The Wilma Theater opens its 30th Anniversary Season with the Philadelphia Premiere of the 2008 Tony® nominee for Best Play, Rock 'n' Roll, by Academy Award®-winner and four-time Tony Award®-winner Tom Stoppard. The Wilma's production is directed by the theater's co-Artistic Director Blanka Zizka, whose 07-08 season production of Eurydice was recently nominated for seven Barrymore Awards, including Outstanding Overall Production and Outstanding Direction.
For Blanka Zizka and co-Artistic Director Jiri Zizka, who immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia after their theater was closed down by the government, Rock 'n' Roll is a play with deep personal significance. "With half of the play taking place in former Czechoslovakia, Rock 'n' Roll brings us back to one of the defining moments in our lives when we left the country in 1976," says Blanka. "The Czech characters in the play encounter events very similar to experiences of our closest friends who remained in Prague. Tom himself was born in Czechoslovakia, and he has long been impressed by our personal story of immigrants coming to a foreign place, knowing nobody, and creating a theater. It is the perfect play to mark our 30th Anniversary Season."
The Wilma has had an artistic relationship with Stoppard for over a decade and has previously produced eight of his plays, including Night and Day,
Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love. "I'm delighted that my long relationship with The Wilma Theater will be continuing with Rock 'n' Roll. I feel among friends," says Stoppard.
Hailed by The New York Times as "triumphant" and "arguably Stoppard's finest play," Rock 'n' Roll was a recent hit on Broadway following a record-breaking run in London's West End. The Wilma's production - the first regional theater production on the East Coast - begins previews on September 17, opens on September 24, and closes on October 26, 2008. Tickets are $44 - $60 and are available by calling the Wilma Box Office at (215) 546-7824 or online at www.wilmatheater.org.
In 1968, as the world is ablaze with rebellion, Jan, a young Cambridge graduate student with little but a prized collection of rock albums, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. Back in England, Jan's mentor, Max, a professor of Marxist Philosophy, faces his own crisis as the idealism he so strongly held onto smashes against the landscape of political upheaval. Incorporating a playlist of rock music that changed a generation, Stoppard's epic tale combines history, conflict, and passion, and spans 22 turbulent years, at the end of which, love remains - and so does rock 'n' roll.
From the rise and fall of original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett - a recurring figure in the play - to the impact of the underground Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, Rock 'n' Roll's music reflects a revolution with classic recordings from artists such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and more.
Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Straussler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England in 1946 after fleeing from the Nazis to Singapore and then to India. While not an autobiographical play, Stoppard does draw from his own experiences and says he identifies with the lead character of Jan. "His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty [a type of pastry], and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are mine," he writes in the script's introduction.
Visiting the Wilma last March for a discussion with Blanka at a standing-room-only event, Stoppard said, "There was a time when I thought it would be rather neat to write my fake autobiography as a play. Because I left Czechoslovakia when I was a baby and my Czech father was killed in the Far East in the war, we were [living] in the Far East. And I guess if my mother hadn't - after the war - married… my stepfather, maybe we would have gone back to Czechoslovakia. And for a while I thought it would be quite interesting to write this as a play… about myself as though at the age of eight I'd gone to Czechoslovakia instead of England… Jan is born pretty much close to me in the same little town."
The Wilma produced its first Stoppard play with Travesties in 1994 and developed a long-term relationship with the playwright over the subsequent years. Blanka says, "When Tom was writing Rock 'n' Roll, he was in contact with Jiri and me, and we had the privilege of reading his first drafts. From the very beginning we made it clear to Tom that we wanted to produce the play at the Wilma."
Blanka and Jiri left Czechoslovakia in 1976 as the state of "normalization" under Soviet occupation repressed a democratic movement and censored artistic expression. Blanka lost her position as a dance teacher after refusing to adhere to a mandate ordering all educators to become members of the Communist Party. In her next job as a cleaning woman in a university library, she was "absurdly assigned to the department of forbidden books, where there was nothing to clean, since no one was allowed to enter the room." She spent the rest of her time working with an underground theater, packing a gym on the edge of Prague full of audiences for unpublicized performances. The theater was shut down in 1976, around the same time of the arrest of The Plastic People of the Universe, the underground rock group featured in Stoppard's play. After being separated for five months in refugee camps in different parts of Germany, Blanka (then pregnant with their son Krystof) and Jiri were reunited, eventually arriving in the United States, Jiri in May of 1977 and Blanka in November of 1977.
Blanka says, "I believe that our experience in Czechoslovakia is partially responsible for our tendency to choose plays dealing with human rights, plays that explore dynamics between human potential and obstacles imposed by politics, society, prejudices, racism, or darker parts of human character and nature."
Blanka and Jiri staged their first Wilma production in May of 1979 - an original adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm, a novel censored in their homeland. That production marks the beginning of Blanka and Jiri's 30-year relationship with the theater and their eventual founding of The Wilma Theater as it is known it today. During the Zizkas' tenure, they have directed a combined total of 103 productions at the Wilma, including world and American premieres, in addition to productions in New York and around the country. The Wilma Theater has established a national reputation for provocative work ranging from the international drama of Bertolt Brecht,
Athol Fugard, Eugene Ionesco, Caryl Churchill, Linda Griffiths,
Martin McDonagh,
Peter Shaffer and
Tom Stoppard to new American plays by
Arthur Miller,
Sarah Ruhl, Dael Orlandersmith,
Doug Wright,
Itamar Moses, and many others.
The cast of the Wilma's Rock 'n' Roll includes New York, D.C., and Philadelphia based actors. The cast of 11 are Mark Cairns (Milan), Barnaby Carpenter (Jan),
David Chandler (Max) - who appeared in the Wilma's production of Patience, Julie Czarnecki (Candida),
Ryan Farley (Ferdinand), Victoria Frings (Magda, Gillian, Deirdre), Mary McCool (Lenka) - who previously appeared at the Wilma in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Jered McLenigan (Stephen) - seen at the Wilma in last season's Amadeus and in The Pillowman, Kate Eastwood Norris (Eleanor/Esme) - a D.C.-based actress who has appeared locally at Arden Theatre Company in Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Franklin's Apprentice, Seth Reichgott (Nigel, Interrogator) - who was last seen at the Wilma in Wintertime, and Libby Woodbridge (Esme/Alice).
The design team is set designer Matt Saunders - a 2008 Barrymore nominee for Outstanding Set Design who previously created sets for the Wilma's Age of Arousal and My Children! My Africa!, lighting designer Joshua L. Schulman - a 2008 Barrymore nominee for Outstanding Lighting Design, costume designer Oana Botez-Ban whose work was last seen in the Wilma's Eurydice, and sound designer Andrea Sotzing.
Tom Stoppard's other work includes those produced by the Wilma; Night and Day, The Invention of Love,
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with André Previn), Indian Ink, The Real Inspector Hound, On the Razzle, Arcadia, and Travesties; as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, and the trilogy The Coast of Utopia. His radio plays include If You're Glad I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died, and In the Native State. Work for television includes Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle. His film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman), and Enigma.
Symposium Series
After the End of History
Monday, October 20th at 7:30 p.m.
Rock 'n' Roll ends in 1990. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and "the end of history" proclaimed. Has the promise of 1989 been fulfilled in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe? How did the end of the Soviet Empire contribute to the world we now live in? A panel of noted thinkers examines what has happened in Eastern Europe and the world since that time, and what we might expect in the future. Participants include Benjamin Barber (Jihad Vs. McWorld, and Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy), Trudy Rubin (Foreign Affairs Columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer), and Paul Wilson (
Vaclav Havel's translator and a former band member of The Plastic People of the Universe).
Is the mind merely excitable neurons, an "amazing biological machine" that could be "made out of beer cans" if we understood the technology well enough? Or is it something more? Does the soul have a place in an age of breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence? Join us for a provocative discussion featuring panelists including philosopher and neuroscientist Owen Flanagan (author of The Problem of the Soul and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World), Robert Kurzban (director of Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology), and Joseph LeDoux (author of Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain).
Tickets: FREE for all Rock 'n' Roll ticket-holders, otherwise $10. Seating is limited. For tickets, call the Box Office at (215) 546-7824 or email tickets@wilmatheater.org. Dates, times, and panelists subject to change.
The Wilma will continue its 30th Anniversary celebration with the U.S. Premiere of Schmucks by Roy Smiles, directed by Jiri Zizka (December 3, 2008 - January 4, 2009), the Philadelphia Premiere of Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, translated by Linda Gaboriau, directed by Blanka Zizka (February 25 - March 29, 2009), and the Philadelphia Premiere of Hysteria by Terry Johnson, directed by Jiri Zizka (May 13 - June 14, 2009).
The Wilma Theater's 30th Anniversary Sponsor is Rohm and Haas. Daniel Berger is Honorary Producer for Rock 'n' Roll. Sporting Club at the Bellevue is a Season Sponsor, and WHYY is the Wilma's Media Sponsor.
The Wilma Theater's Symposium Series is supported by The Wallace Foundation Excellence Award grant. The Wallace Foundation Excellence Awards were created to support exemplary arts organizations to pioneer effective practices to engage more people in high-value arts activities.
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