Theater

executive artistic director

Theater

Rock 'n' Roll, Tony Nominee for Best Play,
Opens at Wilma Theater in Philadelphia

The Wilma Theater opens its 30th Anniversary Season with the Philadelphia Premiere
of the 2008 Tony® nominee for Best Play, Rock ’n’ Roll, by Academy Award®-winner and four-
time Tony Award®-winner Tom Stoppard. The Wilma’s production is directed by the theater’s
Co-Artistic Director Blanka Zizka, whose 2007-2008 season production of Eurydice was recently
nominated for seven Barrymore Awards, including Outstanding Overall Production and
Outstanding Direction.

For Blanka Zizka and Co-Artistic Director Jiri Zizka, who immigrated to the United States from
Czechoslovakia after their theater was closed down by the government, Rock ’n’ Roll is a play
with deep personal significance. “With half of the play taking place in former Czechoslovakia,
Rock ’n’ Roll brings us back to one of the defining moments in our lives when we left the country
in 1976,” says Blanka. “The Czech characters in the play encounter events very similar to
experiences of our closest friends who remained in Prague. Tom himself was born in
Czechoslovakia, and he has long been impressed by our personal story of immigrants coming
to a foreign place, knowing nobody, and creating a theater. It is the perfect play to mark our 30th
Anniversary Season.”

The Wilma has had an artistic relationship with Stoppard for over a decade and has previously
produced eight of his plays, including Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Indian
Ink, and The Invention of Love. "I'm delighted that my long relationship with The Wilma Theater
will be continuing with Rock ’n’ Roll. I feel among friends,” says Stoppard.

Hailed by The New York Times as “triumphant” and “arguably Stoppard’s finest play,” Rock ’n’
Roll was a recent hit on Broadway following a record-breaking run in London's West End. The
Wilma’s production – the first regional theater production on the East Coast – begins previews
on Sept. 17, opens on Sept. 24, and closes on Oct. 26.

In 1968, as the world is ablaze with rebellion, Jan, a young Cambridge graduate student with
little but a prized collection of rock albums, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as
Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. Back in England, Jan’s mentor, Max, a professor of Marxist
Philosophy, faces his own crisis as the idealism he so strongly held onto smashes against the
landscape of political upheaval. Incorporating a playlist of rock music that changed a
generation, Stoppard’s epic tale combines history, conflict, and passion, and spans 22
turbulent years, at the end of which, love remains – and so does rock ’n’ roll.

From the rise and fall of original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett – a recurring figure in the play
– to the impact of the underground Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, Rock ’
n’ Roll’s music reflects a revolution with classic recordings from artists such as The Beatles,
Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and more.

Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Straussler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England in 1946
afterfleeing from the Nazis to Singapore and then to India. While not an autobiographical play,
Stoppard does draw from his own experiences and says he identifies with the lead character of
Jan. “His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty [a
type of pastry], and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are
mine,” he writes in the script’s introduction.

Visiting the Wilma last March for a discussion with Blanka at a standing-room-only event,
Stoppard said, “There was a time when I thought it would be rather neat to write my fake
autobiography as a play. Because I left Czechoslovakia when I was a baby and my Czech father
was killed in the Far East in the war, we were [living] in the Far East. And I guess if my mother
hadn't – after the war – married… my stepfather, maybe we would have gone back to
Czechoslovakia. And for a while I thought it would be quite interesting to write this as a play…
about myself as though at the age of eight I'd gone to Czechoslovakia instead of England… Jan
is born pretty much close to me in the same little town.”

The Wilma produced its first Stoppard play with Travesties in 1994 and developed a long-term
relationship with the playwright over the subsequent years.

Blanka says, “When Tom was writing Rock ’n’ Roll, he was in contact with Jiri and me, and we
had the privilege of reading his first drafts. From the very beginning we made it clear to Tom that
we wanted to produce the play at the Wilma.”

Tickets are $44 – $60 and are available by calling the Wilma Box Office at (215) 546-7824 or
online at www.wilmatheater.org.

Philadelphia Theatre
Company's Premiere of
Wasserstein's Final Play

By Andrea K. Hammer
For the Philadelphia Bulletin

George Widman for GPTMC

The Philadelphia Theatre
Company (PTC) premiere of the
late Wendy Wasserstein's Third will
welcome Director Mary B. Robinson
back to the area.

Formerly the artistic director of the
Philadelphia Drama Guild for five
years and the associate artistic
director of Hartford Stage in
Connecticut, Ms. Robinson returns
to PTC, where she has directed
Three Viewings, Molly Sweeney
and This Is Our Youth and Dinner
With Friends. Since leaving
Philadelphia in 1995, she has lived
in Brooklyn while directing and
teaching.

Some of Ms. Robinson's recent
directing credits include Judith
Ivey's one-woman show Women on
Fire at the Cherry Lane; String
Fever at Ensemble Studio Theatre;
Jeffrey Hatcher's Three Viewings at
Manhattan Theatre Club; revivals of
Michael Weller's Moonchildren,
Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky - for
which she was nominated for a
Drama Desk Award - at Second
Stage; and A Shayna Maidel,
which ran for 15 months
off-Broadway, as well as many
regional productions from Los
Angeles Cincinnati. In addition, she
has taught for more than 11 years at
New York University, where she
currently runs the undergraduate
directing program; Ms. Robinson
has also taught in the graduate
program at Brooklyn College for 10
years.

"I'm starting to direct more these
days," she says. "Now that my son is
in high school and much more
independent, I'm getting back into
the stream a little more." ....

READ MORE

Symposium Series

After the End of History
Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m.

Rock ’n’ Roll ends in 1990. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and “the end of
history” proclaimed. Has the promise of 1989 been fulfilled in the
Czech Republic and Eastern Europe? How did the end of the Soviet
Empire contribute to the world we now live in? A panel of noted
thinkers examines what has happened in Eastern Europe and the
world since that time, and what we might expect in the future.
Participants include Benjamin Barber (Jihad Vs. McWorld, and Fear’s
Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy), Trudy Rubin (Foreign Affairs
Columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer), and Paul Wilson (Vaclav
Havel's translator and a former band member of The Plastic People of
the Universe).

Body and Soul in Rock ’n’ Roll
Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Max: “The brain is a biological machine for thinking…we could make
one out of – beer cans.”

Eleanor: “I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”

Is the mind merely excitable neurons, an “amazing biological
machine” that could be “made out of beer cans” if we understood the
technology well enough? Or is it something more? Does the soul have
a place in an age of breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial
intelligence? Join us for a provocative discussion featuring panelists
including philosopher and neuroscientist Owen Flanagan (author of
The Problem of the Soul and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a
Material World), Robert Kurzban (director of Penn Laboratory for
Experimental Evolutionary Psychology), and Joseph LeDoux (author of
Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain).

Tickets: Free for all Rock ’n’ Roll ticket-holders; otherwise, $10.
Seating is limited. For tickets, call the Box Office at (215) 546-7824, or
e-mail tickets@wilmatheater.org. Dates, times, and panelists subject
to change.