The heart is always pumping the Eastern European blood into all my Eastern European body with all its Eastern European extremities more eagerly when I learn my new, adopted homeland shows interest in my old homeland’s culture. As far as I remember, there was nothing really to regret about the old order’s abdication except for its revolutionary arts. While most of people were proving the human nature being predominately one of creatures of habit, the only ones who never really could get used to restrictions of communism were artists. Stifling rules of communism, kept producing bold artifacts.

Even though I’m not Hungarian (and Hungary was always the only place the Eastern Block’s citizens could go to see a little bit better live, a little bit happier people, at least that’s what we thought at the time). I got unreasonably proud about the Extremely Hungary Festival, a yearlong festival showcasing contemporary Hungarian visual, performing, and literary arts in New York and Washington, D.C., throughout 2009. My few visits to Budapest were the most unforgettable experiences of all I had behind the former Iron Curtain (although they happened later, when the Berlin Wall was long time gone, sometime in the beginning of 2000s). Budapest was class, I have to admit. Almost everyone spoke English (pretty unheard of in post-communist countries almost a decade ago), cultural venues that I happened to visit were extremely professional but still had this vibe of community driven ones. It was like a better version of communism, with money.

I guess, these are times that the new work from Electric Pear Productions set in. The play titled Balaton (script by Ashlin Halfnight, directed by Kristjan Thor) tells the story of the Hungarian family struggling in the new, unknown world of fast food and luxurious goods they cannot afford. What was fine in the past isn’t OK anymore: youth pushes wisdom out of the picture, political correctness replaces honesty. Is the new order going to deepen the fracture within family ranks or, eventually, will it glue it back together?

Three weeks only run: October 17th through November 7th as a part of the Extremely Hungary Festival at The Theater at 30th Street. (259 West 30th St, NYC) should make it easier to understand the souls that once lived their lives in never-ending 1984th.