Polish Audiences React Warmly to Taper’s Road Show

POZNAN, Poland — The great brooding hulk of Poznan’s Palace of Culture was gussied up recently with an exhibition of star-spangled glitz depicting the history and variety of the American theater.

It was all a bit dazzling, in a country where, especially in winter, the predominant color is a gray that matches the sky. So the groups of Polish high school and college students who filed in every afternoon seemed almost subdued at first, as though their eyes were adjusting to the light.

But by the time they settled onto their benches to watch the actors of the Mark Taper Forum perform three sample works from the Los Angeles company’s repertory, they were primed for the excitement, ready to be moved by the magic of the theater. And they usually were.

The November and early-December exhibition and the three one-act performances by the troupe from the Taper were part of the U. S. Information Agency’s “Theater in America” project, mounted about five years ago to offer a taste of American show-business culture to some of the gloomier regions of Communist Eastern Europe.

The plays from the Taper repertory presented in the three-week stay in Poznan included “Coming into Passion / Song for a Sansei,” written and performed by Jude Narita; “A Christmas Memory,” an adaptation of a Truman Capote short story; and “Tintypes,” a condensed version of musical Americana originally produced at the Taper in 1981.

Some of the theater’s 12-member traveling team, including director Gordon Davidson, had been on the road in Eastern Europe before. Earlier this year, they were in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Producer Corey Beth Madden was also a veteran of the Czechoslovakia trip and an earlier production in Cluj, Romania. It was an experience that gave her some perspective on the relatively easier life in Poland.

“Romania isn’t a place I’d want to go back to,” Madden said. “Czechoslovakia was not a place where the people were happy. We were watched. We had some harassment.

“Here, in Poland, there is no restraint. We’re colleagues with the Poles who are working with us. We work together. There’s a feeling of teamwork. Personally, I think Poland is in very good shape, because the people are participating, they’re interested in the direction of their country. In Czechoslovakia, you have the feeling they’ve withdrawn, opted out. You don’t have that feeling here.”

As a thumbnail situation report, Madden’s analysis was right on target, and the company members often sampled the sharp political consciousness, the legendary romanticism and resistance to oppression that seem to form a large portion of the Polish birthright.

These qualities may be most obvious in the Polish response to Jude Narita’s solo portrayal of the experiences of Asian women, a multi-character piece that she wrote out of frustration at the lack of roles available in theater and film for Asian women.

“We were worried that Jude’s piece might not go over,” Madden said. “But it does. It’s the piece that gets the strongest response.”

“I was really nervous,” Narita said, recalling the misgivings voiced especially by USIA advisers, who wondered whether Poles--or Eastern Europeans in general--could relate to the experiences of a Nisei woman recalling World War II internment or the portrayal of a Vietnamese prostitute.

“It seemed to me at first that people looked at me funny on the street here, like they weren’t used to seeing people of color,” Narita said. “So I really did wonder, maybe these people are fundamentally different.

“But I really believed that there was something bigger in the piece than just Asian issues. There are issues of women, of motherhood, the experience of women and war. It’s like I say in the piece, we’re all the same. So the reaction, finally, was nice. It was a validation. I was very pleased. It’s been a great experience.”

The pieces were all done in English, with a simultaneous Polish translation provided over earpieces for the audience. A play such as “A Christmas Memory,” with its regional inflections and almost poetic language, might have lost something in translation, but the audiences seemed thoroughly tuned in to the performances of Irene Tedrow and Michael Tulin as the aging cousin and Buddy, her young companion, making their Christmas fruitcakes.

“We’ve had some performances where they just don’t seem to get it,” Tulin said. “There’s just nothing, no laughter or anything. But mostly they do, and always, at the end, the response is very warm.”

After the day’s last performance, there was an informal question-and-answer period with the actors, and it frequently became yet another opportunity for the expression of Polish political concerns.

“I wouldn’t want to turn this into a political forum,” one young man from the audience began, “but you said you’ve been to Czechoslovakia, and I wondered what you could say about . . . Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) there. Is the theater in Czechoslovakia free?”

Tulin, who says he has a fascination with Eastern Europe and fondly recalls an evening of vodka and frank discussion with chance companions on a train trip through East Germany, answered the question.

“I think Czech theater is free,” he said, “but I don’t think glasnost has come to Czechoslovakia. Perestroika, either.”

The Polish audience, who really didn’t need to be briefed about the situation, laughed appreciatively, glad that this American visitor is nobody’s fool.