When Elinor Fuchs, author, theatre critic and teacher at Yale School of Drama, exulted in the Nov. ’85 issue of American Theatre that “international festivals such as Europe has known for decades may at last be an idea whose time has come in America,” she could hardly have known that 15 years later she’d be called upon to lament the almost total reversal of that fortuitous trend. In this month’s essay, Fuchs tallies the losses occasioned by America’s retreat from its “brief era of theatrical cosmopolitanism” in the ’80s and assesses the prospects for a more international future.
We theatre folk—even we in New York—live in an economy of scarcity. To find this out all you have to do is visit Avignon in the summer, Paris in the fall and Berlin every spring. You can also go to Montreal, Edinburgh, Adelaide and Istanbul. But in this country the idea of presenting “big” foreign-language theatre created by major artists is all but dead.
Economies of scarcity are debilitating. One never knows whether to demean oneself with gratitude for the little that is given, or embarrass oneself with complaint against what little one gets. The major theatre offerings of the Lincoln Center Festival this summer provided the New York theatre community with an occasion for just such ambivalence.
The excitement came first. The Russians are coming! The Lincoln Center Festival was bringing to New York the Maly Theatre epic Brothers and Sisters, directed by the renowned Lev Dodin, and a Vakhtangov Theatre production of the Ostrovsky melodrama Innocent as Charged (usually translated, to the extent it is translated at all, as Guilty Without Guilt or Innocent but Guilty). So what if the Brothers and Sisters was the same production that had been scheduled for New York in 1988 and cancelled because of cost (yet had managed to get to San Diego a year or so later)? And no matter that Piotr Fomenko, the director of the Ostrovsky, disassociated himself from the production, which he had created six years previously and had not seen since. We in New York are so starved for any theatre that originates from east of London that old news is still news to us. But excitement was followed by puzzlement, disappointment and a murmur of complaint from that same New York theatre community, as it pondered the context of these works, and wondered what the more contemporary Russian theatre work (which we are unlikely to see now that we’ve had our “Russian year”) might have looked like.
We live in a certain Anglo-American insulation in New York; we are able to see English and Irish companies thanks to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And it is true that a little, a very little, foreign-language theatre breaks through the complacency of the audiences watching British stars perform Shakespeare. We have seen Ingmar Bergman at BAM. Some hardy Greeks dare to take on the City Center. The delicious Peony Pavilion was the surprise obsession of last year’s Lincoln Center Festival.
But quick! Tell me when you last saw one of those legendary Berlin Schaubuhne productions directed by Peter Stein—say The Cherry Orchard or his famous Peer Gynt—on a New York stage? The answer is never. And while we’re at it, recall that we last saw the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s theatre work (Hamlet) at the final PepsiCo Summerfare festival in 1989; that only one production by the Lithuanian director Eimuntas Nekrosius (his astounding Uncle Vanya) has been seen here, at the final New York International Festival in 1991; that the Los Angeles Festival, which began with Mnouchkine and Strehler in 1984, withered and died after its fourth trial in 1993; and that the Chicago International Festival ran out of money and steam in 1994.
Baltimore’s 1986 Theatre of Nations Festival, sponsored by the International Theatre Institute, under the direction of the redoubtable Martha Coigney, did not lead to the hoped-for continuation. Stabs by San Francisco and Atlanta at establishing international festivals also failed. Now New Haven is attempting to take up the slack: Good luck, New Haven! But this too is old news, and we in theatre no longer summon up the hope, much less the expectation, that the leading theatres of the non-English-speaking world will visit our major cities, even though our society is awash in money.
Our situation in my own cosmopolitan city is summed up by producer/writer/foundation executive Robert Marx: “New York is an international city when it comes to music, dance, film and the visual arts. Just imagine having no foreign films, no visiting orchestras, no dance companies from abroad, no art shows from elsewhere in the world. Unthinkable. But that is almost where we are in theatre.”
Take a single recent case of a missed opportunity: the final production of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble heir, the late Heiner Muller. Why could this parable on the rise of fascism, a topic New Yorkers can never get enough of, with one of the great performances of the past few decades anywhere (Martin Wuttke in the Hitler role), from one of the world’s most celebrated theatres, and one which was about to end a Brecht tradition of nearly 50 years—why could it not find its way to New York? And starved though the entire country is for large challenging theatre from countries that nourish serious theatre cultures, how did the production find its way to the West Coast?
I phoned Benjamin Mordecai, an eminence of foreign theatre presentation in the U.S., to discuss the question. Mordecai, associate dean of the Yale School of Drama, was co-founder of the American-Soviet Theatre Initiative, which helped to bring Brothers and Sisters to San Diego. He is now president of its successor organization, the American Theatre Exchange Initiative, which has expanded its focus beyond its former Soviet mandate. Mordecai stresses above all that the essential ingredient involved in bringing foreign theatre work to the United States is “grand passion.” He and others credit the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, and the passion of its organizer Robert Fitzpatrick, with launching our brief American era of theatrical cosmopolitanism. In the decade that followed—a period Mordecai calls the time of Big Art—major corporations threw themselves into “cause marketing.” As opposed to favoring passive charitable giving, big corporate patrons looked to identify themselves with something on an artistic scale that matched their view of themselves. For about 15 years, Mordecai says, a few passionate, entrepreneurial people of the theatre made allies at corporations like Philip Morris, AT&T and American Express. But though these and other corporations continue to subsidize art, this kind of corporate giving in general is highly volatile.
Norman Frisch, a festival curator and dramaturg who worked closely with Peter Sellars on the Los Angeles festivals, puts it this way: “There’s more and more marketing money, and less and less corporate foundation money.” “Consumer-driven” (as against “mission-driven”) money may go to art for a while, but let the weather or the CEO change, and the money trundles off to tennis, golf or the Statue of Liberty. PepsiCo, at the SUNY Purchase campus near its corporate headquarters in Westchester County, poured millions into what, under Christopher Hunt, became an international festival second to none. When PepsiCo decided to change direction after 1989, a sophisticated, world-class cultural resource collapsed overnight.
I asked Mordecai if he had heard any behind-the-scenes account of efforts to bring the Berliner Ensemble to New York with Arturo Ui, and he had not. But he was sympathetic with the difficulty of the project in today’s climate. In 1998 Mordecai attempted to put together a three-city tour marking the centennial of the Moscow Art Theatre. In the end, the Kennedy Center backed off and the sole taker was BAM, which in this case put little money into, and thus took little risk in, the undertaking. Mordecai was astonished that even for an event of recognizable magnitude—the centennial of a legendary theatre—other organizations did not leap to join the occasion. So, he implied, how are you going to sell the Berliner Ensemble if you can’t even sell the Moscow Art Theatre?
Since BAM was willing to offer Chekhov in Russian and Ibsen in Swedish, I asked its executive producer, Joseph Melillo, about German-language theatre–so important in Europe, so conspicuously and reliably absent from BAM. (There is an impression in the theatre world that Harvey Lichtenstein, BAM’s founder and Melillo’s predecessor, did not actually like German theatre. But it is already evident to those of us who read the BAM programming the way ancient priests once read the entrails of birds that Lichtenstein and Melillo have differences of taste and orientation.) Remembering how, many years ago, some critics sneered at the idea of hearing Ingmar Bergman’s Hamlet in Swedish, I expected Melillo to lay the blame at the door of the press, but I was wrong.
“You’re touching a very sore muscle in my body,” he said, when I raised the question of the late lamented Arturo Ui, “because I am now one of the senior members of the cultural community, and I am very concerned about American culture in the 21st century.” American institutional theatres, says Melillo, bear the chief responsibility for American theatrical insularity. “They don’t travel!” he exclaimed, describing himself as one who “camps out” at the Avignon Festival. “They haven’t tried! Unless they have met these [foreign] directors and developed a passion for bringing their work to their home audiences, they don’t know what they are talking about!”
Melillo’s prescription is travel and patiently cultivated relationships. He is less interested in importing a show than in developing ongoing partnerships in which BAM participates in the basic production. He is especially drawn to those projects that involve rethinking classical work. Thus BAM was central to the London run of the Almeida Theatre’s Coriolanus and Richard II with Ralph Fiennes, which played at BAM in September. “We backed these before we ever saw them,” Melillo said, emphasizing the risk (though backing two Shakespeare productions with a famous international movie star doesn’t sound as risky as bringing in the coruscating Arthur Ui with the Berliner Ensemble). Still, Melillo acknowledged that the new corporate sponsors (as against the old corporate philanthropists) don’t get excited about non-English-language theatre. “If it’s foreign poetry in some foreign language that nobody understands? Forget about it.”
Jane Nicholl Sahlins, founder and producer of the now-defunct International Theatre Festival of Chicago, says she always needed to lace each festival with a strong shot of the Brits because “Chicago audiences were not willing to work,” even with simultaneous translation. If productions were not in English, then it was important that they be strongly visual.
But there is by no means unanimity on this point. Robert Marx tells the following story about the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. Plans were underway to offer simultaneous translation for the Strehler productions The Tempest and The Servant of Two Masters. When Strehler heard about this, he said that making the audience understand what was on the stage was his job, and that he would cancel the tour if there was simultaneous translation. “Fitzpatrick then decided that if we weren’t going to translate for Strehler, we weren’t going to do it for anyone,” Marx recalled. “And it worked! The Los Angeles audience was excited about foreign work. They would come to the theatre clutching the play. If we could create that in Los Angeles, it can be done elsewhere.”
In Istanbul I sat through the more than three-hour-long Berliner Ensemble Arturo Ui in German with supertitles in Turkish—and still thought it was one of the seven wonders of the world. I decided to seek out Dieta Sixt, the Goethe Institute director in San Francisco, who—with the grand passion that Ben Mordecai sees as a pre-requisite for importing Big Art—was responsible for bringing the production to the West Coast. In the early ’60s, Sixt, now a veteran promoter of German culture in the U.S., was an 18-year-old in love with New York and with the theatre. She found her way to La MaMa ETC’s Ellen Stewart, the most passionate believer of them all in bringing theatre from other cultures to the U.S. Sixt keeps in close touch with theatre and dance developments in German-language cultures and had had her eye on Arturo Ui from its opening.
The Berliner Ensemble conducted its first European tour in 1956, but, remarkably, it had never been to the U.S. Because Arturo Ui had in part been written in Santa Monica, Sixt believed that this production “belonged” to the West Coast. But before she could put the package together, the demise of the theatre was announced and the tour of the play was cut short. Then, a Rome engagement was suddenly cancelled, leaving a window, and Sixt leapt on the dates.
Talks started in December of 1998 with Cal Performances (sometimes described as the “BAM of the West”), a performing arts organization affiliated with U.C. Berkeley. A deal was struck in March, and the production was presented in July of 1999. In Berkeley, Arturo Ui played only twice. Before critical notice or word of mouth, it sold out a hall seating 2,000 spectators. It is hard to imagine such a feat being replicated in New York, where advance work alone requires the lead time of a national election.
It actually took three national elections to get Brothers and Sisters to New York, a delay that dissatisfied many professional theatre people I talked to. Lincoln Center had offered up stale crumbs from the table of Russian theatre, they said, a “museum piece” with aging actors playing 15-year-old roles and a production whose anti-Communist politics and “Soviet socialist” style no longer reflected Russian culture. Some walked out at intermission, or said later that they wished they had.
I, however, was grateful to see the Maly’s epic tale about the sufferings of a Russian village under the scourge of the Soviet command economy. What the production lacked in current novelty it may have gained in contemporary historical perspective. We understand even better now the depth of corruption the drama inexorably unfolds. Distance also reveals how truly subversive Brothers and Sisters was, how it turned the system’s own performance style—heroic gestures, large sentiments and intermittent group “hymns”—against itself.
Baryshnikov was in the audience of Brothers and Sisters the Saturday I was there, but all of Brighton Beach turned out for the Ostrovsky play. Word had it that this was really the production to see. Since Ostrovsky’s old chestnut of a mother-son recognition plot was played out against the background of a third-rate provincial acting company, I sat there for a long while thinking that I was seeing something diabolically clever—a send-up of a third-rate acting company (and like Brothers and Sisters, another sort of undermining through formal means). The minimal but hilarious set, with its ghastly, dust-laden fake potted plants, led one in this amusing direction.
But once again, the experience ended in confusion and cultural disconnect. Here were some of the most distinguished actors of Russia, laden with awards, known also for their film work: Why did they look, well, like a real provincial company? The Russian-speaking members of the audience were enjoying themselves, but the Americans sat in bewilderment. Or were we right in perceiving what appeared to be a sentimental milking of the text, with actors intent on making drawn-out “star” entrances and exits? Were we not able to appreciate good theatre produced under unfamiliar rules of engagement?
And yet we’re grateful to have been offered this peek (too old! too sentimental! not representative of Russian theatre today!) into another theatre culture. I asked Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival for the past three seasons, about Piotr Fomenko’s refusal to accompany the production after having been announced as a speaker at a festival symposium. Redden is infinitely gracious and winningly understated. “We didn’t know that then,” he chuckled.
Though British, Redden has had a long history in the American performing arts world. He continues as general director of the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, has worked as executive director of the Santa Fe Opera and for a time ran the performing arts program of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He admits to no problems about funding or raising audiences for foreign-language theatre, even though his most ambitious plan of the moment is another mini-festival of English-language work.
I ask him about bringing German theatre to the U.S. He chuckles again. “I tried to bring the Schaubuhne Three Sisters to Spoleto a few years ago, 1989 or 1990. It needed heavy subsidies, but the man at the German foreign office asked me, ‘Now Charleston, is that near Los Angeles?’ And that seemed to be the end of it.”
Elinor Fuchs is the author of The Death of Character (Indiana University Press, 1996).
