Uwishunu.com

Wilma Theater Co-Artistic Director took time to chat a few weeks ago with uwishunu.com about the Wilma’s impending production of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll , the latest of many of Stoppard’s works that Zizka has directed at the Wilma. The play, set against the backdrop of mass political demonstrations in both Cambridge and Prague, hits close to home for Zizka, who grew up in Czechoslovakia and entered the US as a political refugee in 1975.

uwishunu: How’s everything coming together on the set of Rock ‘n’ Roll?

Blanka Zizka: It’s very exciting to work on this play. It’s very complex. There are many different levels: political, personal. And that’s what’s so great about Tom [Stoppard]. He’s so much about ideas, as a writer, but when he gets into the emotional life of the characters at the same time, that’s what usually starts the spark.

uwishunu: How about as far as design, rehearsal, etc?

Blanka Zizka: We’re working with Matt Saunders, who’s a local designer/actor “” he does a lot of different things in theater. And we were trying to figure out how, well, we’ve got Cambridge [University] and Czechoslovakia happening at the same time. It’s very difficult to make that work, to go from one space to another. In terms of design, what we came up with was actually a turntable. It’s kind of a very minimal design: a huge turntable, with three walls, and it’s all kind of grey. It has a very conceptual feel to it, and very minimalist. And when you look at it further down “” in our theater you can look down at the floor “” it can remind you of either a huge record player or a clock, of time moving.

Blanka Zizka: Tom said once in an interview that for him, all drama, when you strip the language away, is really about time, and mortality. So that resonated in the design. There’s also a lot of discussion about the history and politics of Czechoslovakia in the 60s and 70s. So to make it much more visceral for an American audience, I’m using a lot of images from Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1990. And each scene is divided from the next by a rock and roll song. Tom Stoppard is a huge fan of rock and roll; he has a huge collection. So those moments, those transitions that are filled with rock and roll, I’m adding these videos to create a dynamic between the spirit of rock and roll and the stupefying boredom of normalization [backlash to the mass demonstrations of 1968 in Czechoslovakia] that took all the life and spirit out of Czechoslovakia at the time.

uwishunu: You came of age in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of 1968.

Blanka Zizka: We were all working in underground theater. The [Soviet] invasion happened in 1968. I was 14. By 1971 there was a huge turnaround from the Dubček [President of Czechoslovakia in 1968-1969] era, who tried to implement human rights and freedom of expression into socialism. It was all swept away.

Huge censorship started. People were thrown out of jobs, put in prison. So the only place where you could still have some kind of open discussion was in the theater. But it wasn’t in direct lines. It was in subtext. So to communicate you could say, like in Hamlet, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and it suddenly had an echo in Czechoslovakia.

uwishunu: And your family was directly affected by all of this.

Blanka Zizka: Well, were living in a small town. My father entered the Communist Party in 1967 when the democratization was happening, and then he was thrown out in 1969. But what happened was basically thatanyone who was thrown out was considered even more of an enemy than someone who was just a non-member. My father was a lawyer, but he was bumped down to working as a notary public. It wasn’t a huge thing. By 1975, I was making money by teaching kids between six and nine years old. And there was basically an order around 1975 that everybody who was in education had to enter the party. I said that I would not, and I ended up working in a bakery, then in a university as a cleaning woman, in the “Department of Forbidden Books,” which was totally absurd.

uwishunu: Because so many of Stoppard’s plays satirized the Soviet system, they had a very obvious resonance in Britain and the US during the Cold War. Has thir significance changed, post-1989?

Blanka Zizka: Stoppard never really lived in Czechoslovakia very long. He got very involved in the 1970s with Russian Jews, helping them to get out of Russia, and yes, he became very critical of the Marxist left in England. I thonk what interests me about this play though, is the ending. When he’s talking about language. How is it that the language is misused so much in the captalist system as in the communist system, and how those systems can become blood brothers. You know, so much that language, and newspapers, actually serve the system. And that’s something that echoes through where we are now, and the way we live now. I also feel that we as human beings are creating situations, through politics and history, that repeat themselves from time to time. And we’re going to find ourselves in situations where even though a system is over, there can still be a lot in it that resonates, nowadays. Looking at the Republican Convention for instance, there are all these journalists who have been arrested for minor misdemeanors, supposedly. In Czechoslovakia they’d use almost the same word “” hooliganism. They’d arrest people for hooliganism.