IN MEMORIAM: Wladyslaw Klech, scenic artist and set designer (11/11/01)

IN MEMORIAM: Wladyslaw Klech, scenic artist and set designer

by Ika Koznarska Casanova

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. - Wladyslaw Klech (Klechnowski), scenic artist with the Metropolitan Opera of New York and in the post-war years set designer with Volodymyr Blavatsky's Ukrainian Actors' Ensemble, died on July 22 at age 79. Apart from his work in theater, Mr. Klech worked as scenic artist for the film and television industries.

Mr. Klech was with the Met for some 30 years, during which time, as head of a group of scenic artists, he worked on the sets of over 60 opera projects.

Prior to joining the Met in 1962, Mr. Klech was with the Eugene Dunkel Studio (1958-1962), which did work for the Met and leading theaters in New York. Among highlights of his career at this time were a season with the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico (1961), during which he worked on the theatrical scenery for the company's production of Stravinsky's opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" and the ballet "The Rite of Spring," Paul Hindemith's opera "Neues vom Tage" and Douglas Moore's "The Ballad of Baby Doe," among others. He also did the sets for New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center for Stravinsky's "Petrushka," based on sketches by Alexandr Benois.

As master scenographer and member of the United Scenic Artists of America (1961), Mr. Klech worked in all fields of scenic design. Work of this period included sets for the New York World's Fair Hollywood Pavilion for such memorable film classics as "Spartacus," "Cleopatra," "West Side Story" and "South Pacific," as well as for television productions, including the three major networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) and the children's program "Sesame Street" on PBS.

Mr. Klech's lifelong passion for the theater was characterized by a striving for a fresh vision and renewal, informed by the spirit and developments of the times, while his career was marked by the vicissitudes of his personal life.

Wladyslaw Klech was born on July 4, 1922, in Kyiv. His father, Stanislaw, left Warsaw for Ukraine in 1920 to work as an engineer, where he met and married Maria Shkabara.

Mr. Klech's interest in theater goes back to his days as a schoolboy in the provincial town of Konstantynivka in the Donbas region of Ukraine, where he also attended art classes at the local Palace of Culture and had the opportunity to see stagings by traveling theater groups.

With the arrest of his mother in 1937 and her subsequent disappearance in Stalin's gulag, family life was shattered. As a son of a repressed parent, he was essentially barred from enrolling in school but ultimately managed to get into a trade school in Kyiv.

With the outbreak of war, he was drafted into the Red Army. As the army was retreating from Ukraine, he was taken prisoner by the Germans, but was able to escape from a POW camp and reached Kyiv by foot.

His first opportunity to do scenery for a play came when he was in Bila Tserkva, for the newly formed Taras Shevchenko Theater, where he gained hands-on experience working on the staging of the established Ukrainian ethnographic and classic repertoire of the time. He stayed on with the theater when it moved to Koziatyn in the Podillia region.

With the close of the theater in 1943, came Mr. Klech's disappointing search for his father in Warsaw. The end of the war found Mr. Klech in a labor camp in Germany. In 1945, he ended up in a displaced persons' camp in Neu Ulm.

In Neu Ulm, Mr. Klech, together with fellow artists T. Vereshchynsky, M. Gerus and Mykola Antonovych, founded the Rozvaha theater, which was active in 1945-1947. This period marked an important stage in Mr. Klech's creative work, signaling a departure from a naturalistic to a constructivist-expressionist mode, as first evidenced in the sets designed for three works: "Kazka Staroho Mlyna" by Stepan Cherkasenko, "Zozulena Dacha" by Yuriy Kosach, and, most notably, in the conceptual sketches for "Morituri" by Ivan Bahrianyi.

Some of Mr. Klech's best work, and a most productive period in his career, was done in the years 1947-1949, with the renowned Ukrainian actor and director Volodymyr Blavatsky of the Lviv Opera Theater, who invited the then 25-year-old Mr. Klech to join his newly formed company - the Ukrainian Actors' Ensemble - when it transferred from the displaced persons camp in Augsburg to Regensburg, Germany.

This marked the beginning of a most fruitful collaboration, forged in the uprootedness of the difficult and trying post-war years. The productions of this period, featuring both modernist Ukrainian and foreign repertoire, have become an integral part of the history of Ukrainian theater.

Among the outstanding productions during Mr. Klech's tenure, considered to be among the highest achievements in Blavatsky's career as director, were the staging of Jean Anouilh's "Antigone" and André Aubey's "Lucrèce."

Major influences on Mr. Klech's work were the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s, with figures such as Petrytsky and Meller, as well as radical new developments in post-war European theater in general.

Blavatsky and his company emigrated to the United States in 1949, settling in Philadelphia. Mr. Klech joined the company a year later and continued to work with the theater until 1957, when the theater ceased to exist four years after Blavatsky's death.

With the demise of the Ukrainian Actors' Ensemble, Mr. Klech enrolled briefly in the Famous Artists School in Connecticut, (where Norman Rockwell was teaching at the time), before moving on to New York, where he joined the studio of the Russian émigré Eugene Dunkel.

Concurrently, from 1959-1963, Mr. Klech collaborated with the New Russian Theater, a professional ensemble founded by Russian émigrés of the post-revolutionary period, for which he designed scenes for works of the Russian classic repertoire.

As owner of his own company, Mr. Klech was also associated with Finian's Musical Comedy Theater in Plattsburgh, N.Y., (1963-1964) and the New Rochelle Opera Theater (1991-1994) for which he did stage scenery.

He continued to work with Ukrainian theater ensembles, among them, the Young Actors Theater, which in 1990 staged I. Chyzh's "Kniahynia Olha," under the direction of Volodymyr Shasharovsky, a former actor of the Blavatsky Ukrainian Actors' Ensemble, as part of the "Teatr u Piatnytsiu " in Philadelphia.

Mr. Klech had a special relationship with the Ukrainian Stage Ensemble, an amateur theater group under the direction of Lydia Krushelnytska, for which he did stage design for the following productions, starting in 1988 with I. Kocherha's "Yaroslav Mudryi," which was staged in celebration of the millennium of Christianity of Rus'-Ukraine; followed by a stage adaptation of Shevchenko's poems "Nevilnyk" and "Dumy," Lesia Ukrainka's "Lisova Pisnya" and Mykola Kulish's, "Patetychna Sonata."

Following Ukraine's independence in 1991, Mr. Klech toured Ukraine with the Ukrainian Stage Ensemble, in what was his first trip to his homeland since the war. The tour, which took him to Lviv, Drohobych and Kyiv, was followed by a renewal of professional contacts.

In 1993 Mr. Klech was inducted as member of the Ukrainian Theater Professionals' Union and, in 1998 the union instituted a prize in his honor, to be awarded on basis of a juried competition, to a top Ukrainian set designer.

A monography on the life and work of Mr. Klech is slated to come out as a publication of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the U.S.

Mr. Klech is survived by his wife, Eleanor; his daughter, Natalie Uzzi; and granddaughters, Christine and Janine.

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