Lev Lunts at Princeton, Sep. 30-Oct. 1, Oct. 6-8, 2011

[Shvabrin, Stanislav]

Dear SEELANGS,

The Princeton University Program in Theatre cordially invites you to a world premier of "The Monkeys Are Coming!" ("Obez'iany idut!") by Lev Lunts. Directed by Gabriel Crouse (Princeton), the play will be performed in a new English translation by Michael Arthur Green, Jerome Katsell and Stanislav Shvabrin.

Time: 8:00 PM on September 30--October 1 and October 6--8, 2011;

On September 30th the opening night  of "The Monkeys Are Coming!" will be followed by a talk by Stanislav Shvabrin (Princeton), "A Death Spurned: On The Vitality of Lev Lunts," followed by discussion.

Place: Marie and Edward Matthews '53 Acting Studio, Lewis Center for the Arts, 185 Nassau Street, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA;

Advanced Tickets: Please call University Ticketing at (609) 258-9220;

http://www.princeton.edu/arts/arts_at_princeton/theater/productions/monkeys-are-coming/overview/

"The Monkeys Are Coming!" (pub. 1923), Lunts's enigmatic, genre-defying and unforgettable dramatic experiment, puts to an exacting test many pre-conceived assumptions regarding the limits of theater and theatricality while probing the essence of humanity, dehumanization and fear against the backdrop of a war-Communism-era Petrograd.

During his brief life -- he died at age 23 -- the Russian-Jewish dramatist, writer, literary theoretician and scholar Lev Natanovich Lunts (German: Leo Lunz, 1901, St. Petersburg--1924, Hamburg) distinguished himself as the moving spirit behind the Serapion Brotherhood. Due to Lunts's eloquent, fierce opposition to parochialism and totalitarianism in matters aesthetic, his work was thoroughly suppressed in the Soviet Union. Held in high esteem by Maxim Gorky, Roman Jakobson and Luigi Pirandello, Lunts exerted a powerful influence on his fellow Serapions and on contemporary playwrights, including Evgenii Shvarts.

So entrenched was the Soviet detestation of Lunts that in his infamous denunciatory oration of 1946, Andrei Zhdanov cited Lunts at length as an example of everything "pernicious and alien" to Soviet culture, on a level with Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Kuzmin, Osip Mandel'shtam, Fedor Sologub, Lidia Zinov'eva-Annibal and Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Please address any questions about this event to "shvabrin[at]princeton.edu"

Hoping to see you in Princeton,

Stanislav Shvabrin.

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