Mark Weil, dead at 55: Uzbek director with ties to Seattle stabbed to death

P-I STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES

The stabbing death of Mark Weil, a prominent theater director in Uzbekistan, is stirring up grief and shock in Seattle, where he lived part of the time.

Weil, who founded the innovative Ilkhom Theatre more than 30 years ago, was attacked in front of his apartment building in the capital, Tashkent, late Thursday night, spokeswoman Oksana Khrupun said.

Weil, 55, died on the operating table at a hospital.

His last words were unintentionally theatrical. He reportedly said, "I'm opening the season tomorrow, whatever happens," Khrupun said.

The show did go on. The company performed Aeschylus' "The Oresteia" in Weil's honor Friday.

Ilkhom, which Weil founded in 1976, was the first independent theater in the former Soviet Union. Long before perestroika in the late 1980s, Ilkhom gained popularity but also faced censorship and criticism for staging productions that pushed accepted political and social boundaries.

Weil was far better known in Europe. Seattleites only had one opportunity to see a play that Weil directed -- "The Suicide," by Nikolai Erdman, in 2003 at the University of Washington. But local theater people hope his Ilkhom Theatre will perform here next spring, as planned.

Kurt Beattie, artistic director of ACT Theatre, is raising funds to host the company here for at least a monthlong engagement.

"I was just astonished at how wonderful they were," said Beattie, who was introduced to Weil by members of the UW faculty and spent several weeks in Tashkent in 2005 with Ilkhom.

He said Weil had inventive ways of telling stories and using the body to communicate.

"He could take a piece by Chekhov and imagine it in a totally different way, and yet honor the deep, original intent of the author," Beattie said. "It was magic what he was able to do."

Similar words came to the minds of Weil's Seattle-based colleagues in describing him: brilliant, genius, astonishing.

In an e-mail from Austria, where he was traveling, Mark Jenkins, head of the UW's Professional Actor Training Program, called Ilkhom "a force of nature" and "one of the few great, pure, artistically driven theaters in the world."

Libby Matthews, a UW student, spent the past academic year in Tashkent at Ilkhom through an exchange program. "You just felt so gifted to be in his presence. If I ever met a genius, he was really it," she said.

Although she always felt safe in Tashkent, Matthews said it was routine for bomb-sniffing dogs to sweep the theater before a performance. She added that Weil didn't worry for his own safety, saying he never felt the theater had enemies.

And while Weil's work was often provocative, he did not employ screaming or histrionics to communicate.

"He was just the warmest, most friendly, kind, generous thoughtful man there ever was," said Sarah Nash Gates, executive director of the UW Drama School. "He wanted people to think and to respond. He wanted to have an impact."

Actors at Ilkhom said Weil was taken to the hospital by neighbors, who described seeing two young men in baseball caps waiting for the director in front of his building.

Weil was not robbed, and he said he did not know his assailants, according to the actors, who refused to speculate on a motive for his killing.

Online and media speculation on the motive has ranged from an anti-Semitic attack to one by religious fanatics displeased by some homoerotic work by the company.

Homosexuality, punishable by up to two years in jail, is a taboo topic in Uzbekistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Weil and his award-winning theater traveled to festivals around the world, and Weil directed plays in Moscow and Seattle, where his family lives.

Weil first came to Seattle, a sister city of Tashkent, in 1988 after a group of Seattle theater artists visited Tashkent for an artistic collaboration, Gates said. In 1996, Weil's eldest daughter moved to Seattle to attend the UW, and his younger daughter and wife later joined her.

Weil is survived by his wife, Tatyana; daughter Julia Weil, who graduated from the UW in 1999, and daughter Aleksandra Weil, who sings and plays piano in the band "Scarlet Room."

Weil's body was to be transported to Moscow for cremation and the ashes brought to Seattle, a theater spokeswoman said.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/330 ... bit08.html

I'm definitely not into this stuff but I have a problem when those people are murdered for that.