I’VE STAGED THE SAME PLAY MY ENTIRE LIFE

by Markas Petuchauskas

The boy from Pažiobris village near Šiluva, unlike many future theater critics and actors, didn’t take part in amateur efforts, didn’t dream of becoming an actor and didn’t visit the theater keenly. The first play he saw was in the tenth grade. Instead, he loved prose: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and while he knew Shakespeare existed, he didn’t read him because “it wasn’t interesting then.” His older sister, an attorney who, her brother said, had “the true professional eye of a spectator,” and his teacher Bronius Burneckas, “a polyglot, a person of learning and a sort of Leonardo da Šiluva,” encouraged Nekrošius to enter the Conservatory. And so Eimuntas ended up in a course led by Vytautas Čibiras and Dalia Tamulevičiūtė. Two years later, bedazzled by these two wonderful directors, he matriculated at the GITIS in Moscow to study directing.

I would like to talk about the young director’s plays in his own country, which are likely little-known or completely unknown abroad. After all, most spectators of the older generation viewed them and later recalled them in Lithuania. So little time relatively has passed since the heart of the theatrical genius stopped. Can this really be called history already?

About four decades ago Eimuntas told me the story: “I travelled to Moscow to study without receiving a recommendation from the Republic, the competition was fierce, it seems as if there were 15 people for every place available. The renowned director Andrey Goncharov was selecting the students. I read Mayakovsky’s poem, I wrote a director’s explanation of Maguerite Duras’s ‘Hiroshima My Love.’ Goncharov liked it. The course was international, with representatives of eight countries of the world chosen. I was the only one from the Baltics. For five entire years I was on the edge of being kicked out of the institute. Goncharov mercilessly gave me threes for specialty disciplines. Over five years some of the students presented excerpts from five works, I presented maybe fifty over the same time-period–‘Richard III,’ ‘Faust,’ almost the entirety of ‘Mozart and Salieri’–but Goncharov constantly rejected them as failures. I was told over and over: ‘It’s not that sort of school, it’s the wrong manner, you’re going in the wrong direction…'”

This conversation took place when I was preparing for publication my first portrait of Nekrošius called “Gyvenimo metaforos link” [Towards the Metaphor of Life] (1983) examining the director’s work. At different times I wrote in newspapers, magazines and almanacs about almost all of his plays: Shelagh Delaney’s “Taste of Honey,” Saulius Šaltenis’s “Duokiškio baladės” [Ballads of Duokiškis], Anton Chekhov’s “Ivanov” and “Uncle Vanya,” a dramatic adaptation of “Kvadratas” [Square], Vadim Korostylov’s “Pirosmani, Pirosmani…,” the rock opera “Love and Death in Verona” (based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”) and others. When the opportunity arose to watch his rehearsals, it greatly helped me to understand the essence of Nekrošius’s creativity. As I recall it, the auditorium behind me used to be empty. Eimuntas only very reluctantly used to allow outsiders to watch rehearsals. I dare think I received this privilege when the director was convinced of my “theatricalicity.” I used to also see at rehearsals the young critic Ramunė Marcinkevičiūtė who had also earned a similar level of trust and who spent a large part of her future work on studying Nekrošius’s art.

Eimuntas Nekrošius entered Lithuanian theater with the wave of young new directors in the 1970s: Dalia Tamulevičiūtė, Jonas Vaitkus, Gytis Padegimas and Saulius Varnas. When after the impassioned renewal of the theater and artistic polemic a time of contemplation came to be. One clear example of the scholastic arguments which were widespread then was the endless considerations of who was the more important figure, the director or the actor. Paradoxically, after Nekrošius’s first plays it began to be said he had “hustled and made things happen” in a fashionable way, demanding the same of his actors. It was in his plays that Kostas Smoriginas, Remigijus Vilkaitis, Vidas Petkevičius, Dalia Storyk, Kristina Kazlauskaitė and Vladas Bagdonas created roles which opened new and significant stages in their work for them, and in many cases set important new directions in theater.

As it happened, I watched the rehearsal for “Uncle Vanya” as well, which gave rise to a major storm of accusations against the “hustling” director. I won’t go into the theater masters, specialists, noted writers and other artists who took offense at this interpretation of Checkov’s play. Many of the “accusers” rapidly converted to a passionate admiration of the same director. The important thing was that Nekrošius didn’t give in, and his “amateurish” “Uncle Vanya” drew oceans of spectators to the Youth Theater who stood vigil through the night in line outside the ticket booth. I remember I was sitting next to Monika Mironaitė and just as the curtain rose she began criticizing the awful “improvisation.” Demonstratively sighing, she kept moving as if to leave, but I, pressing her hand firmly against the arm of the chair, convinced her in a whisper not to hurry off, since she, too, used to experiment bravely on the stage.

The action of the famous American playwright Arthur Miller rang out as brilliant dissonance to the harsh critics. When he visited Lithuania and watched Nekrošius’s play “Ilga kaip šimtmečiai diena” [Day as Long as a Century], he kneeled before the director, presented him flowers and was perhaps the first to call him genius. Thanks to the efforts of poet and dramaturg Allen Ginsberg, Nekrošius’s plays managed to break through the Iron Curtain and the world learned of the Lithuanian director after his tour of the United States.

Nekrošius was asked numerous times about the echoes of Jewish melodies of mourning in his plays. Theater researcher Ramunė Marcinkevičiūtė in her monograph “Eimuntas Nekrošius: erdvė už žodžių” [Eimuntas Nekrošius: Space Beyond Words] (2002) said, correctly, the beginning of the “Uncle Vanya” production where music plays before Chekhov’s words had been long ignored. During performances in Amsterdam, Nekrošius was asked why he used motifs from the Jewish kaddish elegy, and said: “This is not purely a Russian or Lithuanian play, it is also Jewish, because Judaism provided the first impulse for Christianity and culture.” Marcinkevičiūtė very precisely says: “from the very first moments of the play–the Mass in Hebrew, doctor Astrov looking for a vein–the director proclaims he has a completely different understanding of Chekhov. … Nekrošius has a very original interpretation of time, as both a structural element of the drama, and as a factor of historical context. Incredibly, he makes sense of the famous leitmotif of Chekhov’s play: the allusion to those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us.”

Whoever has seen at least once the Youth Theater’s “Uncle Vanya” will undoubtedly remember the troika of hooligan servants inserted by the director, the floor polishers. These servants polished the floor with real gusto, deeply angry and embittered, with unhidden hatred perhaps towards their masters slandered here, or perhaps for the entire world, which the “enslaved” would each like to reorder in their own way. Rimgaudas Karvelis, Vytautas Taukinaitis and Jūratė Aniulytė developed these characters and those who watched the flying and shattered dishes and overturned tables could harbor no doubts on what sort of “reform” this would be…

All of Nekrošius’s plays, however different they might be, are connected by a common thread. Right from the debut of “Taste of Honey” we “tasted” the love of man. Perhaps these words are somewhat archaic. The spirituality, the humanity here first expresses itself in the respect and attention paid to the actor, to the colleague with whom the play is produced. Nothing so concerns the director as the plight of man in our complicated age, the corrosion and interruption of interpersonal relationships. The tragic erosion of the personality and the search for inner connection with the Other is the leitmotif of “Duokiškio baladės,” “Ivanov,” “Katė už durų” [Cat behind the Door], “Kvadratas,” “Love and Death in Verona” and “Pirosmani, Pirosmani…”

Dialogue as the antithesis of lost contact. Theater as dialogue. The director’s aesthetic position, his relationship with the spectator lead to this. For every play, he sought ever different artistic expression, opening up vistas on new worlds existing autonomously, according to the inner laws of the truth of the stage, discovered by the director for concrete manifestation.

Some sixty years ago the first of Chekhov’s Ivanovs on the Lithuanian stage suffered the difficult drama of a “performed” figure. Ivanov by Panevėžys Theater artistic director Jouzas Miltinis and actor Stasys Petronaitis youthfully believed he would be saved by an oasis untouched by life, by Sasha’s pure love. Nekrošius’s Ivanov on the Kaunas stage, however, desperately clung to Sasha out of hopelessness. This was a completely different drama, almost transgressing the final limit of existence. It is the tragedy of the modern man whose spiritual contact with the world has been broken off catastrophically. Nekrošius’s aspiration Ivanov would himself reach a brutal end resembles Chekhov. Portraying Ivanov’s environment, the director even used the grotesque principle of masked comedy (not characteristic of and even alien to Chekhov’s greatest dramas). Everyone expects without the slightest doubt any sort of slander by the cynic Borkin, insulting, debasing, desecrating and trampling the man. But none of those around listen to the words of truth, they don’t heed Sasha’s arguments. That person whom no one around him hears, Chekhov named, not coincidentally, Ivanov, perhaps the most common surname in his country. Here society was deaf to the Ivanovs.

Nekrošius emphasizes: in the eyes of those around, all of Borkin’s distasteful speech and all accusations fall upon the “sinful” shoulders of Ivanov, no matter what he does, while the morally degraded Borkin is view with sympathy and forgiveness: oh, that lovely, lovely cynic…

Marrying a Jewish girl out of great and noble love, Ivanov risked ruining his reputation, but those around him are convinced he did so out of mercantile considerations. As if a bird, shot, still tries to rise up, to break through to the light, but the future marriage with Sasha is still considered an alliance “of calculation.” Even his first wife, Anna (Sarah), stops believing him before death, and finally so does Sasha. Ivanov (actor Petras Venslovas) is neither able to explain to himself nor adapt himself in order to restore failed relations with those around him. All bridges have been burnt, he simply cannot go back. The chilling spiritual catastrophe ir revealed tersely. Ivanov is not communicative, he doesn’t talk much. As if he were “disconnected,” hiding his spiritual state. He knows neither how to justify nor explain it, and is therefore all the more fragile. Impotent not just against the Borkins, but impotent for his wife, Sasha, as well. Undertaking not even the slightest activity, Ivanov in the first scene of the play doesn’t even read books (as the script says). Only recently he had been powerful and talented, but now, senseless gaze fixed on the future, he gnaws at an apple ambivalently. It isn’t coincidental that, half-jokingly, Borkin doesn’t point the gun at Ivanov, as in Chekhov, but at doctor Lvov. But the shot will not ring forth in the finale, either, again as the script says. The hero of the play will fade away slowly and with difficulty.

The maximalist director took that entire bundle of energy from “Ivanov” and raised it to the world of visions, that irreal flying carriage of hopes. This is like an ironic contradiction to the flight of Nikolai Gogol’s three stallions, the “troika.” Here the carriage flies Ivanov to the happy land of Sasha, although in reality it isn’t rushing anywhere and isn’t flying anyone. It is stuck, frozen, the reins have fallen slack… The scale of colors of the red and black of the carriage recall the funereal bier where Ivanov and Sasha’s love is buried, and later, at the end of the play, both Ivanovs as well, their fate.

The entire visual, plastic and audio structure of “Ivanov” has a great emotional effect. Just as emotionally, from the hooting of the owl (Chekhov’s remark) incredibly emerges the melody of the mournful Jewish prayer, revealing Anna’s (Sarah’s) tragedy. The hooting of the owl and the sounds of the tragic kaddish follow Anna (the actress Rūta Staliliūnaitė), reminding us that she, although baptized, has nonetheless failed to fully forget the spirit of her forefathers. It’s as if the director here is continuing the dramatization beloved by Chekhov of the broken musical string, occasionally “heard” in some of his plays.

The director redacts the text of the play and it ends with penultimate scene from the play. Ivanov slowly stretches out on the floor like a powerless, abused child. A person who has drunk the cup of his fate to the last drop. Perhaps he has gone mad, and perhaps also he is wise, having prepared himself for non-existence. “Where is Matthew? Let him take me home,” he asks, with one shoe off and somehow unsuccessfully dressed, then drops silent. He is silent next to Anna in the same funeral car. Both quiet, satisfied. The dreams of life have receded.

In other versions of “Ivanov” I have seen, I have never seen such a painful and tragic Anna as the one created by the director and the actress Rūta Staliliūnaitė, an Anna who is the equal to Ivanov (perhaps with the exception of the actress Konstantsiya Royek at Moscow’s Little Theater, who chose a similar path). The relatively few lines didn’t prevent showing the profundity of this woman’s drama. Loving and self-sacrificing, courageous and irresolute, she illuminates the play with a spiritual light. Ever “directing herself,” Rūta Staliliūnaitė managed to meld mental, emotional and physical expression into a final tragic portrait. Incidentally, Nekrošius many times suggested to actors they develop their characters themselves.

The tragedy of unbelief as the director interprets it in “Ivanov” expresses that Chekhovian spiritual maximalism.

How poetic can each and every thing of the spinning world become when the transformative magic of the theater touches upon it! In that regard, Porismani’s friend, the mute Guard (actor Vidas Petkevičius), the suffering sidekick to the artist’s soul, grabs an empty bottle and blows into it in order to bring down the blind wall of ambivalence, making a strange whistling sound, raising a chilling drama of solitude to metaphor.

“The main thing for me in theater,” Nekrošius said commenting on my thoughts in my reviews, “is artistic verisimilitude, and namely artistic, rather than the first layer of mundane truth. But I don’t want to break away from earth, not even an inch. But even so, it is necessary to break away from the earth in order to stir the atmosphere of the stage, for the miracle of theater to emerge. It’s a slippery slope from details discovered to pure feeling, to the calling of the actor. Only Petkevičius was the right one for blowing as the Guard, not another actor, for example, Antanas Šurna, who sought another way to express solitude. You have to really know the actor, to feel his inner self. It’s all like pharmacy scales. For a long time I looked for a way to express Pirosmani’s fate. I thought: here was this dark figure, this redneck dear to no one, interesting to no one, but glory arrived and suddenly he became important, but he himself was already gone. Just try to take a dead person and belatedly whitewash him, what do you do, sprinkle flour on him? That’s how the scene with Vladas Bagdonas as Pirosmani sprinkled with flour was born.”

In the play “Kvadratas” [Square] the iron bed of the hero of the actor Smorigin, an attribute of prison life, became the world of his spiritual metamorphosis. Lumps of sugar became the metaphor for nascent love, fidelity and patience. Of painful exertions not just to overcome hundreds of kilometers separating two people, but also the poetic image of spiritual distance. And the white rain of those bits of sugar was also the sign of coming blessing. Just as the empty old jam jar in the actor’s hands becomes a transmitter by which signals of human warmth overcome cold, dead space… It’s sufficient for Smorigin’s hands to brush up against the wrinkled and faded prison uniform of his hero and you understand: this is a celebration of man’s meeting with man.

“I always prepare carefully for rehearsal. I write a lot, there is too much writing in the drama transcript, even the cover has no space left, I always have regrets there are so few empty margins… Usually I am trying to capture not the concept itself, but its specific implementation in each scene. We search a lot, with the actors, and then we choose from everything they and I have brought to the scene. Sometimes something looks brilliant at home, but when you get to rehearsal, it looks totally different.

“The issue of the hero of the scene is always a concern. I won’t hide that I sympathize with the hero afflicted by misfortune who needs not only consolation but help as well. Let’s remember that five or six hundred spectators are sitting in the auditorium, there are so many invisible strings stretching from each person to the stage and back to the auditorium…

“… I attend my own and my colleagues’ plays systematically. I could count on my fingers how many plays I’ve missed. This is extremely important to the actor. The constant presence of the director shows he’s interested in the play, and that unites the troupe of actors. I also attend performances by my colleagues. I like Povilas Gaidys’s “Mindaugas,” Henrikas Vancevičius’s “Stepančikovo dvaras” [Stepančikovas’s Manor] (I viewed it several times), Jonas Vaitkus’s “Karalius Ūbas” [King Ūbas], “Statytojas Solnesas” [Solnesas the Builder] and other presentations. Some of Yuri Lyubimov and Anatoli Efros’s plays left a deep impression. To be frank, though, there isn’t a director whom I would like to emulate. I intentionally stop myself: nothing needs to be repeated in theater. Neither Efros, nor Lyubimov, nor anyone else.”

Nekrošius arrived at the Youth Theater at a time when there was already a certain line of direction there which had grown out of the presentations by Dalia Tamulevičiūtė. It was possible to fall back on that. There was a repertoire, first and foremost the track set down by Saulius Šaltenis’s dramaturgy, which it was possible to follow. The aspiration to create with the actor and through him gave rise to the concept of the Nekrošius theater as synthetic art. Special attention was paid to its components such as scenography, music, lighting and sound. There was a broad and often incredible stylistic amplitude in genre plays. Each play was also a new search together with the scenographer, especially Adomas Jacovskis, new attempts to explore the stylistic and genre possibilities in directing.

Presenting a rock opera based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the director transformed the opera genre into that of drama. Not through music, but through the servants of the muse of drama he again demonstrated the true synthetic nature of the theater, for which all is attainable: the living spirit of the character and also painting, sculpture, music, architecture, psychology, dance and the pregnant, static moment. And so the visual musicality of acting and the drama of music, passionate pantomimic expression and psychological certitude, the stylistic integrity of concept and a polyphony of genres and their organic diffusion were all enshrined in the space of Shakespearian tragedy.

In later years Nekrošius many times shocked the theater with his musical and operatic presentations, providing new artistic prospects for this genre to the world.

Eimuntas Nekrošius’s novel directing of opera gave to the world stage works by Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Johann Goethe, Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov and Albert Camus, a unique contribution to the renewal of the theater in the modern era. The Lithuanian director’s plays spread around the world at lightning speed, a world who inscribed his name in gold in the history of theater. They are performed everywhere theater is appreciated. And most enthusiastically, it seems, in Italy, Eimunta’s second homeland. Visionario. That is the extent to which he, seen as the mystical dreamer of unique imagination, is loved by all of Italy.

Nekrošius’s best plays are full of the lyricism, reserve and even asceticism which gives rise to the severity of the stage metaphor characteristic of the Lithuanian theater. Psychological, repressed to almost the symbolic level, but pulsing with shared features, hopes and faith of humanity.

Saulius Šaltenis’s play “Duokiškio baladės” (based on the “Duokiškis” fable) presented by Nekrošius way back in 1973 in Kaunas, as I predicted in my review, gave rise to polemic. It’s understandable why. The national culture lives through memory. Every new generation inevitably attempts anew to understand the crossroads of the past in order to live today and create a tomorrow. In the Soviet era this was a very brave play transcending time about the pernicious collision of two systems, incarnated in the portraits of Jėzus Grigaliūnas and Pernaravičius, a collision which causes the death of the rambling Spielskis types who cannot find a place for themselves.

The directing of the presentation was extraordinary and its rules of play weren’t immediately evident. Nekrošius, the artist Nadezhda Gultayeva and the composer Saulius Šiaučiulis managed to give sense to the ruthless drama of history through the entire scenic, plastic and audio structure of the play. As hard as that bread carried by Pulmanas’s (actor Leonardas Zelčius) one-horse cart which became stone. Pulmanas is transporting small loaves of bread to the town which are replaced by Jėzus Grigaliūnas’s men with rocks. The image of the man bending over the stone carries many meanings. Pulmanas is barely able to bear the heavy stone of destiny. The rock by which Jėzus Grigaliūnas makes the final attempt to defend himself turns into the grave mound through which intersects a cross made of branches …

Towards the back of the stage is a wooden pedestal upon which grows a gate similar to the Lithuanian folk religious posts found along village roads: through the gate enter the living in order to carry away the dead, and the dead to take the living… The lowering and again rising broad, cracked and holey board can become a burning oven, and the wall beyond which death lurks And the huge table like a cradle for the tragic last supper of Christmas, when former student Jėzus Grigaliūnas’s bullet pierces the teacher Spelskis. Actor Vytautas Grigolis’s Spelskis was a slight man vacillating between the two camps. Funny and at the same time dramatic. His Christmas confessional “monologues” rise to the level of stark theatrical symbol. The posthumous entry onto the state by Spelskis and the student who had committed suicide (actor Algimantas Pociūnas) as an exuberant and loud march song plays recalls the ecstasy of some danse macabre.

The actor Valdas Žilėnas developed the role of the partisan leader Jėzus Grigaliūnas in two organically intertwining directions: a sculptural solidity and reserve and the expression of inner power; and the attractive beauty of youth, with childishly soft facial features and eyes burning with hatred. Grigaliūnas never enters the scene in a normal way, he’s always somersaulting onto the stage through a gate of logs. His antipode also wears a grey travelling cape, as does Jėzus Grigaliūnas, he who calls himself the defender of the people, the gangster-henchman Pernaravičius (played by the actor Kęstutis Genys). In the visual composition of the play these two are like two opposite poles between whom the Spelskises find themselves and run around, as if in the crossfire.

The fate of the younger generation comes to the top of the agenda in the impressive second part of the play. Speilskis’s eldest son Augustas’s difficult personality and even more difficult and flawed fate was revealed by the actor Petras Venclovas. Inner drama seems to be an inborn characteristic of the actress Jūratė Onaitytė, so proximate to Nekrošius’s play, and she infused this in her portrait of Elzė Pulmonaitė. The actress’s screeching irony suddenly replaces the lyricism of the fragile heroine.

The odd trio of Augustas, Elzė and Žygimantas (played by Robertas Vaidotas) becomes the conceptual and emotional culmination of the play. Not only do they sort out the earlier life relations between Grigaliūnas, the elder Spielskis and Pernaravičius, the wrathful balance of existence, but also meaningfully extend the horizons of the new generation. The deadly shot in the final act suddenly echoes anew in the voice of a person talking, as if witnessing to the future, erasing and burying much from the past, but also preserving something, having learned.

And the thought occurs to me: is perhaps this play by Nekrošius not just about the postwar period? Is it perhaps about the ceaseless wrestling between the old and the new world which has always and everywhere taken place in the heart of man? Today we can say with confidence that all of this is the leitmotif of the brilliant work of the director, or, in his own words, of the “play which I have been presenting my entire life.”

No, Eimuntas Nekrošius’s heart hasn’t stopped. It beats on in his plays.

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Translation © 2020 by Geoff Vasil. All rights reserved. No part of this translation may be used, copied or transcribed by any means including electronic and print without prior written agreement with the translator. Violators face severe criminal and civil liability.