Power of Darkness after the play by Tolstoy directed by Jay Scheib

THE POWER OF DARKNESS, AFTER TOLSTOY

A Pont Színház, a Trafó, Kortárs M¦vészetek Háza, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Mu Szinház, a ROTOR Productions és TCG / ITI

munkabemutatója

Lev Nyikolajevics Tolsztoj:
A sötétség hatalma
A magyar szöveget Németh László fordításának és Jay Scheib
szövegváltozatának felhasználásával írta Merényi Anna

Pletl Zoltán, Pogány Judit, Scherer Péter, Urbanovits Krisztina, Pereszlényi Erika, Enyedi Eva, Vajna Balázs, Keszég László, Isabelle Lê, Jeremy Morris, Leah Gelpe, Márkos Albert, Merényi Anna, Ken Roraback, Jay Scheib

DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM NOTES HERE

IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF COCA-COLA Anisya rat-poisons her terminally ill husband Peter for the love of Nikita, who sleeps with Everyone, and gets Everyone pregnant, including his step-daughter Akulina—but when the conniving mother-in-law steps in to set things right . . . No one will ever be the same.
What happens when beautiful people make monumentally bad decisions? Repeatedly?
Purveyor of the finest in human disasters, Leo Tolstoy turns his hand to the stage with alarming accuracy, taking us on a joy-ride of love and desire. Well, it's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye for an eye...
Director and MIT Professor, Jay Scheib, stages this classic of the 19th century Russian stage as though it had been written this morning. In this hybrid physical-theatre/multi-media family catastrophe, Scheib offers a portrait of human beings caught inside of a pressure cooker. Times they are a changing. ——lapstick, humor and horror, tragedy and satire collide in an eloquent portrayal of our times through the lens of Tolstoy's masterpiece of modern drama: Power of Darkness.

IMITATION INTELLIGENCE OR CAUGHT IN THE HOLD OF AN ARTIFICIAL LIFE
or, if the claw is caught the bird is lost...
Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness is a tragedy without royalty, without kings or princesses. Darkness in the title points dually to Night and to Evil. As in many Greek tragedies there is a quality of darkness (a general lack of illumination) a dark spot on the landscape—emanating from this darkness is a crime. One crime is the mother of a second crime, and another in an ever-mounting spiral of crimes—crime crime crime until the final crime. Until devastation can be percieved no more.
This play is about common ordinary individuals caught up in an extraordinary cycle of opportunistic self-loathing—adultery, theft, murder, sensless violence, infanticide... But these are not Kings, these are Farmers. They are workers. Not necessarily bad people—ie they are not hardened criminal types. These individuals are incapable of seeing the options that exist for them.
The play was written by Tolstoy in the late 19th century. My interest is in making the play today—and making it about America. This has a number of ramifications. The distance between today and the late 19th century is vast in some ways but many of our concerns have not changed substantially. Coca-Cola was invented in the late 19th century—and soon will represent all that is wrong with the insatiablity of global capitalism. Custer’s last stand took place in the ends of the 19th century and the mass genocide of the Native American peoples is begun a new chapter—that of the reservation. This chapter continues—regrettably—to this day. There has not yet been an apology.
The American Buffalo at the end of the 19th century was brought near to extinction. They were slaughtered for their pelts and their carcasses were left to rot, while Native Americans on reservations were forced to starve.
Of course there are many many things happening at that time—the bicycle is invented as is the phonograph, the Russian Revolution looms on the horizon, the death penalty in Russia had been recently reinstated, Sigmund Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams, the NAACP is soon founded.... and somehow these things are clear in the play that Tolstoy has written. It is possible in his work to sense the movements of the world.
America Today is simply, where to begin? An American taste for tragedy has blossomed into an ever-growing appreciation for Reality-based television. In this climate Naturalism has taken some unexpected twists. Strindberg called it Super Naturalism.