artistic director of the WaxFactory, and
Jasen Boko, a Croatian scholar, dramaturg, and critic.
As Croatian culture redefines itself after a decade of conflicts in the
1990s, Croatian theatre artists- playwrights, directors, designers, and acto rshave continued to make extraordinary contributions to international theatre
through attendance at major European and Latin American festivals. The
youthful and creative energy of the Croatian theatre offers US practitioners
a rich resource for collaboration and exchange. As a way to facilitate
conversations between US and Croatian theatre artists, Talijancic, based in
New York, and Boko, working in Zagreb and Split, organized WaxFactory's
USA/Croatia playwriting exchange. The May 13 event at the Segal Center was
a way to introduce both the playwrights and the exchange project to the New
York City theatre community. Talijancic and Boko hosted the evening, which
included a short presentation by Boko on the histor y of Croatian theatre, live
and recorded excerpts of Sajko's and StiviCiC's work, and a panel discussion
with the artists.
Boko, through a multimedia presentation, contextualized the
contemporary Croatian theatre by explaining its recent history in relationship
89
Gillian Chadsey and Ivan Talijancic in Woman-Bomb by lvanka Sajko,

Martin E. Segal T heatre Center, New York, 2010
90
Slavic and East Ettropean Performance VoL 30, No. 3
to a general narrative of European theatre since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Focusing on Croatian theatre from the end of the Yugoslav Wars, Boko
pointed to the recent proliferation of theatre organizations around the country
as an indication of the growing importance of theatre within Croatian culture.
According to Boko, Croatia, with a population of 4.5 million, currently has
eighty-four registered theatre organizations. Younger generations, in particular,
have developed a growing interest in the theatre-fourteen of the twenty-two
professional theatres in the country are aimed specifically at young people.
Until recently, however, Croatian theatre critics have primarily privileged the
work of Croatian directors, leaving the contributions of the country's most
innovative playwrights relatively unacknowledged. This, Boko pointed out,
is quickly changing, particularly as writers such as Sajko and Stivicic gain
prominence internationally.
Following Boko's presentation, the audience was able to see excerpts
of the playwrights' work. Talijancic staged a selection from Sajko's play !VOmanBomb---an extended monologue that follows the final thoughts of a female
suicide bomber just before her attack. 2 The piece exemplifies the lyricism
pierced by aggression that marks Sajko's style both as a writer and performer.
Meghan Finn directed an excerpt of StiviciC's most recent play, Invisible-a
piece that explores the intra-European immigrant experience. In contrast to
Sajko's works, StiviCiC's plays frequently make use of a larger collection of
actors working together to carry out often complex plots. While Sajko's work
explores an interiority that tends to manifest in a non-linear structure, StiviciC's
projects seem to follow more of a traditional Aristotelean dramaturgy, rich in
political and social questions.
The evening concluded with a panel discussion with the playwrights,
Boko, and Talijancic. While the conversation at first focused on the individual
careers of the playwrights-their influences, training, and so forth-it
eventually turned to larger questions about what exactly defines a Croatian
playwright. Can there be national theatre identities any longer when artists are
producing theatre in such a globalized world? Both Sajko and StiviCic work
extensively outside of Croatia. Sajko spends much of her time in Germany
and has enormous popularity there as a performer and writer. Stivicic, having
received her master's degree in writing from Goldsmith's College, University
of London, currently resides in London where her work is being produced
more and more frequently. While both women acknowledged their unique
91
experiences as young Croatian theatre artists at the turn of the twenty-first

century, they stressed the "universal" nature of their work. Each firmly
positioned her work inside an international context, dismissing ideas that their
plays describe a particularly Croatian past, present, or future.
The tension between the national and global identities of contemporary
theatre artists does not in any way diminish Talijancic and Boko's exchange
initiative. In fact, their collaborative project offers an important opportunity
to challenge artists, producers, scholars, teachers, and students gathered at
the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Together, those that comprise the global
theatre community can begin to interrogate their own frameworks for looking
at contemporary international theatre and build new models for understanding
performance in the twenty-first century.
NOTES
1. See Margaret Araneo, wrhe Zagreb Youth Theatre's Garage," Slavic and East
European Peiformance 30, no. 3 (Spring 2010).
2. The first published English translation of Woman-Bomb, translated by
Tornislav Brek, appeared in the January 2010 issue of PAJ. See PAJ: A journal of
Peifonnance and Art 94, YO!. 32, no. 1.
92
and Jasen Boko at the Martin E . Segal Center, New York, 2010
\0
L
CONTRIBUTORS
PAUL ALLAIN is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Head of Drama
at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has published extensively on Polish
theatre, Grotowski, and actor training. He has recently been researching
Russian actor training and the legacy of Grotowski's work through the British
Grotowski project: http://www.britishgrorowski.co.uk.
MARGARET ARANEO is an Instructor of Drama at New York University's
Tisch School of the Arts and an Adjunct Lecturer at Brooklyn College.
Her research focuses on the intersection of nineteenth century popular
entertainment and neuropsychology. She is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre at the
Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds a B.A. from Johns
Hopkins University and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University.
KATHLEEN CIOFFI is an author and theatre historian who has written
frequently about Eastern European theatre. A regular contributor to SEEP,
she is also the author of Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954-1989 and the series
editor for PIASA Books, the publishing arm of the Polish Institute of Arts and
Sciences of America.
COLE M. CRITIENDEN is the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students
at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests include the Russian
novel, Russian and Czech drama, theories of drama, film history and theory,
and the study of time. His articles and reviews have appeared in Kronoscope,
Slavic and East European Journal, and Bulletin of the North American Chekhov
Society. He has taught at Princeton University, Harvard University, and Rutgers
University-Newark. He received his B.A. from Weber State University and his
Ph.D. from Princeton University.
DONATELLA GALELLA serves as the production manager of PAJ- A
Journal of Performance and Art. Her research interests range from Shakespeare to
superhero musicals. She is a doctoral student in theatre at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York.
94
BRAD KRUMHOLZ is co-founder and artistic director of NACL Theatre

(North American Cultural Laboratory). As a director and teacher, he has toured
across the United States and to Canada, England, Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, and
Romania. He has worked in the field of ensemble experimental theatre since
1991, first as a student at Odin Teatret in Denmark, and then with Richard
Fowler of Canada's Primus Theatre. He is a student in the Ph.D. program in
Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has taught at City College and
Hunter College. His article, "The Problem of Movement Theatre" is published
in the Allworth Press book, Movementfor Actors.
DOMINIK.A LASTER is an Adjunct Professor at New York University. She is
the co-founder and executive director of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski
and Thomas Richards in the Americas. Her book, Grotowski's Bridge Made of
Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work, is
forthcoming as part of the University of Chicago Press Enactments Series.
STEPHEN NUNNS is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the M.FA.
Program in Theatre Arts at Towson University. His writing has appeared in
the New York Times, Village Voice, American Theatre, and other publications. He
is currently working on rwo books: one about the seminal avant-garde theatre
artist Lee Breuer, and another about free speech, pragmatism, and American
performance.
95
Photo Credits
Elzbieta Czyzewska in-"ilier the Fall Platonov and Medea

Photos courtesy of Teatr Dramatyczny
Zygmunt Malik in the 1970s Akrgpolis. and Kordiqn
Photos courtesy of Paul Allain
Martial Arts and Froz,en in Time
Photos by Robyn Quick
Tama-Ta'!,ya
Photo by Matt Gahs
!Won
Photo by Karen I Iouppert
Natasha's Dreant
Photo by Jay Herzog
Natasha's Dream
Photo by Karen Houppert
!Won
Photo by Jay Herzog
Paratheatre
Photos by Andrzej Paluchiewicz
Leaving
Photos by Jim Roese
SfJihian Stones
Photo by Cathy Rocher
SC,Jthian Stones
Photo by Jonathan Slaff
The Concretes
Photos by Diana Dulgheru
96
Spotlight Croatia
Photos by Frank Hentschker
97
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Playwrights Before the Fall:

Eastern European Drama in Times of Revolution
Edited by Daniel Gerould, preface by Dragan Klaic
Playwrights Before the Fall: Eastern European

Drama in Times of Revolution contains translations of Portrait by Slawomir Mrozek (Poland);
Military Secret by Dusan Jovanovic (Slovenia);
Chicken Head by Gyorgy Spiro (Hungary);
Sorrow, Sorrow, Fear, the Pit and the Rope by
Karel Steigerwald (Czechos-lovakia); and
Horses at the Window by Matei Vi~niec
(Romania). In this unique anthology, playwrights examine the moral and psychological
dimensions of the transformations taking
place in society during the years of transition
from totalitarianism to democracy.
Written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the five plays reveal the absurdities
of an inflexible system based on belief in abstract ideology that sacrifices the
individual to dogma. These authors bear witness to the ravages of communism and to the traumas of its disintegration and lend their voices to the
frightened and manipulated whose lives were stunted by entropic regimes.
Price US $2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Sega l Theatre Center,
The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016
Visit our website at: www.thesegalcenter.org Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
Czech Plays: Seven New Works

Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is

the first English-language anthology of Czech plays written after the
1989 "Velvet Revolution." These
seven works explore sex and gen-- der identity, eth ni city and violence, political corruption, and
religious taboos. Using innovative
forms and diverse styles, they
tackle the new realities of Czech
society brought on by democracy and globalization with characteristic humor and intelligence.
Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payment s in US dollars payable t o : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.

Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY100164309
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jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works

for the Theatre
Edited and foreword by Frank Hentschker
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan

Fabre is considered one of the most
innovative and versatile artists of
his day. Over the past twenty-five
years, he has produced works as a
performance artist, theatre maker,
choreographer, opera maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume represe nts the first collection
of plays by Jan Fabre in an English
translation.
Plays include: I am a Mistake (2007), History of Tears (2005),
je suis sang (conte de fees medieval) (2001), Angel of Death
(2003) and others.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 with in the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.

Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New Yo rk, NY1oo164309
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Witkiewicz: Seven Ploys

Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
Wotk.ii'CVICL
SEVEN PLAYS
This volume contain s seven of Witkiewicz's most

important plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor
Brainiowicz, Gyubal Wahazar, The Anonymous
Work, The Cuttlefish, Dainty Shapes and Hairy
Apes, and The Beelzebub Sonata, as well as two
of his theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words About the Role
of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form."
roMANIA After 2000

Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould .
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff.
This volume represents the first anthology of new
Romanian Drama published in the United States and
introduces American readers to compelling playwrights
and plays that address resonant issues of a post-totalitarian society on its way toward democracy and a new
European identity. includes the plays: Stop The Tempo
by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan
Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera Ion, Romania 21 by ~tefan
Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu .
Please make payments In US dollars payable to : Mart in E. Segal Theatre Center.

Mall Checks or money o rders to : The Ci rculation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave nue, New Yor k, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http:// web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by

Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstand
ing playwrights of three generations. Benet i )ornet
won his first drama award in 1963, when was only
twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has
become Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive theatre. His
plays have been performed internationally and
translated into fourteen languages, including
Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Llu'lsa Cunille
arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early
1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic
voices. The acto r-director-playwright Pau Mir6 is a
member of yet another generation that is now
attracting favorable critical attention.
}osep M. Benet I }ornet: Two Plays

Translated by Marion Peter Holt
)osep M. Benet i )ornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of
more than forty works for the stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling
"tragedy-within-a-play," and Stages, with its monological
recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his
most important plays. They provide an introduction to a
playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form
and treatment of provocative themes have made him a
major figure in contem porary European theatre.

Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
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Four Plays From North Africa

Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
Th is volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb : Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Galla ire's House of Wives, both Algerian, Julila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tunisia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies
Berbers from Morocco.
--.
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'
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....................
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....
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iii. .~~-.~~~~~f!:U' ~--- ;"-~----~
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As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community, an important area within that tradition is still underrepresented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That
is the drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region
known in Arabic as the Maghreb.
The Arab Oedipus

Edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus
legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world.
Tawfiq Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's
The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of
Oedipus and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as AlHakim's preface to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic
tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia
Basiouny, and a general introduction by the editor.
THI ARAB OEDiftUS
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that growing awareness.
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Graduat e Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10o16-4309
Vi sit our website at: http: //web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
Theatre Research Resources in New York City

Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
'lm\ 11U kl\t \kltJt
w .. ~u"
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most

comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the indexed
volume, each facility is briefly described including an
outline of its holdings and practical matters such as
hours of operation. Most entries include electronic contact information and web sites. The listings are grouped
as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical Societies;
University and College Libraries; Ethnic and Language
Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting Schools;
and Film and Other.
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, students, artists, and general readers interested in the theory and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have
been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy
and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is
an essential guide and resource, providing authors,
titles, and publication data for over a thousand books
and articles devoted to this most elusive of genres.
_..__,
____
-'---
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center.
~
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868
The Heirs of Moliere

Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
ri.Ul PI""'(" C IHCfl>1U Or Tilt
41 A Nil It
This volume contains four representative French comedies of

the period from the death of Moliere to the French Revolution:
The Absent-Minded Lover by Jean-Fran~ois Regnard, The
Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault Destouches, The
Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de Ia Chaussee, and
The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.
C't.NJt.-tl'"'
$ - _"_......_
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit and

spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest something of
the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy of charac~~Vf
ter through the highly popular sentimental comedy of the
mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends.
+..--~
.q: .....__ ....
~,......
<[.. ...., .....~ ...' :::
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas

Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or /afar and Zaida, The
Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher
Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or
The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's
plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright,
"Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most
stunning effects, and brought the classic situations offairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of
a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century.
Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Visit our website at: http:/ /web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
Buenos Aires in Translation

Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collaboration, bringing together four of the most important contemporary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing
them with four cutting-edge US-based directors and
their ensembles.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel
Veronese; A Kingdom, A Country or a Wasteland, In the
Snow by Lola Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic
by Rafael Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122
Production, an initiative of Salon Volcan, with the support of lnstituto Cervantes and the Consulate General of
Argentina in New York.
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus

Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch
language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and
upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, novels, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant
terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he
was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to
his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the
celebration of his novel, The Sorrow ofBelgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price US$15.00 plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)

Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868

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SEEP-Vol. 30 No.3 Fall 2010

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SEEP (ISSN # 1047-0019) is a publication of the Institute for Contemporary

Slavic and East European Performance Vol 30, No. 3

"Zygmunt Molik, 1930-2010"

"The Natasha Plays:

PAGES FROM THE PAST

"Yara Arts Group's Scythian Stones"

"The Concretes Abstracted: Vladimir Sorokin Translated and Staged

"Spotlight Croatia: New Voices in Croatian Drama"

Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 30, No. 3

All Journals are available from ProQuest Information and Learning as

FROM THE EDITOR

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 30, No. 3

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 30, No. 3

Target Margin Theater presented The Yellow Sound by Wassily

Electric Parry Songs at the Bowery Poetry Club on November 9, at

The Chekhov International Theatre Festival presented Declan

I Am America on October 11 (Vilnius) and 16 (Modena).

Slavic and East European Performance VoL 30, No. 3

Of parents and children ( 0 rodi!ich a detech), directed by Vladimir :Michalek

Tuesdqy, rifler Christmas (Marfi, dupa Craciun), directed by Radu Muntean

Nicolae Ceaufescu, directed by Andrei Ujica (2010) .

The Third Annual Russian Documentary Film Festival presented

Yana's Friends (Ha'Chaverim She/ Yanna), by Arik Kaplun (2001).

Five Hours From Paris (Hamesh Shaot MiParis), by Leonid Prudovsky

Slavic and East European Performance Vol. 30, No. 3

Masin, at BAMcinematek, BAM Rose Cinemas.

Kawasaki's Rose (Kawasakiho nlze) followed by Q&A with director Jan

Essential Ki//ing, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, Poland-NorwayIreland-Hungary (2010).

The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow presented the

Left Behind, directed by Fabian Daub and Andreas Grafenstein,

LECTURES AND BOOK PRESENTATIONS

Slavic and East European Peifonnance VoL 30, No. 3

LECTURES AND BOOK PRESENTATIONS

The Russian American Cultural Center presented the photography

Slavic and East European Performance VoL 30, No. 3

Author, at South London Gallery from October 1 to November 28.

Le Chateau Artistique, Staten Island, New York, on October 28.

CALLS FOR PAPERS

Slavic and East European Peiformance Vol. 30, No. 3

"Gender in Conflict," the fifth biennial conference of the Association

- - - . Pani Scenograf jad1viga Po:?:flkowska na Scenach Polskich. Wyb6 r material ow,

Slavic and East European Peiformance VoL 30, No. 3

Elzbieta Czy:i:ewska as Maggie in Arthur Miller's After the Fall,

Slavic and East European Performance VoL 30, No. 3

Smiling Face of Youth (Ufmiechnir_ta Twarz Nlodziezy)

Artistic Section (Cz{Ii Arrys!Jci!za)

Jan August K.isielewski's Caricatures (Karykatury)

Teatt Dramatyczny, Warsaw

Alice in Andrzej Wydrzyriski's Murderers' Feast ( Ucifa Morderc6w)

Witch in Shakespeare's Macbeth directed by Bohdan Korzeniewski

Zina in Leonid Zorin's Youth (Czas iVf.lodoicz) directed by Wanda

She in Zbigniew Herbert's Second Room (Drugi Pole6j), directed by

Kurrubi in Diirrenmatt's An Angel Came to Baf?ylon directed by Konrad

Daisy in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, directed by Wanda Laskowska

Nervous Girl in Euripides' iVf.edea directed by Jerzy Markuszewski

Sonia in Chehkov's Platonov directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz

Lena in Buchner's Leonce and Lena directed by Wanda Laskowska

Ill's daughter in Diirrenmatt's The lhsit directed by Ludwik Rene

Sheila Mooreen in O'Casey's Red Roses for Me directed by Aleksander

Miranda in Frisch's Don juan directed by Ludwik Rene