In 1957 Richard Southern published a book dedicated “to the memory of Bertolt Brecht and to the Berliner Ensemble.” It was written, as he says in his Foreword, from the point of view “of a practising scene designer” enthusiastic about his “discovery of how the ‘new’ open stage demanded a new form of auditorium and implied a new form of theatre.” His book, while historical in subject, was a gesture towards “joining the avant-garde who stand on the threshold of a new world.” Since 1957 new worlds have come and gone. In contrast, The Medieval Theatre in the Round has become for some theatre historians a fixed star by which to plot their interpretations of the surviving evidence of late-medieval stagecraft.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational Theatre Journal. All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RAYMOND ). PENTZELL A Hungarian Christmas Mummers' Play in Toledo, OhioFew people, even residents of Toledo, Ohio, are aware that a Hungarian folkplay is performed through the streets and in the houses of a neighborhood on the East Side of the city every Christmastime. The play has received no substantial newspaper coverage, at least in the last decade. Even folklorists seem not to know of it. After living and teaching in Toledo for eight years, I learned of its existence from a student in an introductory theatre-history class who appeared singularly unimpressed by the mysteriousness of seasonal hero-combats, Perchtenliaufen, komoi, and Frazerian hypothesizing. "Oh, we have all that over on the East Side every year," he told me. "In Birmingham, among the Hungarians. It's a Bethlehem Shepherds' play, but it's got all your boogie-man stuff in it too." Thus I encountered (unprepared by experience in folklore fieldwork) the local versions of the Betlehemes jatdk, a folk genre familiar in every part of Hungary and in Hungarian communities within the present borders of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians began to make their presence felt in the sparsely settled East Toledo section called "Birmingham" in the 1880s. Around 1892 the National Malleable Castings Co. transferred a number of Hungarian workers from its home foundry in Cleveland to its new plant in Toledo, and within a few yearsBirmingham had taken on the character of a Magyar enclave. Local records show that most of the populace had emigrated from the so-called Pal6c2 counties of North-Central Hungary: Heves, Abauj (now part of Borsod-Abauj-Zemplen County), and Gomior (now in Czechoslovakia). Most, though far from all, were and remain Roman Catholic. Although assigned to a nearby parish, they were visited regularly by a Hungarian priest from Cleveland; Raymond J. Pentzell is Professor of Theatre at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Theatre Survey, TDR, and Comparative Drama. This article is based upon a paper presented to the American Society for Theatre Research in 1975. 1 My debts to local informants, guides, and translators are many. Most helpful were the Rev. Martin Hernady (Pastor of St. Stephen's Church), Mr. Peter Ujvagi, Mrs. Anne Campbell, Mr. A. E. Hochstein, and a student research-assistant, Mr. John Anderson. 2 The Pal6c people are an ethnic group with a recognizable dialect, living in the Matra Mountains along the Czech-Hungarian border. By loose extension, the inhabitants of N6grad, Heves, and Borso...
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