I should be leading the reader astray if I caused him to think that the half dozen theatres which I have described in detail were the only fine ones in Moscow. Such is not at all the case. The necessity to be brief in text and the physical impossibility of covering with any degree of thoroughness the work of any larger number of theatres in the six months I was in Moscow, are the only things that have prevented me from becoming much more expansive. In order that the reader may have some idea of the breadth of activity of the stage in Soviet Russia’s capital, however, I propose to supplement my account of the history and development of the theatres of Stanislavski and Meierhold, Tairov, Vakhtangov and Okhlopkov, with short stories of some of the other great theatres, and with a description of the rise of several of the newer groups.
Earlier I stated that I found in Moscow some forty professional theatres, all of them composed of permanent groups of artists performing in repertory. Each of these forty had its own set of artistic principles consciously codified, and every one seemed to differ from every other. But careful examination disclosed to me that however their outward appearances might differ, all of them had an inner connection and similarity which was the result of both their heredity and their environment. The further I proceeded the more it became apparent to me that instead of finding myself simultaneously at a score of widely di-
203
vergent ends, I would come upon three or four lowest common denominators. These denominators I found to be the theatres of Stanislavski, Meierhold and Vakhtangov. That is why I have described them first. Now let me extend the picture by discussing briefly the rest of the Moscow scene.
I must take you first of all to the Maly Theatre, which is really the common denominator of all the others, if one speaks historically, for it is the oldest theatre in Moscow— its doors having been open over a hundred years. Maly means “little” and Bolshoi means “big” or “great.” The Maly and the Bolshoi were the two imperial theatres in Moscow and they still stand on two sides of the great Theatre Square in the center of the city; the latter is the principal opera house of Soviet Russia. In 1917 the Maly Theatre was considered, as it still is today, to be the inheritor and upholder of the classic tradition of the Russian stage. It was therefore looked upon as reactionary. It had not always been so, however. Lunacharski said of the Maly: “The struggle for a representative theatre between the feudal bureaucratic autocracy and the surging liberal public opinion brought victory to the latter and thus the Maly Theatre was the offspring of the progressive part of the Russian intelligentsia in her warfare with all the crusty attributes of the feudal order, and even to some extent with capitalism.”
Lunacharski was describing the situation in the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time the Maly was the chief proponent of realistic domestic drama of which Ostrovski was the Russian master. Ostrovski and the Maly are inseparably connected in the minds of all who know the history of Russian drama. Ostrovski was the great dramatic social critic of his time, and his writing reveals the contradictions and weaknesses of the Russian middle class. With deep psychological insight he drew his charac-
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 205
ters, people from every-day life, which the Maly seemed able to incarnate with rare understanding.
In addition to this strain of contemporary criticism, the Maly found itself attracted to heroic romanticism, perhaps chiefly because it possessed artists of sufficient power to portray with the necessary breadth the heroes of classical romantic tragedy; so to its realistic strain was added the romanticism of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Hugo. Satire it also made use of and we find on its stage works of Gogol, Griboyedov, Lope de Vega and Moliere— a ponderous repertoire, but a grand one.
The Maly Theatre was always a theatre built around great acting. The actor was its strongest bulwark to which all the other instruments of theatrical creation were subordinated. The names of Shchepkin, of Mochalov, master of the tragic role, of Lenski, Ermolova, Samarin, are those of actors who, if tradition speaks truly, were as great as any western Europe knew at any period of her dramatic history. It was they, and particularly Shchepkin, who gave to Russian acting its characteristic qualities. Theodore Komi- sarjevsky, writing about the latter in The Theatre , says that although a realist, he "did not aim, like the first French adepts of this school who came after, at the 'exact, complete, sincere and simple reproduction of the social milieu of the period which one is living in.’ The Russians felt the presence of eternity and God in actual life both in its depths and ugliness as well as in its heights and beauty. To Shchepkin realistic forms and characters served as means to express [his] feelings and ideas, and [he] condensed and adapted them to suit [his] artistic and philosophic purposes.
"Shchepkin’s acting was the condensed imaginative acting of life-like characters. Although Shchepkin held that a close observation of people was a necessity for an actor, he called imitative acting 'actoring. 5 He considered it
necessary that a player should not only 'live through’ his part on the stage, but transform himself into a character and be an 'embodiment’ of it.”
In his description of this great actor, Komisarjevsky has set forth the foundations of Russian realistic acting which the Maly Theatre created. In his work one can observe the roots of Stanislavski’s system. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, and during the years before the War, the Maly began to lose strength. After Ostrovski it could seem to find no contemporaneous dramatist who fulfilled its demands or drew out its full strength in realism or heroic romanticism. "The romantic tendency degenerated into stiltedness, affectation and pseudo-classical pathos; the realistic inclinations became fixed upon an empirical approach to the portrayal of every-day life,” says Amaglobely, its present director. Moreover, the great geniuses had passed from its acting company and those who followed used their talents in an effort to imitate the masters who had preceded them. The Maly thus weakened both its progressive tone and its artistic resonance.
The course of the Maly Theatre since 1917 follows the general evolution of the theatres during that time. An "academic” theatre, tied by taste and tradition to the past, it was slow to accept all the implications of the new system. It wisely preferred to preserve its inheritance until such time as it could be of use to the new theatre of the Revolution. Gradually as it came to understand the Communist ideology it undertook to restage its classic repertoire in conformity with Marxian principles. Ostrovski retained his position as leading dramatist on its stage, and the plays of several Soviet writers were included when their writing suited the Maly’s realistic style. We find such plays as "Skutarevski,” "The Fighters,” "Lyubov Yarovaya,” playing side by side with "Don Carlos” and "Wolves and Sheep” and "Mad Money” by Ostrovski.
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 207
Down to the present time this theatre has brought its traditional style of acting, its emphasis upon the importance of the actor’s art. Little influenced by the new forms of staging which have sprung up around it, it continues to pass on from generation to generation of its artists the body of acting traditions which began a hundred years ago with Shchepkin. Its great actors work by intuition, its lesser actors imitate as best they can the results of the intuitive process of their superiors. The Maly has developed no system, it has had no guiding genius in recent years. Consequently, within the general bounds set up by its traditional demand for truth to life, a certain eclecticism of style is apparent which has resulted from the diverse talents of its individual actors and the various directors whom it has invited to stage its performances. The Maly, nevertheless, remains to this day the symbol of the great Russian theatrical past, and it is loved and revered by all cultured Muscovites. It is even rumored that this fortress of conservatism is Stalin’s favorite.
It is the Moscow Art Theatre, however, and not the Maly, which has played the chief role in setting the style of Russian acting. This is principally due to the work of Stanislavski in assembling the best things out of the Maly’s tradition, and with careful analysis creating a system of acting based on them which could be passed on in some tangible and conscious form to other workers in the Russian theatre.
Even before 1917 Stanislavski had begun this work by creating what was afterwards known as the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. For a number of years he had been devoting a great deal of thought to the formulation of his conceptions of the art of acting based on the work of Shchepkin and other masters of every country as well as upon his own observation. He had finally worked
out his system whose aim, he says, "was to give practical and conscious methods for the awakening of superconscious creativeness.” The First Studio was formed to provide an opportunity for young actors and even for some of the more experienced actors of the Art Theatre to try out the system. It was created largely as an experiment with Sulerzhitski at its head, for Stanislavski could not personally devote his entire time to it. After a long ripening process, during which the Studio spent a summer living communally on the shores of the Black Sea—a scheme devised to bring the actors into closer understanding of each other as individuals—their first performance, a dramatization of "The Cricket on the Hearth,” was presented, and the Studio started on its creative career.
Stanislavski had intended that this studio should be a training school-for actors who would eventually be received into the company of the Art Theatre. Such, however, did not turn out to be the case. The Great War and the Revolution intervened and fashioned out of this younger generation a group which developed ideas and theories of its own and which found the principles of the Art Theatre not entirely to its satisfaction. Its founder wisely did not bind the group to himself but, feeling that it possessed sufficient artistic strength, let it go free to pursue its own way. The First Studio eventually became a theatre in its own name and right, but in its title it proclaimed its distinguished parentage and acknowledged its tie to the past, for it called itself the Second Moscow Art Theatre.
To understand wherein the Second Art differed from the First Art Theatre we must return to a part of what is the difference between Stanislavski and Vakhtangov. The latter, together with Michael Chekhov, was the guiding spirit in the development of the Second Art Theatre’s principles of acting. In its search for realism and truth, the Moscow Art Theatre had come to believe that the artist
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 209
must study the character he portrays until he understands its psychological nature so completely that when he is called upon to play the part, he ceases to be himself and fuses his spirit with the spirit of the role. "I am the person whom I represent,” he must say and believe. The Second Art Theatre did not entirely accept this. They wished to add an outward theatrical effectiveness to this psychological truth. "Let us suppose,” they would say, "that the play we are presenting to the audience is a chicken. The First Art Theatre will serve you the chicken: it will be a real chicken and it will be well-cooked; you can eat it and be nourished and know that you ate a real chicken. That is true. We also shall serve you a chicken, but we shall add a few garnishings and a sauce. It will be no less a chicken than the one which the First Art will have given you, but it will have a little added flavor. It is true that our chicken itself will be no better or more nourishing than theirs, but perhaps you will think so because its taste has been heightened a little.”
In reply to this their forbears would make answer, "You err. In the process of preparation you have substituted, perhaps without knowing it yourselves, veal for chicken. It looks, when cut fine, very like chicken; it is probably just as nourishing, it tastes much the same, particularly when you have added your sauces and garnishings. But you mustn’t tell the public that it is chicken because it isn’t.”
"But after all, isn’t it the taste and the nourishment which count, whether they come from a cow or a fowl?”
In the process, it is true, the actors of the Second Art Theatre did make a subtle change. They believed that psychological truth was an essential element in their portrayal—in this they were true children of the First Art; but in order to add that extra theatrical effectiveness which they wished, they found it necessary that the actor in creating his role should approach the image of the char-
210
MOSCOW REHEARSALS
acter without ever entirely losing his own identity. He must fall in love with the character, as it were, and bring himself as close to it as he can, but he must never become the character, for in doing so he would give up his objective perception of the role.
This problem of differentiation is an exceedingly subtle one, particularly here in its first stage where the dividing line is thin, but the Second Art Theatre has accomplished the graduation of technique with skill. Its leading regis- seurs, Bersenyev and Birman, have a keen understanding of the actor’s approach to his role; they know how close he must come to it without losing himself in it. It was the former who suggested to me the example of the chicken and the sauce.
The Second Moscow Art Theatre is today characterized by a strong, bright style, by a certain buoyancy and love of color to which witness is borne in their recent productions of "'Twelfth Night” and John Fletcher’s "Spanish Curate.” Problems of setting and costume fascinate the Second Art and it offers as decorative a stage as any in Moscow. In line with its principal desire for theatrical effectiveness, a heightened realism, its backgrounds are real without ever becoming natural, decorative without being abstract. Always they are colorful, seldom monumental. The Second Art seems most fitted of all theatres to serve this last phase of the Revolution which calls for lighthearted relaxation and amusing entertainment.
Many people in Moscow consider that the Second Art Theatre has no face of its own. Lacking an individual genius to give form to the whole theatre, it is true that it possesses a less codified system of aesthetics than some of the other theatres. Its work, however, seems to me no less satisfactory than that of many theatres of more specific artistic character. What the Second Art Theatre loses in the lack of one guiding hand, it has made up for in the closely
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 211
knit group consciousness which is present. I know of no theatre in Moscow which is so completely collective as this one. It has been said, also, that the Second Art Theatre today more clearly portrays the spirit of Vakhtangov than the Vakhtangov Theatre itself, and this is very possible, since his contemporaries, the people with whom he worked longest, were at the Second Art, and his disciples at the Vakhtangov, knowing his influence over a shorter time, may have less successfully grasped his meanings. At any rate, there is a close similarity between what Vakhtangov wanted and what the Second Art Theatre offers today.
After the First Studio had been well established, Stanislavski founded a second studio to continue his work of training actors under the Stanislavski system. This studio, instead of becoming a separate theatre like the First, was absorbed back into the parent organization then in need of new blood, and so its members became the second generation of the Art Theatre. With "The Marriage of Figaro” in 1927 this younger group began to come into prominence, for in that production the older actors played the small roles and the newer ones assumed the leads. In "The Days of the Turbins” the whole cast was composed of the young group. It is this membership drawn from the Second Studio which has probably largely effected the Art Theatre’s acceptance of the Revolution. But the process of fusing the two generations into unity has not been easy. Here were the grandfathers and grandsons, as it were, but the sons were in the Second Art Theatre, and the loss of that intervening generation made the alliance harder. I suspect that there is still a tragic break between the elder generation and the younger within the Moscow Art, a break which could not have been avoided when we consider the speed with which Russian ideology has changed.
Both Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko in the early years of the Revolution not only turned their attention to the perpetuation of their theories through the establishment of acting studios, but sought to express themselves through a new medium, that of opera. In this they abandoned their old collaboration and each worked in music toward his own end. Today, therefore, although both perform in the same building, the Stanislavski Opera Theatre and the Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Studio exist as separate organizations.
For Stanislavski this was not a new interest. In his youth he had hoped to be an opera singer and had always had certain ideas about the production of opera. Other theories developed out of his work with the spoken drama. Chief of these was the importance which he became more and more convinced derived from rhythm. Not only the outward rhythm of movement and action but 'The inner rhythm of that unseen energy which calls out movement and action.” This inner feeling seemed to him more easily summoned through the medium of music where the composer could come to the poet’s aid.
The Opera Studio was founded, like the Art Theatre before it, as a protest against the truthless, empty and elaborate conventions of the day—this time in opera. Stanislavski sought simplicity, adherence to the truth of inner feeling, in order to bring out the rhythms of the music in their full meaning. Attention to the psychology in their roles and the application of the Stanislavski system in their work had its effect on opera stars who no longer advanced to the footlights and addressed their passionate hopes and fears full blast to the audience; they sang and acted naturally. The slow, measured tempo of movement which we call "operatic” was abandoned to be replaced by tempi which the scene demanded. A singer might run or skip if the mood required; striding and pacing with advanced
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 213
chest and head thrown back were proved to be not entirely necessary adjuncts of the operatic art. A prima donna might sing an aria perched on a window sill or while lying on her stomach looking down over the edge of a cliff, as I saw one do in a rehearsal of "Carmen”!
Nemirovich-Danchenko has created a "musical studio,” not an opera theatre, the difference being that his is a theatre where actors can sing, rather than a theatre where singers can act. He is working for a new synthesis of action, word and music, and toward the production of a new kind of "musical theatrical realism.” He has found that certain modern artists, notably Shostakovich, who gave him "Katerina Ismailova” (known to America as "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk”), are seeking this same synthesis, and so he has made excursions into the field of contemporary music.
His studio has also felt the social demands of the Revolution more strongly than Stanislavski’s opera theatre; it has been more influenced by new techniques in stagecraft. Its presentation of "Lysistrata” in America showed audiences here toward what forms of expression this studio was working. In the 1935 production of "Traviata” by Nemirovich both trends are apparent. Great liberties were taken with the libretto in order to emphasize the social contradictions of the world which produced the situation depicted in "Traviata.” The chorus ceased to be decorative vocal appendages to be brought onstage and taken off without rhyme or reason; they sat in boxes surrounding the stage where they became commentators upon and not participators in the drama. In other ways the form of the production is a far departure from the conventional operatic pattern. The front curtain and footlights have been banished, the stage extended beyond the proscenium on both sides. Actors enter from the orchestra pit before the act begins, await their cues on this fore-stage in full view
of the audience, the chorus marches in and seats itself in the semicircular tier of boxes that backs the acting area. A curtain opens behind the actors at the beginning of each act to reveal impressionistically painted backdrops which set the location of the action. Properties are changed in front of the audience. Perhaps to a certain extent the performance appears to be a tour de force . But at the same time, is it not possible to suggest that it may be the forerunner of a new day or at least a new way on the operatic stage?
2
In the early days of the Revolution when Meierhold was hailed by his many disciples as the savior of the theatre from that certain decay toward which its bourgeois affiliations were leading it, he established a theatre which is now called the Theatre of the Revolution. It was composed in large part of actors who had responded more quickly than their fellows to the call of Revolutionary art and who ran from the academic theatres to the Meierhold standard. With these artists he conducted a sort of experimental laboratory where he worked on his more radical theories of staging. Here he developed the application of constructivism to the theatre and produced such plays as Ernst Toller’s "Masse-Mensch” and a new version of the old "Snug Place” of Ostrovski. However, the force of Meier- hold’s personality requires that his acting material be completely flexible. The performers of this theatre, many of them having gone to school to Stanislavski, were too fixed in their methods of work to be able to go all the way with him in his radical experimentation, and so he withdrew from the Theatre of the Revolution and went on to the creation of the theatre which bears his name and with which he is now identified.
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 215
The Theatre of the Revolution nevertheless continued to grow. It naturally continued to practice many of Meier- hold’s principles—productions like Zarkhi’s "Joy Street” are full of the movement and the "bio-mechanics” of their former leader—and this has given the theatre much of its dynamic force and has influenced its scenic backgrounds very strongly. To the Meierhold principles the succeeding directors have added much from the system of Stanislavski. It is this realistic strain in the method of presentation, no doubt, which has made it possible for the Theatre of the Revolution to incorporate so many of the new realistic plays about Soviet life of the last five years into its repertoire. The new socialistic realism is definitely the burden of its song and its chief choristers, Pogodin, who gave his "My Friend” to that theatre, and Zarkhi, Faiko, Vishnevski. all are performed there.
Aside from its importance as chief champion of most of the recent plays, it is also an interesting theatre because of its methodological aim to weld the theories of Stanislavski with those of Meierhold into a satisfying harmony. Through an elimination of the outworn in the Moscow Art Theatre and of the impractical in Meierhold, and through a combination of what is left of the inner feeling of the former and the outward form of the latter, this theatre hopes to create something which can have the greatness of both. To a certain extent the Second Moscow Art Theatre has in mind some such fusion, although the name of Meierhold is left out of its councils, for that was what Vakhtangov while he lived was working toward. Okhlop- kov and Vakhtangov’s disciples seek this too. But it is not easy to serve two masters. Vakhtangov might have succeeded, although he would have ended by being servant to neither and a master himself. Lesser souls have smaller chances, but that is what they want to do.
With the so-called Studio Theatres, small and intimate, all of them comparatively young, the path toward the future continues. The two which seem to be most important at this time are the studios of Zavadski and of Simonov. Both of them were pupils of Vakhtangov, both are actors of excellence themselves and both are trying to combine the Stanislavski and Meierhold ideas of theatre in line with Vakhtangov’s approach, but sifted through their own personal temperaments. Zavadski is probably more interested in the chicken; Simonov’s taste runs to the sauces. But Zavadski’s theatre has added to soundness of psychological portrayal a heightening of style and an intensification of pictorial values which makes its performances of "The Devil’s Disciple” and "Wolves and Sheep,” for example, brilliantly theatrical. Zavadski works toward the irony which Vakhtangov loved so well, but like his it is gentler than Meierhold’s. His laugh is as hearty but his lip is less curled. He uses the grotesque and caricature to fine advantage—in this he has learned a lesson from Meierhold. He has also learned the use of dynamic movement. Everything about his stage seems in action. He has a fine ear for the theatrical value of music and his productions have a running orchestral commentary which strengthens and elucidates his thoughts.
Simonov is also a master of movement—faster and less lyrical than Zavadski—and he is also a musician. His productions are a series of scherzos and rhapsodies. Never has he reached symphonic heights, but his performances are chef d’ceuvres of rhythmic composition in a light and amusing key. Throughout his performances also music plays intermittently, not with the desultory sentimentality of our "incidental off-stage music,” but to give point to a situation, to help bring a laugh, to intensify suspense, to deepen a mood. The actors as well as the audience seem to hear the music and to respond to it. It is thus integrated
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 217
with the performance. Some Russians say there is much of the music hall in Simonov, and this they mean as no compliment, for the Russian has no high regard for music halls. If by that they mean that he possesses no great philosophical profundity, that his skill is chiefly comic and that his comedy is surface, they are right. Were he to portray a president it would not be with the brush of Sargent but with the pen of Peggy Bacon. But like her he often surprises one by the accuracy of his seemingly superficially and lightly drawn lines. His characters may not be three-dimensional, flesh and blood, weighty, and his plays may not have the power and sweep of greatness, but his comedy is apt and intelligent, his tragedy, while not perhaps real tragedy at all in his hands, has sharp poignancy; one is more deeply moved over the plight of Ellen Jones in his version of "Machinal” than one is over the more tragic Ellen of Alice Koonen at the Kamerny Theatre.
There are a dozen other stages in Moscow which should be reviewed. They are interesting for various reasons, more perhaps because of the individual circumstances under which they work or because of the need which they were designed to satisfy, than because of any great artistic contributions which they have to make. The ones which I have in mind are the more definitely workers’ theatres, the theatres for young people and for children, for the Red Army, those for the so-called National Minorities. All of these theatres, excepting the latter, have as their basic artistic principle the teachings of Stanislavski, most of them are directed by various artists who once went to school to him, and so they are all creatively akin to the Art Theatre. The Stanislavski system is practiced on these stages with varying degrees of orthodoxy and according to the style and ability of the individual director and his company.
The MOSPS or Moscow Trade Unions Theatre was founded some ten or twelve years ago for the purpose of producing exclusively Soviet plays with a direct message to the organized industrial worker audience. They were realistic in theme and required a realistic treatment. Factory management, collective farm organization, labor and industrial problems, and in the last few years plays a bit more psychological dealing with the life of the "new man” in work and play, are the themes of the work of dramatists like Bill-Byelotserkovski, Kirshon, Finn, and others which MOSPS has presented with a very fair degree of artistry.
The YTSPS Theatre, also a workingman’s stage, developed out of the old Prolet-Cult, which found its origin in the factory and had such distinguished leaders in its early days as film director Sergei Eisenstein and dramatist Alexander Afinogenov. At that time it was much influenced by Meierhold, but recently under the direction of Diki, a regisseur of great talent, it is working toward a creative path of its own which carries it away from the spectacular Meierholdian experiments of Eisenstein. 1
The TRAM, or Theatre for Young Workers, also developed out of the factory dramatic work and is a direct expression of the young proletariat. It too occupies itself chiefly with the output of the modern Soviet authors and chooses those plays which will most appeal to an audience composed of young workers in their late teens and early twenties. The actors themselves are of about the same age as their audience and were all formerly industrial laborers who have proved themselves more able on the boards than in the mill.
To appeal to an audience still younger, Moscow has two outstanding stages, the Theatre for the Young Spectator and the Moscow Theatre for Children. Their performances
1 Huntly Carter in The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre has much to say about this Prolet-Cult Theatre.
THE MOSCOW SCENE EXPANDED 219
are for children, not by them, and the adult artists who create the dramas, ballets, pantomimes and operas which entertain and enlighten their young audience, work along very scientifically developed lines combined with a high order of artistry. Natalie Satz, not so old herself, but the founder of the Theatre for Children, is the originator of the movement in Moscow.
If we pass by the doors of the Satire Theatre, the Dramatic Theatre, the Historico-Revolutionary Theatre, the Workers’ Art Theatre, the Studios of Ermolov and of Khmilyov, the Len-Soviet Theatre, and half a dozen others, we shall end our tour with the stages on which Russian is not spoken—the theatres of the National Minorities, the two outstanding of which are the State Jewish and the Gypsy Theatre. The former has the more highly cultivated art, finding expression in rhythm, vivid color, dynamic movement, albeit a little harsh and strident to unfamiliar ears and eyes. A peculiar form of the grotesque seems to attract the Jewish actor, who plays in a highly stylized and oddly musical monotone. I must frankly admit that I do not care for this theatre, although many people do. Shortly after I left Moscow, however, this theatre presented for the first time a production of "King Lear” which has been considered by all critics as one of the finest performances to be seen in the Soviet Union today. Gordon Craig, who saw it in the spring of 1935, even went so far as to tell me that it was one of the finest performances he had seen at any time in any country. The earlier plays in the Jewish Theatre’s repertoire were drawn from old Yiddish material —**200,000,” "The Travels of Benjamin III,” "The Tenth Commandment”—treated modernistically. Later, contemporary subjects found their way onto its stage. S. M. Mikhoels, its present director, is also its leading actor and possesses a rare and unique talent. The Gypsy Theatre is more primitive but equally vivid and picturesque. Plastics
and color are richly used; music is highly important. In plays like their version of "Carmen,” or in "Life on Wheels,” the Gypsies give their audience a glowing, moving and primitive picture of not only their life but their art.
CHAPTER NINE