Perspectives / László Marton László Marton has been artistic director of Vígszínház in Hungary since 1987. He directed several Humana Festival shows during the 1990s. How did it happen that I came here from faraway Budapest, in the little country of Hungary, to the Humana Festival to tell stories by American playwrights about American life? The idea came from my friend Jon Jory. When he called me I was very doubtful whether I would be able to direct an original American play. That was when I first read Beast on the Moon. I was just about to call him when I suddenly remembered my relatives, most of whom have been living in America for forty or fifty years. They have never lost their strong Hungarian accents, they have been eating the same Hungarian food – sausages, salami, goulash, goose liver – and they have kept all the same old Hungarian rituals. But while preserving the Hungarian tradition, they have always proudly declared themselves Americans. And so the poetic Beast on the Moon, a magnificent play by Richard Kalinoski, a story about Armenians in America, quite naturally became a play I felt very, very close to. A new American play, ready to face the world. In the history of theatre the most important playwrights have always portrayed the life of their own communities. Just think of Molière, Chekhov, Goldoni, Lope de Vega or Shakespeare. They wrote for their own audience and yet – what a paradox – we still identify with their heroes, regardless of race, culture and nationality. This helps us to understand the success of the Humana Festival. The new plays are written about Americans – average Americans – with their own unique problems, desires, defeats and successes. Actors’s intention is to create new American drama and to stage it authentically for the very first time. The original production largely determines the future of a new play and the future of the playwright. This is the director’s biggest responsibility. To help when a child is born. The responsibility of a midwife.