From Iván Hevesy’s Aesthetics and Dramaturgy of the Film Play (1925), Part 2: The Structure and Image Construction of the Film Play

Teachers and scholars seem always to have experienced some critical discomfiture in dealing critically with that mode of artistic production we call drama or play. It is, of course, literature. But then again, of course, it isn't. The debate which surrounds this paradoxical hybrid is at least as old as Aristotle, and we may derive from fragmentary and often oracular Poetics some notion of how this problem was seen in classical times. Though Aristotle pays extremely careful attention to constituent parts of a play in performance and indeed bases his definition of tragic mode on his perception of a theatre audience's response to play form, he goes on to add, For power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from and actors. The tone of this remark suggests that Aristotle is but carefully noting an to what he understands as norm: play in theatre with representation and actors. Yet, several chapters later, pursuing this exception Aristotle notes that the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without aid of eye, he who hears tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place. This is impression we should receive from hearing story of Oedipus. Here again, however, Aristotle goes on to suggest that it is in playing that tragic piece achieves its full psychological impact. Though one can simply hear or read Oedipus, play, he seems to say, is a gestalt designed to yield its full effect only when all roles are well acted and when all of its constituent scenic parts work in harmony together.

"This Great Passion for Producing"The Affective Reversal of Brecht's Dramatic Theory Vidar Thorsteinsson (bio) Brecht, always a teacher, was no ordinary teacher. When he took a moment's rest from playwriting and directing to compose his magnum opus of dramatic theory, A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht had such faith in the affective powers of his theatrical techniques that he threw instruction off the stage with the strongest proclamations of his entire career on the topic: "Not even instruction can be demanded of it," he wrote of his theatre (180).1 From now on, Brecht's theatre would engage its audience exclusively through that frequently reviled and discredited thing, pleasure; it would provide "no more utilitarian lesson than how to move pleasurably" (SO, 180–81). Given the playwright's enduring reputation as a cultivator of spectatorial intellect and his previous, well-known critique of empathy and rejection of the "mental immaturity" given us by the "emotional suggestibility of a mob" (Gobert, 14), how are we to understand the resolute confidence with which Brecht affirms the role of emotional pleasure over instruction in his last but most acclaimed treatise on dramatic theory?2 In short, Brecht appears to have made a discovery: Leaving behind his prior suspicion of affective spectatorship for its connotations of impotence, maudlin empathy, and political docility, Brecht now sees how the political itself is constituted affectively. Politically cogent theatre does well to orient itself toward the affective—not merely because theatre knows how to make a political lesson "fun," as Brecht approvingly put it (SO, 180)—but because "passion" and "attitude" (SO, 185) point to and arise from the sociopolitical terrain itself and hence facilitate our critical engagement with it no less than intellectual insight does. For Brecht in the late 1940s, affect becomes a potent way of mapping the two pivotal and overlapping zones of revolutionary leftist politics: the sphere of production and the sphere of political action. [End Page 57] Granted, insofar as it remains inadequately understood, production must be accounted for at the cognitive level with the help of materialist critique, but Brecht's late dramatic theory is now more eager to chart the territory of production through an affective, emotional, and bodily exploration. Accordingly, as class-based militancy emerges out of an orientation toward and within production, the revolutionary subject is also affectively constituted, going beyond the catharsis of private individuality and recomposing itself experimentally as a feeling and desiring collective. It is in this passage from a desire for production to a desire for social change where Brecht's theatre now finds itself pleasurably interposed, ready to enhance, connect, and facilitate between the two. The late Brecht's passionate defense of political–theatrical affect has been somewhat occluded by the partly justified and by no means ignominious portrayal of him as a didacticist. While the role of instruction, pedagogy, and judgment in Brecht is fully deserving of attention in its own right, the current interest in affect theory makes our reassessment of the affective Brecht an altogether timely and urgent undertaking. Indeed, reading the German playwright with a central philosopher of contemporary affect thinking, Gilles Deleuze, opens up some possible beginnings for this reappraisal. As this essay aims to show, Deleuze's writings are of help in shedding light on why the great socialist artist-teacher finally abandoned learning and oriented his theatre productively and politically toward the body, desire, and affect. It has been pointed out how Brecht's critique of mimetic representation, decentering of subjectivity, and emphasis on the constructed nature of social relations can be related to some strands of poststructuralism. Herbert Blau hence has read Brecht with Jacques Derrida, and Elizabeth Wright has read him with a host of French post–World War II authors from Jacques Lacan to Jean-François Lyotard.3 However, apart from references to a couple of passages in Cinema 2 where Deleuze discusses Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard, no work to this date has brought Deleuze and Brecht into serious dialogue. Alongside our slow recovery from Brecht fatigue and the steady presence of poststructuralist philosophy as a matter of hot debate on the academic Left, it is time to...

Reviewed by: Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann David Krasner TRAGEDY AND DRAMATIC THEATRE. By Hans-Thies Lehmann. Translated by Erik Butler. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016; pp. 466. Few theories pose as great a challenge to define as those of tragedy. From ancient Greece through the Renaissance and into the modern age, the idea of what constitutes tragedy has been examined and reworked by philosophers and theorists, with shifting emphases. Hans-Thies Lehmann's dense, yet important book takes on the enormous task of defining tragedy historically and onstage, as he works to "identify the continuity of a tragic motif that admittedly does not proceed smoothly" (7; emphasis in original). Lehmann begins his examination with Aristotle amid the Attic "palaia diaphora" (24)—the ancient quarrel between philosophy and theatre. Next, he examines Hegel's influential, though static, theory of tragic conflict, declaring it concrete but bookish; whereas Nietzsche, Lehmann argues, situates tragedy theatrically—in gesture, music, and the theatrical event. Examining tragic concepts like rupture, suspense, overstepping, immoderation, excess, intrigue, violence, death, Lehmann asks: Is tragedy defined by character overreach (Aristotelian hubris), compassion (Lessing), or conflict (Hegel)? Is it a mode of aesthetic experience (genre) or is it tied to speech acts (Benjamin) or tethered to text (Szondi)? Is it quotidian (Maeterlinck) or quixotic (Heidegger)? Is it post-dramatic (Artaud, Brecht) or is it a theatrical experience defined viscerally, vicariously, and representationally through madness, horror, and shame? Can we define tragedy as an ethical experience (Kant and Hegel), or as an experience of pity and terror (Aristotle)? Is its focus on hyperbole and blood-soaked revenge (Seneca) or on transgression (Bataille)? Is it best explained using the concepts of imaginary versus symbolic (Racine through a Lacanian lens)? Is it modern, as in words defining "the theatrical images of what dramatis personae endure" (219), or postmodern, as in theatrical and gestural—that is, temporal and spatial, with minimal words. And if it is a theatrical experience located in the observer-audience, must it be collectively affirmed in order to verify its corporeal authenticity? [End Page 121] Ultimately, the issue that Lehmann raises is: What defines the tragic experience in the theatre, given theatre's ephemerality? Throughout his book Lehmann argues that tragedy is not literature, but theatre: "If we consider that tragic experience is a mode of representation … and view it as specific to the theatre …, then we may grasp the actuality of tragic experience in a way that goes beyond inherited notions of tragedy as a literary form," yielding "tragedy-as-concrete-theatrical practice" (120). One example (among many) is Antigone: the tension between civic authority (Creon) and defiance (Antigone) creates a theatricalized forum for meaningful observations of public and private life. As Hegel reminds us (and as A. C. Bradley reinforced), it is not that Antigone or Creon is unimpeachably perched on the moral high ground, but rather that her/his uncompromising position provides dramatic intensity, uncertainty, and tragic consequences. Tragedy receives its special force by presenting the contrast of two worldviews engaged in irreducible conflict in the immediacy of a theatrical event—forces oscillating before the eyes and ears of an audience. Likewise Othello, in which Lehmann argues that audiences observe in real-time characters locked in internal and external struggles that reflect on the tragic nature of truth, where "one party takes pride in fabricating falsehoods" while another "wants to have someone to trust" (235; emphasis in original). These theatrical oppositions of conflict and sanctimony (Antigone) or trust and deception (Othello) create a powerful tragic magnification of human volition. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre is a tour de force of intellectual insight, copiously researched by an experienced scholar. In attempting to define the idea of tragedy, we risk running afoul of Wittgenstein's meme that if we cannot distinguish between things and how they function, then we cannot talk about them. But for Lehmann, the enticement of tragedy lies in what he calls "an understanding of our failure to understand"; in other words, if tragedy acts incorrigibly on our psyche and provides a fillip to our self-knowledge by allowing us to vicariously imagine the incomprehensible, then tragic experience "involves self-confrontation and self-foreignness," as...

Ingarden’s literary theory is formulated primarily in his two works, The Literary Work of Art, An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. The first work deals with the ontological foundation of the literary work of art, and the second deals with the ways in which response to and “knowledge” of the literary work arise in the mind. Through the investigation of this intentional object (the literary work as an object which is neither real nor ideal) from these two points of view, Ingarden attempts to reconcile the problem interesting him as a philosopher, that is, the problem of idealism and realism. Thus he investigates the literary work of art primarily in order to supply explanatory and exemplary material for his studies dealing with purely intentional objects. But, because the objects of art in general provide him with many of the most important arguments in the controversy between realism and idealism, eventually Ingarden’s philosophical investigation into the nature and mode of being of the objects of knowledge gradually moved him closer and closer not only to the formulation of his empirical literary theory, but also to the attempt to create the foundation of an entire system of philosophy of art.

Reviewed by: Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory Steve Giles John J. White . Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Pp. 348. $90 (Hb). This meticulously researched study is the first in English to deal exclusively with Brecht's writings on theatre and is the first monograph on Brecht's dramatic theory in any language to take full account of the new Berlin/Frankfurt edition of Brecht's complete works, which appeared in Germany between 1988 and 2000. As such, Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory is essential reading for all Brecht scholars, whatever their disciplinary affiliations, and establishes a benchmark for all future research in this area. White analyses Brecht's major writings on theatre from 1930 to 1956, starting with the "Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" (previously known to aficionados of Brecht's work as "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre") and finishing with the "Short Organum for the Theatre" and the Messingkauf project. White also discusses essays from Brecht's exile period and his otherwise neglected dramaturgical poems. Readers should note, however, that Brecht's work is referenced and cited in German throughout, with no translations of German texts and few cross-references to the standard English translations of his theoretical writings – in view of the large number of Brecht teachers and scholars who do not have fluent German, this is rather regrettable. In his introduction, White addresses a series of methodological issues raised by any attempt to deal with the full range of Brecht's writings on theatre: do they constitute a coherent corpus of theoretical statements or are they simply occasional notes functioning as appendages to his practical work? do they display any consistent historical or evolutionary development? should they be [End Page 124] construed as aesthetic or anti-aesthetic interventions? and how do they relate to the Marxist category of the unity of theory and practice? These traditional concerns in Brecht scholarship are then overlaid with further problems posed by the new Berlin/Frankfurt Brecht edition. The four volumes devoted to Brecht's "theoretical" writings – 3,800 pages in all – bring together some 1,700 items, only 300 of which were published in his lifetime. Moreover, these writings deal not only with theatre but also with sociology and politics, philosophy, film and mass media, and Marxist aesthetics and cultural theory. White's solution to this textual and methodological conundrum is to home in on Brecht's most significant and influential theoretical writings on theatre – which explains the familiarity of the texts he highlights – but at the same time to subject them to rigorous close analysis, reading them intertextually in relation to other essays from the same period. This original and challenging approach works particularly well with the "Notes to Mahagonny," the "Short Organum," and the Messingkauf, where White's detailed and deftly argued analyses richly reward the concentration and attentiveness required of his readers. Although Brecht had produced some three-hundred theoretical notes and essays prior to 1930, White's study begins with the "Notes to Mahagonny." This, White observes, is because the "Notes to Mahagonny" have a special status in Brecht's Weimar work. They represent his first major published account of epic theatre and are possibly his single most influential theoretical statement. Yet the "Notes to Mahagonny" have never been subjected to detailed textual critique, a scholarly oversight that White proceeds to remedy with considerable acuity and wit. He skilfully disentangles the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Brecht's theoretical writing, notably in his penetrating critique of the dramatic theatre / epic theatre schema in the "Notes to Mahagonny," reading Brecht's texts resistantly and showing how they generate a sense of estrangement and critical distance. One of White's key concerns throughout his study is to engage with the complexities of Brecht's shifting accounts of audience response from the 1930s to the 1950s, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between emotion and critical distance. White resolutely rejects the cliché view (a view attributed to him, somewhat bizarrely, in the publisher's blurb advertising his study) that Brecht does not want his audiences to feel but to think and queries the simple opposition...

the Rhymers' Club had looked to Pater as the greatest contemporary prose stylist, and they had been infatuated with his philosophy of the flux. Like many literary styles in the nineties, Yeats' early experiments, such as Rosa Alchemica and The Shadowy Waters, were imitations of Pater's florid, languorous cadences. Partly as a result of his early stylistic failures, Yeats, with the help of the rigorous demands imposed by writing for the stage, began during the next decade to forge a new style that led to the lean, sinewy power of his mature verse. Writing plays gave Yeats' verse vigor, concreteness, and a sense of structure, and consequently brought it out of the cloud and foam of the Celtic Twilight and his 1890's aestheticism. It has long been a critical commonplace that Yeats' experience as a dramatist had a substantial impact on his later poetry, but what has not been recognized is that Pater played an even greater role in shaping the dramatic ideals that informed Yeats' new style than he had in influencing his earlier style. When Yeats went to Stratfordon-Avon in April of 1901 to study Shakespeare as part of his preparation to become a serious dramatist, he again turned to Pater for philosophy; only this time he was assessing not the philosophy of the flux but Pater's philosophy of aesthetic form, and not the accidentals of his style but the essence of his thought. As the revisions to On Baile9 s Strand and the development of Yeats' dramatic theory after 1901 indicate, Yeats' new style resulted not merely from a fusion of his early Paterian lyricism with a new interest in dramatic action and simplicity ;1 rather his new dramatic aesthetic was an expansion and refinement of a somewhat vague notion of lyricism into a more precise and profoundly Paterian concept of lyric unity. Moreover,

Specificity of embodiment of Shevchenko’s image in Lev Colodub’s opera “Poet”

This article analyzes Kubik , a theatre play for children 1 to 3 yearold, conducted by the theatre company Teatro Paraiso: it’s appropriate communicatively, they prepare very thorough fully the space, and the scenic tools are suitable for the children. And they do it taking in to account the adequacy of the play for an infant public (1-3 year-old) which historically hasn’t been considered in theatre, and the fact that this theatrical play is based on action and pleasure, in other words, on the play, meaning playful action, predominant in children’s life as well as the base for children learning and dramatic arts. These reasons reinforce the idea that Kubik is a novel and attractive resource for the educational community, and also, it facilitates the integral education to children of this age. The research is designed from a qualitative point of view, with the collected voices of the teachers in the formative sessions, the field notes from diverse representations and the later evaluation of the adult public, all of this captured in a categorical system provided by the NVivo8 program. It focuses on describing and evaluating, from a pedagogical point of view, the contextualization of the play, the pedagogical tools used, and the interaction between play and movement. Therefore, Kubik is a good pedagogical tool, and an adequate way to initiate children in the artistic education, because allows the identification and the nearness with children and the connection with their development phase, which uses the exploration, the object manipulation and the pleasure for action.

The paper aims to illustrate the Italian play L’Avversario, a work by Invisibile Kollettivo that tries to translate into a theatrical show the roman written by the French author Emmanuel Carrere. Both in the roman and in the play the most important aspect is the author’s point of view together with his feelings. This results quite normal referring to a book, but it is way too original in a theatrical play. So, the paper tries to explain the motivation that moved the Italian artists to stay loyal to the spirit of the book, choosing the form of the scenic reading for bringing it on stage. Theatre, Carrere, Lettura scenica, Teatro dell’Elfo, Invisibile Kollettivo

To write a ‘performative text’ is to produce a piece of writing which is necessarily active, an open dialogue with itself and the reader, full of interjections and mutations. The following text is a theatre play, framed by parameters of an academic paper — an introduction and footnotes — that function as a parallel dialogue to the play, a set of interruptions and meta-texts. The intention here is to try and see how the artwork can be mapped out as a text, in and of itself, and to approach the theory-practice conundrum from this point of view, rather than as a body of practice serving as an appendage to a parallel enquiry, or vice versa.

The development of the vital potential of the drama theater is in a continuous search for new forms of expression. Today, in an attempt to establish itself on the territory of a multicultural environment, as well as in an attempt to gain a unique method of communication with society, the theater as an art sphere expands the boundaries of its purpose. Going beyond the stage space turns out to be an important subject of research from the point of view of the search for the artistic existence of the theater in the conditions of digital reality. This article discusses the issue of finding a place for a drama theater in a digital environment where the energy of human relations is significantly minimized and manifests itself in a specifically different way. The subject of the research for the author was the cultural and creative activity of the Tovstonogov BDT. The St. Petersburg Bolshoi Drama Theater does not need recommendations: it has a great history in the twentieth century, an attractive stage "today" for the audience and, undoubtedly, interesting prospects. In the practice of BDT under the leadership of Andrei the Mighty (2013-2023), there are such turns of dramatic action that are not directly connected with the stage and are almost out of place for the "repertory" theater. The phenomenon of the theater, as if removed from its ancestral roots, leaving the walls breathing tradition, is considered in the article as an experience of cultural and theatrical "exit" to the "stage" of digital reality. Among such experiments, the most significant are the social action "Help the doctors", as well as the experiments of "Minecraft" performances. In addition to the usual comparative historical method for art studies, others will be used, first of all, the formal method, which distinguishes the St. Petersburg school of theater studies. Scientific novelty is determined by the subject of research itself: BDT is considered as a phenomenon of a multi-genre cultural space, in which, as before, a special place is rightfully given to the actor, his role, as well as to the viewer who finds himself in the conditions of a new socio-cultural picture of the world.

Poszukiwanie rozwiązania sceno-widowni dającego możliwie szerokie możliwości aranżacyjne, było domeną lat 60 i 70-tych XX wieku. W owym czasie powstało najwięcej projektów i realizacji scenicznych, w których możliwe były do zaaranżowania podstawowe relacje terenów gry i obserwacji, zatem barokowy włoski, otwarty i arenowy. Tendencja ta na przełomie wieków zanikła, nastąpił natomiast renesans sceny włoskiej w różnych odmianach, z zasady o niezmiennej formie, czasem z niewielkimi możliwościami transformacji na linii opera – koncert – teatr dramatyczny. Wszystkie te rozwiązania generowały ogromne koszty poprzez konieczność zastosowania niestandardowych urządzeń technicznych, również znacząco podrażających eksploatację. W 1996/1997 roku w Londynie otwarto zrekonstruowany szekspirowski teatr „Globe”. Obiekt ten niewątpliwie dał początek odrodzonej wizji współczesnego teatru dramatycznego. Forma przestrzenna, nawiązująca do starożytności, z pozoru nie wydaje się mobilna inscenizacyjnie. Jednakże z punktu widzenia szczególnej relacji widza i aktora, stosując odpowiednie kryteria reżyserskie, układ zyskuje „wewnętrzną” zmienność przy praktycznie niezmienionym układzie przestrzennym. Idea teatru renesansowej Anglii w pierwszym rzędzie ma zastosowanie w obiektach masowych, otwartych. Dyskusyjne są rozwiązania, w których stosuje się otwierany dach, czy rozbudowaną w tle „języka” scenicznego namiastkę sceny pudełkowej. W końcu wznoszenie obiektu w ciężkiej, żelbetowej konstrukcji, a nie w lekkiej, drewnianej, powoduje zaniżenie „efektywności” inscenizacyjnej, koszty natomiast rosną. Surowość formalna teatru elżbietańskiego przy wymaganiach technicznych odnoszących się głównie do bazy oświetleniowej, jest akceptowalna w szerokim zakresie repertuarowym. Przy niewielkich nakładach finansowych i zgodnym współdziałaniu architektów i inscenizatorów z przypisanymi im branżami, całkowicie spełnia się zasada synergii.

This article analyzes the dramaturgical perspective of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella and General Art director of Thalia Theater Antú Romero Nunes’ play Michael Kohlhaas in the sense of modern law and justice, the conflict between sovereignty and legitimacy, and the relationship between force and right. Both the novella and play of Michael Kohlhaas question the conflict of legality, legitimacy, and the sense of justice. Since the story of Kohlhaas has been a canonical work for both different artistic productions and sociology of law for two centuries, this article offers a conversation among Kleist's novella, Nunes' play, and the sociological analysis of modern law. From an interdisciplinary point of view, the article examines the construction and interpretation of the story of Michael Kohlhaas.

Difficulties of developing strategy for improving impulsive buying (IB), major purchase transaction in supermarkets, had been general case. There is research gap on examining and assessing efficiency of decision variables from supermarkets’ point of view, since most IB studies were still focusing on perception and psychological variables of customer’s point of view. This article is focusing on fundamental exploration of display, one of supermarket’s decision variables, and on development of assessment model to improve IB transaction. IB improvement will enhance supermarket’s competitive advantage.BR Mathematical model is delivered by logistic regression, which then becomes an assessment model. The model was developed by interviewing 110 respondents and observing 55 product group displays in Check-Out Counter (COC) of five supermarkets in Indonesia. The model developed indicates that IB occurred because of the proper arrangement of display profile: space width (SW), product mix complexity inside a group product (COM), and height of level from eye level (LVL). IB responses for the same display profile maybe vary depends on the consumer’s queuing time (TM). As managerial implication, this research is suggesting to provide product mix which will expand its space width, to display product closer to eye level, and to maintain proper length of queuing.

Power in WeaknessMusicals in Poland under Communism Jacek Mikolajczyk (bio) On June 11, 1987, Pope John Paul II visited Gdynia, a major Polish port city by the Baltic Sea. Over 500,000 people assembled at Gdynia’s main square to meet him. A mass celebrated by John Paul II was broadcast all over the world. The government tried to undermine the importance of the event, but officials overlooked one important detail, which eventually contributed to its subsequent symbolic meaning. Adjacent to the square, there was a huge sign on the façade of the building of Gdynia’s Musical Theater advertising its most recent production. All over the world people saw pictures of the pope in the center of a city in communist Poland addressing a crowd beneath a string of large glittering letters spelling out the words “Jesus Christ Superstar!” This is how the world came to see that Broadway musicals were in fact being produced in the People’s Republic of Poland.1 Arguably, few people would expect musicals to be produced in communist countries.2 Musicals are a uniquely American genre, deeply rooted in an American system of commercial theatre, and communist regimes were typically anti-American. The government, having introduced proactive censorship after World War II, had all the means to control the culture in the country. Moreover, in the People’s Republic of Poland there was no free theatrical market as all theatres were run by the state. If musicals were to make it to the stage, the government must have approved or at least tolerated the musical as a genre. The conundrum is why the government would allow and tolerate such productions. An answer to this question presents a paradox. The power of the musical in Poland resided in its weakness. American musicals were staged in operetta theatres and, accordingly, they were regarded by the authorities [End Page 77] and members of the theatre industry as a relic of the old days of nineteenth-century operetta. This kind of theatre was tolerated only because of its popularity among less educated spectators, and it was largely scorned both by theatre artists and politicians. On the other hand, this is exactly why musical theatre artists sometimes had more artistic freedom than directors of more respected productions in dramatic theatres. Since musical productions seemed less serious, the government control was much less strict in their case. As it turned out, while resistance against the government grew and censors were increasing their pressure on dramatic theatre, there were far more productions that conveyed meaningful political attitudes in musical theatre. Interestingly, the musical genre was only introduced to Polish theatres because of the political change that accompanied the fall of the Stalinist dictatorship early in the history of communist Poland. In 1956, the so-called “Thaw,” announced in the Soviet Union by Nikita Khrushchev, coincided in Poland with both the death of Bolesław Bierut, a leader of the regional Communist Party, and the first mutiny of Polish laborers in Poznań. Władysław Gomułka, one of the leaders of Polish communists during the 1930s, became the new First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party. His regime was much more liberal than the previous one. Censorship was loosened and culture in the country opened up to the West. Generally speaking, for eleven years following World War II, Poland was separated from the West; hence, it is not surprising to find Polish artists and consumers abruptly trying to catch up with recent developments in Western culture. In numerous theatres, plays by Beckett, Ionesco, and Sartre were staged, and the very availability of Western works encouraged managers of operetta theatres to look around the world’s stages. In 1956, the Everymen Opera Company visited Warsaw with their production of Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin. It was probably the first visit of an American theatre group in Poland, and both audience and critics welcomed it as a sensational event. In the following year, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate opened at the Comedy Theatre in Warsaw.3 This first production of the American musical sparked a veritable wave of Broadway musicals...