Cerību ezers

(Jaunais Rīgas Teātris, 15 June 2016)

The play consists of a potpourri of snippets and soundbites, perhaps meaningful to the director and evocative for some in the audience, but not adding up to a coherent narrative or a portrait, and hence not adding to the audience's private experience (if any) with the subject matter of the play.

An artist should aspire to deal in the largest unit he can perfect. A theatre production is a complex, delicate enterprise. Rīdzinieki have mastered the art of cafes, which compete with and surpass in their design and ambiance those in Paris and Vienna. Good taste and some worldliness suffice to succeed in design. Scriptwriting and direction require intelligence of a top scientist or engineer---in addition to good taste---and so are scarce.

Exposure to an authoritarian regime conditions an individual to blame authority for his circumstance and attitude to this circumstance. Authoritarian regimes arbitrarily label individuals and pitch them against each other. It is peculiar that individuals would choose to brood on these arbitrary divisions even after the authoritarian regime collapses, instead of choosing to exploit their newly gained freedoms by pursuing art, science, and entrepreneurship.