Dragana Varagic

CROSSING THE BRIDGE

In this paper I will discuss three productions from or related to East European culture: Princess T. by Daniela Fischerova, Happiness Channel by Silvija Jestrovic and Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers by Branko Milicevic. I participated in them as a director and in one of them as an actor as well.

Although all three playwrights are of East European origin, the plays are written in different languages (Czech, English, Serbian) and represent different genres: Princess T. is a combination of the fairy tale and commedia dell'arte, Happiness Channel is an allusion to Chekhov's Three Sisters and Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers is a children's play. The productions addressed different kinds of audiences (academic, Fringe Festival audience and young audience). However, it is not differences between the plays I that want to talk about. I want to focus on similarities between these three productions and the underlying theme of identity which connects them.

Princess T., produced for the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama of University of Toronto, is the play based on the fairy tale about princess Turandot. A cruel princess sets a task for her suitors in the form of riddles. Those who are not able to answer her riddles will be executed. The hero takes up the challenge, solves the task, marries the princess and ascends the throne. The story develops with the help of three clowns from commedia dell'arte.

Happiness Channel originated within Tarragon/Chalmers Playwrights Unit and had its first production at the Toronto Fringe 2000. Happiness Channel is the story about immigrants' life: three women from Belgrade-an actress, an art historian and a photographer, one childhood friend, one Italian painter and one young man from Newfoundland. All meet in Toronto in search of their identities.

Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers is the story of twin brothers, with two hats and one cape, who happen to be the brothers Grimm, fighting about who writes better fairy tales. Since they cannot write a new fairy tale in front of children as judges, because they lived long time ago, they decide to present an old one-Snow White.

In all three productions the question of identity is the major theme. It is related to the question of identity of the characters, genres and the audience. The characters in the plays are exposed at the beginning as stereotyped figures: immigrants, brothers who fight, stock characters from commedia dell'arte or fairy tale.

In Princess T. the combination of the fairy tale (with its assumed happy ending) and commedia dell' arte) with its assumed comic, playful characters) provides advance information for the audience. The clowns from commedia dell'arte are playful, joyous stereotypes engaged in buffoonery. They giggle, chase each other, try to outdo each other with silly tricks, make fun of their own replicas. But at the moment of frustration they display cruelty and fear, and their gestures tend towards grotesque and even realistic, violent acting. The audience becomes aware that the context of commedia dell'arte is not appropriate any longer. The deviation from the original fairy tale story appears from the very beginning. The princess is not young and beautiful. She does not want a husband, but the power to rule over China. She is a problem to her old father. The hero is clever, young, poor but honest, and the princess falls in love. At the end of the play we learn that the hero is not the outcast but the prince of the conquered land who also wants power; that he is not honest but manipulative because he made a secret arrangement with the princess's father in order to achieve his goal. The theme of love turns into the theme of power and manipulation, the princess becomes a victim, and the hero becomes the villain. Fischerova maintains the basic structure of the fairy tale, as well as the fairy tale's main characters, but she inverts the meaning of the fairy tale, the underlying relations between always triumphant good and always defeated evil. The fairy tale happy ending, the wedding of the prince and princess, is served with bitterness and irony.

In Happiness Channel three successful women from Belgrade, after coming to Toronto, have had to make some adjustments: a famous actress works as a part time dental receptionist, an accomplished photographer waits on tables and arranges her marriage of convenience to a young man from Newfoundland in order to get her Canadian passport, and an art historian and a former ambassador's daughter works as an S&M “art history teacher” in a peep show. The situation becomes complicated when their mutual childhood friend, a journalist from New York, arrives in Toronto with his friend, an Italian painter. These two are also at the crossroads of their lives. They all choose to play fabricated stories of their success to hide their real situations. The lies trip over each other, producing comic effects. But during the course of the play, the desperate situation becomes obvious to everybody. The comedy of errors turns into a drama about lost identities and isolation. The childhood friend goes back to Belgrade, the Italian painter runs away with the Newfoundlander. Three women in Toronto watch the news of the beginning of air strikes of Yugoslavia.

In Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers two brothers reveal themselves as unemployed actors, who, with the third actor and helped by children playing the dwarfs, make a performance. The question of the genre is literally explored when the scene between Snow White and the hunter almost turns into a tragedy and stops the story. With the intervention of one of the brothers Grimm the scene, in which we see Snow White in danger, is immediately repeated, this time played as a full comedy based on the silent movie genre.

All three productions revolve around the relationship between reality and the theatre, and role playing is an important component in each. The clowns in Princess T. take up minor roles in the fairy tale plot, the immigrants from Happiness Channel play the roles of successful professionals, and the brothers Grimm play parts in the fairy tale about Snow White. There is an interplay between the actor, the character and the role the character takes on, which includes the audience into the productions; this brings us to the question of the identity of the audience.

In Princess T. there is always an intrusion of the private space: the fairy tale characters are granted access to each other's private worlds, and the clowns watch the performance of the fairy tale. The fictional audience on stage corresponds to the real audience in the auditorium. The audience watches the show. The clowns watch the fairy tale. The fairy tale characters watch each other's private business. This was insinuated from the very beginning, when in the opening scene, with lights still up, clowns rush on stage through the auditorium with the first lines. The blocking connects the auditorium and stage into one playing area that includes the audience in the theatrical presentation. The audience belongs to the world that surrounds fairy tale characters.

Happiness Channel starts with an actress speaking the lines of Masha in Chekov's Three Sisters. After the speech, she addresses the audience directly casting them into the role of a director she just auditioned for. The actress is the only character in the play who addresses the audience directly. At the end of the play we have an actress playing an actress who cannot get the job, when she suddenly finds herself in front of the audience, and takes a bow.

In Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers the brothers Grimm cast the children in minor roles, and also assign them the role of the audience in a play within a play. With the audience situated in the playing area the fiction becomes reality, or reality becomes fiction. The intrusion of reality into the fictional world provides for the psychological development of the characters. With the emergence of the subplot, the genre changes and the subplot evolves into a major plot.

The clowns' function in Princess T. is to expose the theatre machinery: they divide the play into the scenes, and serve as the stagehands. Combining the two genres with stock characters and different plot characteristics, one with a firmly structured plot and the other with a sketched plot, the playwright obtains an interesting result: the fairy tale loses its independence, being executed by the forces outside the dramatic action-that is, by the clowns, and the plot follows only the outline of the fairy tale plot. The stock characters from both genres become far more developed psychologically then in their original context. There is a parallelism between Fischerova's violations of the conventions of both fairy tale and commedia dell'arte on one hand, and violence as one of the themes on the other. This parallelism is closely connected to the question of the identity in Princess T. One way or another every single character inflicts violence on all others; at the same time, every single character suffers violence at the hands of the others. The clowns are instruments of violence either as “servants” of the Emperor of China assigned to execute the politics, or as “servants” of the “author” assigned to execute the play. As the servants of the “author” their major influence is in segmenting the play. By such means they control the behaviour of the fairy tale characters, limiting their otherwise spontaneous motivations. The Clowns are not only the instrument, but also the objects of violence. At the beginning they appear more as a chorus than as three individual characters: they execute the same action and continue each other's lines, making them into a coherent speech. But at the moment of frustration the Clowns, being suddenly gripped by the fairy tale plot, break up the unity of the chorus into separate characters, and accuse each other of revealing their hidden identity. By sudden emergence from one circle of the play (commedia dell'arte) into another (the fairy tale), the infusion of the plot of the clowns (which is not developed in front of the audience) into the already frustrated plot of the fairy tale, the characters from both circles become united in their realistic behaviour. This new plot represents an intrusion of violent reality into the apparently benign plot. The plot is brought from the “long time ago” and the “far away” to the here-and-now. On the basis of the Clowns' behaviour, the audience situates them in the context of commedia dell'arte. At the moment when the Clowns disclose that the stereotypes of commedia dell'arte are masks for their hidden identity, the audience becomes aware that the context of commedia del'arte is not appropriate any longer.

In Happiness Channel we have two groups of people with conflicting interests: to manipulate each other. The audience watches the comedy of errors when they enter the game of make believe. With the intrusion of the reality into the fabricated story, the lies become transparent to all characters and the role playing becomes absurd. When some kind of the resolution is expected, the characters unite their efforts in maintaining the absurd situation, helping out each other whenever reality threatens to break in. In fact the characters move their internal communication into a deeper level, silently acknowledging the irony of the situation. Although the group splits, compassion and protection of each other's vulnerable dignity, shaken in the mid-zone between the past and the present, turn the theme of manipulation into a theme of friendship. So far, unlike the characters, the audience has had access to all information. Suddenly the characters close the internal communication circle. When the group splits, the audience learns that the art historian and the journalist are in love, the photographer got an exhibition and the actress is pregnant with the Italian painter's child.

In Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers the major plot is not the plot of the fairy tale as it is expected from the title. During the performance of the Snow White, the two quarreling brothers, trying to out do each other, alter the fairy tale plot. Now, neither actors nor the characters brothers Grimm, can remember any longer how the fairy tale is brought to the happy ending. The actress in the role of Snow White stops the performance and explains the solution.

The plays revolve around the relationship between the reality and the theatre. This relationship is defined by three concentric circles. The first circle coincides with the core of the play and is based on stereotyped characters. The second circle is founded on psychologically developed characters, while the third circle finds its circumference in the audience. The boundaries of the circles fluctuate. Constant betrayal of the audience's expectations and the shift of the focus from one perspective to another gives rise to the theme of identity of the genres involved, of the characters, and of the audience itself.

In Princess T. the set (by Andjelija Djuric) was a box with curtains on the front side. The sides of the box were transparent and either opened or closed. The fairy tale characters were using the sides of the box for entrances and exits, some characters only left, and some only right side. In the second half of the production they changed sides. The clowns used the space in front of the box. Princess Turandot had her own established space-inside the box. Although manipulated by actors, the box looked very rigid, and too solid. At the end, the box took up all the characters in its womb. The leitmotif was a simple waltz children usually learn during the first piano lessons. The music (by Dragoslav Tanaskovic) accompanied the clowns and changed with the change of the roles clowns play in the fairy tale. The music was joyful when clowns represented children, serious when they were “doctors of law,” or disharmonic when they were drunken guards. At the end of the play, during the wedding waltz, the music sounded like it was from a broken record. All characters, dancing like marionettes after the discontinuation of the music, danced into the box, occupying Turandot's space. The box spun around faster and faster, and then stopped with the abrupt stop of the music, facing the audience, with the lights already up in the auditorium.

Happiness Channel is a full-length play which for the purpose of the Toronto Fringe presentation, had to be cut to an hour version. With the approval of and in collaboration with the playwright (Silvija Jestrovic), the dramaturg (Yana Meerzon) and assistant director (Milija Gluhovic) and I cut almost half of the play. Some scenes were combined, some cut completely. We were careful to preserve the plot. We cut most of the information about the political situation in Yugoslavia, and together with it, the origin of the title Happiness Channel, which was the name of the TV station in Belgrade broadcasting the mixture of fabricated news and porn movies. The decision was to omit the irony of the political situation in Yugoslavia, and focus on the irony of the characters' situation in Canada. The fully developed scenes were cut deliberately into snap shot scenes. Each scene started in the middle of the action and finished abruptly when the new theme rose. In that new structure and rhythm the last, absurd line did not serve the ending of the play properly. The ending of the production was found in development of the transitions. In the original play the scenes were divided by darkness, during which the change of the set took place. Confronted with the number of short scenes happening in different locations, the set designer (Andjelija Djuric) and I decided that the set would consist of different elements which could be easily rearranged many times: three chairs, a trunk and a clothes rack. The clothes rack was to represent the reference to the theatre as well as to the characters' relationship to the past. It carried number of costumes assigned for the use of the characters in the play. During the transitions, which happened in full light, the clothes rack was moved around in a clock-wise direction. In transitions the actors, after rearranging the elements of the set, froze for a moment in positions for the beginning of a new scene. Transitions were accompanied with a leitmotif (Dragoslav Tanaskovic)-a couple of piano notes repeated several times in a certain rhythmical structure. As it moved around with fewer and fewer costumes on it, the clothes rack took up different functions: the clothes rack at the girl's apartment, a barrier behind which the customer sat in a peep show, and in the last scene, positioned in front of the audience, it represented a TV set. This position of the clothes rack also marked the boundary between the actors and the auditorium, which was never compromised. We built the fourth wall at the moment of broadcasting news about the bombing of Yugoslavia. The isolation of the group was complete. In the following scenes the man from Newfoundland came back to his friend/wife after not being able to find his place in the “big world,” and joined the three women in front of TV. In a simultaneous scene a childhood friend read aloud his letter from Belgrade, and the Italian painter, now living on a Caribbean island with a few inhabitants, in his letter invited everyone to join him in life without politics and civilization. While speaking their lines the two actors joined the motionless group in front of the TV. The characters and the audience watched each other through the frame of the TV/clothes rack and listened to the news. In a commercial break during the news, we hear the voice of our actress performing as an alien in sci-fi commercial for a chocolate bar, the only professional job she got in Canada. The commercial is an ironic comment on the immigrants' situation. During the outburst of comments from other characters, the actress comes to the clothes rack/TV set and switches it off. At that moment we hear piano notes from the transition scenes. Drawn by the sound coming from the space in front of her, the actress, followed by other characters, slowly crosses through the frame of the clothes rack, and finds herself in front of the audience. The three piano notes from the transition scenes for the first time develop into a full melody. The lights fade in the auditorium and actors take a bow. As well as each scene in our new version of the play, the production ends with the rising of a new theme.

In Snow White and Her 7-8 Helpers (translation by Milija Gluhovic) minor adaptations were done on the text: the children's games from Yugoslavia were replaced by the games from North America, some intertextual references to Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty were cut, and two scenes which explained the genres-comedy versus tragedy-were replaced with pantomime accompanied by the silent movie melodramatic and comic music. At the end of the production when the actress who played Snow White provided the happy ending for her character, the actors together with the audience sang “High-Ho, High-Ho”, the dwarfs' song. The set consisted of three geometric figures hung from the ceiling. Those elements, manipulated by actors, were used for building the tree, throne, sun and cottage in the woods. This process serves the theme of making of the theatre and creating an illusion from rigid elements.

In these productions the set was always represented by different elements rearranged a number of times through the course of the play, with the hope that the change of set would point to the change of the major character, which, at the end happens to be a group, not the individual. The shift of the problem from the individual to the group was a directorial choice in all three productions. In spite of the conflicting interests of the members of the group, the group was always preserved as a whole. The interplay between the actor, the character and the role the character takes on, and the audience's involvement in the production was intended to point out that the boundaries between the reality and fiction are blurred and to pose the question: what is the identity of the present moment?

© Dragana Varagic