Tied (and Untied)

by Hanoch Levin Translation: Terry Fisher Director: Terry Fisher Set and Costume Design: Elena Ivanova Composer: Emiliyan Gatsov-Elbi Choreography: Mila Iskreanova Constructor: Borislav Tonev-Bucky Cast: Svezhen Mladenov Zhana Rasheva Georgi Zlatarev Mariana Zhikich Hrista Botev Stanchev TIED (AND UNTIED) is an anti-romantic comedy in which everyone is smarter than normal, but all are forced to get married. Marriage promises no joy, yet freedom threatens them with social failure, stamped with the label “old bachelors and old maids.” With the intelligence and vacillation of Hamlet, poised between self-contempt and arrogance, stands our hero, who must choose between two women he cannot stand. He must choose between elusive heroism and the horror of living the life of an average loser. Yet two dangerously intelligent ladies and two virtuoso seducers—pickup artists—stand opposite him. And so five people are set against one another for the purpose of getting married, without wanting to. Hanoch Levin continues the line of Gogol and Molière, except that from these character-types emerge living people, with their frank, stripped-down, and unsentimental strategy of sexual survival. Love is bittersweet in the poets of love; bittersweet is Hanoch Levin’s laughter on the other side of love. — Terry Fisher