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Fellowship Programs Enter Refining Period

Julie Dalgleish Leaving Foundation

Bush Artist Program Introduces 2010 Fellows

Kira Obolensky

“I am at heart a surrealist.”

My proposed plans for the fellowship year might sound strange—essentially I ask for the time to reinvent myself. I’m certain that I am a playwright and will always write plays, but there’s something more that I desire in my development as a theater artist. There’s another step that has nothing to do with writing another play and finding a production for it. The feeling I can describe only as an implicit understanding that my more recent ideas seem to be somehow not contained in a computer, on a page. They are messier, maybe they are bigger, and they make me want to get my hands dirty. —From Kira Obolensky’s BAF application

However she reinvents herself, Kira Obolensky is an artist whose imagination is brilliantly multifaceted. Trained as a visual artist and classical musician, she found herself constrained by the conventions of writing traditional plays. During her fellowship period, she worked with an idea that did indeed escape the bounds of computer and page. Inspired by the work of South African director William Kentridge, she embarked on Quick Silver, a multimedia project for which she made puppets (in collaboration with visual artist Irve Dell, BAF’88); learned animation and created a film; and wrote a complex script in which human actors interact with the other elements. Still, Quick Silver bears the hallmarks of her other plays. Its drama grows out of a curious (or perhaps bizarre) historical setting, and its subtext is the mysterious workings of the human mind.

Based on the town of Danbury, Connecticut, the hatmaking capital of the world in the 1920s and ‘30s, Quick Silver explores the communal madness that overtook hatmakers who were exposed to mercury in the process of felting wool. “They had the shakes and quivers and hallucinations and their teeth fell out,” Obolensky said, “but the town was complicit”—they prospered while the rest of the country fell into the Great Depression. he premise of an earlier play, Lobster Alice, is equally provocative: It deals with the creative madness of Salvador Dali at a particularly strange moment in his career—the weeks he spent in Hollywood in 1946 working with Disney animators. “Dali’s dangerous, absurd, scatological and surreal” imagination seriously unsettles the sanitized storytelling mentality of the Disney artists. “Other playwrights would die for her imagination,” said fellow playwright and actor William Corbett. The Adventures of Herculina was inspired by the erotic diary of a French hermaphrodite, as translated by Michael Foucault. She writes with enormous wit, poetic imagery and gleeful attention to detail.

Though she has recently discovered playwrights and theater people in her ancestry—they were active in Russia before the revolution—Obolensky found her passion for theater somewhat by accident. On the advice of her mother, who remembered her daughter’s Christmas plays for the family, Obolensky took a class at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. Her success there led to a fertile period in New York as a playwright in residence at the Julliard School, a Guggeheim Fellowship, as well as grants and commissions. Lobster Alice won the 1998 Kesselring Prize (Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was an earlier winner), premiered at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis and was produced by Playwrights’ Horizons in New York. In addition to her busy theater career, Obolensky writes about art, architecture and design. She has written three best-selling design books, including The Not So Big House with architect and co-writer Sarah Susanka.

In Lobster Alice, Dali says, “It is my hope that an encounter with Dali will cause the world to be seen in a different way, that there is irrational knowledge available in the juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella upon a dissecting table.” And for herself, Obolensky said, “People who create are marveling at the notion that the world can be seen in many different ways.”

Written by Margaret Todd Maitland (BAF’89 & ’99) for Pathways to Transformation: Three Decades of the Bush Artist Fellows Program

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