ARTicles vol. 3 i.3b: Welcome: Desire Under the Elms

When we enter an artwork from another place and time we often enter it without the knowledge of historical moment and culture that its creators brought to it. There is a freedom in this exploration, a freedom similar to what an artist from a foreign culture experiences when investigating the work of masters from across time and space. With this in mind, we invited our great friend and colleague János Szász back to the A.R.T. from Budapest to tackle O’Neill’s mythical Desire Under the Elms. As his A.R.T. productions of Uncle Vanya, Marat/Sade, and Mother Courage have shown, János is a great interpreter of any work that involves the torrential passions of humanness. He brings little allegiance to the mid-nineteenth century New England O’Neill originally imagined – this will never be the blood of what János creates. His aesthetic has been nurtured in the artistically rich soil of a Europe of conflict far removed from O’Neill’s world. In this global age the opportunities for artists to engage with the masterpieces of other cultures has generated enormous artistic combustion. The outstanding Japanese directors Yukio Ninagawa and Tadashi Suzuki have restaged Shakespeare and the Greeks and created new masterpieces of their own. The brilliant Dutch director Ivo Von Hove has staged a series of landmark productions of plays by O’Neill and Williams that have freed these works from the moorings of tradition. We invited János to have a dialogue with O’Neill and his tormented, fiery universe, and to share his discoveries with you in his production of Desire Under the Elms. Robert Woodruff