• Marion Gering and Louis Lozowick as Meyerhold’s followers in the USA: a constructivist production Gas (1926)

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DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2025-3-10-31

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Maxim M. Gudkov

Senior lecturer of Department of interdisciplinary art studies and practices of the Faculty of liberal arts and sciences
Saint Petersburg State University, Russian State Institute of Performing Art
Saint Petersburg, Russia
E-mail: m.gudkov@spbu.ru

Marion Gering and Louis Lozowick as Meyerhold’s followers in the USA: a constructivist production Gas (1926)

Abstract

The study focuses on the analysis of the stage activities of little-known both in the USA and in Russia Vsevolod Meyerhold’s American followers. Theatre director Marion Gering was a student of the Soviet Master at the State Higher Directing Workshops (GVYRM) and the Theatre of the State Institute of Theatre Art (GITIS Theatre). He emigrated to the United States in 1924. Louis Lozowick was a set designer who got acquainted with The Meyerhold Theatre (TIM) productions in Moscow in 1923. They both were inspired by Meyerhold’s main constructivist productions — The Magnanimous Cuckold, Tarelkin’s Death (both 1922) and The Earth Stands on End (1923). For the first time in Russian theatre studies, their brief creative biography is given, as well as a description of the Goodman Memorial Theatre in Chicago where they staged Georg Kaiser’s play Gas in 1926. The example of this production reveals Gering’s and Lozowick’s continuity with Meyerhold’s constructivist ideas: the conceptuality of the solution and the special organization of the stage space outside the realistic, illusionistic theatre traditions. The production of Gas was characterized by volumetric-spatial composition, rhythmic play of alternating horizontals and verticals, contrast of volumes and planes, and changes in forms using light and shadow. The study is based on materials from collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (including papers of Roman Bohnen, — an actor who played a role in Chicago’s Gas), the Chicago Public Library (including the Goodman Theatre Archive), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D. C., including the Louis Lozowick papers). This study allows to deepen the understanding of the incorporation of Meyerhold’s theatre ideas abroad, as well as to clarify the cultural relations between our country and the United States during the interwar period of the twentieth century.

Keywords

American theatre, Soviet theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold, stage constructivism, Marion Gering, Louis Lozowick, Georg Kaiser, Gas play, Goodman Memorial Theate in Chicago.

For citation

Gudkov M. M. Marion Gering and Louis Lozowick as Meyerhold’s Followers in the USA: а Constructivist Production Gas (1926). Theatre. Fine Arts. Cinema. Music. 2025, no. 3, pp. 10–31.

DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2025-3-10-31

EDN AAPTAY

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Received: 15.07.2025

Revised: 05.08.2025

Accepted: 09.08.2025