It was 18 years ago. I had been in rehearsals for a show in Philadelphia for more than three weeks when it dawned on me that the director didn’t seem to know my name. Or if he did, he had never used it. He spoke to me rarely, and his taciturn manner had started to rankle. The actor I was playing opposite felt the same way about him, so one night we conspired to loosen the director up a bit over a bonding beer at a local pub.
The director was Jiri Zizka, and that night was the start of a long friendship that would last until the day he died. Instead of the remote, cool man we thought we knew from the rehearsal room, the singular Jiri—inspired director, passionate producer, innovative filmmaker/animator, Czech political refugee, visual chronicler of the Velvet Revolution, athlete, intellectual, and co-founder, with his wife Blanka Zizka, of the Wilma, one of the finest regional theatres in America—was actually a pretty approachable guy.
Jiri never had the ability to suffer fools gladly, but being perceived of as standoffish and even mysterious didn’t seem to faze him one bit. Mysterious? Well, why did he hold all those passports? And just how many languages did he speak? I counted at least five. Why on earth was he a crack shot and an expert skier? Why did he drive a hundred miles an hour? Was he some kind of glamorous spy posing under the handy cover of theatre?
Usually dressed in black, from soft-soled shoes (the better to tread softly) to ever-present baseball cap, with a crisp white button-down shirt, he had a European panache that made him stand out in crowds of Americans. His pithy, sometimes searing, always insightful comments rarely contained an extra syllable.
Jiri was a frequent guest at my house in the Delaware Water Gap, and one weekend when dinnertime rolled around, he offered to get takeout Thai food. In the time it took him to go on his errand, a violent flash storm hit my little valley and a 75-foot tree crashed onto the back side of my property. The upper branches of the tree completely embraced the house, but somehow the only structural damage was a bent gutter. The deck and garden however, were destroyed. The storm passed within 20 minutes, and an unsuspecting Jiri returned via the front door with dinner in hand. I told him I had something to show him and led him to the utter mayhem out back. His eyes went slowly back and forth from the gigantic root ball to the mess of a yard and shattered deck, and then to the house proper that had been miraculously spared. Then he said, in a blasé tone, “You should buy a lottery ticket,” and headed back into the house to eat his Pad Thai.
But as gifted a director/producer and as enigmatic a personality as he was, when I think of Jiri, I think first of visuals. His house, which he renovated himself, was (unlike his sartorial preferences) splashed with vivid colors and undulating shapes punctuated by framed prints of his fellow Czech Mucha’s art nouveau femmes fatales. Jiri communicated his personal perception of beauty to his theatrical canvas with his inspired set concepts and fantastic projections. His shows were filled with stunning imagery, most recently the evocative landscape of doors in the American premiere of Václav Havel’s Leaving, Jiri’s last show. Mr. Havel, a great hero and friend of the Zizkas, was present at opening night and the pride in Jiri’s normally inscrutable eyes was clearly evident.
Until recently, all of the Wilma’s production shots were credited to a photographer named George Golem. “George,” who was actually Jiri, took thousands of pictures of the wonderful theatre created by the Zizkas. He had an uncanny ability of catching on film the ephemeral magic of live performance. A series of oversized freeze-frames of productions spanning three decades form an indelible collage in the lobby of the Wilma.
Blanka now mans the fort without Jiri, and under her sole leadership their theatre will continue to flourish and grow, but the enormous scope of his contribution to the Wilma and to American theatre is memorialized forever by signal moments in imaginary time the wily Jiri captured and shared with us all.
I hope in his own final “leaving,” he found a door that led to peace. Vaya con Dios, Jiri Zizka, my endlessly interesting friend.
Alison Fraser is an actress. For a sampler of Jiri Zizka’s theatrical photographs, visit www.tcg.org/americantheatre.
