‘SHADOW OF HEROES’ BY ROBERT ARDREY

November 9 – December 9, 2018

How fragile is a dream?

Three friends and lovers in Budapest struggle to find freedom, from the liberation from the Nazis in 1945 to its invasion by the Soviet army in 1956. 

A story of devoted idealists fighting for their beliefs in the face of political opportunism, temptation, and betrayal, a chilling insight into the fragility of decency and conviction in the face of authoritarian power.

“If we haven’t done things for some greater good, Julia, then we’re common criminals and that’s all”

Idealists

Ideals remain ever beyond our grasp…hence the name.  And yet we uphold them: aspirations to which we may ever strive.  Should we?  When does devotion to an ideal beget an ideology? And if we cleave to it too tenaciously, blinkered creatures that we are, might we be doomed betray the very dream to which we aspire?

Robert Ardrey’s Shadow of Heroes begins here and plunges into thorny political, moral, and even epistemological quandaries.  The play does so with dramatic flair and heartfelt passion, showing historical movements through the lives and relationships of human beings in all their pathos, humor, frailty, and transcendence. The result is not only a philosophical confrontation, but exciting, moving, funny, and frightening theater.

Based on actual people and events, Shadow of Heroes is an American author’s account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. We begin in a Budapest safe house in 1944, the eve of the Nazis’ defeat, as three resistance fighters plan to make contact with their Russian liberators.  The extraordinary stories of the three—committed Communist leader László Rajk, his wife and partner Julia, and his deputy János Kádár—unfold as they help to create a post-war government under Party directives from Moscow. The twisting history sees János, an obedient worker, ascend almost in spite of himself to party leadership; László, whose popularity threatens the state’s authority, convicted of treason one year, but rehabilitated seven years later; and Julia imprisoned, then released, and then embraced as a martyr who inspires the rebellion itself…as well as the Soviet tanks that crushed it.

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Photos: Metropolitan Playhouse

Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz. ‘’SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY”. Von Dead Centre nach »Der Sturm« von William Shakespeare. Regie: Bush Moukarzel und Ben Kidd, Buehne: Chloe Lamford, Kostueme: Nina Wetzel, Video: Jose Miguel Jimenez Gonzalez, Musik: Kevin Gleeson. Mit: Thomas Bading, Moritz Gottwald, enny Koenig, Nina Kunzendorf, Mark Waschke. Premiere am 24. April 2018.                                             (A. J. Goldmann’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/2; via Pam Green.)                                                                                                                                                                                                         MUNICH — As befits the world’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare has had his work translated into over 100 languages, including Klingon. But long before he was the international superstar we know today, he was adored by the Germans with a fervor that led August Wilhelm Schlegel, the poet and critic who masterfully translated his complete works in the early 19th century, to claim him as “ganz unser” — “entirely ours.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, this country’s most revered writer, compared his experience of discovering Shakespeare at age 22 to “a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch.” Roughly a century later, in 1864, the world’s first Shakespeare Society was founded in the city of Weimar. It survived the Cold War divide and is still going strong, with roughly 2,000 members. In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe in London held a season of events to acknowledge Germany’s special relationship with the playwright. (He is performed more frequently here than in his native land, the theater said.)

So far this season, the highest-profile Shakespeare production here has been a new “King Lear” that reopened the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in October, after the theater underwent a major renovation.

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(Bruce Weber’s article appeared in The New York Times, 10/31; via Pam Green.)

María Irene Fornés, a Cuban-born American playwright whose spare, poetic and emotionally forceful works were hallmarks of experimental theater for four decades, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 88.

Her death, at the Amsterdam Nursing Home, was confirmed by the playwright Migdalia Cruz, a friend and former student of Ms. Fornés’s. She had had Alzheimer’s disease for some time.

A favorite of many critics, theater scholars and fellow playwrights, who often declared that her achievements far outstripped her fame, Ms. Fornés came to playwriting relatively late — her first artistic pursuit was painting — and never earned the popular regard of contemporaries like Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, John Guare and Lanford Wilson.

Her plays earned eight Obie awards, the Off Broadway equivalent of the Tonys, and she was given an Obie for lifetime achievement in 1982. But her only work to appear on Broadway, a 1966 comedy called “The Office,” directed by Jerome Robbins, closed in previews.

Still, over a long career during which she wrote dozens of plays, many of which she directed herself, and fostered the high-minded idea of the sovereign playwright by producing experimental plays and teaching a generation of younger playwrights, Ms. Fornés gained a reputation within the theater world as an underrecognized genius.

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Photo: The New York Times