This collection of theater writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theater
to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is
his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the
Stalinist Terror and never performed. Its plot builds on Alexander
Pushkin's poem "Cleopatra," while parodying the themes of Eros and
empire in the Cleopatra tales of two writers Krzhizhanovsky adored:
Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In a chilling echo of the Soviet
1930s, Rome here is a police state, and the Third Guy (a very bad poet)
finds himself in its dragnet. As he scrambles to escape his fate, the
end of the Roman Republic thunders on offstage.
The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky's compelling and
idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy
of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at
the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage
bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth
century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the
theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor,
and the relationship between the theater and the everyday. Commentary by
Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky's
writings.
