Written by: Nobel Prize Winner Herta Müller
Adapted for stage by: Mihaele Panainte
Translated by: Dr Jozefina Komporaly
Directed by: Ana Margineanu
This is a first rehearsal, open to the public, for a fully staged workshop of the play which will be shown at the main festival on June 23.
Lowlands is a haunting depiction of the moral decomposition of the terminal years of communism seen through the eyes of a child from the German minority of Romania. It is based on a text by the Nobel Prize winning writer Herta Müller. It will be followed by a talk on topics related to the play.
The play features Annabel McConnachie, Susie K. Taylor, Calaine Schafer, Miguel Loyola, and Vas Eli
Co-presented with the Romanian Cultural Institute in association with Untitled Theater Company No. 61
Part of Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival honoring Vaclav Havel, produced by the Václav Havel Center (VHC) and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
Performed in English.
ABOUT
Ana Mărgineanu is a theater director who works both nationally and internationally. She graduated from The National University of Theater and Film of Bucharest, Romania. She is co- founder of PopUP Theatrics, a partnership creating immersive theatrical events around the world and in collaboration with international theater artists. Ana Mărgineanu is a past resident of Women's Project Theater, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center and an alumnus of The Lincoln Center Directors Lab. Her work has been presented and/or developed at the WP Theater, The Kennedy Center, Juggerknot, 3LD Art & Technology Center NY, Working Theater, Urban Stages NY, New York Theatre Workshop, The Lark, Ensemble Studio Theater and in numerous theaters and festivals in Europe, most notably: New Plays from Europe Wiesbaden, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, National Theatre Festival Bucharest, Sibiu International Theater Festival. She has also directed, taught and facilitated workshops at Colleges and Universities like: The New School, SUNY Purchase, Pace University, Wesleyan University, Queens College, National Theater and Film University of Bucharest. Called “one of the reigning queens of New York’s highly intimate, one-shot-only, conceptual-based theater” by the NYC critic Randy Gener, Ana Mărgineanu is known for close cooperation with the local communities who are audiences for her work, highly metaphoric visual style, and ability to draw raw, visceral performances from her actors.
Herta Muller
Herta Muller is a Romanian-born German writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 for her works revealing the harshness of life in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The award cited Müller for depicting “the landscape of the dispossessed” with “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose.”
She was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a German-speaking village in the region of Banat, Romania. From 1973 to 1976, Herta Müller studied Romanian and German literature at the University of Timişoara, Western Romania, where she befriended authors from the “Aktionsgruppe Banat,” a group of writers opposed to the Ceauşescu dictatorship and the official literature of the ruling socialist party. Upon completing her studies, Herta Müller worked as a translator in a machine factory in Timişoara. In 1979 she was approached by the Romanian secret police (Securitate), but she refused to spy on her colleagues and foreign guests, and as a result she lost her job and could only find occasional employment.
Her first book Niederungen (Lowlands) dates from this period, although it wasn’t until 1982 that a censored version appeared in Romania. In 1984 she published a collection of short prose in Romania entitled Drückender Tango; that same year an uncensored but abridged edition of Niederungen came out in Germany, making her name as a writer overnight. Told from the perspective of a young girl, with all her fantasies and fears, the book depicts the confinement, corruption, intolerance, and oppression of a Swabian village in the Banat. In the German media, Herta Müller openly criticized the communist dictatorship: as a result she was prohibited from publishing and repeatedly summoned by the Securitate for interrogations, where she was confronted with absurd accusations, reviled as a prostitute, charged with black marketeering, and threatened with death. In 1987 she emigrated to Germany together with writer Richard Wagner, her husband at the time. Since then she has lived in Berlin.
ABOUT THE 2024 REHEARSAL FOR TRUTH INTERNATIONAL THEATER FESTIVAL
Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival, honoring Václav Havel, is a showcase of contemporary European theater organized each year in New York City. Conceived in 2017 as a shared endeavor of the Václav Havel Center (VHC) and Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association (BBLA), the festival honors the legacy of Czech playwright, dissident and political thinker Vaclav Havel.
Each edition of Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival addresses current sociopolitical trends in Central and Eastern Europe, offering New York audiences a unique opportunity to witness the region’s theatrical zeitgeist.
The program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.