Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 163
Directors often work very closely with dramaturgs, as when Romanian director Gábor Tompa collaborated with
dramaturg Visky András in adapting Nobel Prize–winner Imre Kertész’s introspective Hungarian novel about a
Holocaust survivor, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, into a production that won critics’ awards in Romania in 2008 and
at France’s Avignon Theatre Festival in 2009. Titled Long Friday (Naître à jamais in French), the play is a meditation
on the survivor’s refusal to have children since, as he says repeatedly, “Children were born at Auschwitz.” Tompa’s
performers tackled the deeply provocative work with astounding athleticism, continually crashing to the floor and
bouncing back again amid the singing of baleful dirges in Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Italian, French,
English, Spanish, and German. The design was by Carmencita Brojboiu. © Hungarian Theatre of Cluj/István Biró
Torvald calls her his “little love-bird”) in his Broadway
production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, it seemed to many
an odd choice, but McTeer’s dazzling performance brilliantly
underscored Page’s notion that Torvald and, by
inference, all men of his ilk who shortchange their wives’
capabilities, are themselves severely diminished. And
director Lee Breuer’s casting of his Mabou Mines company’s
production of the same play with actors four feet
tall or less in all the male roles and tall women for the
female ones proved an equally brilliant stroke. Breuer’s
casting was complemented by the show’s miniaturized
“Alice-in-Wonderland” setting, and it expanded the personal
and marital themes of the Page production to a
more general social analysis of male-female relations in
both Ibsen’s and our own times. The ability to see beyond
traditional casting options, and to imagine the unique
and unexpected relationships actors can create with even
“standard repertoire” roles, has always been the mark of
the most daring and most successful directors.
REHEARSALS
With the play selected and conceptualized, with the
designers chosen and the designs under way, and with the
actors auditioned and cast, the production begins to take
physical, emotional, and above all dramatic shape. This
is the period of rehearsal. During the coming weeks,
the play will be read aloud, memorized, staged, and
rehearsed, often in a room with makeshift rehearsal furniture
and the walls of the set indicated by taped marks