54th STERIJINO POZORJE FESTIVAL 2009

Directed by OLIVERA ĐORĐEVIĆ

Set Design MARIJA KALABIĆ

Costume Design MIRNA ILIĆ

Repetiteur ÁGOTA VITKAY-KUCSERA

Matrix for Schizophrenic Medley
GÉZA KUCSERA
Video material ANTAL ERDUDAC
Light Design EDVÁRD MEZEI
Sound Design ÁRPÁD TÓMÓ
Assistant Director RÓBERT LÉNÁRD

Premiere: January 22nd 2009

CAST
Mrs. Charlotte Wallace	MÁRTA BÉRES
Prudence	ANDREA ERDÉLY
Bob	ÁRPÁD MESZÁROS
Andrew	GÁBOR MESZÁROS
Bruce	IMRE ELEK MIKES
Dr. Stuart Framingham	CSABA RALBOVSZKI

T H E A T R E......

'DEZSŐ KOSZTOLÁNYI' THEATRE - SUBOTICA

Alternative, experimental, modern and open - this is what characterises the “Kosztolányi Dezső” Theatre from Subotica. The theatre was founded by the local Subotica government in 1994. At first it operated in the building of the Subotica National Theatre. Ferenc Péter and Tibor Szloboda played an important role in its history so far. Since 2006/2007 season András Urbán has been at its head. In November 2006 the theatre opened the new season in its own theatre hall. The ensemble consists of four young actors: Márta Béres, Andrea Erdély, Árpád Mészáros and Imre Elek Mikes. They gave five premiers: The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare, Dracula - The Brightness of a Moment, Tangoby S. Mrožek, Five for Two, Dénes Döbrei) and Heni Varga, The Hardcore Machineby Brecht, which premiered in Berlin. The 2007/2008 season has seen premiere performances of: Urbi et orbi by János Pilinszky, The True Nature of Love by Brad Fraser, The Last Temptation of the Lambby Andor Szilágy, The Collector byJohn Fowles, A Curve of Death (after the drama by Otto Tolnai), Turbo Paradiso (after the short story Encyclopaedia of the Dead by D. Kiš), Happy Lunatics by Zsolt Pozsgai. During this season the ensemble has been invited to the 58th Festival of Professional Theatres of Vojvodina (Zrenjanin), 53rd Sterijino Pozorje, Festival “POSZT” (Pécs), INFANT (Novi Sad), “THEALTER” (Szeged), “SZIGET” Festival (Budapest). During the 2006/2007 season the theatre initiated a programme series ‘Streetcar Desiré’ (Desiré villamosa), a unique project in Vojvodina. The aim of the project is to present theatrical and related productions Vojvodinian audiences have not had a chance to see and to introduce recognised national and Hungarian artists. The programme has included mainly alternative theatrical productions and theatre of movement performances, and organised literary evenings and concerts. The theatre wants to provide a space for young artists of Vojvodina. Since October 2007 it provides simultaneous translation into Serbian.

P E R F O R M A N C E......

THERAPY

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Therapy is a romantic / comic parody of relationships, self-analysing / self-curing spiritual pornographic show, psycho-individual treatment, romantic / comic / love thriller, a workshop based on books, magazines, announcements and personal experience, group/meditative / expressive workshop encompassing elements of therapy, hydrotherapy with slaps (and / or gas-engine-with-four-cylinders-has-soul), psychological / documentary / romantic comedy.

S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T......

Durang's neurotic/hysterical/asymmetric sextet of characters in a farsic search for a soulmate and some sort of emotional harbor represents in itself a solid basis for a comical, playful web of stage sensations, and what Olivera Djordjevic makes of it with an orgy-like, uplifting collaboration with actors is a matter of a particular theatrical order, fortunately adjusted for brilliant entertainment. As it has already been done in this run-in collective, the chosen textual sample empties itself of everything excessive in a dialectically brave manner, in order to fill itself simultaneously with impressive interplays from the sphere of media reality exchanges, a live dialogue with the audience, evidently refreshed by the burlesque and cabaret tradition, “self-analyzing/self-curing spiritual porno show” of all the actors, simultaneity of internal and external play time in a perpetual adaptation and remodeling. All this within a small space and tucked into a short period of time energetically, extraordinarily supports the equally small but excellent cast, so that with a little good will and a minimum of active memory, Therapy can be experienced as some para-kind of bright and cheerful homage to that dark pearl delivered at the last-year’s Pozorje, under the title Urbi et orbi, by the Subotica theatre, and under an excellent, long-recognizable creative leadership of Andras Urban.

Igor BURIĆ & Vladimir KOPICL

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Olivera Đorđević: Born in 1974 in Belgrade. Completed Thirteenth Belgrade Gymnasium (three years), and then Jefferson Performing Arts High School in Portland, Oregon. Graduated from the department of multimedia directing in the class of Professor Boro Drašković at the Art Academy in Novi Sad. She worked in the organising teams for the festivals Bitef, Sterijino Pozorje and Joy of Europe. Since 2006 Director of the Serbian Language Drama of the National Theatre in Subotica.
More significant works as director: M. Crowley, Guys from the Band, Youth Theatre, Novi Sad; A. Popović, Ljubinko and Desanka, NT Banja Luka; U. Šajtinac, The Right to the Russian, SNT; J. Heller, We Bombed New Haven, Youth Theatre, Novi Sad; W. Shakespeare, Othello, Portal Theatre, Novi Sad; B. Menhoff, Felix and Doris, NT Nish; M. Gavran, Doctor Freud's Patient, Argo Theatre, Sombor; M. Frein, Beyond the Props, NT "T. Jovanović" Zrenjanin; P. Shaffer, Dark Comedy, NT Sombor; O. Wilde, Importance of Being Ernest, NT Sombor; N. Simon, The Apartment, NT Subotica; Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, NT Subotica; Nušić, The Grieving Family, NT Subotica; Feydo, Bug in the Ear, NT Sombor.

D I R E C T O R ...

Why is it so difficult to get to know people? Prudence from Beyond Therapy asks herself... Is it because we really don't ask the right questions, is it because in our fake society we don't have a choice but to be fake ourselves, or because we are simply afraid since the earliest childhood (when we realise that in a toy shop toys for girls are on the opposite end of those for boys) until old age (when we finally leave all the stories about “the one,” our “soul mate,” princes on white horses etc. in order to adapt to the immortal, always applicable motto “give me what you have”)? Are these the right questions and is it worth giving and looking for answers in a theatre play? Maybe it all means that the search for a perfect (or whatever) partner and the need for understanding one’s own needs and own sexuality is an inexhaustible and eternal topic? Or that we are so buried in certain stereotypes, clichés and assumptive traditional “truths,” that only stripping the entire life absurdity called “modern” (in fact this only a euphemism for the easy way out and legitimate giving up from any kind of closeness, if our mediators are not Facebook or My Space, of course) can help us? Are we really satisfied with any, the mediocre, disposable, bought, superficial...? Is our time going to pass really more quickly if we search more, better, right? Whom can we ask? To whom can we tell? With whom to talk? With a therapist? With a professor? With the partner? With someone in the audience? Where to look for answers? In Freud? In From? In the Celestin prophecy? In Oprah Winfrey? In Milan Tarot? In Cosmopolitan? In Men’s Health? In “Therapy”? ...

Olivera ĐORĐEVIĆ

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Christopher Durang (1949, New Jersey, USA). Educated at Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, he has had plays both on and off Broadway including The Nature and Purpose of the Universe; Titanic; A History of the American Film; Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You; Beyond Therapy; Baby With the Bathwater; The Marriage of Bette and Boo; Laughing Wild; and Betty's Summer Vacation. He won Obie Awards for Sister Mary Ignatius and The Marriage of Bette and Boo, received a Tony nomination for "Best Book of a Musical" for A History of the American Film, and received a Drama Desk nomination for Betty's Summer Vacation. He has also written several screenplays including Beyond Therapy; The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valence; The House of Husbands (which he co-authored with Wendy Wasserstein); and The Adventures of Lola.

R E V I E W S......

Breaking Illusions
The text Beyond Therapy is a farcical, light and fluidly playful presentation about wandering, losing and finding in male-female relationships. Starting with this comedy, director Olivera Đorđević realised a compact, theatrically exciting, multi-genre play, also comprised, beside parts of Durang’s text, of personal confessions by actors, texts inspired by magazines such as “Cosmopolitan” or “Men’s Health,” as well as many songs. With this dramatic/directorial procedure the conceptual corps of the play is to a great extent made more complex, the ideas of the initial texts are significantly deepened and rewarded, a great deal was gained in dynamics and vitality of the plot. (...) The play Therapy is unusually entertaining, topical and mischievously comical, because of the stripped sincerity in expressing different aspects of the insanity in contemporary male-female relationships. In the circumstances of the all-encompassing improvement of technology, globalisation and fragmentation breaking the subjects and our fragile identities, love, nevertheless, appears as a constant. Even though terribly fragile and elusive, it is, it seems, at the same time invincible, the absolute in the world of relativism.
Ana TASIĆ, Politika, February 3 2009

Group Therapy
(...) What has been already taking place under Urban's directorial guidance - “gradually leaving the piece” - Olja Đorđević executed “even more” radically, “making” the actors not only leave the piece, but also numerous other theatre conventions, leading Therapy into an almost circus manner. Durang’s classical American ambiguous comical theme of love relationships during the time of equal “bi”, “homo”, “lesbian” and “hetero” sexual tendencies, as some kind of karaoke matrix, serves the play in growing into a hilarious and theatrically intelligent, loosened story, a medley of gender conflicts, in fact a real war, as it most often seems to the man and woman looking for the one. In the search in which all the means (even wrong), which are at the same time contradictions, are allowed.
Igor BURIĆ, Dnevnik, January 23 2009

Therapy
(...) In the little “Kosztolanyi Dezso” theatre it was enough to bring two tables and four smallest chairs from a bad bar, and the director and six excellent actors made a “huge play” of two hours in which everything explodes from laughter, intelligence, irony, self-analysis, skill, humor, critique of the kitsch in us and around us in every moment. Imre-Elek Mikes, Andrea Erdely and Csaba Ralbovszki dominated with speed, freedom of the treatment of emotion on stage, character concept and above all - monty python-like craziness with conscious and unconscious irony. (...) The character of the crazy and lonely psychiatrist was excellently played by Marta Beres, and the other - even crazier psychiatrist with sexual problems was the craziest on stage - Czaba Ralbovszki. Arpad and Gabor Meszaros at the end found themselves in a happy homosexual relationship they were ironically and wittily looking for and arranging through a series of episodes in which they balanced the characters of contemporary homosexuals - stars of a TV soap opera. I have to mention once again the supreme technical and acting skills of young actors who sing, play, dance and of course - act, perfectly and intelligently... My hat down!
Goran CVETKOVIĆ, Radio Belgrade 2, January 23 2009