Staging Religion Across the Twentieth Century: Orthodox, Catholic, and Jewish Scenes

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel analyzes theatrical performance as a means of engaging with religious thought and identity across a century of secularization in Eastern Europe in three of the region’s major religions: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Judaism. The first presentation is a microhistorical analysis of the 1906 production of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Sister Beatrice staged by Vsevelod Meyerhold and Vera Komissarzhevskaia in St. Petersburg. This presentation recovers the work’s incidental music and censorship documents to reconsider the balance between implicit and explicit expression in the context of both Symbolist aesthetics and Orthodox thought. The second presentation considers Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of the holy actor or holy theater, reading it against Catholic theology of incarnation. What appears on the surface to present a vague and nondenominational sense of spirituality in fact reveals a powerful unity of both the divine and the material in the holy actor. This presentation will show what the divine-material unity implies for our belief in the reality or truth of the theatrical performance. The final presentation considers the Russian-language playwright Grigorii Gorin's late Soviet play A Prayer for the Dead, an adaptation of Yiddish-lanuage stories about Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem. Working with recorded performances of the play, directed by Mark Zakharov and first staged at Moscow's Lenkom theater in 1989, this paper argues that the figure of Tevye, lifted from stories involving anti-Jewish violence over seventy years earlier, served as a cipher for processing the ongoing and violent collapse of the USSR along ethnic and religious lines.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Lindsay Marie Ceballos, Lafayette College

Papers

• The Ecstasy of Sister Beatrice: Music Heard and Unheard with Meyerhold, Komissarzhevskaia, Liadov, and the Censors - David Thomas Salkowski, U of North Florida

• Incarnation and Belief in Grotowski’s 'Holy Theater' - Alisa Ballard Lin, Ohio State U

• Tevye on the Stage: The Figure of the Soviet Jew and the Theater of Perestroika - Sasha Senderovich, U of Washington

Discussant

• Thomas Seifrid, U of Southern California