The Play
Tolstoy based his play on a true crime story – as was very much in the vogue at the time. And I am interested in doing the same – today and in deploying some of the most popular narrative means of making real stories really real.
Pina Bausch remarked once that she was not so interested in „how people move but in what moves them”. In service of this idea, this project represents my own personal return the beginnings of mainstream modern drama/naturalism as a means of establishing a critical space in performance through an examination of Everyday Life practices. The process of examining everyday life with an eye to developing strategies for a spatial and temporal vocabulary that might have something to say about our lives is the foundation of my artistic practice. The degree to which technology interferes and or enhances the ability to perceive those realities and to communicate accurately and inaccurately (or poetically) our experiences, comprises, by and large, the spectrum of my research.
I am interested in citing nature, in capturing a distinctly American sense of nature and reality – which is in many ways incomplete without media. Without multiple points of reference and sometimes with so many points of reference that the truth is completely drowned in the sea of free speech. Farmers sit around the kitchen table of our exceptionally mechanized and highly specialized Bread with Miracle Whip. How we got here is a mystery to me.
I attack with a broad sense of humour. And the slice of life seems unlike the mirror held up to nature – but it is. Artificial Life. Imitation Intelligence. Jay Scheib
The director
Jay Scheib was born in 1969 in Iowa. He got his MFA degree in directing at Columbia University in Anne Bogart’s class, where his professors included Andrei Serban and Robert Woodruff. As a graduating student he was already staging a piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and in his Senior Year of studies he won the Richard Sherwood Award offered to the most promising young American artist of the year. From the next year on he has been teaching acting classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum and for two years he has been working as a professor at the Boston MIT.
His latest work includes: In this is the End of Sleeping after Chekhov’Platonov. The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes, Lorenzaccio by Musset, Euripidész-Müller: Medeia after Heiner Müller and Euripides (at La Mama), The West Pier by Bernard-Marie Koltes, The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Brecht (Yale Repertory Theatre), Falling and Waving, Heracles after Euripides-Müller-Händel, Miss Julie by Strindberg. He staged several productions in Berlin: MARGARETHHAMLET, Oresteia by Aischylos, two pieces by Lothar Trolle in the studio space of the Berliner Volksbühne.
He worked in Budapest two times creating Glass/Mohn after Tennessee Williams and Paul Célan with the Pont Workshop and making a ten-day workshop of Viewpoints with Krétakör based on Antonioni’s Red Desert at Millenáris.
Jay Scheib’s and Pont’s ways had to cross. László Keszég’s company are ideal partners for this autonomous, determined, yet very open director, in whose works image and choreography are equals of the text, who was brought up on Chéreau, Wilson and Pina Bausch and sees the naturalism with which Hungarian theatre-goers are bored stiff as a mischievous luxury and an exciting adventure. It is no chance that the actors he chose for the project come into it with strikingly different histories, backgrounds and theatre cultures.
Pjotr/Mitrics Keszég László Anyiszja, wife of Pjotr Urbanovits Krisztina Anyutka, their daughter Isabelle Lé Akulina, Pjotr's daughter from one of his previous marriages Pereszlényi Erika Nyikita, Pletl Zoltán Matrjona, his mother Pogány Judit Akim, his father Scherer Péter Marina, Nyikita's fiancée Enyedi Éva Policeman, later Marina's husband Vajna Balázs
Adaptation/Directed by Jay Scheib Set/Light/ Jeremy Morris Scenic Supervisor MichaelByrnes Assistant Director Ken Roraback Music Márkos Albert Video Leah Gelpe Hungarian text/Dramaturgy Merényi Anna (based on the original translation by László Németh and the transcription of Jan Scheib)
