Péter Halász: 1943-2006

I was born into Péter's theatre, onstage while still in the womb, performing as I learned to use a potty. Over time, I became Péter's witness, confidante, interlocutor, and, on occasion, inspiration. My insights into Péter's life and art are inflected by an intimacy few children have with their parents, by the idealization of the recently deceased, and by the very ethos of his performativity, which actively blurred the distinctions between art and everyday life. Our closeness has challenged me to find an Archimedean point from which to comprehend what Péter Halász—my father, seminal figure in the Hungarian avantgarde, award-winning actor and director, agent provocateur in downtown New York theatre—created with his life and art.

Figure 1.

Péter Halász, actor, director, and filmmaker. Sullivan County, New York, 2004. (Photo by Judith "Galus" Halasz)

Péter was a child of war and resistance. World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the Hungarian Revolution were not simply matters of circumstance, but active participants in his life. His relatives were taken to concentration camps; some would survive to recount the horror. His mother took part in the underground resistance to the Nazis, his father played a leading role in the 1956 Revolution, and Péter and his brothers ran out in the streets to witness the symbolic razing of Stalin's statue and the foolish valiance of the local invalids who armed themselves and faced off with Russian tanks. With the immortality of youth, the boys would make light of the situation. Shells would explode in the night and one of the brothers would ask, "Who farted?" These were the stories Péter would tell me repeatedly—as if by sharing the tragic absurdity, the absurd tragedy, we could exorcise the hauntings with laughter and remembrance.

As I began working on my dissertation on bohemian life, I asked Péter, "What drew you to the theatre?" He answered with three childhood memories. One of his earliest recollections was of a woman with her entire head masked by post-operative bandages—his mother's undercover patient. This woman became Péter's faceless babysitter as she secretly convalesced in the family home. The masked woman, symbol of his mother and her empathetic heroism: a doctor who helped other Jews escape by forging documents and forging their faces. At his beloved mother's funeral, Péter's brother tormented him with irresistible jokes. Despite the pain, he could not suppress the forbidden laughter. In the following days, as he told his young schoolmates of his mother's death and funeral, he discovered that he could capture the rapt attention of an audience with story. Having experienced the electricity of the spotlight, young Péter was hooked. He would mature into a master raconteur, using succinct gesture and word to convey the tragic humor that circumscribed his life.

From his earliest encounters with the theatre in his university days until his death, Péter worked tirelessly at his art—acting in theatre and films, directing, writing, producing, filming, staging operas, teaching theatre, even singing and dancing. After his initiation into classical drama with the Hungarian University Theatre (1962-1969), Péter founded five theatres with friends and lovers: Kassak Theatre (1969); the nameless underground apartment theatre in our home on Dohany Utca, where the group moved after being banned from the Kassak Culture House (1972); Squat Theatre (1976); Love Theatre (1985); Varosi Szinhaz (2001); and informal groups in between. With each iteration, he left his mark on the avantgarde.

With Squat and the preceding groups, he experimented with form and framework. What began as amimetic, Happening-inspired performances in the 1960s would mature into collectively created compilations of vignettes, which were juxtaposed to form a bricolage of everyday life with classical, modern, and popular cultures. The implication of the audience in performance, the storefront as theatre space, and the use of film in live shows constitute some of their most exemplary interventions in avantgarde theatre. At first, the audience was pulled into the...