Two Ukrainian women among entrepreneurs honored by theater community (01/24/99)

Two Ukrainian women among entrepreneurs honored by theater community

by Cathy Zadoretzky

NEW YORK - Vera Shumeyko and Olga Shuhan of Kobasniuk Travel Agency were celebrated as recipients of the 1998 Local Heroes Awards, presented by the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York (A.R.T./New York) on December 7, 1998.

They were among entrepreneurs of 28 small businesses in Manhattan who were honored for their unusual contributions to New York theater at the organization's annual meeting and reception at the Roundabout Theatre on Broadway.

"I was very proud," said Mrs. Shumeyko, when Mrs. Shuhan was presented their award that evening on stage. The awards ceremony was attended by over 500 of New York's theater directors and stars.

A.R.T./New York serves New York City's 350 not-for-profit theater companies, from which have come some of the finest works of American professional theater. Their cumulative history of Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and a profusion of other commendations has distinguished the New York theater community as an epi-center of talent and innovation.

The Kobasniuk Travel Agency was nominated for recognition by the Yara Arts Group "for sending Yara to Siberia and for bringing them back."

"They did everything but rent our horses," recounted Yara Director Virlana Tkacz; "the Buryats did that for us."

The Yara Arts Group is a member of A.R.T./New York and creates theater pieces in collaboration with artists from the East, especially those of Ukraine. It is a resident company at the internationally renowned experimental theater, La MaMa, E.T.C. Yara has performed at festivals in Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv in Ukraine with artists such as the legendary Nina Matvienko. In recent years, Yara has initiated a variety of projects in Ulan Ude, Siberia, with artists from the Buryat National Theatre.

In fact, the troupe has worked abroad nine times with the help of the Kobasniuk Travel Agency. Mrs. Shuhan, a travel agent with Kobasniuk, made all of Yara's arrangements. An actress who has worked in the Ukrainian theater, with the Yara Arts Group and most recently with the experimental theater group of Ping Chong, Mrs. Shuhan has been particularly adept at negotiating Yara's budgetary and artistic needs.

"I have been deeply touched by Olga's dramatic passion, always tempered by subtlety," reflected Ms. Tkacz. She first admired Olga at work as a student of Josyf Hirniak and Olympia Dobrovolska, original players with the theater group of Les Kurbas, Ms. Tkacz's inspiration.

"I am an avid theater-goer," remarked Mrs. Shumeyko, the agency owner, who remembers attending every stage play, operetta and concert at the Ukrainian National Home on Sixth Street with her parents when she was a young girl. "I danced in Vasile Avramenko's children's dance group - we were all about 12 and under - and we were very good." She recalled that her father, Stephan Kowbasniuk, sponsored the opera "Mazepa" for the stage impresario, Dmytro Chutro, in the early 30s, in which she and the other children in Avramenko's group danced one dance.

Mrs. Shumeyko's father founded the Kobasniuk agency (the "w" was eventually dropped) on the Lower East Side in 1920. He sold steamship tickets for the White Star Line and the United States Line, transmitted money to Europe for the immigrants living on the Lower East Side and did their taxes.

He also had a free mail service as a convenience for people, primarily working men, who were living as boarders and needed a trustworthy address to receive mail from family in Europe. He would place the letters on a counter inside the store window so that people could stop and look in the window for their mail. Many people came to him because he spoke six languages. He had been a translator of documents for the U.S. Patent Office when he first came to the U.S. from Ukraine.

Stephan Kowbasniuk died in 1952. His daughter inherited his business and at that time continued the agency's close association with Lydia Savoyka of the National Catholic Welfare Council (NCWC), providing assistance to Ukrainians who wished to bring families to the U.S. from displaced persons camps in Germany. Applications were made through the NCWC at no cost to the applicants. The Kobasniuk Agency completed the applications for the price of $2 per family.

When people expressed personal reservations to Mrs. Shumeyko about returning alone to Ukraine to visit families there, she decided to start a group tour business; and in the early 1950s, she led her first tour of eight persons to Ukraine. The tour business grew quickly and she became a firm, diplomatic navigator of the rigid Soviet bureaucracy. The Kobasniuk Travel Agency is now the only Slavic-speaking (Ukrainian, Polish and Russian) agency that can boast of such a long history - 78 years - of sending people to all parts of Eastern Europe.

Among the speakers at the reception who saluted New York's non-profit theater community and its Local Heroes were Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theatre and board president of A.R.T./New York; Schuyler Chapin, commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Bernard Gersten, executive producer of the Lincoln Center Theater; and Virginia Louloudes, executive director of A.R.T./New York.

In his keynote address to the assemblage of theater workers and supporters, playwright John Guare affectionately acknowledged the people of theater as "what the next generation is dreaming of."

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