Yesterday, the second Akademikų išvyka to see When Lithuania Ruled the World, Part IV returned fully intact. I was part of the group, so I can tell everyone a bit about this play, on until the end of the month at the Chicago Cultural Centre. First, it was, of course, completely worth the $10 I spent to see it. I found it hilarious, winning on a wide array of levels, and probably even worth a second viewing. But of course I’d say that; the play has to do with Lithuania, and I saw it on what would be a rather memorable day in Lithuanian history.
What the play is, essentially, is a telling of the story of Vytautas the Great, who is the “boss” (as the play frequently calls him) of Lithuania during the back 20-odd years of the 14th century into the first 15 years of the fifteenth century. Vytautas, like just about any head of state during that time, is involved in a series of intrigues and shifting allegiances, mostly concerning the crusading Teutonic Knights and his cousin, Jogaila, who weds the 13-year old queen Jadwyga of Poland, making himself both Christian and the King of Poland while starting Poland’s much-beloved Jagiellonian Dynasty. Additionally, Vytautas has to contend with a Russia that is slowly growing in strength (Vytauto uncle, Algirdas, rather famously, and maybe apocryphally, marched to the gates of Moscow eight times and was bought off each time, though he did end up with a Russian wife), in part because it can maintain control of its state with a church that is an appendage of the state. The Lithuania Vytautas controls stretches from the Baltic to the Black Seas and is a multi-cultural entity with no specific state religion. Vytauto father Kęstutis was a pagan of the old school, and that rubbed off on Vytautas. The Teutonic Knights, as well as the neighboring Poles, want Lithuania to turn towards Rome (well, in theory–plunder, land, and power were all also motives for the Knights). But within Lithuania’s borders are Jews, Karaims, Orthodox Slavs, and Mongols and other Turkic people. Naturally, a single state religion is not possible. During the course of the play, Vytautas is repeatedly betrayed, betrays others, converts to Christianity, tries to bring the Orthodox faiths back into the fold of Rome, defeats the Knights once and for all at the battle of Tannenberg with a rag-tag army made up of mercenaries of every imaginable eastern ethnicity, and waits for a crown from Rome to finally be placed on his head, making him King of Lithuania, not just Grand Duke.
Now, upon this ripe history, the playwright, director, and star Kęstutis Nekas (an associate professor at Roosevelt University) adds meditations on ethnicity’s role in a multi-cultural society, familial obligation, naming, time, and stereotyping. To push the ideas along, Nekas uses both absurd dream sequences as well as an entire library of post-modern theatric devices, including breaking the fourth wall, disrespecting unity of time, and anachronism (Jogaila and Vytautas fly around on a plane together for much of the play, alluding to a pair of 20th Century Lithuanian heroes, Darius and Girėnas).
Additionally, Nekas has his characters (a cast of 11 play between them about 50 characters) peform highly-allusive lines in a set of couplets whose rhyming seems to drift in and out. What results is something appealing to the audience persistently along multiple levels of meaning. For example, at Tannenberg, there is a young Polonius ready to fight. He explains that after he’s done, he’ll finally have earned his degree. However, the summer heat is cooking him within his own armor, so he starts getting whiny. It’s funny listening him complain (as the Germans call him “the little Dane”), and finally, once he’s had enough, it’s maybe even funnier to see him run off the stage, shouting something along the lines of, “I’m going to be true to myself and not fight in this heat!” At another time, during a dream sequence about the redeclaration of independence of Lithuania in 1990, a cast member asserts that freedom will come to the Lithuanians with “bombs bursting in the air and Nightline’s red glare.”
Where the play starts to veer off course, however, is about three quarters of the way through. During a dream sequence about Lithuania’s annexation by the Soviet Union, the very real questions of genocide and collaboration come up. Nekas shows some of the complications of the situation by having two characters spar over crimes committed by both pro-Soviet and pro-Nazi groups. Yet the sequence ends with Nekas’s Vytautas denying that any genocide will happen in his future, capping it with the line “genocide is easy; comedy is hard.” While true, it sets the play off in a direction that does not seem to settle itself well. Plus, the line seems to brush off the relationship between Jews and Lithuanians during World War II, instead presenting in hagiographic terms a Vytautas firmly committed to freedom for all religions as a solution to the thousands dead in the wake of both Stalin and Hitler’s megalomania. It seems a bit of a cop out, and that’s pretty sad, as Nekas handles the tragedies within Vytauto life rather well, culminating with turning his back on his parentage and family by murdering his pagan wizard and wife simultaneously with a dagger fashioned from a crucifix.
And maybe that’s the underlying theme of the play. Vytautas is presented throughout as a “sole operator” (to use Nekas’s term used during the Q&A afterward), and at one point he presages the Sun King himself, proclaiming that he is the state. Without his egoism, there would be no history to speak of, and maybe no Lithuania, either. He created (in the realm of the play) a state unattached to a fundamental religion or ethnicity–he created, in other words, a postmodern state (or America). Yet he could not have done this without his own bourgeois sense of individuality and destiny (yet another anachronism, natch). Yet given that individuality is formed by the interaction of a series of group identities, Vytautas turns the tables on that by denying each group of which he is a member the benefit of having him as a constant member. He betrays everyone and every group, leaving only the positive, self-actualised self who dies at the end of the play, without family or heir. His legacy is a land that is quickly swallowed by those he tried forever to keep at bay (Polish assimilationsts led by the first series of branches of the Jagiellonian sapling).
Going into the play, I was worried that it might be too bogged down by in-jokes to be much of a treat to people who haven’t been indoctrinated since birth by why Vytautas deserves the distinguisher “the Great.” And there were a lot of gags tossed the way of that demographic, but not so many as to derail the enjoyment the play can give anyone with a decent sense of humour. Hell, there’s a plane in the fourteenth century! Even kids would laugh at that. Plus, as mentioned above, the madcap stream of allusion and counter aristotelian pranking works regardless of whether one understands the dozen or so Lithuanian words thrown into the play (the meaning of most is very clear from context, anyway). In fact, this play may work especially for people who aren’t Lithuanian but know one, as then, afterward, they will be able to say to themselves, “yup. They are all like that. I knew it!” Because, in fact, we all are, and we learned it from Vytautas.
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