Waif T’s Private War is part of Green Drama, a collection of Slovak theater plays related to the burning topics of ecology and environmentalism. The play focuses on two socially excluded women, the aged punk Tanya and her wheelchair-bound senior mum. Living in a shabby apartment building and without money, life in a big city feels like hell for them. Conflicts, remorse, and unpaid bills dominate the women’s reality. Their sole escape comes in the form of a daily stroll to a nearby park, whereby they can reminisce about the great neighborhood community long gone. One day, the harsh reality of the future tears them from their sweet dreams of the past, when they find out that a development project is slated to destroy their lovely park. Tanya resists by trying to stop the developer with "kitchen" weapons.
Waif T's Private War is a tragicomedy with an unhappy ending that can take place anywhere in the world. It shows the helplessness and loneliness of socially excluded people in cities where nature and public space are slowly disappearing.
Waif T’s Private War, Slovakia. Playwright: Ursula Kovalyk. Director: Alexandra Aron. Cast: Marjorie Conn (Mummy), David Mandelbaum (Neighbor Feher), Doug Shapiro (Dushan), Katarina Vizina (Neighbor 1), Monique Vukovic (Tanya), Robert Sebastian Webb (Neighbor #2/Mr.Chobra). Stage directions: Deborah Beshaw-Farrell. Translated by: Lucia Faltin.
Ursula Kovalyk will participate in the talkback.
Free and open to the public. Online registration through Eventbrite is required.
The 2022 Spring Stage Readings: Bridging the Worlds is dedicated to the people of Ukraine fighting for their independence. 🇺🇦 Suggested donation ($10) will be used to support Ukrainian refugees. All collected funds will be donated to People in Need, a Czech non-governmental, non-profit organization with over 20 years of experience in helping people in emergencies all over the world.
Proof of vaccination and wearing of a face mask during the event is required.
ABOUT
URSULA KOVALYK is a fiction writer, playwright and social worker from Bratislava, Slovakia. She currently works with disabled and homeless actors in the NGO Theatre With No Home. She has published three collections of short stories: Unfaithful Women Lay No Eggs (2002), Travesty Show (2004), Pure animal (2019) and two novels, The Secondhand Woman (2008) and The Equestrienne (2013). Her books have been translated into English, Czech, French, Arabic, Slovenian, Hungarian, Hindi and Serbian. She is also the author of the radio plays The Draft, Gift from Brazil, Gothic Summer, Auntie and The Pancake Dog, which were broadcast on Slovak Radio. Uršuľa Kovalyk’s plays include The Thing (2003), The Poppy Seed Spinster (2004), The Bloodied Key (2005), Octagon (2006), Día de muertos (2008), Squat (2009) and Waif T’s Private War (2020) and Take care, Julie! (2021). Some of them were performed on the stage of the Theatre With No Home and P.O.Hviezdoslav Theatre in Bratislava. She created The Equestrienne and Mrs. Clementine's Library staged readings with performative elements.
ALEXANDRA ARON is an international director and producer, based in New York City. She has been at the helm of more than 25 world premiere productions in New York City, at major regional theaters, and internationally from 1990 to the present. Highlights include A Night in the Old Marketplace (music by Frank London, lyrics by Glen Berger, seen in São Paulo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Toronto, Milan, MASS MoCA, and Bard Summerscape among others), Naked Old Man by Murray Schisgal starring David Margulies (EST, NYC), Imagining Madoff by Deb Margolin (Theater J, DC), Eloise and Ray by Stephanie Fleishmann (New Georges), Judith Sloan’s It Can Happen Here, and Salomé: Woman of Valor by Adeena Karasick and Frank London (Vancouver, Toronto, ART’s Oberon Theater). She was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina (1995). Alex is slated to direct the premiere of Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Ed Mast for Loose Change Productions in New York City in 2022. She is the Producing Artistic Director of Remote Theater Project and a graduate Wesleyan University.
DEBORAH BESHAW-FARRELL is an actress, singer and puppeteer who, for the last 25 years, has worked with Drama of Works, Puppeteers Cooperative and the Czechoslovak American Marionette Theatre. In her work with CAMT, she's played Mefistofl in Johannes Dokchtor Faust: A Petrifying Puppet Comedye; Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude and all of Fortinbras' army in Hamlet (in Prague, Busan, South Korea and parks all over Manhattan); 28 different individuals in Once There Was a Village at La MaMa, and many others. She is also an enthusiastic amateur photographer.
CAST
MARJORIE CONN, actor, playwright, ventriloquist, made her acting debut with the late, great Ethyl Eichelberger as his leading man playing Aegisthus to his Klytemnestra with her lover, the late, incomparable Katy Dierlam as Electra. She was given an award by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for her contributions to theatre in Provincetown, MA. Marjorie is most known for her portrayal of Lizzie Borden (ax murderess) and Lorena Hickok (Eleanor Roosevelt's lover). These plays, which she wrote, are published in Lost Lesbian Lives. She founded the Provincetown Fringe Festival in 1994, which relocated to Asbury Park, NJ in 2007. Currently she is a full-time New Yorker living in Hell's Kitchen with a plethora of rescue animals.
DAVID MANDELBAUM has been producing, acting and directing in experimental theater in New York for over 40 years, at La MaMa, Theater For The New City, Castillo, St. Clements, The Common Basis Theater and others. In 2007, he and Amy Coleman founded New Yiddish Rep and presented it’s first show, the Holocaust classic by Zvi Kolitz Yosl Rakover Speaks To G-d, which he adapted and performed under her direction. This was followed by Allen Lewis Rickman’s The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum, and Shane Baker’s The Big Bupkis: A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville. Under Mandelbaum's leadership, New Yiddish Rep has presented original films, concerts, performance art, and art exhibits, in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. NYR has produced classics of the Yiddish theater by Sholem Aleichem, Moshe Nadir, I. L. Peretz, and most recently the critically acclaimed production of Sholem Asch's God Of Vengeance. It commissioned and produced the translation of the ground breaking Yiddish world premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. And the Yiddish world premiere of Eugene Ioneco's Rhinoceros, Hanoch Levin's The Labor Of Life and The Whore From Ohio. It produced Chaver Paver's translation of Clifford Odets’ Awake And Sing and its celebrated production of Joseph Buloff's translation of Death Of A Salesman which garnered two Drama Desk nominations for best revival of a play and best actor. newyiddishrep.org
DOUG SHAPIRO really loves breakfast. He is also an actor. Past work includes The Sorceress (Di Kishefmakherin) and several readings (King of the Jews) with Alex Aron!) with National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine. Doug also works as an audiobook reader, a standardized patient in hospitals and a business role-player. Doug has been a company member of The Barnstormers Theatre in Tamworth, NH for over twenty years.
KATARINA VIZINA is a native of Bratislava, Slovakia, holds an MA in Musical Theater from the Czech Republic and an MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College, where she was awarded the Fellowship for Outstanding Contribution to Theater. Katarina has performed in plays, musicals, one woman shows, cabarets, sketch comedy, radio shows, movies, and countless voiceover spots. Favorites include: Kate (Brighton Beach Memoirs), Beatrice (A View from the Bridge), Elizabeth (Escape from Happiness), Kate (Harold Pinter’s Old Times), Mary (The American Theater of Actors), Concierge (The Alchemical Theater Company), Cain’s Wife (Chocolate Factory), Agape (One Woman Show), and being part of Cabaret in Captivity: Songs and Sketches from Terezin. She sings and performs in English, Slovak, Czech, German and Russian. Katarina is the general to her three handsome boys, personal stylist to her lovely little princess and a tsarina to their father.
MONIQUE VUKOVIC is a New York City based actor and graduate of the National Shakespeare Conservatory. Television and film work include The Sinner, FBI: Most Wanted, Barry, Losing Ground, etc. She has worked in theater with the Roundabout Theatre Company, Vineyard Theatre, Tom Noonan's Paradise Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, La Mama, e.t.c., Living Room Theatre, Hartford Stage, New Georges, The Debate Society, Clubbed Thumb, and others.
ROBERT SEBASTIAN WEBB Having studied acting for several years at New York City’s The Barrow Group and as a founding member of the Socially Distant Shakespeare production company, his credits include: STAGE- The Odd Couple (Murray), Stories by Strindberg (Hugo), All’s Well That Ends Well (Paroles): FILM- Kurched Productions’ The Handsome Club (Frank), RSWPAF Productions’ A Goldfish Contemplates Life (Fly), Gadin Media's The Impolite Boys (Thom), Raymond Turturro's The Swan Way (Eli), TV- In Denial Studios’ ON-AIR (Harold Krepps). Robert would like to thank his family, friends, and teachers for their undying love and support without which this life would not have been possible.
LUCIA FALTIN is a freelance writer, translator & humanitarian worker
THE 2022 SPRING STAGE READINGS
The 2022 Spring Stage Readings: Bridging the Worlds is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, Untitled Theater Company #61, Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, GOH Productions, and Romanian Cultural Institute. The festival is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Spring Stage Readings is part of the Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival honoring the playwright and human rights activist Vaclav Havel.
The 2022 edition has been conceived in consultation with Attila Szabo, Deputy Director, Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute; Martina Peckova-Cerna, Head, International Cooperation Department, Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague; Tomek Smolarski, Performing Arts Programming, Polish Cultural Institute New York; Raluca Cimpoiasu, Program Manager, Romanian Cultural Institute; Vladislava Fekete, Director, Theatre Institute in Bratislava; and Andrea Domeova, Head of the Centre for Editorial Activities, Theatre Institute in Bratislava.