The Audience of The City at Dawn Performance

Abstract

The phenomenon of the Moscow State Theatre Studio under the direction of Alexei Arbuzov and Valentin Pluchek, which in February 1941 produced the play The City at Dawn about the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, can be viewed from different angles. One of the most important aspects is the relationship between the creators of the play and its audience. This article examines a series of issues: who the audience of the play was, what response the play, written collectively by the students of the studio, found in the public, how the audience perceived the aesthetic innovations of The City at Dawn, and if the ambition of the Arbuzov Studio to become the ‘voice of the generation’ who graduated from schools and universities in the late 1930s and went off to war in 1941, was finally realized. The article publishes (mostly for the first time) the texts of letters and notes sent by the audience to the members of the Arbuzov Studio, the answers to questionnaires that the audience was asked to fill out, and the quotes from the studio journal of observations of the performance.

Keywords

• city at dawn
• a.n. arbuzov
• v.n. pluchek
• studio
• audience questionnaires
• sociology of the audience
• dispute