Welcome to the Fall 2024 issue of The Mercurian!

We begin with Laurence Senelick’s translation of Russian playwright Mikhail Lermontov’s play Masquerade from 1835.  Like me, many readers may only be familiar with Lermontov’s name from Chekhov’s character Solyony in Three Sisters who compares himself to Lermontov and quotes a Lermontov poem.  As Senelick describes in his introduction to the translated play, Lermontov’s penchant for self-dramatization created a Byronesque impression of him in the popular imagination that he encouraged by provoking scandals in his personal life and projecting his disbelief in convention on the characters in his work.  Masquerade’s anti-hero Arbenin becomes a vehicle for exposing the hypocritical nature of 1830s St. Petersburg high society.  Senelick’s translation of Austrian playwright Ferdinand Raimund’s play The Mountain King and the Misanthrope appeared in our Spring 2024 issue, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Masquerade is followed by Cobina Gillitt’s translation of Indonesian playwright Putu Wijaya’s short monodrama OH from 2021.  As Gillitt puts it in her introduction to the translation, Putu’s work is inspired by his Balinese upbringing, including the aesthetics of traditional Balinese paintings that mix multiple life events at once.  This leads him to create plays that mirror reality’s unpredictability by combining comedy, tragedy, and the absurd in a single work.  Believing the objective of his theatre is to create “mental terror”, Putu seeks to provoke his audience’s long-term thought and self-reflection, not merely to entertain.  Readers can decide for themselves if he succeeds in disrupting their world view, causing them to question what is real or true either now or sometime in the future.

Next comes Cuban playwright Alberto Pedro Torriente’s play Infinite Banquet in Linda S. Howe’s translation.  Infinite Banquet, written and rewritten between 1996-2003, is a satirical farce that reflects not only the economic crisis of the Special Period (1990-2000) caused by the abrupt loss of subsidies to Cuba from the defunct Soviet Union, but also explores the State’s desire to maintain power at all costs.  Taking place in an unnamed country Torriente’s play depicts a leader, Hierarch, who, having lost the approval of the masses, reinvents himself as Paradigm, a new leader with the same face who is then himself deposed.  In its scatological language and stage antics Infinite Banquet is reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, but its complex Cuban cultural references and use of the Cuban choteo—jokes that “mock personal and national predicaments”—as Howe describes in her introduction, firmly root the play in the Cuban context while simultaneously creating a piece that speaks to failed utopian political systems globally.  Howe’s work has appeared previously in The Mercurian with her translation of Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera’s The Serfs in Vol. 9, No. 3 (Spring 2023).

The issue concludes with Jozefina Komporaly’s review of Plays from Contemporary Hungary: ‘Difficult Women’ and Resistant Dramatic Voices, Edited and Translated by Szilvi Naray.  Komporaly’s translation of Romanian playwright Matéi Visniec’s Decomposed Theatre appeared in The Mercurian, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2021).  Faithful readers of this journal may recall Naray’s article “True to the ‘The Life’ in the Text: Naturalistic Drama Through the Actors’ Naturalistic Tools” about her translation process with Hungarian playwright Jànos Hay’s Sunday Lunch that appeared in The Mercurian, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall 2013).

Back issues of The Mercurian can be found at under the “Archives” tab on our website: https://the-mercurian.com/. As the theatre is nothing without its audience, The Mercurian welcomes your comments, questions, complaints, and critiques. Deadline for submissions for consideration for Volume 10, No. 3 Spring 2025 will be February 15, 2025.

—Adam Versényi