Poverty is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky

Director: Everett Dixon

Dramaturge: Irina Kóstina

Colombian adaptation: Students of the Performance Workshop II

Musical Direction: Claudia Vélez

With a special appearance by Libardo Carvajal

Production Design: Jorge Reyes

A production of the Universidad del Valle's Theatre Department and Four Worlds Theatre Research Group.

Premiere: September 2008

Doña Cecilia with two guests (Isabella Moloney with Oriana Gironza, Diana Tapasco) in Poverty is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)

Ostrovsky is the most important Russian playwright, and were it not for the fame of the Moscow Art Theatre, and the subsequent rise of Anton Chekhov, who knows if we would not rather be staging Ostrovsky in all the theatres of the world, and not Chekhov?

As with Chekhov, Ostrovsky is dismaying at first because his plays don't seem to have any conflict. It is difficult to understand them at first, because no one is who they seem - the characters are neither good nor bad, and they never finally reveal themselves. In this aspect, Ostrovsky is more authentic than Chekhov himself, whose almost seasick vision of people's banality lead him, out of extreme sensitivity, to make quite cruel moral judgments of them.

Ostrovsky is more generous than sensitive, and he always seems to be waiting himself to see who his characters really are. As the Ostrovsky scholar Lakshin writes: "The very hero throws the author off a little. [...] Perceptive as an artist, Ostrovsky analyses life and brings to light new types of characters, without out making definitive judgments on them." Ostrovsky suspends moral judgment, - in a way this is the essence of his style. You Never Can Tell (title of a play by George Bernard Shaw) could be the title of any of Ostrovsky's plays, and it would be well worth taking the time to compare these two prolific playwrights (Ostrovsky wrote 47 plays with 728 characters, Shaw wrote 57 plays with fewer characters, as Russian plays are always more crowded). The fact that Ostrovsky pegs popular sayings to his plays does not reflect the simplicity of his vision, but rather the complexity of popular wisdom, which is older than all of us, and also knows that things are never what they seem.

In contrast to his contemporaries, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Ostrovsky has a more modest background; he was born in Zamoskvarechie ("The Other Shore"), the huge merchant class neighbourhood on the south side of the Moscow River. His plays, like many from the sixties in the XIX century, mark a fascinating transition in theatre history: the plays are still within the great tradition of melodrama, and are full of brilliant effects, tableturnings, unexpected endings, etc., but at the same time the context is no longer the nobility but rather the aggressive world of the merchant class, depicted with great fidelity. The term realism was coined in Russia by the critic Dobroliubov, speaking of the new plays by Ostrovsky. There are few writers in the history of literature - except perhaps Ostrovsky's contemporary Anthony Trollope - who better describes corrupt lawyers, poet-merchants and scheming accountants, and yet Ostrovsky was also a poet, whose dreamlike parentheses in the action, incomprehensible for the more conventional realistic writer, gave his plays all of their vitality. (At the very climax of Wolves and Sheep, two characters in conflict suddenly begin to speak about tobacco.)

With the rise of neoliberalism all over the world, Ostrovsky's plays, at one time thought to be the parochial works of a provincial Russian writer, have experienced a re-evaluation in the world, and his themes are more pertinent than ever. Ostrovksy is also modern in his treament of women: the great majority of his plays, including the two mentioned, have as their principal character strong-minded and independent women.

His great masterpieces are The Forest (staged by Meyerhold, one of hos three or four most important productions, in 1923); Wolves and Sheep, one of the first important artistic successes of the Fomenko Theatre under the direction of Peter Fomenko and Ma Zheng Hong; and The Storm the most famous play by Ostrovsky outside of Russia. This production's director began his directing carreer with a production of Truth is Good , but Luck is Better in Ottawa in February 1996.

The Musicians (Lina María García, Estefanía Díaz, Cindy Muñoz and maestro Libardo Carvajal) in Povertu is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)

This play unites three types of characters: a group of young people who are just beginning to live, and want to live life to its fullest (Mitya, Liubov; characters who have lived too long and who want to recover a happiness that seems to be slipping from their fingers (Korshunov, Tortsov); and characters who are simply happy despite their condition (Pelageya, Liubim, Arina). As in another play which confronts the heady aspirations of youth with the nervous nostalgia of age, Romeo and Juliet, this play is about a group of people who are ever after a happiness that only falls into their lap, miraculously, at the end of the play. Shakespeare's play is a failed comedy; this play by Ostrovsky is a failed tragedy, and both playwrights mixed comedy and tragedy in unexpected ways in all of their plays.

As far as the action of the play is concerned, this play celebrates national prowess, and for this reason it would make no sense to preserve the original Russian songs and traditions, but instead it is better to look for their equivalents here in Colombia. Our version is full of traditional colombian music, the "llanera" style which so much resembles, in atmosphere, content and complexity, Russian music, and the action of the play takes place in a different generation, the age of our grandparents, in the forties, when traditions still hadn't broken down before aggressive modernity.

In short, this play is a party that some of the characters want, and fail, to spoil. We are delighted to present this author unknown in the Spanish world, and we are proud to present this Latinamerican premiere of Poverty is no Crime.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Director: Everett Dixon
Acting Coach: Camilo Carvajal
Set and Costume Design: José Aristizábal

Página web del teatro Anhelo del Salmón
Programación de Esperando a Godot en el XII Festival Iberoamericano de Bogotá
Reseña de la obra en el blog del maestro Sandro Romero
Entrevista con Everett Dixon con Colombia.com













Leonardo Villa, Gadiel López and Edward Gómez as Lucky, Estragon and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)


THE PARADOX OF SAMUEL BECKETT

Beckett dedicated his life to unmasking the emptiness behind language, and was implacable in his honesty at the manipulative senselessness of daily discourse. He put all of his linguistic virtuosity - as another brilliant writer, Vladimir Nabokov - into the game of taking language apart. But it is curious that an author who kept after emptiness so much should write plays so full of meaning beyond words. His plays, set on avoiding the traps of language in search of a terrifying honesty, surprise us with their light vitality, their childlike innocence, their readiness to play, and, significantly, their abundance of meaning. The best moments in Beckett, like Pozzo's description of the sunset, are suddenly, and shockingly, moving. Milton, in writing Paradise Lost, wanted to write a morality play, and wound up writing an inadvertent apology for the devil and original sin. In some ways, Beckett does the opposite: he wants to show that there is nothing beyond language but nothing and more nothing, and he winds up writing eloquent testimonies to ineffable fullness of life.

This irresistible exaltation of the fullness of life comes in his plays from two sources. The first is the same vital energy that unites us all, which the Catholic Church calls the Holy Spirit, the Japanese call ki, and actors like us, always more prosaic, simply call "play". In his project to prove the senselessness of life, he wound up writing a celebration of life. But was it really his project? Or has the old fox deceived us all? Sometimes I think that old Sam, always suspicious of words but always ready to laugh, has played a wonderful practical joke on us: it seems that he knew all along that the only way to express the fullness of life was with a mute paradox, an "act without words". An old fox so determined to feign cynicism that many still believe it years after his death. The second source of the irresistible energy of this play is in the paradoxical vision of Beckett himself.

We come to the theatre, fifty four years later, we see the absurd antics of Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky, their awkward desires, their innocent attempts at meaning "in spite of everything," and we come out curiously revitalized. They have nowhere to go at the end of the day, the food is slight, but still, the road has its special luminescence, and where all else fails, the four are still able to tell a good joke. As Beckett says somewhere, there is nothing more comic than tragedy, but don't tell anyone.

CAST

Vladimir - Camilo Carvajal
Estragón - Gadiel López
Pozzo - Eduard Gómez
Lucky - Leonardo Villa
Boy - Alexander Herrera

Leonardo Villa, Edward Gómez, Gadiel López and Camilo Carvajal as Lucky, Pozzo, Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. (Photo: Carlos Mario Lema)

Research Group Teatro Cuatro Mundos, Theatre Department, Universidad del Valle, 2008-present

In 2008, Dixon founded the research group Teatro Cuatro Mundos, dedicated to the investigation of post-colonial playwrights, and canonical contemporary and classical playwrights unknown in the Spanish-speaking world. In both cases there is also an emphasis on playwrights for women. The first line of research is to develop the work at the Pacific Coast Workshop for Young Artists in Buenaventura (Colombia's New Orleans), an extended outreach program created by the Theatre Department of the Universidad del Valle in 2004, in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture and the Buenaventura Branch of Univalle. The TCM group has staged two successful productions under the direction of Manuel Viveros, Colombian adaptations of Beef, no Chicken by Derek Walcott, and The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. This last production has been invited to the XII Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro in Bogotá in 2010.

The second line of research is developed in the Professional Cycle of the Theatre Department, and began with a successful production of Alexander Ostrovsky's XIX century musical comedy, Poverty is no Crime.

Productions with the Young Artists' Workshop

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. Directed by Manuel Viveros
Beef, no Chicken by Derek Walcott. Directed by Manuel Viveros

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel

Dirección: Everett Dixon

Traducción del inglés por Everett Dixon, Claudia Vélez y el grupo de Montaje IV.

Michael and Chrissie (Cristian Vásquez and Francia Solano) in Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel, Padres e Hijos. (Fotos: Catherine Ávila)
Bailando en Lughnasa es una obra muy parecida a otra obra renombrada “chejoviana”, El Zoológico de Cristal de Tennessee Williams, pero se distingue de ésta (y de Chéjov) por su notable falta de crueldad. Sin sentimentalizar, esta obra logra dignificar a la gente sencilla por la poesía de su vida cotidiana. El proceder de Friel aquí es el del arzobispo-cronista Lombard en Haciendo Historia: ajusta la narrativa caótica de la vida de los personajes – del narrador Michael, de la tía Maggie, del padre Jack – a la propia visión idealista que tienen, luego se divierte tejiendo esta visiones contrastantes en una estructura de transiciones inesperadas. Por lo tanto, se arma un conflicto inhabitual en el teatro: el abismo que se abre entre nuestro vuelo imaginativo y la irrevocabilidad del pasaje del tiempo. Como su compatriota Shaw, toca una problemática moderna – en este caso la angustia existencial – y como Shaw da una solución de sentido común: hay que alegrarse. Comamos, bebamos, alegrémonos, que mañana moriremos. Esta obra tiene la alegría dolorosa de un alabao, herencia africana como las ceremonias que describe el padre Jack en el segundo acto, y la insistente presencia de la música en la obra no es una casualidad. Y visto que la obra habla del tiempo, pues, toma su tiempo, como las veladas nocturnas de nuestro propio festival pagano de otoño, la Noche de los Muertos.
REPARTO
Michael, joven, narrador - Johann Philipp MorenoKate, cuarenta, intitutriz - Ximena OrozcoMaggie, treintaiocho, ama de casa - Lauren CeballosAgnes, treintaicinco, tejedora - Satiana LondóñezRose, treintaidos, tejedora - Gianina AranaChris, veintiseis, madre de Michael - Francia SolanoGerry, treintitrés, padre de Michael - Cristian VázquezJack, cincuenta y tres, sacerdote misionero - Andrés Camilo López
Michael, quién narra la historia, también dice los textos del niño, es decir, Michael mismo cuando tenía siete años.Acto Primero: un día caliente de principios de agosto, 1936. Acto Segundo: tres semanas más tarde.La acción transcurre en el hogar de la familia de los Mundy, a cuatro kilómetros de la aldea de Ballybeg, en la condad de Donegal, Irlandia.
Arkady, Arisa Vlasyevna y Vassily Ivanich (Julián Caicedo, Sindy Ángel y Diego Robledo) en Padres e Hijos.
Visite la página web del montaje de la misma obraen el Teatro Estudio Fomenko, Moscú, Rusia.«Танцы на прaздник урожaя»


Para ver fotos de la obra, haga clic en la foto de la página web.
FICHA TÉCNICA
DirecciónProductora
Everett DixonSatiana Londóñez