One of the most recognizable symbols of the city, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge connects Buda with Pest. Glamorous on its own during the day, thousands of brilliant lights illuminate the Széchenyi at night. Exploring the city with my camera and tripod, I wanted to take some cool time-lapse pictures. The Széchenyi, with the Buda castle in the background, was the perfect subject and the epitome of the beauty of Budapest.

Nick DeFrancis  ’10

Hungary’s leading playwright, György Spiró, offers a talk called Trends in Contemporary Eastern European Drama at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 13, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, at Bates College, 56 Campus Ave.

The talk, which takes place the day before Bates presents a Spiró play in its American and English-language debut, is open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-8294.

Spiró is in residence as a learning associate at Bates during the theater production workshop that is presenting his short play Prah. Sharing a bill with Prah is Unveiling, by Czech writer Vaclav Havel. The program will be presented in performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, May 15-17, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 18, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 2 Andrews Road.

Admission for the plays is $6 for the general public and $3 for children and seniors. For more information, please call 207-786-6161 or visit the Bates online box office.

Prah is about two people who belong to the in-between generation of contemporary Hungary, explains Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater at Bates. Born and raised under communism, the pair can’t imagine how to reinvent their lives when they suddenly become rich.

“It’s a darkly funny story about old habits confronted by new and unbelievable opportunities,” says Andrucki, who is leading the workshop, held during Bates’ five-week Short Term. Andrucki commissioned the translation of the play, which he hopes will be become the standard English-language version.

According to the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, Spiró’s work has “opened a series of windows onto an era of transition: out of the bane of communism and into the bane of uncertainty.”

As Andrucki puts it, the playwright “has paid sustained and detailed attention to the relationship between people and their social environment both during and after the communist era — finding plenty to be critical about in each period.”

He adds, “It’s important to see how an insider views life in Hungary after the fall of communism. Seeing this play will help American audiences understand some of the world’s headlines in terms of the everyday lives of ordinary people.”

For his students in the production workshop, meanwhile, “the play calls for detailed realistic acting and staging, so it allows the actors, directors and designers to dig deeply into character and environment.”

Having Spiró on hand will be an invaluable resource for the students. Not only will they be able to ask about character motivation and plot, but having the playwright in the audience is “the ultimate incentive to get it right” according to Andrucki.

Havel is known as both a writer and as the first president of the Czech Republic after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Unveiling is one of three plays he wrote in the 1970s, during the crackdown following Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” of 1968, about a persecuted writer named Vanek.

“Vanek is widely regarded as Havel’s alter ego,” Andrucki explains — “a man whose dissident politics have gotten him into trouble with the authorities and alienated him from his conformist friends.”

In “Unveiling,” a couple who invites Vanek to see their newly remodeled home try to sell Vanek on their consumerist view of life, with increasingly bizarre results. Havel’s scathingly funny satire of materialism gone wild has proven popular with audiences worldwide.

István Szabó, Academy Award-winning director of the 1981 film Mephisto, comes to Bates College to give a lecture titled “Close-up: The Art of Film” at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, Andrews Road.

Szabó, Hungary’s best-known director, won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for Mephisto, the story of an actor in pre-war Germany whose ambition proves to be his downfall. (The director’s full name is pronounced “eesht-vahn saw-boh.”) The film is the subject of a first-year seminar this fall at Bates.

The lecture, sponsored by the Mellon Program in the Humanities at Bates, is open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-6378.

Szabó, like his late Polish counterpart Krzysztof Kieslowski, is one of the few directors from the former Soviet bloc to win international acclaim, explains Katalin Vecsey, a lecturer in the theater and rhetoric department who invited Szabó to Bates.

“He’s a director from a small country with a strange language who’s been able to step over those barriers and make movies for a worldwide audience,” she says.

Szabó has demonstrated a distinctive grasp of themes central to the human condition, Vecsey says, pointing to 1999′s Sunshine. Starring Ralph Fiennes and set in Hungary, the film explores the impact of anti-Semitism on successive generations of one family through three momentous periods of history — the eras of Habsburg, Nazi and Communist domination.

“It was just so touching, and I think very few people are motivated to make movies like that,” she says. “He’s talking about really universal issues, and it doesn’t matter if you are American or Hungarian or Armenian, it’s just something that you get.”

Born in 1938 in Budapest (also Vecsey’s home town), Szabó became a leading figure in the new wave of Hungarian film following the 1964 release of his first feature film, The Age of Daydreaming. He has won a variety of international awards for his work and has taught film history in London, Berlin and elsewhere. His Bates visit comes during editing in Toronto for his next film, Being Julia, with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.

First-year seminars at Bates are designed to introduce the basics of academic writing, research and critical thought. ” ‘Mephisto’: Film, Novel, Screenplay” starts with Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel, loosely based on the career of his brother-in-law. In preparation for the course, Vecsey and the theater department commissioned the first English translation of the Mephisto screenplay, originally written in Hungarian and filmed in German.

The story, says Vecsey, has “a universal message about how far people will go to be successful in their fields. It’s important to see this theme happening nowadays — if you think of network television with all the reality shows, everybody wants to be famous. People will eat anything just to be on television.”

In a production that the student cast and crew will take to Hungary this April, the theater department presents six performances of Eric Bogosian’s gritty, darkly comic play subUrbia.Bogosian’s semi-autobiographical play, the tale of a gang of slackers set in a convenience store parking lot, will be performed in at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, March 7-8 and 14-15, and at 2 p.m. Sundays, March 9 and 16, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St. Tickets are $6 for the general public and $3 for Bates faculty, staff and senior citizens.

For reservations or information, please call 207-786-6161.

An actor and monologist as well as playwright, Bogosian’s other works include the play (and screenplay adaptation) Talk Radio (1988) and the solo piece Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001). He has appeared in a number of films and television programs, including The Larry Sanders Show and Law and Order.

subUrbia was first performed on stage in 1994 and was made into a film by Slackers director Richard Linklater in 1996. Tapping Bogosian’s own experiences slacking at a strip mall in Woburn, Mass., the piece depicts a group of friends going nowhere fast. Their frustration with life erupts when a former member of the group, now a rock star, pays a visit.

The play offers three colliding versions of the American dream, explains director Martin Andrucki, Charles A. Dana Professor of theater. The first version is the dead-end existence of the slackers, who numb their boredom and frustration with sex, drugs and daydreams. There is the glitzy show-biz dreamworld of Pony, the former gang member turned rock star, and the traditional course of hard work and self-reliance followed by Norm, the Asian immigrant proprietor of the convenience store.

“There’s a lot in it that invites reflection about the nature of success, the nature of ambition, what it’s like to be young and not to know where you’re going,” Andrucki explains. “There’s a lot about racial and ethnic conflict that’s rather brutally depicted. And a lot of humor and irony about some of the things that young people are often earnestly obsessed with.”

“It seems to capture something authentic about a slice of American life in the late 20th or early 21st century,” Andrucki adds. “And it’s funny and it’s serious at the same time, so it has an interesting emotional range as well.”

The nine cast members and about half of the crew are Bates students, the remainder being faculty and staff. Most of the company will travel to Budapest, Hungary, in April for a Short Term unit involving performances at the international Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest and the International Buda Stage. It is the third Budapest Short Term in theater organized by Andrucki and his theater department colleague Katalin Vecsey, a native of Hungary.

The Jewish community of Luboml, dating from the 14th century, was among the oldest in Poland. By the 1930s, Libivne (as it was called in Yiddish), had a vibrant community of 4,000 Jews. The years between the first and second World Wars were a period of great cultural ferment in this shtetl (village).

While the family and traditional religious institutions continued to play a central role, they were joined, and sometimes challenged, by modern intellectual attitudes, styles of dress and other secular influences — particularly Zionism — which increasingly influenced this corner of Eastern Europe.

Jewish life in Luboml came to an abrupt end in October 1942, when the Germans murdered almost all of the town’s Jews. Only 51 Libivners (excluding those who had emigrated before the war) survived the Holocaust.

In 1994, Aaron Ziegelman, a Libivner who emigrated to the United States in 1938, initiated the Luboml Exhibition Project to preserve the history and the memory of the “shtetl.” To date, the project has collected nearly 2,000 photographs and artifacts from more than 100 families and archives around the world, and has videotaped oral histories with many Libivners. Remembering Luboml features highlights from the collection.

A native of Hungary and an Auburn resident, Isaacson is a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of Hessisch Lichtenau, a satellite camp of Buchenwald. Her book, Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor (University of Illinois Press, 1990), has been a best seller for both the press and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum bookstore.

An expanded edition and a German edition of the book were published in 1991, followed by a Hungarian edition in 1993. The chamber opera Seed of Sarah, composed by Mark Polishook, premiered in 1995. A film based on the opera will be released by a London producer later this year.

Isaacson served on the governing boards at Bowdoin College and recently received its Hargraves Freedom Prize. She holds honorary doctoral degrees from Bates and Colby colleges and the University of New England.

Isaacson’s talk is part of the Bates College lecture series Spiritual Journeys: Stories of the Soul featuring individuals who represent a variety of religious traditions, disciplines and professions. The photography exhibit is sponsored by the Office of the College Chaplain, the college’s Jewish Cultural Community and the Bates history department.

Ladd Library hours fom April 5 through April 25 are are Monday through Thursday, 7:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.; Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m; and Sunday 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Hours from April 26 through the end of the month of May are Monday through Thursday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday noon to 8 p.m.; and Sunday noon to 10 p.m. Summer hours, beginning June 1, are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. The library is closed Saturdays and Sundays during the summer.

The Red Faust, by Zsolt Pozsgai, a two-time award winner of the annual Erno Szap Prize for best new Hungarian play, will be directed by Martin Andrucki, professor of theater at Bates. The production stars Australian actor and Budapest resident Peter Linka, who translated the production into English and who serves on the staff of the Hungarian National Academy of Drama and Film. All other actors are Bates students.

The play is a fictionalized version of the life of Mindszenty. Jailed by the fascists during World War II and sentenced to life imprisonment by the communists during 1949, the Hungarian dissident was briefly freed during the 1956 revolution. With the arrival of Soviet troops in Budapest, he sought refuge in the American embassy, where he spent the next 15 years of his life.

In this drama, the playwright imagines Mindszenty as a kind of Faust, constantly tempted by a diabolical fellow inmate to abandon his principles in exchange for freedom.

In May, as part of a Short Term unit in which students at Bates study one subject in great detail for five weeks, the Bates cast and crew will head to Hungary where they will present their English-language production at the International Buda Stage. The U.S. Embassy, where Mindszenty sought refuge, will host a reception for the Bates students during their stay.

Katalin Vecsey, a lecturer in theater at Bates with extensive Budapest connections, will accompany the group, which will study historical and political backgrounds of the play, meet with leading figures in contemporary Hungarian culture and visit relevant historical sites.

Vecsey and Andrucki originally received a special faculty development grant from Bates College to study and translate contemporary Hungarian drama and establish ongoing relationships between the college and the Budapest theater community.