{"id":1563,"date":"2019-05-18T07:17:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T04:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yanaross.com\/?p=1563"},"modified":"2019-05-18T08:33:57","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T05:33:57","slug":"odon-von-horvath-tales-from-vienna-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yanaross.com\/?p=1563","title":{"rendered":"\u00d6d\u00f6n von Horv\u00e1th “Tales from Vienna Woods”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Yana Ross<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
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Horvath gradually came to the conclusion that human beings must feel guilt for their coldness of heart, for their inability to love. Evil doesn’t prevail because evil people are too numerous or powerful, but rather because good ones become\u00a0pragmatically cynical and do not resist, choosing to keep silent.\u00a0Horvath translates history into genealogy by representing the bourgeois family as a site where middle-class values are disseminated and preserved and where the public and the private intersect. Thus the story effectively reveals the self-deceptive jargon of ideology within the institution of the bourgeois family.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tales from Vienna Woods reviews 2019<\/h3>\n

Tales from Vienna Woods<\/i>\u00a0is \u00d6d\u00f6n von Holv\u00e1th\u2019s scathing depiction of Vienna\u2019s\u00a0Kleinb\u00fcrgertum<\/i>, the petite bourgeoisie that played their own crucial role in the \u2018demise of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent rise of National Socialism\u2019\u00a0in the interwar period. Yana Ross recently adapted this text for the State Youth Theatre in Vilnius to a contemporary Lithuanian context, provocatively turning the deprivation and humiliations following the loss of the First World War into the \u2018victorious\u2019 period following Lithuania\u2019s regained independence in 1991. The binaries of winning and losing that frame the source text are tested to their limits in these cultural conditions. While Horv\u00e1th\u2019s Austrian characters argue that they surely would have won WWI if only the conflict had lasted two more weeks, in Ross\u2019 adaptation Robertas (the Captain) complains that he would have been given an honourable discharge from the Soviet military if only independence had been delayed. At the same time, the widow Valerija (Valerie) exclaims that it was independence that made her rich. Thus, from the outset, Ross exposes the broad (and often ambiguous) spectrum of social consequences of Independence, for both its seeming victors and its obvious losers. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The eponymous \u2018Vienna Woods\u2019 is transformed into a former gymnasium that can now be rented for parties, funerals or weddings. The set is a downtrodden interior of functional Soviet-era architecture, which draws attention to the pomposity of the former system and the austerity and dispossessions of the current one. The pink paint on the walls has been hurriedly and inaccurately applied to slouching walls and the parquet floor bubbles from flooding that signals broken pipes and poor heating systems. The opening scene revolves around a funeral, which is repeatedly interrupted by the entrance of new characters who are either unsure how to participate \u2013 \u2018Lovely funeral!\u2019 one mumbles \u2013 or are overly concerned with their own problems \u2013 \u2018Where are my socks?\u2019 another grumbles. (When a member of the audience\u2019s phone rang in the middle of this scene on the night I attended the performance the disruption added to the dark humor of the play \u2013 rather than drawing attention away from the stage world we felt even more perversely implicated in it.) The grim but humorous ritual is punctuated by the tinny sounds of an electric keyboard that also resists participating in the gravity of the ceremony by blurting out its prerecorded cheerful, high-pitched tunes to the pianist\u2019s great chagrin. This world is a patchwork that barely holds together. One tries but never quite gets it right. Life in this place accumulates as a series of exhausting, comical and humiliating rituals (parties, funerals and weddings). And it is clear that there is nowhere else for these people to go. Even when characters exit the stage you sense them hovering in the wings, lost, directionless.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What Ross shares with Horv\u00e1th is the primary scene of conflict: Maryt\u0117\u2019s (Marianne) rejection of the man her father has chosen for her, the financially stable butcher Oskaras (Oskar), in favour of a pecuniary figure of her romantic interest Alfredas (Alfred). Ross stages the initial wedding between Maryt\u0117 and Oskaras as the background to her seduction of Alfred, thus creating the necessary tension in a contemporary relationship while, at the same time, offering a disturbing take on beloved Lithuanian customs. After announcing that \u2018our nation is famous for cutting life short,\u2019 one wedding guest suggests that her fellow celebrants indulge in \u2018hanging the matchmaker\u2019. Tradition requires the matchmaker (usually a male in Lithuania) to be sentenced to death because he has lied to the bridegroom about the bride\u2019s dowry. The bride is supposed to rescue the matchmaker before the execution, and the guests are invited to hang his effigy instead. This apparently benign \u2018game\u2019 turns unexpectedly violent, and the matchmaker is left stripped and unconscious beneath a table laden with nuptial meats. While the guests then participate with lascivious ferocity in another beloved ritual, the sauna, Maryt\u0117 defies her father, her fianc\u00e9 and her society and chooses to pursue her own object of desire, the youthful and intensely sexy Alfredas, which causes total havoc and mass anxiety in her community. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The world conspires to bring Maryt\u0117 back into the frame of male domination. After giving birth to their son, Maryt\u0117 is convinced to leave the child with Alfredas\u2019 mother outside of the city, in a village where the air is cleaner. The mother, horrified by her son\u2019s inappropriate match, quickly takes the opportunity to convince Alfredas to leave Maryt\u0117 to pursue his own interests and a more prosperous future as an economic migrant in Norway. Horv\u00e1th carefully crafted the dangerous eruptions of nationalist fervor in a scene that begins in a pub and drunkenly ends in a cabaret, where Marianne works as an erotic performer after Alfred abandons her. In this adaptation, Maryt\u0117 take up online pornography as a means of supporting herself and her child. Ross\u2019 brilliant turn here is to expose the internet as a space of capitalistic voyeurism and inverted shame (which invites some critical re-readings of the cabaret form). The patriarchal violence that produces the status quo in Horv\u00e1th\u2019s text is imaginatively applied to the digital sphere, which demonstrates how the reach of patriarchy today extends far beyond one\u2019s geographical borders. In the back of the stage, there is a room sealed off by a pane of glass, a voyeuristic world in which we first encounter the semi-naked bodies of the wedding guests in the steamy sauna, and where later Maryt\u0117 is forced to play with multiple phallic vegetables (organic dildos) in front of a live camera. The man watching her turns out to be the old military captain, who invites Maryt\u0117\u2019s own father to become a fellow spectator of her streamed performance. Like the inevitable chain of a chemical experiment, this produces a string of reactions whose violence is multiplied with each new event that begins with the father\u2019s enraged attack on the captain and ends in Alfredas\u2019 mother leaving Maryt\u0117\u2019s son by a window so that he catches pneumonia and dies. In a small but heartbreaking move, the bubble in the parquet floor becomes the child\u2019s grave. The funeral and the lack of any alternatives leaves Maryt\u0117 with the only choice she has left, to marry Oskaras, the man her father had chosen for her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Horv\u00e1th deploys schmaltzy and nostalgic music such as Johann Strauss\u2019 waltz that appears in the play\u2019s title and calls to mind the cream-cake version of Austria, Ross turns to\u00a0Swan Lake<\/i>, Tchaikovsky\u2019s intensely loved ballet that revolves around a story of sublime love and moral vindication. The crushing difference between the German\/Russian fairytale and Maryt\u0117\u2019s reality offers a brutal glimpse into the structures of Lithuania\u2019s social economies that also calls into question forms of national belonging. It should be no surprise that Horv\u00e1th, who was himself multilingual and multinational in the old Hapsburg sense, should be so critical of national claims to ethnic integrity and cultural singularity. In the source text, Erich stands for the new Prussian influence that dwells within the heart of the Nazi movement. Ross turns him into Erikas, a lean, blond man who fetishises the purity of the Lithuanian nation when he reveals an enormous tattoo on his back that he calls a \u2018Hippocentaur\u2019, a centaur with a snake in place of a tail. This ridiculous creature, which features on both Lithuanian and Polish coats of arms (though Erikas claims it as \u2018pure\u2019 Lithuanian), proves that \u2018our strength is in the glory of our past\u2019. Audronis Liuga, artistic director of the Youth Theatre, suggested that the production asks spectators to consider how they reflect on the past in their everyday lives. Valerija sums up the whole of Lithuanian history in two sentences: \u2018One thousand years ago we slaughtered Bruno of Querfurt. And from then on, everyone is slaughtering us.\u2019 History is thus a source of pride and anxiety, and the persistent return to history in conversations throughout the play reveals how the very emblems of nationalism are simultaneously sources of nationalist defensiveness. One of Ross\u2019 most controversial (and brave) choices was to question the role of Lithuanian partisans, who waged a guerilla war against the Soviets between 1944-53. These are heroic figures \u2013 whose deaths are still problematically characterized as a form of genocide in Vilnius\u2019 Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights \u2013 that form the pinnacle of Lithuanian patriotism. When one woman recalls the sexual violence perpetrated by the partisans she is quickly silenced and told that she is selfish and ungrateful for their sacrifice. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final scene, the community stands together to have their portrait taken by a photographer. Defeated and punished for her disobedience, Maryt\u0117 takes her spot beside Oskaras in the line-up. The theatre plunges into darkness. When we see the flash, the camera is facing us, the audience. We too are frozen in our own historical moment, which is once again magnified by the threat of fascism in Europe. What is most unsettling about this play is our knowledge that this \u2018tale\u2019 precipitated the Second World War. Horv\u00e1th was virtually forgotten in the postwar era and was only resurrected in the late 1970s, and though he is now considered one of the foremost German-language playwrights of the twentieth century (Peter Handke claimed that he deserves more recognition than his contemporary Bertolt Brecht) his work remains difficult to classify as a specific movement or genre. Perhaps this is what makes his texts such rich ground for experimentation for our most talented and boundary-shifting directors, such as Yana Ross. This production can be seen within a broader trajectory of performances that have interrogated Lithuania\u2019s difficult pasts over the past few years at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, where Liuga was formerly artistic director. These include Ross\u2019 staging of Tadeusz S\u0142obodizanek\u2019s\u00a0Our Class<\/i>\u00a0and Krystian Lupa\u2019s production of Thomas Bernhard\u2019s\u00a0Heldenplatz<\/i>,\u00a0which both reveal the stakes and legacies of fascism. Whenever\u00a0Tales from Vienna Woods<\/i>\u00a0is staged \u2013 a rare event in Lithuania \u2013 the play signals a cautionary warning. By looking back to the past for stability and clinging to the status quo ante, what horrifying aspects of history might we also be reanimating?<\/span><\/p>\n

Bryce Lease, The Theater Times<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Premiere February 14, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span>Team<\/div>
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Adaptation<\/strong>: Mindaugas Nastaravi\u010dius and Yana Ross<\/span><\/div>\n
Set<\/strong> design<\/strong>: Justyna Elminowska (Poland)<\/span><\/div>\n
Costume<\/strong> design:<\/strong> Juozas Valenta and Flore Vauvill\u00e9 (France)<\/span><\/div>\n
Sound<\/strong> design<\/strong>: Gintaras Sodeika<\/span><\/div>\n
Live<\/strong> film<\/strong> director<\/strong>: Algirdas Gradauskas<\/span><\/div>\n
Light<\/strong> designer<\/strong>: Vilius Vilutis<\/span><\/div>\n
Assistants<\/strong>: Saul\u0117 Norkut\u0117, Goda Janu\u0161kevi\u010di\u016bt\u0117, Ur\u0161ul\u0117 Barto\u0161evi\u010di\u016bt\u0117<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u00a0<\/div>\n
Cast<\/strong>:\n

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Matas Dirgin\u010dius, Sergejus Ivanovas,\u00a0Irmantas Jankaitis,\u00a0Aleksas Kazanavi\u010dius, Janina Matekonyt\u0117,\u00a0Dalia Morozovait\u0117,\u00a0Vidas Petkevi\u010dius, Au\u0161ra Pukelyt\u0117, Simonas Storpir\u0161tis,\u00a0Dovil\u0117 \u0160ilkaityt\u0117,\u00a0Paulina Taujanskait\u0117<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\t\t