Talking (in) Turkey : Candor of Soviets Surprises American, Turkish Theater Folks

Perched as it is on the edge of two continents--Europe and Asia--Istanbul is not a city that would automatically come to mind as a theatrical center.

A place of great antiquity, yes. From the amazing sultanate halls of its Topkapi Palace to the vaulted domes of AyaSofia (the basilica of Saint Sophia) and the needle minarets of its Mimar Sinan mosques, Istanbul is a curious amalgam of cultures, straddling East and West, past and present, as handily as it straddles the Bosporus.

Its polyglot history has receded into a population of 7 million, 97% of which is now Muslim, yet, by its own insistence, not Arabic; whose upper strata is dedicated to the emulation of Europe and America (which includes sending its children to Western colleges), whose traffic and air pollution choke in full-fledged Western style, and yet whose pace, customs and lavish hospitality remain distinctly Old World and Near Eastern.

In other words, Istanbul is contrast heaped on paradox. So is the life of its theater--a widespread, well-regarded activity with a lengthy roster of playwrights, directors and actors whose comfortably salaried lifetime positions could be the envy of struggling Western artists. Or could they?

Like eunuchs in a harem, Turkish theater artists are impotent in Eden. They have no control over what parts they play, what plays they do or what company does them. Of the 20 or so theaters in Istanbul, roughly 15 are vanity operations, owned by star actors who use them as personal showcases. In the state and municipal theaters, all is decided by theater boards and politically appointed artistic directors. Since no one gets fired, there’s no need to try harder. Standards can’t be measured by high-risk factors and other rigors of the American theater.

The three-day International Theatre Institute Symposium that brought us to this city was intended precisely to examine these differences in all of our cultures.

It was hosted by the Turkish arm of ITI, an organization founded in 1947/48 at the urging of Julian Huxley (then-director general of its parent outfit, UNESCO) “to promote the exchange of knowledge and practice in the theater.”

So in a mild October, participants from the United States, the Soviet Union and Turkey came together at the ornate Yildiz Palace (a rococo yellow and white structure erected at the turn of the century by Sultan Abdel Hamid) to discuss theater in their respective countries and how in each, money and art, freedom and power, interact.

From the United States came playwright Edward Albee; La Mama’s free-spirited real mama, Ellen Stewart; Michael Miner, artistic director of the Actors Theatre of St. Paul (currently producing a Soviet play, Vladlen Dozortsev’s “Breakfast With Strangers”); Alan Rust, Dean of the School of Drama at the North Carolina School of the Arts; Martha Coigny, president and director of U.S. ITI, and this reporter.

On the Soviet side were Oleg Tabakov, an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre who serves as director of its drama school and is best known in the West as the star of the exquisite film “Oblomov.” He was accompanied by Valery Fokin, artistic director of Moscow’s Yermolova Theatre; Anatoly Smeliansky, theater researcher and dramaturg of the Moscow Art Theatre; Aleksandr Rubinstein, chief of sociological and economic studies at the Soviet National Institute of Artistic Studies; Uri Taratorkin, an actor with the Mossoviet Theater; Azerpasha Neymatov, artistic director of the Azerbaidjan Theater of Youth in Baku; and Valery Khasanov, critic, translator, and director of Soviet ITI.

Our host was Refik Erduran, a Turkish journalist and playwright, head of Turkish ITI. From France came the institute’s secretary general, Andre Louis Perinetti.

The hope was that Soviets and Americans meeting on so-called “neutral” soil would feel freer to express their views. While the Turks spoke in proverbs, the Russians in parables and the Americans in declarative sentences, the talks remained informal and provided instant surprises--none greater than the candor with which our Soviet friends described the influence glasnost and perestroika --openness and restructuring--are having on Soviet theater.

Smeliansky tackled the subject in his opening remarks. He spoke of the end of a long night--the stultifying era of centralized, bureaucratically decreed and censored Soviet theater and of the recent blossoming, in its decentralized wake, of many smaller, free-enterprising “studio theaters.”

These new cooperative ventures are the result of an underground theater movement that mushroomed in the ‘80s, supported by audiences equally fed up with the status quo. While still partially subsidized, these experimental theaters are now officially free to govern themselves, stand or fall by their own artistic choices, shielded only by the new National Union of Theatre Workers established last year to help smooth the transition to self-determination.

“We are trying to go back to the sources of our revolution,” Smeliansky said, acknowledging it’s a bold, scary and complex experiment. The large, state-supported repertory companies such as the Moscow Art, or those headed by such giants as Meyerhold and Vachtangov, produced few heirs to the masters. “Negative social energy” and “corrosive processes,” Smeliansky said, had substituted “sluggish uniformity for creative like-mindedness.”

The new Soviet byword? A very American one: Diversification, with a limited number of major companies continuing to exist with new checks and balances--”devices for getting rid of non-creative ballast”--while the smaller, self-supporting companies are encouraged to take their chances, trust their instincts and find their writers “as a husband finds a wife.”

Solutions, of course, create new problems and the Soviets know it. As enthusiastic as they are, they’re aware of the toll of the high-tech revolution on such a hand-crafted art as theater. Fewer people than ever are going to the theater in Russia too, especially outside Moscow. The new developments are welcome, but sudden freedom has left some Soviet theaters in a panic, they tell us, unsure how to proceed. The tenured and untalented don’t want change. When Tabakov said, “I would like you to wish us ‘bon voyage,’ ” before heading back to Moscow early, he wasn’t talking about himself.

So, for the first time, Soviet theater faces at least some of the problems American theater has always faced: how to break even, survive on limited subsidy, make choices, take risks and please a public. It’s a dubious rapprochement-- encouraging yet nervous-making. Watching how the Soviets handle this experiment in the next several months and years may teach us all a great deal.

This narrowing of the gap between the United States and the Soviet Union did not escape any of us, especially not Albee, who noted that American artists could do with a little more security and Soviet artists with a little less. After touching on what a peculiar thing it is to be an artist at all, he outlined the four faces of theater in America: Experimental (“mostly urban, poor and serious”), university (that attempts to educate audiences and artists alike), subsidized regional (which holds a mirror to humanity) and Broadway escapist (which holds up a distorting “fun-house” mirror).

“For (a ticket of) $5 (audiences) want the mirror that speaks the truth; for $40 they want the fun-house mirror,” he quipped. “In the United States, (writers) are encouraged to tell that which is easy rather than that which is hard.”

St. Paul’s Michael Miner brought up the growing American dilemma of finding actors able to commit to low-paying regional theater jobs when they’re lured by big bucks in films and television.

(Coigny, head of the U.S. delegation, underscored the problem by reminding everyone that actress Colleen Dewhurst, who had been scheduled to come along to Turkey, had bowed out because she’d gotten a job she couldn’t pass up.)

Much of the discussion on the last day focused on problems with translation and copyrights.

Copyrights were the thorniest issue. Citing his own grievances, Albee brought up the matter of the Soviet Union’s continuing failure to pay royalties for foreign plays. He drew--news in itself--a conciliatory acknowledgement from Khasanov and Smeliansky who said they hoped that, with the restructuring, this would soon be corrected.

Dissent? It came, surprisingly, from a Turkish playwright and a woman. Bilgesu Erenus disrupted ceremonial complacency on an eloquent note of political passion.

“You have not really come to Turkey,” she announced to the unsuspecting delegations. “We live in a country where economic and political war prevails.” Citing social injustice and police brutality, she said, “We are living through a crisis: the terrorism of the state.” She added that theater in this land of high unemployment, inflation and rents really begins after the curtain’s come down.

“What role do we propose the audience play? Recently we’ve been feeling some relief,” she acknowledged, “but I see a danger. There’s an attempt to label protesters as feminists, radicals and communists. The picture I’ve painted is not seen from the windows of palaces. But I love my country. I’m hopeful about the future.”

“No part of the world is perfect,” Erduran concluded. “Five years ago this statement would not have been possible.”

Indeed, as the days wore on and we all spent more time together, we became more open, relaxed and convinced of the universality of many of our problems. La Mama’s Ellen Stewart had called it early: “Artists are a bridge to all humanity. We are one world. We should be trying to be that.”

“Our meetings,” echoed Azerbaidjan’s Neymatov, “shows me that, in the long run, we know something about each other.”

Or to quote Erduran quoting ITI’s Perinetti: “Every 10 years someone changes the angle of the mirror and we have to take a fresh look at our society’s reflection.”