Wayang Kulit

 

[Wayang kulit is one of Indonesia’s major art forms, with many stylistic and regional variations.  As found on the islands of Java and Bali, wayang kulit is both entertainment and ritual.

[Several epic cycles form the basis of the plays and provide characters with which new plays are created.  Of various origins, the epics have been altered and supplemented extensively, forming a distinctly Indonesian mythology.  Most wayang stories performed today in Java and Bali are based on the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic (though the Javanese are predominantly Muslim, while the Balinese are mostly Hindu).  

[I’ve only seen one wayang performance live—when I was in Honolulu for a Kabuki course at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. UH has an active Asian performance program.  Run at that time by James Brandon (1927-2015), it included the Festival of Ethnic Music and Dance, which in July 1988 a wayang performance by the University of Hawaii Gamelan Ensemble directed by Hardja Suslo. 

[I’d seen videos of wayang kulit, but this was my first (and so far only) opportunity to see it live. I have to say that dalang Marc Hoffman made those puppets do things I wouldn’t have believed was possible with inanimate objects!  I can tell you that shadow is somehow magical.  It sort of explained to me why spectators are drawn to the back side of the screen—to see that the puppeteer isn’t engaged in something paranormal back there.]

“LARRY REED, 81, MASTER OF SHADOW PUPPETRY 
WHO MADE IT MODERN”
by Richard Sandomir

[Larry Reed, an American wayang kulit shadow puppet master, died on 30 January.  His obituary, which ran in the New York Times on 28 March 2026 (Section B: “Business”/”Sports”), motivated me to blog on the Indonesian performance form. 

[I realized, though I had covered several other forms of theater from Asian cultures—noh, kabuki, gigaku, classic Sanskrit drama, and the Natyasastra, I’d never posted anything in the Indonesian shadow puppets, which are tremendously fascinating.  I decided to do it by commenting on Reed’s obituary, which was also posted on the Times website on 25 March 2026 as “Larry Reed, Master of Shadow Puppetry, Dies at 81.”]

Taking the intimacy of a traditional Balinese art form and making it a large-scale show.

In 1970, a young filmmaker named Larry Reed traveled to Pengosekan, a Balinese village, searching for a new theatrical experience, something different from the standard Broadway fare.

He wasn’t certain what he was looking for. But one night he found it.

“We came upon a clearing filled with people crowded around a small screen, with a flame behind it making flickering shadows,” he recalled decades later. “A single performer was manipulating scores of puppets, creating incredible sounds with his voice, leading the orchestra with a mallet in his foot and making the audience laugh and cry.”

What he had seen was the ancient art of wayang kulit, or Balinese shadow puppetry, whose stories are derived from the Mahabharata myth cycle. UNESCO designated the form a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003.

[Wayang kulit (pronounced wah-YAHNG KOO-lit) literally means ‘shadow leather’ because the puppets are carved from leather. Wayang can refer to the puppet alone or the whole puppet theater performance. Furthermore, wayang can be used to mean ‘theater’ in general, as one of the forms of Indonesian performance is called wayang orang, which is theater performed directly (i.e., no shadows) by human actors. (Orang is the same word that appears in orang utan, the great ape whose name means ‘man of the forest.’)

[The Mahabharata is an ancient Indian epic poem, revered as one of the two major texts of Hinduism alongside the Ramayana. (The Ramayana is the story of the god Rama, a major Hindu deity.) Composed in Sanskrit between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, the Mahabharata is the longest known epic poem in world literature, about ten times the length of both the Iliad and the Odyssey together. 

[The name means ‘the great (story) of the Bharata,’ who are the descendants of the legendary emperor Bharata, whose name is also the Sanskrit and Hindi name for India.  The Mahabharata is the story of the rivalry between two princely families, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas.] 

Mr. Reed, who died at 81 of a heart attack on Jan. 30, at his home in San Francisco, didn’t understand the language being spoken.

But the show “excited me because it was so worked out, yet so wild,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1984. “It involved the same old stories that we’re used to here, but a different mix — like ballet and a clown show all mixed together. It was like watching primordial cartoons.”

This would not be just a thrilling one-off. Over the coming years, as he trained to become a dalang, or shadow master, Mr. Reed returned regularly to Indonesia to study in the village of Tunjuk [on Bali] with the dalang I Nyoman Rajeg. Mr. Reed lived in Tunjuk for a year [ca. 1974] with his future wife, Jane Levy, before they married in 1976.

Back in the United States, Mr. Reed had formed the nonprofit ShadowLight Productions in San Francisco in 1972 to stage traditional shadow puppetry shows. But by the early 1990s, he began to realize that “not everybody in the world is as interested in Indonesian stuff as I am,” he told Mission Local, a San Francisco news website, in 2023.

So he created a modern version, or what came to be called cinematic shadow theater, “that emerged over many years through experimentation,” Caryl Kientz, ShadowLight’s managing director, said in an interview.

Mr. Reed turned the intimacy of traditional Balinese shadow puppetry into a large-scale show, using the age-old techniques to tell stories from around the world. Instead of a single dalang, there was a cast of performers — including puppeteers, masked actors and dancers — behind a 15-by-30-foot screen, and multiple electric light sources instead of a flame.

[The puppet figures of wayang kulit are rear-projected. They are flat leather figures carved and incised from water buffalo or goat hide and attached to rods which the dalang uses to make the limbs and heads move. The shadows are thrown onto the back of a large linen screen by an oil lamp (the traditional method) or, today, an electric light.

[The leather is used rather than other, more modern materials. Because in its thin state, after being worked and carved, it’s not only more supple than any other material, but it’s slightly translucent, make the shadows less opaque and more lively.

[The dalang manipulates puppets while sitting on the ground—wayang kulit performances are traditionally outdoor events—between the lamp and the screen. Audiences, who are free to come and go as they please during a performance, are clearly meant to be seated on the opposite side of the screen from the dalang. But it has long become common for spectators to come behind the screen and watch the dalang work and see the shadows from the “wrong” side.

[The wayang performance is traditionally accompanied by a gamelan orchestra, commonly an ensemble of bronze percussion instruments.  The dalang “conducts” the gamelan, who are seated behind the dalang. The gamelan is usually also accompanied by male and female singers.

[The dialogue of the puppets isn’t written down—there are no scripts in the western theater sense. The dalang, with all his other duties in a performance, makes up the words the puppets speak as the story unfolds. Furthermore, the story is tailored to suit the audience attending the performance. The dalang may even make references to current events and local affairs, especially during comic scenes.]

Drew Dir, a shadow puppeteer and a founder of Manual Cinema, a performance company in Chicago, called Mr. Reed a creative inspiration.

“When we were coming up, people would pass us DVDs of his performances,” Mr. Dir wrote in an email. “His tools were so simple — light, shadow, foamcore, the human silhouette — and yet the possibilities were endless. To the best of my knowledge, he was the creator of modern shadow play and performance.”

Mr. Reed’s productions, which he often directed and in which he gave voice to some of the characters, were multicultural in their subject matter.

“Monkey King at Spider Cave” (2006) was based on a 16th-century story about a Buddhist high priest in China. “Ghosts of the River” (2009), a series of vignettes written by the playwright Octavio Solis, explored stories about crossing the Rio Grande. “A (Balinese) Tempest” (2005), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, debuted in San Francisco and was also performed at the Public Theater in Manhattan.

[The Monkey King. a simian trickster with human characteristics and abilities, is one of the best loved and most enduring characters in Chinese literature. Armed with a staff and extraordinary powers, he comes from the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, attributed to writer Wu Cheng’en (c. 1500-82 or 1505-80). In the centuries since his literary debut, the Monkey King has been the subject of movies, TV shows, and games across both the East and the West.]

“In Xanadu” (1993) followed the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan’s [1215-94] quest to bring his late wife, Chabi, back from the underworld. It won puppetry’s highest honor, the Citation of Excellence from UNIMA-USA, the North American chapter of an international puppetry organization.

Steven Winn, a critic for The [San Francisco] Chronicle, praised that show’s “ingenious use of perspective,” which made shadow images of 13th-century warriors look three-dimensional on the screen [see what I mean about the dalang’s magic?]. The battlefield scenes, he added, had “a wonderful, illusionistic depth.”

Charles Lawson Reed III was born on June 21, 1944, in Los Angeles, and moved with his family to Cincinnati after World War II. His father, Charles Reed Jr., was an engineer who owned a valve-manufacturing company. His mother, Dorothy (Whittaker) Reed, was a homemaker and an active supporter of arts organizations.

Mr. Reed recalled noticing the effect of shadows from an early age.

“Once I woke up from a nap and found myself watching the shadow of a bug on a leaf, inches from my nose,” he wrote in Puppetry International magazine in 2009. “My first photographs were of shadows in the snow.”

In elementary and boarding school, he acted. At Yale, he studied French and theater, but left after two years to join a Peace Corps theater program, through which he worked at the National Theater of Costa Rica from 1966 to 1968. In 1970, he earned a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree in film from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Following his first trip to Bali, Mr. Reed returned to the United States, where he studied Balinese instruments and the Indonesian language at the Center for World Music in the Bay Area [founded in San Francisco; relocated to San Diego in 1980]. One of the teachers suggested that Mr. Reed study shadow puppetry with his father, Mr. Rajeg, in Indonesia.

Returning to Bali for extended trips in 1973 and 1974, Mr. Reed recalled sitting behind the screen with Mr. Rajeg — watching him perform, learning how he gave voice to multiple characters and how he animated his flat, carved-rawhide puppets.

“I learned the entire repertoire, just note by note, the way the Balinese do it, except much slower,” Mr. Reed said in a video on the ShadowLight website.

His time in Mr. Rajeg’s village led him and the filmmaker John Knoop to make “Shadow Master” (1979), a docudrama about the dalang’s family — including his grandchildren, caught between tradition and modernity.

Mr. Reed’s troupe has collaborated with organizations like the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, the Santa Fe and Los Angeles operas, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, a Balinese music and dance company, the singer Coco Zhao, the choreographer Wan-Chao Chang and the actress Karen Kandel.

Mr. Reed is survived by his wife; his son Nik, who confirmed the death; another son, James; three grandchildren; two sisters, Janet and Dede Reed; and a brother, Foster.

His final show, which he performed last November on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., was a wayang kulit story, “Arjuna Tapa,” in which the title character travels to secure a powerful weapon from Lord Shiva for an upcoming war. Mr. Reed, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease [COPD], was the sole puppeteer and used a portable oxygen concentrator to breathe during the performance.

Rachel Cooper [performing arts presenter specializing in cultural exchange], the director of performing arts, culture and diplomacy at the Asia Society [New York City], recalled watching him perform in Indonesia in 1996.

“People were so delighted,” she said in an interview. “I think they felt here was someone who really respected and knew the form. If you can make jokes in another language, and they laugh, it tells you something. He made that connection.”

[Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for the Times for more than three decades.  “I am . . .  assigned to write short biographies of the famous, the infamous and the obscure,” he says.  Sandomir joined the Times Obituaries desk in 2016 after 25 years covering sports media and sports business for the paper.  

[He’s worked for Long Island’s Newsday and other publications, and written several books, including his most recent, The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic (Hachette Books, 2017). Sandomir’s journalism background of more than 40 years has helped him become a better storyteller, which is critical to writing obits.  He graduated from Queens College of the State University of New York in 1979 with a B.A. in communications.]

More Notes on Acting

by Kirk Woodward 

[My friend Kirk Woodward has contributed well over a hundred posts to Rick On Theater since I started the blog—at his suggestion—back in 2009.  He’s covered many subjects over those years, from personal reminiscences, play and other performance (most notably, pop music) reports, some history, and lots and lots of theater.

[As readers of ROT know by now, Kirk’s a multi-hyphenate theater person—a playwright, director, occasional actor (see below, for example), composer and lyricist, instrumentalist, theater and acting teacher, theater historian, reviewer and critic, and general commentator.  He’s blogged here in all those capacities.

[He’s also, since his younger years, a journal-keeper.  Not a few of Kirk’s posts have been based on diaries and journals he’s kept, some dating from as far back as his army service in the early 1970s, and even before.  “More Notes on Acting” is one such post.

[Also as ROTters will already know, Kirk, who lives in suburban New Jersey, is very engaged in the life of his community, including, perhaps even especially, the theater life, which is especially rich in his Jersey region.  He has written for, directed, acted in, composed for, musical-directed, and accompanied many area productions for numerous local troupes.

[Kirk’s contributions to ROT are too many to list in their entirety anymore.  So I’m going to cherry-pick the posts that cover acting specifically one way or another.  (Most of Kirk’s posts on directing, a long list in itself, also make comments pertinent to acting—so do his play reports—but adding them to the upcoming list would extend it to an unmanageable length.)

[Here, then, are Kirk Woodward’s acting posts in Rick On Theater:

·   “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” (1 June 2011)

·   “Reflections On Directing: Actors” (17 April 2013)

·   “Creative Dramatics” (30 September 2013)

·   "Reflectionson Theater Etiquette” (11 February 2014) – less about acting than about actors

·   “Memoirs of a Desperate Actor” (3 March 2015)

·   “Simon Callow” (23 June 2015)

·   “Four Actors” (30 January 2018)

·   “Notes from a Sometime Actor” (27 December 2019)

·   “Acting Class (On-Line Edition)” (4 August 2020)

·   “The Method – a Review” (12 March 2022)

·   “Acting Notes” (27 April 2022)

·   “Bombast to Beckett” (13 January 2025)

[Interested ROTters can find all of Kirk Woodward’s posts by clicking on his name.  There are also more articles on ROT about actors and acting by other authors, including me, in those links.]

I have written in this blog before about my experience as an actor in a production of the musical Follies in 2024 directed by the very talented Kristy Graves (“Performance Diary: Follies, Part 1” [15 December 2024] and “Part 2” [18 December 2024]). This year I was cast in the musical Little Women, also directed by Kristy.

The musical is based on the well-known 1868/1869 novel by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) about a close-knit family of four daughters and their mother (with the father remaining offstage) with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, and book by Alan Knee.

Little Women was performed on Broadway for a modest run of 137 performances in 2005. It toured extensively and has been produced numerous times since. It is a “chamber musical” (a small-scale musical theater production characterized by a limited cast, small orchestra, and intimate venue setting) with a cast of ten playing eighteen roles, although it can also be performed by a larger cast.

Our production, like last year’s Follies, was presented at the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. It had two performances, on April 9 and 12, 2026. I played the small role of Mr. Lawrence in the play.

Our rehearsal period had its ups and downs, like pretty much every production. The “downs” are not my subject in this article, but I will briefly summarize some of them:

·    Space availability was a problem, apparently the reason we gave only two performances. Since the space was available for rental by outside groups, we frequently had to clear the space completely after a rehearsal, which led to some late evenings. Also because of space availability, we had to hold the earlier rehearsals in the director’s living room.

·    We performed the show in a lovely second floor ballroom, with the stage area on one of the shorter walls, and the small orchestra located outside the room beyond a side double door. This was an excellent setting for the home scenes which made up most of the play, but since we were in a room, not on a stage, the backdrop could not be changed when, for example, the characters were on a beach, indicated by their sitting on a blanket.

·    Acoustically the room was close to an echo chamber. No amplification was necessary (or affordable), but voices bounced around the room. Visually, since the room was a ballroom with a level floor, visibility from the rear seats was limited. (As a result Kristy did her best not to have characters sit if she could avoid it.)

·    As always, actors’ time was limited, making it difficult to schedule rehearsals. Kristy had to make major overhauls of the rehearsal schedule twice due to shifting commitments. She held up under the strain, but it must have been difficult.

Offsetting these difficulties was the nature of the “family” in the show – all high school students, plus Kristy as the mother (Susan Knight Carlin provided a second directing eye). Every one of the school-age women was talented, skilled at singing and dancing, and thoroughly professional at things like learning their lines and being on time. [Susan Knight, as she prefers to be called professionally, is mentioned in “Performance Diary: Follies, Part 1” and “Acting Class (On-Line Edition)” (4 August 2020).]

They were a delight to work with and a challenge to us older people. They made me feel there was hope for the future. During one “notes” session I glanced over the shoulder of one of the students, who was doing her Physics homework on a tablet. Physics!

I played Mr. Laurence, the crochety grandfather of one of the boys in the play, and it’s my experience in that role that I’m writing about here, because it taught or reminded me of a number of things about acting.

I should explain that directing and playwriting, not acting, have been my major interests in theater. I took acting classes and did a moderate bit of performing onstage in the 1970’s, but little acting after that until recently. I did however teach acting, and I’m happy to report that I’ve found the things that I taught to be sound.

However, doing them is something else, and here I will describe mistakes I made (that I know of) and things I learned, or re-learned. I suppose and hope that professional actors know all these things already, but actors at my level and non-actors and non-theater people who are curious about the work might find this interesting.

IMAGES – When I was asked to play the role of Mr. Laurence, I did exactly what I’ve told acting classes for years not to do. I read the play hunting for the scenes I was in (there were five), basically ignoring the rest. I had never read the novel and had only the vaguest idea of its story, and I never really caught up with the plot until the first run-through.

That is bad enough. Not yet having the script, I skimmed through the play online, hunting for the scenes I was in. But there’s worse. Gathering that Mr. Laurence was a difficult, cranky old man, I immediately formed an image of what a difficult, cranky old man would be like. (I had little problem with the “old” part.)

What’s wrong with that? The question is, what’s right with it? Over a hundred years ago, the director and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), followed by numerous others, stressed the importance of the actor’s developing a character “from the inside,” from what the character wants and what the character does to get what it wants.

To ignore this – to begin with an “image,” or in other words a cliché – is to turn a specific character into a generalized, unmoored notion of an unspecific person. If we think about it even a moment we realize what a bad idea this is. My two grandmothers and grandfathers were utterly unlike each other. We are all individuals. That’s part of what drama often wants to teach us.

I ignored it and spent most of the rehearsal period trying to undo the image and work from the specifics of my character.

ONE THING AT A TIME – As a director, a few years ago I began to believe it’s important that actors be given a goal for each rehearsal (or section of a rehearsal), something they can focus on, such as “Tonight we’ll only be working on the words of the script,” or “For this run-through please just concentrate on in-the-moment contact with the person you’re talking to.” [Kirk addresses this same practice from a director’s point of view in “All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes, Part 2” (29 November 2025).]

The effect of this approach is to reduce strain for the actors, keeping them from trying to do everything at once. Practically speaking their acting improves a great deal under these conditions, because they’re not worrying about it – their focus is elsewhere, on whatever the director has pointed them to.

Given the role of Mr. Laurence, though, I completely forgot this idea, and tried to do everything at each rehearsal. I should have applied what I learned as a director and set myself a goal for each rehearsal – “this time just focus on your lines,” “this time really listen to the other actor.” I finally caught on, but late in the process.

This approach reminds me of what I’ve read about the film directing technique of Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), who dislikes re-shooting a scene and has been known to film a scene’s rehearsal, unbeknownst to the actors, and use it in the finished movie. He wants to remove the stress of acting from the performers as much as possible, and the same is true of the idea I have described here.

The next points are common currency, but I again saw their importance and I feel they’re worth mentioning.

KEY POINTS – My daughter Heather tells me she realized this idea in drama school; it came to me much later, and yet surely it’s obvious: an actor should identify which points in a scene must be made clear to the audience, so it can follow the story with security.

Sometimes these moments are difficult to miss – “I’m going to kill you someday,” that sort of thing. Sometimes they are quite subtle, and yet the play may not make sense without them. It’s best, I’d think, to start from the obvious and work to the more hidden. At the back of an actor’s mind should be the need to make sure the points are clearly made.

I’m guessing this idea is probably not taught in many acting schools, where the emphasis may be on what the character is feeling and wanting. That’s fine and important, but somewhere along the line the needs of the play and the audience ought to be addressed. Once the “plot points” are identified by the actor, they don’t need to be dwelled on – just presented clearly.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? – Many scenes grow out of some earlier scene that the audience doesn’t witness. Those earlier scenes are fuel for the actor. In my first scene in Little Women, I have just seen, out my window, one of the girls next door chopping down one of my trees and dragging it into her house for a Christmas tree.

This fact should be – and was – enough to send me charging into the next scene, in which I confront the family and the girl, who is standing next to the tree. A piece of cake! – if I’ve made the preceding moment clear to myself, and refreshed it just before I go on stage.

DISCOVERIES – Because as actors we learn lines, we subconsciously come to think of a scene as a series of things that inevitably have to be thought or said. At least it often feels that way. However, for the characters in the play, none of those things have happened yet, and many of the things that characters do and say are motivated by discoveries, new realizations about something.

There may be only a few of those discoveries in a scene, or as many as several times in a single line of dialogue – it all depends on the play. If as actors we identify those discovery moments in advance, then when they come up we can let the discovery “hit” us as though for the first time, think our way through it (very fast, usually), and respond more freshly than we otherwise would.

Because we had a week-long break in rehearsals due to school vacations, I had leisure to go over these points using the script and to try and get them into my mind. I tried to work methodically with these points in mind, and found it difficult to stick to the program – my acting habits, as opposed to my directing habits, were deeply ingrained, or, possibly, just needed developing.

(On the other hand, I can’t help thinking these limitations in my acting skills have helped me as a director, because I seldom if ever have the impulse to show an actor how something should be done, a practice that is widely frowned on today. I do like the story about the director George Abbott (1887-1995), who, criticized for giving an actor line readings, replied, “How else will they know what I want?” [See “George Abbott” (14 October 2018).])

A few more observations:

Kristy, our director, has a remarkable ability to work on many things at once. As a result she at least visibly takes calmly things that would drive me to distraction. As I’ve already said, she is an excellent director, with a creative approach to a script, a fine visual sense, and a straightforward way of working with actors. I’d enjoy seeing how she directed under relatively calm conditions.

Possibly because of time constraints, there was relatively little feedback on performances up to the last couple of rehearsals, not a lot of comment on how things were going one way or the other. I had no idea whether people thought I did a good job or were just putting up with me. However, I realized that I was happy not getting specific praise because I felt it would make me wonder whether I could repeat that good thing I’d done, or not.

Final rehearsals went the way they usually do – the lights were a day late arriving, we tried to work straight through the show each night but had to stop to fix things, and the focus became more and more on opening night and not on that particular night’s rehearsal.

On the daily schedule updates that Kristy sent out during the last week (“production week”), the last item read “Clean (?).” I assumed that meant straightening up the mess that always accumulates backstage in theater productions. I should have realized that what she meant was, “Clean up whatever small problems remain to be fixed.”

I adopted two mottos for keeping myself in focus during our final rehearsals. The first was “clarity and calmness” – that is, focus on what my character was doing, and breathe.

The second came when my friend Janet Aldrich, who has had a major theater career including Broadway, walked by muttering to herself, “In the moment.” That’s a phrase that actors often use; it means to be there each moment in a scene, not thinking about something else. Like everything else, it takes work to get in that frame of mind, but it definitely helped me concentrate.

One thing I made it a point to do was to thank the orchestra and the lighting operator for their contributions. I’ve played in the orchestra for a couple of high school shows, and we had no connection with the casts of those shows at all, which I don’t think is a healthy condition. The people who support the production should not be taken for granted.

My friend Annie asked if I felt jitters before performances, so I tried to understand how I actually did feel at those times. On the surface, my principal feeling was curiosity – I wondered how it all would go. Underneath, I suspect, was a deep reservoir of panic, but if so it never became conscious. I knew I had worked diligently on the project; I just hoped that was enough.

Hopefully there comes a time when a difficult task turns into an enjoyable experience. A great deal of the satisfaction of theater comes at the end of it, after a great deal of work. On the day we opened, driving here and there, thinking about the show, I found myself thinking, “I love this!”

I didn’t love, quite as much, the mistakes I made in the first performance – two involving lines, and one when I took off a costume too soon and couldn’t sing onstage in a chorus number (I sang just offstage). The second and last performance, I was almost letter perfect. That’s show business!

Tamizdat – Тамиздат

[The article reposted below, about books banned in the Soviet Union (and now also in Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation), caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it’s about Russian literature, and, as many readers of Rick On Theater will know, I studied Russian in college and then in the army. 

[Two, I am utterly opposed to censorship for political or religious reasons.  As I’ve said many time on this blog, I am pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  I’ve blogged on various kinds of censorship, mostly in this country, on ROT, and, having read “Banned by the Soviets,” I knew I had to add it to my coverage of this act.]

“BANNED BY THE SOVIETS, AVAILABLE IN NEW YORK”
by Sarah Chatta

[This article ran in the print edition of the New York Times on 1 March 2026 in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted online as “The Kremlin Banned These Books. You Can Find Them in a New York Library” on 23 February.]

A professor has built a collection of contraband books from an earlier era.

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper.

Soviet tourists visiting Western Europe brought mini-volumes of “Doctor Zhivago” [Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), 1957 in Russian (Milan, Italy); 1958 in English (New American Library)] back home with them. Members of the Moscow Philharmonic were said to have lined their sheet music with book pages. From balloon-launching sites in West Germany, copies of George Orwell’s [1903-50] “Animal Farm” [English; 1945] were lofted into Eastern Europe.

Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world.

[Hunter College at Park Avenue and East 68th Street is a division of the City University of New York (CUNY).]

The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

[White Rabbit Books at 200 West 86th Street, Manhattan, New York City, is a bookstore with Russian, English, Ukrainian, and Hebrew books designed for various children’s ages.  It hosts book club activities and cultural events for children and teenagers. (White Rabbit Books in the United Kingdom is a prominent music and literary publisher based in London and Essex, not associated with the NYC shop.)]

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through.

[Chatta is a little free with her English renderings of samizdat (самиздат) and tamizdat (тамиздат). They’re two Russian portmanteau words formed by joining two words (or parts of two words, to coin a new word that combines their meanings (English examples: ‘televangelist’ = ‘television’ + ‘evangelist’; ‘cockapoo’ = ‘cocker spaniel’ + ‘poodle’).

[The Russians, and especially the Soviets, were very fond of acronyms (GUM [ГУМ]; Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín [Государственный Универсальный Магазин], or State Universal [that is, ‘Department’] Store; since 1991, Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin [Главный Универсальный Магазин], Main Universal Store) and portmanteaus (Soviet: Comintern [Коминтерн]; Communist International [Коммунистический интернационал; Kommunisticheskiy internatsional]; post-Soviet: Zomboyashchik [Зомбоящик], Zombie [зомби] +  Yashchik [ящик; ‘box’] = “Zombie Box,” slang for a television).

[In this instance, the second part of the portmanteaus is from the word izdatel'stvo (издательство), which means ‘publishing house’ or ‘publisher.’ The portmanteau use was meant as a pun on the name of the official Soviet state publishing house, Gosudarstvennoye izdatel'stvo (Государственное издательство), known as Gosizdat (Госиздат).

[Sam (сам) is the Russian word for ‘self’ (samoubiystvo [самоубийство]: ‘suicide,’ literally ‘self-murder’), so samizdat is literally ‘self-publisher’ (as if there were publishing company with such a name) or, more colloquially, ‘self-published.’ Unfortunately, in the more comfortable English term, the wry pun is lost—but it probably wouldn’t really connect with an English speaker in any case.

[Tam (там) is Russian for ‘there’ (the opposite of tut [тут; ‘here’]), so tamizdat (тамиздат) is literally ‘there-publisher’ or ‘over there-publisher’—meaning, of course, somewhere other than the USSR.  Again, we’d more likely say ‘published abroad.’

Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle [b. 1954; U.S. Ambassador to Russia: 2008-12].

With this collection, the story of the “significant intellectual effort of both Soviet creators and Western partners — the publishers and funders and whoever else, smugglers — it is all in one place,” said Alla Roylance, New York University’s Slavic studies librarian, who donated some of her own books to the Tamizdat Project. “That is incredibly relevant these days,” she added, as the Kremlin unleashes a new wave of censorship.

Page by page

Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident, best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian, 1962; English – censored, 1963; uncensored, 1991), August 1914 (Russian, 1971; English, 1972), and The Gulag Archipelago (Russian, 1973 by a Parisian publisher; English, 1974).]

“One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said.

Countless Soviet households have similar stories of treasuring contraband literature — hiding “Doctor Zhivago” under a grandmother’s mattress, making a copy of the poet Anna Akhmatova’s masterpiece, “Requiem.”

[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian and Soviet poet who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She is best known for Requiem, an elegy about the Stalinist terror (published in Russian in Munich in 1963 and in English in 1973).]

In the winter of 2022, Mr. Klots had just finished writing a book about the history of Cold War censorship [Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023)]. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Kremlin began a crackdown on free expression at home at a scale unseen since the Soviet era. Russian officials targeted authors, arrested publishers and censored fan fiction websites. The police raided bookstores, and officials drew up lists of objectionable literature, requiring librarians to pull works by Vladimir Sorokin [Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright; b. 1955], Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Russian novelist and short story writer; b. 1943], Haruki Murakami [Japanese novelist, essayist, and short story writer; b. 1949], Truman Capote [American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright; 1924-84], Susan Sontag [American critic, essayist, and novelist; 1933-2004] and Danielle Steel [American romance novelist; b. 1947], among others.

“All of a sudden it became no longer history, but the present and reality again,” Mr. Klots said. “I just couldn’t stand in front of my students and only teach and only tell them about the peculiarities of Russian literature.”

[It’s also not confined to the former Soviet Union! On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools. See “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025). 

[An order to remove certain books from service academy libraries was issued on 29 March 2025. The action was directed at the U.S. Naval Academy before being expanded to West Point (9 April) and the Air Force Academy (15/16 April).]

He founded the Tamizdat Project, through which he built the library, raised money to help students fleeing war and persecution, and archived oral histories of literary repression. When the Tamizdat Project announced it was publishing a book by an author critical of President Vladimir Putin [Linor Goralik, Exodus-22 | Исход-22; 2025], Russia branded the organization a “foreign agent.” Now, anyone in Russia who so much as shares the Tamizdat Project’s website without a disclaimer could be penalized.

Mr. Klots shrugged off the threat. The Tamizdat Project plans to publish five new titles this winter and spring. If history is any indication, he said, the impact of a tamizdat book could be like a stone thrown in a lake: “Wherever it falls, the waves get much bigger.”

A pure detective story

New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.

The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” [Мы, romanized: My] — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin [Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire; 1884-1937] — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York.

“It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said.

Chekhov Publishing House received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency through the Ford Foundation, writes the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders [British journalist and historian; b. 1966] in “The Cultural Cold War,” and was one of numerous literary ventures in the city supported by the agency. The C.I.A. also had a banned-book dissemination program, known for years as the International Literary Center, headquartered on Park Avenue. Under the stewardship of the exiled Romanian aristocrat George Minden [1921-2006], the organization ran a vast international book distribution network that smuggled some 10 million books and magazines into communist countries, often by mail and in diplomatic pouches.

At its height, the Cold War project of printing literature banned in — and very often destined for — communist countries explicitly involved more than a dozen New York publishing houses.

Government analysts described Cold War book distribution, probably one of the least expensive of the C.I.A.’s covert operations, as a “demonstrably effective” way of reaching the Soviet elite and influencing their attitudes “toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.”

Newly relevant

As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”

One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline [1932-2017], a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work.

The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam [Soviet writer, translator, educator, linguist, and memoirist; 1899-1980], Lydia Chukovskaya [Soviet and Russian writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident; 1907-96] and Joseph Brodsky [Russian and American poet and essayist; 1940-96].

Mr. Kline’s daughter, Carole Feuer [b. 1960], spoke with the Tamizdat Project about the years when Soviet exiles like Mr. Brodsky frequented her family’s Park Avenue apartment. During one visit, a leading dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexander Godunov [1949-95], defected to the United States in her living room [1979]. “He was somewhat cute,” she said, “and it was the day I was supposed to go to college.”

Several years earlier, Mr. Kline started Khronika Press with the Soviet dissidents Valery Chalidze [Soviet author, publisher, dissident, and human rights activist; 1938-2018] and later Pavel Litvinov [Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident; b. 1940]. Khronika produced a bimonthly magazine in Russian and English that regularly broke news of arrests and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union [A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (1973-82); Хроника защиты прав человека в СССР (Khronika zashchity prav cheloveka v SSSR)]. For a time it served as the main voice of the Soviet opposition.

Without Mr. Kline, his old collaborator Mr. Litvinov told the Tamizdat Project, Khronika Press “wouldn’t have existed.”

A growing movement

Today Mr. Klots is one of many in a growing community of Eastern European immigrants picking up where the Soviet human rights movement left off. A new group of Russian dissidents recently created a new Kronika in New York, this time backed by PEN America [nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide] and Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], with a more expansive mandate than its predecessors: to preserve independent media from places where journalists are persecuted, including Russia and Guatemala. It calls this work “digital resistance to state censorship.”

In Brooklyn, Anya Morlan-Stysis opened Kvartira [731 Washington Avenue], a nonprofit bookstore that caters to Eastern European exiles and their supporters. Against bright yellow walls and a wide array of children’s literature, Kvartira hosts talks with dissident authors and evenings for participants to write letters to political prisoners. It is the only brick-and-mortar shop listed in New York City as a vendor by the banned-book publisher Freedom Letters. (Last September Russia added the store’s website to a register of proscribed sites, citing unspecified “extremist information.”)

In 2024 Knopf published “Patriot,” the memoir of the late opposition leader Aleksei Navalny [1976-2024], which Russia has since outlawed for inciting “hatred and enmity” toward the government. Last summer Abrams [Books; U.S. publishing house] released an English translation of “Pioneer Summer” [by Ukrainian-Russian duo Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova], the gay teen romance that the Kremlin banned after it became a popular sensation. This represents only a small fraction of the global output of contraband titles, some 600 or 700 by Mr. Klots’s estimate, produced since 2023.

[The Pioneers (Пионеры) was a children’s communist organization in the USSR. Children joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.

[On the surface, the Pioneers resembled the Boy Scouts and other similar organizations, but along with the scouting activities, community projects like collecting scrap metal, and sports, the Pioneers also went through ideological indoctrination and military simulation games and basic military instruction.

[Membership was virtually mandatory as the Pioneers and the Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth. Inducements, such as preferential admission to universities and especially to the top schools, made membership attractive. Children who chose not to join were often marginalized by their peers as well as the party apparatus that controlled access to both amenities and necessities.]

“I can’t help thinking about what will actually remain from this new time of tamizdat that’s so exponentially growing today,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone reading Solzhenitsyn as their bedtime reading, can you? But everyone was doing it not so long ago.”

The Tamizdat Project hopes to help a new generation rediscover such books. “It’s enough for a text to find itself elsewhere for it to become a new book,” Mr. Klots said.

[I served five years in the army in the early 1970s, a low-point in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, as a Military Intelligence officer, including, as ROTters will know, a 2½-year tour in West Berlin.  Though both samizdat and tamizdat were in practice at that time, I never had any contact with that kind of publication.

[Years after I got out of the service and was trying to make my way in the theater in New York City, however, I saw first-hand the final chapter of a story that began with a variation on both publishing tactics.  (I’ve told this story on ROT before, but readers, I think, will excuse me for telling it again here.)

[I got to know experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) in the mid-1980s and into the early ’90s (and have blogged about him, his company, and their work many times).  In 1992, when I was researching a profile of Shapiro and The Shaliko Company for The Drama Review, the director was in rehearsal for his third staging of Kafka: Father and Son by Russian dramatist and director Mark Rozovsky (b. 1937).

[Shaliko had produced the play first from 28 February to 24 March 1985 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, its world première.  It’s the story of the play’s origin and how Shapiro got the script and brought it home that’s pertinent here.

[In March 1984, Shapiro and his partner in The Shaliko Company, Elena Prischepenko went to Russia on a three-week theater tour with a group of theater professionals.  The tour spent two weeks in Moscow and at the Soviet writers’ union, Shapiro made “a rather intemperate . . . speech” about seeing so many plays with “happy endings.”  He asked the assembled playwrights why they didn’t “have the courage to talk about life as it really was.” 

[According to Shapiro, after the session, Rozovsky told him, “I have play, no happy ending, you want?”  They arranged to meet secretly and the playwright turned over the manuscript of Kafka: Father and Son (Russian: Кафка: отец и сын), “[j]ust like . . . a spy novel.” 

[Rozovsky had workshopped Kafka at the Moscow Art Theater Studio around 1983, but Pyotr Demichev (1918-2010), Minister of Culture for Soviet leader Yuri Andropov (1914-84; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1982-84), who’d been Chairman of the KGB from 1967 until 1982, cancelled the performances after the second preview, because the Czech embassy protested that discussions of the works of Franz Kafka (Czech; 1883-1924) had been the incitement for the start of the Prague Spring of 1968, so it never officially opened. 

[Shapiro said he “smuggled it out under my shirt,” and Prischepenko translated it when they got back to the United States.  In March 1985, Shapiro presented the world première of Kafka: Father and Son.  The play was both “published” (in typescript only) by samizdat and, since it was accomplished abroad, by tamizdat.

[After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1985-91; President of the Soviet Union: 1990-91) initiated his policy of glasnost’, or ‘openness,’ in 1986, Rozovsky was permitted to stage the play at his Theater at the Nikitsky Gate and he invited Shapiro to come to Moscow to direct it.  Rehearsals were in April 1990 and the Russian (and Russian-language) première was in May.

[Here’s a list of past posts on the topic of censorship: 

•   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)

•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)

•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)

•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)

•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)

•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)

•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)

•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)

•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)

•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)

•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)

•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)

•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025)

•   “More on Censorship of School Theater” (12 December 2025)

[Sarah Chatta is an editorial assistant in the Opinion department of the New York Times.  In addition to her editorial work, she writes for the paper.  Before joining the Times in October 2024, Chatta held several diverse roles in journalism and education, including fact-checker at the New Yorker, where her writing and translations were also published; freelance editor for Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian newspaper published in Riga, Latvia; investigative story coordinator for the syndicated tabloid television newsmagazine Inside Edition; and international reporter for the Daily News in Sri Lanka and the Chilkat Valley News in Alaska.  Chatta studied Russian and creative writing at Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio), which informs much of her current reporting on Russian literary and cultural history.]