Katalin Vecsey (USA/HU)
Between Place and Time: Social and Cultural “Reality” of Post-Communist Hungary in the Contemporary American Drama Balaton
Twenty years after the fall of communism in Europe, the transition is still in progress. According to transition scholarship, ‘‘East and Central European societies are best regarded as places where virtually everyone, save a tiny political elite, belongs to the same sociologically faceless and non-descript assemblage’’ (Fuller, 2000).
Ashlin Halfnight’s new play, Balaton, puts faces to that assemblage and, through the lives and longings of five characters, voices the socio-economical and cultural changes of post-communist Hungary. The four-generation family drama, set very creatively in a tenuous afterlife, allows the characters to move fluidly between place and time. The author examines the problems in interpersonal family relationships—between mother and son, and husband and wife—while making us aware of the lingering ghost of the communist past. This process becomes especially painful when the family matriarch is confronted with her “informer” past. The play also examines the consequences of the recent wave of immigration to the United States of young Hungarian intellectuals.
The world premiere of Balaton by the Electric Pear Productions Company in New York opened on October 17, 2009 under the direction of Kristjan Thor. The author, Ashlin Halfnight, was a 2006 Fulbright Award winner, and an artist in residence at the National Theatre of Hungary. This paper analyzes the drama as a mirror of the personal problems arising out of a uniquely transformative social and historical period. It also discusses the New York production.