Cast
Anna Karenina - Mary O'Dowd
Konstantin Levin, Muffled Figure #2 -
Rich Kropp
Muffled Figure #1, Petritsky, Peasant, Guest -
Mike Mallon
Stiva - Jonathon Genson
Dolly - Kathy Kusper
Kitty - Eileen Duban
Count Vronsky - William FitzGerald
Countess Vronsky, Peasant - Gini Welch
Agatha, Princess Betsy, Peasant -
Marilyn Weiher
Seriozha - Ben Schaeffer (CTWS)
Alexei Karenin - Joe Petrolis
Vasily, Peasant, Guest - John Mueller
Governess, Widow, Peasant, Guest - Jackie Weiher
Nikolai, Peasant, Guest - Cal Turner
Guest, Peasant, Stiva Woman - Iya Goschinsky
Guest, Peasant, Stiva Woman -
Deborah Sampson
Guest, Peasant,Priest - Al Dreifke
Guest, Peasant, Nurse, Hotel Woman -
Darla Goudeau
Guest - Rob Snyder
Dramaturg's
Diary
About Tolstoy (1828-1910)
One hundred years before TWS staged its first production, off by
a year, Count Lev (Leo) Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born (1828) on his
estate, Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Fields), eighty miles south of Moscow.
Orphaned at the tender age of nine, he was brought up by his aunt,
who saw to his education as a nobleman. He attended the University
of Kazan in 1844 to study oriental languages and law. Three years
later he returned without a degree to Yasnaya Polyana.
In 1851, Tolstoy went to the Caucasus Mountains to join his brother
Nikolai in the army where he obtained a commission. While on active
duty, he wrote Childhood, his first published work for the periodical
Sovremennik for which he was popularly praised. His transfer to
Sevastopol and participation in the Crimean War produced the experiences
for Sevastopol Sketches. This book established his literary reputation.
After he left the army in 1856, he continued to write, but disliked
the role of literary celebrity. He returned to the family estate
in order to pursue the more "useful" activities of estate
management and education of the children of his serfs. He founded
a school on his estate and made frequent trips to Germany to study
teaching methods.
In 1862, he wrote a novel Cossacks and soon married Sophia Behrs,
a neighboring aristocrat.. He devoted the remaining years of the
decade to finishing his masterpiece, War and Peace.
From 1873-1877 he worked on Anna Karenina, but he became ever more
emotionally distressed. As he contemplated the meaninglessness of
life confronted by the inevitability of death, he occasionally became
so depressed he entertained thoughts of suicide. By 1878 he experienced
a "conversion," finding relief from his spiritual crisis
in the ideals of humanity and in the teachings of Jesus. He wrote
of his crisis in Confession, its publication forbidden by the government
censor, probably among other objections because he did not accept
the divinity of Jesus.
Despite intermittent ill health, his last ten years were spent working
on religious compilations and his enormous correspondence. He received
hundreds of visitors; his fame had become global. He irritated the
authorities who censored or banned his work and harassed his followers.
In 1901 the Orthodox Church excommunicated him. The competition
between followers and family over the allocation of his royalties
caused him to leave his estate for good, alone and on foot embarking
on the pilgrimage The multifaceted Tolstoy, a constant seeker of
truth, was a gigantic success in many fields as a teacher and educational
theorist, philosopher, military man, farmer, social critic, seer,
prophet, but above all he was a literary artist.
About
the Adapter
By Marion Reis
About the Playwright
Helen Edmundson, British playwright, actor, director, founder of
the Red Stockings Theater, a feminist touring company, is most noted
for her adaptations of novels for the stage: Lev Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina and War and Peace and George Eliot's Mill on the Floss.
She was born in 1964 in Liverpool, grew up on the Wirral and in
Chester, and studied drama at Manchester University where she was
also a part-time tutor. Her work with the agit-prop touring company
gave her a broad experience in all aspects of theatre. Her first
solo writing was a musical comedy Ladies in a Lift, created for
Red Stockings in 1988. After leaving the company, she played roles
on stage and on television, mostly in northwest England. She was
dramaturg for the Northwest Playwrights Workshop. Her first play
was Flying, produced at the Royal National Theatre Studio in 1990.
In the decade of the 1990s, she worked on various plays and films
for television, doing adaptations for the Shared Experience Theatre.
The first of her adaptations, Anna Karenina (1992) won the Theatre
Managers' Association Award for Best Touring Production. Her second
play, an original, The Clearing (1993) and her other adaptations
Mill on the Floss (1994) and War and Peace (1996) received world-wide
recognition and won awards,
Since 1994, she has been living in west London with her husband,
actor Jonathan Oliver, and three children. She wrote screenplays
of The Clearing and The Spire for production in 2001. Considered
a rising star on the London theatre scene, she has been more recently
at work on an adaptation of Mary Webb's wild passionate Gone to
Earth for Shared Experience. Her original plays cover contemporary
issues from works of charity to ethnic cleansing.
About the Play and Edmundson's Method
Anna Karenina is one of Leo Tolstoy's (1823-1910) greatest novels.
Issues of love, fidelity, passion, marital morality, and the meaning
of life permeate the novel and Helen Edmundson's stage adaptation
as well. The novel opens with the famous sentence, "Happy families
are all alike; but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
The novelist goes on to illustrate this theme by following the fate
of three couples. Prince "Stiva" Oblonsky, Anna's brother,
a philanderer, and his wife Dolly, a devoted wife and mother; Levin
the owner of a landed estate who loves and eventually marries Dolly's
sister Kitty; and Anna herself unhappily married to a highly placed
government official Karenin. Their son, Seriozha, complicates the
highly impassioned affair Anna has with Count Vronsky who had been
courting Kitty.
Unlike other adaptations which focus on Anna and her lover Count
Vronsky, Edmundson reconstructed the narrative by melding and intertwining
the separate love stories of Levin and Anna to focus on their parallel
development as co-protagonists. She puts them into a kind of surrealistic
never-never land, in an afterlife, where these kindred souls, are
compelled to recollect, retell, and relive relevant scenes from
their earthly life. Through their personal interaction, they reveal
how they sought fulfillment -- Levin eventually finding love and
domestic happiness with Kitty and Anna ending in tragedy under the
wheels of a moving train. The deterioration of Stiva and Dolly's
marriage, the third couple, is a backgrounded subplot.
"British playwright Helen Edmundson is equal parts chemist,
historian, literary sleuth and trapeze artist," wrote critic
Mary Carole McCauley in the Baltimore Sun on September. 14, 2003.
These are the talents characteristic of a craftsperson who can fashion
plays from mammoth seemingly unstageable novels. Edmundson condenses
850 pages into a play with a running time of two and a half hours.
She writes a visual language into dialog that captures the spirit
of the originals.
McCauley questioned Edmundson about how she goes about adapting
complex novels for the stage. Her reply, "I immerse myself
in it. I read the novel several times, and I copy out chunks that
I find useful into a notebook -- I can't bear to mark up the pages
of the book itself. Then, I do a lot of research about the author,
so I know what was preoccupying him. I read different criticisms
that were written when the book came out, so I know how it was received.
I also take research trips. For Anna Karenina, I went to Russia.
I took the same 12-hour train ride that Anna took from Moscow to
St. Petersburg."
Edmundson says she's done enough research "when I stumble on
a big river of theme that I can use for the play as a whole."
In Anna the theme was "how we choose to live our lives, whether
to pursue our passions and pleasures, or whether we have a greater
moral responsibility." Then she discards whatever does not
contribute to the theme. Thus, she knows she'll remain faithful
to the spirit of what the author wanted. She said, "As always
in working with Tolstoy, I am left with the impression that he possessed
more compassion and humanity than he would ever have cared to admit."
Edmundson is keenly aware that the narrator of a novel must be done
away with if the story is to be put into dramatic form; therefore
the characters must speak about themselves and their situation without
too much self-knowledge. In Mill on the Floss, Edmundson divided
the main character into three separate selves. In Anna the playwright
decided to have Levin and Anna on stage talking to each other throughout
the entire play, even though in the novel they meet but once near
the end. The dialogue in the novel also must not be slavishly followed
because on-stage dialogue must accomplish about four things at once,
more that it does in the novel. Edmundson is good at this.
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Production Credits
Production Credits
Director
Tony Vezner
Technical Director
Troy Lee Brasuell, Jr.
Stage Manager
Sue Turner
Assistant Stage Managers
Carol Dapogny, Peggy Carlson
Costume Designer
Patti Roeder
Costume Crew
Lori D'Asta, Eileen Crow, Marilyn Darnall, Judy DiVita, Chris
Gavlin,Pat Huth, Cassandra Johnson Locke, Julie Mueller, Ellen
Smith, Julie Suarez
Dance Choreography
Joe Savino
Dance Assistant
Iya Goschinsky
Movement Choreography
Scott Illingworth
Dramaturg
Marion J. Reis
Hospitality Chair
Carol Clarke
Hospitality Crew
Dorothy Attermeyer, Carole Borg, Hedy Bosch, Jack Calvert, Karol
Calvert, Ruth Cekal, Brian Centers, Mary Clarke, Rob Cramer, Mike
Dekovic, Liz Egan, Sharon Feldt, Ceri Hartnett, Bonnie Hilton,
Karen Holbert, Anne Marie Hultgren, Mike Janke, Jo Jones, Sue
Kuenhold, Bruce Larson, Lynn Larson, Bill Love, Joyce Love, Cassandra
Johnson Locke, Debbie McHenry, Debby Mills, Jon Mills, Roxanne
Moreno, Norma Naselli, Arlene Page, Rick Pavia, Katie Pecis, Pat
Rafferty, Susan Remy, Joan Roeder, Nancy Schifo, Connie Sierzputowski,
Betsy Stiles
Lighting Designer
Benton Bullwinkel
Lighting Crew
Linda Bugielski, Katie Pecis, Jim Pusztay, Betsy Stiles
Makeup Designer
Bridget Bittman
Makeup Crew
Lori D'Asta, Roxanne Moreno
Properties Designer
Rob Snyder
Properties Crew
Karen Arnold, Linda Auer, Carole Borg, Laura Leonardo-Ownby, Greg
Maurer, Martha Niles, Amanda Ragan
Set Construction Chair
Peter Sonnenberg
Set Construction Crew
Lee Brasuell, Ann Cahill, Joe Delaloye, Mark Hewitt, Mike Huth,
John Otto, Rich Ptacek, Paul Roach, Sibylle Sonnenberg
Set Designer
Dan Marema
Set Painting Chair
Susan Remy
Set Painting Crew
Lee Brasuell, Jrl, Katie Remy, Michael Remy
Sound Designer
Stephanie Bullwinkel
Sound Crew
Carole Borg, Jonathon Genson, Carol Hudson, Dick Jacoby, Rick Pavia,
Ginny Richardson, Betsy Stiles
Box Office Chair
Mary Ellen Schutt
Box Office Crew
Linda Bremer, Peg Callaghan, George Dempsey, Mary Dempsey, Janet
Ryan
Grasso, Terry Kozlowski, Jo Ann Mallon, Roxanne Moreno, Jill Neely,
Lori B. Proksa, Paulette Sarussi, Sandy Squillo, Carol Suda,
Marilyn Wilson
House Manager Chair
Bill Wilson
House Managers
Susan Cardamone, James Dutton, Harry Hultgren, Bill Rotz, Denny
Wise
Group Sales Chair
Carole Clark
Group Sales Crew
Mary Clark, Ceri Hartnett
Poster Distribution
Kathleen Kusper
Production Coordinator
Karen Holbert
Program Advertising
Cheri Campbell
Publicity Chair
Arlene Page
Program Advertising
Cheri Campbell
Program Editor
Bonnie Hilton
Program Crew
Alison Burkhardt, Cheri Campbell
Website
Judy DiVita
Director
Corner
By Tony Vezner
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy
in its own way."
-opening line of the novel Anna Karenina
The Russian sensibility about human behavior is really quite
remarkable. Perhaps because they are an older culture than ours
they look at human weakness with much more understanding and acceptance.
Where we Americans still ask ourselves what the causes of flawed
human behavior are, or try to create medications to fix those
flaws, the Russians almost celebrate the defects and their intricacies
as part of the marvelous colors that make us human. When you get
a group of flawed people together as the quote above suggests,
the interactions of those flaws can cause endless numbers of dramas
and problems - all of them much more fascinating and exciting
than if the group were "functional".
As for motivation for poor human behavior, the Russians would
say not to bother to look. After all, can anyone definitively
say why Anna becomes a slave to her passion? Why Stiva can't be
faithful? Why Levin is drawn to Kitty? Or why any one of us acts
the way we do? We are all so bound up in our own weakness that
it is almost impossible to see ourselves. One quote I have in
a newspaper article above my desk refers to this fact, stating
"Jerks are like vampires, they can't see their own reflection."
This statement applies to all humans. Even those who work in theatre
and ruminate on human behavior can't always figure out why people
act in selfish or foolish ways. Perhaps the lesson finally is
that the best we can do is try to live that foolishness fully
on stage and less so in our own lives, and move on.
Acknowledgements
Produced with special permission from
Dramatic Publishing Inc.
More Photos
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