Theatre Olympics

I’m a little embarrassed.  I’d never heard of the Theatre Olympics, an international theater festival, until the end of last year.  Since the first festival was held 25 years ago, I’m very late to the party—and I don’t know how I missed the memo. 

I first learned about the Theatre Olympics when I spotted an article in the New York Times on Sunday, 15 December 2019, in the “Arts & Leisure” section entitled “No Torch Needed Here: The Theatre Olympics bring the drama world together” by Roslyn Sulcas, a dance reviewer and culture writer for the Times. 

I didn’t read the article right then, but I put it aside to read later.  Then, the next morning, my friend Kirk Woodward e-mailed me about the Times report, asking me if I saw it.  That’s when I read it and decided to look into what this event was all about.

I looked into the Theatre Olympics to see what I’d missed and what follows is what I learned.  Maybe I’m not the only one who’s out of the loop: the New York Times only covered the festival a few times (it got passing mention in a couple more articles).  In the article on the last festival, author Sulcas specifically remarks that “remarkably few people from the Western  theater world seem to have heard of the Theatre Olympics.”

Even one 2019 participant, Stefan Kaegi, a founder of the Berlin-based theater collective Rimini Protokoll, acknowledged in an interview, “I knew nothing about it before they invited us.”   Like some others who heard the name for the first time, he thought it “might be one of those pre-Olympic Games cultural festivals.”

Other U.S. publications I found in a database search also had sparser coverage.  (The foreign press was more generous, but even that was parsimonious, reporting mostly on artists and productions from the publication’s home territory.)  “Perhaps,” offers Sulcas, “that’s because, so far, the festival has been in countries (China, Greece, Japan, South Korea and Turkey, among others) that are not international theatrical hubs.”

I thought at first the Theatre Olympics was descended from the Theatre of Nations, the international theater festival organized since 1957 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  (See my post “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” 10 November 2014.)  The Theatre of Nations has been dormant since 2008, and I wondered if the Theatre Olympics was a rebirth of the Theatre of Nations under a new name. 

I quickly learned that this wasn’t so; not only are the Theatre of Nations and the Theatre Olympics not related, but the Theatre of Nations is still alive on paper and ITI is working to revive it as a regular event again.  The Theatre Olympics is a completely independent operation, albeit with similar goals.

Theatre Olympics, a non-profit organization, fosters exchanges between diverse theater-makers, irrespective of ideological, cultural, or language differences.  Theatre Olympics’ primary project is an international multicultural, multidisciplinary theater festival (also called the Theatre Olympics), which embraces diverse theater traditions from many cultures and encourages intercultural exchanges among theater artists from around the world.  The Theatre Olympics festivals are held irregularly and in various locations around the globe; the last Theatre Olympics, the ninth in 2019, was the first festival held in two cities, Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan.  

(A brief note about terminology and nomenclature.  The parent organization that conducts the programs, including the festival, is called Theatre Olympics, without a definite article: ‘the.’  The festival is customarily called the Theatre Olympics, with a definite article.  Both, incidentally, are spelled in the British manner: ‘Theatre.’  For the most part, I’ll be looking at the theater festival—and, except in a proper name or a quotation, I spell ‘theater’ the American way.)

Theodoros Terzopoulos (b. 1945), a Greek theater director, asserts that the origins of the present organization stems from a series of talks and seminars for theater directors and academics that he hosted in 1989 in Delphi, Greece, the city of the oracle.  “We had all these great names—Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Tadashi Suzuki . . .,” said Terzopoulos in an interview.  “They were talking and exchanging ideas, philosophies and theatrical traditions.  We thought, how can we create an international version of this, which will travel around the world?”

Out of this grew the Theatre Olympics organization, formally established in 1994 by an international committee led by Terzopoulos, who continues to serve as chairman.  The original committee members were the other participants in the 1989 discussion: Nuria Espert (b. 1935), Spanish theater and television actress, and theater and opera director; Antunes Filho (1929-2019), Brazilian stage director; Tony Harrison (b.1937), English poet, translator, and playwright; Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014), Russian stage actor and director who founded the internationally renowned Taganka Theater; Heiner Müller (1929-95), German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist, and theater director; Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939), Japanese theater director, writer, and philosopher who is the founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT); and Robert Wilson (b. 1941), American experimental theater director and playwright.  

Except for the deceased members of the founding committee, all others still serve on the current International Committee of Theatre Olympics along with nine new members.  The committee meets once a year; Theatre Olympics’ administrative headquarters are in Athens, Greece, for its European operations and Toga, Toyama, Japan, for Asian operations.

Theatre Olympics originally had the subtitle “Crossing Millennia” to reflect the importance the organization placed on connecting the past, present, and future of cultural endeavors and to reflect the festival’s aim to re-establish the importance of theater in the cultural life of the 21st century.  Despite the name, there are no prizes, awards, or medals bestowed at the Theatre Olympics; it’s not a competition like the athletic Olympics or even many film festivals and the Edinburgh International Festival of theater.

Each festival is organized around a broad theme, such as Greek tragedy for the first Theatre Olympics in Delphi in 1995 or theater’s role in and contribution to globalization at the fifth Theatre Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, in 2010.  The number of participating countries has ranged from seven in Delphi to 35 at the eighth festival in New Delhi, India, while the number of productions staged has been between nine at the first Theatre Olympics and 465 in New Delhi.  (New Delhi was clearly an outlier; the next greatest number of participating productions was 97 presentations at the third Theatre Olympics in Moscow in 2001.)

Each host country selects its own artistic director, so far usually a member of the Theatre Olympics organization’s International Committee.  The national organizing committee is invariably comprised of prominent members of the host country’s cultural scene and the festival often reflects the host country’s theater heritage. 

Funding for the festival depends largely on the host country, which arranges a combination of state funds through its culture ministry or similar agency plus contributions from non-governmental arts organizations and private and corporate donations.  (The budget for the Russian portion of the 2019 festival alone was around $10 million, according to reports.)  Participating theater companies must, as is customary for theater festivals, both regional and international, raise their own funds to pay the expenses of their presentation. 

As the most recent festival, let’s have a look at the ninth Theatre Olympics this past year, the 25th anniversary of the first festival.

By design—it’s written in the Theatre Olympics charter—the first several festivals have been in the home countries of International Committee members—and the artistic director has been the committee member from the host country or, as in this instance, countries.  So in 2019, the Toga portion of the festival was directed by Tadashi Suzuki and the Saint Petersburg event by Valery Fokin (b. 1946), a Russian theatrical director and writer, who’s artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg and president of the Meyerhold Center in Moscow.

The statistics: between the two venues, Theatre Olympics 9 hosted 50 presentations from 20 countries.  The Russian half of the festival ran from 15 June to 15 December 2019 and the festival in Japan went from 23 August to 23 September.  In Russia, the main venues were the Aleksandrinsky Theater’s Main and New Stages, but Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of tsarist Russia, used more than 50 locations all around the city involving some 300 participants. 

In Toyama Prefecture, Japan, performances took place at the Toga Art Park (which contains seven theaters) and in Kurobe, a little under 30 miles north, at the Unazuki International Conference Center “Selene” and the Maezawa Garden Open Air Stage.  Toga is the home of Suzuki’s theater company, SCOT, and site of the school where he teaches his renowned Suzuki Method of Actor Training.  (The village is also the administrative headquarters of Theatre Olympics for Asian operations.)

The theme of the ninth edition of the Theatre Olympics was “Creating Bridges,” which appears to have been simply a reiteration of the initial Theatre Olympics mission statement, “the cross-fertilization of the past with the future.”  Though “Creating Bridges” “appeared in [the] management framework of the festival,” noted Emiliia Dementsova, a creative writer, theater critic, editor and lecturer from Russia, in her post in The Theatre Times, an online global theater portal, “there is no single core and distinct message that always distinguished the previous Theatre Olympics.” 

In an interview on the website Performing Arts Network Japan, Suzuki commented:

Despite the fact that we have the word globalization today, the direction or orientation to create that kind of shared heritage anew has been lost in politics and economics today.  That kind of orientation toward creating new rules of coexistence that can bridge this type of contemporary division is the theme of the Theatre Olympics this time, which is “Creating Bridges.”  I want us to think about the need for this kind of value, this kind of spirit for people to share; to think about the rules for coexistence.

Here’s a snapshot of some of what was on offer at the two Theatre Olympics 2019 venues:

In Toga, Suzuki presented Greetings from the Edge of the Earth, a play that looks at images of Japanese ethnicity and how this shifting identity has been shaped by key historical figures.  (The director brought two productions to Saint Petersburg as well, just as the Aleksandrinsky Theater sent productions to Japan.) 

SCOT’s production of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (Act II) featured a female cast fighting over the infamous Marquis de Sade, and brought to life some of the social shifts during Japan’s Showa Era (1926-89).  Suzuki also presented Dionysus (adapted from Euripides’ The Bacchae), a production that has toured worldwide and includes a cast of Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese actors.

The Russian director and host of the Saint Petersburg portion of Theatre Olympics 2019, Valery Fokin, brought to Toga Today, 2016, a play based on the sci-fi novel by Kirill Fokin (Valery Fokin’s son) about aliens who arrive on Earth and plead with world leaders to ban weapons for the survival of humankind.  (Sounds a little like the plot of 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, doesn’t it?)  

Greek director (and Theatre Olympics International Committee chairman) Theodoros Terzopoulos brought to the event a politically charged rendition of Euripides’ The Trojan Women with a cast of actors from Syria, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Robert Wilson, the U.S. director and Theatre Olympics founding member, presented a performance of John Cage’s composition Lecture on Nothing (1949), which mixes philosophy and poetry in a lecture performance that explores Cage’s complex time structure.  

Also from the United States, director Anne Bogart, who collaborated with Suzuki in 1992 to form the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) in Saratoga Springs, New York, presented her production Radio Macbeth in Toga.  In the play, the actors rehearse Shakespeare’s Macbeth in an abandoned theater at midnight and are soon surrounded by ghosts of past works stirring ambition, violence, and madness.

By the time the Russian segment of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was over, it had racked up a truly Olympian record.  First of all. the Saint Petersburg program encompassed presentations by the national theaters of Yakutsk, Sakha Republic (Yakutia); Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan; Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia; Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan; Elista, Republic of Kalmykia; Grozny, Chechnya; and Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia.  2019 was declared the Year of Theater in Russia by President Vladimir Putin and the Theatre Olympics overlapped with the 2019 Chekhov International Theatre Festival (May-July).

In addition, special programs and projects of the Theatre Olympics in Russia were held in 26 cities in eight federal districts: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Pskov, Velikiy Novgorod, Sochi, Volgograd, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Petrozavodsk, Izhevsk, Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Kerch (in Crimea), Sevastopol (Crimea), Simferopol (Crimea), and Yalta (Crimea).

In total, the 2019 Theatre Olympics in Russia comprised 82 theater groups from 22 countries, including 51 foreign and 31 Russian troupes.  In addition to Russia, companies participated from Japan, China, India, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, Lithuania, and Austria.  

Among the participating artists in Saint Petersburg were Krystian Lupa (Poland), Theodoros Terzopoulos, Declan Donnellan (England), Robert Wilson, Samuel Tétreault (Quebec, Canada), Peeping Tom (Belgian dance theater company), and FC Bergman (Flemish theater company).

Khots Namsaraev Buryat State Academic Drama Theater of Ulan-Ude presented A Flight: A Story of Bilchir.  This work of the young director Soyzhin Zhambalova based on an artistic expedition is performed in Bulgat dialect of the Buryat language.  The play is based on the documentary story of Osinsky District residents in the Irkutsk Region, who watched the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station on the Angara River. Large tracts of land were later flooded. 

Olonkho Theater of Yakutsk presented Dzhyrybyna the Warrior Woman, which  immerses the viewer in the secrets of shamanistic rituals and ancient beliefs.  The production of the National Theater of Karelia, Bear the Son, based on Karelian folk tales, includes songs and ceremonies in the Finnish, Karelian, Vepsian, and Russian languages, is also a creation with a magic component.  Khodari, based on the works of Vasily Firsov, is another fable-based performance of this company, but it is a fairy tale for adults.  The traditions of folklore and the eternal themes of the fight against the dark forces assailing the human soul are combined here with folk humor and traditional anecdotes.

The Khanpasha Nuradilov Chechen State Drama Theater of Grozny brought two performances to Saint Petersburg: My Home – Red Home (or Going Home) and Higher than the Mountains.  The first performance tells a contemporary story about the difficult life of an émigré in Paris who does not want to lose his national identity.  The second is a story in which Chechen folk traditions and legends are woven into an eternal tale of love and mercy, forgiveness, and a sense of duty.

The Galiasgar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater presented The Rooster Flies on the Wicker Fence, which is based on a comic tale of a silly argument between two neighbors in a Tatar village in the Soviet ’70s.  A distinctive feature of the performance is the development method of the director Farid Bikchantaev: the text of the performance was created in the process of rehearsals.

The Mazhit Gafuri Bashkir Academic Drama Theater performed Zuleykha Opens Her Eyes, based on the bestselling novel by Guzel Yakhina.  This story begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village.  Zuleykha is sent into exile to a remote region on the Angara River in Siberia.  Peasants, intellectuals, criminals, Muslims and Christians, agnostics and atheists, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Chuvash people—all will meet on the banks of the Angara, fighting for their lives and future.

One of Suzuki’s two contributions to the Saint Petersburg portion of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was his renowned adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, performed in Japanese.  Suzuki doesn’t try to decode the text of the play; rather he explores the complex relationships of men and women, East and West, past and present, and the idiosyncrasies of both traditional Japanese music and Italian opera.  The performance itself abounds with strong Japanese characters and, though minimalist, manages to capture the attention of the audience and tug at their heartstrings.

Susuki’s protagonist, Kyozo, is a former samurai who became a writer, and who, before dying, writes an autobiographical play.  Thus, Cyrano and Kyozo, character and creator, are the same person, and Roxane and Christian de Neuvillette are both portrayed by the same actress.  (This sounds like an interesting reversal of the Kabuki onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles.  I wonder if that was Suzuki’s intention.  None of the accounts I read mentions this.  See my Rick On Theater post “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010.) 

The director tries to combine elements of the Noh and Kabuki theaters with those of modern-day European theater.  kimonos, tatami mats, paper umbrellas, sakura (Japanese cherry trees), Japanese tea rooms, and paper screens are in abundance here and Cyrano de Bergerac becomes a play about suppressed desires and unfulfilled dreams. 

After disparaging in another article the application of the 2019 theme in the realization of the Theatre Olympics, Emiliia Dementsova asserted, “The artistry of Suzuki really contributes to building bridges between the cultures of East and West . . . .”

Between the cities of Delphi, Greece, in 1995 and Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan, last year, the Theatre Olympics festival has been hosted in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1999 with the theme of “Creating Hope”; Moscow, Russia, in 2001 with the theme “Theatre for the People”; Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006 with the theme “Beyond Borders”; Seoul, South Korea, in 2010 with the theme of “Sarang: Love and Humanity”; Beijing, China, in 2014 with the theme “Dream”; Wrocław, Poland, with the theme of “The World as a Place of Truth”; and New Delhi, India, with the theme “The Flag of Friendship.”

Reports are that the next Theatre Olympics may be held in Hungary in 2023. Hungary’s interest in hosting the Theatre Olympics in 2023 was declared by the Hungarian Minister of Culture and the artistic director of the Hungarian National Theater at a press conference at the closing press conference of this year's event in Saint Petersburg.

They approached the International Committee of Theatre Olympics through its founder and president, Theodoros Terzopoulos, and committee member and artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater, Valery Fokin.  The cultural minister came to the international cultural forum to emphasize the importance for the country of hosting the Theatre Olympics.  The International Committee plans to consider Hungary’s proposal, which the cultural minister feels has the support of Terzopoulos, Fokin, and Suzuki.

One-Act Plays Festivals

by Kirk Woodward

[Now comes my friend Kirk Woodward with a new contribution to the blog he urged me to start, lo these 7½ years ago.  This time, returning the broad topic of theater, Kirk’s looking at one-act plays and one-act festivals.  I know you’ll find several truths in his thesis and possibly some thoughts that had never occurred to you before.  As a playwright himself, Kirk has had years of experience writing—and submitting—short plays and in “One-Act Plays Festivals,” he shares some of what he’s learned from that experience as well as that of a long-time theatergoer and sometime theater reviewer.]

There’s a remarkable current theatrical phenomenon that I haven’t seen much published comment about – namely, the one-act play festival or competition.

One-act plays have a long theatrical history, as curtain-raisers, as short stand-alone entertainments, and as major dramatic works in their own right. Moliere (1622-1673) gained his early fame writing one act comedies like “The Flying Doctor” and “The Rehearsal at Versailles” that followed the tragedies he and others wrote. In the late Nineteenth Century, when full-length plays formed part of longer evenings’ entertainment, important writers like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) wrote short plays to precede the main events.

Much of the early growth of American theater in the first half of the Twentieth Century can be found in the one-act plays that Eugene O’Neill, in particular, wrote for the Washington Square Players (1914-1918) and the Provincetown Players (1915-1929), with his “sea plays” generally regarded as among his best, and as outstanding examples of the form. The professional career of Tennessee Williams began when a collection of one-act plays he submitted to a Group Theatre competition was awarded a special cash prize.

So one-act plays are an enduring presence in theater. However, the classic one-acts are old news. The words “World Premiere,” “Original Work,” and “New Plays” are assumed to have strong appeal, and the one-act play festivals and competitions I’m talking about almost all feature new work. At a minimum, they will not feature a play by, say, Eugene O’Neill.

The idea of the one-act play festival or competition got a major push when the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) began its National Ten-Minute Play Contest in 1989. This gives me a certain sense of pride because I’m from Louisville, and because I was present at the first organizational meeting of that theater, in 1964.

ATL did not invent the one-act play festival or competition, any more than it invented the one-act play. Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in New York, for example, began a notable one-act play festival in 1986, three years before ATL, which continues to this day. However, EST accepts submissions up to forty pages long. (Generally speaking, a page of a script is assumed to equal a minute of stage time.)

The genius of ATL was to impose a limit in the length of one act plays to ten minutes. (Their specific requirement is for no more than ten pages of script, not counting the title page and notes.) I have not been able to determine whether the ten-minute limit was ATL’s invention – I’d guess it was not – but they also popularized it by publishing a series of collections of the one-act plays they’ve produced. These collections have wide popularity in the theater community.

With a ten minute play limit, a full evening of one-acts can contain eleven or twelve plays without much difficulty. (ATL has experimented with even shorter time lengths of submissions in recent years, including plays to be performed as phone conversations, and plays printed on T-shirts.)

In any case, the one-act play festival phenomenon has now reached astounding proportions. A Google search for “one-act play collections” reports about 9,730,000 results. About!

                                                                                                             

One of the first listings on a recent search was titled “One Act Plays For Every Stage – Read 2,100 One Act Plays Free.” That’s a lot of one-act plays on just one website. My brain can’t hold the idea of 2,100 one-act plays existing, much less the idea of reading all of them. I don’t know if I could read 2,100 of anything. And that was among the first search item that turned up.

A web search for “one-act play competitions” turns up a couple of million fewer hits. Among the notable long-lasting festivals in Manhattan are those of the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, the Strawberry One-Act Festival, and, as noted, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s series.

In a way the term “one-act play” is something of a misnomer. It might equally well be applied to full-length plays (one or one-and-a-half to two hours long or longer) performed without an intermission, like 2016’s The Humans. Shakespeare’s plays appear to have been originally performed this way, with no breaks in the action at all. (The first division of his plays into acts was by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) in his edition of the plays published in 1709. He created the scene divisions in the plays too.)

I admit that I have no name to substitute for the kind of play I’m talking about here. “Short one-act play” is about as close as I can come, and it is implied in this article. Very often these plays are original – that is, they’ve never been produced before. Producers love to announce premieres. Clearly this policy wastes good plays – why shouldn’t they be produced more than once? But the label “new work” has some drawing power.

There are many reasons that short one-act play festivals and competitions are currently popular, reasons that apply to producers, to actors, potentially to audiences, and definitely to playwrights as well. There are downsides too, which I will mention.

For producers, one-act play festivals and competitions offer a conceivably enticing financial prospect. If a producer puts on a program of, say, seven one-act plays, each with an average cast of three, and if each of those people, plus the writer, brings in six family members, there is already a practically guaranteed audience of 168 people, and the producer hasn’t even printed a flier yet. (I have been in more than one production of a full length play that didn’t bring in that many people over an entire run.)

Of course success still may not be guaranteed, even in a theater with a small seating capacity. But there is another possible strategic move. Call your night (or nights, or weeks, or festivals) of one-act plays a competition, offer a cash prize of a reasonable amount, and make it clear that winning the competition will depend on audience voting.

Writers in particular will pack the house with “safe” voters. More audience! If you have a smallish sized theater, you may even sell out. Meanwhile your production costs are likely to be low, since multiple set changes between plays require that items like furniture be kept to a minimum.

So presenting a festival or competition of one-act plays is a sensible financial strategy, even if the words “An Evening of One-Acts” on the marquee is by itself no guarantee of success. (It may be, of course. The one-act play competition at Actors Theatre of Louisville, for example, is extremely popular on its own. However, that theater has worked hard to build a reputation as a quality production house.)

For actors, the advantage is a significant increase in the number of available roles. True, a big role in a one-act play probably won’t be the size of a big role in a full length play. On the other hand, it could be a meatier role. In any case, it’s work. Often one-act plays are rehearsed on independent schedules, one for each play, with the whole group brought together only at the last minute. This too is an advantage for actors, who need to schedule their time efficiently.

The advantage of one-act play festivals and competitions to audiences is more problematic. As I said, the festivals at Actors Theatre of Louisville are popular, but the quality of work at that theater is high, which is not the case of the material at every one-act play festival, even in Manhattan. The odds are against any new play’s succeeding; the odds of a dozen of them succeeding at once are low.

Of course, the risks involved in one-act plays are also smaller. Some, actually, are no more than skits, which I’d define as actors in short depictions of situations that require only surface characterization. Good skits aren’t easier to write than anything else, but at least they are compact, often funny, and quickly understood.

Generally, however, I doubt that much of the general play-going public is thinking right now, “I wish I could find a good evening of one-act plays.” I was once in a rock band where, after a particularly successful string of numbers, the lead singer announced, “Now we’re going to do some original material.” The crowd fell ominously silent and he had to add that he was joking. I’m not sure that the term “one-act play festival” doesn’t have something of the same effect.

However, as noted above, many of us will go to a play for the purpose of supporting a friend or relative who’s in it or wrote it, and an evening of one-act plays offers an opportunity to include a lot of those.

One-act play festivals and competitions are also attractive to playwrights. This is in fact an element in the popularity of one-act plays for both producers and playwrights. Producers need plays to present, and playwrights write them. Producers love one-act plays because all they have to do is ask for them, and the plays come pouring in, because the playwright has a chance of getting a play produced.

What a wonder this is for a playwright, who lives a life of continual rejection. Of course there’s no guarantee a particular one-act play will be accepted for production. I have written, for example, a ten-minute play on a Christmas subject that I think is both offbeat and funny, and that has never gotten the slightest glimmer of interest from any festival of holiday plays (a sub-genre of the one-act play festival).

But the odds of having a play accepted by a one-act play festival or competition are at least greatly increased, because not only might one performance present between half a dozen and a dozen plays, but the festival might include dozens more presented on different nights, perhaps in a different order for each performance.

Also, because the producing organization actually wants to receive submissions of plays, instead of dreading to receive them (as is often the case), a playwright can have reasonable confidence that her play will really be read by somebody. (People who have not submitted plays to theaters and agents can’t begin to imagine how often plays are lost, ignored, or cursorily read.)

And it simply takes less time to write a short one-act play – say, a play ten minutes long – than it does to write a full-length play. If I have a good idea, I can write a good one-act play overnight. The demand for “original work” can easily be met.

But what if I don’t have a good idea? Shorter is not necessarily easier. In fact, shorter is much more difficult. If it weren’t, there’d be – I was going to say hundreds, but considering the Google search, I should probably say millions – of good or great one-act plays around. There aren’t.

The sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one,” has been attributed to many people. Whoever said it, its point is correct. It’s easy to be verbose and extraordinarily hard to be succinct.

The solution, for many one-act plays I’ve seen, is to choose a subject with impact, use that as the subject of the one-act, and rely for success on the seriousness of the issue raised – say, because I’ve seen so many of these plays, cancer. Cancer is real, it’s terrible, it’s disastrous, it’s horrible. No question.

So write a play about someone with cancer. They die – tears. Or they live – cheers! Or they struggle – drama!

What can possibly be wrong with that? I have two answers, one more or less practical and one aesthetic. The practical objection is that what you’re doing in such a play is emotional manipulation. You’re taking a subject you know will succeed in stirring an audience’s feelings, and putting it up there in the knowledge that it’s precertified as intense, stirring drama.

Emotional manipulation is difficult to avoid, but we ought to try. It’s just too easy. Shakespeare figured that out a long time ago, and he does very little emotional manipulation. He has Hamlet say:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

I understand that cancer, or any other strenuous or catastrophic event, may not be “nothing” to the writer – it may in fact be real and personal. But as artists we have responsibilities to our art, and one of them, I submit, is to cheat as little as possible, and to approach subjects creatively and imaginatively, rather than using them for their predetermined value in tears and fears.

Far too often, one-act plays take a huge problem, throw it at us knowing we already have feelings about it, and leave it at that. Easy to do – one-act plays aren’t very long. Suppose a play competition’s subject is “Dogs.” Then have a play where a child’s dog is run over. Why not? It happens in life, doesn’t it? It’s terrible, isn’t it? But it’s also emotional manipulation.

And as I said, there’s also an aesthetic reason why such an approach is dubious. Aristotle in the Poetics says that tragedy – and I think this can be applied to other forms of drama as well – works when it is an “imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”

Although there’s plenty of argument about exactly what he means, I think it’s clear that he feels a play’s size should be proportional to its subject.

Few of us today would want to turn Aristotle’s observations (assuming they are his – some suspect the Poetics is lecture notes) into rules, as happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the man has a point. A one-act play needs a one-act action – an action that fits the size of the play. A study of the best one-act plays points this out.

In a series of postings elsewhere on this blog, I describe several excellent examples of the genre by George Bernard Shaw, for example “The Glimpse of Reality” and “The Six of Calais.” [See the author’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September.] In both these plays Shaw does everything required by the size of his story – not less, and not more.

Contrast Shaw’s examples with a number of the one-act plays I’ve seen recently, whose subjects have included, among others, old age and dementia; cancer – there it is again;  severe mental illness; suicide; having to put animals to sleep; and my very least (but frequent) favorite, the Deceased Wife Play. Sometimes two or more of these are combined in one ten-minute episode. I suggest a firm rule: No more than one death per one-act play!

Such works make one-act plays on subjects like dating rituals seem like masterpieces. Perhaps that’s why there are so many one-act plays about dating rituals.

A friend remarked to me that many of these plays – both the tragic and the “relationship” one-acts – are “window” plays:  you look at them and you see a bit of life, as though you saw it through a window, not much changed from the way it happens in the world. My two responses are that looking through a window is not the purpose of art, and that if those things are what the window reveals, I don’t want to live in that neighborhood.

In saying all this I am also grateful for the many delightful one-act plays I’ve seen. They exist and I salute the people who write them. As a favorite example I cite “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives (1987). A riff on the idea that a million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write the plays of Shakespeare, it shows three monkeys (named Milton, Swift, and Kafka) banging away on the keys, comparing and criticizing their work, briefly coming close to an actual Shakespeare line, and illustrating in a charming way the difficulties of writing and the frustrations of creative work. It’s a play with both immediate and long-range implications, snugly embodied in the short play form. May its tribe increase.

Unquestionably, no one has the right to tell an artist what to create. Playwrights must write the plays that come to them. But I would love to be able to look at a sign that reads “AN EVENING OF ONE-ACT PLAYS” with anticipation rather than dread. Could evenings of one-act plays be more like festivals, and less like autopsies? May I suggest that as a goal?

[Over the time I’ve been posting play reports on ROT, I’ve included a number of one-act play evenings.  Some are not really very short plays, the way Kirk means, and several fit into the negative characterizations Kirk describes.

·   Horton Foote’s nine-play trilogy, The Orphans’ Home Cycle (reported on 25 and 28 February 2010), is an assemblage of one-act plays all telling the fictionalized story of Foote’s father’s life. 

·   Five By Tenn was a bill of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, first staged as the opening show of “Tennessee Williams Explored” (April-July 2004), the season-long celebration by Washington’s Kennedy Center of the great playwright; I posted my review of the evening, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” on 5 March 2011.        

·   Happy Hour, a world première staged by the Atlantic Theater Company, is a collection of three one-acts by Ethan Coen; I reported on the trilogy of bleak glimpses at human behavior with an ironic title on 29 December 2011. 

·   Early Plays, an adaptation of three one-acts from the Glencairn Plays by Eugene O’Neill, was presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse by the Wooster Group and the New York City Players.  My report was posted on 14 March 2013.

·   3 Kinds of Exile, a collection of three one-acts by John Guare connected by a common theme, was presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in June 2013.  I posted my report on 27 June 2013.

·   Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy is comprised of three connected one-acts, International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, which premièred separately.  I saw the joint production at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and posted my report on 5 October.

·   Lee Blessing’s Flag Day is a pair of one-acts, Black Sheep and Perilous Night, also originally presented individually, that I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Sheperdstown, West Virginia, in 2004; I posted my report, “Contemporary American Theatre Festival (2004),” on 8 July 2014.

·   Summer Shorts is an annual two-part festival of one-act plays, often including work by well-known authors, presented in July and August by 59E59 Theatres.  I saw one evening of the festival in 2015 and published “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” on 12 August.

·   Desire is another collection of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, but these six plays are all adaptations of short stories, scripted by different playwrights.  It was a production of the Acting Company, which has made something of an industry of assembling this sort of evening (Chekhov stories, Shakespeare sonnets), in 2015 and my report appeared on 29 September.

·   Last May, I caught a presentation of three Samuel Beckett one-acts, Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby, performed in a bravura production by Irish actress Lisa Dwan called “Beckett Trilogy.”  I posted my report on this experience on 1 May 2016.

·   In June, the Signature Theatre Company presented an evening of one-acts drawn from past seasons devoted to three playwrights: Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, María Irene Fornés’s Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.  I posted a report called “Signature Plays” on 3 June 2016.

·   My most recent one-act evening was Horton Foote’s The Roads to Home, produced by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.  The three connected one-acts, A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, Spring Dance, is running though 27 November and my report was posted on 22 October. 

[Some of these playlets were composed to be performed together, so they’re not necessarily the kind of bill of one-acts that Kirk is writing about, but the list does give some idea of the popularity of the short play on today’s theater.]

Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986

[In the mid-1980s, when I was working on a graduate degree in Performance Studies at New York University, I was hired to launch and edit the newsletter for a new organization for stage directors and artistic directors, the American Directors Institute.  

[ADI’s founder and Artistic Director, Geoffrey Shlaes, and I determined that the newsletter, which we decided to call Directors Notes (the title Notes was already in use by a music-oriented association), would not only cover news and announcements of the organization, but articles of interest to theater directors across the country.  

[So when the biennial celebration of worldwide theater, the Theatre of Nations, was about to open in Baltimore, Maryland, Geoff thought I should attend the festival and write about it for the DN.  For theater folk, this gathering was a big deal: it was the first (and so far only) TON held in North America and press coverage, not to mention spectator interest, was expected to be huge.  

[So I got press credentials, went to Washington, D.C.—a 45-minutre drive away from Baltimore—to stay with my parents, and headed to the City of the White Stoops.  It turned out to be the most intensive theater experience I’d ever had; I frequently saw two shows a day, and occasionally three, plus formal interviews arranged through the press office, and ad hoc conversations and meetings at informal venues like Club 45. 

 

[My original intent was to cover the festival, a program of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for DN, but during the intermission of one performance, I saw Richard Schechner, a professor of mine at NYU and the editor of The Drama Review, attending the same show.  

[I went to say hello and he asked me why I was at the performance.  I explained my assignment, and Richard asked me if I’d like to write up TON for TDR as well.  He was planning to devote an entire issue to the festival (the coverage turned out to bleed over into a second issue) and I’d write the general article on the overall event, with the rest of the issue filled with articles on individual productions, artists, and issues.  

[I readily agreed, and the article below, “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” is the result.  It ran as “Theatre of Nations” in TDR in the spring issue of 1987).  A much-abbreviated report was also published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986.]

 

Between 15 and 29 June 1986, Japanese theatre came to Baltimore, Maryland.  So did Indian theatre, and  Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Brazilian, Polish, British, Irish, Canadian, Italian, Swedish, and American.  Principally through the offices of Producer T. Edward Hambleton; Theatre Project Director Philip Arnoult; and the U.S. Director of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), Martha Coigney, “The City of the White Stoops” captured the first North American presentation of the Theatre of Nations, sponsored biennially for the past 30 years by ITI. 

 

There were 103 performances of 33 works by 22 groups and solo performers from 13 countries in 16 spaces during 14 days (Monday, June 16, was dark).  Along with the international companies and performers, 10 entries from the United States showed 13 works from New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore.  The pieces exhibited ranged from traditional drama to ballet to non-conventional theatre to performance art. 

 

Not that all went smoothly.  Just as in the 1981 International Theatre Festival, Baltimore-area blacks objected to the appearance of a South African company, despite the fact that it featured two distinguished but banned black performers, and succeeded in having it sent home, a Soviet protest over the inclusion of Peter Hall’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm forced ITI President Wole Soyinka to separate the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production from the official festival activities.  Animal Farm went on as scheduled, but was considered an “independent” production.  

 

Shortly after the festival opened, another Eastern Bloc country caused a momentary flap.  Newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Back Stage, reported that Bolek Polivka, touring with his group Divadlo na Provazku [theater on a string], had been recalled to Czechoslovakia by his government.  No reasons were given, and neither the Czech Embassy in Washington nor Polivka himself claimed to know anything about the recall.  In the end, Polivka’s The Jester and the Queen went on as planned, playing to full houses including, at his opening performance, the Czech Ambassador, the Cultural Attaché, and their wives.  After his last performance, Polivka married his “Queen,” French actress Chantal Pollain, on the stage of the Theatre Project. 

 

Aside from covering the Animal Farm protest and the Polivka rumor, there was next to no national press notice of the Theatre of Nations.  Sarah Fenno Lord reported in Warfield’s that the “thirty to fifty journalists, from out of state and all over the world, . . . writing ‘Dateline Baltimore’ stories,” as one of the festival’s principal financers had hoped, did not materialize. 

 

For some, such as the Shaliko Company’s Leonardo Shapiro, a national spotlight was an important reason for performing at the festival.  Shapiro, regretting also the absence of representatives of other festivals, had hoped that The Yellow House, an exploration of Vincent Van Gogh through his letters to his brother Theo, would be picked up for further productions as a result of coming to Baltimore.  He was bitterly disappointed with the press apathy: “I thought Jack Kroll [of Newsweek] was going to write. . . .  He was here the first week and he left.  He told me he would come back and he didn’t.  There has been no national press.  I got a great review in the Baltimore Sun, which is not going to get me anywhere.  So, if I don’t get some kind of national press out of this, this is the end of [The Yellow House].”   ITI’s Martha Coigney, when told by a visiting New Yorker at the end of the festival that the Times had given almost no space to the festival, aside from the Animal Farm brouhaha, was “angry as hell at their apathetic attitude.”

 

Nonetheless, the Theatre of Nations was chock-a-block with some of the best and most interesting performances available in the participating countries.  Just as the works on view were varied in style and content, so were the audiences.  Certainly some people went to many different performances, and theatre folk were ubiquitous, but the more traditional offerings such as Animal Farm and, even though it was performed in Bulgarian, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre’s Retro, attracted an older, tie-and-jacket crowd.  The more experimental pieces, such as Fred Curchack’s Inquest for Freddy Chickan, Shaliko’s The Yellow House, and the work of the Swedish-international collective Jordcirkus and Poland’s Gardzienice Theatre Association, appealed to a younger, more blue jeans-and-sneakers audience. 

 

Some performances had more specialized draws: Northern Ireland’s Charabanc Theatre Company, because it was dubbed a feminist company (it is not), had a heavily female audience; the Theatre Pardes from San Francisco, because it was once called A Traveling Jewish Theatre (it is), had a predominantly Jewish attendance.  Sprinkled among the spectators were theatre celebrities such as actresses Helen Hayes, Mildred Natwick, and Celeste Holme; La Mama’s Ellen Stewart; and producer-director Hal Prince.

 

Since each show was presented only one to eight times, there were opening nights right up until June 27.  Something new was available almost every day of the festival and, despite matinees and varying curtain times, it was not possible to see everything. 

 

Many groups, particularly the international companies, came to Baltimore as part of an extensive tour, arriving from another venue and departing for a new one somewhere else.  Some groups brought one piece and some two or more.  Most of the works were not new.  Ghashiram Kotwal (Ghashiram, the Police Chief) by the Theatre Academy of Pune, India, had been in that company’s repertory for 15 years, while Shaliko’s The Yellow House was reconceived especially for the festival.  One performance was a genuine premiere: Fred Curchack’s Freddy Chickan.      

 

Aside from the obvious boost to the tourist trade, and the interest to habitual theatergoers in a gathering of performers from far and wide, there is an important benefit of international festivals for American theater professionals.  They need to rub artistic elbows with colleagues doing different kinds of work elsewhere in the world.  Without cross-fertilization, theater stagnates.  Philip Arnoult, whom Martha Coigney called “a card-carrying internationalist” in Warfield’s, accused American theater artists of being “criminally isolated, not only from the rest of the world, but from each other.”  (This and all other unattributed statements were made in interviews and conversations with me during the festival.)  Even the established geographical regions, such as the Mid-West and the Boston-Washington Corridor of the east coast, behave as if they are walled off from each other. 

 

American directors, for example, do not talk to one another, asserted Stan Wojewodski, Jr., Artistic Director of Baltimore’s Center Stage and a Theatre of Nations co-director.  They seem threatened by cross-fertilization and will seldom travel to Los Angeles, Chicago, or Louisville, much less Paris, Edinburgh, or Avignon, to see shows by colleagues.  Festivals give artists an opportunity to see the work of a collection of others compacted into a short time.  Wojewodski said a number of the participating artists had expressed delight at being in Baltimore for the festival.  Geoffrey C. Shlaes, a free-lance director and Artistic Director of the American Directors Institute, was taken enough with Shaliko’s The Yellow House to spend more than an hour discussing the work with Shapiro.

 

Shapiro himself explained that being in Baltimore was “important to me for the same reason that having a company’s important to me—to be a citizen and to find some way to have a base from which I can say something about the way things are done.  I think the festival’s important because American theater is completely closed in—just like the rest of the society.”  Mohan Agashe, President of the Theatre Academy of Pune and a leading actor in Ghashiram Kotwal, expressed the same thought: “The reason we also go to national theater festivals [in India] is also to get input.  If you keep on getting lost in things only you are doing, I’m sure you’ll run out of your own resources very soon.  At some point, it’s very necessary to see the work of others.”

 

Despite Wojewodski’s indictment of American directors, Shapiro spoke enthusiastically of the work of colleagues whom he respects and on whom he draws for inspiration.  He praised the puppetry of Marcos and Rachel Ribas of Brazil’s Grupo Contadores de Estorias (The Storytellers) and is in contact with Dario Fo, who, along with everything else, is an expert on masks, advising Shapiro on two future Shaliko projects, a production of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe and Punch!, a new Punch-and-Judy show.  Agashe was drawn to Poland’s Gardzienice, and described several performances from Africa, Spain, and Belgium he saw at the International Theatre Fortnight in Quebec City where the group had been before Baltimore.  Many of the other Theatre of Nations artists were in the audiences during their times off and gathered nightly to chat at Club 45, the make-shift cafe behind Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project.  It is a way, as Agashe put it, to “know where you really stand in the world scene.”

 

Despite this evidence, however, such exchanges are still rare in the United States.  One reason that the Theatre of Nations is such an important event is that, past festivals in Baltimore (1977, ’78, ’79 and ’81) and the recent ones in Los Angeles (1984) and Chicago (1986) notwithstanding, festivals, popular in Europe and India, are uncommon here.  One reason, of course, is the great distances.  Regardless of borders and governments, it is still logistically less daunting to transport a company from Budapest to Paris or Helsinki to Edinburgh than it is to bring one from Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America to New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.  Transportation aside, Ghashiram Kotwal, which has a simple set and few props, cost $20,000 [almost $43,000 today] to produce at the festival.  This figure is at the low end of the spectrum because the Indian company does not pay its personnel.  Shaliko, who only had to transport their production from New York, spent $46,000 [over $98,000 in 2014] to come to the Theatre of Nations.  Unable to raise their original projected budget of $70,000 [nearly $150,000], the company persuaded the artists to take severe cuts in pay to get the show produced in Baltimore. 

 

The entire festival was originally budgeted at $1.5 million [$3.2 million].  With $335,000 provided by city, state and federal agencies, $309,000 raised from the local business community, and $150,000 expected from sales of tickets ranging from $6 to $25, that would leave a short-fall of over $700,000 and necessitated a reduction in budget plans.  San Francisco, initially slated to share the festival with Baltimore, could not raise the required $300,000 bond [$640,000] because of apparent lack of interest by local business interests and relinquished its claim to half the event.

 

Logistics and distance are not the only costs, however.  Americans have an attitude about money that, according to Agashe, makes mounting festivals difficult.  In negotiating a tour in Europe, Agashe noted, “the inevitable sequence would be what work it is, then they would discuss time, and finally we would come to money.  But invariably here in America nobody would even ask me a single question about the work.  The first thing they ask about is money.”  If the work is worth doing, Agashe maintained, money can be found, but not if the project is dismissed out-of-hand on the basis of finances alone.

 

Americans are also language chauvinists.  According to Agashe, Martha Coigney warned that “to take any non-English-speaking theater to America is next to impossible.”  In Passport, the Theatre Project’s newsletter, Philip Arnoult admonished that our “one-and-a-half language society,” as he calls it, prejudices Americans against foreign performances, regardless of dependence on language.  Unless it is Tango Argentino, Marcel Marceau, or grand opera, Americans just will not accept it.  Agashe traveled throughout the United States before bringing the Pune Academy here, and, despite the warnings, decided, “O.K., it’s difficult, but if we leave it at that, it will not happen at all.  Somebody has to go ahead and do it.”  The Theatre Academy’s sixteen North American performances, he points out, have been well received by both audiences and critics in such cities as Dayton, Ohio; Fullerton, California; and Rockville, Maryland.  This was borne out by reactions at performances of Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo (Comic Mystery) and Franca Rame’s Tutta Casa, Lietto e Chiesa (It’s All Bed, Board and Church), in Italian with live translation and supertitles; the Suzuki Company of Toga’s Clytemnestra, mostly in Japanese with one actor speaking English; and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre’s Retro, entirely in Bulgarian. 

 

Other performances did not depend on language at all, such as Grupo Contadores’ silent puppet plays, Hungary’s Gyor Ballet and Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, or were presented in English by multilingual performers such as Jordcirkus and Bolek Polivka.  Still, these performances do not get seen in the U.S. often enough to break down our prejudices and fears of not understanding them because, it seems, we simply do not have a tradition of sharing our work. 

 

John Strausbaugh, formerly Associate Director of the Theatre Project, quoted Philip Arnoult’s philosophy on this subject in Passport:

 

I’ve said it many times—art is fundamental to the sanity of the planet, and that one of the most important gifts we can give one another is to share our artistic visions among nations and cultures. . . .  I think it’s a very sane impulse.  In the last five or so years there’s been a lot of official talk by governments about establishing a cultural policy and formal exchange programs.  That’s good, but in truth it’s mostly still talk.  The truth is that it’s only when artists meet artists and artists meet audiences that the real exchanges happen.  There are artists and audiences in Baltimore, New York, San Francisco and Montreal who are seeing what artists around the world are doing.  They’re sharing visions, accepting and rejecting one another’s ideas.  But there needs to be more.  It’s a two-way street. 

 

It was to permit “theatre artists . . . to communicate unencumbered by the pressures of politics”  that ITI was organized in Paris in 1948 as an arm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), according to an ITI press release.  The Theatre of Nations was first held in Paris in 1956, and remained there until 1975 when it became a biennial event hosted by a different country each time.  Nevertheless, it has taken eleven years for the festival to come to North America, mostly because, as Agashe asserted “it’s just not customary.”  Well, now we have tried it and, despite being ignored by the press and other festival representatives, it has worked.

 

Within the smorgasbord of offerings, there was a decided bias towards the experimental.  According to Wojewodski this was neither an accident nor the result of the personal interests of the planners.  In most major American cities there are good companies that present Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill, Mamet, or Shepard.  What is needed is more exposure to the out-of-the-ordinary.  What would be the point of a festival that featured only what everyone is already familiar with?  Who would travel any distance to see it?

 

The experimental bent of the Theatre of Nations had also another rationale.  Philip Arnoult remarked that the American avant garde of the ’60s was greatly influenced by Europeans such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba.  American groups in the ’70s synthesized the European influences into an indigenous form, and returned the impulse to Europe, where it was picked up by new experimental troupes.  Now, in the ’80s, the work of American experimenters is better known in Europe than it is in America, and both Arnoult and Wojewodski are endeavoring to “complete the circle” by reintroducing new European work to American artists.  They saw the Theatre of Nations as a way of bringing receptive artists together in a big way.

 

Theories and intellectual projections aside, the Theatre of Nations festival was a success from the point of view of audiences who saw and enjoyed a great selection of theater.  As Martha Coigney said of the reactions she had overheard, “This is what it should be about—people just saying, ‘My kid saw that and loved it’; ‘My wife thought it was fun.’”  No criticism, no analysis—just enjoyment.  There was certainly something for everyone to enjoy.  A sampling: 

 

To begin with there was Animal Farm, controversy aside.  Peter Hall’s production is a straightforward rendering of Orwell’s fable with lyrics by Adrian Mitchell and music by Richard Peaslee, who also did the music for Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights.  This pair also composed the music for the Royal Shakespeare’s Marat/Sade and US.

 

As a small child sits at the down-right corner of the forestage, reading the novella with his back to the audience, the anthropomorphic beasts of Manor Farm create and then subvert an animal workers’ paradise.  With costumes and masks ranging from full-heads for the horses, cows, and donkeys to snouts for the pigs, and stilts of varying heights for the animals’ forelegs, the production style is as simple as a child’s pop-up book, and the theme as subtle as a sledgehammer.  Orwell’s blunt anti-totalitarian, specifically anti-Stalinistic, moral was neither diluted nor enhanced by the National Theatre’s interpretation.  No wonder the Soviets objected.

 

Jordcirkus, a ten-year-old communal theater group, brought four pieces to Baltimore.  They performed one of their street pieces, As the Bird Flies (Fagelvag) at the opening ceremonies, presented one matinee performance of a children’s play, A Little Princess (Draken), and several performances each of Blood and Champagne (Blodsband) and The Duel (Duellen). 

 

Blood and Champagne, inspired by Latin American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, recounts the four-generational history of the Montoya family as a young man learns it from the ghosts of his ancestors.  Anselmo has been locked in a room since childhood to hide his family’s shame at his illegitimate birth.  When he emerges from his prison, there is no one left in the house—except voices from the past. 

 

In a fast-paced and physical presentation, Jordcirkus actors double and triple as many characters, some real, some long dead, some purely imaginary.  The company, adept at mime and circus arts as well as conventional acting, has combined many styles and techniques, using bits of costume and a jumble of a set made of corrugated metal and wooden slats, into a performance that alternately draws the audience in and assaults its senses.  Often hard to follow intellectually, the story unfolds in fits and starts, confusing reality with fantasy and past with present.  Though each actor often seems to be in his or her own production, the energy never flags.

 

In a more conventional vein, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria presented Retro, a straight comedy by Russian playwright Alexander Galin.  In subtle but conventional Stanislavskian realism, the six actors are able to communicate, with the aid of an English synopsis, the tenderness and most of the humor of the situation.  The story is of a young couple, frustrated by an elderly, widowed father who never leaves the house.  They invite three lonely women over for a visit in the hopes he will marry one of them.  Though the visitors are supposed to come at different times, they all show up at once—and the old man refuses to cooperate.

 

The incongruity of a Russian play performed in Bulgarian before an American audience is momentarily disconcerting, but the truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations manages to come through.  Of all the Theatre of Nations presentations, Retro was the most dependent on language and, though a simultaneous translation was proposed, it was rejected by festival producers as too complex and expensive. 

 

Not depending so much on language, but on traditional Asian storytelling techniques of music, mime, and dance, the Theatre Academy of Pune presented Ghashiram Kotwal.  Written for the company by Vijay Tendulkar, the two-act play is the story of a corrupt nineteenth-century mayor of Pune who appoints an even more corrupt police chief who becomes a vicious tyrant.  Combining techniques of Western theater with those of traditional Indian performances, especially the moving human wall, borrowed from the khele, a kind of performance game or play-acting the young servants in Bombay engage in during their time off,  the Academy actors sometimes portray characters and sometimes present themselves as performers as they unfold a political satire appropriate to today’s India.  Stepping in and out of the wall, which itself may serve as scenery, chorus members play many roles.  The Sutradhar, or Narrator, drawn from ancient Sanskrit theater, also alternates between standing outside the action and entering into it.  The Marathi-speaking company, drawn from fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, and business, conducts seminars and workshops, promoting experimental theater using Indian and Western forms. 

 

(The appropriateness of Ghashiram Kotwal to other societies as well as contemporary India was demonstrated by an anecdote Mohan Agashe told me.  When the Academy performed the play in one city in Europe, they were required to preface the production with a disclaimer that the characters were fictional.  Instantly, the audience assumed that the play related to local current events and began searching for the keys to the “true” identities of the Indian characters.)

 

Language provided no barrier at all for the Grupo Contadores de Estorias of Brazil.  Puppeteers Rachel and Marcos Gaetano Ribas presented two wordless pieces drawn from Brazilian folk life, Indian lore, and contemporary life using foot-high, doll-like puppets manipulated directly without strings or rods.  Pas de Deux is a play of urban life, and Mansamente (“softly,” “smoothly,” or “gently”) tells three stories about Brazilian Indians and peasants.

 

Set to Brazilian flute music, Mansamente first depicts the solitary life and death of a peasant couple as they farm their small piece of land.  The second story is the adventures of an Indian boy who changes places with a squirrel he chases up a tree.  In the third tale, a young Indian couple from a tribe made extinct by syphilis caught from Europeans enjoy life and then make love in consonance with nature.  The Ribases, dressed in black from head to toe, gently and gracefully manipulate the puppets.  In the meticulously set scene, lit from floor level as the puppeteers loom in the shadows, the puppet characters go about their various activities—tilling the soil, climbing a tree, flying, making love—as if they were in a dream.  No word is spoken—the only sounds are the haunting music and the occasional squawk of a bird—heightening the dreamlike quality of the performances.  Even the Ribases seem to sense this: at the end they quietly leave the Amazonian lovers so as not to disturb them. 

 

Pantomimist Bolek Polivka’s The Jester and the Queen is a different kind of dream world.  Combining the sensibilities of Stanislavsky, Brecht, Marceau, Bill Irwin, and Doug Henning with a slightly bleak outlook and large measures of humor and personal charm, Polivka depicts the life of a clown in service to a queen who requires him to make her laugh whenever she commands.  In this exploration of the relation of art and power, Polivka, who can perform in English as well as a number of other languages with equal ease, makes points about theater, directors, Brecht—and life.  He shows us how his magic works, particularly a wonderful flying bit done with a mirror, and explains why he does certain things before he does them.  These revelations do not diminish the way his material delights and even stuns the audience. 

 

In another example of virtuoso solo work, San Franciscan Fred Curchack premiered his Inquest for Freddy Chickan at Theatre of Nations.  In what he bills “A Sci-Fi, Horror, Romance, Mystery, Musical, Comedy, Improv . . . ,” Curchack played all the characters in a search for popular TV comedian, Freddy Chickan, who had mysteriously disappeared.  The performance actually begins in the lobby as Curchack, in the guise of a hard-bitten New York detective, baits and rails at the audience.  He frequently returns to the audience for his comedy, which often fell flat at the opening performance, and even directly confronted the camera team from Maryland Public Broadcasting covering the performance.  Using masks, wigs, recorded and electronically enhanced voices (his own), and some unusual lighting and shadow effects, Curchack becomes, among others, the detective, Freddy’s lover, his agent, a space visitor and, of course, Freddy Chickan himself. 

 

Most striking in the 90-minute performance, however, is Curchack’s use of light and shadow.  When he retreats behind a white curtain to transform into one of the characters, he has an uncanny way of manipulating the shadow of himself changing costume that gives it a life independent of the artist.  He uses floor-level electric lights, candles and even a flashlight to create some bizarre shadow-and-light effects that include flashes, flares, floating bodies, and others that defy description. 

 

We in America need to sponsor more international festivals like the Theatre of Nations.  It’s an education none of us should deny ourselves —or our fellow artists.  As Philip Arnoult sees it, as reported in the Baltimore Sun, “This gathering . . . will change the face of world theater.”  In an article in the Baltimore City Paper, David Bergman sums up the event by quoting Percy Shelley: “‘Poets,’ by which he meant all artists, ‘are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’  For two weeks in June they were making new laws in Baltimore.”

 

[The first Theatre of Nations (Théâtres des Nations) festival was in 1956 in Paris, the headquarters of UNESCO, the parent agency, where it remained based until 1975.  These early biennial Paris festivals, where dozens of international theater companies perform in their native languages, hosted the introductions of Beiing Opera, the Berliner Ensemble, Kabuki, and the Moscow Art Theater to Western audiences.  

[In 1975 the International Theatre Institute, the UNESCO organization, founded in Prague in 1948, that runs the festival, decided to site each TON in an applicant city at 2-year intervals.  Held first in Warsaw in 1975 and then in a series of other cities, the Theatre of Nations has moved around the world to nearly every continent (though the 1986 Baltimore festival remains TON’s only North American appearance).  

[In 1998, the ITI established the Academy of the Theatre of Nations, which offers workshops for young performing artists.  Currently, a TON designation is awarded by ITI when an approved application is made to the institute.]