The Woman Rabbi (Rabínka)

Abstract

About the Author: Anna Grusková (1962) is a theatre and film director, playwright, screenwriter, theatre scientist and curator. She graduated from the theatre and film science at the Charles University in Prague. Her doctoral studies took place at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. She worked as a lecturer at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, then in the Bratislava Theatre Institute and as editor-in-chief of the review Medzičasopis. In 2001, she spent three months in India. After return she started focusing on art – theatre and television dramaturgy, acting, directing, writing radio and theatre plays, prose, poetry as well as translating. She has staged productions with mentally challenged actors, homeless people and social workers, she co-operates with professional theatres in Slovakia and abroad. In this way she has directed the play The Bloody Key (with Uršuľa Kovalyk, 2004), her adaption of Arthur Schnitzler play Five Courses for Two Persons (2009), as well as the collection of short international plays Danube Drama or Ugly Coffee and Cheap Cigarettes (2010). She has written plays for Slovak Radio, such as A Turkish Fancy for Women (1996) about the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt or Almtraum (2004) about Alma Mahler-Werfel; she has adapted the Indian fables Panchatantra (2002) and the Sanskrit epic poemMahabharata (2004). Grusková has initiated important Slovak and international social and theatre projects like Brides (2007–2009) or Sarcophaguses and Cashpoints (2008–2009) and she has written the core play for the Czech Project of the Archa Theatre Chance ’89 (2009), with an intention to create theatre plays reflecting the life in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia before and after the Velvet Revolution. In 2012, she became a film director. She has directed, among others, the docufilm The Woman Rabbi (2012) and A Return to the Burning House (2014) dedicated to Haviva Reick who was one of the parachutists sent by the Jewish Agency on military missions in Slovakia in 1944. She writes both in Slovak and Czech language and translates from the German into Slovak (Arthur Schnitzler, Hans-Thies Lehmann).