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Restructuring the Lithuanian Theater
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18630 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,755 Words |
| Author
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Nicholas Rudall
Nicholas Rudall is artistic director of the Court Theatre,
Chicago, and professor of classics at the University of
Chicago. |
Bernie Sahlins, one of the founders of Chicago's Second City improvisational theater group, is in the middle of an extraordinary attempt to restructure the Lithuanian National Theater along free-market lines. This is a story of paradoxes--of astonishing artistic achievement in the midst of long periods of stagnation, of international acclaim and domestic disarray.
In the early 1980s, Lithuanian theater was, as one might expect, virtually unknown in the West. Theater in Russia and the satellite countries still struggled against political censorship. But to imagine Soviet theater as the slave of socialist realism in those years would be a mistake. First of all, Soviet theater has had a long and vibrant tradition of inventive and nonrealistic stagecraft. Stages are filled with symbolic and metaphorical design in a tradition that goes back to Mayakovsky. But more importantly, theater, in some miraculous way, was the one major art form that, in the midst of repression was able to give expression to great human yearnings. Theater was, and now certainly is, a political and an artistic forum.
Directional Vocabulary
During this time, something unique was happening in Lithuania. A man named Eimuntas Nekrosius was making his artistic presence felt at the National Youth Theater in Vilnius. He was single-handedly devising a new directorial theatrical vocabulary. He remained truthful to a basic Stanislavskian technique in which he and his actors extracted the authentic feelings and thoughts of the characters onstage. But he also brought to that stage metaphors that further illuminated the relationships between beings.
In a now internationally famous production of Uncle Vanya, for example, Nekrosius directed the scene between Astrov and Yelena (where Astrov is showing her the maps of the forest) in the following way. He had Astrov bring the maps to the table and, contrary to normal practice, they were extraordinarily small. Astrov had to use a magnifying glass to look at them. Normally the scene is overwhelmed by the size of these maps, Astrov's passion, and Yelena's boredom. This time, in a brilliant moment, Astrov took the magnifying glass away from these seemingly postage-stamp-sized and unimportant maps and looked at Yelena through the large magnifying glass, distorting her face for himself and the audience. It was a moment that clarified the disparity of their worlds in a way the words alone could not do.
Absolutely
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