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The Comic Grotesque of Povilas Gaidys
 
Povilas Gaidys most clearly revealed his directorial talent and unique theatrical thinking through his comedies. He used these to draw attention to himself, demonstrating an early talent for an intelligent and multifaceted grasp of humor and its various manifestations on stage. The search for new opportunities for humor and for more complex and layered methods of comedic expression in the late 1960s brought Gaidys into the camp criticizing Soviet reality. Somehow he quite naturally resolved to take on the challenges of the grotesque aesthetic, choosing scenes from Soviet reality as a thematic foundation.
 
Gaidys hurled his illegal anti-Soviet offensives with the greatest effect by shackling "legal" Soviet comedies under the lock and key of the grotesque, in the productions of Ivan Kocherga's The Craftsmen of Time (1967), Vladimir Mayakoski's The Bathhouse (1970), Alexander Kopkov's Elephant (1977), and Viktor Merezhko's The Proletarian Mill of Happiness (1981). These different productions essentially were variations of the same theme: a brave proclamation of the general disorder of the Soviet system. Employing a particularly broad palette of comedic colors – parody, irony, caricature, clowning, grotesque – Gaidys used his productions to sketch out the contours of the illogical, lopsided and absurd Soviet world. He also addressed its inhumanity, about how brutally the Soviet system mangled its people, turning them into tools of "dystrophic bureaucratic thinking" (The Bathhouse) Rimantas Venckus, „Klaipėdos dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių tarybinis dramos teatras: 1957–1970, sudarė Algirdas Gaižutis Vilnius: Vaga, 1987, p. 188. or "exhausted", "depersonified cogs in the collective 'order'" (Elephant). Gražina Mareckaitė, „Klaipėdos dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 229.
 
These productions testified to Gaidys' maturity as a director: his precise and sharp sense of form on stage, his grasp of the grotesque, the persuasiveness of rhythm on stage, as well as the director's creative relationship with his acting company which, by the 1970s, was increasingly filled with talented, capable, and compelling artistic individuals such as Vytautas Paukštė, Balys Barauskas, Valentina Leonavičiūtė, Liubomiras Laucevičius, Henrikas Andriukonis, and others. The courageous anti-Soviet subtext of Gaidys' productions did, however, "damage" the director's political reputation and caused great confusion in Communist Party circles. Following the staging of The Bathhouse, intense "ideological court hearings" were held at Party meetings. Even Mayakovsky's prestige failed to protect against ominous accusations that Gaidys had forgotten the theatre's role as "bearer of communist ideals", requiring redemption for such a "poor memory" in the form of a tribute to the communist underground by staging Grigory Kanovich's The Long Life of the Dead in 1971. And yet, The Bathhouse survived the pressure, and remained part of the theatre's repertoire.
 
The life of the production of Elephant was even more spirited than that of The Bathhouse, and was "akin to a wart on the nose of every functionary – banned by the party leadership, stricken from the program, permitted again, reported to Moscow, mulled over at conferences and party meetings, etc." Gražina Mareckaitė, „Klaipėdos dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 230.
 
Today, the many episodes in the saga of Elephant's battles with censors can be appreciated like a good joke. Take, for example, the theatre's response to an order issued by the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic's (LSSR) Ministry of Culture to get rid of the multicolored patches that had adorned the costumes of actors portraying collective farmers in the play's crowd scenes. The theatre dutifully obeyed the order: when the crowd appeared on stage, the patches had been replaced by gaping holes, evidence of "collective farm poverty" inspired by the censors themselves that, far from impoverishing the production, only served to lend more significance to Gaidys' directorial concept.
 
These and other skirmishes became part of the routine for most Lithuanian theatres seeking a more "political" voice. They were particularly fierce at the Kaunas Drama Theatre from 1968 onward, with the appointment of Jonas Jurašas as Senior Director. Jurašas immediately established a kind of "protest office" at the theatre, consistently developing the theme of a flawed Soviet reality and presenting numerous works on stage that "spoke, always from a different aspect, about their relationship with the existing order and society." Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 155. Like Gaidys before him, Jurašas affirmed and promoted Lithuanian theatre's turn toward modern forms of expression: the poetics of the grotesque, paradox and the absurd. Unlike Gaidys, however, in his productions Jurašas tried to speak in a more painful, dramatic and tragic language.
 
The Tragic Grotesque of Jonas Jurašas
 
Jurašas came to the Kaunas Drama Theatre with an established name as a dangerous director. His first productions (a staging of Look, Europe by Arkady Arkanov and Grigori Gorin in Šiauliai 1966, and productions in Vilnius of Leonid Zorin's Warsaw Melody (1967) and, that same year, Tango, by the Polish absurdist Slawomir Mrożek) earned him a reputation as an interesting, but also rebellious, personality. Tango was particularly problematic: using the grotesque to speak of the dangers of a "red plague" it was, of course, quickly "and quietly euthanized", and "removed from the repertoire" by government decree. Irena Aleksaitė, Jonas Jurašas, sudarė Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, Vilnius: Gervelė, 1995, p. 22. This incident inspired Jurašas to fight even more stubbornly for the right to proclaim the truth. It was, it seems, one of the reasons for the theatre to select the theme of conflict between artist and government as one of the main plot lines of its struggle.
 
This theme was given a particularly timely development in Jurašas' first production in Kaunas – Mikhail Bulgakov's Moliere, in 1968, telling the story of a Moliere (played by Leonardas Zelčius) exhausted by "arrogant government brats", a man for whom "the greatest surprises lurked at every moment, hounding him and even spitting at him (unfortunately, in the truest sense of that word). Irena Aleksaitė, „Nemirtingumo kaina“, Literatūra ir menas, 1968-03-23, p. 12.
 
This "spitting" took place during Moliere's disturbing finale. Jurašas fashioned it as a compelling metaphor of the hatred felt by an intrusive and thuggish government for a talented artist, showing an entourage of noblemen storming in on a dead Moliere and relishing the opportunity to spit upon him.
 
Jurašas inserted a contemporarily relevant scene into an episode of French history of the Louis XIV era, revealing the drama of an artist suffocating from the censorship of his own day.
 
He returned to this theme once again – and even more compellingly, more painfully and with greater inspiration – with The House of Discipline by Juozas Glinskis in 1970, the story of the imprisonment, interrogation and "reprogramming" of 19th century Lithuanian poet Antanas Strazdas. Unlike in Moliere, Jurašas laid out this story in an austere space-time of dreams and madness, nightmare and visions, delirium and phantasmagoria. He seemed to transform the narrative into a nightmare, enveloping it in a grueling, horrible and oppressive atmosphere, but also one of a poetic nature, revealing the rebellious, unshakeable spirit of Strazdas (played by Algirdas Voščikas), contemptuous of restrictive laws, a spirit that was also "light and airborne, much like a real thrush" (the meaning of the Lithuanian word "strazdas", also the protagonist's surname). Dana Rutkutė, „Negesk, žiburėli“, Tarybinė moteris, 1971, Nr. 6, p. 6–7.
 
The production was instantly noticed. The particular atmosphere of The House of Discipline was created with an absolute harmony of word, image and body: harsh but poetic text, metaphorical stage spaces dressed with natural, coarse materials, dividing the stage into tight coffin-like cells (designed by the artist Janina Malinauskaitė), all in harmony with "extremely expressive acting." Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 159. In evidence were "moments of the tragic grotesque, powerful, interpretive theatricality, flexible in form," and a particular "insight and accuracy of thought." Irena Aleksaitė, Jonas Jurašas, sudarė Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, Vilnius: Gervelė, 1995, p. 165. In all likelihood, the production was the first to so clearly demonstrate the ability of new Lithuanian directing to fuse all elements – literature, art, and the actor's voice, movement and expressiveness – into an integral stage image.
 
The House of Discipline appeared to be an extraordinarily expansive – as well as specific and very universal – stage narrative that served as a dramatic metaphor for an artist in a totalitarian system. It expressed the tragedy of the existence of freedom-seeking men living in a world that had been transformed into a prison or psychiatric asylum, "drastically exposing the wounds of the era, human desecration, violence, scheming and deception, particularly against those seeking truth and freedom, and those fighting for a natural human existence and creativity." Antanas Vengris, „Strazdelio drama“, Muzika ir teatras, 1972, Nr. 8, p. 21.
 
 
Perhaps not as drastically, but just as persistently, Jurašas also explored another aspect of "popular deception", by exposing a society that had become featureless and dense. He addressed this in Kazys Saja's Mammoth Hunt (1968), in which a group of unfortunate souls "dressed in masquerade costumes" wandered around in "some sort of clearing," "hopelessly searching for a celebration and the promised beckoning lights of communist prosperity." Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 155. He sought to address this in Kazys Saja's Šventežeris in 1970 which, together with Janina Malinauskaitė, he had decided to "politicize" using a metaphoric scene of a Lithuania being trampled under thick canvas boots. The theatre's art council did not approve this proposed scene, during which a field in the shape of Lithuania was to be "spread" over a low platform, dotted with small farms, cottages, churches and a well, while the characters of the play would walk over it, trampling everything under foot. Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 155.
 
 
Read more: Kazys Saja.
 
 
To be sure, the Šventežeris incident was only one of many instances of controversy at the Kaunas Drama Theatre between Jurašas and the artistic overseers of the day. Jurašas had to learn how to negotiate with them. One of the results of his "negotiations" was the appearance in his repertoire of Mikhail Shatrov's Bolsheviks (1970), a production based on the October revolution that Jurašas proposed to present as a kind of gesture of redemption for past and future "sins."
 
The result was quite different, however. He produced yet another "sin." It was clear to everyone that Jurašas had reshaped the hero of the October revolution – the "hungry, idealistic old bolsheviks" – so that their portrait now resonated as a loud smack in the face of all of their modern descendants, those "fat cats living in a communist paradise at the expense of the much-praised, beloved people." Irena Aleksaitė, Jonas Jurašas, sudarė Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, Vilnius: Gervelė, 1995, p. 25. Jurašas managed to "load" an official Soviet play with the significance of anti-Soviet opposition. Moreover, it was likely the first demonstration in Lithuanian theatre of the power of directing to fundamentally alter the ideological content of a literary text.
 
One scene from The Bolsheviks entered the annals of Lithuanian theatre history as a particularly graphic display of the power of directing, namely the staging of a "last supper". In the scene, party "apostles" sat around a wooden table breaking black bread, "wrapped" in red lighting that transformed their faces into fantastical red skulls, symbolizing the blood shed both in the past, and in the future. Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 158.
 
Of course, the clouds gathering over Jurašas' head were only fed by these affronts, but they did not obscure his reputation. On the contrary, audiences flooded the Kaunas Drama Theatre, not only from Lithuania, but also from neighboring republics, while theatre critics unanimously praised director Jurašas' talent while staying silent, of course, about any political allusions.
 
Nevertheless, an explosive confrontation was inevitable. It is uniquely symbolic that it was ignited by Barbora Radvilaitė, by Juozas Grušas, in 1972, a play in which Jurašas attempted to reflect on the "tragedy of the collapse of humanistic ideals and the destruction of personal identity" Egmontas Jansonas, „Sumanymas ir jo įkūnijimas“, Literatūra ir menas, 1973-01-13, p. 11. and to give meaning to the idea of the death of humanity – first and foremost the decency, love, beauty and goodness embodied in Barbora (played by Rūta Staliliūnaitė) – amid dirty, political, "palace" intrigue. The relevance of this idea was seemingly confirmed by reality: after a final rehearsal review of Barbora Radvilaitė, censors began a desperate fight with Jurašas. The original play's severe finale – a legendary scene, shown only once during the final rehearsal, culminating in the descent of a revered painting of the Holy Mother of Aušros Vartai (The Gates of Dawn) – was prohibited. After protesting this prohibition, Jurašas was forced to leave the Kaunas Drama Theatre and, two years later, in 1974, his native Lithuania. Thereafter Jurašas's name disappeared both from the posters of the Kaunas Drama Theatre, and from Lithuanian theatre as a whole.
 
In spite of this, it was clear that Jurašas had established and strengthened the determination of the Lithuanian stage to find new experiences of freedom and truth-telling, both of which were most evident in the direction of Jonas Vaitkus.
 
Jonas Vaitkus' "Shock Theatre"
 
Jonas Vaitkus' directorial debut came in 1974 at the Šiauliai Drama Theatre, with the presentation of Zurab Khalapyan's Lullaby in a production that reflected upon the juncture of rebellion and conformity. Vaitkus' reputation began to grow in earnest from 1975 onward, from the start of his long and acclaimed career in Kaunas. At that time he had already earned a reputation for "multiformity" and "diversity in genre", in other words, as a director of great possibilities. He appeared to have a hunger for a freedom of expression in various genres and, most importantly, he had mastered the different rules of each. He was capable of creating theatre pieces of poetic vision (Dream Pilgrim, by Eugenijus Ignatavičius and Jonas Vaitkus, 1975), and farce (Alfredo Jarry's King Ubu, 1977, and Ivan Radoev's Red and Brown, 1979), able to plunge into the depths of psychological theatre (Maxim Gorky's The Last Ones, 1978), and emit a journalistic energy (Juozas Grušas Union, 1978), or give form to "brutal" realism (Juozas Glinskis' Kingas, 1980). Blends of all of these styles appeared in later productions of Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder in 1980 and in Šarūnas, by Vincas Krėvė, that same year.
 
Nevertheless, Vaitkus' multifaceted theatre was also uniquely consistent, primarily due to its relentlessly penetrating revision of reality and its determined initiative to speak the truth. So penetrating and determined, in fact, that, after The Last Ones, it was described as "having a shock effect: devastating, rousing and inspiring", but the same could probably be said after every one of Vaitkus' productions. „Ruošiantis klasikos festivaliui“, Teatras, 1978, Nr. 2, p. 10.
 
One of the most noticeable truth-telling themes in Vaitkus' theatre was based on the diagnosis of a putrid, rotten, insane and "inhuman" reality. Vaitkus pronounced this diagnosis resonantly in King Ubu, in the first interpretation of the avantgarde play produced in the Soviet Union. In this production, the director portrayed with great relish Jarry's fallen world of astounding folly, passionately populating it with many "kings", one more blinded from their decay than the next, with characters performing slow movements, donning brightly made-up deformed masks, their bodies stuffed into costumes made of plastic kitchen mats. It appears the minor detail of Soviet kitchen mats was sufficient (or perhaps not even necessary) for King Ubu to resonate with the subtext and intonation of an aesopic parody of Soviet reality, providing a way to view the world as if through a strange crooked mirror. Confronted by this, the entirety of contemporary reality – "everything that was heard on Soviet radio and television or expelled by newspapers stuffed with ideology and demagoguery – took on phantasmagorical, repulsively humorous forms that had much in common with the theatre of the absurd." Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 177–178. Vaitkus seemed to find absurdist forms in King Ubu, and later used them often as a critical instrument for diagnosing reality. He also, however, sought antidotes for these forms.
 
 
When staging Radoev's Red and Brown, a documentary play based on factual material from the trial in Leipzig of communist activist Georgi Dimitrov, Vaitkus fundamentally "corrected" its genre. He "Ubued" the production, i.e. turning the rampage of the "judges" into an absurd vaudevillian orgy, while at the same time illuminating the oppositional voice of Dimitrov (played by Viktoras Valašinas), as a "humanist, lyricist and passionate speaker of truth". Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 187.
 
In his staging of Glinskis' Kingas, he created an hyperbolized picture of the sadism of a correctional facility, emphasizing "the physical torture and moral mocking" of the motives of human dignity, Gražina Mareckaitė, Laisvoji zona: Juozo Glinskio teatras, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2002, p. 59. while at the same time arguing that an alternative existed: heroic suicide as the final act of rebellion against savagery.
 
It should be noted that these productions – Red and Brown and Kingas – were the first experiments with nudism on stage in Lithuanian theatre. In truth, Red and Brown did not aspire to a place in the history of displaying the naked body. The play merely showed half-naked soldiers, dressed in fragmented costumes, decorated with colored exotic bird feathers. However, actors in Kingas – the romantics Saulius (Zigmas Bateika) and Elena (Audronė Paškonytė) – stripped down completely. Having escaped from the "zone" and climbed high atop a roof, they seemed to consume the fresh air of freedom and unexpected love with all of their naked limbs.
 
Humanitarian characters did not, however, become the protagonists of Vaitkus' theatre. Neither did the conflict between an absurd, cruel world and the individuals who had still retained their nobility – reminiscent of Jurašas' time – solidify into a main theme. Vaitkus was much more concerned with examining the consequences of that brutal world – the anatomy of the deformed, crippled and disfigured human consciousness. He concerned himself not only with the social realities of the day, but also with a revision of man's internal reality.
 
Undoubtedly the strongest presentation of this pursuit came with the legendary production of The Last Ones at the peak of the early stage of his directorial career. The plays' revealing and dramatically exposing energy was more than obvious. Critics openly named the director's theme in The Last Ones as "the recognition of evil." They went on to note that the story of the degraded Kolomiytsev family – the father, Ivan (Viktoras Valašinas), and his children Alexander (Viktoras Šinkariukas) and Nadezhda (Gražina Balandytė) – was elevated to a portrait, shocking in its candor, of the fall of man and society eroded by "social phantoms, i.e. violence, lies and demagoguery".  Antanas Gudelis , „Ruošiantis klasikos festivaliui. Blogio atpažinimas“, Teatras, 1978, Nr. 2, p. 7.
 
The most important explanation for the power of this special portrait was a different and unique kind of psychologism. Vaitkus was able to "recognize evil" not only as the source of man's impudence, but also of man's helplessness. His was an ability to penetrate the dramatic souls "condemned to evil" without denouncing them, but rather "transforming them from private to universal ones" and seeing in them the casualties of "the degradation of man and society". Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 181, 183.  
 
With The Last Ones, Vaitkus began writing the medical history of the damaged soul of society. He expanded upon it with the story of Solness (Juozas Budraitis), the builder akin to one "suffering from the tortured poses of an epilepsy patient, the modulations of a broken falsetto, or a hoarse scream," Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, „Kauno dramos teatras“, in: Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006, p. 190. as if suffocating from habits, suppressed desires and hidden complexes, or the story of Šarūnas (Juozas Budraitis) – the suffering hero, hunchbacked and limping, full of unsuppressed fury, torturing all of those around him, "afflicted" with extreme loneliness and "full of resignation, [...] a personality suffering from a complex of uncertainty". „Tai, kas svarbiausia“, Kauno tiesa, 1981-04-03
 
Vaitkus infected the characters of classical drama with the human diseases of the day. And he once again confirmed – only even more forcefully and radically – what other critical "revisionists" of reality had been asserting in one way or another, namely that Lithuanian theatre had a special "realist" metaphorical-poetic ability. Vaitkus seemed to reinforce – by sharpening and polishing – the linguistic tools of metaphoric imagery, symbolic conclusions and poetic analogies and used them to dissect the deepest and most painful sorrows of reality.
 
Paradoxically, but logically in its own way, the more keen the "dissection" by Lithuanian theatre, the stronger became the desire for an alternative relationship with reality. The struggle to articulate pain, anger and despair embodied by an increasingly intensified voice of "revisionist" Lithuanian theatre of the 1970s, also encouraged a search for their opposites in the "forms of hope."
 

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Sources and links

„Tai, kas svarbiausia“
Kauno tiesa, 1981 04 03
Irena Aleksaitė
Jonas Jurašas
Vilnius: Gervelė, 1995
Irena Aleksaitė
„Nemirtingumo kaina“
Literatūra ir menas, 1968 03 23
Audronė Girdzijauskaitė
„Kauno dramos teatras“
Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006
Antanas Gudelis
„Ruošiantis klasikos festivaliui. Blogio atpažinimas“
Teatras, 1978, Nr. 2
Egmontas Jansonas
„Sumanymas ir jo įkūnijimas“
Literatūra ir menas, 1973 01 13
Gražina Mareckaitė
„Klaipėdos dramos teatras“
Lietuvių teatro istorija. Kn. 3: 1970–1980, sudarė Irena Aleksaitė, Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2006
Gražina Mareckaitė
Laisvoji zona: Juozo Glinskio teatras
Vilnius: Kultūros, filosofijos ir meno institutas, 2002
Dana Rutkutė
„Negesk, žiburėli“
Tarybinė moteris, 1971, Nr. 6, p. 6–7
Rimantas Venckus
„Klaipėdos dramos teatras“
Lietuvių tarybinis dramos teatras: 1957–1970, sudarė Algirdas Gaižutis Vilnius: Vaga, 1987
Antanas Vengris
„Strazdelio drama“
Muzika ir teatras, 1972, Nr. 8
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