More Script Reports III: Translations

 

[As the third installment of my old script evaluations I’ve chosen a quartet of foreign plays offered in translation.  These were all contemporary plays by then-living playwrights—all from Europe as it happens.  (Three of the authors died since I read their plays and made my reports.) 

[All four of the writers—an Icelander, a Pole, an Austrian, and a German—were prominent and highly regarded in their own countries by the time I got their scripts.  Only two became somewhat known here: Thomas Bernhard and Slawomir Mrożek; Mrożek became famous to U.S. audiences for one play, Tango.  None of the plays evaluated below became part of the American theater canon.]

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[Kjartan Ragnarsson (b. 1945 in Reykjavík. Iceland) is an actor, director, playwright, and translator.  He graduated from the Drama School of the Reykjavík Theatre Company in 1966 and studied further for the theater in Poland from 1968 to 1970, where he studied with the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski.  

[Starting in 1966, Ragnarsson was an actor and director with the RTC and he also directed for the National Theatre and the Student Theatre at the University of Iceland.  He has directed in most of the theaters in the Northland, staging many of his own plays and adaptations.

[Ragnarsson wrote his first play in 1975 and for the rest of that decade, he wrote realistic plays, mostly comedies.  In the ’80s, the budding playwright moved away from Realism and the conventional structure of the mid-century drama and into an epic structure dealing less with domestic themes and more with historical subjects.

[Jói (“Joe” or “Joey”) was first staged in September 1981 by the RTC, premièring in the International Year of Disabled Persons.  The young actor who played the title role in the play’s début asserted that Ragnarsson had written Jói expressly for the occasion.]

StageArts SCRIPT EVALUATION 

Date:  7/28/84
Evaluator:  [Rick]

Joi by Kjartan Ragnarsson, trans. by Martin Regal

PLOT:  This story is not really about Joi at all, but his sister, Loa, and her husband, Halidor (Dori).  Joi is retarded, and, at 30, behaves and understands like a little boy.  When his mother goes to the hospital, he comes to stay with Loa and Dori and, though they come to love him, he disrupts their life completely. 

When the mother dies, the family must decide what to do about Joi.  Dad can’t take care of him alone and keep his job; brother Bjarni has just gotten married; Loa and Dori plan to go to Germany for 3 years on a grant. 

Joi is placed in a home, but runs away to Loa and Dori.  They decide to keep him, but their home life is nearly destroyed and neither can work.  Finally they convince Joi to make them a gift of the 3 years in Germany by agreeing to stay in the home until they return.

When he is gone, Loa and Dori confront one another with the understanding that their promise to Joi may be a lie, and they wonder what each of them would do if the other became a similar burden.

THEME:  No one wants to take responsibility for the disabled.  (The play was written in 1981, the Year of the Disabled.)  Each family member has his/her own reasons not to accept Joi, and each places the responsibility for the final decision to place Joi in a home on someone else.

GENRE/STYLE:  Basically, realistic drama, but each scene is separated by an “interlude” in which Joi has an imaginary conversation with Superman (yes, the comic book character!).

STRUCTURE:  6 scenes, 5 “interludes”—no act break(s).  Except for the fantasy sequences, the structure is conventional.

SETTING:  Loa and Dori’s apartment in Iceland (probably Reykjavik); could be transferred to US with minor changes.

LANGUAGE:  Realistic dialogue (even “interludes”); Regal’s translation is a bit stiff and leaden, but could be rewritten with little effort.  It will never be extraordinary in any case.

CHARACTERS:  2 women: Loa is 29/30, Maggie (Bjarni’s wife) is late 20’s/early 30’s; 5 men: Dad is late 50’s, Bjarni is mid-/late 30’s, Joi is 30, Superman is “Superman.” 

The characters are hard to peg—possibly the fault of the translation.  They seem to vacillate and change personality frequently and without justification.  They are stiff and underdeveloped; even Joi is not a convincing retarded man—just very childlike. 

There would be great acting problems here—possibly insuperable ones.

EVALUATION:  This play disappointed me.  I had hoped it would develop into a real drama dealing with the rights/struggles of the disabled.  It never really deals with much and the focus is not on Joi at all, but his sister and brother-in-law. 

Furthermore, despite the obvious intent of Ragnarsson that I should expect Joi’s family to sacrifice their own lives to care for him full-time, I kept feeling that this was somehow wrong. 

I have friends with a severely retarded daughter [she was a Down’s child], the same age now as Joi.  As much as they love her—and there are also 2 married siblings, just as in the play—they could not keep her at home after her early teens.  She and they are much happier with her in a special school from which she comes home on holidays.  Sacrificing the fabric of the family would have destroyed it.

Ragnarsson has created a false dichotomy—either full-time, in-family care or compete abandonment.  There is a viable, real, and beneficial third choice, as my friends have demonstrated.  Ragnarsson ignores this option entirely. 

(In one last parallel to my real-life case, the retarded girl’s older sister, when she was single, acted as a volunteer at the special school, increasing the family contact the little girl [she was really a woman by this time] received even when she was away from home.  Loa is a “family psychologist”—why could she not do a similar service for Joi?) 

All in all, I feel Ragnarsson just touches the surface of the problem and does not create a really dramatic situation.  I doubt the script would play well at all.

RECOMMENDATION:  Reject

SOURCE: NR [Nell Robinson, one the StageArts artistic directors]

[The Down’s woman in my example died about 20 years after this report was written.  Her parents predeceased her, but her older sister, who by then was married and the mother of a son and daughter, both now approaching middle age themselves, continued to bring her little sister home for holidays.  Unlike the character Joi in the play, this woman had the mind of a 4- or 5-year-old (Joi’s mental age is about 10) and was non-verbal.

[Many years later, I found myself in an analogous situation with my mother.  At the end of her life, she was afflicted with dementia.  In addition, she was quite old and increasingly frail.  I left my home in New York City and moved into her apartment in Maryland until it was no longer safe for her, at which time I found a memory-care facility nearby where she lived out the last months of her life.  I visited her daily, ate meals with her, and participated with her in whatever activities she could manage. 

[It took me months after her death to rebuild my life in New York, but my only regrets were that I sometimes think of things I could have done better or ways I could have helped her that I didn’t think of at the time.  The time I gave my mom at the end of her life is not something I’m sorry I did.  But, unlike the family in Joi, I was not a young married just starting out; I’d done most of whatever I was going to accomplish.]

*  *  *  *

[Sławomir Mrożek (1930-2013) was a Polish dramatist, writer, satirist, and cartoonist born in Borzęcin, a village (pop. 2,900) in southern Poland.  His plays, in the style of the theater of the absurd, dealt with philosophical, political, moral, and psychological themes.  

[Mrozeck was born in the interwar period of the Second Polish Republic, ostensibly a constitutional democracy; he was a schoolboy of 9 when Germany invaded to start World War II and he and his family lived in Krakow under the Nazi occupation while he finished elementary school and started high school.  He was a young man of 18 when he graduated from a Krakow high school in what by then was the Polish People’s Republic, a member of the Soviet bloc of communist nations.

[Mrożek joined the Polish United Workers’ Party, the communist party that ran the Polish People’s Republic and supported the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union.  He took a job as a reportorial shill for the government on a weekly magazine and in 1950 made his début as political cartoonist in the magazine.  He wrote his first play, The Police, in 1958. 

[The budding playwright’s youthful attraction to communism passed quickly and his ideas changed radically. He explained that as a very young man, he was ready to accept any ideological position without much questioning as long as it was revolutionary.

[In 1963 he traveled to Italy and then in 1968, to France, where he became a citizen in 1978.  Mrożek’s peripatetic exile later took him to the United States, Germany, and finally Mexico, where he lived from 1989 to 1996, when he returned to Poland, now a democratic republic again after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. 

[During his expatriate period, Mrożek  took a decidedly anti-communist and anti-Soviet stance in his writing.  He became Poland’s best-known writer abroad.  His first play during his self-exile, Tango (1964), was also his best-known work and his most produced abroad.  It was staged for the first time in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in 1965.

[Tango was translated into about two dozen languages (including Esperanto) and made Mrożek  an internationally known dramatist.  In 1966, it was presented in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged by Trevor Nunn, and Minneapolis’s Tyrone Guthrie Theater débuted the play in St. Paul in December 1968.  Tango had its New York City première in January 1969.  (In the cast as David Margulies, an actor whose gotten notice on this blog several times and who seven years later would become a teacher of mine.)

[Letni dzień, the Polish title of the play evaluated below, was first performed on the Chamber Stage of Warsaw’s Polish Theater in 1984.  A Summer’s Day had its U.S. (and English-language) première at Chocago’s Eclipse Theatre in 1996, and it had its British première at the Red Lion Theatre in London in 2000.]

StageArts SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  3/16/85
Reader:  [Rick]

AUTHOR/(TRANSLATOR):  Slawomir Mrożek/(Jacek Laskowski)

TITLE:  A Summer’s Day [Polish: Letni dzień, 1983]

GENRE/STYLE:  Absurdist tragicomedy

STRUCTURE:  3 acts, French scenes. Continuous action w/in one day.

SETTING:  A park; an open-air cafe; a beach.  All are minimalistic and somewhat surreal in a Beckettian sense.

LANGUAGE:  Absurdist dialogue, very Beckettian, at least in translation, which tends toward British.  There are some long speeches, but most is conversation of a very heightened symbolism.  It will require a specific style consistent throughout—individual idiosyncrasies will destroy this language.  (I’d like to see the translation Americanized.)

NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS:  2 men, 1 30’s, 1 40’s; 1 woman, 30’s.

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT:  As with most absurdist drama, they have little past and no real future; they exist in the play only.  All are people stripped down to their most basic characteristics:  self-effacing insecurity, self-assured security, complete selfishness.  At the risk of over-using the term, they are quintessentially Beckettian, though perhaps slightly less stark.

CONCEPTION:  Selfishness is the handmaiden of success; there is no such thing as an altruistic success.  The successful man, faced with possible defeat, will resort to deviousness and deceit.  Also, as someone already said, “It’s not the earth the meek inherit, it’s the dirt!”

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST:  The simplicity and directness of the statement and the starkness of the medium.  Also, the bleak message is sent in a charming and humorous style.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  Unsux (for “unsuccessful”) is about to hang himself in the park when Sux (for “successful”) happens by.  It turns out they are contemplating the same thing for opposite reasons.  A beautiful Lady passes, and Unsux is taken with her.  He persuades Sux to assist him in approaching her, and they all plan to meet at the beach later.  Manipulated by Sux, who has feigned no interest in the Lady, Unsux drowns, leaving Sux and the Lady together alone.  It is “Godot meets The Zoo Story and Luv.”

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:  I liked this play; it has humor and a peculiar charm that appeals to me.  I’ve already indicated that it reminds me very much of Beckett, whom I like a lot.  With the right director, this could make a startling stage presentation.  Has it ever been done in the US? 

I do have a couple of minor reservations, though.  It is very reminiscent of Beckett, and may seem out-of-date theatrically.  This is very much the kind of theater that was being done 25 years ago here.  Theatrically, this isn’t breaking any new ground.  (When was it written, by the way?)

The other small problem is its length: it’s only 32 pages long.  It wouldn’t be an hour long in performance, I wouldn’t imagine.  It would almost certainly need a companion piece, and I don’t really know what to suggest.  (I think a Beckett would be a bad idea.)  One thought occurs to me: If you have any plans to present shows at untraditional times, this might make a terrific late-night or lunch-time piece for a certain kind of audience. 

RECOMMENDATION:  I doubt a reading would tell us anything, but a workshop production with a director and some tech support might reveal the theatricality I’m afraid is missing and give us an idea where to go with it. 

(personal note:  If you do decide to do something with this, I’d like a crack at Unsux.)

*  *  *  *

[Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet, born in Heerlen, Netherlands.  Winner of the 1970 Georg Büchner Prize, one of the two most important awards for German-language literature (the other‘s the Goethe Prize), he’s one of the most internationally important Austrian and German-speaking authors.

[Die Macht der Gewohnheit, the German title of Force of Habit, premièred in 1974 at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.  That performance was followed in 1975 by a transfer of the same production to Hamburg, Germany’s Deutsches Schauspielhaus.

[(The German title of Bernhard’s play uses the word Macht, which is ‘force’ in the sense of ‘power’ or ‘might’; it’s sometimes translated as The Power of Habit—which, of course, removes the pun of the English idiom, which, according to Dictionary.com, has the secondary meaning of “behavior occurring without thought and by virtue of constant repetition.”)

[Force of Habit’s English-language première was at the Lyttelton Theatre of London’s National Theatre in 1976.  Its U.S. début was at Theatre Emory in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1985. The play doesn’t seem to have been staged in New York City.  (In 2016, the play was presented at Tel Aviv University in Israel.)

[Cynthia Jenner, my principal dramaturgy teacher at New York University who was trying to launch Theatre Junction, had been a literary advisor at the American Place Theatre for several seasons and often used its files of script reports as a resource for both my work at StageArts (I was even given access to APT’s files and spent several hours looking through the reports on reposit there) and for Theatre Junction.

[I believe Force of Habit was one of the APT report files Cynthia pulled and circulated among those of us helping her with the inception of TJ.  Copies of the previous evals, including hers, would have been attached; unfortunately, I don’t have them anymore as they were most likely returned to Cynthia with our own reports.]

THEATRE JUNCTION SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  3/17/85
Reader:  [Rick]

AUTHOR/(TRANSLATOR):  Thomas Bernhard/(Michael Feingold)

TITLE:  Force of Habit [German: Die Macht der Gewohnheit, 1974]

GENRE/STYLE:  Structuralist comedy-drama

STRUCTURE:  3 scenes; musical structure, the scenes acting as movements; repetitive and circular.

SETTING:  Interior of a circus wagon; very non-realistic: suggested, abstract, surreal—anything but realism!

LANGUAGE:  Free verse; symbolic, repetitive, rhythmic poetry.  The dialogue varied from monosyllabic to very long poetic passages that fold back on themselves in repetitions, variations on themes and non-sequiturs.

MUSIC/LYRICS:  None per se, but the characters are rehearsing the Trout Quintet and tune their instruments, though they never actually play them.  A few bars of the TQ are heard on the radio at the end.

NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS:  4 men, 1 woman; ages are indeterminate, though the woman must pass as the granddaughter of one of the men, and another character must pass as his nephew.  The woman, probably a very young girl, must be able to do ballet pointe exercises, and one man must be able to do some simple tumbles and clowning.  All the characters must be able to manipulate their instruments (violin, cello, viola, bass and piano), though no real playing occurs.

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT:  They have no history or future, but exist only in the world of the play.  The four circus performers all draw their meaning from Caribaldi, the circus master who formed the quintet.

CONCEPTION:  Obsession with perfection is self-defeating. Life is an obligation to do something you don’t like doing and a circular series of delaying tactics.

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST:  The musical structure—language as music.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  As this play has already been read and reported on several time, I’ll defer to the existing reports.

[As I said above, Force of Habit had been read by others before me, and I didn’t repeat their plot summaries in my report (though I probably stapled the previous evaluations to my submission).  Here’s what’s missing with respect to the plot synopsis: 

[The play deals with the same theme in all three acts: circus master Caribaldi tries desperately to make the performance of the Trout Quintet possible.  It’s a really terrible experience, because the rehearsals of the quintet are always sabotaged by one of the artists.  For example, the Lion Tamer often gets drunk, annoys everyone with his favorite dish, radishes, and makes the rehearsal impossible.  

[In the 3rd act, the Clown’s constant losing his cap becomes a recurring problem and irritates Caribaldi.  In these situations, Caribaldi always tries to list the mistakes of the others and to correct them, but he’s usually ridiculed by the artists.  His Granddaughter especially, whom he’s forced to play the viola, tries to trip him up.  She knows incredibly well how to irritate Caribaldi with her spiteful laughter.]

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:  I cannot say I really “got into” this play.  I presume it will play better than it reads—I’m sure Bernhard never wrote it to be read since the sounds of the words should be a major part of the performance.  I’m not convinced that it will stage with enough theatricality to be anything but talky and repetitive.  I found myself lulled to sleep by the repetitiveness and circularity. 

                        Though I don’t see it in the script, there may be possibilities to create theatricality (of what style, I don’t know) given the right director.  I realize there is a strong commitment to this play [on the part of Cynthia and TJ, though I don’t recall the circumstances], but I have this vision of an abundance of language just lying there on the stage.  Forgive me—it’s just not my cuppa.

RECOMMENDATION:  I won’t commit, since I know how important this play is to Theatre Junction.  Maybe a reading would convince me, but since my fear is its inaction, a reading may just compound it.  I’d consider a workshop—not for the playwright, but for me.

*  *  *  *

[Dieter Forte (1935-2019), was a German author and playwright, born in Düsseldorf.  After finishing school, young Forte worked at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus from 1960 to 1961 under artistic director Karl-Heinz Stroux.

[In 1970, Forte became the playwright-in-residence at Theater Basel in Basel, Switzerland; his predecessor in the position was internationally renowned Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-90; The Visit [Der Besuch der alten Dame], 1956).  Many of his plays premièred at Theater Basel.

[Forte made his playwriting debut in 1970 with Luther, Münzer and the Bookkeepers of the Reformation which became an international success and marked the start of a trilogy about European civilization and the beginning of globalization.  The play made its début at Theater Basel because the city of Düsseldorf prohibited Stroux from staging Forte’s maiden drama at the Schauspielhaus.

[The reason was kept under wraps until the playwright revealed it to a local newspaper just before his death; the story ran in a local paper in 2020: an oral agreement—they’d been discussing the possibility since 1968, before there was even a line of dialogue on paper—had been made between Forte and Stroux, who really wanted to bring his young assistant’s first play to the Schauspielhaus stage to inaugurate the company’s new building.

[But the city politicians were angry at Forte because, as a native Düsseldorfer, he’d accepted a position at the municipal theater of Basel.  Rumors also had it that the local church officials had a hand in the ban, perhaps because Forte’s play seemed to denigrate Martin Luther.  Forte’s plays were banned in Düsseldorf, he said, right up to his death.

[Luther/Münzer (as it came to called for short) was a great success all over Germany, playing in the main theaters of almost every German city.  In 1983, the year of Martin Luther’s 500th birthday, Südwestfunk, Radio DRS Basel, and Sender Freies Berlin produced the drama as a 200-minute radio play.  In 1984, Deutscher Fernsehfunk, the state television broadcaster in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) recorded Luther/Münzer at the Volkstheater Rostock.

[Luther, Münzer and the Bookkeepers of the Reformation, as I noted, was the first part of a trilogy, in which Forte dealt with the relationship between reason and faith.  The trilogy also includes the plays Jean Henry Dunant (1978) and The Labyrinth of Dreams (1983).

[Despite its success in Europe—and Luther/Münzer played a number of non-German-speaking cities—there doesn’t seem to have been a production in the United States (or the U.K.).  I don’t know the reason for this, but at a guess, I’d say that the size of the play in all its aspects daunted most repertory companies—European theaters are largely subsidized—and perhaps the subject matter scared off many theater boards as well.] 

THEATRE JUNCTION SCRIPT EVALUATION

Date:  8/19/85
Reader:  [Rick]                                                            

AUTHOR/(TRANSLATOR):  Dieter Forte/(Christopher Holme)

TITLE/(DATE):  Luther, Münzer and the Bookkeepers of the Reformation/(1972); trans. of Martin Luther & Thomas Münzer oder Die Einführung der Buchhaltung (“Martin Luther & Thomas Münzer, or The Introduction of Bookkeeping”), 1970

GENRE/STYLE:  Historical drama

STRUCTURE:  2 acts w/many scenes of varying length; basically linear, though time is compresses in classical tradition.

SETTING:  Non-realistic unit set w/ 2 platforms and 2 tables w/chairs; actors remain onstage throughout (à la Equus).

LANGUAGE:  Contemporary dialogue, with references to period (16th C.); translation is excellent as far as actability is concerned (I can’t judge the faithfulness since I haven’t seen the original, but seems good).  Luther has a monster monologue of several pages, and Münzer has one only slightly shorter; there are several other long speeches.

MUSIC/LYRICS:  Several period hymns are indicated (music not included).

NO. CHARACTERS/SPEC. NEEDS:  Huge cast (26 named chars. + extras), but only a few need be individual actors (ca. 4-6 men, 1 woman, varying ages), with an ensemble of 10-12 (poss. fewer) to play all the rest as they are needed.  Very intriguing idea, theatrically.

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT:  Despite the number and the immensity of the script, most are individuals with real personalities.  Forte’s idea that the Reformation was a matter of business means they all play contrived roles (not a fault), but they aren’t symbols or allegories—not even stereotypes.  The leads and important featured parts are terrific acting roles, some suggesting star stature.

CONCEPTION:  As above: the Protestant Reformation, which coincided with the rise of capitalism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, was a matter of business, not theology, politics, or philosophy—and Luther was manipulated.  Forte states that all the facts are accurate, and the words are mostly historically correct, so his point is very strong.  It’s a very interesting view of history, and an intriguing dramatic idea.

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST:  The theme; the “knowing” atmosphere of the play; the contemporary approach to the world juxtaposed with the Renaissance material; the staging concept.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  The Pope and all the princes in the Holy Roman Empire are in debt to Jakob Fugger, the most powerful capitalist in Europe.  They are so in debt they have to bargain with him to do anything—wage war, travel, acquire property, marry—or get a new title.  Fugger, in fact, controls the HRE, not the princes and bishops.  In the end, Luther, who merely wanted to debate some ecclesiastical points, is unwittingly subverted and turned into an instrument of Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, who uses him to maneuver the Pope [Leo X] and Emperor Charles V.  Luther doesn’t even know what’s happening to him most of the time.  Fugger, of course, simply becomes richer and richer at everyone’s expense—peasants, clergy, nobles.  Münzer [radical reformation preacher and theologian] is a rabid radical, reminiscent of ’60s activists.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION:  I like this play.  It’s intriguing both intellectually and theatrically, and it’s literate, witty, knowing, and provocative.  It’s one serious problem is its length.  I guess it must take as much as 4-5 hours to play uncut.  A lot of the history and theology that’s expounded may be cuttable, paring the play down to the meat of the theme.  After avidly reading the first act, it became a chore to plough through the rest, even though there are some wonderful moments all through.  It’s just too long for standard staging, and, in some cases, too talky.

This translation reads very well, and the play, if cut carefully, should be very actable.  As I indicated above, the major roles are star parts.  I mean that stars could play them, or they could make stars out of whoever does.  This is a big play, in more ways than just bulk.  The ideas are big, the scope is big, and the dramatic and theatrical impact should be big.  Producing this will be a coup.  I want to do it!

RECOMMENDATION:  Produce!  (If you can get the playwright to agree to cuts, otherwise workshop it to see how it might work in non-traditional performance.)