Word: tania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHEN PATTY HEARST wanted to symbolize the end of her bourgeois existence and her reincarnation as a dedicated revolutionary, she chose to rechristen herself Tania. The Tania she was thinking of was an Argentinian communist undercover-agent and guerilla fighter who was killed with Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. But this Tania--the subject of the current production at the Cambridge Ensemble--was in fact the second in the line of revolutionary Tanias, having abandoned her given name. Tamara Bunke, to rename herself after "the Tania that died in the siege of Leningrad...
...Tania rises out of the ashes of another, the struggling spirit of an obscure Russian revolutionary passes through the body of a Latin American guerilla to live on in the unlikely incarnation of a kidnapped American heiress, and the revolution continues. The individual Tanias throw off their bourgeois identities to merge into a greater Tania, a Tania who lives and breathes the revolution...
...such is the message of Maxine Klein's play, which in its structure and in its production reflects the striving towards collectivism that has been a fundamental part of most 20th-century revolutionary movements. Even the program carefully avoids anything resembling star billing. Under the heading. "The Tania Collective," everyone in the production is listed in alphabetical order, their names followed by words like "actor" or "stage manager." Klein's name appears about a quarter of the way down the page, with the explanatory note, "Author, Director." Most of the actors play several different parts, and most of the characters...
...problem is that collectivism may make good revolutions, but it doesn't necessarily make good theater. Even in the revolution there are individuals. Tania gives us too many chants and slogans and not enough character development, too many shining, upraised eyes and not enough genuine emotion. Especially in the overly long first act, the actors subject the audience to rhetorical harangues supposedly broadcast over Radio Havana, speeches that do little to explain the action or the characters. A line like "it is the duty of all revolutionaries to behave as revolutionaries no matter what country they are in" will...
...three weeks after her six comrades in the Symbionese Liberation Army died in a Shootout with police, Patricia ("Tania") Hearst dropped out of sight. Last week she and Fellow Survivors William and Emily Harris surfaced in a 33-minute tape-recorded message clandestinely delivered to radio station KPFK in Los Angeles. In it the newspaper heiress heaped scorn on her parents, vowed to fight on against "the pigs," and revealed that she had taken an S.L. A. member as her lover...