My one-act play, “Leaving Cremona,” opens this week at the Analogio International Festival 2022!
Jozef (Nikos Vatikiotis) and Helena (Filippa Koutoupa), survivors of the holocaust and left with no home, struggle to figure out how to leave the displaced persons camp in Cremona in order to start a new life. Directed by Konstantina Nikolaidi. Translated by Smaro Kotsia.
A PRIOI Theatrical Productions: www.a-priori.gr
1. Director Konstantina Nikolaidi - founder of A PRIORI Theatrical Productions - makes it easy to collaborate from across the ocean by email! Our shared passion for doing theater permeates all and any boundaries. I’m also so fortunate that Konstantina is fluent in English.
2. Konstantina asked for my script interpretation. This is the first time I’ve been asked this question. It makes me wonder whether a playwright’s script interpretation is common practice in some countries. I haven’t come across it in the US. I’m reluctant to give my interpretation because I like complete freedom to be given to the director, actors, and designers to instill their interpretations - this is the phase where I let go the script and that the collaboration with other theater artists begins. So, instead, I provided Konstantina with my motivation for writing this play:
I can say what inspired me to write this play. I know a wonderful woman who has a very kind husband and three great daughters. When we met, her parents had already passed away. Her father, in particular, was very old when he had her and her brother. One year we had a holocaust memorial in Pittsburgh and she asked me to go with her. She said, "It suddenly occurred to me that my father had a whole family before he had us. His first family perished in the holocaust." She had never given it much thought. Her comment struck me: How did her father create a whole new family and spare them from the pain of his past? How did he manage to raise them as if they were his "only" family? In other words, my friend's family is so kind, funny, and well-adjusted that I would have never known her father had a family before this one. Many people I know who are children of holocaust survivors live with their parents' pain & anxiety and idiosyncracies.
I modeled Jozef and Helena as a couple who survived trauma and want to give a "healthy" family life to their children. I explored through them how they negotiated such a feat.
3. Directors interpret symbolism in the script - be it the characters’ names or objects in stories told within the story of the script. As a playwright, I need to keep the symbolism clear.
Filippa Koutoupa (Helena) and Nikos Vatikiotis (Jozef) star in “Leaving Cremona” at the Analogio International Festival 2022 in Athens, Greece.
4. Directors piece together characters’ motivations with various actions that happen in the play like a puzzle, so as a playwright I’ve got to keep checking back on what I wrote to ensure I keep the motivations clear.
5. Resources! While directors do their own research to understand the background and context of the script, it helps if I also provide some key resources I’ve used in my research for the play. I provide a page of props. I’ve decided now to also provide a page of a few key resources.
#analogio2022 #crossingborders #kambanellis #greekdrama
A PRIORI Theatrical Productions: www.a-priori.gr
I’m thrilled that my one-act play, “Leaving Cremona,” is among the plays being produced this week at the Analogio International Festival 2022 in Athen, Greece! It’s included in a spectacular lineup of plays addressing the theme of Crossing Borders.
Text: Judy Meiksin
Translation: Smaro Kotsia
Direction: Konstantina Nikolaidou
Performers: Nikos Vatikiotis, Philippa Koutoupa
I constantly go back to this theme. I find very well written books, and I find books published, I think, for the information regardless of the quality of writing. I care about the quality of writing when addressing this topic. My favorite book, now, of all time is Ida Fink’s A scrap of time. This is a book of short stories, and I didn’t find any more books by Ida Fink until I did one more search, recently, on amazon. The short stories are, I think, autobiographical, and written not for the purpose of stating what happened so the world will know, but to re-experience what happened in its complexity in order to understand it. I read the book in 2016, couldn’t put it down. I came across it again in 2017 and, again, couldn’t put it down. Here is the opening of the book:
I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. I was afraid, too, that this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word—we no longer said “in the beautiful month of May,” but “after the first ‘action,’ or the second, or right before the third.” We had different measures of time, we different ones, always different, always with that mark of difference that moved some of us to pride and others to humility.
Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi. I’m constantly drawn to how people survive. Like Elie Wiesel’s Night Trilogy, this particular book of Levi's is very well written and insightful of what life was like in the death camps and what type of decisions people made in order to survive even though the act of survival was “by chance” with no rhyme or reason based on what people did to try to survive. I did learn, however, that anger helps us live. When the Kapos beat the prisoners, they actually saved their lives because the anger in response to the beating produced energy which was vital to extending life.
All that I am, by Anna Funder. What a fantastic novel of everyday life at the time Hitler became chancellor and the first resistance group that tried to tell Germany and the world what a danger he was. Again, a story of courage in the face of life and death by people who couldn’t sit still. While we may all like to think we’d do the same, this book brings us to the reality and fears, unlike the Hollywood movies that make us feel victorious because we already know the ending of the movie where we survive. I also read this novel as Trump entered the White House and Facebook was filled with dread and horror and questions of “am I over-reacting” etc. Beautiful writing—here’s the opening:
When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. Our apartment was on the Schiffbauerdamm near the river, right in the middle of Berlin. From its windows we could see the dome of the parliament building. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match.