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vocative grab-bag we began with before. We also have a challenge: to find the proper balance between replications and re-creation; to make Sganarelle live again, but to make it live anew, freshly conceived out of the different energies and talents of a different set of people. From the racks come new improvisations - not as numerous, but fully as charged with energy and imagination. Very soon though, we take up the scripts and Serban urges us to learn the lines right away, so that we can drop the scripts, and leave our minds and bodies free to work out the stage business. It is a very different process. Much of the business comes from the recollections of the veterans. The other actors are astonishingly receptive and patient with this process. What did I do next? they ask, meaning What did my character do next? They never chafe against the form; they mold it to themselves, bending it to suit their own bodies, mouths and imaginations. When somehting old works, they latch onto it; when they think of something that works better, Sganarelle improves. It is, for many of us, a new process, but is a necessary process for the building of a theatre. Evanescence is the natural condition of the theatre. One of the tasks of a permanent repertory theatre, though, is to keep its

successful productions alive and growing; revival as a process of continuing creation. With our lines only barely memorized, we begin a series of rehearsal / performances for schoolchildren in the lobby of our theatre, with the merest suggestions of sets and costumes. We learn from the kids - what grabs them, and what leaves them cold - and our performances are infused with the energy of communication between an unsophisticated audience and a theatre company stripped of all the trappings of a theatic. And then we go on tour, a monh-long bus-and-truck odyssey, crisscrossing New England from Long Island to the Canadian border, adapting the production to everything from tiny churches to gargantuan concert halls. We keep working on the show, even though the director is no longer with us, trying to realize a potential we can all sense. One rehearsal of A Dumb Show in a theatre lobby in Storrs, Connecticut, is particularly telling: we all chip in, suggesting, criticizing, goading, and we feel the farce coming to new life within us, witrhin the company. We begin to catch fire. The farther north we go, it seems, the deeper the snow, the deeper the sense of isolation - the hotter the sense of interplay, of communication with the people. The stage sometimes seems to blaze with energy, and

ttien the conflagration spreads to the house, which returns our energy with explosive ovations. Sganarelle has indeed taken on new life, more vibrant than ever. At the end of the month we are back in Cambridge, back in our home theatre, night after night, and rehearsing other plays by day, plays that will atlernate with Sganarelle in the A.R.T. repertory. The phantasmagoria of the tour - where Sganarelle has taken a new shape every night, in every new town - is behind us, but is still implanted in the innards of the production, now and again flaring into prominence as a new bit, a new moment of improvisation, appears from nowhere. At the end of March Sganarelle goes into hibernation - a welldeserved rest - but there is the promise of new life, new circumstances, new acters, new theatres and audiences for our Sganarelle on the road again, in Chicago in the spring and in Europe in the in the summer. We feign weariness, joking about the show that wouldn't die, but there is affirmation here; a sense that in performing these farces again and again we are in touch with the roots of the living theatre. And in taking Sganarelle again, we can imagine that we are extending the work of our colleague, Moliere: our fellow actor, member and leader

of another permanent repertory theatre, who devised and repeatedly reworked these same farces to suit his own acting talents and those of his fellows, and then took the work on tour as we have done. These are not literary plays; they are theatrical farces, and they truly exist only upon the stage. As our colleague wrote in 1965. Comedies are made only to be performed. You will see our company this evening engaged in much the same work that Moliere undertook night after night, three centuries and more ago: making Sganarelle come to life once again, □ Jonathan Marks, Literary Manager.

Andrej Serban Andrej Serban, roden u Rumuniji, došao je u Sjedinjene Dŕžave 1970. godine kao stipendistä Fordove fondacije i počeo da radi u pozorištu La Mama ETC. Tokom narednih pet godina režirao je Medeju, Elektru i Trójánké, koje su kao Fragment! trilogije (zajedno sa Dobrim čovekom iz Sečuana) bile na gostovanju u Evropi i na Bliskom istoku. Od 1977. do 1978. godine Serban je bio po-