An Old Theater

Snow days at home were always among my least favorite kinds of holidays. To be sure, it was nice to get to sleep in and spend a lazy day in my pajamas…but what good is a free day if the roads are too bad to spend it visiting friends or obliterating my to-do list? Here, though, I can walk wherever I need to go. I don’t really have friends and my to-do list involves studying Georgian verbs, so being home suits me fine. Yesterday, I read and wrote for most of the day. Maguala’s friend came over at noon—as always—and I had coffee with them. This particular friend has recently started bringing her grandchild with her when she visits. 

The women talked for awhile and I quietly sipped my coffee. I don’t usually talk much when Maguala has friends over,  because her coffee-hour is her one time to relax and enjoy herself each day. This time, though, I tried to take part when matters turned to slightly less-serious problems. And what a reaction I got!

You see, at theater practice the previous day, Giorgi announced that the local government had reniged on their promise to sponsor (in part) his group’s performance. Ineza, the German speaker, explained to me that they need 2000 GEL to buy costumes and some curtains for a very basic set. That’s about $1500. The woman from the local government that Giorgi talked to said he should just have his parents send the money from Tbilisi. To contextualize this, let me reiterate that the government had already said they would provide some funding and let me say that Tbilisi has a staggeringly huge percentage of her population living below the poverty line. Not that Giorgi or his parents are part of that statistic necessarily—I don’t know, but the probability that his parents have that kind of money to send to a place that doesn’t want to do anything to help itself…

Giorgi responded by leading a team-building exercise and entreating his cast to take heart. They responded by saying simply “We’ll perform regardless.” Maybe because I’m an American or maybe because I’m a Villa girl (my high school has a reputation for turning out over-achievers), my reaction was totally different. I sat down with paper and a pencil and brainstormed. Fundraising in Oni wouldn’t work: most people don’t have much spare money and the politics between the families are too complicated. Certainly, they could use a coffee-shop or a bakery; someplace that sold to-go hot coffee would do very well because such a commodity is cheap to produce, cheap to buy, in demand, and fashionable enough that people would be drawn to it. But the theater group can’t have a bake sale or coffee stand because family members without money would feel obliged to support them and neighbors from other families might not exactly be supportive. Fundraising in Tbilisi wouldn’t work: again, people don’t have money…and the people in Tbilisi have no reason to send money for a show to Racha. With a bit of internet, we could fundraise in America. The easiest and most practical things to make here and sell there would be either recordings of folk songs or a cookbook.

I figured it could work pretty easily. The people here are proud of their music and their recipes, so I figured they wouldn’t be opposed to sharing these things—pooling their talents to generate marketable commodities which would cost them nothing and potentially support their performance. If they recorded music, I could send the files home to either my sisters or my friends. They could burn CDs to sell cheaply at theater performances at Villa, Malvern, NYU…I have a lot of friends in theater, and $1500 isn’t an impossibly huge sum to raise. If the cast here provided recipes, it would be more work for me. I would have to translate everything, organize it into a single document, and then look up book-printing services in the US. Again, a sister or a friend would have to pick up the books and sell them, but it wouldn’t be very difficult. Within a few minutes, I was feeling pretty pleased and sure that we could solve their budgetary problem. And really, why were they relying on the government for funding anyway?

I figured very incorrectly. I tried to talk to Giorgi about it, but he just wanted to tell me how much he likes my nose and wants me to come to Tbilisi with him. So that didn’t work. Then, when Maguala was telling her friend about their situation during their coffee-hour yesterday, I told her my idea. I was careful with my phrasing. I needed to make sure that I didn’t sound patronizing, that I didn’t reinforce any misconceptions about Americans having lots of money lying around, and that I use the right tenses for all my verbs. She laughed and asked why I would want to help. Vistvis? Giorgis? Sisuleli xar. she said. “For whom? Giorgi? You’re ridiculous.”

And that was the end of it. I’m ridiculous. Working is ridiculous. Self-efficacy is ridiculous. Wanting to support a cause outside one’s own self is ridiculous. It’s a mindset that drives me crazy, but that I was warned about before I came here. A friend in Prague told me that Eastern Europeans have a special apathy that they cherish. A friend who lived in Russia told me that the deficit of men post-WWII led women to spoil the men who were there, so that now there are many lazy men and many cynical over-worked women. After first visiting Georgia, a friend told me that the soviet mentality (rather than a communist mentality) has led people to treat the exteriors of their cities with indifference. He reported that apartments may be nice and people may take great care of their clothes, but at the same time they let the balconies crumble from their buildings because such things are considered the responsibility of the government. And usually the government does nothing.

6 o’clock rolled around, and Maguala and I got ready to go to play practice. Today, they were practicing in the old theater at the House of Culture. Maguala warned me to dress warmly because the building isn’t heated, and off we went. I’d been to this building once before. At the time, I was there to record voices for Keti’s puppet show. I was also very sick, which spurred me to go in search of a bathroom. I found a room with a sink, a urinal-like hole in the floor, and a swastika graffitied on the wall. As we crunched through the snow to the building this time, I said a quick prayer of thanks that this time I was healthy. We walked first through an empty blue room with pictures all over the walls. Giorgi Berishvili and Goiko told me that the room was a discotheque 15 years ago. Goiko’s uncle used to work at the bar there. The pictures, they also told me, are all from performances that were held in the big theater. There were photos of our Avto as a young man, of Keti and her brother as children, of Maguala’s neighbors and of Batono Giga Japaridze himself.

We walked into the huge theater auditorium, and I was breathless. The walls and ceiling were elaborately decorated with wallpaper that is now ripped and discolored in some places. I saw the windows in the back of the theater where a video projector may have been, and then Goiko suggested not standing under them because pieces of the ceiling there were crumbling. I was wondering about the people who used to come use this space. He was worrying about pieces of concrete hitting me in the head and killing me. Amazingly, this is typical.

While the cast milled around complaining about the cold and waiting for the few who are always late, I explored under and behind the stage. The stage itself is relatively new. Obviously it was rebuilt recently. Underneath, though, the floorboards sagged and cracked as rotten wood gave way under my feet. The giant turntable in the middle of the stage was long ago rendered stationary by rusted gears and swollen old wood. The rooms upstairs had holes in the walls and cracks in the ceilings. There were no panes in the windows, so the old costumes hanging like ghosts in some of the rooms were more worn from weather exposure than from use.

I did a lot of thinking during the practice. Giorgi had other girls there to flirt with, and the old women were too cold to do more than throw coats at me (I was buried under 4 at one point)…so I was left with my thoughts in the cold creaky theater for about three hours.

Obviously, fixing the ceiling or the windows in the theater would require a lot of money and a lot of work. Other things, though, like painting the stage or sweeping the floor would greatly improve the space and could be done cheaply. If on one spring day someone cared enough to air out the room and spend a few hours with a mop, the space would be much more lively. The front room, the old discotheque, is in perfectly good condition and the bar almost looks new (if empty). The more I learn about this place, the more of a puzzle it becomes. At first, I wondered that there were no public places for socializing other than the street. There are no bars or cafes or theaters…Over the past few months I’ve learned that once Oni had all of these things. They gave people places to meet outside their homes, but more importantly they gave young people places to laugh and they provided badly needed jobs.

The café closed when the Germans who ran it fled the war. The theater fell into disrepair after its last director passed away. The declared center of Oni has changed its face over the past two decades, but more interesting is that the actual center (where the traffic is concentrated) is both unacknowledged and on the opposite side of town from where it used to be. One war meant that wealthy tourists stopped coming from the north and a second war meant that visitors coming from Tbilisi could no longer take the short-cut through South Ossetia. As a result, the flow of traffic (what there is of it) through Oni was totally reversed. Some streets are hardly streets at this point. Some buildings have been bombed or earthquake damaged, and rebuilding them would take more money than anyone here has. Some buildings just need a little love and elbow grease, but things are complicated. Love and elbow grease aren't possible if people don't care enough to give them...if people don't see a point to expending effort on something that could be confiscated or bombed and that doesn't give them any concrete benefits. 

I want to know why they think the way they do. I also want to know why I think the way I do. Why should they put effort into fixing up a theater? Why do I feel an urge to help them? How I long to understand......