Artistic Director’s Notes:

Burning Coal has been producing for 18 years. We closed our first season with David Edgar’s play Pentecost. We presented it in Raleigh in June of 1998 in an un-air conditioned high school gymnasium. The audiences were asked to climb atop some fairly doubtful scaffolding and from that perch to watch a 2.5 hour play about ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe performed by a company most of them had never heard of or seen. The play began to pop  during rehearsals. A turning point came one night near the end of the rehearsal process when a photographer from the local ‘paper of record’ came to shoot some rehearsal stills for a story that it was planning to run a week late. He apologized immediately, saying that he could only stay for an hour as he had to go shoot his six year old daughter’s swimming competition. He quietly went about the business of snapping shots for that hour and then left as he’d said he would. About 10pm that night, though, he came back. I watched him for a bit, then walked over and asked him why he’d returned. He whispered to me as the rehearsal moved on, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had to come back!” That was pretty good for Burning Coal, and a night when I began to believe that our little company might actually find traction in this (then) sleepy southern town with a long history of literary accomplishments, pottery and what I like to call the ‘tactile arts’ – but a fairly minimal and certainly unknown record where the performing arts and theatre were concerned. 

Since then, we’ve tried to walk the line between entertaining our audiences and providing material for the community that is informative, educational, useful. That’s a tough trick, sometimes – watching the masses flock to yet another overhyped sporting event or a vapid touring production of the latest stage adaptation of a not altogether memorable or meaningful film while you struggle to fill seats. We had in fact, an intrepid 13 in attendance at our very first production, a few months before Pentecost. And certainly there was no reason for me to think this challenging work would do any better. But it did. The word of mouth, every producer’s favorite ally, led to huge audiences, people being turned away at the doo, and almost no one leaving before the production’s 2.5 hours had run their course (in fact, only one elderly couple did over a three week run, citing the uncomfortable chairs – they were right!). I wish I could report that every production in the 18 years since then has had similar results, but it has happened often enough that we have confidence in our community. We believe in them and we have faith that if we lead them down an interesting path, they will follow. 

Time and again, those interesting paths have started in the fertile imaginations of playwrights either from or inspired by the English and Irish theatre tradition. This little corner of the earth seems to create men and women who know how to tell a story. Maybe that is tradition, maybe its climate, maybe it’s what you eat for breakfast – I don’t know. But I do know that we are grateful for this centuries old facility. E hope that our work on these three plays by one of your favorite sons will honor that tradition. The fall of the Iron Curtain is, I believe, the greatest story of our lives (those of us born in the second half of the 20th century), and one that continues and will continue to unfold in interesting and all too often disturbing ways. The 25th anniversary of that event’s beginning makes staging them this fall an easy choice. The three plays are, collectively, the greatest work of art yet created on this subject. We are delighted to be making our London debut with these three powerful and thrilling plays. 

Lastly, a heartfelt thank you to Dave Wybrow and his remarkable team here at the Cockpit. His willingness to take a chance of this magnitude on an unknown company is a compliment to his passion. His extraordinary generosity, his knowledge of the art form for which he toils and his boldness.  Those are the qualities of a great leader, an we are happily in his debt.

Jerome Davis/Artistic Director 

Playwright’s Notes:

From Babel to Pentecost (and back again)

David Edgar

In early 1990 I visited what was still just about Yugoslavia on a British Council lecture tour, subsequently journeying to Romania in order to research a film about their December 1989 revolution. Out of this came not a film but three stage plays. They weren’t intended as a trilogy – writing the first raised questions that I tried to answer in the second, which in turn raised questions I wanted to address in the third. They weren’t premiered by the same institution: the first was done by the National Theatre, the second and third by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Although they’re all set in unnamed countries, they’re not the same country, and they don’t share any characters. They’ve not been done together until now.

The first play – The Shape of the Table – was directly inspired by the events of late 1989 and was premiered one day before the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. For someone of my generation and history, these events were both inspiring and poignant. Those brave East Europeans thronging the streets, squares and churches of Eastern Europe had returned revolution to the historical agenda, and with a vengeance. But they had done so in order to overthrow regimes that claimed to be the torchbearers of the revolutionary ideal. Although I had never had much time for the Soviet Union, I was formed by the student revolt of the late 60s, which was both an inspiration for the 1989 insurgents and the most recent version of the ideology it sought to overthrow. So when the wall fell, it seemed indecent not to try and write about it. And because, in Eastern Europe, basically, the same thing happened five times, in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia (Romania was different), I decided I could and should create a fictional, paradigmatic East European revolution constructed from the body-parts of all the real ones.

The Shape of the Table was most closely based on the Czech revolution, and begins with a dissident brought from prison during a political crisis to discuss the terms of his release. The play is set in a 19th century Austro Hungarian Imperial palace taken over by the Communists as a government building in 1945, in what had been a ballroom and was now called the Great Hall of the 23rd of May. In it, I was able to assemble the two groups I was most interested in. Of course the play deals with the heroes of the revolution, tumbling in off the streets. But it also deals with the losers. Many, if not most of the great political dramas are about the vanquished – from Aeschylus’ The Persians and Shakespeare’s Richard II. I felt it proper and right, in a play about the end of the Marxist-Leninist dream, to acknowledge that, despite its failure in practice, it had been a great dream and that its collapse impoverished humanity.

However, as I wrote and rehearsed the play, there was no doubt that the dream was over, not least because of the confidence and energy of the forces that had defeated it. This was after all a most extraordinary time, that spring and summer of 1990, when it seemed the entire youth of Europe was marching, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on their lips, old Soviet army caps at jaunty angles on their heads, through the great yawning gaps in the Berlin wall. To the west, it seemed, the national barriers had already fallen, and there were only a few more pockets of resistance to clean up before the European Union ideal of a frontier-less, supranational Europe was fully and finally realised. To the east, surely, it was only a matter of time before the emergent liberal democracies of the former Soviet empire followed the western powers down the Pan-European path, exchanging their sadly failed version of post- enlightenment utopia for an obviously successful one.

But two years on, things looked very different. Far from the east importing western universalism, the traffic appeared to be the other way, with Bavaria, Catalonia, Lombardy and Scotland eagerly emulating the emergent separatism of Slovenia, Slovakia and the Baltic states. And instead of being a temporary festivity, the ornaments of new nationhood were hardening into real statehoods with real controls over the movement of people and capital, often defined by the atavisms of ancient religious and ethnic disputes (virtually the first act of any new east European state appeared to be the delegitimization of their own minorities, be they ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, ethnic Russians in Latvia or Muslims in the former Yugoslavia).

The concept of Europeanness itself had changed from one of inclusion to one of exclusivity, less about who you were than what they weren’t. Even in 1990, I was aware that for many of its citizens, Europe was a continent that stopped 20 kilometres to the east of wherever one happened to be. By Christmas 1990, when I visited Prague, it was clear that liberal middle class Czechs had drawn thick black borders between themselves and the Slovaks, were seriously debating what to do about the gypsies, and weren’t frankly that sure about the Moravians.

Whether post-cold war Europe was to prove an assertion or a denial of universal enlightenment values – whether the lesson of Pentecost would defeat the stern lesson of the Tower of Babel was, thus, the question posed by my second Eastern European play. The third play was inspired by a television documentary on the Oslo peace process, and started outoptimistically. Its source material was about the initially successful attempts to settle two kinds of conflict: those long-standing contentions in South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Middle East which had appeared intractable but which after 1989 seemed open to resolution, and new disputes which emerged in the wake of the cold war, notably in the former Yugoslavia.

It was in this spirit that I started work on The Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the manner of The Shape of the Table, I wanted to draw on these different real world events and create a fictional paradigm (an insurgency by majority Muslim province against a majority Christian, post-Soviet republic). But when I’d reached the second act, what had seemed a success story was falling apart. Following the unqualified success of negotiations in South Africa and what appeared to be breakthroughs in the Middle East and Northern Ireland; peace settlements were beginning to unravel. The Northern Ireland process appeared to grind to a halt. The techniques which had ended the Bosnian war at Dayton failed to resolve the Kosovo conflict at Rambouillet.

Despite or maybe even because of the success of Oslo, the Middle East settlement crumbled and the intifada exploded once again. As a consequence, the confidence of governments in conflict resolution wavered and suddenly it was the peacemakers themselves whose strategies, techniques and motivation were called into question, with both European and American peacemakers facing charges that far from being honest brokers they had their own agendas, which were not always in the interests of the people they were claiming to help. Finally, surely, the era of hope for a new kind of peace-making, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the date Europeans write as 9.11.89, was brought to an end by the events of the American 9.11.01.

So are the plays I wrote towards the end of the last century – and the questions they posed – now no more than an interesting historical curiosity? In The Shape of the Table, the dominant political reality for the leaders of my fictional East European state democracy is what is referred to euphemistically as “our great neighbor to the East”, a country now led by Vladimir Putin. In Pentecost, a country divided between supposedly a civilized, European-oriented west and alleged reactionary primitives in the east is invaded by asylum seekers, including an Afghan fleeing his collapsing country and a Kurd fighting for a separate state. The first half of The Prisoners’ Dilemma is about two peoples of different ethnicities and religions, trying to work out whether they can live together in the same country, or whether the ultimate solution is for the Christians to flee from the Muslim areas and for a new state to be created by forced partition of the old one.

The first image of the Iron Curtain trilogy is of an artist in a country whose totalitarian regime is about to be overthrown by a mass popular uprising. The last is of another artist who is threatened with expulsion from a separatist statelet that has been taken over by religious fundamentalists. Much of our contemporary world – in both its positive and its negative aspects – was born 25 years ago.

Crew: 

Stage Manager: Steph Scribner 

Technical Director: Barry Jaked

Asst. Technical Director: Jeff Stevenson 

Scenery Design: Elizabeth Newton

Lighting Design: Matthew Adelson 

Costume Design: Karen Morgan Williams

Props: Sarah Morrissey 

Sound Design: Aharon Segal

Asst. Director: Ilana Rozin 

Dramaturg: Fred Corlett 

Study Guides: Eric Kildow

Graphics Design: Simmie Kastner

House Manager: Carry Vaughn 

Asst. Stage Manager: Mia Carson and Taylor Shumatae

Asst. Stage Manager/Board Operator: Tanisha Woods

Scene Painter: Danielle Hall

Asst. Technical Director: Michael Gorman 

Asst. Lighting Designer: Cee Cee Huffman 

Cast:

Shape of the Table: 

Brain Linden – Pavel Prus 

Thaddeus Walker -Petr Vladislav 

Tim X. Davis – Joseph Lutz 

Marc Carver – Michael Kaplan 

Jeff Aguiar – Jan Milev 

Jon Fitts – Andrew Zietek 

Brook North – Jan Matkovic 

Randolph Curtis Rand – Victor Spassov 

Rajeev Rajendran – Bishop 

Greg Paul – Minister of Defense 

Matthew Lupin – Social Democrat 

Hope Hynes Love – Monica Freie 

Joey Heyworth – Youth LEader 

Julie Oliver – Vera Rousova 

Maggie Lea – Victoria Brodskaya 

Pentecost

Brian Linden – Leo Katz 

Tim X. Davis – Czaba/Nico 

Marc Carver – Oliver Davenport 

Jeff Aguiar – Grigori/1st Soldier 

Jon Fitts – Pusbas/Abdul/Swedish Man 

Rajeev Rajendran – 2nd Soldier/Command

Greg Paul – Bojovic

Matthew Hagar – Karolyi

Hope Hynes Love – Garbeilla Pecs 

Joey Hayworth – Restorer/Commando

Julie Oliver – Anna Jedlikova/Amira 

Maggie Lea – Marina 

Max Hanau – Raif/Restorer 

Gil Faison – ANtonio 

Rebecca Bossen – Czaba’s Secretary/Fatima 

Jeanine Frost -Yasmin

 Steph Scribner  – Tunu 

Madeline Kvale – Cleopatra/Restorer

Mikaela Saccoccio – Toni Newsome/Teen Girl 

Matthew Lubin – Restorer/Policeman 

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Thaddeus Walker – Roman/2nd Kavkaz Soldier 

Jeff Aguiar – Nikolai/Lou Wasserman 

Jon Fitts – Al Bek 

Brook North – Erik 

Brian Linden – Petrovian 

Rajeev Rajendran – Hasim/1st Kavkaz Soldier

Greg Paul – 1st Drozhdan Soldier/Trevelyan/Zelim 

Joey Jeyworth – Young Man/Paramilitary/2nd Drozhdan 

Julie Oliver – Floss Weatherby

Matthew Lubin – Kavkaz Soldier/Soldier/Paramilitary/Father 

Marc Carver – Tom Rothman 

Max Hanau – James Neil/2nd Paramilitary 

Joel Oramas – Patterson Davis/Len 

Rebecca Bossen – Kelima 

Jeanine Frost – Gina/Mother 

Mikaela Saccoccio – Emela/1st

INDY Review

The Guardian Review

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Burning Coal Theatre 

 (919) 834-4001 

  info@burningcoal.org   

224 Polk St., Raleigh NC 27604