The Battle of Stalingrad OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF The Battle of Stalingrad

  

  Souls Suspended on a String in the Shadows of a Russian City Under Siege

  Charles Isherwood

  July 22, 2010: War buffs who can settle down in front of the History channel for marathon viewings are decidedly not the audience for “The Battle of Stalingrad,” the puppet-theater piece by the Georgian writer and director Rezo Gabriadze that returns to the Lincoln Center Festival this year after first being presented in 2002. (It replaces a new show of his that was not completed in time for the run.) In spite of its documentary-worthy title, Mr. Gabriadze’s play is not a straightforward dramatization of that monumental and bloody battle but a quirky theatrical poem on the vagaries of life itself.

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• BACKSTAGE REVIEW OF The Battle of Stalingrad

  

  The Battle of Stalingrad

  Jason Fitzgerald

  July 22, 2010: In the opening image of "The Battle of Stalingrad," the puppet-theater piece by Georgian writer-director Rezo Gabriadze, now in a return engagement at Lincoln Center Festival 2010, a peaceful, melancholy face emerges from a mound of sand, followed somewhat delicately by its corpselike body. The ghost methodically recovers tokens—a flag, a helmet, a cross, a star—and presents them to us before returning to a seemingly endless slumber. This brief but memorable scene anticipates the structure of the 90-minute performance to follow. From the sands of a forgotten history, half-remembered stories and dreamlike fantasies vanish as quickly as they appear, leaving behind the awesome responsibility of remembering.

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