Hungarian theater director Árpád Schilling’s website doesn’t read the way most American theater artists’ do.
“The Krétakör Foundation, with Árpád Schilling’s leadership, has been searching for almost 10 years now for possible answers to the cultural crisis,” goes one line, referring to the company Schilling created and the society-wide urgency of artistic freedom under an oppressive regime.
“你,亲爱的专业少数民族,你仍然是银ent, utterly silent, and even resented when others politicised, protested, barked, created confusion!” reads another.
如果先令的写的条件in his native land electrifies and harrows, he is equally forceful in discussing gun culture in the United States, the subject of “Someone Dies Again,” the show he created withthe Imaginistsrunning Thursday,May 19, through June 11 in San Francisco and Santa Rosa.
“It’s shocking if you come from Europe, how close the (American) people are to the gun, to this kind of tool,” he told The Chronicle during a recent rehearsal break atthe Imaginists’ Santa Rosa venue.
The idea of having a gun inside the home is alien to him, as is seeing advertisements for firearms next to chicken in supermarket circulars. In an open-carry state such as Nevada, he said, “I can stand in line waiting for ice cream in front of somebody who has a huge gun, and he thinks it’s just a very peaceful day because he is a good guy. But for me, it’s very disturbing.
“If you have a gun, and if there is an argument, you can use it like a point at the end of a sentence. It’s like, if I have a gun, I’m right,” he added.
In one powerful scene, Marty (Brent Lindsay) rips a gun away from his ne’er-do-well brother, Larry (David Roby), and kicks him out of the house, leaving Larry pounding at the door and weeping in a puddle. Packing heat was Larry’s only tie to adulthood; without a firearm outdoors, even just on a doorstep, he’s an infant in a tantrum. That’s how terrifying it is to emerge from one’s tenuous home fortress in the U.S., the show posits.
If an internationally acclaimed Hungarian theater director who creates “pedagogical social projects and political actions” and a small North Bay theater company seem unlikely partners, “Someone Dies Again” is nearly a decade in the making. Imaginists Co-Artistic Director Amy Pinto got introduced to Schilling in 2013 after attending an independent theater festival in Budapest, Hungary, under the auspices of the Center for International Theatre Development.
“In every way, it was just tearing at theater,” she recalled thinking of Schilling’s work at the time.
When they later sat down to talk, the two found they shared a “wicked” sense of humor and had children of the same ages. After multiple get-to-know-you sessions, they decided to collaborate.
The group devised the show from a series of improvisations that were then transcribed and edited. That’s how Schilling prefers to work — not with an off-the-shelf script, something that’s already “perfect.” For him, to direct classics is to think, “I don’t have to take responsibility for this material because it’s the responsibility of somebody else.” As an artist, he likes being in a place of not knowing: “If there’s a question mark at the end — what is this? — maybe it’s good.”
It was important to Pinto, who in the show plays a mother whose white son died after an altercation with a Latino peer, not to be didactic or spout easy liberal pieties.
“I think there’s a thing in American theater that one, we’re all going to agree, or two, there’s a message that we can all stand up and cheer for,” she said.
“Someone Dies Again” focuses on a North Bay family who, as Schilling puts it, might say, “Oh, I never touched a gun. I have no racist thoughts.” As a lawyer (John Most) revisits the family’s case, bringing to light racial animus, the play asks its characters and its audience, “You’re sure?”
“This question was much more interesting for us than to make political propaganda about the typical white supremacists, the Christian people,” Schilling said.
An outspoken critic of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Schilling has not been back to Hungary since 2018, living in France and, for the past few months, in Santa Rosa. He noted, however, “Hungary is not Russia. I didn’t have to go to prison. There was no investigation.”
But the state found other ways to pressure him. It cut his funding. It dubbed him a national security risk. He got audited. He was no longer invited to appear on television, which he had frequently done before 2010, when Orbán came to power.
“This is a psychological thing; the method is to achieve self-censorship,” he said.
He started to find other businesses — a truck rental company, for instance — unwilling to put his company’s name on a contract because of the paper trail. Events he was invited to were abruptly canceled on flimsy excuses.
Ultimately, he didn’t leave because of Orbán; he left because his friends and colleagues told him he had been “too loud,” he said. When he used the word “fascist” to describe what was going on, others told him it was too early for such a term. “OK, so you want to wait for the moment when they kill you?” he’d reply. “This was very, very tiring for me.”
Hungarian is his mother tongue, but now he doesn’t think of himself as Hungarian.
“My family is very Christian, Catholic, white, antisemitic, racist and homophobic. This is my root. So it’s very hard to say, ‘Yeah, I want to keep my roots.’ ” Instead he says, “I’m European, or I’m a human.”
“Someone Dies Again”:Written by Árpád Schilling and the Imaginists. Directed by Árpád Schilling. Thursday, May 19-May 28. $15-$55. Z Space, 450 Florida St., S.F.www.zspace.org; June 2-11. $15-$50. The Imaginists Theater, 461 Sebastopol Ave., Santa Rosa.theimaginists.org