Moscow Performances II: The 1996-1997 Season (Russian Theatre Archive)

Moscow Performances II Russian Theatre Archive A series of books edited by John Freedman (Moscow), Leon Gitelman (St ...

Author: John Freedman

61 downloads 1082 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Moscow Performances II

Russian Theatre Archive A series of books edited by John Freedman (Moscow), Leon Gitelman (St Petersburg) and Anatoly Smeliansky (Moscow) Volume 1 The Major Plays of Nikolai Erdman translated and edited by John Freedman Volume 2 A Meeting About LaughterSketches, Interludes and Theatrical Parodies by Nikolai Erdman with Vladimir Mass and Others translated and edited by John Freedman Volume 3 Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp Natalia Kuziakina Volume 4 Sergei Radlov: The Shakespearian Fate of a Soviet Director David Zolotnitsky Volume 5 Bulgakov: The Novelist-Playwright edited by Lesley Milne Volume 6 Aleksandr Vampilov: The Major Plays translated and edited by Alma Law Volume 7 The Death of Tarelkin and Other Plays: The Trilogy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin translated and edited by Harold B.Segel Volume 8 A Chekhov Quartet translated and adapted by Vera Gottlieb Volume 9 Two Plays from the New Russia Bald/Brunet by Daniil Gink and Nijinsky by Alexei Burykin translated and edited by John Freedman Volume 10 Russian Comedy of the Nikolaian Era translated and with an introduction by Laurence Senelick Volume 11 Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses

iii

by Aleksandr Gladkov translated, edited and with an introduction by Alma Law Please see the back of this book for other titles in the Russian Theatre Archive series

Moscow Performances II The 1996±1997 Season by

John Freedman

harwood academic publishers Australia • Canada • China • France • Germany • India Japan • Luxembourg • Malaysia • The Netherlands Russia • Singapore • Switzerland

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 1998 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Malaysia. Amsteldijk 166 1st Floor 1079 LH Amsterdam The Netherlands British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Freedman, John Moscow performances II: the 1996–1997 season.—(Russian theatre archive) 1. Theater—Russia (Federation)—History—20th century I. Title 792 .0947 09049 ISBN 0-203-98985-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 90-5755-084-9 (Print Edition) Cover illustration: Natalia Vdovina and Konstantin Raikin in The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman

Contents

Introduction to the Series

ix

List of Plates

x

Preface

xii

Performances 1996±97 As a Lamb

1

The Threepenny Opera

2

Moscow-Petushki

7

Sonechka and Casanova

7

The Threepenny Opera

9

The Game

10

A Month in the Country

12

The Last Night of the Last Tsar

13

The Marriage

17

Don Juan

17

A Warsaw Melody

18

Crime and Punishment

20

The Sakhalin Wife

20

Playing the Dummy

22

Brocade

23

The Dance of Death

24

The Seagull

26

Masculine Singular and The Terrorists

27

The Journey of Benjamin the Third to the Holy Land

29

vii

Our Town and Midsummer Night’s Dream

31

Prisoners

31

A Bourgeois Wedding and The Threepenny Opera

33

Life Is no Bed of Roses

34

Hunger and Thirst

36

Fleeing Pilgrims and The Terrible Parents

39

Greetings, Don Quixote!

41

Britannicus

42

Little Comedies

43

The Wedding

46

The Storm

47

The Unattainable and Farewell and Applause

49

Three Sisters

51

Anomaly

53

Little Tragedies: Part One

55

The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater in Russia

57

The Woman in the Dunes, A-Flat, Three Sisters and Tanya-Tanya

58

Joan of Arc: Childhood

62

The Possible Meeting

64

The Cherry Orchard

66

Vieux Carré

67

Five Evenings and The Marriage

70

Wandering Conflagrations

72

Barbarian and Heretic and Krechinsky’s Wedding

72

The Whim

76

“Art”

77

The Tales of Belkin

78

The Herd

81

Sublimation of Love

81

viii

Bel-Ami

84

No More, No More…No More?

86

Laughter in the Dark

87

Doves

89

People and Events Moscow Power Names

92

Around The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater

94

Theater and Money

95

Golden Mask Festival: Spotlight on the Provinces

99

Golden Mask Award Ceremony

101

Vladimir Mirzoev

103

Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights

106

Index

111

Introduction to the Series

The Russian Theatre Archive makes available in English the best avant-garde plays from the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. It features monographs on major playwrights and theatre directors, introductions to previously unknown works, and studies of the main artistic groups and periods. Plays are presented in performing edition translations, including (where appropriate) musical scores, and instructions for music and dance. Whenever possible the translated texts will be accompanied by videotapes of performances of plays in the original language.

List of Plates

1 Gediminas Taranda and Irina Maximkina in As a Lamb, a play by Nadezhda Ptushkina. 2 Konstantin Raikin and Natalia Vdovina in The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon, staged by Vladimir Mashkov at a cost of $600,000. 3 Rustem Yuskaev and Galina Tyunina in Sergei Zhenovach’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country for the Fomenko Studio. 4 Irina Kupchenko and Alexander Zbruev as Nikolai and Alexandra surrounded by their children in Valery Fokin’s production of The Last Night of the Last Tsar, a play by Edvard Radzinsky. 5 Alisa Bogart in Viktor Shamirov’s production of A.K.Tolstoy’s verse play Don Juan for the Russian Army Theater. 6 Darya Mikhailova and Alexander Filippenko in Brocade, Mikhail Mokeev’s production of Dostoevsky’s first novella, Poor Folk. 7 Irina Grinyova and Alexander Sinyukov in Alexander Ostrovsky’s Life Is no Bed of Roses, directed by Viktor Shamirov at the Chelovek Theater-Studio. 8 Yevgeny Gerchakov in Eugene Ionesco’s Hunger and Thirst at the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot, with sets by Søren Brunes. 9 Sergei Taramaev and Irina Rozanova in Sergei Zhenovach’s production of Little Comedies at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater. 10 Yulia Svezhakova as Katerina in Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm at the Young Spectator Theater, directed by Genrietta Yanovskaya. 11 Alexander Galin directed his own play, Anomaly, at the Sovremennik and occasionally performed in it too. 12 Araki Kadzuho and Mikhail Okunev in the Omsk Drama Theater’s dramatization of The Woman in the Dunes which played at Moscow’s Golden Mask festival. 13 Inga Oboldina as Joan of Arc in Garold Strelkov’s production of Joan of Arc: Childhood for the Debut Center. 14 Sergei Bezrukov in Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré, directed by Andrei Zhitinkin at the Tabakov Theater. 15 Vasily Bochkaryov and Tatyana Pankova in a musical version of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s comedy Krechinsky’s Wedding, directed by Vitaly Solomin at the Maly Theater. 16 Mikhail Filippov and Igor Kostolevsky in an international production of Yasmina Reza’s “Art”.

3 5 14 16 19 25 35 38 45 49 54 60 63 68 75 79

xi

17 Vasily Yushchenko and a partner performing in The Class of Expressive 82 Plastic Movement’s The Herd, a physical performance created by Gennady Abramov. 18 Director Vladimir Mirzoev, playwright Mikhail Ugarov and the actors 91 Alexander Usov, Vladimir Skvortsov, Vitaly Khaev and Olga Lapshina at the premiere of Doves at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater. 19 Maxim Sukhanov and Viktoria Tolstoganova in Vladimir Mirzoev’s 105 production of Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World at the Stanislavsky Theater. 20 Oleg Bogaev and Olga Mukhina comparing notes at the Lyubimovka 108 Festival of Young Playwrights.

Preface

This slim collection of reviews and articles is the first in a planned series of yearly publications that will continue to expand the story told in Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991–1996. As in the original book, the pieces included are drawn primarily from the weekly columns I write for the English-language daily, the Moscow Times. The need for regular updates on the developments in Russian theater is clear: The maturation of many artists now in mid-career and the increasingly frequent appearance of new talents is rapidly changing the face of contemporary theater in Russia. Furthermore, the interest in, and influence of, Russian theater outside Russia has grown considerably in the 1990s and there is no reason to expect it to abate soon. In August 1997 the traditionally Franco-centric Avignon Festival organized a much-publicized and highly successful “Russian season” featuring nine Russian-made shows. Four productions by the Fomenko Studio, two by Anatoly Vasilyev’s School of Dramatic Art, plus single shows directed by Valery Fokin, Kama Ginkas and the puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze, attracted the attention of people from all over the world. Simultaneously, Moscow’s Theater Near the Stanislavsky House performed a musical show called Russian Melancholy in the fringe program at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and took the second-week prize for miscellaneous genre. The Moscow Performances yearbooks, while emphasizing activities in the capital, will also report on what is occurring in the provinces. In the current edition this is accomplished by two articles on festivals featuring out-of-town talent and reviews of touring performances. I hope that one of the strengths of the series is that I invariably offer opinionated responses to what I have seen. At the same time, I believe it is worth repeating what I stated in the preface to the original volume: I do not claim to have a line on the truth. My viewpoint largely coincides with the traditional Russian belief that good theater must amaze. Once, many years ago, I walked away from a show I had appreciated greatly, accompanied by the actress Yelizaveta Nikishchikhina. She was not moved and she told me why. “You Westerners can be satisfied with being entertained,” she said. “We Russians must be stunned by theater.” I consider myself somewhat less categorical than Ms. Nikishchikhina, but I have more than a soft spot for her intensity and for her conviction that the

xiii

best theater must not only be made well, it must matter. The pieces that comprise this book are some of my admittedly subjective attempts to determine just what it is that makes theater matter. At the same time I hope that even in my most irritable mood I provide a sufficiently objective visual picture of what the artists did and, perhaps, why. For, ultimately, all of the people I write about are engaged in the fascinating task of moving Russian theater into the future. I think it’s a great story. *** The biggest trend of the 1996–97 season in Moscow was the rush to entertain at any cost. On occasion, that cost was literally very high. The first hit of the season, Vladimir Mashkov’s production of The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater, carried a price-tag of $600,000 and was reported to be the most expensive dramatic show ever created in Russia. A few shows were rumored to cost in the neighborhood of $200,000. They included Valery Fokin’s elaborate production of The Last Night of the Last Tsar for the Bogis Agency and Vitaly Solomin’s lush production of Krechinsky’s Wedding at the Maly Theater. By Western standards these figures may not sound outrageous, but in a country that was still experiencing major financial difficulties and in a professional environment where the average actor’s base salary was 400,000 rubles a month (that was approximately $80 at the beginning of the season, $73 at the end), it was still a lot of money. One of theater’s key jobs is to suggest and deceive, so it should come as no surprise that—the big-money shows notwithstanding—the wealth and opulence seen on so many stages was more often illusory than real. There was a glut of productions flaunting high-class people in gorgeous clothes surrounded by sets representing elegance. Surely this was in part a calculated effort to attract the attention of the so-called New Russians. They may only make up about 10% of the populace, but their wealth and influence exceeds that number several times over. This is the group that is almost exclusively catered to by the independent or “commercial” producers as they are routinely identified in Russia. The Anton Chekhov Theater, with Somerset Maugham’s The Unattainable, the newlyformed Art Club XXI, with Nadezhda Ptushkina’s As a Lamb, and the Mikhail Kozakov Enterprise, with productions of Paul Barz’s The Possible Meeting and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, are fair, if not equal, examples. Among the repertory theaters, the Lenkom, the Satirikon, the Tabakov Theater and, increasingly, the Mossoviet Theater aimed to attract the young, wealthy crowd with loud, flashy spectacles. Some of these shows were impressive indeed; many were quite forgettable. Meanwhile, there were plenty of the smaller, visually more eclectic and more challenging type of show that I would argue represents the Russian theatrical endeavor at its finest. These were the productions that were out to make discoveries—about the plays, the people creating them or the people watching them. The best of them did not reinforce familiar perceptions, attitudes or beliefs, they sought to expand them or push them into new territory.

xiv

Valery Fokin’s handling of a recent play by Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Night of the Last Tsar, is an ideal example of that. Combining masterfully the elements of circus, ballet, opera and drama, Fokin took the essentially straightforward play about the two men closest to the murder of the last Russian royal family members, and created a penetrating fantasy on historical (and personal) themes. In deed very different, but similar in principle, was Genrietta Yanovskaya’s revisionist production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s “standard masterpiece,” The Storm. This interpretation refocused attention away from the melodramatic story of Katerina’s doomed love, and explored the atmosphere that made her tragedy possible. It was a mark of Yanovskaya’s achievement that when presented in a new light, even Katerina’s story rang with new power. Mikhail Mokeev, who after a promising start in the late 1980s left Russia to work abroad in the early 1990s, made his return to the capital in the fall of 1996. Especially noteworthy was his sensitive and creative interpretation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella, Poor Folk. Like Yanovskaya in The Storm, Mokeev did not fear to stray from the original in order to create something new and independent. Two of the season’s most promising debuts easily fit into the broadly defined category of directors working on a small scale in an effort to achieve big results. Viktor Shamirov, a recent graduate of Mark Zakharov’s class at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, was the first to appear, followed shortly thereafter by Garold Strelkov, a young man who is scheduled to complete Pyotr Fomenko’s class at the same school in 1998. Shamirov immediately gained attention with an unorthodox staging of A.K.Tolstoy’s semi-forgotten verse play, Don Juan, in which the audience was seated in the middle of the stage and the action took place around them. He followed that with a minuscule and thoroughly contemporary reading of Ostrovsky’s chamber play, Life Is no Bed of Roses. Shamirov’s interest in exploring the possibilities of small spaces was a clear sign of his artistic independence if for no other reason than his former teacher, famed for his booming spectacles filled with technical marvels, is a sworn enemy of what he has derisively called “laboratory experiments.” Strelkov made his bow with an equally ironic and heartfelt interpretation of a new play by Yelena Gremina, The Sakhalin Wife. The show, mounted under the auspices of a center organized to support contemporary playwrights, featured all student actors and served notice that the well of youth in Moscow theater is brimming with talent. The shoestring production of The Sakhalin Wife and the creation of its venue, eventually called the Debut Center at the House of Actors, again put the spotlight on the sorest canker of Russian theater at the end of the 20th century: the lot of the contemporary playwright. It continued to be a hard one in the 1996– 97 season, although, as there had been throughout the mid-1990s, signs occasionally arose that the situation might be improving.

xv

The percentage of new Russian plays produced remained roughly what it has been throughout the decade, fifteen percent. However, one of the season’s biggest commercial hits was based on a new play, Nadezhda Ptushkina’s As a Lamb. Although the play evoked vastly different responses among the critics (I was one of its strong supporters), it drew packed crowds whenever it played.1 It was the first time in years that a commercial producer had gone out on a limb with a new play and had such success. (Yelena Gremina’s popular Behind the Mirror in 1994 was co-produced by an independent producer, the Russian Theater Agency, and a repertory house, the Chekhov Art Theater.) The public response to As a Lamb indicated spectators were more than willing to take their chances with something new. Other encouraging signs on the playwriting front were the Moscow debut of the critically acclaimed Mikhail Ugarov, and the reappearance of the Lyubimovka festival for playwrights. Ugarov, the author of seven refined plays that have long drawn praise from those who know them, finally saw his first play, Doves, written in 1988, staged in an intimate environment by Vladimir Mirzoev at the Stanislavsky Theater. The annual Lyubimovka festival, a summer gathering where playwrights from all over Russia come to share their work and experience in an informal setting, has been the launching pad for several of the top contemporary plays of the 1990s. It fell victim to hard times in 1996, but was back with a strong showing from June 10 to 21, 1997. Moscow is never short on controversy and the biggest of them during the 1996–97 season centered around a national festival and awards program, the Golden Mask festival, and the Moscow Art Theater’s preparations for its 100th anniversary. Both of these topics receive repeated coverage in this volume. The Moscow Art Theater, now split into two independent houses called the Chekhov Art Theater and the Gorky Art Theater after a messy civil war in 1987, is not in prime shape to commemorate its centennial. The Gorky Art Theater, run by Tatyana Doronina, an actress who achieved the peak of her popularity in the 1970s, toils in an obscurity that is, frankly, deserved. The Chekhov Art Theater, run by Oleg Yefremov since 1970, is the one that has most of the right and all of the pretensions to be considered the heir to the Stanislavsky heritage. In the first half of 1997, preparing to set the stage for a big birthday party in 1997–98, the Chekhov Art Theater unleashed four new shows. Yefremov himself directed Chekhov’s Three Sisters while his heir-apparent Roman Kozak staged two of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies on one bill and Gogors The Marriage. Vyacheslav Dolgachyov, one of the theater’s top staff directors, mounted a dramatization of Ingmar Bergman’s television script, After the Rehearsal. The Yefremov and Kozak works could only be considered as programmatic statements. Yefremov, then approaching his 70th birthday, clearly took a page from Nemirovich-Danchenko’s book. It was Nemirovich who, at the age of 81, had his last great success with a staging of Three Sisters in 1940. But lightning did not strike twice: Yefremov’s version was tired, plodding and unimaginative. That did

xvi

not stop several of the theater’s oldest friends from washing the production in ecstatic public acclaim. Not many were fooled, however, by what was either a shrewd public relations campaign or an honest response from some loyal comrades. The production soon gained the reputation of a boondoggle and spectators stayed away in droves. The matter of Roman Kozak’s two productions was more perplexing. Kozak in the past has proven himself to be a highly talented, if erratic, director. His productions of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s Cinzano at the Chelovek TheaterStudio (1985), Lermontov’s The Masquerade at the Art Theater’s Fifth Studio (1990) and Slawomir Mrozek’s Widows (as Banana) for the Moscow Salon (1994) were exceptional outings. At the same time he made a mess of a single year as the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Theater in 1991–92, and he has struggled ever since signing on as a staff director at the Chekhov Art Theater in 1994. The curiosity of it all is increased by the fact that during the same period Kozak has created some strong productions at the Russian Drama Theater in Riga, Latvia. In 1996, Kozak brought his exhilarating Riga production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to Moscow for a single performance, while in 1997 his two productions for the Art Theater were underwhelming, to put it lightly. Equally puzzling were other developments at the Chekhov Art Theater. In the fall, a shockingly amateurish dramatization of Crime and Punishment led off the theater’s season, while the organization of a promising center for young directors and playwrights was strangled before it could get started. Eventually it was replaced by a clone that had none of the daring or imagination of its predecessor. The Playwright and Director Seminar at the Chekhov Art Theater debuted with a handful of showings of Garold Strelkov’s production of The Sakhalin Wife. But as soon as the show began attracting public attention, the theater informed the group it was withdrawing support. The primary reason was reportedly that the director and some of his actors were students of Pyotr Fomenko at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. The brass at the Art Theater explained it wanted only people from its own school taking part in an experimental organization it was funding. Strelkov and his crew went off to help create the Playwright and Director Center at the House of Actors, while the Art Theater relaunched its own Director and Playwright Seminar-Laboratory in the spring of 1997. Its first show was Mikhail Zuev’s play, The Green Zone. This bracingly old-fashioned social play about a constellation of people waiting to be moved from their Khrushchev-era living quarters in ramshackle barracks into a new apartment house was weak material, directed and acted with indifference. In sum, the Moscow Art Theater made a rocky approach toward its 100th year.

1

For an overview of the critical responses see Dramaturg, No. 7 (1996), 199–200.

xvii

The third annual Golden Mask festival, honoring productions created during the previous season (1995–96), was the first to include the vast Russian provinces in its purview. Critics cried foul left and right, first belittling the nominations, then carping about the winners. I began to detect that passions might be ready to break when conducting a pre-festival interview with Vladimir Petrov, whose Omsk-based production of The Woman in the Dunes was nominated in four categories. Petrov admitted he was ambivalent about the upcoming competition. “If you don’t win,” he said, “you still have lots of fun. If you do win, you immediately make lots of enemies.” He couldn’t have been closer to the truth if he had had a crystal ball. When The Woman in the Dunes took three awards—best director, best actor and best actress—Petrov and his cast found themselves in the middle of a firestorm. Petrov might have pulled off a grand slam had it not been for Anatoly Vasilyev and his production of The Lamentations of Jeremiah at the School of Dramatic Art. Vasilyev’s musical version of the Old Testament book, co-directed by Nikolai Chindyaikin and featuring music by Vladimir Martynov, took best production while Vasilyev shared the nod for best designer with his longtime cohort, Igor Popov. They were the only Moscow-based artists to be honored in the categories relating to dramatic theater. That does not mean the choice of Vasilyev’s show was not controversial. Indeed, it was an odd choice as a nominee for best dramatic production, since its genre can only be defined as a religious choral work. No actors are involved in the piece, which is entirely sung by the Sirin religious choir. This group, which has an international reputation of its own, has no connections to Vasilyev’s School of Dramatic Art other than performing in Lamentations as hired hands. The desire to include Lamentations in a Russian national festival and awards ceremony was understandable. The legendary Vasilyev had been conspicuous by his absence in the 1990s, giving only rare semi-public showings of works-inprogress that were dropped almost as soon as they began achieving concrete form. Lamentations, on the other hand, was not only the first show in nearly a decade that Vasilyev presented as a completed work, it was the first that the School of Dramatic Art began offering publicly to ticket-buyers on a regular basis. It was, in its way, a coming-out for the theater and the director who had become best known in Russia for being inaccessible. Although, technically speaking, Lamentations belongs to the 1995–96 season (I saw one of the first performances in February 1996), a short description of it is in order here since I did not write about it in the original publication of Moscow Performances. The visuals were striking, with brilliant white side-lighting, two enormous monastery-like walls leaning at a sharp angle over the stage, and approximately eighteen white doves flying freely about the space during the second half of the performance. Each of the tilting walls was cut with approximately sixty arched windows of varying sizes, in each of which there was a lighted candle. The singers, approximately ten men and ten women, maneuvered about the stage in formations, breaking up and coming together in

xviii

deliberate, graceful motions. They wore floor-length, monasterial clothing, sometimes black, sometimes white. During pauses between the movements of Martynov’s composition, the stage was left empty and silent, with only the cooing of the pigeons and the crackling of the burning candles to be heard. Occasionally the swarms of singers would make way for one or two men who would read from the Bible. Whether or not Lamentations was a proper choice for the Golden Mask festival’s best dramatic production, there is little doubt that the openly religious production was Vasilyev’s most effective local outing in the 1990s. It was the first time during that period that he found a text, an approach and a set of performers that were mutually suitable. Several of Moscow’s most talented directors more or less sat out the 1996–97 season. Pyotr Fomenko put together a clever student production at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, but, mostly for health reasons, was unable to complete a couple of shows he was rehearsing at professional venues. Kama Ginkas spent the first half of the season staging Macbeth in Finland and then returned home to Moscow in February to rest. Sergei Artsibashev opened the season with an acclaimed operatic production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Novaya Opera Theater, but staged nothing at his own Theater na Pokrovke. Yury Lyubimov rehearsed his dramatization of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov at the Taganka, but the show was still in preparation when the season came to an end. The relative inactivity of so many important directors clearly was one of the reasons why the 1996–97 season was lacking in major artistic—as opposed to entertainment or controversial—events. Nevertheless, the aforementioned productions by Valery Fokin and Genrietta Yanovskaya, joined by a brilliant interpretation of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country by Sergei Zhenovach,2 achieved levels of excellence that would make them competitive even in the best of years. Add to that the return of Mikhail Mokeev and the debuts of Viktor Shamirov and Garold Strelkov, to say nothing of the continued work of a host of other artists who fearlessly kept on making theater, and you have in abundance what no great theater town can do without: diversity and energy. *** Most of the articles in this collection appear as published in the Moscow Times. I have double-checked dates and facts and corrected a few errors that slipped past me the first time around. I often have replaced mentions of days of the week, obvious in a newspaper environment, with dates and months. The biggest changes took place in the preview of the Golden Mask festival, included in the People and Events section. As it was originally published with an expanded lead I did not write, I restored my original lead in the interest of maintaining factual accuracy. One piece, the review of the provincial entries in the Golden Mask festival, appeared in the magazine Plays International. All of these pieces are followed by the original date of publication. Two articles that

xix

did not run in the Times at the last minute because of scheduling changes have been included here. They are marked as unpublished. As I did in Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991–1996, I feel compelled to provide some “truth in packaging” to allay possible concerns about conflict of interest. Because my wife Oksana Mysina is an actress in Moscow, I do not write directly about the shows in which she performs. In this volume I avoided crossing her path professionally by interviewing her director Vladimir Mirzoev shortly before the premiere of a production they both worked on, Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World. Because of Oksana’s participation, I did not write at all about a production I otherwise would have covered: Boris Lvov-Anokhin’s staging of the Eugène Scribe-Ernest Legouvé play, The Novellas of Margaret of Navarre. (It was retitled A Queen’s Revenge for the Moscow run.) Finally, I am happy to recognize the input, advice and support of the people who helped me reach my readers. At the Moscow Times I would like to thank Frank Brown, Radhika Jones, Margaret Henry and John Kenyon for their talent, patience and good humor. I am keenly grateful to Peter Roberts, the editor of Plays International, for his continuing interest in the monthly column I have written for him since 1994. Two individuals at Harwood Academic Publishers have made my association with the Russian Theatre Archive sheer pleasure. Robert Robertson, as the senior editor, is a fount of creativity, ideas, energy, joy and wit. Marybeth Bingham, as the coordinating editor, has been a delight for her kindness, professionalism, sharp eye and enthusiasm. I forgive her for leaving the series and going on to bigger and better things just as this book was ready to go into production. Without these friends and colleagues my Moscow Performances would never have made it out of rehearsals. Moscow, 1997

2

I would like here to correct an error I committed in the introduction to the original edition of Moscow Performances: Sergei Zhenovach, in fact, was a student of Pyotr Fomenko.

Performances 1996±1997

As a Lamb, Art-Club XXI The so-called “commercial” shows which have appeared with restrained regularity since the state relaxed its grip on the arts five years ago, have not often lived up to the expectations surrounding them. With just a few exceptions, these relatively wealthy, privatelyfunded shows have substituted splashiness for substance. That is something to quarrel about in a town that takes its theater seriously. And I suspect fighting words will be exchanged over As a Lamb, the new production from Art-Club XXI. Some of the possible gripes—it is too long and the cast doesn’t always work as a unit—are legitimate. But As a Lamb is still a moving, often beautiful piece of theater. The play retells one of the world’s most enduring myths; Jacob’s doing seven years of servitude for the right to marry Rachel, only to accept her sister Leah on the wedding night. With equal strokes of boldness and sensitivity, it has been restructured from the original versions in the Bible and Koran by Nadezhda Ptushkina, one of Moscow’s most promising new playwrights. Ptushkina extracted from the tale of a man’s fidelity to God and Purpose the underlying human passions which may have attended the real people who inspired the myth. Jacob’s destiny as the ancestor of the twelve tribes of Israel, and his descendance from Isaac and Abraham are little more than a pastel shading here. Nor does Ptushkina pursue the “sequel” to the dual marriage, Jacob’s anger at Rachel’s barrenness, or Rachel’s eventual death in childbirth. In fact, as indicated in the title, Ptushkina is less interested in Jacob than in Rachel, whose name in Hebrew means “ewe.” In this play Rachel’s lamb-like naivete and her bright, wise and tenacious love take precedence over the trials and humiliations which are her lot in the holy writings. Director Boris Milgram, with designer Alla Kozhenkova, cleared away everything on the spacious stage at the Mossoviet Theater but for a few soft pillows masquerading as rocks in the desert. There is no stone-covered well, Jacob and Rachel’s first meeting place; just the meeting itself. This sleek,

2 MOSCOW PERFORMANCES II

modern approach retains the purity and simplicity of the myth, leaving us to focus on the only thing we see: the coming together of a man and a (soon-to-be) woman. Ptushkina has written some excellent, if sometimes repetitive, bantering dialogue that engages us and the characters in the prelude to an uninhibited sexual game. It is the playwright’s accomplishment that she poeticized and romanticized frank sex talk in a way I had never heard on the Russian stage. But what also emerges among the puns and parries is the thematic image that makes As a Lamb compelling drama: Jacob’s confused perception of Rachel as an “empty vessel.” Long after Leah has usurped Jacob and kept him through long nights of bestial sexual indulgences, Rachel confronts her sister, claiming, “You can’t give Jacob anything more than lust!” Leah shoots back: “What more does a man need than lust?” To which Rachel replies triumphantly, “Soul!” That insight of Rachel is embodied splendidly by Irina Maximkina. Debuting in a major role which calls on her to appear first as a delightfully girlish 13 yearold and become a woman who acquires wisdom through her losses, Maximkina unfailingly exudes freshness, intelligence and an inborn sense of humor. As Jacob, the former Bolshoi Theater dancer Gediminas Taranda also takes his first steps as a dramatic actor. Wandering the zig-zags of boisterousness, tenderness, cowardice and contrition, Taranda has a graceful, winning ease, even if he does betray a few flashes of professionally calculated charm. The confidence and freedom with which Taranda and Maximkina perform dream-like and narrative dance interludes (choreographed by Nikolai Androsov to Vladimir Cherkasin’s funky, eastern-tinged music) are a mixed blessing. They do give the drama an added dimension, but they also drag it out. Oddly, the biggest hitch is in the great Inna Churikova’s Leah. She gives a powerful performance as the lonely, insidious woman who “steals” her younger sister’s destiny. But it is in that power that she seems at times, especially the early scenes, to be working in a heavy stylistic manner alien to the show. On the other hand, while Taranda and Maximkina actually benefit from having their voices amplified through wireless microphones—usually a deadly obstacle for dramatic theater—Churikova needs none of that. Her sensitive, inflected voice carries unenhanced, giving her portrayal authenticity and genuine intimacy. Despite occasional unevenness, As a Lamb is a perceptive, unflinching take on the risks we run and the rewards we reap when we love. (September 1996) The Threepenny Opera, Satirikon Everybody is talking about it, so here’s the lowdown: The new production of The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater cost $600,000. Not counting Peter Stein’s 1993 production of Oresteia, an international project geared toward

PERFORMANCES 1996–1997 3

1 Gediminas Taranda and Irina Maximkina in As a Lamb, a play by Nadezhda Ptushkina. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.


touring European festivals, it may be the most expensive dramatic production ever mounted in Russia. That’s right, dramatic, because even with a few of the reduced number of Kurt Weill songs scattered throughout, strictly speaking this Bertolt Brecht epic is neither opera, operetta nor musical. In this production, it isn’t even much of an epic. Call it a dramatic spectacle. It’s the spectacle, of course, that cost the money. Designer Alexander Borovsky built a humongous, multi-tiered London Bridge (backed by what looks to be the Chicago skyline) that stretches all the way across the yawning arc of the stage. Anatoly Kuznetsov provided voluminous, piercing lighting that cuts swaths of color through smoke and darkness. Bullets ricocheting about the stage during flashy, choreographed gunfights set off jarring pyrotechnical displays.


2 Konstantin Raikin and Natalia Vdovina in The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon, staged by Vladimir Mashkov at a cost of $600,000. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

That’s where the money went but the only question that means much is, “Yeah, but is it any good?” Yes, it is. Quite good, in fact. For the same reasons that everything at Konstantin Raikin’s Satirikon Theater has been so good over the last few years: Great acting from the principles and excellent support from the ensemble. More than any other theater in Moscow today, the Satirikon puts forth team efforts; it is as close as you can get to a guarantee of quality. That said, this production does not entirely match the high standard set either by the Satirikon, or the guest director of The Threepenny Opera, Vladimir Mashkov. It has all the whirl and spin one expects from top-flight entertainment, but in the end there’s something cold and calculating about it. Mashkov’s 1994 production of The Death-Defying Act for the Tabakov Theater was spectacular not only because of its breathtaking effects, but because


of its emotions and heart. The last three major shows at the Satirikon, Pyotr Fomenko’s The Magnificent Cuckold (1994), Valery Fokin’s The Metamorphosis (1995) and Raikin’s own Romeo and Juliet (1995)—for all their vast differences —have been rich in soul. By comparison, grand and sweeping as it is, The Threepenny Opera seems a rather piddling story. For lack of space, I will only mention that serious questions have recently been raised about how much of The Threepenny Opera even belongs to Brecht. It has been estimated that as much as 80% was written by one of his lovers in the 1920s, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Whatever the case, the version at the Satirikon was streamlined by Mashkov and Oleg Antonov, the author of The Death-Defying Act. They give us the straightforward tale of the robber Mack the Knife who handily maneuvers his way through marriage to a rival crook’s daughter, love trysts with prostitutes, conflicts with his fellow thieves and brushes with the law, emerging miraculously untouched. It is a parable for modern times with Raikin in the role of Mack looking every bit the modern hood in his snazzy tux and glib manner. Mashkov defines the show’s genre in the program as a comicstrip, and indeed, anyone who, like me, grew up on the American Dick Tracy t.v. cartoons, will see his point. The action is fast, the characters one-dimensional. It is in that rather narrow niche that this show works so well. Mashkov’s sense of spectacle is so unerring you are inclined to ignore the fact that it can also be a bit formulaic. And then there is that Satirikon troupe. Even if Raikin weren’t a great actor, he’d still be Moscow’s best showman. As Mack the Knife, he is hot-tempered, delightfully unencumbered by scruples and utterly charming. He whips through the energetic dances staged by Valery Arkhipov with the utmost of ease and handles this version’s reduced number of songs with life and personality. Mack’s rival (and father-in-law) is Jonathon Peachum, the boss of the town’s 14 criminal “precincts.” Nikolai Fomenko is superb in the role, investing it with an inaccessible dark side. His ambiguity is the closest we get to a multi-planned character in this show. As Mack’s wife Polly, Natalia Vdovina adds a new triumph to a growing number of magnificent performances at the Satirikon. In the spirit of the cartoonlike show, she appears early on as an endearingly squeaky flapper-girl, later emerging as a toughy out to control her husband’s little kingdom when he gets arrested. It is as if she plays two different characters, although the shift is signalled by a shrewd Mashkov innovation in Act One, an elaborate magic act which Vdovina performs brilliantly. These are the key strengths of The Threepenny Opera. If the story itself runs thin, the telling of it is almost always entertaining. (September 1996)


Moscow-Petushki, Taganka Theater Over the last few years Yury Lyubimov has provided a showcase for small, semiexperimental shows staged by other directors at his Taganka Theater. Most have been interesting; all, until now, have been short-lived. The most recent “little show” to join the Taganka’s repertory is MoscowPetushki, an interpretation of Venedikt Yerofeev’s famous novella about the adventures of a drunk who keeps trying to get to the Kremlin, but keeps winding up in the town of Petushki, the final stop on a commuter train that runs from the Kursk Station. Scripted, designed and staged by Valentin Ryzhy, Moscow-Petushki is played out in the second-floor buffet at the Taganka. Very much in the style made famous at the Taganka, it transforms and animates the simple objects of the set, so that buffet tables become train benches and empty chairs become the drunken traveler’s partners. Also echoing the Taganka’s familiar declarative, socio-political style, it includes short monologues by Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders. The production involves a total of four actors and two actresses, although in essence it is a one-man show featuring Alexander Tsurkan in the role of Venechka. Climbing, leaping, diving and balancing on the upturned tables, Tsurkan displays impressive physical skills, as well as a convincing ability to get inside his character and bring him to life. The drawback is that at nearly two hours without an intermission, the repetitive actions and text eventually wear thin, something that is only partly alleviated by Sergei Letov’s live performance of the eclectic music by Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko. (September 1996) Sonechka and Casanova, Hermitage Theater Sonechka and Casanova at the Hermitage Theater is a bit like an onion. You keep peeling away the layers but you never really find a center. And yet, despite the burning taste, there are still always a brave few who enjoy eating onions raw. Sonechka and Casanova is the most recent of Mikhail Levitin’s deeply personal, atmospheric productions that are a patchwork of literary and dramatic texts. The source this time is the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva, or more specifically, her prose “Tale About Sonechka,” her verse plays The Adventure and The Phoenix, and bits and pieces of her diaries. Sonechka was Sofia Holiday, born 1896 and died around 1934, by all accounts a potentially brilliant actress who was so unconventional and misunderstood that she eventually withered away in obscurity and died forgotten. She crossed Tsvetaeva’s path for just a short three weeks in 1918, but left a lasting


impression. The poet immortalized her in “Tale About Sonechka” and dedicated numerous poetic works to her. Casanova is the legendary 18th-century Italian gambler, charlatan, alchemist, lover and memoirist, and the hero of The Adventure and The Phoenix. He has no connections to Sofia Holiday other than those which Levitin has breathed into his dramatic composition by way of inspiration or madness. That is the question which this abstruse, frequently tedious, witheringly long production leaves us with: Is it a muddle or is it a revelation? One thing is certain, if you aren’t a Tsvetaeva expert, Levitin’s aggressively fragmented work will not help you. Spectators sit on the stage facing the auditorium, emptied of seats and decorated by David Borovsky as a summer cafe. It is a near literal realization of Tsvetaeva’s recollections of reading a play to a theater group the day she first saw Holiday. “I read in some theater on a stage…,” she wrote. “The theater was empty, the stage was full.” Levitin’s idea is clever in principle, but reality rudely intrudes. The sightlines are bad, the lighting is often hopelessly dim and voices echo so that much of Tsvetaeva’s spectacular texts are lost. With difficulty and unclarity, what emerges is something of a mystery play about love, role playing, memory and theater. Tsvetaeva herself (played with a tough, unpoetic fortitude by Irina Kachuro) is listed in the program merely as “little Alya’s mother.” Alya (Sonya Donnants) was Tsvetaeva’s daughter, but here she is most often a younger shadow of Holiday (Irina Bogdanova), who frequently transforms into women appearing to Casanova (Viktor Gvozditsky). Casanova, alternately in his 20s, 30s or 70s, doubles as Alexei Stakhovich, Holiday’s colleague and Tsvetaeva’s friend. Other actors and actresses take on unidentified roles ranging from one of Holiday’s frustrated directors to visions passing through. None of these transmogrifications are signalled, all are taken for granted. Bogdanova and Gvozditsky have some excellent moments creating sparks in the murk. Gvozditsky’s trademark impetuousness and seductiveness are ideal for capturing Casanova’s irreverent spirit. But Bogdanova is the find here, an impressively passionate, effervescent actress. Almost against all odds, I nearly enjoyed this one. Despite often being bored silly, infuriated by the effluent obscurities, taxed by the excruciating length and frozen by what I suspect was close to an inhouse temperature nearing freezing, I was impressed by Levitin’s commitment. That is one of those intangibles which always accompanies good theater, and I sensed it here in abundance. Levitin, nominated as a novelist for the 1994 Booker Prize in Russian literature, once wrote, “Theater exists in surges and conjectures. Theater must be intolerably mad.”


That seems a just and apt epigraph to Sonechka and Casanova. (October 1996) The Threepenny Opera, Satire Theater The season has barely begun and it is already flying under the banner of Bertolt Brecht and friends. Now joining the hottest ticket in town—the Satirikon Theater’s production of The Threepenny Opera—is a new production by the Satire Theater of The Threepenny Opera. Meanwhile, students at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts are playing The Threepenny Opera and the little Laboratory Theater has announced that later this year it will produce… The Threepenny Opera. For good measure, Alexei Levinsky, both at his own studio and at the Yermolova Theater Center, has put together two shows based on works written by Brecht with various compatriots, The Tutor and A Bourgeois Wedding. One thing about Valentin Pluchek’s version of The Threepenny Opera at the Satire Theater, it gives us a complete serving of Kurt Weill’s songs. At least in terms of numbers, that puts this show way out in front of the spectacle rich, but musically skimpy rendering at the Satirikon. In one of his best moves, Pluchek seated a live orchestra in the pit not only to accompany the singers during their numbers, but also to provide a musical background to the dramatic action. But this show, long on facemaking, shrieking, drawn-out pauses and the kind of fussy comic acting usually associated with domestic comedies, needed a lot more than live musicians to pick it up. It has its moments, especially as the drama gets a bit tighter in the second act, but its rewards are still few and far between. We get the whole text written by Brecht (and/or, as some suggest, Elisabeth Hauptmann who was one of Brecht’s numerous unacknowledged collaborators over the years). Mack the Knife (Yury Vasilyev) has his hands full with the Peachum family, marrying daughter Polly (Svetlana Ryabova), and engaging in what amounts to war with her father Jonathon (Valery Garkalin), also a crook who would love to see Mack’s neck in a noose. Police chief Tiger Brown (Alexander Didenko), Mack’s old friend and protector, has a mind to keep Mack out of trouble, but the prostitute Jenny (Marina Ilyina), maybe Mack’s one true love, sells him out for a pittance. Vasilyev, thin-lipped and scowling, plays an unchangingly (often monotonously) slick Mack, chalking up his best moments cutting loose in Weill’s ballads. Garkalin, an excellent actor, seems trapped in silly material and surroundings that are far beneath him. Almost the only instances bearing the breath of genuine human contact involve Ilyina, whose unspoken thoughts and emotions hover in her glances and her careful gestures. Pluchek has created a Threepenny Opera that looks decidedly old-fashioned and more than a little enervated. It never is clear whether the director was out to


revive the cabaret feel of the original 1928 pro duction or draw parallels with the present. As a result the production seems to hang in a generic and temporal limbo. If Pluchek’s wish was merely to put on a show, his aim was too low and his trigger finger too slow. The set by Valery Levental doesn’t help. From the shabby, cardboard tenement walls revolving around the stage to the enormous trio of spread-legged, cardboard prostitutes who occasionally descend from the heavens, the keynote is cheap. That ailment also infects the props. The plastic bouquets, fake fruit and the two whirling blue paddy wagon lights accompanied by a pathetically inadequate siren, all add up to underwhelm us visually. If Bertolt Brecht deserves all the attention he’s suddenly getting in Moscow, this production does little to prove it. (October 1996) The Game, Mossoviet Theater I am not one to knock success. Too hard, anyway. That little confession is wrested from me by Pavel Khomsky’s production of The Game, called in the program at the Mossoviet Theater a “musical match in two sessions.” Let’s clarify immediately that the kind of “match” intended here is as in chess, not as in “complement,” “adequate replacement” or the like. But before going on with that— or why I really detested this show— let’s return to the success story which The Game undoubtedly is. At last weekend’s premiere an overflow house greeted the parting curtain with squeals of delight; the first spotlight came on to a burst of applause. At show’s end, the curtain calls provoked a prolonged standing ovation punctuated with whoops and hollers. The object of the commotion was Alexander Chevsky’s “musical fantasy” concocted on the corpses of tunes by the Beatles, Jethro Tull, ABBA and a host of other bands from the 1960s and ’70s. Yaroslav Kesler’s libretto pursues the contest between a chess champion and his opponent, although that’s really little more than an excuse for Viktoria Sevryukova’s black-and-white chessboard costumes and the hanging, collapsing chessboards that dominate Alexander Yatsko’s sparse set amidst the gaping spaces of the open stage. This game, while having its full share of pawns, rooks, kings and queens, is essentially being played for fame, dames and power. The Champion (Oleg Kazancheev), looking nothing like a chess master, appears as a surly rock star hounded by the press, besieged by hordes of adoring fans and tormented by loneliness. His opponent, the Pretender (Valery Storozhik), is out for blood, but not nearly as much as his sinister Second (Vyacheslav Butenko), who will stop at nothing to get his way. Crossing the battle lines are Gloria (Lada Maris), the Champion’s secretary who falls in love with the Pretender, and Rita (Yelena Galliardt), an assistant in the Pretender’s team who falls for the Champ.


In the spirit of the genre of the musical, the plot is simplistic to the point of inanity, the burden of proving the show’s merit falling on the performers and the music. Which, after noting that most of the voices in this cast are quite impressive, is where we return to the question of matches. One thing is certain, there are a lot of mismatches in this Russian show based on Western rock and pop. Not the least of which are cultural. It is a fact; the Beatles and those they spawned mean one thing in the West and something altogether different in Russia. Obviously the two experiences are legitimate on their own terms, but, as Kipling might have observed had he lived to experience the rock revolution, the twain between them never shall meet. British and American rock, like Siamese twins each with its own personality but sharing a single heart, were and occasionally still are a vital, intuitive expression of the shape that the searches for sex, love and happiness—probably in that order—take on in every young Brit’s or American’s hometown. The language, the rhythms, the intonations and the references spring from the streets of Liverpool, Detroit or Asbury Park, New Jersey. For a Russian, these songs are exotic. Banned and thus seditiously attractive for decades under the Bolshevik gerontocracy, they now have freely entered the public domain. But rather like Tutankhamen’s tomb in a New York museum, they remain foreign objects to be admired and deciphered. I make this digression not out of arrogance, but out of affection. For the music without which I, an American, might not recognize my own life. I won’t go into the complex though bogus notion of “rockopera,” but Chevsky’s schmaltzy hatchet-job on the Beatles must be condemned. He dismembered the melodies of such songs as “A Day in the Life,” “Piggies,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “It’s Getting Better All the Time” and more, squeezing from them fleeting themes which wend in and out of themes ripped out of other songs, great (The Animals’ “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”) and dreadful (take ABBA for instance, please). It all reaches a chaotic, maddening crescendo as you instinctively struggle to identify the abominated but familiar tunes accompanying new Russian lyrics about black kings, traitorous women and philosophical, dethroned champions. Thanks to some fine singing from Maris and Galliardt, some appropriately malevolent acting from Butenko and some really snappy legwork by the tight, energetic dance corps, there are merciful moments of respite, although nothing could actually save the score short of destroying it. Still, before I get too comfortable on my high horse, I have another confession to make. I learned my Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky on the living room floor in front of the t.v. in the soundtracks to Bugs Bunny cartoons. It’s enough to evoke horror among my Russian friends. So I guess it’s a cultural thing, which means I have no problem calling The Game a success. If you doubt it, just ask any of the screaming teenage girls who were at the opener. (October 1996)


A Month in the Country, Fomenko Studio There is a moment when the Fomenko Studio’s new production of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month In the Country achieves perfection. Director Sergei Zhenovach knows it, because at the scene’s end he cuts it loose and lets it glide into a soaring pause that hangs like a crystal chandelier— heavy and bright. As if to say, “Just think about that awhile. Isn’t this great?” Galina Tyunina and Polina Kutepova, playing women after the same young man’s heart, know it too. With the second act winding down, they stand at an angle to one another near the edge of the stage. They are motionless, but all the anger, hurt and broken trust which have brought them to this point still flash in their eyes and course through their tranquil but rigid bodies. Kutepova’s Vera, a 17 year-old, has suddenly realized she is not merely the ward of Tyunina’s 29 year-old Natalya, she is her rival. The scene achieves one of dramatic theater’s most difficult and vital tasks: to register tangibly shifts in mood, perception or states of mind. In this case it is the instant of Vera’s coming-of-age which is played with the precision and deceptive ease of a two-step dance. Then Zhenovach stops everything and lets it hang. This scene of maturation has an added symbolism, at least for me. While many have raved about Zhenovach’s aggressively languorous productions at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater and the Fomenko Studio’s shows with various directors, I have largely remained unmoved, perhaps stubbornly so. For me Zhenovach has usually been a meticulous, thoughtful director, not quite able to distinguish between actors playing ennui and spectators enduring boredom. A Zhenovach defender once berated me, “Yes he can be boring, but he’s so intelligent!” I couldn’t have argued my own dissenting case better. As for the Fomenko Studio, entering its fourth year as a professional theater, it has often impressed me as a group of gifted though notready-for-prime-time players. Last season’s brilliant Tanya-Tanya, directed by Andrei Prikhodko with major assistance from the masterful Pyotr Fomenko, began turning the tide. A Month In the Country confirms it: The Fomenko Studio is hitting its stride. It is all the more satisfying since it has occurred with Zhenovach’s help. Even at a daunting four and a half hours, the pacing is splendid. Turgenev’s five acts are delivered in three segments, each with its own distinct personality. The first, acquainting us with the characters, is light, sparkling comedy. The second, revealing the underlying conflicts, is compelling, heart-rending drama. The third occasionally achieves the tension of tragedy, although that ambience is tempered by bursts of humor. The visuals evoke an atmosphere of delicacy. Vladimir Maximov’s simple set, backed by a terra cottacolored drop, consists of two pieces of an incomplete white gazebo which rotate at center stage. Like Alyona Sidorina’s soft-hued costumes, they seem illuminated from within when washed in the lighting by Alexei Nenashev.


The air is thick with the aroma of all the attributes of love: intrigue, flirtation, elation, jealousy and desperation. Zhenovach’s sparing use of Beethoven barely hints at the emotional states before silence again overtakes the hushed music. Characters’ thought processes come alive during monologues as the people in their musings drift across the stage. Tyunina, whose Natalya grows increasingly obsessed, acerbic and despairing, is superb as she realizes that her infatuation with the 21 year-old Alexei (Kirill Pirogov) has obliterated her cozy pseudoaffair with the well-intentioned but weak-willed Rakitin (Rustem Yuskaev). Explosive and sarcastic, racked by selfdoubt and pangs of conscience, she is equal parts discretion and wickedness as she races past Vera, Rakitin and her husband (Yury Stepanov) in pursuit of Alexei. Kutepova, as Natalya’s overmatched rival, is refreshingly modern in her outmoded role of the dependent girl with no rights. Ironic, naive, and capable of depth and growth, she fills to overflowing the vessel of her heroine’s passions. These actresses carry the show, although the ensemble works well. Yuskaev tends to overact and show off technique, but finds the sincerity to bring the ineffectual Rakitin to life. Pirogov’s Alexei has a limited but lively, boyish charm. Among several fine comic episodes, the best are Madlen Dzhabrailova as a spunky servant girl, and Tagir Rakhimov as a thick-headed neighbor who has come to ask for Vera’s hand. At the premiere, Fomenko himself watched intently from the balcony. I would like to think he was pleased. In any case, his students, along with his protege Zhenovach, had put together a show worthy of their teacher. (October 1996) The Last Night of the Last Tsar, Bogis Agency The presence of Valery Fokin alone might be enough to vouch for the robust health of theater in Moscow. He is not alone, of course, and shares the spotlight with a number of talented directors, some veterans, many newcomers. But Fokin, who turned 50 in the spring, is clearly in a category of his own. “Better” or “best” isn’t the point. What is, is vision, individuality and style. Fokin has a surfeit of them and when he is on, he is capable of creating great art and thrilling theater. There are moments of greatness in Fokin’s production of Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Night of the Last Tsar. It has the same barrage of imagination which lifted the director’s recent productions of The Metamorphosis and A Hotel Room in the Town of N to the status of theatrical events, but leaves you feeling as if you’ve seen nothing like it. Once again Fokin has taken total control of the environment. We gather outside a circus tent whence emanate the sounds of applause, motorcycles and drum rolls, and take our seats inside as acrobats do a trapeze act.


3 Rustem Yuskaev and Galina Tyunina in Sergei Zhenovach’s production of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country for the Fomenko Studio. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.


It is a brazen, maybe even reckless move to make a “circus” of the story of the murder of Russia’s last royal family, although the justification is there both in Radzinsky’s pliable if unspectacular play and Fokin’s attitude to the historical event which provoked it. Less the tale of the demise of the Romanovs, this is an exploration of the two men closest to the bloody act: Yakov Yurovsky, a former photographer who fired the bullet at the tsar, and Fyodor Lukoyanov, a.k.a.Comrade Maratov, the head of the local secret police. Yurovsky’s utterly fantastic ability to disengage himself from conscience makes him quite like a clown, while Lukoyanov is something of a tight-rope walker balancing unsteadily between revolutionary dogma and moral responsibility. The action commences with Lukoyanov (Yevgeny Mironov) visiting the dying Yurovsky (Mikhail Ulyanov) in the hospital. Lukoyanov, tormented by his grim role in history, has come to seek the truth about that last night. Yurovsky, dull and incapable of introspection, just wants a pill to help him sleep. It is in their conversations and arguments that the images of the tsar’s family take flesh. Nikolai (Alexander Zbruev) and Alexandra (Irina Kupchenko) appear in a tranquil, idyllic light, as they find in their prison room the “luxury” of merely being a husband and wife. He lovingly recounts his daughters’ flaws, she tells quietly of having sewed diamonds into her children’s undergarments. That, incidentally, is why it was so difficult to kill the heirs— bullets bounced off them as if they were wearing armor. The narrative lurches and surges as the focus shifts between Yurovsky’s hospital room and the chamber holding Nikolai and Alexandra. The royal daughters appear as a quartet of lithe ballerinas. Alexei, the hemophilic son dressed in a sailor’s suit, enters with a bit of circus flair, circling the ring as if acknowledging applause. As his sisters dance and sing a bit of nonsense, Alexei takes an agile leap over the bed of his father’s killer. It is a moment of grace and triumph. But when that leap is repeated once the tale has become more macabre, it acquires stinging, emotional power. This is Fokin at his best; masterfully manipulating unexpected and seemingly insignificant details which deepen the action’s impact. Working with him hand in hand is Alexander Bakshi, whose alternately gasping, nervous and comical music —performed on and off stage by Tatyana Grindenko’s Academy of Ancient Music, a string quintet—creates aural complements and counterparts to the visuals. Mironov is the catalyst among the cast, giving a naive yet profoundly probing interpretation of Lukoyanov. Whether recalling his attraction to Anastasia with pain and disbelief at what befell her, or ripping out folk songs with resigned desperation, Mironov is fully in sync with Radzinsky’s moral investigation and Fokin’s unorthodox framing of it. As Nikolai, Zbruev maintains calm and personable dignity with tangible warmth. Kupchenko’s Alexandra has a noble inner beauty which even the rare slip into theatrical hysteria cannot shake. Far more problematic is Ulyanov’s


4 Irina Kupchenko and Alexander Zbruev as Nikolai and Alexandra surrounded by their children in Valery Fokin’s production of The Last Night of the Last Tsar, a play by Edvard Radzinsky. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

Yurovsky. A much-honored actor and public figure, Ulyanov seems confused and ill at ease, neither getting inside his character nor creating the clown one suspects Fokin was after.


But this show, mixing drama, ballet, music and the circus, is bigger, broader and deeper than any single performance, with the possible exception of Mironov’s. It is a compelling, thought-provoking look at the Russian legacy, and another gem from a director at the peak of his powers. (October 1996) The Marriage (final performance), Malaya Bronnaya Theater The farewell performance of Anatoly Efros’s historical production of Gogol’s The Marriage took place at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater last week. It was performed 480 times between March 14, 1975 and October 24, 1996. Four actors, Maria Andrianova, Antonina Dmitrieva, Lev Durov and Kirill Glazunov, played in every show of the 21-year run. The Marriage was one of the most beloved and influential of the many great shows Efros created from the early 1950s until his death in 1987. Its dark, tense anxiety lurking beneath the crackling humor on the surface provided a completely new approach to the classic play. Echoes of and direct responses to Efros’ innovations can clearly be seen in the numerous unusual interpretations of The Marriage in the 1990s. Directors as divergent in style as Yury Pogrebnichko, Vladimir Mirzoev and Sergei Artsibashev have all leaned on Efros to one degree or another. As final performances of long-running shows go, this one was good enough to be called inspired. Durov was brilliant as always as one of the wildly comic, hard-luck suitors, while Olga Sirina was especially touching as the potential bride, a role originally played by Efros’ favorite actress, Olga Yakovleva. Only a handful of Efros productions continue to run in Moscow. They include Don Juan at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater, and reconstructions of Tartuffe at the Chekhov Art Theater, and Napoleon I at the Mayakovsky Theater. The latter was originally staged in 1983 at the Malaya Bronnaya. (October 1996) Don Juan, Russian Army Theater In Don Juan at the Russian Army Theater, director Viktor Shamirov probably bit off more than he could chew. Working primarily with a young, inexperienced cast, he took on both A.K.Tolstoy’s complex, 19th-century dramatic poem about the legendary libertine and the huge theatrical graveyard better known as the Army Theater’s stage, one of the most cavernous in Europe. The show has shortcomings about as numerous as Don Juan’s conquests, although not unlike the lover himself it also has its charms. Shamirov, helped by designer Alyona Mikhailova, has his biggest successes in his use of space. He seats the spectators on a grandstand in the middle of the stage,


occasionally spinning them around and revealing everchanging theatrical landscapes as drops and curtains are added or removed with each revolution. Satan, intent upon wresting Don Juan’s soul from the protection of divine Spirits, appears as a specter out of a bank of blinding lights, while in one of many homey comical moments, the Spirits actually take a service elevator down to earth from Heaven. At times the bottom seems to drop out of the earth as enormous traps are opened, while by stopping the revolving grandstand either flush against a wall or with huge, gaping spaces in front of it, Shamirov manipulates moods of intimacy or solemnity. The entire first act uses tight, enclosed space to create sensations of claustrophobia—as in the scene of Don Juan’s servant Leporello (Sergei Danilevich) being interrogated by the Inquisitor (Alexander Chutko)—or of confidentiality and privacy—as in the interviews of Donna Anna (Alisa Bogart) with Don Juan (Artyom Kaminsky) or her father, the Commendatore (Leonid Persianinov). It is here, the actors working an arm’s length from the spectators, that this production’s flaws are most glaring. Many in the cast just don’t have a feel for the depth of the play’s philosophical and emotional problems. At such close range their confusion or emptiness cannot be hidden. True, Shamirov deliberately undercut Tolstoy’s loftiness by having his actors speak with ultramodern, even sloppy diction, or by inserting ludicrous “jokes,” such as Leporello “galloping” in from out-of-town on a two-wheel scooter, or the dead Commendatore’s statue calmly puffing on his pipe in the final act. Too often, however, the result smacks of amateurism rather than evoking what I suspect was intended as lighthearted irreverence. In any case, Kaminsky, whose Don Juan is up against a daunting triple whammy—excommunication from the church, possession by the devil and losing his heart to real love for the first time in his life— cannot muster much more than blasé nonchalance. Things fare best where it concerns Bogart’s Donna Anna and Vitaly Stremovsky’s Satan. Bogart is equally intense and informal, capturing with ease the divergent styles of the playwright and the director. She almost singlehandedly picks up the meandering first act with her convincing portrayal of a woman ready to abandon all for love. Stremovsky brings to the proceedings a cool philosophical center as he plays the quintessential devil with grace and gallantry. Although this Don Juan is an underachiever, there is too much of interest going on in it to merely write it off. (November 1996) A Warsaw Melody, Pushkin Drama Theater As great debates go, it will never make the top ten, but the polemics surrounding contemporary Russian playwriting can get pretty hot. To oversimplify the


5 Alisa Bogart in Viktor Shamirov’s production of A.K.Tolstoy’s verse play Don Juan for the Russian Army Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

problem, it is often suggested that there are no playwrights anymore who can compete with those of previous generations.


That makes the new production of Leonid Zorin’s A Warsaw Melody at the Pushkin Theater especially intriguing. Here is a play once considered so fine it was given a staggering 150 productions in the decade following its 1968 premiere. Its sentimental story about a Russian youth who falls in love with a Polish girl but can’t marry her because of government interference presumably gave postPrague, pre-perestroika audiences a safe chance to quietly rant at the authorities while also shedding a pleasant, soap-operatic tear or two. Now, for all its endearing naivete, this schematic play with its formulaic characters looks downright inept. The young man— a vintner’s apprentice who becomes a PhD. and invents his own wine variety—and the young woman— a conservatory student who becomes a world famous singer— are as predictable as daylight. And such complications as his refusing to go off with her many years later in Warsaw because he is with a group and doesn’t dare be gone too long, are too laughable to ignore. Viktor Gulchenko’s production, which bends over backwards to show off Vera Alentova (but can’t avoid having her lip-sync songs in the dark), might be fun nostalgia for some. I say bring on the contemporary plays. (November 1996) Crime and Punishment, Chekhov Art Theater A new dramatization of Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, at the Chekhov Art Theater continues the questions being asked about what is going on at one of Russia’s most famous and prestigious houses. Scripted and directed by Viktor Sergachyov, it often plays like a student production replete with simplistic, purely plot-oriented scenes and plenty of hand-wringing and lipquivering. As the wily police inspector tracking down the murderer Raskolnikov, Alexei Zharkov injects a few moments of calm and welcome irony, and in a single scene Vladimir Kashpur shines as the drunken Marmeladov making Raskolnikov’s acquaintance in a tavern. But little else in this very long show (three hours, forty minutes) even holds up to professional standards. For the second show in a row (after a flat performance in Ostrovsky’s The Storm), the potentially fine young actress Diana Korzun, playing the prostitute Sonya, appears to have been abandoned by a director to the whims of fate. Her natural sincerity and charm are just not enough to make sense of this complex character. (November 1996) The Sakhalin Wife, Playwright and Director Center at the House of Actors1 Yelena Gremina has had it up to here.


If she were Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in a Hollywood blockbuster, she’d be toting two rocket launchers under either arm and have a satchel of souped-up, computerized hand grenades slung over her shoulder. She’d have pursed, white lips, fire in her eyes and a dark, foreboding crease in her brow. She would be on a do-or-die mission: get her man or have them send her home in a pineboard box. Her man is Anton Chekhov. And for a contemporary playwright like Gremina —best known for her play, Behind the Mirror, playing at, of all places, the Chekhov Art Theater— few enemies are as formidable as the unassuming doctor in a pincenez who wrote four of the greatest plays to have appeared in the last 100 years. He is one of a handful of the “classics” who have a lock on directors’ imaginations these days. Fifteen shows based on Chekhov plays are currently running in Moscow, with eight more scheduled to open this year. All told, that means there will soon be four more productions of Chekhov alone in this town than there were of all contemporary playwrights put together last season. That’s enough to get a hardworking writer’s dander up. Gremina, blessed not only with talent but a sense of humor, finally went seeking revenge by organizing a lecture series last spring “celebrating” the original 1896 flop of Chekhov’s masterpiece, The Seagull. Simultaneously she completed her seventh play, The Sakhalin Wife, whose action unfolds on the Siberian island at the time that Chekhov traveled there on his famous fact-finding trip in 1890. In the play, Gremina lets her characters talk about Chekhov, but she doesn’t let him make an actual appearance. Take that, Anton. Then came the next stage of Gremina’s battle: getting her play performed. A laboratory production of The Sakhalin Wife, which explores the lives and strivings of four convicts and two of their attendants, was originally mounted a few months ago as part of the experimental Playwright and Director Seminar at the Chekhov Art Theater. Public showings in a foyer, usually excerpts from the work-in-progress, attracted much attention in theater circles. But that wasn’t enough—or maybe it was too much—for the Art Theater. After just two complete performances before overflow crowds, the Art Theater in another of the strange moves characterizing that famous house’s policies recently, declined permission to continue the presentations. Enter Margarita Eskina, the director of the House of Actors. When she saw the show, she saw a chance to support an interesting but homeless piece of theater. She also seized an opportunity to do what everybody has been talking about for years, but nobody has been willing or able to do: Take concrete action to promote the writing and performing of new plays. Eskina created the Playwright and Director Center at the House of Actors, and its public inauguration will take place December 16 with a performance of The Sakhalin Wife.

1

The name of this center was shortened to the Debut Center later in the season.


Staged by a mixture of students from the Art Theater School and Pyotr Fomenko’s class at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts, the show bristles with youthful energy and sincerity Director Garold Strelkov coaxed some fine, honest performances from his inexperienced cast, bringing out Gremina’s paradoxical blend of bantering comedy, underlying despair and more than an inkling of solid, dry-eyed hope. Ivan (Ilya Lyubimov) is doing time for murder by arson, and has shacked up in the prison colony with Marina (Inga Oboldina), a Siberian native who has killed two or three husbands. Their friend Stepan (Dmitry Bobrov) is an axmurderer from Petersburg who put away three victims including his wife and her lover. The mildmannered Stepan amazes everyone with his desire to plant roses in the harsh Siberian soil, but otherwise their lives progress uneventfully until they are informed by their guard (Mikhail Salov) and a doctor (Dmitry Balashov) that guests are coming: the famous writer Chekhov and Olga (Yevgenia Grigoryeva), who will be given as a wife to Ivan or Stepan. Gremina toys with several set notions about Russian life, its mysticism, its passion, its penchant for violence, its spirituality and its attraction to the idea of an enlightened intelligentsia. Strelkov and his cast deliver them with intensity, faith and humor. I do not want to mislead. This is a student production and the elements of overexertion and enthusiasm are present almost in equal quantity with talent and insight. But in a show like this—in part, an effort to get the theater world to wake up to the present—that is a plus. Who knows, maybe this is the first salvo in an assault that will eventually put Anton Chekhov in his place? (November 1996) Playing the Dummy, Malaya Bronnaya Theater The production of Playing the Dummy at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater has had its share of troubles getting going. Premiere dates were repeatedly set back in September and October and even after the show finally opened, the director and author of the play, Artyom Khryakov, had to go back to the drawing board when two of his original cast members backed out of the project. He himself took on one of the vacated roles, actually getting more out of himself as an actor than he did as a director. Khryakov’s previous production at the Malaya Bronnaya was a delightful and loving parody of Soviet life and theater in 1994 called What a Lovely Sight! but this time he turned out a contemporary comedy that should be funnier than it is. In it, four men gather at a snowed-in dacha to play some cards, but the game quickly acquires stakes higher than anyone can afford. When the original quartet is joined by some comic family members and mysterious colleagues, the competition gets way out of hand and it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who is bluffing whom.


The play is filled with astute, irreverent and stinging observations about the Russian love of taking risks for the sake of taking risks, but as played out in this production, they seldom add up to more than a string of gags. (November 1996) Brocade, Alexander Filippenko Theater Brocade, an intimate, ethereal show based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first literary assay, a novel in letters called Poor Folk, brings back to the Moscow spotlight a trio of artists who have quietly been absent of late. First among them is Alexander Filippenko, a popular stage and screen actor of great intensity who used to be a member of the Vakhtangov Theater but has never quite felt comfortable in the confines of a single playhouse. He is joined by Mikhail Mokeev, once a leader among a group of directors touted for imminent stardom, but who since the early 1990s has worked more abroad than in Russia. The threesome is rounded out by Darya Mikhailova, an actress whose talents were never quite appreciated at the Vakhtangov Theater and who now, like Filippenko, has struck out on her own. Filippenko, Mikhailova and Mokeev came together under the banner of the socalled Filippenko Theater, which is more a description of a state of mind than an indication of a place on a geographical or cultural map. For the time being, they are playing Brocade as guests on the small, upstairs stage at the Mossoviet Theater, but future dates are uncertain. My advice is to catch this small gem while you have the chance. Dostoevsky’s novel consists of a series of letters exchanged by the impoverished, 47 year-old Makar Devushkin and his neighbor, the 17 year-old orphan, Varvara Alekseyevna. He is in love with her, but with his meek, unassuming character, he hardly expects more than the opportunity to correspond with her and occasionally have the joy of seeing her. Varvara is a sensitive young woman, still suffering from hardships at the hands of several cloying men and a hard-hearted “benefactress.” Grateful for Makar’s friendship, she is not nearly as sentimental or isolated as he. In dramatizing the novel, Anna Rodionova reshuffled Dostoevsky’s epistolary monologues into a series of dialogues that occasionally slip into confessional soliloquies. It works well because even as Filippenko’s Makar and Mikhailova’s Varvara chip off dramatic sparks through their interactions, they remain lonely people trapped in their own worlds. Mokeev, meanwhile, simplified the focus of the story, giving us two clearly defined, compelling human portraits. Little is left of Dostoevsky’s light spoofing of sentimentality or social satire, while his metaliterary commentary on Pushkin, Gogol, hack writers and the process of writing itself have largely receded into the background. If you want unadulterated Dostoevsky, go to the book. But if you might be interested in a carefully calibrated, superbly acted piece of theater that is a response to Dostoevsky, Mokeev has provided just the thing.


Early on, Filippenko and Mikhailova move about the stage as if occupying separate but connected universes. Their motions, from putting on their coats to starting out on a walk, echo one another without being exact repetitions. The two characters almost never touch, but in the rare instance when they do, a musician (Oleg Linatov) sitting at the edge of the stage extracts a startled twang from his guitar. In time the two draw closer physically, although the more that happens, the more we see the impassable gulf that keeps them apart. At one point the two come together in an embrace that reveals all the disparity between them. It is for Makar a precious, even sensuous moment; for Varvara it is an opportunity to rest and think. Makar’s thoughts and reminiscences lead only to Varvara. They are the poorly concealed expression of his love and his wild, unspoken hope that someday, perhaps, they might be together. Whether he complains about neighbors ridiculing their friendship, recalls an actress he had a crush on, or justifies a drunken night on the town, he has only Varvara in mind. Varvara is too aware of her adversities ever to forget the compromises she has yet to make in life. While encouraging Makar’s affections, she continues to angle for a marriage proposal from the lecherous Bykov in order to pull herself out of poverty. And when she gets the offer, she puts the shattered Makar into service as a go-between with her seamstress and jeweler. The broad band of brocade she has him order for the collar of her wedding dress is just one of the final humiliations she heaps on him unthinkingly. The dominant feature of Yury Kharikov’s set—a low-hanging, bone-colored net stuck with a dozen rolled-up letters—perhaps symbolizes that piece of brocade as well as the limited, confined life Makar lives. Most of all, this show’s strength is its acting. Filippenko, usually a live wire on stage, here keeps his energies bottled up and delivers a forceful, subtle performance. Mikhailova matches him step for step, her outward, girlish nonchalance never hiding her complex character underneath. (November 1996) The Dance of Death, Russian Drama Theater, Riga, Latvia The single performance last week of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death by the Russian Drama Theater from Riga, Latvia, gave Moscow another opportunity to see some of the work its native son, director Roman Kozak, has done abroad recently. Last year the same theater brought to town his production of Nikolai Yevreinov’s The Main Thing. One of many stars of The Dance of Death was designer Andris Freibergs, whose stark, modern set of a sunken living room gradually turned into a wading pool as rain poured down on an angled glass wall at the back. It was an ingenious way of illustrating in reverse the living conditions of the main characters, Edgar and Alice, whose unhappy home is situated on an island. Add Sergei Makryashin’s haunting orange, blue and gray lighting which reflected in swirling


6 Darya Mikhailova and Alexander Filippenko in Brocade, Mikhail Mokeev’s production of Dostoevsky’s first novella Poor Folk. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

patterns off the water onto a backdrop, and this became one of the best designed shows I have seen in some time. In this story of the bitter, irrational intrigues raging between a couple married for twenty-five years, Kozak had his actors exploding in aggressive, belligerent bursts of emotion which were often as comic as dramatic. Yakov Rafalson and


Lilita Ozolina were superb as the battling husband and wife. As might be expected, the dances staged by Alla Sigalova were not only forcefully evocative, but beautiful, as the actors kicked and splashed in the water. (November 1996) The Seagull, Maly Theater The Seagull, Anton Chekhov’s first major play, premiered 100 years ago in St. Petersburg. The author himself escaped during the second act, aware he was witnessing a prodigious flop. That night he told a friend, “I will never give a play to a theater again if I live another 700 years.” In fact, Chekhov lived eight more years, giving four plays, The Seagull included, to the newly-founded Moscow Art Theater. Those plays established Chekhov and the Art Theater as standard-bearers of the theatrical art in the 20th century. The venerable Maly Theater, Russia’s oldest playhouse, took a long time to discover Chekhov. Not counting a one-act vaudeville it mounted in 1891, it first tackled his drama in 1960, just one year before Yury Gagarin went into space. The current configuration of the Maly is more generous in its offerings, a new production of The Seagull being the third Chekhov play in the venue’s repertory. This Seagull, directed with care by Vladimir Dragunov, is probably best described as a routine outing with a few highlights scattered throughout. Its overall strengths and weaknesses pretty much share the same source in the Maly’s much ballyhooed conservatism. This is not a house known for innovations, at least in our century. The Maly is loved for its traditions, which usually means good, solid acting and reverential treatment of a play-wright’s text. The play focuses primarily on the daring young writer Konstantin Treplev, examining his relationships with his beloved Nina Zarechnaya a neighbor girl, his famous actress mother, Arkadina, and her lover, Trigorin, a popular writer. But with Chekhov, every character, no matter how minor, has a compelling biography. Without what we learn about Sorin, Arkadina’s retired older brother who fears he has never lived, Masha, a 22-year-old woman who has dried up before her time for lack of love, and Dr. Dorn, an intelligent but sarcastic middleaged loner, we would never gain the insights we do into the principals. As Treplev, Alexander Korshunov is high-strung and uncompromising. His best moments come early when he is literally preparing the stage for his homemade play which will star Nina and which his mother will ridicule as “decadent.” The actor delivers Treplev’s call for “new forms” in art with such conviction that you are later left wondering why Dragunov’s production is so conventional. The Maly recently added to its troupe the film star Irina Muravyova, and she makes a splashy, crowd-pleasing house debut as Arkadina. Lively and impetuous, she sidesteps the usual interpretation of Arkadina as a possibly great actress, giving us, instead, one who is limited but popular. Selfishly running roughshod over her son’s dreams, and belliger-ently overwhelming the weak-


willed Trigorin (Yury Solomin) when he shows signs of falling for Nina, she is always a bundle of energy. Solomin similarly plays a “reduced” Trigorin. This is a hack writer who knows perfectly well he is no Tolstoy or Turgenev and couldn’t care less. When he returns two years later after a disastrous affair with Nina, he hasn’t changed a bit. All he cares about is going fishing. Nina, the play’s second center after Treplev, is given a lightweight once-over by Inessa Rakhvalova. More frivolous than spirited, she seldom reveals the motivations for a strong-willed girl who defied her father, ran off to become an actress, suffered a humiliating liaison with Trigorin, lost her illegitimate child, and still finds a reason to go on. Rakhvalova shows flashes of that fortitude at the end of her final scene, but it is too little to force a reconsideration of her entire performance. Alexander Glazunov’s revolving set depicting the interiors and gardens of a country estate is backed with various changing skies, from breezy blue to dark and starry. Like this production as a whole, it is pleasant though undistinguished. (December 1996) Masculine Singular, Stanislavsky Drama Theater; and The Terrorists, Pushkin Drama Theater A small rush of French plays has brought two titles to Moscow stages that couldn’t possibly be more different. The Pushkin Theater has staged Albert Camus’ unrelenting philosophical and political treatise, The Just Assassins, under the title of The Terrorists, while the Stanislavsky Theater has just drawn back the curtain on a light piece of gender-bending entertainment by JeanJacques Bricaire and Maurice Lasayques called Masculine Singular. The Bricaire-Lasayques play, one of many the duo has collaborated on since 1968, is a snappy situation comedy about sex changes which throws in the semblance of a background political intrigue as a red herring—just to keep things on the wild side. As directed by Semyon Spivak, a top St. Petersburg director making his Moscow debut, the play becomes a bubbly farce with equal measures of dancing and sentimentality. Frank Harder (Vladimir Korenev) originally appears as an American colonel who has come to Paris to meet with Albert Lamar (Vladimir Anisko), a member of the French parliament But it doesn’t take long before we—and then Albert— realize that Frank has come strictly on personal business. It seems he used to be a she, and she is the mother of Albert’s son Louis (Andrei Gusev). Everything goes topsy-turvy when Louis realizes a secret is unfolding and concludes that Frank is his father and his father’s fiancee Mathilda (Lyudmila Lushina) is his mother. This is one of those professionally written plays that is funny if you’re in the mood for mirth. The “unexpected” plot twists are almost always tipped off miles in advance, so that much of what we do is watch characters slowly figure out


what we already know. It is left to some crazy details—such as Frank having been a CIA agent when he was a woman named Marie-Louise, and father and son Lamar having a dual affair with their governess Jassante (Irina Koreneva) without either of them knowing about the other—to keep things lively. Spivak added a few reelin’ and rockin’ dances that are performed with enough spunk (if not precision) to boost the energy level. This version of Masculine Singular, which frequently slams the humor too hard, probably works best in its quieter moments as a kind of plea for tolerance. It is when it shows us the dignity of the unusual that it interests us most. As for the final surprise, which has not been tipped off anywhere, I’m not talking. The Terrorists, by contrast, is a grim play presented grimly. We enter the hall of the Pushkin Theater to find that director Yury Yeryomin and his designer Valery Fomin have draped the balconies, amphitheater and boxes in coarse sackcloth. It creates a bunker mentality from the outset and readies us to watch five revolutionaries conspire to commit murder. Camus’ play is set in Russia and, while names are not named, it clearly is based on the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei in 1905. Each of the five plotters has his own distinct personality. Janek (Igor Bochkin), who eventually kills the Grand Duke after once refusing to in order to spare innocent children, is a kind of lovable, sentimental killer. Stepan (Alexei Guskov) is ruthless and unwavering, while the gang leader Boris (Vasily Bezdushny) is, almost as in a socialist realist novel, organized, businesslike and understanding. He even lets the high-strung Alexei (Alexander Peskov) back out of the conspiracy at the last minute, and he gallantly suppresses his love for Dora (Yelena Novikova) because she is in love with Janek. Camus, unlike Bricaire and Lasayques, wastes little time on plot complications. When the first assassination attempt fails because of Janek’s conscience attack, Camus moves on to the second which is successful. In the second half of the play he presents Janek in his prison cell as he is visited by Skuratov (Andrei Maiorov), the philosophical investigator, and the Grand Duchess (Nina Popova), both of whom try in vain to convince the young man to repent. The performance is engaging although it seldom matches the play’s high intensity. Bochkin’s folksy bomb-thrower is a bit too much to believe, while the taut atmosphere preceding the murder attempts smacks of manufactured theater nerves. Furthermore, the age when people killed for ideas now seems so far from our own when people kill for money, power and the fun of it, that the story can even seem a bit quaint. The Terrorists does not lack impact, however. In fact, its ending, more abrupt than unexpected, is so sobering that it almost deprives the audience of the will— though not the desire—to applaud. The message that killing is a dirty business, still retains the power to move. (December 1996, unpublished)


The Journey of Benjamin the Third to the Holy Land, Yevgeny Gerchakov Theater This is what Moscow theater is like: You’re going along catching the routine shows, some better, some worse, and all of a sudden, as if by magic, you find yourself witnessing something special. That excitement is enough to keep you plugging on for a long time, if need be, in search of more surprises. The recent appearance of The Sakhalin Wife, a fresh, lively staging of a contemporary play now showing at the House of Actors, was like that for me. Similar was the Alexander Filippenko Theater’s Brocade. This delicate adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel, Poor Folk, which had no advance publicity, features fine work by some topnotch artists who have not been active of late in Moscow. And then there are the rare, truly extraordinary discoveries. Enter Yevgeny Gerchakov, an actor, incidentally, who is no stranger to veteran Moscow theatergoers. He spent twelve years as the leading man at the Moscow Miniature Theater, which had already acquired its present name of the Hermitage Theater by the time he left it in 1992. Since then, however, he has lived something of a pilgrim’s life. Gerchakov abandoned Moscow in 1992 for five months to play Freud’s soul, of all things, in a Swiss play called Sigmund in Geneva. When he returned to Russia, he tried his hand at hosting t.v. shows, directing t.v. movies and acting in big-screen feature films which, as he says, no one ever saw. He soon will be seen in a three-part t.v. adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Dandelion Wine. Last year he made a return to the stage in Oedipus Rex, a production of the Torikos Theater in the Black Sea town of Gelendzhik. The show opened in Gelendzhik and toured some abroad, but played Moscow only once last fall. As fate would have it, I missed that show, and I never had the opportunity to see Gerchakov at the Hermitage. So, when I recently found myself waiting for the beginning of the Yevgeny Gerchakov Theater’s new production of The Journey of Benjamin the Third to the Holy Land, I did not know what I had been missing. I was not left in the dark much longer. Yevgeny Gerchakov is an inspired actor who takes the wind out of conversations about “portrayals,” “interpretations” and “performances.” The image he assumes on stage—in this case, a stubborn, hapless and endlessly endearing wandering Jew by the name of Benjamin—is entirely in harmony with Gerchakov himself. His quirks, blinks, sighs and gestures have nothing to do with the traditional theatrical creation of a personality, and everything to do with the revealing of the actor’s own depth and spirituality. There is little to say, really, about actors of this magnitude, because they work on an intuitive level which descriptions do not capture. You can note his small stature, his uncommon appearance, his strikingly lively and expressive face or his penetrating eyes, but all of it falls short. Gerchakov’s true impact bypasses


the mind with all its schematic ways of perceiving things, and strikes at the heart. Benjamin is the hero of Mendele Mocher Sforim’s classic Yiddish epic, usually known in English as Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third. He one day hears an inner call to embark upon a journey to the Holy Land, and, convincing his henpecked friend Senderl to go along with him, he casts off from his home village of Tuneyadovka (“Parasite-ville”) in search of the divine. It probably doesn’t matter that the two travelers lose their way in this soujourn that takes them across Eastern Europe and winds up bringing them back home again. They are so tired—and perhaps so changed by their experience—they don’t even realize they have come full circle. Gerchakov, who also directed and co-wrote the dramatization with Nikolai Sheiko, created a simple, humorous, beautiful and moving parable which is sprinkled throughout with Yiddish songs and Jewish dances. There is no decoration on the stage, just the people inhabiting Mendele Sforim’s distinctive, East-European Jewish world of the late 19th century. The story begins unfolding as Mendele the traveling bookseller (Valery Shalavin) tells of some of the people whose paths he has crossed. When he recalls Benjamin, Senderl (Mikhail Doloko) and their wives, the two families come into sharper focus as we see scenes of their modest life in the shtetl. The event that changed it all was Benjamin’s revelation that he must go on a pilgrimmage. He brought shame to his wife and ridicule to his name, although he knows nothing about that. As he tells Senderl in a moment of rapture, “While we are moving, we are alive!” Gerchakov is spell-binding as he takes his character through the transformations of a meek, unassuming man who acquires a purpose and discovers his own spirituality when he undertakes something of significance. The actresses handling the roles of Benjamin’s wife Zelda (Mira Safarova) and Senderl’s wife Rikl-Leah (Olga Berestenko) frequently appear in other guises, whether it be as sweetly singing birds attending to the two travelers’ secretive, early-morning departure, people they meet along the way or characters from their feverish dreams. The Journey of Benjamin is the first production of Gerchakov’s new brainchild, a theater and production company which he hopes will give him the artistic freedom he has lacked recently. Meanwhile, he has also accepted an invitation to play the lead in Mark Rozovsky’s production of The Story of a Horse at the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot. Consequently, Journey, while being a production of the Gerchakov Theater, will also play at the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot until Gerchakov can find a larger, more suitable stage. The return of Yevgeny Gerchakov has provided still another of those unexpected joys that Moscow theater has a way of providing with impressive regularity. (December 1996)


Our Town and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mikhail Tumanishvili Film Actors Theater, Tbilisi, Georgia The week-long Moscow tour of the Mikhail Tumanishvili Film Actors Theater, which ended December 18, displayed the unique work of a director most Muscovites know only by his films. But Tumanishvili, who died at age 75 in May 1996 just twelve days before his troupe was to take part in the Second Chekhov International Theater Festival, was also an influential figure in Georgian theater. He was the teacher of Robert Sturua and Temur Chkheidze, and the Film Actors Theater, which he founded in 1975, won him an international reputation. Of the three shows the theater brought to town, I caught the adaptation of Our Town and A Mid-summer Night’s Dream. The former was a fully “Georgianized” account of Thornton Wilder’s play originally written about life in an American town, and it beautifully demonstrated the director’s trademark inventiveness. The change—intro-ducing purely Georgian characters, problems and humor—brought a new sense of urgency to a play that now often looks dated or at least nostalgic. But it was the spectacular Mid-summer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s brilliant play about love and magic in an enchanted forest, which best revealed Tumanishvili’s delicacy and elegance. Airy, bright and shot through with tenderness, this show provided a clinic in how to get the most out of the simplest theatrical devices. The set, illuminated in soft light, consisted of nothing but eleven abstract paintings in pastels. Actors shaking plastic sheets of plexiglass created the illusion of light refracting in the woods. Most of all, however, it was the inspired, nuanced performances of the actors that made this production the extraordinary treat it was and gave a living illustration of what the critic Natalya Krymova calls the “Tumanishvili school” of theater. (December 1996) Prisoners, Yermolova Theater Prisoners at the Yermolova Theater is the latest in the unstemmed flow of plays by the classic 19th-century author Alexander Ostrovsky to appear in Moscow. Directed by Vasily Sechina, the production is modest to fault. But, even in this weakly realized story of a young woman whose dreams of romantic love are shattered, you can feel the playwright’s powers of observation. Ostrovsky wrote about merchants, their families and their considerable problems; about their narrow lives, their repressive codes of behavior, and, consequently, their penchant for breaking the rules. The playwright often put a woman in the middle of the turmoil, showing her lot as a symbol for the harshness of Russian life. But whatever the specific plot of any given play, the people inhabiting it are always impeccably real and recognizable.


Prisoners tells of an “exalted” heroine who is bought as a wife by an older man she does not love. She gives herself in love to her husband’s clerk only to find that this sleazy lothario is also carrying on an affair with her best friend. Sechina rightly realized that at the end of the 20th century you cannot give straight readings of stories about the pitfalls of arranged marriages, and he skipped over that superficial complication to go at the problem of people rationalizing away their scruples. It was something Ostrovsky was good at getting to the heart of, and in the list of human vices it seems to be one with staying power. Sechina pushed things almost to the level of satire, going for lightness and irony at every turn. As a result, in his version the impetuous heroine Yevlalia eventually accepts the rather modern notion that lovers can be bought as easily as wives. That said, however, this production has trouble getting going. Its biggest flaw may be Oleg Skudar’s flimsy set. Dominated by a nondescript carousel with revolving doors in the middle, its endless spinning is presumably intended to remind us of the aimless circles in which the characters are moving. That may be a legitimate, if obvious, metaphor, but rather than support the cramped action on the small stage, it detracts from it. The actors, for all their eagerness and effort, often give us pale, onedimensional portrayals that are clearly only shadows of what Ostrovsky had in mind. Tatyana Argunova’s Yevlalia is lively and frivolous; Yelena Silina, as her friend and rival Sonya, is calculating and unscrupulous; Boris Mironov, as Artemy, the single object of the two women’s affections, is slick and cynical. But while they all seem to suit the spirit of the director’s approach, their performances are too thin to draw us very far into either the drama or the comedy of the situations. Both Tatyana Govorova, as the scheming maid Marfa, and Vladimir Pavlov, as the drunken lackey Miron, aim for warm humor but fall short. The latter’s inebriated antics are entirely unconvincing. Standing above all is Boris Bystrov as Yevlalia’s husband Yevdokim. His thoughtfulness and doubt about the way he has treated his young wife give him a depth no one else has. When he returns from a business trip and suspects Yevlalia’s unfaithfulness, his reaction is a noble one. Rather than follow the advice of his ignorant friend Nikita (Vladimir Kuzenkov) to hold his wife a prisoner, he offers her freedom. Bystrov’s somber yet sympathetic mien creates the kind of shadings which suggest ambiguity and inner struggle, and bring characters to life. This production of Prisoners does not pull off what it set out to accomplish, although it is always a pleasure to cross paths with Ostrovsky’s characters even in reduced dimensions. (December 1996, unpublished)


A Bourgeois Wedding, Yermolova Theater Center; and The Threepenny Opera, Laboratory Theater The current season has not been especially rich in big events, but a minor phenomenon has been the resurgence of Bertolt Brecht. Six productions of Brecht plays have opened since September, led by the flashy staging of The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater. But the real surprise from my vantage point has not been the rediscovery of Brecht’s genius. It has been the nagging thought that all the fanfare about Brecht’s greatness is only so much hype and aca-demic hot air. I am even more convinced in my skepticism after having seen another new version of The Threepenny Opera, this one at the Laboratory Theater, and a production of A Bourgeois Wedding at the Yermolova Theater Center. At the Yermolova, director Alexei Levinsky has often employed his wry, ironic approach to the classics with success. His unorthodox take on Anton Chekhov’s one-act plays, The Wedding and The Anniversary, produced fine results, while his ambitious undertaking of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid was uneven but beguiling. Levinsky’s production of A Bourgeois Wedding, maintaining the same strange stylistics as his other works, has none of the life or humor. A Bourgeois Wedding consists of two one-act satires on bourgeois morality, the title piece coming first, followed by Lux in tenebris, or Light in the Darkness. The opening scene presents a bride (Galina Anisimova) and groom (Sergei Badichkin) as they celebrate with family and friends. What begins as a proper reception soon declines into chaos as the guests quarrel, the newlyweds fight and the chairs keep breaking one by one. Designer Viktor Arkhipov provided a simple set consisting of a long banquet table stretching across the small stage from side to side. The guests sit around it on three sides facing the audience, so that we are confronted with a kind of portrait gallery. Some actors’ movements and speech patterns are heavily mannered, even mechanical, and the picture that arises of them is distinctly grotesque. Others, notably the bride’s father (Fyodor Valikov), are softer, but none the less grotesque. Valikov’s hero keeps interrupting to tell about the bed he has presented to the young couple: His uncle, it seems, died a terrible death in it. This attack on hypocrisy—with the bride hoping the guests won’t leave because “without them it will be even worse,” and the groom learning that his wife is already pregnant—has a mean streak that is uncharacteristic of Levinsky (though not of Brecht). More damaging, it just doesn’t seem to be of any consequence. It’s not only that you don’t care about the people, which Brecht didn’t want you to do anyway, it is that neither the “message” nor the theatrical medium which carry it have the ability to generate interest. The show’s second half is a trifle about a man (Andrei Kalashnikov) who resolves to put a brothel out of business by informing the public about the evils of


syphillis, but ends up buying the joint and planning to make his fortune. This playlet, silly and outmoded, suffocates in tedium when subjected to Levinsky’s understated approach. At the little Laboratory Theater, with its shoebox stage and hall that seats forty, director Andrei Rossinsky decided to think big. He not only staged the freewheeling Threepenny Opera in a space so small the actors can barely turn around, he got rid of Kurt Weill’s songs, replacing them with new compositions by Alexander Rakviashvili. I have a soft spot for daredevils, but, frankly, here’s a risk that was not worth taking. When there are as many as nine people on stage, to say nothing about a long table and a folding, movable wall cutting the space nearly in half, you might be excused for thinking you are watching an open can of sardines rather than a theatrical performance. Furthermore, Rakviashvili’s thin, pop-oriented music has none of the cut and slash of the Weill originals. Brecht minus Weill is a little like potatoes without gravy: dry and utilitarian. This is where you see the emptiness of the story about the robber and lothario Mack the Knife who gets a queen’s pardon when all his enemies thought him as good as hanged. Innovative in the 1920s and ’30s for toying with the spectator’s expectations by making a “hero” of a scoundrel, that kind of approach now is as common as they come. All that can really catch our eye these days are the personalities, but Brecht, because he wasn’t interested in that, left them as bare sketches. Oleg Chumakov is a slick and handsome Mack, while Olga Pletnyova, playing his wife Polly, at least can carry a tune, unlike some of the cast members. But, in all, this Opera hardly seems worth a bent nickel. (January 1997) Life Is no Bed of Roses, Chelovek Theater-Studio Finally someone has done it— staged a 19th-century melodrama by Alexander Ostrovsky as if it were a contemporary play. I don’t mean just modern clothes and trappings, although that is rare enough. I mean getting down inside of Ostrovsky’s quintessential Muscovite language and characters and coming back up with a performance about what people are experiencing at the end of the 20th century. The man who did it is Viktor Shamirov who just last month won a “Moscow Debut” award for his first professional production, an unusual staging of Don Juan at the Russian Army Theater. In that show, Shamirov tackled one of the largest stages in the world; in his intimate production of Ostrovsky’s Life Is no Bed of Roses (literally Not All Is Shrovetide to the Cat in Russian) at the Chelovek Theater-Studio, he took on what must be one of the smallest. Furthermore, indicating he is not inclined to suffer from claustropho bia, Shamirov joined with designer Vadim Tallerov to cut the puny stage at the Chelovek in half again. For most of the performance, the actors work right under


7 Irina Grinyova and Alexander Sinyukov in Alexander Ostrovsky’s Life Is no Bed of Roses, directed by Viktor Shamirov at the Chelovek Theater-Studio. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

the noses of the spectators in a tiny oblong space made even smaller by a low, slanting patchwork ceiling of rugs and blankets. The shortcomings in Don Juan— primarily Shamirov’s inability to coax adequate performances from some of his lead actors—have largely been turned around in Life Is no Bed of Roses. Or at least that happened to a sufficient extent to make this production a thoroughly engaging look at the games of power and humiliation which are played between people with wealth and those without it. Darya Fedoseevna (Olga Dzisko) is an impoverished widow living in a cramped “Soviet” apartment with her 20-year-old daughter Agnia (Irina Grinyova). The young woman, full of longing for a better life, is attracted to Ippolit (Alexander Sinyukov), a young neighbor who is crazy for her. But since he has been working without pay for his rich uncle Yermil (Valery Barinov) for nearly ten years, Ippolit can offer Agnia nothing more than his affection. When Yermil comes courting and throwing around expensive gifts, Agnia finds herself on the proverbial horns of a dilemma—Should she marry for love or money?


The first seconds immediately tip off Shamirov’s efforts to find in this story a contemporary pitch. Agnia and her mother sit silently at the kitchen table drinking tea and munching crackers and slices of apple. Nothing happens and nothing is supposed to. This is no theatrical impression of how people lived 100 years ago, it is a truthful, modern portrayal of people sitting at their kitchen table lost in unguarded revery. Grinyova exudes the perfect combination of youthful irony, impatience and aimlessness. She is an actress of great subtlety and it is enough to watch her chew a fingernail or roll her eyes to sense exactly what is going on inside her head. Her heroine, cloudily trapped between the desire for an idle life and the impulses of frustrated sexuality, is at a crossroads which she herself only vaguely recognizes. Grinyova lays out Agnia’s inner battle with a surgeon’s precision. In time, Agnia’s attentions—and the focus of the production—are swallowed up by Yermil’s ravenous appetite for veneration. Barinov’s considerable achievement as the lecherous, arrogant middle-aged man is measured in the depth of the antipathy we feel toward him as he bullies everyone around, as well as in the short-lived pang of sympathy we unexpectedly experience when his well-laid plans collapse. It is not so much that we see in him a projection of the so-called “New Russians,” but more that we come to perceive the destructive weight of so much self-satisfaction. Perhaps not surprisingly, the real winner in the battle of wits is Agnia’s unassuming mother. Always ready to bow and scrape before her “great” visitor, she stops short of what would be tantamount to prostituting her daughter and refuses Yermil’s increasingly insolent demands. Dzisko is in her element in these final scenes, pulling a deep sense of strength and values out of the wooly weakness that usually characterizes her Darya. As the hesitating Ippolit who is finally put up to outfoxing his uncle by Agnia, Sinyukov cuts an excessively pale figure. But since Agnia’s infatuation is more with her own confused desire for excitement and/or luxury than with any specific person, this is not a major flaw. Agrippina Steklova turns in several masterful moments of comic abandon as Feona, Yermil’s housekeeper who stops to share in some wacky girl talk with Agnia. Shamirov in Life Is no Bed of Roses was not out to “modernize” Ostrovsky or to hold contemporary Russian life up to a 19th-century mirror. He simply delivered a fine, insightful play with modern intonations, creating a compelling encounter with some of Moscow’s eternal people and situations. (January 1997) Hunger and Thirst, Theater u Nikitskikh vorot Eugene Ionesco didn’t like it, but that didn’t stop anyone and it still doesn’t. He got included among the central figures in the rather amorphous, non-movement called the “theater of the absurd,” and it stuck.


His strange plays, which he called “tragi-farces,” are, of course, built on the incongruities and indifferent cruelties of the human experience which partly make up the universe of any play said to belong to the “absurd.” But for all the learned pronouncements flying around about Ionesco’s grand philosophical, political and social underpinnings, I would hazard to say that what was so striking about this French-Rumanian writer who died in 1994 at the age of 82, was his impeccable ability to capture the minute details of and thoughts behind the simplest, most common everyday activities. The first act of Hunger and Thirst, Mark Rozovsky’s production of which opened this week at the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot, is a fine example of Ionesco’s extraordinarily keen eye for the basic, primary problems that hound us. Jean and his wife Marie-Madelaine have returned to a dank basement apartment with their infant daughter because Jean could not abide the spacious rooms they inhabited of late. Instantly, however, Jean falls to griping about the dismal aspect of this old abode he abhors. His dream, the dream of an idealist, is a “house with transparent walls and ceilings.” Marie-Madelaine is certain she can make this hole a home again with her love; she says she will “warm it with her heart and light it with her eyes.” In this half of the play, Ionesco isolates with brilliant clarity the eternal conflict of the impulses to settle down and to keep moving in search of something greater. And in the exquisite simplicity and truth of the playwright’s language, you are tempted to hear a transcript of an actual conversation he once was privy to. This is really Ionesco’s power— his gift for distilling the situations, thoughts and emotions which are universal to people and even peoples of all kinds. To play the role of Jean, Rozovsky was fortunate to get Yevgeny Gerchakov, who recently made his impressive Moscow stage comeback in The Journey of Benjamin the Third to the Holy Land. Gerchakov’s velvet vulnerability, his quiet, gentle nervousness, are the very stuff of what I suspect Ionesco was after when he created this character. The actor moves in a perpetual state of inner agitation. He listens to his wife’s entreaties, he hears them, he may even want to believe them, but an inner voice is invariably telling him something is critically wrong. As Marie-Madelaine, Galina Borisova is a force in her own right. She sidesteps the nagging a lesser actress might emphasize in the role and comes at Jean with a heartfelt conviction in the sanctity of the home hearth. When Jean finally abandons her in search of the vague truths tormenting his imagination, her real sympathies are with him, who “didn’t know that a miracle was possible here, too.” The first act is entirely colored by the personalities of Gerchakov and Borisova, which, for the most part, works in favor of the show. Their soft, introspective sincerity, even if it does tone down a good deal of the humor, accentuates the intimacy of their relations (both with their own demons and with each other). Jean’s rare bursts of frustration and Marie-Madelaine’s occasional


8 Yevgeny Gerchakov in Eugene Ionesco’s Hunger and Thirst at the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot, with sets by Søren Brunes. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

flashes of aggressiveness only highlight the understated, poignant nature of their struggle. The second act could loosely be titled Jean in Hell. Ragged, tired and hungry from his peregrinatio ns, Jean comes upon what appears to be a monastery inhabited by four monks. Initially they seem to put the traveler at ease, but their hospitality soon takes on the spirit of torture.


The smirking monks demand he recount what he has seen on the way and are not satisfied until they harass him into signing a document admitting he ignored a person begging for help. Then they show him a sketch in which two monks play —or become—prisoners persecuted into believing in God. Most of this section, suffering from the fast and loose performances common at Rozovsky’s theater, does not achieve the heights of the first act. The slapstick humor carries Ionesco’s message, but doesn’t drive it home until Gerchakov delivers Jean’s final monologue. Now bullied into serving the monks, he opines that evil is the only proof of God’s existence, while the elastic walls, floor and ceiling of the set by Søren Brunes twist eerily into a vortex trapping the actor at the stage’s edge. This final scene revives the atmosphere of the moving first act and reminds us of what Ionesco— and this production of Hunger and Thirst—did best: take on the complexity of the human condition with disarming ingenuousness and simplicity. (January 1997) Fleeing Pilgrims, Mossoviet Theater; and The Terrible Parents, Yermolova Theater You want dysfunctional families? We’ve got dysfunctional families. Alexei Kazantsev’s Fleeing Pilgrims at the Mossoviet Theater gives you all you want to know about the depravities of the New, Old and Future Russian family. And as a reminder that Russians aren’t the only ones hanging out their dirty underwear, there is The Terrible Parents at the Yermolova Theater. That’s Jean Cocteau’s 1938 melodrama (also called Intimate Relations in English) about a sort of ménage à cinq in which a French family’s sexual inversions are about the only thing that hold it together until they destroy it. In Fleeing Pilgrims Kazantsev went for the big picture. It is not so much a play about people as an attempt to delineate a few social types and use them to make a grand statement about Russia. In short, things are bad, but there may be hope yet. There is the happy-go-lucky sneak Nadya (Larisa Kuznetsova); her husband, the infantile Roman (Vladimir Steklov); their friend, the driven business-woman Inga (Nelli Pshennaya); her lover, the mysteriously creepy Dmitry (Alexander Domogarov); and Inga’s daughter, the good, but suffering Polina (Flora Mazi). What all have in common, except perhaps Polina, is that their ethics have turned to kasha. But Polina—a budding alcoholic who visits her dying father in defiance of her mother and who fell in love with Dmitry when he raped her—has a rough road ahead. This is a miniature and marginally comical Sodom and Gomorrah in which most of the characters are as addicted to sex as they are to getrich-quick schemes. But unlike God, who got fed up and destroyed Sodom, Kazantsev takes pity on his backstabbers and sinners. Polina has a dream that all have died and


are waiting judgement and it is there we realize that they are just good souls gone wrong. Director Leonid Heifetz gives us a straight-up, realistic treatment in which almost none of the characters come to life. Only Larisa Kuznetsova’s volatile, over-the-top comic performance as the unscrupulous, life-loving Nadya occasionally brings things down from the lofty realms of generalizations to a tangible, believable human level. She single-handedly carries the plodding first act. The Terrible Parents was banned as immoral in France during the Nazi occupation. Which just goes to show again how lacking in humor those totalitarian governments are. This is not a great play, and there are moments when you want to stand up and shout—“Enough, already, I get it!”—but it does have plenty of laughs sprinkled among some emotion-grabbing scenes. As deftly directed by Mikhail Mokeev, it even comes off as more than just an entertainment. You find yourself getting genuinely wrapped up in the convoluted drama. Yvonne (Yelena Korolyova) has ignored her husband George (Alexei Sheinin) for years because she’s got this thing for her son Michel (Rodion Yurin), who, in his turn, likes to paw his mom and call her “Sofie.” That all suits Yvonne’s sister Leonie (Natalya Arkhangelskaya) because she’s been in love with George for decades and it lets her keep a tight rein on this “gypsy camp” as they call it. But, the family idyll dissipates when Michel announces he will marry the pretty Madelaine (Ilona Belyaeva). Neither of them realize his dad is the lover she’s about to drop. The pepper-pot Korolyova turns in some wild scenes as the selfish, irrational and unkempt mother who would go to any lengths to keep her son. Whether she’s sulking, threatening suicide or taking the offensive, she is a master at monopolizing attention. But it is the duet of the youngsters, lightly choreographed by Mokeev with stylized, occasionally acrobatic movements handled expertly by the actors, which makes this show more than a frothy frolic. Yurin’s toothy, grinning innocent would no less question his relations with his mother than doubt his love for Madelaine. His bright, simple Michel is a babe in the woods and you believe Madelaine when she calls him the purest thing she has ever known. Belyaeva’s guileless Madelaine is the key to this story’s depth. As the outsider in the group, she brings some “normalcy” to the chaos, while her position as the lover of both father and son puts her in the way of tragedy. One of the most powerful moments hits unexpectedly as George corners her and forces her to give up his son. As she trembles kneeling on his arm thrust insolently between her legs, the tension can be cut with a knife. These two productions either work (The Terrible Parents) or don’t (Fleeing Pilgrims) as a result of the same basic thing: their ability, or lack of it, to put a human face on human failings. (January 1997)


Greetings, Don Quixote!, Contemporary Play School In Greetings, Don Quixote! at the Contemporary Play School, Sancho Panza listens with rapt attention to a philosophical tirade from his master, the would-be knight errant Don Quixote. He takes it all in, then blurts out, “Your madness is smarter than a wiseman’s intellect!” Don Quixote is not only one of the great symbols of a visionary idealist, he is one of the most lovable heroes in one of the most enduring stories ever told. The mild-mannered bookworm-turned-avenger-for-the-truth has a bit of everyman in him, his wounded sense of justice having universal appeal. Of course he’s also nuttier than a fruit cake, which makes for a barrell-full of laughs. It’s a great combination to bring to the theater, and I’m sure that’s just what Iosif Raikhelgauz was thinking when he signed on three of Moscow’s top actors to play the trio of Don Quixote (Albert Filozov), Sancho Panza (Lev Durov) and Dulcinea del Toboso (Tatyana Vasilyeva). So why is this show so often such a torture to watch? I think one explanation is schizophrenia, or at least over-ambitiousness. The show’s subtitle, Dialogues, Opera, Ballet, and Clown Show for Dramatic Actors, wastes no time tipping off how much ground director Raikhelgauz wanted to cover. Moreover, the program lists Raikhelgauz as the “author” of the production with “quotes” from Miguel de Cervantes, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yevgeny Shvarts, Alexander Volodin, Anatoly Lunacharsky and the composer Leon Minkus, all in a “stage composition” by Viktor Korkia, Alexander Lavrin, Valery Beryozin and Iosif Raikhelgauz. And that isn’t all, really, because the contributions of choreographer Gennady Abramov and the codirector of the clown show, Leonid Leikin, are substantial. This is a show that comes at you with guns blazing on all sides. But once it falters, it misses nearly every shot. Things start well enough with a homey prologue in which the actors address the spectators directly, drawing them into the act of make-believe. This short segment, and the following introductory scenes showing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza embarking on their journey, are handled in the same playful, pseudoamateur style which made Raikhelgauz’s 1992 staging of What’re You Doing in a Tux? one of Moscow’s most popular in the early ’90s. Actors playing the “crowd” or the “people” build the heroes’ wooden horse and donkey before our eyes, and the illusion of the two static riders traversing the countryside is acheived by actors carrying wooden cutouts of trees, churches and windmills across the stage behind them. But for all the hyper-theatrical fun, the action develops at a snail’s pace and the characters seem strangely one-dimensional. Raikhelgauz offers a clumsy progression of soliloquies and dialogues occasionally broken up by some event, such as Quixote’s confrontations with the windmills he confuses with monsters, or the galley-slaves he mistakes for persecuted gentlemen.


The further the show advanced, the more I had the feeling nobody had ever decided what was most important, so that every idea which got as far as the drawing board was included in the final plan. That problem pales, however, once we pass from the “dialogues” to the socalled “opera.” This shrieking assault which concludes the first act must last at least half an hour and seems primarily intended to test an audience’s threshhold for pain. Actors are a dependent lot, even the usually fine threesome engaged here, and when a director says, “Jump,” they ask, “How high?” In this case, Raikhelgauz asked three tone-deaf dramatic actors to croon their way through the entire scene of Don Quixote’s adventures at the inn which he misconstrues for a palace. For five minutes it is almost funny; for ten it is grimly tolerable; after that you couldn’t care less about the plot complications of Quixote winding up in the embraces of the Asturian maid (played by Vasilyeva), you just hope nobody gets hurt. The second act abandons any attempt to pick up a coherent narrative and consists of the largely mimetic “ballet” and “clown show,” each of which, like the “opera,” lasts nearly thirty minutes. The former features a series of what appear to be dream scenes with actors and actresses tumbling and somersaulting about the stage. The latter revives one of the “ballet’s” elements, the appearance of Death. In a mock funeral procession for the dead Quixote, the rednosed Dulcinea squirts streams of tears into the audience. Vasilyeva, who is gifted with great timing, evokes a few vivid, comic moments. But any hopes of saving this show by now could only be labeled quixotic, which, to paraphrase my dictionary, means “great idea: no chance.” In Russian the title Greetings, Don Quixote! conceals a doubleentendre: It could also be translated as Don Quixote Is Nuts! Frankly, I think that gives a more accurate picture of this production. (January 1997) Britannicus, Novy Drama Theater Slowly and with remarkable punctuality, Vladimir Sedov is going about creating his own kind of theater. Once every two years he unveils a new show at the Novy Drama Theater where he is a staff director. In 1993 it was an atmospheric and obscure reading of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me. In 1995 it was Pip, a stark, revisionist handling of Charles Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. In 1997 it is Jean Racine’s Britannicus. Racine’s verse tragedy about the intrigues of power in Nero’s Roman court in the first century A.D. is right up Sedov’s alley. The intellectual games, the deceitful characters, the helplessness of honest people, and life’s essential cruelty are all themes which recur to one degree or another in the director’s shows. He strives for a world of abstraction and alienation which exists beyond feelings or emotions.


The problem is that Sedov’s hyper-aesthetic manner is so wintry and bloodless it fails to touch us. Britannicus is no exception to the rule. I, at least, invariably leave one of his productions feeling I have seen the work of an artist who has honed the external and structural elements of his style to a fine point, but who flounders when it comes to making us care about the people in the play. Granted, Britannicus is not populated with a lot of people inspiring sympathy. Nero (Leonid Udalov), through the machinations of his scheming mother Agrippina (Natalya Bespalova), has been awarded the throne in place of his teenaged ward Britannicus (Dmitry Shilyaev) who was the proper heir. But rather than be grateful, Nero suspects his mother is out to manipulate him. Encouraged by Narcissus (Oleg Burygin), the unscrupulous mentor of Britannicus, and scornful of his own moderate mentor Burrus (Vladimir Levashyov), Nero begins a campaign against his ward and mother both. The grounds for his offensive is the beautiful Junia (Irina Manuilova), who is betrothed to marry Britannicus but whom Nero resolves to make his own. Racine’s play about the corruption and dehumanization wrought by power streaks on relentlessly, each scene vigorously propelling the plot forward. That sense of pristine simplicity is reflected beautifully in Andrei Sergeev’s neoclassically inspired set of a semi-circle of elegant chairs backed by sleek, shiny wooden columns, as well as in Natalia Zakurdaeva’s tasteful, modern costumes executed in shades of brown and black. But Sedov’s actors, speaking Racine’s verse in an elevated—too often, forced —manner, and moving about the stage in stiff, almost geometrical, patterns, provide only a pale imitation of the atmosphere evoked by the visuals. Most take themselves so seriously, there is little room left for us to do the same. The exceptions are, to an extent, Vladimir Levashyov, who brings an effective combination of human depth and limitation to his Burrus, and, more unequivocally, Irina Manuilova as Junia. Manuilova, smooth, graceful and light as a feather, brings such clarity to her role that she is capable of illuminating the entire production when on stage. In her accepting Nero’s demand to reject Britannicus, and in her explaining to her former betrothed that she had no choice if she were to save his life, Manuilova expresses both her character’s personal drama and her place as a cog in the machine of history. That her efforts are in vain only deepen the tragedy of her position. In Britannicus Vladimir Sedov shows again that he is a stylist with a unique artistic signature. But I suspect his work would have a much greater impact if it carried more heart and soul. (February 1997) Little Comedies, Malaya Bronnaya Theater Half-way is not a word in Sergei Zhenovach’s vocabulary. If he gets into something, he goes all the way.


When Zhenovach staged Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in 1995, he included every word of dialogue from the classic novel in a three-part show that runs nearly twelve hours over three days. This season it is Ivan Turgenev who has captured Zhenovach’s fancy. In the fall he unveiled a marathon, four-and-a-half-hour version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at the Fomenko Studio. Now he has taken on not one, not two, but three of Turgenev’s one-act plays at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater, where he is the chief director. The show, titled Little Comedies as a winking nod to Alexander Pushkin’s famous Little Tragedies, includes Breakfast at the Magistrates, The Provincial Wife, and A Conversation on the High Road. It runs nearly four hours with two intermissions. Frankly, I don’t see the point of such maximalism in regards to Turgenev’s short plays. I may contend that twelve hours of The Idiot (at least as presented by Zhenovach) is too much of a good thing, but I would never argue that Dostoevsky is unworthy material. As for A Month in the Country, it is one of the finest Russian plays of the 19th century and Zhenovach’s atmospheric, wellpaced interpretation made it sparkle anew. Little Comedies is a collection of trifles. Why drag them out so? Breakfast observes a late-morning meeting at the home of a provincial district magistrate. Several landowners have gathered to resolve the region’s most burning problem—a dispute over inherited lands between a brother and sister. In the course of the meeting, as people come and go, most everyone succeeds in offending someone or being offended, and the assembly breaks up when the perhaps less-than-honest magistrate loses his cool and flees the room. Finita la commedia, or at least what there is of one. This aimless sketch, like the other two for that matter, is little more than an excuse for actors to dig into their repertoire of comic tricks. As the magistrate, Sergei Perelygin is angular, moderately and sleazy and self-content. Alexander Kotov’s judge, hip-hopping about the stage like a rabbit, is fastidious and nervous. Best of all is Vladimir Toptsov’s frizz-haired, bug-eyed Ferapont, the brother who is battling his obstinate, giggling sister (Yelena Matveeva). But with no real drama unfolding, once you get a bead on each character, there is little left to watch for. The unquestionable highlight of the evening is The Provincial Wife. This piece has at least something of a story to it, but even more important, it gives a pair of Zhenovach’s top actors the chance to try something new. Darya (Irina Rozanova) is dying to escape the doldrums of life with her cloying husband (Sergei Batalov) in the provinces. When an aging, foppish count (Sergei Taramaev) whose house she grew up in appears in the neighborhood, Darya resolves to turn his head and get him to offer her husband a job in St. Petersburg. Ultimately, her scheme works so well that hubby may be headed to the capital as little more than extra baggage. Taramaev, often cast in the roles of defenseless and/or deeply spiritual characters, is superb in his comical turn as the arrogant cynic whose aristocratic


9 Sergei Taramaev and Irina Rozanova in Sergei Zhenovach’s production of Little Comedies at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.


reserve crumbles at the first signs of flattery. Rozanova also reveals a far deeper strain of uninhibited, low humor than I have ever seen her show, and proves herself a masterful comic actress. The two put on a marvelous exhibit of vaudevillian slapstick as Darya’s seduction plan gets underway. The educated provincial wife shows off her pianoplaying talent by performing a tuneless, hammering excerpt from an “opera” the count has composed, and then rattles off a tortured spiel in French to tell him how his music inspires her. The material here may be inconsequential, but the acting is impressive. After the peaks of The Provincial Wife, the desultory dialogue in A Conversation on the High Road goes nowhere fast. A whining, insecure young master (Gennady Nazarov) castigates his moody servant (Vladimir Toptsov) and salt-of-theearth driver (Sergei Kachanov) as they bump and roll in a carriage. Most interesting is the background to Yury Galperin’s set— three hanging platforms topped with lifelike dolls and haystacks which sway from side to side to give the illusion of movement through the countryside. The trio of travelers sit on the forestage in a bouncing carriage whose swinging drive shaft almost reaches the first row of seats. Little Comedies would have a far great impact if it were instead One Little Comedy. More is not necessarily better, and this show would be stronger if trimmed by two-thirds. (February 1997) The Wedding, Russian Academy of Theater Arts Not many directors have reputations so strong that even their pedagogical productions attract the wide attention of the public and the press. One who does so regularly, however, is Pyotr Fomenko. Of course, his 1993 graduating class at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI) which comprises the heart of his popular theater, the Fomenko Studio, had a lot to do with that. But that is only part of it. The director, who will turn 65 this July, is an artist at the peak of his powers and no matter what he does, it is of interest. Fomenko’s most recent student production at RATI, where he teaches directing and acting, is a typically imaginative take on Anton Chekhov’s one-act farce, The Wedding. As do all of his professional proje49cts, this show about the strange people attending a wedding reception for a starry-eyed young bride and her older, sour-puss groom, is pulling in standing-roomonly crowds. The limitations of any student production are a given. What looks like amateurism and overacting is really young talent taking chances. But that, especially when buoyed by the distinctive marks of Fomenko’s direction, makes this show worth seeing. Fomenko “broke up” the action which usually consists of a series of vignettes at a banquet table. His characters are not glued to their seats, but, on the contrary, spend their time retreating from the crowd to play out duets or trios in


isolation. This lends the performances space, depth and perception, always key elements in Fomenko’s work. Most of all, Fomenko’s style is highly theatrical, filled with physical digressions, visual illustrations of the text and the use of dances and music. The Wedding is no exception. When the entire cast, minus the glowering groom, gets up and does an energetic line dance winding in and out of the nooks and crannies on stage and behind the spectators, nothing could better portray the basic conflicts at work. Most of the actors are actually future directors, and to be honest, it shows. But their energy, commitment and enthusiasm are catching. However, Fomenko is the real draw. And, as usual, he delivers. (February 1997) The Storm, Young Spectator Theater It would hardly be risky to suspect many of Moscow’s directors of having a hole where their imagination is supposed to be. Case in point: their obsession with Alexander Ostrovsky. I have lost exact count, but there are about 35 productions of the 19th-century writer’s plays running in town. He’s a great playwright, arguably Russia’s finest. But how often can you go see a performance of, say, The Storm, to pick one of his masterpieces? At some point aren’t we justified in muttering a couple of expletives and crossing Ostrovsky off our list, at least until the next millennium? Maybe so. But if you do before seeing Genrietta Yanovskaya’s production of The Storm at the Young Spectator Theater, you’ll miss one of the most imaginative interpretations you could hope for. I think I’ve seen this play produced a thousand times; I’ve never seen one that looked or played like this. The action unfolds with unflappable prop men called “storm men” stalking the stage which the audience shares with the actors. Sergei Barkhin’s eclectic, suggestive and highly theatrical set surrounds and towers above us with a rainmaking machine situated high up in the flies, thunder sheets hanging on the walls and entire communities of traditional Russian clay dolls scattered everywhere. The Volga, with a birch tree bearing painted eggs standing nearby, is depicted as a tin trough set into a strip of real dirt. It all suggests a play you’ve never heard of. Everybody knows The Storm tells of Katerina, a spirited young woman suffocating in the fetid atmosphere of her wimpy husband’s house which is ruled by his overbearing mother, Marfa Kabanova. But while all that is present in Yanovskaya’s interpretation, the play’s grounding theme—the igno rance of the backward Russian provinces—has been brought up out of the background. This river town is afflicted by more than ignorance. The cankers of mental degeneration and dumb violence are killing it. Ostrovsky’s play begins as the local “intellectual” chats with two young men on a bench. Traditionally the scene is staged as a folksy, comic introduction.


Yanovskaya comes out with a tense, even frightening, scene in which the young men are thugs getting their kicks by harassing the mild-mannered Kuligin (Igor Yasulovich) whose dream is to discover the secret of perpetual motion. With the appearance of Boris (Maxim Vitorgan), a cultured newcomer who will fall for Katerina with disastrous results, Vanya (Vladimir Puchkov), the ringleader in the gang of two, momentarily latches onto a new victim. Boris later sighs that he can’t get used to the Russian ways. Replies Kuligin, “You never will. We have cruel customs in our town.” All that follows is colored by that observation and the scenes that precede it. But the underlying threat of violence is not this town’s only misfortune. In the context of the universe Yanovskaya creates, Kuligin is not merely an eccentric, he is borderline crazy. He is not alone. The wandering pilgrim Feklusha (Olga Demidova), with her dreams of good and stories of people with dog-like faces, seems more than a little looney. But to drive the point home, Yanovskaya added a character not in the play, a nameless, constantly squeaking ward (Yevgeny Sarmont) in the Kabanov home whose mental development was arrested in infancy. This is a world in which intellect, gentleness and insanity go hand in hand, and crude intimidation is the keeper of order. It is in that harsh light that Katerina’s tragedy unfolds. Katerina, as played by Yulia Svezhakova, is a bright, optimistic girl who has already had her wings clipped by the time we meet her. Her sparkling eyes and sunny grin have not faded yet, but she moves under a growing cloud of desperation. The reason, even more than the boredom of life with her husband Tikhon (Igor Gordin), is the hostility of her mother-in-law Kabanova (Era Ziganshina). Her sister-in-law Varvara (Viktoria Verberg) takes pity on her and arranges a meeting with Boris when Tikhon is away, but that only hastens Katerina’s demise. She cannot live a lie, nor will she let herself drift into the dementia which seems to protect this town’s other sensitive people. Katerina confesses her infidelity and drowns herself in the Volga. At last week’s premiere, the cast often seemed tentative and obsessed with technique. The primary exceptions were Demidova, in her razor-sharp portrayal of the strange Feklusha, and Ziganshina, whose quietly tyrannical Kabanova is even more menacing for her dignity and occasional flash of generosity. Svezhakova, making her professional debut, gave a moving, big-hearted performance and promises to get better yet as she gains experience. But the real strength of The Storm is Yanovskaya’s unusual and convincing conception of it as the place where dreams collide with brute force. (February 1997)


10 Yulia Svezhakova as Katerina in Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm at the Young Spectator Theater, directed by Genrietta Yanovskaya. Photo: Alexander Ivanishin.

The Unattainable, Anton Chekhov Theater; and Farewell and Applause, Tabakov Theater Leonid Trushkin’s production of Somerset Maugham’s comedy, The


Unattainable, and Oleg Tabakov’s production of Alexei Bogdanovich’s “theatrical fantasy,” Farewell and Applause, are two of a kind. Both are packaged slickly and both bend over backwards to entertain. Don’t get me wrong. I love to be entertained. In fact, I insist on it. I don’t care how “smart” a show is— if it doesn’t entertain me, I won’t find much in it to like. But—and here is the inevitable “but”—I need more than cotton candy to satisfy me. On a scale of sweets going as far as a Savoy truffle, I’d rank The Unattainable as a plain milk chocolate bar. Farewell and Applause is, well, a wisp of cotton candy. Leonid Trushkin, the founder of the Anton Chekhov Theater, Russia’s first post-Soviet private theater, is on a mission to entertain. About once a year he hires a star or two and puts on a show that draws crowds and, as often as not, the derision of the critics. I have aimed my share of raspberries at Trushkin. The reason is he has a way of trivializing the classics beyond recognition (Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Shakespeare’s Hamlet) or approaching second-rate pulp with alarming solemnity (Bernard Slade’s Tribute and the 1967 American film, The Incident). The Unattainable is a clever trifle, a bedroom farce that never gets past the drawing room, written by a fine novelist who didn’t take playwriting seriously. For Maugham, the drama was a place to hone his craft for more important tasks, and this time Trushkin did a credible job of tuning into the author’s flippancy. The be-all and end-all of this breezy show about two “middle-aged” lovers who panic when they get the chance to marry, is the popular film star Lyudmila Gurchenko. She plays the “unattainable” Caroline with all the verve and spirit her public expects. Trushkin staged her every posed entrance and every heel-kicking exit to elicit applause. Not one fails. In the decade that Caroline Ashley’s husband has been absent in Africa, she has blithely carried on an affair with Robert (Boris Dyachenko), a self-important attorney who meets the tittering approval of Caroline’s goofy girlfriends Isabelle (Olga Prokofyeva) and Maude (Olga Volkova). The couple has dreamed of marriage, but when the Times reports Mr. Ashley’s death, the dream quickly crumbles: He hesitates and she is too proud to forgive him. But with the busybody girls pulling out all the stops to save the affair, the lovers realize they can’t avoid marrying—and like bitter old spouses, they bicker over whose apartment they’ll occupy Enter Doctor Cornish (Vladimir Steklov) to save the day. Secretly in love with Caroline, he convinces her to marry him so she can remain Robert’s lover. But he suddenly lies that Mr. Ashley is still alive and gracefully bows out to leave Caroline alone. Forget this story’s last-minute effort to get philosophical. Its strength is not in Caroline’s bleary-eyed realization that she prefers illusions to reality, it is in the bantering comedy that gets her there. Trushkin’s low-point is his annoying use of Vladimir Davydenko’s homogenized, jazzy music. He often raises the volume to short crescendos after every line of dialogue in a cynical effort to create emotion when the text or


performances lack it. Boris Valuev’s stylish, two-tier drawing room and attractive costumes are a definite plus and accent the positive elements of The Unattainable. Farewell and Applause at the Tabakov Theater frames two hours of playful hijinks between a few minutes of pondering the nature of theater at the beginning and end. It might work if the cavorting weren’t so blatantly formulaic. The comedy-of-mask-style story could be fun. A troupe of actors is thrown into chaos by a young actress’ latest fling. Her leading-man husband quits the company and house playwright Carlo Goldoni naively thinks he can fill the void. But his old flame—the theater’s leading lady, the young actress’s elder sister, and the theater manager’s wife—takes swift action to cancel that. The blurring of art and life is clever enough and the conclusion that life serves art (not vice versa) is the kind of thing actors love to sink their teeth into. But if Tabakov’s cast weren’t so young, I might suspect they were gumming this material without dentures. Seldom do you see so many work so hard and make so much noise to imitate merriment with so little success. The sole exceptions are Marina Zudina as the dissembling young actress and Alexander Mokhov as her beau. But his part is too small and hers too isolated to make a difference. (February 1997) Three Sisters, Chekhov Art Theater I would love to separate Oleg Yefremov’s new production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Chekhov Art Theater from the barrage of hype that will surround the 100th anniversary celebration of the Moscow Art Theater next season. It can’t be done. The buildup to the anniversary is already in full swing and everything the theater does from now on can only be seen in its light. Here are some bare facts to orient you. The Moscow Art Theater was founded 99 years ago by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. Together they essentially invented the modern style of realistic theater which quickly became prevalent the world over. The house they built established the standard for the repertory theater, a venue with a steady troupe and a revolving set of productions. The state of the current Moscow Art Theater becomes evident even when you try to name it. After a nasty civil war in 1987 it broke into two factions, the Chekhov Art Theater (on Kamergersky Lane) and the Gorky Art Theater (on Tverskoi Boulevard). The Kamergersky crew at its best puts out professional, entertaining shows, while at its worst can descend into amateurism. The Gorky Art Theater has produced nothing of value. Oleg Yefremov’s role in the demise of the once-proud house is unenviable. Like Mephistopheles in reverse, wishing to do good he seems continually to do evil.


A brilliant actor who led the Sovremennik Theater in its heyday from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Yefremov has been at the helm of the Art Theater (and now the Chekhov Art Theater) since 1970. His accomplishments have been modest and it should come as no surprise that Yefremov is looking for the centennial to reestablish his and his theater’s reputation. Which brings us back to Three Sisters. But this dull, unimaginative production of the play about three sisters who dream of escaping their dreary lives in a provincial army town, creates a portrait of a theater in atrophy. Yefremov’s direction is conservative and literal, basically offering a “talking” version of Chekhov’s text. The acting is wildly uneven. Some brief scenes unexpectedly catch emotional fire, most plod aimlessly on. Quite in the Soviet tradition, many actors, good and otherwise, have been cast not according to their suitability for their roles, but apparently because of their status in the troupe’s hierarchy The last time Olga Barnet and Stanislav Lyubshin played together (very well, incidentally, in Misha’s Birthday Party), she played a 59 year-old grandmother and he played a man celebrating his 60th birthday. Here, she is the 28-year-old Olga, the eldest of the three Prozorova sisters, and he is Vershinin, the 43-yearold, philosophizing officer who sweeps Masha, the married middle sister, off her feet. Various characters play the piano, the violin, the harp and the flute. None of the actors do—they fake it as the sounds drift in from backstage. Yelena Maiorova’s dark, oppressed Masha is the closest this show has to a sustained personality. She is intense, high-strung and trapped in her dismal marriage to the boring, self-satisfied school teacher Kulygin (Andrei Myagkov). But her character remains static throughout, a problem that afflicts everyone. Barnet’s Olga is an impenetrable spinster and Polina Medvedeva’s Irina, the youngest sister, is playful and girlish. They are just what you expect them to be, nothing more. So generic are their performances, I even found myself thinking this was a show without leads. The sisters’ famous refrains of “To Moscow! To Moscow!” have no drama. You don’t believe them capable of such a bold move from the very start The officers who frequent the Prozorova house reflect both the glorious past when this family was the center of society, and the degraded present when that society has become so insipid. Baron Tuzenbach (Viktor Gvozditsky) and Captain Solyony (Alexei Zharkov) compete so lethargically for Irina’s affections, she accepts the former’s proposal almost by default. Tuzenbach is simple and sincere in his final scene with Irina, but his offstage death in a duel with Solyony is anti-climactic. An even more corrosive influence on the sisters’ lives is their weak brother Andrei (Dmitry Brusnikin) and his covetous, vulgar wife Natalya (Natalya Yegorova). While he squanders money at cards, she slowly seizes control of the house. Brusnikin’s over-eager imitation of a feeble man-child is the kind of contrived performance which, according to legend, used to make Stanislavsky bark at his actors, “I don’t believe you!”


Valery Levental’s revolving set shows, by turns, the exterior and the interior of the Prozorova house. In the finale it rides off stage into oblivion, leaving the sisters to combat their despair alone amidst the towering trees of the surrounding woods. One wonders: Is that the same fate in store for the house that Stanislavsky built? (March 1997) Anomaly, Sovremennik Theater Some day Alexander Galin may write a play about feasts in a time of plague. He certainly has the experience. Throughout the 1990s, as Moscow theaters have forgotten or ignored the vast majority of contemporary playwrights with a vengeance, Galin has blithely gone along, enjoying regular productions of his new plays at various venues around town. His latest, the appropriately titled Anomaly at the Sovremennik Theater, by my cursory count brings the total of his plays now running in Moscow to a half dozen. Another of his plays at the Sovremennik, the perestroika-era Stars in the Morning Sky, will be performed for the 300th time on March 15. It is a record that has allowed Galin to surpass Nikolai Kolyada as the mostproduced contemporary playwright in the capital. Galin is a traditional Russian— even Soviet—playwright. Ever since his first play, Retro, was produced at the Maly Theater in 1980, he has been concerned primarily with social themes. He typically uses a spectrum of characters to bring out various aspects of a given problem. When he brings his people to life, as he did in Sorry, an analysis of a discontented emigrant temporarily reentering Russian life that premiered at the Lenkom Theater in 1992, he can create works of compelling drama. But Galin is also prone to producing still-born characters strangled by ideas. Anomaly, a play about the members of a touring puppet theater accidentally winding up in a secret, underground military city, is one of those. Filled with edifying speeches about the battles of art and science with commerce, and encumbered with Galin’s strained phrasemaking (“The only Columbian I ever saw was on a coffee jar when I got humanitarian aid,” says one character), Anomaly tries too hard to be philosophical and topical at the same time. The puppeteers, who strayed off course because of their devoted, but incompetent driver Ivan (Vladislav Fedchenko), are broken down into a tediously recognizable array of types. Tanya (Olga Drozdova) is the pretty but vulgar golddigger; Nina (Galina Petrova) is mousey, but sensitive and sincere; Valentina (Yelena Millioti) is the gruff old communist with a heart; Vasily (Georgy Bogadist) is the token gay, a former ballet dancer who is dying to please; Zhanna (Marina Khazova) is hesitant and mysterious. She is the one who attracts the attention of both the quietly rebellious young Ilya (Igor Larin) and his worldweary but wise father Yefim, the theater’s director.


11 Alexander Galin directed his own play, Anomaly, at the Sovremennik and occasionally performed in it too. Photo: Alexander Ivanishin.

Galin himself will be playing Yefim in turns with Alexander Nazarov, who performed in the show I saw. Nazarov was the best thing the show I attended had to offer. Humble but certain of his own value, powerless yet quietly insistent, and pale but personable, he brought a believable human depth to the cliched dialogues that almost no one else could. The basic conflicts of the play create a triangle of sorts. There is the clash of the actors with the officers who have lived in this underground, iron city for seventeen years, and there are their individual confrontations with the wealthy


bandit Medvedev (Vladimir Zemlyanikin). He has bought the city to mine it of its uranium deposits and is willing to buy a dance with Zhanna for $10,000. Medvedev is a textbook thug-in-a-tie, eternally shadowed by his beefy sidekick the General (Vladislav Pilnikov). From the stories of his main enemy, Lieutenant-Colonel Khrebet (Valery Khlevinsky), we learn Medvedev is impotent, while from Colonel Korovin (Viktor Tulchinsky), another of the lonely officers living like captives underground, we learn that Medvedev sent everybody’s wives away years ago. That makes the visiting females especially welcome, while Vasily is heartbroken when he doesn’t get invited to the party. Through all the gyrations in the complex relationships, what emerges is a tired vision of the eternal strife between honest, penniless idealists (the puppeteers and the officers) and crooked, fraudulent creeps (Medvedev). Lurking somewhere beyond the rusting walls of this city, but not too far away, are those mythical heavies—some of them, oh horrors, foreigners— whose only desire is to pump dollars out of this forsaken land. Naturally, the good guys have their flaws (Yefim convinces Zhanna to dance for the $10,000), but their hearts are in the right place (Yefim did it to save his struggling theater). Some, like Khrebet, whose name suggests “backbone” and who gets gunned down after confronting Medvedev one too many times, come to tragic ends. Galin is one of the few Russian playwrights I know of who occasionally stages his own plays, and he wears the director’s hat in Anomaly. It shows in his conservative, literal approach to the text. David Borovsky’s heavy set effectively depicts the iron, underground city which Yefim refers to as an anomaly, but which we are encouraged to see as a metaphor for Russia at large. (March 1997) Little Tragedies: Part One, Chekhov Art Theater Roman Kozak’s production of two verse plays by Alexander Pushkin, called Little Tragedies: Part One at the Chekhov Art Theater, is a good barometer of the state of that famous venue these days. Sharply uneven, this show on the theater’s intimate New Stage mixes the sublime and the ridiculous with unnerving ease. There is more going on here than in Oleg Yefremov’s numbingly flat Three Sisters, which just opened on the mainstage, but there is also more than an occasional lack of the precision and taste it seems natural to expect from a house that takes its position as a worldclass theater icon so seriously. After a wobbly preface of two sparring partners huffing and puffing through preparations for a medieval tourney, the first play, The Covetous Knight, reflects nicely some of the sparkle of Pushkin’s glittering texts and shrewd observations of human nature.


As Albert, an ambitious young knight who is tired of waiting to get his old father’s money, Sergei Shnyryov embodies both familial honor and youthful insolence. He listens with much too much interest when the money lending Jew (Oleg Topolyansky) surreptitiously suggests a way to kill his father, and eventually responds with just the vehement indignance befitting a respectful, if not loving, son. Kozak livens up Pushkin’s verbally vigorous but action-poor dialogues with some sudden acrobatics handled deftly by Shnyryov. These flips and tricks, unlike the plodding sparring scene at the outset, are quick and to the point. They bring out the winking irony lurking between the lines of Pushkin’s poetry and signal Kozak’s own desire to escape the confines of a stolid, “literary” reading. The peaks and valleys of The Covetous Knight are concentrated in Andrei Panin’s occasionally virtuosic performance of the Baron, the covetous knight himself. Panin is an actor of deep sensitivity and he has some fine moments delivering the Baron’s extended monologue about his love of money, his fears of losing it and his jealous dread of his “depraved” son. He easily draws us into the twisted logic of a graybeard’s ravings, making us sympathize with him even as we laugh at him. But the actor’s performance is undercut by his crude mimicry of an old man’s mannerisms. I was frustrated that such an impressive portrayal so often floundered needlessly in those clear signs of overacting; a false crotchety voice and artificial, stiff movements. The climax of The Covetous Knight resets Pushkin’s quiet irony in grotesque tones. The over-inflated Duke (Alexander Vasyutinsky) attempts to intercede between the warring father and son, but passions run so high his mission is doomed to failure. When the gasping Baron struggles off-stage and dies, all we see is the undignified vision of two motionless feet sticking out from underneath a curtain. The second segment, The Stone Guest, based on the legend of Don Juan meeting his match in a stone monument to a commodore he once killed, plunges aggressively into the low-lying territory of burlesque. This Don Juan (Sergei Shkalikov), despite the stylized period costumes by Maria Danilova, is something of a modern-day party guy. He reminded me of the shadow of a self-assured smart aleck stepping down off the pages of a hip glossy magazine. But I detected few signs of believable magnetism between the lover and his old flame Laura (Irina Apeksimova) or his new obsession, Donna Anna (Natalya Rogozhkina), the commodore’s widow. Apeksimova is good as the generic femme fatale, and Rogozhkina is natural and pastoral as the hesitant widow, although that is hardly enough to create sparks. Don Juan engages in a bout of acrobatic sex with Laura that has all the passion of a workout before a football game, and he seems more dazed by, than attracted to Anna. Kozak pulls out all the comic stops, repeatedly heading off expectations of romantic pathos and undermining the purity of Pushkin’s neo-classicism. In one


example, Don Juan kills Don Carlos (Sergei Sazontyev), his rival for Laura’s affections, by total accident—the oaf walks into Don Juan’s sword and falls like a sack of potatoes. Far more extreme is the finale, a kind of horror movie parody where the set conceived by Kozak and realized by Yekaterina Kuznetsova plays the biggest role. A wall rumbles open to reveal the extremeties of a monstrous statue of the commodore lurking in drifting clouds of smoke. Amid the cascading sounds of screams, he has come to avenge his murder and Don Juan’s soliciting of his widow. If the Don Juan tale can usually be described simplistically as the duel between a sophisticated profligate and his destiny, Kozak reduced it to the demise of a smart aleck. I am happy to credit Kozak’s original reshuffling of the play, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about his hero. I rooted for the statue all the way (March 1997) The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater in Russia, Moscow Shadow Theater I am happy to thank the people at the just-completed Golden Mask festival for one especially great hour of theater-going. Various words of praise for the Moscow Shadow Theater’s puppet show, The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater in Russia, had been reaching me for some time, but for some inexcusible reason I hadn’t found my way to see it. Had this— I would actually call it a puppet event—not been nominated for three Golden Mask awards (it won best director award for Ilya Epelbaum), who knows when I might have gotten around to it? More to the point now is, when will I get back to see it again? Because this is something, a little like a microscopic Disneyland, that you want to do over and over. And since it’s almost short enough to squeeze into a lunch break, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. The puppet performance itself, a Wagnerian swirl of legend, passion, treachery, fidelity and death, only runs about a half an hour. It is the culmination, or maybe, actually, the punch-line of the show, but it is only a part of what creator Ilya Epelbaum is up to. Things actually begin the moment you enter the door leading down a long, mysterious, winding corridor into what seems the bowels of the earth, and the end comes only when you reemerge into the sunlight an hour later. Epelbaum, with his wife Maya Krasnopolskaya, created an entire world. And within that world, he created an event worthy of our attention; a theatrical tour from the land of Lilikania, where the people are so small that when their beloved actors perform abroad, they take the whole theater and all their spectators with them.


As Krasnopolskaya says before the show begins, “There are 2,012 seats in the theater, but since 2,000 are already taken up by Lilikans, only twelve of us can fit in the hall.” She explains that the performance we are about to see will be in the Lilikan language with simultaneous translation into Russian, although the actors have learned Russian well enough to perform the finale in Russian. When we are finally ushered into the foyer of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater, we have already exchanged our rubles for lils, the Lilikan currency which allows us to buy tiny programs and visit the miniscule buffet which serves drinks in cups smaller than thimbles and open-faced sandwiches smaller than the nail on your little finger. We have, by this time, read all the Lilikan slogans pasted on the walls, such as, “All the world’s a stage and all Lilikans are merely players!” The foyer of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater is breathtaking in its scope and detail. This is a walkthrough doll-house to beat all dollhouses. In addition to fascinating, extraordinarily detailed displays of miniature tea services, historical weapons, children’s drawings and the “largest painting in Lilikan history,” we are treated to a four-screen puppet film of the history of Lilikania. We learn how in ancient times these people were so talented they lived exclusively by art, considering the ingestion of food vulgar. Those idyllic years, however, ended when Lilikania was invaded by a nation of monsters, midgets whose size surpassed that of the average Lilikan by 100 times. Only after centuries of struggle and slavery were the Lilikans able to free themselves, in part with the aid of a great, all-inundating flood. In modern times the pride of the Lilikan nation is its theater. Just before curtain time, we take our seats in the ornate hall, surrounded by 2,000 Lilikans in evening wear packing the balconies on all sides. The conductor raises his baton and the Lilikan orchestra strikes up the first chords of the music to Two Trees, the most beloved work in Lilikan theater history. This is the story of the tragic love between a King and a princess who overcome the interference of an evil midget and the Desert Fairy to find eternal happiness after death as two trees growing side by side. In the miniature Lilikan fashion, even the Princess’ central aria—her expression of pain when she comes to believe her love has deceived her—is only two lines long: “Oh God, he is unfaithful! My soul laments!” There is no lamenting the magical hour spent at this delightful, ingenious immersion in a fantasy world. May the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater reign forever in Moscow! (March 1997) The Woman in the Dunes, Omsk Drama Theater; A-Flat, Yekaterinburg Young Spectator Theater; Three Sisters,


Rostov-on-Don Young Spectator Theater; and TanyaTanya, Vasilyevsky Island Satire Theater, St. Petersburg The third annual Golden Mask festival brought the best of Russian dramatic, musical, dance and puppet Theater to Moscow in March. Many of the nominations and winners were controversial and the concluding awards ceremony exploded into a wild scandal when large numbers in the audience voiced their dissatisfaction. The uproar continued for weeks with the main irritant being the naming of Japan’s Araki Kadzuho best actress. Several newspapers, reputable and otherwise, raised a shrill, nationalistic campaign, the usually solid Kommersant Daily taking my personal “raspberry cup” for its asinine claim that the jury committed “voluntary national humiliation” by honoring Kadzuho. It was the performances that counted, however. Among nominees in the dramatic categories were four noteworthy productions from outside Moscow. The Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Olga Nikiforova from Kobo Abe’s novel for the Omsk Drama Theater, included a fascinating experiment in language: The title role was played by Kadzuho in her native Japanese while the entomologist trapped with her at the bottom of the dune was played in Russian by Mikhail Okunev. Director Vladimir Petrov and designer Roo Matsushita set the action in a sand pit surrounded entirely by a transparent bubble that rose to the flies. The spectators watched through the plastic veil as the increasingly frustrated scientist tried in vain to scale the wall and make his escape. The story of the rationally-minded man who is thrown by fate into a strange world whose rules and values he does not accept, was made even more compelling by Petrov’s erecting a language barrier between the two characters. This made their conflicts, frustrations and misunderstandings all the more accessible to an audience, and that created a simple, tangible point of contact when they began making their first breakthroughs in communication. As a result, the philosophical moorings of the novel receded—but were not lost— behind an emotional, though entirely unsentimental story of a man and woman coming to terms with one another. Besides the delicate and enchanting Kadzuho, this show’s other deserving winners were Okunev (best actor) and Petrov (best director). In Natalya Skorokhod’s A-Flat at the Yekaterinburg Young Spectator Theater, director Anatoly Praudin staged a heavily obscure, but nonetheless powerful allegory about the eternal battle between physical and spiritual beauty. The story, to the extent that it emerged during the short show, concerned a young hunchbacked girl with an enormous nose and ears who opts to trade places with a beautiful doll (Yulia Pervukhina) in order to please her piano teacher (Vitaly Kraev). Filled with dark allusions to historical events around the time of World War I, numerous dream and/or imagined scenes, and including a devil-like character called the Bloody Spot (Vyacheslav Belousov) who at first


12 Araki Kadzuho and Mikhail Okunev in the Omsk Drama Theater’s dramatization of The Woman in the Dunes which played at Moscow’s Golden Mask festival. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

seems evilly to encourage the girl’s wish to escape her deformity and then seems horrified that she wants to do it, this production often worked on a subconscious level. The grounding element was the splendid Svetlana Zamaraeva as the impetuous but lonely girl. Her wide, almost silly grin, her bashfully coquettish eyes, her endearing hip-hop walk and her occasional bursts of courage all added


up to a stunning performance of such nuance and heart that it cut right through the obscurities around it. Designer Anatoly Shubin’s elegant white interior, centered on a white, baby grand piano surrounded by winding, potted plants, also served as a source of clarity and simplicity. Vladimir Chigishev’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters for the Rostov-on-Don Young Spectator Theater was an impressive example of reinventing familiar characters without violating the author. One irritated Moscow critic later muttered to me that if she ever met the actor who played that “horrible Solyony” she would punch him. But it was just that directorial boldness I found so refreshing and convincing. Indeed, Boris Vernigorov’s Solyony—the officer who loses the battle with Tuzenbach for Irina’s affections and then kills his rival in a duel—was bitterly sarcastic, dangerously frustrated and deathly quiet. He was a powder keg ready to blow. Unusual? Perhaps. But Solyony, after all, is a murderer, plain and simple. This was the first time I have seen that point made so matter-of-factly. Another unusual interpretation was of Natasha (Svetlana Sadikova), the usurping wife of the three sisters’ ineffectual brother Andrei. Her position as an outsider and a power-grabber was reflected in her clear sexual frustration. Chigishev even brought her lover Protopopov (not included in Chekhov’s dramatis personae) on stage to walk the baby carriage in tandem with Andrei after the pair’s second child is born. These were just some of the most unusual points in this whirling, atmospheric, all-around well-acted production that breathed of the sisters’ youth and hope as long as it could before the despair and stupidity of their provincial town crushed them. In Olga Mukhina’s Tanya-Tanya at the Vasilyevsky Island Satire Theater in St. Petersburg, director Vladimir Tumanov turned to one of the most celebrated new Russian plays of recent years. It is a pseudo-Chekhovian but distinctly modern story about three couples struggling with love and their future as they kiss, drink champagne and talk. For my tastes, Tumanov undercut Mukhina’s airy, tender poetry, although I also admit that by the end of the performance I had more or less accepted the rules of his game. Perhaps the play itself, which I value highly, pulled me along. The central figure is Okhlobystin (Valery Kukhareshin), a man approaching middle-age with all the attending complexes and psychoses. He loves Tanya (Natalya Kutasova) who is married to Ivanov (Valery Dolinin) who is enamored of a Girl also named Tanya (Yulia Dzherbinova) who is trying to avoid the attentions of the Boy (Vladislav Lobanov) who drowns his sorrows by pursuing Zina (Darya Molokova) who is in love with Okhlobystin. It is an amusing and lyrically titillating set-up which, in Tumanov’s version, comes across as an uneasy mix of direct, realistic comic acting and occasionally heavy-handed dream scenes. I found the dream aspects especially bothersome,


because they suggested the director did not trust some of Mukhina’s oddest, but very literal scenes. Alexander Orlov’s effective set suggested a swamp land whose thousands of reeds and cat-tails— like human hopes—were mercilessly trampled by the end of the performance. (Plays International, June 1997) Joan of Arc, Debut Center at the House of Actors Joan of Arc: Childhood is the second show to emerge from what was originally called the Playwright and Director Center, and now is called the Debut Center at the House of Actors. Like the first, The Sakhalin Wife, which opened late in the fall, it is directed by Garold Strelkov, a young man who is finishing his studies in directing under Pyotr Fomenko at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. And, as in The Sakhalin Wife, it features the extremely promising young actress Inga Oboldina in the lead. Several aspects set this production apart from its predecessor. Its cast features two professional actors (Ramzes Dzhabrailov of the Commonwealth of Taganka Actors, and Susanna Serova) among the students, while the basis for the show is not a play but a collation of Mark Twain’s novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and a filmscript by Gleb Panfilov. This is the same famous screenplay which Panfilov and his wife Inna Churikova tried to film throughout the 1970s, but for which they could never get the backing. And then there is the impressive participation of a group of kids from orphanage number twenty-four, where Strelkov runs a theater class. They bring a purity and directness to their supporting performances which cast a glow over the entire proceedings. But for all its pluses, Joan of Arc struck me as something paler and less substantial than The Sakhalin Wife. The conflict between the young Joan (Oboldina) and those around her seems simplistic and, ultimately, monotonous. Joan talks to angels and is told by St. Michael that she will lead the French to victory over the intruding English. Her cherubic boyfriend Louis (Pavel Yegorov) and her mother (Serova) believe her, while her domineering father (Dzhabrailov) is determined to find a cure for her “madness.” He takes her to a quack masquerading as a doctor (Dmitry Bobrov) whose solution is to marry her off as quickly as possible. The least effective scenes take place in Joan’s home. You can actually feel how Panfilov’s camera would have panned slowly across the peasant hut interior, catching grainy (I suspect black-and-white) close-ups of the faces of Joan’s two near-idiot brothers (played here by Mikhail Vainberg and Tomas Motskus), the wooden spoons and bowls with which they eat, the increasingly furious visage of Joan’s father and her quiet, but firmly supporting mother. As played out on the gunny sack-draped and hay-strewn small stage at the House of Actors, the scene musters no more tension than a tolerably well told


13 Inga Oboldina as Joan of Arc in Garold Strelkov’s production Joan of Arc: Childhood for the Debut Center. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.


joke. We laugh and we recognize Joan’s predicament, but we sense this prelude to an impending tragedy should take us far deeper into this family’s hidden secrets than it does. The performance opens with a clever sketch played by the children in the cast. Joan-as-a-child (Olesya Larioshkina) is surrounded by a motley crew of boys including her brothers and boyfriend. This girl is tough as nails. When she tells the boys the French soldiers will return strong and healthy, her absolute optimism is catching. But when one of the boys refuses to believe her, she leads the pack in pummeling him into submission. Larioshkina, who also appears in several other flashback scenes with a young version of her mother (Yevgenia Grigoryeva), is a natural on stage, her daring and personality belying her tender, pre-teen age. With Larioshkina’s effective set-up, Oboldina is the one who lifts Joan of Arc above the average. The actress’s crowning achievement comes early, when we see her alone on stage conversing with St. Michael. Oboldina peers intently into an undefined space hovering over the spectators and responds to her vision with a mixture of reverence and chumminess. The dialogue consists of little more than a series of “yeses” and an occasional wailing “no,” but Oboldina’s expressions and intonations speak volumes. This is a girl, vulnerable and tenacious at the same time, whose deep faith in the mystical has a very concrete grounding in the real world around her. The further this production drifts from the character of Joan and focuses on others, the more it loses touch with the magic Oboldina and Larioshkina are capable of bringing to it. Still, their occasionally inspired performances are more than enough to make this a rewarding outing. Thanks in part to a grant from the Soros Foundation, Strelkov is now planning to stage the second and third parts of the Joan of Arc story. Part one, which ends as the 15-year-old Joan leaves home to convince the heir to the French throne to give her an army, is performed rarely, so catch it while you can. (April 1997) The Possible Meeting, Mikhail Kozakov Enterprise and Art-Club XXI Mikhail Kozakov was one of Russia’s top actors from the 1960s through the 1980s. Which is why it came as such a shock to many when he emigrated to Israel in the early 1990s. It was far less surprising when after half a decade of working in his new homeland, Kozakov returned to Moscow. The small but significant exodus of theatrical talent which went West in the late ’80s and early ’90s has included a return ticket for almost every director and actor who tried the trip. The catch has been twopronged: Every returning artist has missed the Russian language and the intensity of the creative process in Russia. Kozakov, an exceptional actor and an accomplished director, proved no exception to the rule.


I would love to say that with his own production of, and starring turn in, The Possible Meeting, Mikhail Kozakov has made a triumphant comeback to the Moscow stage. I would be closer to the truth saying he has reentered the embraces of an admiring public in an undeniably pleasant and professional piece of entertainment. The choice of material—Paul Barz’s comedy about an imagined encounter between George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach—was probably not the best. The effervescent first Moscow production of the play, at the Chekhov Art Theater in 1992, still remains strong in the memory. Kozakov’s version looks like a poor relation in comparison. The earlier show at the Art Theater starred a lean, sarcastic and wickedly funny Oleg Yefremov as Handel, and a bubbly, impetuous Innokenty Smoktunovsky as Bach in that great actor’s last theatrical role before his death in 1994. The two actors sparked off of one another as they reflected their own personalities through their characters’ bickering, pouting, dreaming and—not least of all—commitment to their art. For Smoktunovsky, generally acknowledged as the finest Russian actor of the second half of the 20th century, his performance of an impulsive, childlike, unblemished genius was a fitting swan song. Meanwhile, Yefremov’s grousing, world-weary but big-hearted Handel drove this modestly philosophical parable about the peculiar shapes that genius takes to unexpected heights. I remembered all that vividly as I watched Kozakov-as-Handel engage Yevgeny Steblov-as-Bach in the new production from the Mikhail Kozakov Enterprise and Art-Club XXI. Kozakov’s Handel in the opening scene with his servant Schmidt (Anatoly Grachyov) sets the parameters of his character which seldom waver during the ensuing rendezvous. He is arrogant, a bit crude and absolutely convinced of his superiority as a composer. Out of view, Bach performs for a congregation of the German Society of Musical Sciences, but Handel, visiting from his adopted home in London, is uninterested. He is upset the society did not receive him with more respect and he wishes he had not agreed to this meeting. He suggests skipping out, but the pedantic Schmidt restrains him. Bach, like Handel before him, appears through a dark corridor beyond a pair of stained glass window-doors in a meagerly depicted church environment designed by Leonid Podosyonov. It is as if the characters emerge from eternity, something also suggested in the magical tinkling that occurs each time Schmidt enters or leaves the room. The wealthy, famous Handel is brusque and condescending with his guest, the anonymous cantor at St. Thomas church in Leipzig. Bach, in his turn, is humble, gracious and, where it concerns his music, stubborn as an ox. Steblov’s staccato, falsetto voice adds an additional idiosyncrasy to this strange man whose poverty and lack of worldly ambition totally confuse Handel.


Barz’s play is a verbal duel that amuses with its personality clashes and provokes thought through its portrayal of two vastly different but equally great artists. Bartz’s point is that true talent is always unique and can never be defined schematically That notion is repeatedly expanded upon as the composers discuss food—especially the joys of eating oysters—family, fame and the enigma of art. Kozakov and Steblov are engaging as the bantering pair, but they always seem less than the men they play. Kozakov often goes at Handel’s bravado through sheer volume of voice and exaggerations of facial expressions, leaving the darker, more mysterious aspects of his hero’s personality unplumbed. Steblov is more ironic, and therefore funnier, although he can seem a pale reflection of the author of the powerful St. John Passion. Kozakov’s direction is minimal, as the two men usually sit at table and converse or take positions at music stands where they mock-conduct excerpts from their compositions. In addition to The Possible Meeting, Kozakov is marking his return to the Russian stage with performances of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, retitled in Russian as The Improbable Seance. (April 1997) The Cherry Orchard, Theater Near the Stanislavsky House It’s always a fine line that separates an artist’s recurring quirks and abberations— the elements that characterize his style—from signs that he is running out of anything new to say. Yury Pogrebnichko, the artistic director at the Theater Near the Stanislavsky House,2 is one of Moscow’s most unique theater artists and, although most of his shows are stylistically a continuation of each other, it had not occured to me that he might be stagnating. Until I saw his recent production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Once again stone-faced actors trudge about the stage stiffly swinging their arms and speaking their lines as if every sentence were an inside joke accessible only to initiates. Once again the actors freely trade parts back and forth without warning. Once again the small, essentially empty stage is decorated with bits and pieces of metaphorical trash—in this case a rusted, broken-down fence that suggests a prison no longer capable of holding its inmates and a single-rail train track that goes nowhere. In most of Pogrebnichko’s stagings, these peculiarities have, indeed, been the markers of his style, the flourish of his signature. The new show, at least as an interpretation of Chekhov’s play about Madame Ranevskaya losing her estate and place in life at the end of an era, falls utterly flat. The old familiar signs

2

Formerly known as simply the Krasnaya Presnya Theater, or the Theater on Krasnaya Presnya.


planted throughout the production cannot muster the sense of surprise and discovery an audience must experience for the show to come to life. But within this often tedious exercise, there is another story. Pogrebnichko’s theater has suffered two traumatic losses in the last sixteen months, the deaths of designer Yury Kononenko in December 1995 and actor Nikolai Alexeev in December 1996. It probably is in the light of these losses that this Cherry Orchard must be viewed. When Lopakhin, the former serf, notes how few honest people there are, six actors step up to the edge of the stage, kneel down and solemnly kiss the ground. It is a sobering moment which, added to the profuse and haunting use of dirgelike folk music, defines this performance as a private message of farewell and passing. I would like to think The Cherry Orchard is a transitional step for Pogrebnichko, and that having said his farewells, he will again tap into the rich imagination which has marked his work in the past. (April 1997) Vieux Carré, Tabakov Theater Tennessee Williams has a firm hold on the Russian imagination. During the writer’s lifetime he was so popular he once almost came to claim the royalties due him in the ruble equivalent of a couple million dollars. He backed down when he remembered the Soviets didn’t care much for gays and the local currency was not convertible. “How would I spend all that money in Moscow?” he allegedly quipped about the stagnating post-Thaw, pre-Afghanistan-era capital. Even today, when that old fortune might have provided an intense week to ten days of nightclubbing, Williams’s popularity continues unabated. With Andrei Zhitinkin’s new production of Vieux Carré for the Tabakov Theater, there are a half-dozen Williams plays running in Moscow. But that is where the seeming success story turns out to be as stable as Blanche’s DuBois’ grip on reality in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams’s plays here often come across as caricatures, their contorted and deep-seated conflicts flattened out into easily consumed clichés. Despite a promising start, Zhitinkin’s Vieux Carré falls victim to the usual problems. This memory play, written six years before Williams’s death in 1983, is based in part on the 1943 story “Angel in the Alcove,” which, in turn, was based on people and events Williams encountered living in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1939. Not on a par with Williams’s best, it lacks the unity of purpose of the major works. In Zhitinkin’s somewhat rearranged version the action commences with the shadowy, lone, hunched-over figure of the Writer in a shoe-length trench coat and felt hat striking a match to light a cigarette outside the back door amidst a heavy wash of jazz and rain.


14 Sergei Bezrukov in Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré, directed by Andrei Zhitinkin at the Tabakov Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

Although it may seem more Raymond Chandler than Tennessee Williams, there is something naggingly American about the scene.


Slowly, the silhouette enters, gazes around and informs us that the darkened boarding house in which he stands once pulsed with energy. The lights come up and the Writer’s former neighbors come to life. The key players in the run-down boarding house at 722 Toulouse Street are the struggling Writer (Sergei Bezrukov), the tubercular and openly gay Painter (Vitaly Yegorov), the squabbling couple of Jane (Marina Zudina) and Tye (Yaroslav Boiko), and the extravagant proprietress Mrs. Wire (Olga BlokMirimskaya). In Williams’s original, the two artists are the focus of the first half, with Jane and Tye dominating the second. Zhitinkin has done some reshuffling to bring all the characters into closer contact. That task is served by Andrei Sharov’s cluttered set which sacrifices aesthetics for practicality. The bedrooms of the boarding house— designated by inflatable swimming pool mattresses for beds—have no walls to hinder movement from room to room. Bezrukov, who is best known as the voices of Yeltsin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the Kukly t.v. show,3 is a potentially charming young actor whose natural exuberance can cause him to overact shamelessly. Here he turns in the best performance I have seen him give as the fledgling writer drawn towards a homosexual liaison with the Painter. He is usually restrained, thoughtful and enigmatic, all of which reflect tenderness and intelligence. Zhitinkin avoided actually bringing the two men together, opting to make the Painter something of a pining, groping voyeur. Yegorov seems trapped in emulating the mannerisms of a gay man, which keeps the character from attaining three-dimensionality. Similar limitations affect the Jane and Tye duo. Zudina is too intent on remaining glamorous to get inside the tortured woman stricken with leukemia and loneliness and slipping into alcoholism. Boiko gives us little more than a slab of meat spread across Jane’s bed. The most heroic work belongs to Blok-Mirimskaya. Playing what Williams defined as a “witch from Macbeth,” she throws herself headlong into the psyche of a woman haunted by demons and possessed of a tenacious instinct for life. Contemptuous of all her boarders except the Writer—in whom she confusedly sees both her own lost son and a potential lover—this Mrs. Wire lives up to her name, a live wire of tragi-comedy. But, as is wont to happen at the Tabakov Theater, hysteria begins substituting for temperament. This is true of Mrs. Wire’s later scenes, as well as an almost unbearable sequence the first time the Writer begins turning his observations into fiction. With music pounding, smoke billowing and crumpled paper raining from above, Bezrukov leaps from his typewriter and tears into a wildly overdone dance. The seemingly endless vignettes of the boarders’ encounters (running two and a half hours without a break) increasingly add up to little of significance. By the time Mrs. Wire was committed to an asylum and the Writer prepared to run off to the West Coast with his mysterious friend Sky (Sergei Ugryumov), I found I


knew too little about these people and, more importantly, didn’t care to learn more. (April 1997) Five Evenings, Malaya Bronnaya Theater; and The Marriage, Chekhov Art Theater Two new productions of vastly different plays might stand as twin symbols of the current season. I don’t ever recall seeing so many moderately pleasant, pointedly reassuring and easily forgettable shows. Now we can add to the batch Sergei Zhenovach’s treatment of Alexander Volodin’s Five Evenings at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater, and Roman Kozak’s staging of Nikolai Gogors The Marriage at the Chekhov Art Theater. The former is a sentimental Soviet drama about love lost and found again which was enormously popular in the 1960s and was fixed forever in hearts and minds when Nikita Mikhalkov made a splendid movie of it in 1979. The latter is a farce about the ordeals of courtship that only the lazy, it seems, have not tackled of late. Of the two directors, Kozak appears most to be striving for the unusual. All of the characters in The Marriage, from the four competing suitors to the potential bride and her mother, are outsized caricatures who bring to the play the feel of a collection of Russian folk dolls. That sensation is echoed in Georgy Alexi-Meskhishvili’s set, which from the second scene on depicts a bright room decorated in flowery Russian patterns. The ceiling line—above which rises a deep blue sky instead of a ceiling—is packed with a jumble of homey objects such as portraits, clocks, samovars and bird cages. The main marrying man is the finicky clerk Podkolyosin (Viktor Gvozditsky). Without a specific bride in mind yet, he has his servant (Vladimir Kashpur) out and about ordering new shoes and clothes for the vaguely anticipated event. And while the matchmaker Fyokla (Natalya Tenyakova) soon informs him she has a candidate in mind, it isn’t until Podkolyosin’s boisterous buddy Kochkaryov (Alexander Kalyagin) takes charge that things really begin to happen. Kochkaryov drags his friend to the house of the bride Agafya Tikhonovna (Alexandra Skachkova), outmaneuvers the other suitors and convinces the coarse, thickheaded girl she wants to marry Podkolyosin. What nobody plans on, however, is just how attached Podkolyosin is to the freedom of bachelorhood. He leaves everybody in the lurch at the last second. In this version, Kalyagin’s loud, blankly grinning Kochkaryov dominates the action. In a furry, bouffant wig, he looks unmistakably like his drag hero from

3

The title means “puppets” and the extremely popular show uses puppets to satirize politicians and political events.


one of his most popular films, a giddy made-for-t.v. affair called Hello, I’m Your Aunt. This may account for the enthusiastic reception Kalyagin receives from the audience, and for why the show never becomes more than a routine, knockabout farce. Kalyagin stifles everyone, including the bride’s wonderfully weird mother (Nina Gulyaeva) and the comically imposing suitor Yaichnitsa—that is, Mr. Scrambled Eggs—(Vyacheslav Nevinny), to say nothing of Podkolyosin. At the show I attended the upstaging of Podkolyosin was rounded out by the technical bungling of two big scenes. His opening pantomime was totally obscured by a rolling bank of theatrical smoke that had the audience blinded and choking (and laughing and talking) for several minutes. Later, as he prepares to escape out the window in the finale, the busy arms and feet of a stagehand fixing a harness to his back were quite conspicuous. So much for the “surprise” of Podkolyosin flying into the sky instead of dropping into the street below. There are no tricks in Five Evenings, whether in the simple, intimate play or in Zhenovach’s conscientious staging. It tries valiantly to make a virtue of its unspectacularness and nearly succeeds. Ilyin (Sergei Kachanov) is back in Leningrad circa 1957 for the first time in seventeen years. When he catches a glimpse of his former sweetheart Tamara (Nadezhda Markina), he pays her a visit. Over the next five evenings, the broken dreams of their past, the lies of their present and their hopes for the future mix in a deliberately pale comedy of errors that pushes them apart before bringing them back together. Ilyin is an outcast, a once potentially brilliant chemist now working as a driver in the distant north. He lies about that to Tamara, telling her he’s the head engineer at a chemical plant. When she hears the truth from the real boss (Vladimir Toptsov), he’s devastated. But she also learns the reason for it: Many years ago Ilyin stood up and told the truth at his institute, ruining his future career. That’s the kind of man Tamara has been waiting for all these years. As the two skittish lovers, Kachanov and Markina are as gray, drab and sincere as Oksana Yarmolnik’s costumes. Adding some welcome contrast are Tamara’s spunky teenage nephew Slava and his spirited girlfriend Katya, played with lively humor by Gennady Nazarov and Maria Glazkova. Alexander Borovsky’s clever set keeps the stage neat and clean, and marks the various places where the play’s meetings occur. A copy of one of the four famous equestrian sculptures on Leningrad’s (and, now Petersburg’s) Anichkov Bridge hangs high above an empty stage across which five different pairs of doors slide to and fro. (May 1997)


Wandering Conflagrations, Mossoviet Theater In Wandering Conflagrations at the Mossoviet Theater, Boris Milgram appears intent on linking his early reputation as an avant-garde director (an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s First Love and a highcamp version of Moliére’s The School for Wives) with his recently acquired status as a creator of commercial shows (Nikolai Kolyada’s Persian Lilac and Nadezhda Ptushkina’s As a Lamb). What a mess he came up with as a result! Wandering Conflagrations is a long-forgotten play by Luka Antropov. Written in 1873, it is a wrenching story about Maxim Kholmin, a floundering, spiritually bankrupt man who clumsily tries to manipulate the women who cross his path. The bleak atmosphere, the unsympathetic hero and the crumbling of social structures seem to point quite clearly to the plays of Leonid Andreev, a kind of theatrical decadent who was popular at the turn of the century and who enjoyed a shortlived resurgence in the early 1990s. In resurrecting the obscure play, Milgram went for a grand-scale show dripping with black humor. However, as played by Yevgeny Glyadinsky, Kholmin comes across not as a parody of the overwrought anti-hero, but as a parody of an actor playing anguish. Kholmin’s wife, the younger sister of the woman he truly loves, is inexplicably played by two actresses (Irina Maximikina as the blonde “before” version and Natalia Merts as the brunette “after”). Whatever the move provides in increased alienation, it utterly destroys in terms of character development. The many incarnations of Yury Kharikov’s wildly imaginative set include something suggesting Stonehenge in a swamp and a distorted, dreamlike papiermache interior. But intriguing as the decoration is as an object, it often sinks the theatrical act by overpowering it so. A bright spot amidst the long and obscure show is Anatoly Vasilyev’s overthe-top performance of Dikovsky. He plays the ruthless sleaze and cynic who toys with Kholmin with such bug-eyed irony he almost becomes attractive.4 (May 1997) Barbarian and Heretic, Lenkom Theater; and Krechinsky’s Wedding, Maly Theater Bright lights! Kicking heels! Soaring voices! Clothes to kill! Obviously the enigmatic Russian soul is ready for a rest. This season it has been showtime in Moscow! It started with a splash in September when Boris Milgram unveiled a sweeping production of As a Lamb. Immediately afterwards came Vladimir Mashkov’s highprofile, high-cost rendition of The Threepenny Opera. Since then there have been more spectacles, entertainments and song-and-dance shows than this town may have seen since the 1920s.


Now, as the theatrical year turns down the final stretch, two more shows have slipped into place as if they were bookends made especially to lend the season symmetry. At the Lenkom Theater, Mark Zakharov has plugged his trademark sonic booms, obligatory bursts of fire and ever-scurrying actors into Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella, The Gambler, under the title of Barbarian and Heretic. At —of all places!—the classy affiliate of the venerable Maly Theater, directors Vitaly Solomin and Alexander Chetvyorkin have turned out a visually stunning, if overly long, musical based on Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s 19th-century black comedy, Krechinsky’s Wedding. To ape the Roman emperors, who also watched a lot of spectacles and were the most peevish critics of their day, I give a plunging thumbs down to Barbarian and a qualified, though admiring thumbs up to Krechinsky’s Wedding. I wonder if I have ever seen anything as surprising as a Maly Theater actress trotting nimbly to the edge of the stage in her fluffy white undergarments and promptly dropping down into the splits. I might have been less amazed by a striptease in the Vatican, or a Mark Zakharov show that doesn’t challenge the eardrums. But the real surprise of Krechinsky’s Wedding is its easy mix of flamboyance and depth, tightly bound by quality. Coming at one of the most conservative venues in town, that is no mean trick. There are whispers that the Maly’s top brass—more comfortable with revivals of costume classics—remains skeptical. One ready musical at the Maly two years ago was shut down before it opened. Krechinsky’s Wedding has been in preparation for two years and a surprise open dress rehearsal last week was said in part to be arranged to muster public support.5 If so, I’m happy to say this is what real theater is about: taking chances and doing it with vision and talent. The story, presented in a libretto by Kim Ryzhov with music by Alexander Kolker, tells of a card sharp, Krechinsky (Solomin), out to cover his debts by marrying the romantic innocent, Lidochka (Lyudmila Titova). She is wholeheartedly encouraged by her squeaky, frivolous Aunt Atuyeva (Tatyana Pankova) and opposed by her cautious and wealthy father, Muromsky (Alexander Potapov), until he is overwhelmed by his daughter’s tears and Krechinsky’s made-to-order charm. But Krechinsky’s debts come due earlier than expected, and, with the wedding still in the balance, he enlists his grimy sidekick Rasplyuyev (Vasily Bochkaryov) in a secret scheme to cheat a moneylender of 40,000 rubles. The idea is to offer Lidochka’s diamond pin as collateral, but replace it at the last

4

The Mossoviet Theater pulled this production from the repertory almost before it opened. It was unclear at the beginning of the following season whether the show would be abandoned or reworked.


minute with an identical glass copy. Lidochka knows nothing about it, although when she finds out, she sets aside her horror to save her intended from prison. Thus the appellation as a comedy. It is heartening to see the excellent Maly Theater actors getting to try something new, moreover since they respond with such sparkle and energy Pankova, deliciously vivacious at 80, savors her eccentric moments with the relish of a young, avant-gardist. Titova, if demonstrating a somewhat thin singing voice, is agile and engagingly pert. The members of the cast work as parts in a well-oiled machine, not the least of which is a group of eight masked dancers, all students of the Maly’s Shchepkin Institute. They are actually the backbone of the dynamic show, their snappy precision holding the posture of Lyubov Parfenyuk’s intriguing choreography. No words can do justice to Yury Kharikov’s wildly frilly costumes and his stunning, dreamlike sets—topped, in my book, by the cavernous, dripping ice house of Krechinsky’s apartment in Act Two. The show’s weakest aspects are the songs—pleasantly rhythmic at best and garish at worst—and the drawn-out third act. (The show as a whole ran nearly four hours.) I suspect the directors are facing some hard decisions about what to cut. I encourage them to be pitiless. This potentially top-notch show, whose next public performance is not yet set for certain, is well worth saving. Barbarian and Heretic is beyond salvation. Artistically, there is no point. Commercially, the Lenkom label—rather like the golden arches at MacDonald’s —will attract crowds no matter what is served. Alexei (Alexander Abdulov) is an impoverished tutor accompanying the children of General Zagoryansky (Oleg Yankovsky) on a gaming trip to the fictional European city of Roulettenburg. There a constellation of foreigners lose their heads and dignity over gambling and love. It is a typically Dostoevskian melange of distorted desires, tortured consciences and complex interrelations. Zagoryansky’s hopes of marrying the beautiful Blanche (Maria Mironova) hinge on his receiving an inheritance from his dying Aunt Antonida in Russia. But when she shows up in person—and loses her fortune at the tables— his plans are crushed. Alexei is involved in a twisted love duet with Zagoryansky’s stepdaughter (Alexandra Zakharova), but ends up running off to Paris with Blanche when she dumps the financially ruined Zagoryansky. Zakharov’s cryptic dramatization of these events—brandishing rhetorical utterances about “Russians and gambling” or “Russians abroad” like banners—is impenetrable. It is worsened by much of the text being spoken with machine-gun speed or in thickly accented French or English. I had to go back to the book to learn what I had seen. All of this is played out amidst booming music, flashing strobe lights, a gyrating corps de ballet and Oleg Sheintsis’ dark, spinning set that features off to

5

The show successfully opened in September 1997.


15 Vasily Bochkaryov and Tatyana Pankova in a musical version of Alexander SukhovoKobylin’s comedy Krechinsky’s Wedding, directed by Vitaly Solomin at the Maly Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

the side a whirring, spinning, ticking, tocking contraption whose only purpose I could discern was to distract attention from the mediocrity around it. To everything there are exceptions, and here they are Inna Churikova, a hurricane of power, comedy and humanity as the imperious old Antonida, and Leonid Bronevoi, infused with warmth and irony as Antonida’s butler. But even this fine pair cannot salvage the wreck of Barbarian and Heretic, symbolized by


the finale of Alexei begging God’s mercy with a contorted face suggesting he is suffering from stomach cramps. (May 1997) The Whim, Novy Drama Theater In The Whim at the Novy Drama Theater, Andrei Sergeev created something of a sequel to his extravagant, colorful 1996 production of The Ball. As with last season’s show, The Whim revives a play that has long wallowed in obscurity. In this case it is a comedy written by Pyotr Nevezhin in the 1870s, later reworked by the great Alexander Ostrovsky. And once again Sergeev bestowed the honors of leading lady on the magnificent Vera Vasilyeva. That is where the direct parallels with the previous show end, however. The Whim, breezing through the rolling, musically inspired first act, and trudging rather heavily through the second act, is much more an intimate chamber piece than its flamboyant predecessor. Sergeev’s own set of an elegant oval drawing room—where the grandeur of the essentially unfurnished room is achieved through a high ceiling and richly colored maroon walls—remains unchanged except for the walls becoming more tattered as time passes. Natalia Zakurdaeva’s costumes are refined and subdued. Sergeev reshuffled the relationships among the characters, returning to Nevezhin’s original plan. Here, Serafima Sarytova (Vasilyeva) is a widow with two intriguingly mysterious daughters, Olga (Marina Yakovleva) and Nastya (Yekaterina Syomina). Their family’s former wealth is slowly being squandered by the steward Barkalov (Denis Bespaly), an arrogant profligate who has captured Sarytova’s fancy Sarytova is described by the authors as “an elderly woman younger than her years.” That is reason enough to make Vasilyeva the only actress I know who could possibly do the part full justice. Her radiant, sunshine smile, her waterfall laugh, the dancing light in her eyes and her effortless agility not only belie, but furiously defy her seventy-something age. Vasilyeva epitomizes all the best that The Whim has to offer. Her passion for her unscrupulous steward is entirely believable because her delightfully selfcentered character is so honest and unencumbered by social convention. When Olga asks if she is expected to sacrifice her future because of her mother’s “whim,” Vasilyeva’s Sarytova doesn’t bat an eyelash: “Yes,” she answers instantly in her girlish, sing-song voice. The buoyant musicality early on derives not only from the songs Sergeev carefully wove into the action, but from the ebb and flow he gave the actors’ intonations of speech and subtly controlled movements. Sergeev is never judgmental about Sarytova’s caprice, his tolerance, even affection, for her weakness infusing Vasilyeva’s performance with warmth and understanding. But the further the action moves away from Sarytova, the more it pales. That seems less a fault of the cast, all of whom turn in admirable comic performances,


than of Sergeev’s failure to create for them the same saturated atmosphere he so generously provided for Vasilyeva. As Bondyreva, who comes to extract her older sister from the grips of her debauched steward, Lyubov Novak is regal and ironic. As Lizgunov, a priggish, self-important young man who has designs on Olga and whose wealth could bail out the increasingly impoverished Sarytova, Andrei Astrakhantsev is a knot of comic quirks. As the local eccentric Guryevna, who wanders in and out and may be filching valuables, Marina Nikolaeva turns in some hard-edged buffoonery. Most telling of the show’s duality is Denis Bespaly’s performance of the rakish Barkalov. In the proper circumstances this character might challenge Sarytova for the plays lead. But here, the steward resolutely remains an effective shading. Even that, however, is no mean fate. One could do worse than fall under the shadow of Vera Vasilyeva. As she demonstrates once again in this bittersweet comedy of late-blooming love, she is an actress of incomparable charm and impeccable talent. (May 1997) “Art”, a production of the International Confederation of Theater Associations, the French Cultural Center in Moscow and the Russian Ministry of Culture A joint French-Russian theater project has brought to Moscow one of the most celebrated international hits of recent years for a limited run. It is the kind of collaboration which, were it to be emulated, could plug Moscow more firmly into the mainstream of the international cultural community. Yasmina Reza’s “Art”, a comedy about friendship surviving the strains of three different personalities pulling in various directions, triumphed when it opened in Paris in 1994. It went on to acclaimed runs in Germany, Israel, Belgium, Argentina, the United States and England, where it won a Laurence Olivier award as best comedy of the year. The version playing this week at the Maly Theater affiliate is supported by French and Russian money, and was created by French talent off stage and Russian talent on it. Patrice Kerbrat’s smart direction and Edouard Laug’s sleek, ultra-modern set highlight Reza’s simple, witty dialogues. Mikhail Yanushkevich, Igor Kostolevsky and Mikhail Filippov (performing Yelena Naumova’s smooth Russian translation) are the actors bringing the characters to life. This production could not have appeared at a more opportune time. As theaters and production companies here increasingly turn to trivial comic fare to attract the masses, “Art” provides a fine example of how to appeal to an audience without pandering to it. The play, portraying three old friends foundering in hostilities after one buys a piece of modern art, has probably been overrated. I would call it a cleverly


written variation on the bickering-friends theme. If Neil Simon had written it, he might have titled it The Odd Trio. But undeniably the piece has a winning clarity and intelligence that raises it above the average. Marc, a tolerably arrogant intellectual (Kostolevsky), is horrified. His best friend Serge (Yanushkevich) has just paid 200,000 francs for a white canvas with a couple of diagonal lines drawn across it. Marc thinks Serge has been taken in by the phony “values of modern art,” while Serge thinks Marc is out of touch with his own age. Wending in and out between the two is Ivan (Filippov), a goodnatured stationery salesman who tries to referee the battle between his two friends while keeping his impending marriage on track as pressures in his own family reach a fever pitch. The talky play is kept briskly moving by the use of partial blackouts, wherein characters exit the action and deliver brief inner monologues, and by instantaneous “set changes” which allow a single off-white setting to serve as the apartments of all three men. Three back panels—a blank one for Serge, a classically decorated one for Marc and a pastoral scene for Ivan—zip into place in a matter of seconds. The actors work effortlessly together, their bantering give-and-take lending sophistication to the comedy. Filippov, especially, gets under the skin as the simpleton with a big heart who can’t figure out what the row is about. The more he tries to play the peacemaker, the more his friends abuse him. This is where the play works: as a snappy, entertaining buddy tale. Trotting through the complications of a false peace, a physical confrontation and the ultimate satisfactory resolution, “Art” is too contrived to take seriously as a dialogue about aesthetics. But it deftly presents three people who hold our interest and make us laugh. I would like to see more contemporary plays brought to Moscow like this. Indeed, I would like Europe to see the best of what Russia has to offer, as it will at this summer’s Avignon Festival. I believe many would be at least as impressed as was the audience at Sunday’s opener of “Art”. (May 1997) The Tales of Belkin, Pushkin Drama Theater The opening of the new Pushkin Drama Theater affiliate comes a year after it was originally expected, but this neat little site tucked into a courtyard off Pushkin Square was worth waiting for. There have been some spectacular theater renovations over the last few years, including the Maly Theater affiliate and the School of Dramatic Art on Povarskaya Ulitsa. The Pushkin affiliate is the first major new structure to be added to the city’s topography in recent memory. From the sight that greets you at the entrance—attractive faux gas lamps, glistening glass, bronze and marble—to the spotless marble floors and mirrored walls of the foyer, everything about this new theater is tasteful and attractive.


16 Mikhail Filippov and Igor Kostolevsky in an international production of Yasmina Reza’s “Art”. Photo: Sergei Teterin.

The muted charcoal gray hall itself, with seating for sixty-two, is spacious and intimate at once. The Pushkin’s chief director Yury Yeryomin chose to underplay the event by offering a simple, homey evening of storytelling for the inaugural show, a dramatization of Alexander Pushkin’s The Tales of Belkin. Included are four of


the five stories which, with their fine mix of austerity and wit, established the standard for modern Russian prose. The production runs precariously close to falling victim to its modesty, although it never loses its warmth. Pushkin was spoofing the sentimental love tales and gothic stories of the supernatural so popular in Russia in the early 19th century. Despite all their seeming sturm und drang, his tales of romance and conflict all end happily or at least conventionally, one macabre ghost yarn turning out to be nothing but a dream. I can’t fault Yeryomin for failing to be inventive. His use of a video camera occasionally showing facial close-ups on a crooked screen on the back wall aims to create a divide between the tellers and their tales. The filmic images instantly escalate the pathos of the stories until the actors turn around and face the audience again with their friendlier, real expressions. Still, I felt most often the director was encouraging me to believe the very sentiments Pushkin was needling. Ultimately, this show probably works best as a pleasant look at some talkative, folksy travelers. The setting is the provincial trading post kept by the stationmaster Samson Vyrin (Vladimir Nikolenko). Bad weather (depicted on screen by raindrops dancing on rocks) has trapped four strangers at his station—a retired officer (Alexei Guskov), a woman (Tamara Lyakina), a shop assistant (Konstantin Pokhmelov) and a landowner by the name of Belkin (Andrei Tashkov) who habitually records people’s stories when he hears them. Bringing all these people together in one place was Yeryomin’s biggest deviation from the letter of Pushkin’s tales, but each of the four narratives are presented just as independently as in the original. In “The Shot” we learn of a mysterious officer who waited years to avenge his hated rival in an aborted duel, but who refused to act when the fateful hour struck. “The Snowstorm” tells of a romancing couple who are astonished to learn they were actually married years before during a blizzard. In “The Gravedigger,” an undertaker has horrible nocturnal visions of the dead he has buried after drinking too much at his German neighbor’s party, and “The Stationmaster” is Vyrin’s own tale of losing his beautiful daughter Dunya (Inga Ilm) to a handsome traveler. The most engaging segment is Pokhmelov’s grotesque and comic telling of the gravedigger’s “adventure.” The actor’s expressive long face, crooked smiles and contorted postures are shown off to good advantage by hauntingly deep colored shadows. Here I felt Yeryomin was teasing me as Pushkin intended. Lyakina’s relating of the amorous complications caused by the snowstorm is endearing, and she gets a good laugh when announcing she’d love to tell another story about a noble girl who pretended to be a peasant, but hasn’t the time. (“The Lady-Rustic” is the fifth Belkin tale, not included in this production.) Valery Fomin’s set, an empty stage framed as a box by the movable benches of the way-station, reinforces the simplicity of the show.


It is a quiet beginning for the Pushkin’s handsome new stage, but enough to make me look forward to the next outing, a dramatization of Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow People, scheduled for the fall. (June 1997) The Herd, Class of Expressive Plastic Movement The Class of Expressive Plastic Movement concluded its season with showings at the Contemporary Play School in early June. The group which is headed by Gennady Abramov as a theater within Anatoly Vasilyev’s School of Dramatic Art, has performed only rarely of late since the only stage it possesses, on Povarskaya Street, has been designated by Vasilyev as a rehearsal hall only. The recent performances of a new show, The Herd, demonstrated how much the group has evolved since it was founded in 1990. What everyone has always known was that Abramov was molding some extraordinarily capable actors whose ability to express thoughts and emotions through movement was often breathtaking. The limitations were almost as obvious. His episodic shows were frequently repetitive and heavily technical. The Herd is a quantum leap forward, for the first time indicating Abramov can create a work with a unifying dramatic line running through it, and that his actors are able to go beyond the courtship-jealousy-loneliness sketches that fascinated them in the past. Crudely put, The Herd consists of actors interacting with overcoats, the unusual “skits” creating an often comical picture of people confronting their own personalities and individuality. Some require isolation, others crave companionship, still others are doomed to accept it. In all cases, the point of contact or conflict are the oversized coats each actor wields almost as a magic wand. The undisputed crowd-pleaser was a series of scenes in which the actors’ bodies were hunched beneath their buttoned up coats, creating the image of a population of headless midgets. The effect was startling as the characters acquired personalities independent of the actors performing them. There were still occasional shades of the old desire to brandish technical prowess for its own sake, but that is probably a peevish complaint. The Herd is Abramov’s most mature creation yet and proves that Moscow’s finest proponent of experimental, physical theater still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve. (June 1997) Sublimation of Love, Tabakov Theater The Tabakov Theater, commemorating its tenth year as a state-funded organization, has been making a season of it.


17 Vasily Yushchenko and a partner performing in The Class of Expressive Plastic Movement’s The Herd, a physical performance created by Gennady Abramov. Photo: Vladimir Artev

After laying low while the final months of 1996 ticked off, the theater with the postage-stamp-sized stage on Ulitsa Chaplygina has unleashed three new shows since February. During that time it has hosted a big, televised birthday bash at


the House of Actors and performed its entire repertoire on “tours” of various big stages throughout the city, including the Taganka, the Sovremennik and soon, the Hermitage. The newest show, Sublimation of Love, performing on the mainstage at the Chekhov Art Theater, is a showcase for the venue’s founder Oleg Tabakov and, to a lesser extent, his wife Marina Zudina. It is slick, swift and simple, and the crowd loves it. Tabakov, who turns 62 in August, is clearly out to prove his is Moscow’s star theater at the end of the ’90s. That position has long been shared by the Mayakovsky Theater and the Lenkom. But with the reputations of those two venues now sinking like rocks at sea, the time is ripe for an upstart to come along and seize it. As the home of top actor/director Vladimir Mashkov, and the actors Yevgeny Mironov and Sergei Bezrukov (who recently shared a State Prize award with Maxim Sukhanov of the Vakhtangov Theater), the Tabakov Theater is a reasonable contender. Tabakov increased the appearance of his theater’s celebrity a few years ago by establishing a highly publicized Tabakov prize which he yearly gives primarily to actors of his own theater. Tabakov, of course, is no mere upstart. He was a founding member of the Sovremennik Theater in 1957, his boyish grin and charming round face quickly winning him national fame both in theater and film. In the 1980s he was a member of the troupe at the Moscow Art Theater and, for many years, he has been the rector of the Art Theater School. In the ’90s, the popular and recognizable actor has been working tirelessly to build his own theatrical empire. His brash self-confidence, occasionally described as arrogance, and his readiness to jump on political bandwagons when it is advantageous, have alienated some in the theater world. That is especially true among the older generation at the Art Theater whose world-wide prestige has been an important factor in lending him legitimacy. Whatever the case, Tabakov has cashed in handsomely on his own self-proclaimed talent for “doing business” with his famous face. Sublimation of Love gives Tabakov an opportunity to bathe his audience in all the tricks and mannerisms that have made him famous, and to bask in his fans’ return admiration. The play by Aldo De Benedetti (called Paola and the Lions by the author) presents a comic love triangie whose resolution hangs on the power of art and the charisma of the artist. Leone (Tabakov) is an aging politician whose biggest wish is to seduce the glamorous young Paola (Zudina). But when that idea fails miserably and it turns out the whole humiliating scene was overheard by a hungry neighbor, Pietro (Vitaly Yegorov), who snuck in to steal some food, Leone suddenly finds himself involved in another “affair.” Pietro is a budding, unknown playwright who convinces the famous Leone to have the plays staged under his own name as a publicity stunt.


The ruse works perfectly, but when Paolo returns to her rejected senator, repentant of having overlooked such a talent, the complications are cranked up another notch. The old man who stood in for the playwright to make his plays famous, now must let the young man stand in for him, to keep the love game intact. Tabakov, as the portly politician who can’t win for losing, is a buf-foon, really, a clown or a vaudeville comic. And he is a fearless one, never disdaining selfparody or even self-denigration to cop a laugh. He is a throwback to the oldtime comedians who may have had only two expressions and three tricks up their sleeve, but who had a genius for recycling and exploiting them endlessly to keep their audience in stitches. Rather in the vein of Benny Hill (whom he even resembles physically), Tabakov’s main task on stage is to please at any cost, and he does that with undeniable success. As Tabakov’s partners, the lovely Zudina shows a model’s flair for striking effective and unorthodox poses, while Yegorov enjoys his best moments sparring with Tabakov for the attentions of their unexpected late night visitor. Alexander Borovsky created a static, two-part set that implies elegance with a Venetian facade on one side and a modestly urbane interior on the other. (June 1997) Bel-Ami, Mossoviet Theater The Mossoviet Theater occupies a special place in contemporary Moscow theater. It is arguably the best organized, best run house in town. I would also wager that more people buy tickets each month to shows at the Mossoviet than at any of the city’s other venues. A few years ago the theater was even showing some signs of daring. While continuing to put on popular costume dramas on the mainstage, it frequently tested more challenging fare on its intimate, upstairs stage “Beneath the Roof.” But as time goes on, those forays into the unexpected have almost ceased, while the mainstage continues to be the site of forgettable, frolicking frivolity. It is important to repeat it: These shows pack the house, although I am at a total loss to explain why. The newest show at the Mossoviet, a colorful, moderately titillating, but dismally trivial dramatization of Guy de Maupassant’s novel, Bel-Ami, illustrates the situation evolving at the theater. Its director, Andrei Zhitinkin, has at various times worked on both the main and the small stages. His 1995 production of My Poor Marat on the “Stage Beneath the Roof” was, in my opinion, one of that season’s top shows. Its depiction of a ménage à trois in blockaded Leningrad was bold and sensitive at the same time. Zhitinkin’s outings on the mainstage (the most recent was J.B.Priestley’s An Inspector Calls) have been notably more hollow and showy.


That quality has emerged in many of Zhitinkin’s numerous productions for other theaters as well, including The Battlefield After Victory Belongs to Marauders at the Satire Theater—a show that became a byword for garish overkill in critical circles—and, to a lesser extent, this season’s Vieux Carré at the Tabakov Theater. Zhitinkin, echoing the title of his notorious production at the Satire Theater, appears to have beaten the once-popular director Roman Viktyuk at his own game. Viktyuk was the man who brought sexual liberation to Russian theater in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That brought him notoriety which, for a few years, was confused with respect. But the increasingly low quality of his work in recent years made him the first has-been of the post-Soviet period. Zhitinkin, whose productions also frequently flirt with sexual taboos, has taken over Viktyuk’s mantle. For the time being, it has provided him with a popularity that is similar, but not equal, to Viktyuk’s at his peak. Bel-Ami tells the story of George Durois, a young veteran of the 19th-century French military campaigns in Algiers, who returns to Paris to make a career. Lacking talent of any kind, he works his way to the top as a journalist with heavy political clout by becoming everyone’s “dear friend” and sleeping with and/or marrying all the important women in Paris. The more brazen and disgusting he becomes, the more power he acquires. That is all there is to this simplistic, episodic show, unless you add that George seems to get his comeuppance by collapsing in a faint when his evil deeds come back to haunt him at the end. There is in that a vague reference to the death of George’s friend Charles Forestier, whom he refused to help at a crucial moment and soon thereafter succeeded. But almost none of the people, either as performed or as conceived by the director, are of any interest. The prime exception is Natalya Gromushkina’s pert handling of the purely marginal character of the waitress Paulette. As George, Alexander Domo-garov plays one note—crass arro-gance—the only variation being his steadily increasing volume. The closest that George’s women come to showing individuality is in their extravagant, brightly colored costumes, designed by Andrei Sharov. Margarita Terekhova, the popular actress whose performance in Andrei Tarkovsky’s great film, The Mirror, brought her enduring fame, is an undeniable crowd-pleaser, her every gesture drawing gasps and applause from the appreciative audience. But that genuine admiration is clearly based on past achievements. Terekhova turns in a mannered and labored interpretation of Virginie, a faded married woman losing her head and dignity over a young buck. Sharov’s set of a huge bed serving as the crossroads of all movement in the play is obviously metaphorical and cheap in appearance. Zhitinkin is undeniably a craftsman, although in Bel-Ami even his craft fails him at times. Forget his stooping to stealing entire scenes from his own previous shows. (George doing a spinning dance under raining clumps of paper after his first article is a success is a verbatim quote of a similar moment in Vieux Carré.)


Worse yet is Zhitinkin’s heavy-handed use of thundering music during transitions between scenes. It is calculated to squeeze applause from the spectators and frequently does. But how long can he go on manipulating his audience with technique alone? Perhaps he should ask Roman Viktyuk, another director who once worked at the Mossoviet. (June 1997) No More, No More…No More?, Dela u Broda No More, No More…No More?, a production of the Dela u Broda company scheduled to play Saturday and Sunday at the Taganka Theater, is one of a handful of shows that left me in a quandary this season. Some shows you love and know exactly why—the Fomenko Studio’s A Month in the Country, the Bogis Agency’s The Last Night of the Last Tsar and The Storm at the Young Spectator Theater are three that immediately come to mind. Others you hate for equally definable reasons—for me the Mossoviet Theater’s so-called musical, The Game, created around the defiled tunes of Western pop songs, was one of those. There are even shows you like for no clear reason. Sonechka and Casanova at the Hermitage Theater was horribly long and aggressively obscure and yet, I still walked out of the theater having gained something. It’s the shows you don’t like but don’t really know why that give you no peace. I found No More, No More…No More?—essentially a sparring match between a man and a woman—almost impossible to sit through, and it doesn’t even run a full two hours. It features two fine actors, Tatyana Vasilyeva and Valery Garkalin, and it marks the Moscow debut of a talented director, Valery Akhadov, who has spent most of his professional life in the city of Magnitogorsk. Even the play by Naum Brod, as annoying as it can get, has a glibness to it that at least gives the appearance of constant forward motion. So, what took the wind out of the sails? I think the problem was one of connections, or lack of them. Vasilyeva, a powerful actress with a flair for the eccentric, seems terribly cramped as the giggling heroine, Natalya. Garkalin, as her nameless partner, has plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his caustic wit, but almost none in which to show off his impish sense of humor. These are primarily limitations of Brod’s play. The fact is, this confrontation between a Russian or Soviet everywoman and everyman wallows in shallow depths. There are hints that some tragedy is awaiting Natalya; she may have just learned she has cancer and seems to have invited her former boyfriend over to keep her company one last time before she enters the hospital. But that is only a vague, undeveloped suggestion.


More than anything, Brod wrote a play about misfiring sexual relations. Both characters, who are perhaps creeping up on middle age, have multiple partners, although that hasn’t increased either their sexual satisfaction or general sense of well-being. That is evident in the way they usually refer to each other: She calls him “honeybuns” and he calls her “mother.” Natalya seems to like her unnamed friend, or at least she tells him she does repeatedly. She is not averse to telling him frankly what a creep he is, either. But this is not a love-hate relationship— which might have mustered some passion and interest—it is a mopup job. It is what people engage in to put things in order when everything between them, and maybe even between them and life, is said and done. Eating, drinking and, especially, sex are what they discuss incessantly Whenever they try to turn words to action, some obstacle slows things down. Natalya’s visitor does finally get his plate of scrambled eggs; they do get a neighbor to lend them a bottle of hootch; and, after several aborted attempts, they do get their clothes off. But they invariably remain two bored, overexperienced people adrift in the world. I suspect Brod’s intent was to find a chic glow in the vulgarity of his characters’ speech and behavior. But the chic never happened and the vulgarities just keep piling up. Early on, his monosyllabic, shotgun bursts of dialogue create the impression of humor. But the often nonsensical exchanges, dominated by the words “what” and “yeah,” wear thin quickly. I kept waiting for flashes of personality and individuality to lead us out of the monotony, but they never materialized. From beginning to end Natalya remains a nurturing, misunderstood dingbat and her boyfriend remains thickheaded and ignorant. Akhadov threw in a couple of nice directorial touches. During the farcical sex scene, the lights go off and Natalya chases her man around the room with a flashlight that occasionally catches both of them in strange or comical poses. Shortly thereafter, the effect of rain is created cleverly when Garkalin turns a bottle of water upside down and balances it on the tip of the umbrella Vasilyeva holds over her head. But for all the nice things I can say about No More, No More…No More? I can think of twice as many rebuttals. (July 1997) Laughter in the Dark, Sfera Theater The Sfera Theater is a house with its own distinct personality. It is the only theater-in-the-round in Moscow. The shows in its repertoire are largely based on dramatizations of prose, some are foreign works, many are Russian novels from the first half of the century The performing style at the Sfera is fast and loose, drawing a good deal of its atmosphere from the music hall. Not coincidentally, most of its shows make generous use of song and dance.


All of this bears the mark of Yekaterina Yelanskaya, who founded the Sfera some fifteen years ago. You feel the presence of a strong leader the instant you enter the door at the Sfera. The employees are polite and helpful; the foyer is neat and clean; the summery buffet is tastefully decorated and the pianist playing piano-bar versions of Beatles tunes has his chops down. In the hall the seating arrangement is spacious and comfortable. Pieces of the set are scattered among the five or six rows of seats surrounding a small, elevated, circular platform in the middle, and it is obvious from the start that the action will also unfold among and behind the spectators. That is also true of Yelanskaya’s production of Laughter in the Dark, which opened over the weekend. (It is a dramatization of Vladimir Nabokov’s early novel, Camera Obscura, using the title by which it is known in the United States.) Actors make their entrances and exits by way of four doors located in the back walls, and many of the scenes are played out at tables or on a sofa placed where the third row of seats once was. Rising above the audience at one end is a bridge-like platform where several more scenes unfold. Laughter in the Dark is the third Nabokov novel in repertory at the Sfera, joining King, Queen, Knave and the notorious Edward Albee dramatization of Lolita which opened in the spring. The convoluted plot of Nabokov’s fifth novel, involving a fifteen-year-old girl, Magda Peters (Tatyana Filatova), who falls in love with the unscrupulous artist Robert Horn (Vyacheslav Nikolaev) but ends up living with the married Bruno Kretchmar (Alexei Novitsky), is exhibited with surprising clarity. That makes for this show’s biggest strength—the ease with which you follow the goings-on. Bruno’s susceptibility to sexual adventure is tipped off immediately as he lies down to sleep with this primly proper wife (Lyubov Sergeeva) and a trio of scantilyattired Graces joins him for a dreamland ménage à quatre. Then we cut to the arrogant, carefree Robert who frankly calls himself a charlatan and describes the creation which made his fame and fortune—a teddy-bear figure named Chippy (played as an often menacing, life-size doll by Yelena Kishchik). When Robert buys the poverty-stricken Magda for a night of wild sex, the three key characters of the novel have been put in place. If you accept the claims of Nabokov’s apologists, which I do here for argument’s sake, the novelist was a master stylist who delighted in undercutting the sentimental expectations of his readers. In this production of Laughter, that is most evident in the character of Robert. If we expect him to be an exalted type because of his profession, we are mistaken. He is crass, unscrupulous and cruel. He uses Magda and abandons her, and when she has become more or less settled with the starry-eyed Bruno, Robert comes back to shatter that silly man’s fragile idyll. Similarly, Magda is no poor waif. She is an ex-whore who will stop at nothing to get a piece of Bruno’s wealth and social standing. Bruno himself proves to be a sentimental oaf who fails to see Robert’s claims to be gay are merely a smokescreen enabling him to carry on with Magda.


But if this makes for intriguing reading, it is less interesting as theater. Unlike Nabokov, Yelanskaya does not ask a whole lot of her audience. In fact, she doesn’t even leave much for us to infer or imagine. The actors weep, wail and shout. The heavy drum and bass-beat music pounds. Yelanskaya is especially fond of strobe light shows during the seemingly countless bump-and-grind sex dances staged by Sergei Vinogradov. A few rare moments of poise are provided by a handful of recordings by the great jazz singer Nina Simone. But the unmistakable authenticity of Simone’s soulful, scratchy voice actually works against the show: By comparison, everything else looks and sounds even more contrived. Yelanskaya, however, is less concerned with depth than appearances. In that sense, Laughter in the Dark may achieve what she was after. It is a relatively lively piece of literary narration spiced with music, dance, flesh and scandalous behavior. (July 1997) Doves, Stanislavsky Drama Theater Vladimir Mirzoev’s production of Doves, a play by Mikhail Ugarov at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater, is modest and quiet. That is an achievement in itself for a director who, in bad weather, could be mistaken for a lightning rod. I am not being snide. Mirzoev has the reputation of an iconoclast and he has earned it. His unorthodox productions of the classics have gained him vocal supporters and detractors, while his recent foray into contemporary drama, a strange and atmospheric production of Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World which opened in June and resumes performances in September, indicated he will put his own personal stamp on any material he takes up. Doves has the shadings of a Mirzoev staging, but mostly in pastels. It is intimate, meticulous and perhaps understated to a fault. Most unusual is the extreme care Mirzoev took with the text, since he is notorious for turning authors on their heads. I did not do a line-by-line comparison of the published play with what I saw performed, but that would have been superfluous. This production exudes a deep respect for, and fascination with, the words of Mikhail Ugarov’s play. Words are one of Ugarov’s great joys. More like a prose writer than a playwright, he wallows in them, their sounds, their meanings, their resonances. That is evident from the very start of Doves, a curious tale of three young monks in 17th-century Russia who, from time to time, call each other doves. Varlaam (Vladimir Skvortsov) sadly looks over a manuscript his cell partner Fyodor (Vitaly Khaev) has copied. “Look at this sheet he ruined,” he sighs in dissatisfaction. “His pen slipped.” As opening dramatic conflicts go, it is not exactly a barn burner. But it is dripping with irony, of course, for Doves is not about scribes bickering over ink blots. The introduction immediately brings out that rarified air which drifts through all of Ugarov’s works.


Determining what Doves is about is more difficult. What happens is the trio of monks becomes entangled in the subtle maneuvers of a power game, as we learn the two senior friars are murderers halfheartedly making efforts to purge their sins. The youngest of the three, the 17-year-old Grisha (Alexander Usov), is a cherubic lad whose natural purity and innocence have not yet been tested. Varlaam only reluctantly confesses the details of his murder, but Fyodor openly admits to having killed the child heir to the throne which threw Russia into the Time of Troubles and facilitated Boris Godunov’s rise to power. Whether any of this is actually true within the world of the play is not clear, nor is it important. As Fyodor argues, whatever a scribe writes becomes the truth, no matter what really happened. More to the point is a story Varlaam tells Grisha. Legend has it the heir to the throne was secretly saved in a monastery where he lives to this day not knowing he is the tsar. Could it be Grisha, whose age roughly coincides with that of the “murdered” heir? But even this is barely window-dressing because great plots and events are not what interest Ugarov. He is fascinated by subtleties of character and behavior and by the illusionary nature of what we consider to be reality or even history. Vladimir Sulyagin’s dove-brown set of a pigeon-loft, the actors’ occasional cooing sounds and wing-flapping motions and Olga Lapshina’s lilting performance of folk songs all remind us of the dove-like gentleness that exists in this odd trio of monks. Even if two are killers and the other has visions of usurping the throne. Mirzoev essentially let the play speak for itself through the actors, each of whom creates a distinct and engaging portrait. Skvortsov’s Varlaam appears composed on the surface although he is also shaken by a dark side of repressed violence. Khaev’s Fyodor is a threatening toughie whose bark is worse than his bite. Usov, making an impressive professional debut, is impeccable as the skittish, unsullied youth. Finally, I suspect it is no coincidence that Mirzoev chose to be so chaste with this author and this play. Ugarov, no less than the director, is also a man with a reputation, although his is more paradoxical. Ask about Ugarov’s plays and anyone in Moscow theater will tell you of his exquisitely turned phrases and his refined sense of humor. Ask the same people what they think of productions of those plays and they all will draw a blank. The reason is simple: This author who has written seven highly praised plays in eight years, has been produced throughout the Russian provinces and has had several of his works staged in Germany and Finland, has never been produced professionally in the Russian capital. Mirzoev’s production of Doves, the first play Ugarov ever wrote, finally breaks the ice. Its delicacy and sensitivity suit both the self-effacing author and his intricate play. (August 1997)


18 Director Vladimir Mirzoev, playwright Mikhail Ugarov and the actors Alexander Usov, Vladimir Skvortsov, Vitaly Khaev and Olga Lapshina at the premiere of Doves at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

People and Events

Moscow's Power Names It used to be that the first week in September kicked off the theater season. As if all of theatrical Moscow jammed the same return flight from the Theater Union’s resort in Yalta in order to hit the ground running with all those other folks they were just sharing the beach with. These days it’s a lot more low-key. As of September 4, only about a dozen of the city’s roughly seventy-five dramatic theaters were open for business. In the coming week another seven will join them. But despite a smattering of new shows throughout the month (most notably the Satirikon’s Threepenny Opera opening September 21), things won’t really hit stride until October. But that doesn’t mean managers aren’t already dreaming about full houses. Which, in the absence of anything new and exciting to go see yet, makes you wonder: Who are the powers in Moscow theater? The point isn’t who is setting artistic trends, but who has the muscle to get the publicity and hold the public’s fascination. Here is a glimpse at the leaders. Oleg Tabakov, 61, has parlayed his actor’s popularity into a mini-empire. As a founding member of the Sovremennik Theater (1957), he is plugged into one of the tightest clans in Moscow, although he has far outstripped his former colleagues. Now as the dean of the prestigious Moscow Art Theater school, the founder of his own Tabakov Theater and the head of the Russian-American Theater School with ties to the Moscow Art Theater, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University, Tabakov has cashed in with his own self-proclaimed talent for “doing business” with his face. He has also passed on his secret to his students. Many, such as Vladimir Mashkov, Yevgeny Mironov and Sergei Bezrukov, are lining up as the next generation of media darlings. Mark Zakharov, 62, arguably runs the most popular theater in Moscow, the Lenkom. It is stocked with a gaggle of Russia’s most famous movie stars, many of whom achieved recognition playing in hit fairy-tale musicals directed by Zakharov for the screen and the stage.

PEOPLE AND EVENTS 93

During the ’80s Zakharov solidified his position as a star and starmaker as the much-parodied, but highly-recognizable, sour-faced moderator of the t.v. show, Kino Panorama. In the ’90s he has remained just as visible turning out boisterous replicas of the kinds of shows which first brought him fame in the 1970s. Moscow without Yury Lyubimov, 79, would be a very different place, which it was while the director was in exile the ’80s. Even since his return in 1988 neither he nor the city have been the same as when his world-famous Taganka Theater was king in the 1970s. But it matters not: Lyubimov is living history and still personifies the standard against which everyone else is measured. The Moscow Art Theater, founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the creator of the socalled “system” which in American cinema acquired a life of its own as “method acting,” is probably the most famous theater in the world. As its artistic director for twentyfive years, Oleg Yefremov, 68, occupies one of Moscow’s most coveted offices. It seems not to matter that Yefremov, an extremely talented actor and another Sovremennik alumnus, has presided over the artistic decline and break-up of the Art Theater into two independent venues (The Chekhov Art Theater run by Yefremov, and the Gorky Art Theater headed by Tatyana Doronina). As the storied playhouse approaches its centen-nial, a public relations blitz will make Yefremov and his theater big news for the next two years. At the Mayakovsky Theater, another of Moscow’s “star gardens,” Andrei Goncharov, 78, keeps his bevy of stars happy and holds them in front of their adoring public. It packs the houses and pads the director’s reputation. Mikhail Ulyanov, 68, fashioned an enviable career impersonating rock-jawed party bureaucrats. Now he plays the part in real life as the artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater and the chairman of the Theater Union.1 It is often difficult to say where his popularity stops and his power begins, but the two do work hand in hand. As the artistic director at the Sovremennik, founding member Galina Volchek, 62, runs a Moscow institution—the favorite theater of the ’60s generation. During her tenure, she has done little to change its style and nothing to alienate its legions of fans. Roman Viktyuk, 59, is a postperestroika media fixture. He is softly photogenic, offers intelligent, articulate interviews and stages shows in which the mysteries of sex and sexuality attract attention regardless of their quality. Finally, make way for Konstantin Raikin, 46, the star actor and artistic director at the lively Satirikon Theater (and another alumnus of the Sovremennik). More than anyone on this list, Raikin combines burgeoning talent with the power of his popularity, and points the way to the future of Moscow theater. (September 1996)


Around The Threepenny Opera at the Satirikon Theater It’s not quite breakfast in bed, but for the ruble equivalent of $75, you can buy a ticket to a hot new show, have it delivered to your home with a free program and booklet, and even sip a complimentary glass of champagne when you arrive at the theater. Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria at the Marquis on Broadway? Petula Clark in Sunset Boulevard at the Adelphi on the West End? No, Konstantin Raikin in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at Moscow’s Satirikon Theater. Big spending, a concept heartily embraced by the so-called New Russians over the last few years in spheres such as homes, furnishings, clothing and transportation, may have finally found its way into the realm of entertainment and culture. That is, if the $600,000 Threepenny Opera is any indicator. It is not the first expensive show to be put on here in recent times, but by all accounts, excluding opera and ballet, it is the most costly. Ever. And that has tongues wagging. Izvestia quickly followed the show’s September 21 premiere with a sour response. “One terribly regrets the half-million dollars that the Satirikon spent, but which are nowhere visible on stage,” wrote Yelena Yampolskaya. Other early reactions have been more moderate, but hardly sterling. In Nezavisimaya gazeta Grigory Zaslavsky damns with faint praise, writing that the show’s director, Vladimir Mashkov, “has seriously tackled the idea of commercial theater. He does what he wants, and, most importantly, what he is capable of.” But a blitz of television appearances by Mashkov, best known to the general public as one of Russia’s top young movie stars, has already guaranteed one thing: The Threepenny Opera is now a major media event. Whether or not it will be called a critical success is a moot point. Moscow is not New York, and critics here have a negligible impact on public opinion. A larger question is whether this privately-funded show, underwritten primarily by the Bee-Line cellular phone company and joined by three other sponsors, is a sign of things to come in local theater. “Of course not,” says Vyacheslav Dolgachyov, a director at the Chekhov Art Theater. “There isn’t that kind of available money to give to culture and art. You will not see [these kinds of expensive shows] popping up like mushrooms after a rain.” Despite the flashy figure of $75 as the top ticket price, only fifty of the Satirikon’s 950 seats are going at that rate. The vast majority of seats fall into a much more moderate range of 20,000 to 150,000 rubles. That makes for an

1 After two five-year terms, he surrendered that position to Alexander Kalyagin in October 1996.


average ticket price of roughly $20, significantly less than the average Broadway ticket of $45. Those kinds of numbers probably will not have potential backers seeing unlimited dollar signs in theater production. That is all the more true since the hefty investment in The Threepenny Opera probably only came about thanks to the golden combination of Raikin, one of the country’s most talented and recognizable actors, and Mashkov, the media-proclaimed “sex-symbol of postSoviet cinema.” By comparison, Dolgachyov points out that a star-studded production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters to be staged at the Art Theater by the renowned Oleg Yefremov has been unable to attract any significant sponsors. Ultimately, the impact of The Threepenny Opera, an unabashedly flamboyant show with music and dancing, may be judged in terms other than finances or critical notices. Says Olga Galakhova, the editorin-chief of the theatrical newspaper Dom aktyora, or House of Actors, “Mashkov is trying to put forth a theater that has no tradition in Russia, that of the grand show or the music hall. His production may not be perfect, but I think what is important is that it has appeared at all.” (September 1996) Theater and Money How has theater changed in Russia in the last five years? One prominent figure gives a telling answer on a narrow scale. Asked about actors’ pay, Yury Lyubimov, the renowned director at the Taganka Theater, said: “Nothing has changed since I created this theater in 1964. Back then an actor making 120 rubles a month rode the trolley and looked at signs saying that the driver earns 300 rubles. It’s the same now. A poor actor starts asking himself ‘Why did I spend four years studying so hard to earn so little and be in such a dependent profession?’” The figures now are different, but with the average non-star pulling in a base monthly salary of around 400,000 rubles as compared to the trolleybus driver’s 1. 5 million, it is obvious that most actors today work more for love than money Even the top base pay, earned by stars with the honored status of People’s Artist, is only 900,000 rubles a month. Most actors receive supplements in the way of cheap lunches, subsidized transportation and bonuses for the number of shows they perform each month, but none of it adds up to more than bare subsistence. Barely getting by That is how many critics might also describe the quality of Moscow’s theater offerings in the 1990s. The older generation tends to bemoan the collapse of theater as a moral institution. They say Russian theater was at its peak when it was a means to opposing a totalitarian regime, and that its emergence as an entertainment industry is a sign of its degradation.


Younger voices are equally critical but often for diametrically opposing reasons. They are tired of the social burden Russian theater has carried for much of the 20th century, and they want, if not art for art’s sake, at least a good show. They are frustrated by the press of Russian conservatism which continues to support an older, more famous generation of actors and directors long past their prime, while new faces and talents confront almost insurmountable obstacles to being recognized. But the critical battles, aside from being something of a tempest in a teapot, look suspiciously like the typically combative ambience present in any big theater town. In reality most of the problems facing Russian theater as the 20th century winds down are quite universal: the search for new stars, new directors, new themes, new styles and even new spectators. It is the search for money, more frantic now than at any time in the recent past, that puts the defining touches on the picture of Moscow theater at the end of 1996. “There is no money,” declares Alexander Volkov, a spokesman for the theater section at the Ministry of Culture. “We are able to finance only salaries, and even then only in part.” What that means is that, in addition to an underpaid work force, there is the chance that the lifeline of theater—new shows—could be severely crimped this year. That is why most of Moscow’s twelve federally funded theaters staged a widely publicized protest on Triumphal Square October 4, and why the Theater Union of the Russian Federation voted at its October 21–22 congress to request that the federal prosecutor instigate a suit against the government for failing to uphold an article in the constitution stipulating that two percent of the federal budget must be spent on culture.2 Interviews with theater managers throughout the city show that the sixty theaters supported by the Moscow City Committee on Culture are doing better than their federal counterparts. The Stanislavsky Theater’s Felix Demichev indicates he is happy with his relationship with the city, adding “We receive what we ask for.” And in a grand gesture during the last week of October, Mayor Yury Luzhkov continued his high-profile support of the arts by making the decision to award Boris Lvov-Anokhin’s Novy Drama Theater, long located on the outskirts of town, a new building in the center of Moscow. Still, almost everyone agrees: This is a time of financial crisis. Even at the Novy Theater, a new production originally planned to coincide with Lvov-Anokhin’s 70th birthday in early October was delayed until December, in part because there was no money for costumes and sets, said managing director Alexander Stulnev. And, of course, it may require two or three years of reconstruction before it can raise the curtain at the old Forum cinema on the Garden Ring near Sretenka Street.3 Last year, during the 1995/96 season, federal and municipal payments for theater reached a postSoviet high. The Ministry of Culture funded a striking succession of events that included the massive, three-month Second Chekhov


International Theater Festival and numerous ambitious tours and festivals involving troupes from all over the former Soviet bloc. The city, through the Committee on Culture, provided generous resources for productions and construction at its sixty theaters, as well as funding much of the threeweek Berlin in Moscow Festival. But as the 1996/97 season commenced, almost the sole topic of conversation in theater circles was the catastrophic lack of money. Sergei Artsibashev, the artistic director of the federally underwritten Theater na Pokrovke, put it plainly, “We have received no [production] money yet and only a fraction of what we should have received for salaries.” What happened? Mikhail Chigir, the managing director of the Theater of Nations, a federal establishment that organizes tours and projects involving Russian theaters, said he was told the shortage is due to “an absence of money in the federal budget.” Several people noted that they have heard from government insiders that the culprits were the presidential elections and the war in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Chigir was forced to close his theater and put his employees on indefinite, unpaid leave. The sheer numbers of state supported theaters in Moscow are staggering. Beyond the dozen federal venues and sixty houses falling under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Committee on Culture, another half-dozen are scattered among such agencies as the offices of the president or the prime minister, the Ministry of Defense and other bureaus. Ilya Kogan, the managing director of the city funded Malaya Bronnaya Theater, noted with dissatisfaction that “the pie is getting slimmer” as the quantity of theaters grows. “In the last five years the number of large theaters has increased from thirty to sixty,” he said. Another disturbing trend Kogan called “very common” is the retreat of private theaters to the safety of the state. “When the commercial theaters arose after the breakup of the Soviet Union, they declared their total artistic and economic independence,” he said. “Then, with rare exception, they crawled into the government budget and, little by little, became like everybody else.” Two prominent examples of that are Alexander Kalyagin’s Et Cetera Theater, now funded by the city, and the once-pioneering independent Russian Theater Agency which became a part of the Ministry of Culture in 1994 and added the word “State” to its title. Indeed, the commercial movement has not been a success either financially or artistically. Of the approximately sixty private or independent theaters and production companies on the books in Moscow, many are dormant or defunct, and only a handful produce shows with any regularity.

2Nothing

came of this resolution. The planned handing over of the abandoned Forum cinema to the Novy Drama Theater fell through at the end of the season. 3


That probably should come as no surprise. Funding has been a volatile problem ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even in the West, where ticket prices are much higher than in Russia, box office receipts comprise only about thirty percent of a theater’s budget. Since the average ticket price in Moscow runs about 30,000 rubles ($6), even a full house will not pay many bills. Further, any ticket price increases above inflation rates would trigger a drastic drop in the numbers of spectators. So, it is that the funds to run the theaters, as well as to mount shows whose costs routinely exceed $100, 000, must come at least in part from outside sources. State support, once comprising one-hundred percent of any Soviet cultural organization’s budget, plummeted in the early 1990s. Soon the new phenomenon of private sponsors began easing the crunch. During that time state theaters received the right to augment their incomes by becoming landlords. Many began subletting or leasing space to banks, businesses or night clubs. Culture Ministry spokesman Volkov says nothing stops theaters from finding private funding, citing as an example the Satirikon Theater’s splashy new production of The Threepenny Opera. Its $600,000 cost was entirely covered by sponsors. But that single instance notwithstanding, recipients of substantial private sponsorship are becoming fewer. “The mid-sized businesses which used to help us can’t anymore. They don’t have the money,” says the Novy Theater’s Stulnev. Meanwhile, as the city and federal governments encourage creative approaches to finding cash, they erect as many obstacles as they remove. Perhaps the biggest one is taxes, Russia’s darkest and murkiest problem these days. It is a subject that one manager of an independent venue would discuss only off the record. His theater recently raised several hundred thousand dollars to produce a show, but that will not be the amount listed in the official documents: The theater can’t afford to pay taxes on that sum, and, anyway, the sponsor would get no tax breaks. Asked whether there aren’t any laws giving tax breaks for sponsorship of culture, the manager guffawed, “There are some laws. They don’t work.” As for the actors, most of them, like the miners in Siberia, are caught between a rock and a hard place. Nobody knows how many actors there are in Moscow, but a conservative guesstimate yields a figure of around 3,500. Only a handful land spots in the slim market of traditional side jobs such as dubbing foreign films or doing commercials. And with the filmmaking world in an even worse plight than theater, the opportunities are few for actors looking to earn extra pay in movies. Unlike artists who can take their skills abroad—musicians, dancers, painters and even writers who can lecture in Russian at Western university Slavic departments—actors are a labor force held captive by the limits of language. Some have taught or even acted in Europe or America, but they are an elite few. Still, while everybody is struggling, most theaters are finding ways to cope. The Lenkom Theater, with its lucrative TRAM restaurant and club, and the


Stanislavsky Theater, with its trendy Stanislavsky Club and an accessible currency exchange window just off Pushkin Square, are two examples of downtown venues doing well financially. The Taganka Theater earns money through foreign tours while such venues as the Tabakov Theater, the Theater Near the Stanislavsky House and the Theater u Nikitskikh vorot have involved themselves at times in offering acting lessons to groups of paying foreigners. Kogan admits he is “close to being pessimistic” about the future but adds, “You can stand around with your hand stretched out to bureaucrats, or you can be creative and come up with ideas. That is possible.” No matter what the case, no one is experiencing nostalgia for the old days. Artsibashev, head of one of the city’s most critically acclaimed houses, sums up that attitude saying, “I would rather be caught in an economic noose than a political one.” (November 1996) Golden Mask Festival: Spotlight on the Provinces The Russian provinces: Russia’s heartland or Russia’s sticks? Is Moscow really “the boss,” as Viktor Kalish, an authority on Russian provincial theater, puts it? And what about St. Petersburg? Is the city on the Neva the second capital? The first in temporary eclipse? Or is it, too, “the provinces”? These loaded questions—involving the pride and self-perception of tens of millions of people in Russia—are primarily tied to matters of culture. That makes the two-week, twenty-four-show Golden Mask festival of Russian theater, opera, operetta, ballet and puppetry, opening March 14, an ideal opportunity to watch what happens when the provinces and the “two capitals” collide. The Golden Mask festival, now in its third year of honoring the top shows, creators and performers, has expanded rapidly. Two years ago, every nominee was from Moscow. Last year, the number of Moscow nominees came in at about fifty percent. In this year’s competition recognizing the twenty top achievements from the 1995/1996 season, just twenty-four of the seventy candidates are Moscow-based. The remaining forty-six, comprising two-thirds of the total, hail from such cities as St. Petersburg, Omsk, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinburg and Perm. But for some, getting here is one thing, while putting the best foot forward is another. Kalish, whose book, The Theatrical Vertical, is a highly regarded study of theater in the Russian provinces, says many talented out-of-towners flop when they play Moscow because “they don’t have that Broadway arrogance.” For them, he says, “Moscow is the boss. They think you’ve got to be nervous” when playing here.


Anatoly Praudin, whose strange, atmospheric production of the fairytale-like A-Flat is nominated for awards in four of the five drama categories, has a unique perspective. For many years a respected director at the Yekaterinburg Young Spectator Theater, where he staged A-Flat, he moved to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1996 to take over that city’s Young Spectator Theater. “St. Petersburg is not a capital,” Praudin says flatly. “Moscow is. That’s where all the best and worst is. If a major artist arises in the provinces or St. Petersburg, he eventually makes his way to Moscow.” Almost everyone agrees on one aspect of the provinces—the distractions are less, leaving more time for work. Vladimir Petrov, whose dual-language, Russian-Japanese production of Kobo Abe’s novella, The Woman in the Dunes, for the Omsk Drama Theater is nominated in four of the five drama categories, sums up the common attitude. “Moscow,” he says, “is a huge Babylon. Artists there are subject to many temptations—ads, films, presentations, commerce, etc. Here [in Omsk] we have nothing but the theater. That’s not good, it’s just all we have.” That is the charm of the provinces, suggests Vladimir Podgorodinsky, a St. Petersburg-based director who is nominated for his staging of the operetta, The White Acacia, at the Omsk Musical Theater. “It is easier to work with people in the provinces,” Podgorodinsky says, “Life there is calmer and there are more opportunities for reflection.” Praudin, on the contrary, admits to having fled the hinterlands. He points out that even a large city of 2 million people like Yekaterinburg has only two drama theaters. The lack of competition, he says, provides “no stimulus to push forward.” “I had the feeling it would be the end of me if I stayed in Yekaterinburg any longer,” he says. “I worked at the Alexandrinsky Theater [in St. Petersburg] a few years ago and it gave me a jolt. It’s still not Moscow,” he says of St. Petersburg, which boasts over twenty-five theaters, “but it makes you keep in shape.” The symbiotic relationship between Moscow, with its roughly 100 theaters and studios, and the provinces is complex. Two of the highly-acclaimed Moscow directors nominated in the field of drama, Pyotr Fomenko (The Queen of Spades at the Vakhtangov Theater) and Kama Ginkas (The Execution of the Decembrists at Moscow’s Young Spectator Theater), have strong ties to St. Petersburg or other cities. When Fomenko was out of favor with the authorities in the 1970s, he escaped to what was then Leningrad to continue his career under less watchful eyes. Ginkas, another artist who was perceived with mistrust by Soviet cultural bureaucrats, began in Leningrad in the late 1960s but spent many years traveling the provinces. It was only after the advent of perestroika that he got a foothold in Moscow. Whether or not there is a future Fomenko or Ginkas among the directors whose shows are coming to Moscow, one thing is certain: The broadening base of the Golden Mask festival shrinks the size of Russia’s vast theatrical territory.


One area in which Moscow has already relinquished the lead is the ballet. Of the three candidates for best ballet, Symphony in C by the Mariinsky Theater and The Brothers Karamazov by the Boris Eifman Ballet Theater are from St. Petersburg, while the Yevgeny Panfilov Ballet Theater’s Romeo and Juliet is from Perm. Eifman won a Golden Mask last year for his production of Tchaikovsky. Panfilov is nominated for the second year running. Moscow ballet’s only representation comes from Vladimir Kirillov (up for best male dancer) and Tatyana Chernobrovkina (up for best female dancer), both of whom perform in The Taming of the Shrew at the Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko Musical Theater. A similar situation affects the opera world. The Mariinsky (with Prokofiev’s The Gambler) and the Zazerkalye Children’s Musical Theater (with Donizetti’s The Love Potion) provide two nominees from St. Petersburg, while the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater’s version of Verdi’s La Bohème is the sole Moscow entry. The big loser in the shift away from Moscow is the Bolshoi Theater. In the eleven categories it potentially could have received nominations, it drew only one. Mikhail Agafonov is up for best male singer in the Bolshoi’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata. Meanwhile, an interesting resurgence of nostalgia can be observed in the category of operetta. Both nominees—Yury Milyutin’s Girls in a Tizzy by the Yekaterinburg Theater of Musical Comedy, and Isaak Dunaevsky’s The White Acacia—revive two of the most popular light composers of the Stalin era. Vladimir Podgorodinsky, the director of The White Acacia and the artistic director of the St. Petersburg Theater of Rock Opera, is not surprised. Dunaevsky’s music is “delightful” he says. It evokes “an entire era.” “The nostalgia of this show is my childhood,” he continues. “I’m one of those who thinks the past is better than the present. I think all Russians are like that.” Podgorodinsky quickly adds, “It is not a matter of politics. It is the warmth and spiritual nature of the past that is lacking today.” (March 1997) Golden Mask Awards Ceremony The worst kept secret in Moscow burst into the open with a wicked vengeance last week: There is bad blood in this town’s theater world. The occasion for the “discovery” was the Golden Mask awards ceremony, which in the ten days since it was held March 24 at the Vakhtangov Theater, has ballooned into a roaring scandal. Some are angry that their favorite shows or artists got passed over, many are livid that Vladimir Mirzoev had the gall (or nerve) to stage the ceremony with more than a tad of gallows humor, and almost everyone is furious that a Japanese actress (Araki Kadzuho in the Omsk Drama Theater’s The Woman in the Dunes) received a “Russian national award.” In the aftermath, the gossips and the newspapers have been in a frenzy.


Kommersant Daily called the ceremony—whose general theme was a mock argument between presenters Sergei Makovetsky and Yulia Rutberg about the death of theater at the end of the 20th century—a “catastrophe.” Moskovsky komsomolets in a front page slam labeled it “impoverished amateurism” and intoned that the audience “regretted no one was selling rotten eggs and rancid tomatoes” in the foyer. Izvestia responded relatively softly, terming the evening’s script (written by playwrights Yelena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov) “incoherent” and chiding Mirzoev for his “absent” direction. Here is what I saw from my seat in last row center. Mirzoev’s show, which scattered several potentially interesting sketches among the awards presentations, was long and poorly integrated into the flow of the ceremony. The first episode, a fascinating piece of modern music in which musicians played the parts of a sleeping man’s dream images, failed miserably because no one (including me) realized it was a digression. As the number developed, the audience became increasingly restless. With proceedings less than ten minutes underway, the “catastrophe” was already in the making. People began talking loudly, laughing and even jeering. From then on, whatever the shortcomings of Mirzoev’s show, the real scandal was the impudence of many in the audience. For three and a half hours, prominent critics, editors at major newspapers, theater employees and others repeatedly whistled, clapped derisively and shouted catcalls while presenters and performers seemed stunned by the rude reception they received. The great ballerina Galina Ulanova was nearly driven from the stage by laughter and derisive applause. She may have rambled on too long, but the treatment she received from the public which had just given her a standing ovation a few minutes before, was nothing short of shocking. The popular film actor and director Rolan Bykov, conferring the award for best female role in an opera, repeatedly tried to placate the audience, each time to growing bursts of laughter. A number of presenters, including the former Taganka Theater actress Alla Demidova, tweaked the spectators for their behavior, but it was to no avail. None of the excesses made it into a carefully edited and eerily silent version broadcast March 29 on Russian television. The biggest squeals have been raised in regards to Kadzuho taking the top actress award. She performs in Japanese in a show staged by a Russian in a Russian theater with Russian financing. Komsomolskaya pravda, referring to the Russian-Japanese dispute over the Kurile Islands with a cavalier attitude to historical accuracy, claimed that unhappy spectators on their way out of the theater were muttering: “They’ve taken the islands and they’ve taken the ‘Mask’.”


The shrillest note, however, was sounded by Kommersant Daily. It accused the jury of committing “voluntary national humiliation” by bestowing the award on the Japanese actress. I have seen plenty of histrionics in Moscow theater in the 1990s, some great, some otherwise. I have never seen such hysterics and such nonsense as in these days following the Golden Mask ceremonies. For my money it has been the theatrical low-point of the decade. (April 1997) Vladimir Mirzoev Why does Vladimir Mirzoev make so many people so mad? In conversation, this director who routinely quotes the wisdom of Eastern philosophies, is soft-spoken and unflappable. In rehearsals he is by all accounts tolerant, patient and even polite; hardly common behavioral traits for a Russian director. And yet, deservedly or not, Mirzoev, 39, is arguably the number one bête noire in Moscow theater today. His unorthodox, I would say rashly imaginative productions of Nikolai Gogol’s plays, The Marriage and The Inspector General (as Khlestakov), have caused many otherwise temperate observers to lose their cool. When he staged a darkly ironic, even macabre, show for the Golden Mask awards ceremony in March, he came precariously close to being run out of town by an incensed press. Maybe his training as a circus director or the five years he lived in Canada in the early ’90s make him hard to fathom. Whatever the case, as regards what might be called the Mirzoev “phenomenon,” one prominent theater personality muttered, “That miscreant should be strung up by his feet!” Mirzoev’s response? He shrugs it off philosophically and goes on about business. But if actions speak louder than words, he may be getting ready to shout. After the Golden Mask brouhaha, he went back to work double-time on two new shows that will now open within six days of each other over the next week at the Stanislavsky Theater. Even that quiet move goes against the grain, however. In an era when you can almost see more horse-and-buggies on the streets than plays by contemporary playwrights in theaters, Mirzoev is mounting the Moscow premieres of two new plays, That, This Other World by Alexei Kazantsev and Doves by Mikhail Ugarov. “I sense people are tiring of the classics,” Mirzoev says calmly. “It’s not that Chekhov and Dostoevsky aren’t great writers. We just need a rest from them.” That does not mean Mirzoev is abandoning his trademark icono clastic approach, certainly a holdover from his circus background, which has led detractors to accuse him in the past of desecrating the classics. When asked


about his habit of freely cutting or adding characters, boldly rearranging texts and interpreting them provocatively, Mirzoev says almost demurely, “I believe I am always faithful to the spirit of the author. Even if I sacrifice the letter of his text.” Mirzoev’s first “sacrifice” in June will be Alexei Kazantsev, who has no idea what shape his play will have when it opens Friday evening. That suits the playwright just fine. “I have no fears at all,” says Kazantsev, who considers Mirzoev one of the most original talents to emerge in recent years. “It’s much worse when a director leaves your text alone but doesn’t understand what you wrote.” What Mirzoev says he sees in Kazantsev’s play is a “metaphysical text” of a “person’s journey to purgatory,” a “surrealistic” version of a person being freed of his “karma and the weight of sin.” On the surface, the story concerns a man who is visited by ten women from his past, including his mother, his lovers, his daughter and his sister. Through his interactions with them and reminiscences of them, he confronts the life he has lived and which he may be parting for the “other world” at any moment. “It’s not clear where he is,” says Mirzoev. “Maybe he’s still alive; maybe he’s dead.” Mirzoev himself once departed for the West, thinking he was taking a one-way trip. It was 1989 and he emigrated to Toronto where he eventually set up his own theater, Horizontal Eight. He calls his relocation abroad a “natural response” to the heavy stream of information pouring into Russia from the West towards the end of perestroika. “It was a common impulse among my generation,” he says. “Several people did it, including the director Valery Fokin, the writer Anatoly Kim and the musician Boris Grebenshchikov. I wanted to try to learn about another culture without the use of its language.” It wasn’t long before Mirzoev acquired a solid working command of English, however. During rehearsals of Horizontal Eight’s first production, Mirzoev’s interpreter simply disappeared. “I had to do something,” he recalls. “At first I mooed and gestured, and then I spoke English.” In the five years he spent in Toronto, Mirzoev worked at a feverish pace, mounting a staggering 15 shows. One at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1992 was typically nonconformist. The play was Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and, ever true to form, Mirzoev turned the piece inside out. He admits that if the show had been performed closer to Pinter’s London home, he might not have been so brash. But he did apply for and receive the author’s sanction to make all the changes he wanted. Moreover, he got Pinter to waive his royalties. “Through his agent we asked him to free us of the obligation to pay the fees since we were broke and proud,” Mirzoev laughs, “and he did.”


19 Maxim Sukhanov and Viktoria Tolstoganova in Vladimir Mirzoev’s production of Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World at the Stanislavsky Theater. Photo: Mikhail Guterman.

But his sojourn in Canada, he notes, first and foremost taught him a lot about Russia. And eventually, as time passed and “socialism was repealed,” he began feeling the pull to return. The first trip home came in 1993 when he made the trek as a documentary filmmaker for the CBC The resulting film, The Unseen Minority, treated the topic of Russian refugees in Canada. It was during this trip that Mirzoev made the contacts which would bring him back to Moscow for good. Vitaly Lanskoi, then the chief director at the Stanislavsky Theater, invited him to stage The Marriage in 1994. That strange and wonderful show, in which two actresses played each female character and the male characters slinked oddly


about the stage, was either loved or hated. Still, it was the controversial 1996 production of Khlestakov which really sent the dust flying. Many were outraged that Mirzoev (with actor Maxim Sukhanov who also stars in That, This Other World) turned Gogol’s lead character into something of a crude, animalistic boor in heat. Some (including this critic) carped that Mirzoev piled so many eccentric theatrical tricks and devices on top of one another that the madness often obscured the method. Others (count me in again) noted that even amidst the chaos, Mirzoev coaxed some truly fine performances from his actors. Says Kazantsev, “I always fear the ‘avant-garde’ label because it is usually a smokescreen for no talent. Mirzoev, after Khlestakov, is an exception for me. His idiosyncrasies come natural to him. That’s the way he sees things.” The dual premieres of That, This Other World and Doves—a witty chamber play about the intrigues among three young monks—come at a turning point in Mirzoev’s career and in the life of the Stanislavsky Theater. Vitaly Lanskoi died in January, leaving the playhouse leaderless and Mirzoev in a no-man’s land. Under Lanskoi, Mirzoev enjoyed a rare freedom—he could conduct all the experiments his heart desired while having the full organizational support of a major theater and none of the headaches. It was a unique arrangement in a town where chief directors are notoriously jealous and much more apt to undercut competition than support it. “Lanskoi,” says Mirzoev respectfully, “was very loyal to all our crazy ideas.” Now, when the question arises of whether Mirzoev may take over the empty position of chief director, he winces and waves it off. “Let’s say I won’t answer that question,” he says. More important are the immediate problems of the two upcoming openers. And then there is a production he has just contracted to do at the Lenkom Theater in the fall. Beyond that, there’s no telling what Vladimir Mirzoev may do. (June 1997) Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights “There were once great people here,” says Oleg Bogaev, quietly surveying the fluttering green landscape around him. “Chekhov, Stanislavsky, NemirovichDanchenko. That means a lot. Chekhov once caught a fish by a poplar tree here that’s still standing.” Bogaev, a playwright from Yekaterinburg, was talking about Lyubimovka, the former country estate of Konstantin Stanislavsky located on the banks of the tiny, winding Klyazma River about an hour northeast of the Moscow city center. Lyubimovka, as the home of the director who co-founded the Moscow Art Theater and heavily influenced the development of psychological, realistic acting in the modern theater, was often the meeting place of Russia’s theater elite in the first decades of this century.


Thanks to the near Herculean efforts of a few fanatics, in the 1990s Lyubimovka is again attracting potential “greats.” Who knows? Bogaev, 27, may be one of them. At the 1997 Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights in June, the soft-spoken author was singled out by many as a top discovery. One passionate critic even got up after a dramatized reading of Bogaev’s tragicomedy, The Russian National Postal Service, and proclaimed its superiority to anything written by two of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th century, Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. The annual festival, first held in 1990 at the Sheremetyevo estate and since 1991 at Lyubimovka, brings together playwrights, aged 35 or younger. This year twenty writers from nine cities (including one from Stockholm) participated. Over a two week period, they lived together in a dormitory on the grounds of the estate and ate, drank and slept playwriting. Each saw one of their plays presented by a professional director and professional actors for a small audience of peers. The showings were followed by frank discussions during which colleagues and guests took the floor either to praise or criticize the author and his work. In the case of Bogaev’s play—the story of a typical Russian “little man” who imagines himself corresponding with all kinds of famous individuals past, present, real and fictional—the first wave of commentary was enthusiastic. The atmosphere thickened, however, when the first dissenter stepped up. Alexei Kazantsev, a well-known playwright and one of the festival organizers, addressed Bogaev directly, reminding him that the festival’s strength is in its honesty and openness. Kazantsev then declared he was physically repulsed by what he perceived to be Bogaev’s unrespectful portrait of his hero. Some immediately came to Kazantsev’s defense, others backed Bogaev. When asked by Kazantsev to comment himself, the young playwright humbly thanked everyone for their comments and their attention to his work. Two days later, Bogaev reiterated in a private conversation that he was indeed grateful to have the opportunity to be heard. “It is difficult for someone in Yekaterinburg to get anyone’s attention in Moscow,” he said. It would appear, however, Bogaev has done just that. After the stormy reception of his play, he said he felt a “real possibility” that The Russian National Postal Service may soon be staged in Moscow. If that happens, it will only be the most recent in a string of Lyubimovka triumphs. In the first half of the decade Lyubimovka was the launching pad for several writers who have achieved prominence. Inna Gromova, the festival’s smiling, white-haired chief organizer, proudly ticks off the list of writers whose plays were first presented at Lyubimovka and have gone on to be produced throughout Russia and Europe. They include Yelena Gremina, Mikhail Ugarov, Olga Mikhailova, Olga Mukhina and many others, all of whom Gromova affectionately refers to as “our playwrights.” Mukhina, whose light, airy play, Tanya-Tanya, was discovered at Lyubimovka in 1995 and became a hit at the Fomenko Studio in 1996, played the role of the returning conqueror this year. Tanya-Tanya has catapulted the 26-year-old writer


20 Oleg Bogaev and Olga Mukhina comparing notes at the Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights. Photo: NG-Foto/ Andrei Nikolsky.

into a steadily growing international prominence and that increased the expectations surrounding the presentation of her newest work, YoU, staged by the Fomenko Studio’s Yevgeny Kamenkovich.


The story about lovers, friends and relatives coming together and drifting apart has the unmistakable, velvety Mukhina stamp. What sets it apart, however, is the unidentified war that rages darkly and almost unseen about the characters. Perhaps predictably, not everyone who packed the house for the unveiling of YoU accepted it. One frustrated speaker complained he didn’t understand a thing. Mikhail Roshchin, another of the festival’s organizers and a famous playwright in his own right, praised Mukhina’s talent for creating atmosphere while chiding her with avuncular gentleness for getting wrapped up too tightly in her own style. Many more, however, sang Mukhina’s praises, drawing parallels to ballet, poetry and the Russian Silver Age of the early 20th century. One speaker who has sent Tanya-Tanya out over the internet quoted one of Mukhina’s cyberspace fans. “She is the Chekhov of our day,” the unknown reader reportedly replied by e-mail. “Tell her hello from Khabarovsk!” Among the writers making their first Lyubimovka appearance this year, Gromova said she has high hopes for the Muscovite Yelena Isaeva, another Yekaterinburg writer by the name of Alexander Naidyonov, Yekaterina Narshi from Novosibirsk and, of course, Bogaev. “This has been a very successful year,” Gromova declared on the festival’s last day in late June. “There were a large number of new names, and some excellent kids from Yekaterinburg.” The successes of this year’s Lyubimovka almost didn’t happen. Due to a lack of funds, the 1996 festival was cancelled and the same fate was in store this year. A twelfth-hour grant from the Soros Foundation came to the rescue. “We could not have done this without Soros,” Gromova says of the $15,000 stipend which covered a large percentage of the festival’s expenses. Gromova has no doubts about the importance of Lyubimovka for the future of Russian theater. She indicates the festival is an obvious and important rejoinder to the conventional wisdom which has stubbornly held throughout the 1990s that contemporary playwriting is in decline. “We are trying to influence the process,” she says. “To prove that there are young playwrights and that there are good ones.” “If there are no new plays,” she concludes, “there will be no theater in the 21st century.” (July 1997)

Other titles in the Russian Theatre Archive series: Volume 12 Moscow Performances The New Russian Theater 1991–1996 John Freedman Volume 13 Lyric Incarnate The Dramas of Aleksandr Blok Timothy C.Westphalen Volume 14 Russian Mirror: Three Plays by Russian Women edited by Melissa Smith Volume 15 Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia: Oh, These Times! and The Siberian Shaman translated and edited by Lurana Donnels O’Malley Volume 16 Off Nevsky Prospect: St Petersburg’s Theatre Studios in the 1980s and 1990s Elena Markova Volume 17 Stanislavsky in Focus Sharon Marie Carnicke Volume 18 Two Plays by Olga Mukhina translated and edited by John Freedman Volume 19 The Simpleton by Sergei Kokovkin translated and edited by John Freedman Volume 20 Moscow Performances II The 1996–1997 Season John Freedman Additional volumes in preparation: Russian Theatre and Movement: the 1920s Vladislav Ivanov The Theatre of Poets Dmitry Milkov This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be cancelled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in the series upon publication. Please write for details.

Index

ABBA (pop group), 9, 10 Abdulov, Alexander, 73 Abe, Kobo, 57, 98 Abramov, Gennady, 40, 78, 79, 80 Academy of Ancient Music, 15 Adelphi (London theater), 92 Adventure, The, 6 A-Flat, 57, 58–9, 98 After the Rehearsal, xiv Agafonov, Mikhail, 99 Akhadov, Valery, 84, 85 Albee, Edward, 85 Alentova, Vera, 19 Alexander Filippenko Theater, 21–2, 27 Alexandrinsky Theater (St. Petersburg), 99 Alexeev, Nikolai, 65 Alexi-Meskhishvili, Georgy, 68 Andreev, Leonid, 70 Andrews, Julie, 92 Andrianova, Maria, 15 Androsov, Nikolai, 3 “Angel in the Alcove” (story), 65 Animals, The (pop group), 10 Anisimova, Galina, 31 Anisko, Vladimir, 26 Anniversary, The, 31 Anomaly, 51–4 Anton Chekhov Theater, xii, 48 Antonov, Oleg, 5 Antropov, Luka, 70 Apeksimova, Irina, 55 Argunova, Tatyana, 31 Arkhangelskaya, Natalya, 38 Arkhipov, Valery, 5 Arkhipov, Viktor, 32 “Art”, 75–7

Art-Club XXI, xii, 1, 63 Artsibashev, Sergei, xvii, 16, 95, 97 As a Lamb, xii, xiii–xiv, 1–3, 70 As You Desire Me, 41 Astrakhantsev, Andrei, 74 Avignon Festival (France), xi, 77 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 63 Badichkin, Sergei, 31 Bakshi, Alexander, 15 Balashov, Dmitry, 20 Ball, The, 73 Banana, xv Barbarian and Heretic, 70, 71, 73 Barinov, Valery, 34 Barkhin, Sergei, 45 Barnet, Olga, 50 Barz, Paul, xii, 63, 64 Batalov, Sergei, 44 Battlefield After Victory Belongs to Marauders, The, 82 Beatles, The, 9, 10, 85 Beckett, Samuel, 69, 105 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 11 Behind the Mirror, xiv, 19 Bel-Ami, 82–3 Belousov, Vyacheslav, 59 Belyaeva, Ilona, 38, 39 Berestenko, Olga, 29 Bergman, Ingmar, xiv Berlin in Moscow Festival (spring 1996), 95 Beryozin, Valery, 39 Bespalova, Natalya, 41 Bespaly, Denis, 74

111

112 INDEX

Bezdushny, Vasily, 27 Bezrukov, Sergei, 66, 67, 80, 91 Birthday Party, The, 104 Blithe Spirit, xii, 64 Blok-Mirimskaya, Olga, 67 Bobrov, Dmitry, 20, 60 Bochkaryov, Vasily, 71, 72 Bochkin, Igor, 27 Bogadist, Georgy, 53 Bogaev, Oleg, 105, 106, 107 Bogart, Alisa, 16–8 Bogdanova, Irina, 7 Bogdanovich, Alexei, 48 Bogis Agency, xii, 13, 83 Bohème, La (opera), 99 Boiko, Yaroslav, 67 Bolshoi Theater, 3, 99 Boris Eifman Ballet Theater (Perm), 99 Borisova, Galina, 37 Borovsky, Alexander, 3, 54, 69, 81 Borovsky, David, 7 Bourgeois Wedding, A, 8, 31–2 Bradbury, Ray, 28 Breakfast at the Magistrate’s, 42 Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 5, 7–8, 31–3, 92 Brezhnev, Leonid, 6 Bricaire, Jean-Jacques, 26, 27 Britannicus, 41–2 Brocade, 21–4, 27 Brod, Naum, 84 Bronevoi, Leonid, 73 Brothers Karamazov, The, xvii Brothers Karamazov, The (ballet), 99 Brunes, Søren, 36, 37 Brusnikin, Dmitry, 51 Bugs Bunny (American cartoon show), 10 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 39 Burygin, Oleg, 41 Butenko, Vyacheslav, 9, 10 Bykov, Rolan, 101 Bystrov, Boris, 31 Camera Obscura (novel), 85 Camus, Albert, 26–7 Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), 104 Carnegie Mellon University, 91

Casanova, Giovanni Jacopo, 6–7 Cervantes, Miguel de, 39 Chandler, Raymond, 65 Chekhov Art Theater (after 1987), xiv–xv, 16, 19, 20, 49–51, 54, 63, 68, 80, 91–2, 93 Chekhov International Theater Festival, Second, 29, 95 Chekhov, Anton, xiv, 19–21, 24–5, 31, 45, 49, 50, 59, 64, 93, 102, 105 Chelovek Theater-Studio, 33–5 Cherkasin, Vladimir, 3 Chernobrovkina, Tatyana, 99 Cherry Orchard, The, 64–5 Chetvyorkin, Alexander, 71 Chevsky, Alexander, 9–10 Chigir, Mikhail, 95 Chigishev, Vladimir, 59 Chindyaikin, Nikolai, xvi Chkheidze, Temur, 29 Chumakov, Oleg, 32 Churikova, Inna, 3, 60, 73 Chutko, Alexander, 16 Cinzano, xv Clark, Petula, 92 Class of Expressive Plastic Movement, 78, 79 Cocteau, Jean, 38 Committee on Culture, Moscow City, 95, 96 Commonwealth of Taganka Actors, 60 Contemporary Play School, 39, 78 Conversation on the High Road, 42, 44 Covetous Knight, The, 54 Coward, Noel, xii, 64 Crime and Punishment, xv, 19 Cyrano de Bergerac, 48 Dance of Death, The, xv, 24 Dandelion Wine (novel), 28 Danilevich, Sergei, 16 Danilova, Maria, 55 Davydenko, Vladimir, 49 “Day in the Life, A” (song), 10 De Benedetti, Aldo, 81 Death-Defying Act, The, 4, 5

INDEX 113

Debut Center at the House of Actors, xiii, xv, 19–21, 60, 61 Dela u Broda company, 83 Demichev, Felix, 95 Demidova, Alla, 101 Demidova, Olga, 46, 48 Dick Tracy (American cartoon show), 5 Dickens, Charles, 41 Didenko, Alexander, 8 Disneyland, 55 Dmitrieva, Antonina, 15 Dolgachyov, Vyacheslav, xiv, 93 Dolinin, Valery, 60 Doloko, Mikhail, 29 Dom aktyora (newspaper), 93 Domogarov, Alexander, 38, 83 Donizetti, Gaetano, 99 Don Juan, xiii, 16–8, 33, 34 Donnants, Sonya, 7 Doronina, Tatyana, xiv, 92 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xiii, 19, 21–3, 27, 42, 70, 102 Doves, xiv, 86–9, 102, 104 Dragunov, Vladimir, 25 Drozdova, Olga, 53 Dunaevsky, Isaak, 99, 100 Durov, Lev, 15–6, 39, 40 Dyachenko, Boris, 48 Dzhabrailov, Ramzes, 60 Dzhabrailova, Madlen, 13 Dzherbinova, Yulia, 60 Dzisko, Olga, 34, 35 Edinburgh Festival (England), xi Efros, Anatoly, 15–6 Eifman, Boris, 99 “Eleanor Rigby” (song), 10 Epelbaum, Ilya, 55, 56 Eskina, Margarita, 20 Et Cetera Theater, 96 Eugene Onegin (opera), xvii Execution of the Decembrists, The, 99 Farewell and Applause, 48, 49 Fedchenko, Vladislav, 53 Fifth Studio (Chekhov Art Theater), xv Filatova, Tatyana, 85

Filippenko, Alexander, 21–4 Filippov, Mikhail, 75, 76 Filozov, Albert, 39, 40 First Love, 69 Five Evenings, 68, 69 Fleeing Pilgrims, 37–9 Fokin, Valery, xi, xii, xvii, 5, 13–5, 102 Fomenko Studio, xi, 10–3, 42, 45, 83, 107 Fomenko, Nikolai, 5 Fomenko, Pyotr, xiii, xv, xvii, 4, 11, 13, 20, 44–5, 60, 99 Fomin, Valery, 26, 78 Freibergs, Andris, 24 French Cultural Center, 75 Gabriadze, Rezo, xi Gagarin, Yury, 25 Galakhova, Olga, 93 Galin, Alexander, 51–3 Galliardt, Yelena, 9, 10 Galperin, Yury, 44 Gambler, The (novella), 70 Gambler, The (opera), 99 Game, The, 9–10, 83 Garkalin, Valery, 8, 84, 85 Gerchakov, Yevgeny, 27–9, 36–7 Gilyarovsky, Vladimir, 78 Ginkas, Kama, xi, xvii, 99 Girls in a Tizzy (operetta), 99 Glazkova, Maria, 69 Glazunov, Alexander, 26 Glazunov, Kirill, 15 Glyadinsky, Yevgeny, 70 Godunov, Boris, 87 Gogol, Nikolai, xiv, 15, 22, 68, 101, 104 Golden Mask festival and awards, xiv, xv– xvi, 55, 57, 58, 97–101, 102 Goldoni, Carlo, 49 Goncharov, Andrei, 92 Gordin, Igor, 46 Gorky Art Theater (after 1987), xiv, 50, 92 Govorova, Tatyana, 31 Grachyov, Anatoly, 63 Grand Duke Sergei, 27 “Gravedigger, The” (story), 78 Great Expectations, 41 Grebenshchikov, Boris, 102

114 INDEX

Green Zone, The, xv Greetings, Don Quixote!, 39–41 Gremina, Yelena, xiii, xiv, 19–20, 100, 107 Grigoryeva, Yevgenia, 20, 62 Grindenko, Tatyana, 15 Grinyova, Irina, 33–4 Gromova, Inna, 107–8 Gromushkina, Natalya, 83 Gulchenko, Viktor, 19 Gulyaeva, Nina, 69 Gurchenko, Lyudmila, 48 Gusev, Andrei, 26 Guskov, Alexei, 27, 78 Gvozditsky, Viktor, 7, 51, 68 Hamlet, 48 Handel, George Frideric, 63 Harvard University, 91 Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 5, 8 Heifetz, Leonid, 38 Hello, I’m Your Aunt (t.v. movie), 68 Herd, The, 78–80 Hermitage Theater, 6, 28, 80, 83 Hill, Benny, 81 Holiday, Sofia, 6–7 Horizontal Eight (theater in Toronto, Canada), 102 Hotel Room in the Town of N, A, 13 House of Actors, 20, 27, 61, 80 Hunger and Thirst, 35–7 Idiot, The, 42 Ilm, Inga, 78 Ilyina, Marina, 8 Imaginary Invalid, The, 31 Improbable Seance, The, 64 Incident, The, 48 Inspector Calls, An, 82 Inspector General, The, 101 International Confederation of Theater Associations, 75 Intimate Relations, 38 Ionesco, Eugene, 35–7, 105 Isaeva, Yelena, 107 “It’s Getting Better All the Time” (song), 10 Izvestia (newspaper), 93, 100

Jethro Tull (pop group), 9 Joan of Arc: Childhood, 60 Journey of Benjamin the Third to the Holy Land, The, 27–9, 37 Just Assassins, The, 26 Kachanov, Sergei, 44, 69 Kachuro, Irina, 7 Kadzuho, Araki, 57–8, 100, 101 Kalashnikov, Andrei, 32 Kalish, Viktor, 97, 98 Kalyagin, Alexander, 68–9, 92, 96 Kamenkovich, Yevgeny, 107 Kaminsky, Artyom, 16, 18 Kashpur, Vladimir, 19, 68 Kazancheev, Oleg, 9 Kazantsev, Alexei, xviii, 37–8, 86, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 Kerbrat, Patrice, 75 Kesler, Yaroslav, 9 Khaev, Vitaly, 87, 88, 89 Kharikov, Yury, 24, 70, 72 Khazova, Marina, 53 Khlestakov, 104 Khlevinsky, Valery, 53 Khomsky, Pavel, 9 Khrushchev, Nikita, xv Khryakov, Artyom, 21 Kim, Anatoly, 102 King, Queen, Knave, 85 Kino Panorama (t.v. show), 91 Kipling, Rudyard, 9 Kirillov, Vladimir, 99 Kishchik, Yelena, 86 Kogan, Ilya, 96, 97 Kolker, Alexander, 71 Kolyada, Nikolai, 51, 69 Kommersant Daily (newspaper), 57, 100, 101 Komsomolskaya pravda (newspaper), 101 Kononenko, Yury, 65 Korenev, Vladimir, 26 Koreneva, Irina, 26 Korkia, Viktor, 39 Korolyova, Yelena, 38–9 Korshunov, Alexander, 25 Korzun, Diana, 19

INDEX 115

Kostolevsky, Igor, 75, 76 Kotov, Alexander, 44 Kozak, Roman, xiv–xv, 24, 54, 55, 68 Kozakov, Mikhail, xii, 62–4 Kozhenkova, Alla, 1 Krasnaya Presnya Theater Near the Stanislavsky House (see Theater Near the…) Krasnopolskaya, Maya, 56 Kraev, Vitaly, 59 Krechinsky’s Wedding, xii, 70–3 Krymova, Natalya, 30 Kukhareshin, Valery, 59 Kukly (t.v. show), 67 Kupchenko, Irina, 14–5 Kutasova, Natalya, 60 Kutepova, Polina, 10, 12–3 Kuzenkov, Vladimir, 31 Kuznetsov, Anatoly, 3 Kuznetsova, Larisa, 38 Kuznetsova, Yekaterina, 55 Laboratory Theater, 7, 31–2 “Lady-Rustic, The” (story), 78 Lamentations of Jeremiah, The, xvi–xvii Lanskoi, Vitaly, 104 Lapshina, Olga, 87, 88 Larin, Igor, 53 Larioshkina, Olesya, 62 Lasayques, Maurice, 26, 27 Last Night of the Last Tsar, The, xii, 13–5, 83 Laug, Edouard, 75 Laughter in the Dark, 85–6 Lavrin, Alexander, 39 Legouvé, Ernest-Wilfrid, xviii Leikin, Leonid, 40 Lenin, Vladimir, 6 Lenkom Theater, xii, 51, 70, 73, 80, 91, 97, 105 Lermontov, Mikhail, xv Letov, Sergei, 6 Levashyov, Vladimir, 41, 42 Levental, Valery, 8, 51 Levinsky, Alexei, 7, 31–2 Levitin, Mikhail, 6–7 Life Is no Bed of Roses, xiii, 33–5

Light in the Darkness, 31–2 Linatov, Oleg, 22 Little Comedies, 42–4 Little Tragedies, xiv, 42 Little Tragedies: Part One, 54–5 Lobanov, Vladislav, 60 Lolita, 85 Love Potion, The (opera), 99 Lukoyanov, Fyodor, 13, 15 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 39 Lushina, Lyudmila, 26 Lux in tenebris, 31–2 Luzhkov, Yury, 95 Lvov-Anokhin, Boris, xviii, 95 Lyakina, Tamara, 78 Lyubimov, Ilya, 20 Lyubimov, Yury, xvii, 5, 91, 94 Lyubimovka (playwriting festival), xiv, 105–8 Lyubshin, Stanislav, 50 Macbeth, xvii, 67 Magnificent Cuckold, The, 4 Main Thing, The, 24 Maiorov, Andrei, 27 Maiorova, Yelena, 50 Makovetsky, Sergei, 100 Makryashin, Sergei, 24 Malaya Bronnaya Theater, 11, 15, 16, 21, 42, 43, 68, 69, 96 Maly Theater, xii, 25, 51, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77 Manuilova, Irina, 41, 42 Mariinsky Theater (St. Petersburg), 99 Maris, Lada, 9, 10 Markina, Nadezhda, 69 Martynov, Vladimir, xvi Marquis (Broadway theater), 92 Marriage, The, xiv, 15–6, 68–9, 101, 104 Masculine Singular, 26 Mashkov, Vladimir, xii, 4–5, 70, 80, 91, 93 Masquerade, The, xv Matsushita, Roo, 57 Matveeva, Yelena, 44 Maugham, Somerset, xii, 48 Maupassant, Guy de, 82 Maximkina, Irina, 2–3, 70 Maximov, Vladimir, 11

116 INDEX

Mayakovsky Theater, 16, 80, 92 Mazi, Flora, 38 Medvedeva, Polina, 50 Merts, Natalia, 70 Metamorphosis, The, 5, 13 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 29–30 Mikhail Kozakov Enterprise, 62, 63 Mikhailova, Alyona, 16 Mikhailova, Darya, 21–4 Mikhailova, Olga, 107 Mikhalkov, Nikita, 68 Milgram, Boris, 69–70 Millioti, Yelena, 53 Milyutin, Yury, 99 Ministry of Culture (Russia), 75, 94, 95, 96 Ministry of Defense (Russia), 96 Minkus, Leon, 39 Mironov, Boris, 31 Mironov, Yevgeny, 13, 15, 80, 91 Mironova, Maria, 73 Mirror, The (film), 83 Mirzoev, Vladimir, xiv, xviii, 16, 86–9, 100, 101–5 Misha’s Birthday Party, 50 Mokeev, Mikhail, xiii, xvii, 21–3, 38–9 Mokhov, Alexander, 49 Moliére, 31, 69 Molokova, Darya, 60 Month in the Country, A, xvii, 10–3, 42, 83 Moscow Art Theater (until 1987, see also Chekhov Art Theater and Gorky Art Theater), xiv–xv, 24, 49–51, 81, 91–2, 105 Moscow Art Theater School, 81, 91 Moscow City Committee on Culture (See Committee on Culture) Moscow Miniature Theater, 28 Moscow People, 78 Moscow Salon, xv Moscow Shadow Theater, 55 Moscow-Petushki, 5–6 Moskovsky komsomolets (newspaper), 100 Mossoviet Theater, xii, 9–10, 22, 37–8, 69, 70, 82, 83 Motskus, Tomas, 62 Mrozek, Slawomir, xv Mukhina, Olga, 59, 60, 106, 107 Muravyova, Irina, 25

My Poor Marat, 82 Myagkov, Andrei, 50 Mysina, Oksana, xviii Nabokov, Vladimir, 85, 86 Naidyonov, Alexander, 107 Napoleon 1, 16 Narshi, Yekaterina, 107 Naumova, Yelena, 75 Nazarov, Alexander, 53 Nazarov, Gennady, 44, 69 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vasily, 6 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, xiv, 50, 105 Nenashev, Alexei, 11 Nevezhin, Pyotr, 73, 74 Nevinny, Vyacheslav, 69 Nezavisimaya gazeta (newspaper), 93 Nikiforova, Olga, 57 Nikishchikhina, Yelizaveta, xi Nikolaev, Vyacheslav, 85 Nikolaeva, Marina, 74 Nikolenko, Vladimir, 78 No More, No More…No More?, 83–5 Not All Is Shrovetide to the Cat, 33 Novak, Lyubov, 74 Novaya Opera Theater, xvii Novellas of Margaret of Navarre, The, xviii Novikova, Yelena, 27 Novitsky, Alexei, 85 Novy Drama Theater, 41, 73, 95, 97 Oboldina, Inga, 20, 60, 61, 62 Oedipus Rex, 28 Okunev, Mikhail, 57–8 Omsk Drama Theater, xv–xvi, 57–8, 98, 100 Omsk Musical Theater, 98 Oresteia, 3 Orlov, Alexander, 60 Ostrovsky, Alexander, xiii, 19, 30–1, 33–5, 45–7, 73 Our Town, 29–30 Ozolina, Lilita, 24 Panfilov, Gleb, 60, 61

INDEX 117

Panfilov, Yevgeny, 99 Panin, Andrei, 54 Pankova, Tatyana, 71, 72 Paola and the Lions, 81 Parfenyuk, Lyubov, 72 Pavlov, Vladimir, 31 Perelygin, Sergei, 42, 44 Persian Lilac, 70 Persianinov, Leonid, 16 Personal Recollections of joan of Arc (novel), 60 Pervukhina, Yulia, 59 Peskov, Alexander, 27 Petrov, Vladimir, xv–xvi, 57, 58, 98 Petrova, Galina, 53 Petrushevskaya, Lyudmila, xv Phoenix, The, 6 “Piggies” (song), 10 Pilnikov, Vladislav, 53 Pinter, Harold, 104 Pip, 41 Pirandello, Luigi, 41 Pirogov, Kirill, 11, 13 Playing the Dummy, 21 Playwright and Director Center at the Chekhov Art Theater (see Debut Center…) Playwright and Director Center at the House of Actors (see Debut Center…) Playwright and Director Seminar at the Chekhov Art Theater, xv, 20 “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (song), 10 Pletnyova, Olga, 32–3 Pluchek, Valentin, 8 Podgorodinsky, Vladimir, 98, 100 Podosyonov, Leonid, 63 Pogrebnichko, Yury, 16, 64–5 Pokhmelov, Konstantin, 78 Poor Folk, xiii, 21–3, 27 Popov, Igor, xvi Popova, Nina, 27 Possible Meeting, The, xii, 62–4 Potapov, Alexander, 71 Praudin, Anatoly, 58, 98–9 Priestley, J.B., 82 Prikhodko, Andrei, 11 Prisoners, 30–1

Prokofiev, Sergei, 99 Prokofyeva, Olga, 48 Provincial Wife, The, 42–4 Pshennaya, Nelli, 38 Ptushkina, Nadezhda, xii, xiii, 1–3, 70 Puchkov, Vladimir, 46 Pushkin Drama Theater, 18, 26–7, 77, 78 Pushkin, Alexander, xiv, 22, 42, 54, 77, 78 Queen of Spades, The, 99 Queen’s Revenge, A, xviii Racine, Jean, 41 Radzinsky, Edvard, xii, 13, 14, 15 Rafalson, Yakov, 24 Raikhelgauz, Iosif, 39–40 Raikin, Konstantin, 4–5, 92, 93 Rakhimov, Tagir, 13 Rakhvalova, Inessa, 25 Rakviashvili, Alexander, 32 RATI (see Russian Academy of Theater Arts), Retro, 51 Reza, Yasmina, 75, 76 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 10 Rodionova, Anna, 22 Rogozhkina, Natalya, 55 Romeo and Juliet, 5 Romeo and Juliet (ballet), 99 Roshchin, Mikhail, 107 Rossinsky, Andrei, 32 Rostand, Edmond, 48 Rostov-on-Don Young Spectator Theater, 57, 59 Rozanova, Irina, 43–4 Rozovsky, Mark, 29, 35, 37 Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI), xiii, xv, xvii, 7, 20, 44–5, 60 Russian-American Theater School (of the Moscow Art Theater), 91 Russian Army Theater, 16–8, 33 Russian Drama Theater (Riga, Latvia), xv, 24 Russian Melancholy, xi Russian National Postal Service, The, 105 Russian State Theater Agency, xiv, 96

118 INDEX

Russian Theater Agency (until November 1994; see Russian State…), 96 Rutberg, Yulia, 100 Ryabova, Svetlana, 8 Ryzhov, Kim, 71 Ryzhy, Valentin, 6 Sadikova, Svetlana, 59 Safarova, Mira, 29 St. John Passion (oratorio), 64 Sakhalin Wife, The, xiii, xv, 19–21, 27, 60 Salov, Mikhail, 20 Sarmont, Yevgeny, 46 Satire Theater, 7–8, 82 Satirikon Theater, xii, 3–5, 7, 8, 31, 91, 92– 3, 96 Sazontyev, Sergei, 55 School for Wives, The, 69 School of Dramatic Art, xi, xvi, 77, 78 Schwarzennegger, Arnold, 19 Scribe, Eugène, xviii Seagull, The, 20, 24–6 Sechina, Vasily, 30 Sedov, Vladimir, 41–2 Sergachyov, Viktor, 19 Sergeev, Andrei, 41, 73, 74 Sergeeva, Lyubov, 86 Serova, Susanna, 60 Sevryukova, Viktoria, 9 Sfera Theater, 85 Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 28 Shakespeare, William, 30, 48 Shalavin, Valery, 29 Shamirov, Viktor, xiii, xvii, 16–8, 33–5 Sharov, Andrei, 67, 83 Shchepkin Institute (of the Maly Theater), 71 Sheiko, Nikolai, 28 Sheinin, Alexei, 38 Sheintsis, Oleg, 73 Shilyaev, Dmitry, 41 Shkalikov, Sergei, 55 Shnyryov, Sergei, 54 “Shot, The” (story), 78 Shubin, Anatoly, 59 Shvarts, Yevgeny, 39 Sidorina, Alyona, 11

Sigalova, Alla, 24 Sigmund, 28 Silina, Yelena, 31 Simon, Neil, 75 Simone, Nina, 86 Sinyukov, Alexander, 33–5 Sirin (religious choir), xvi Sirina, Olga, 16 Skachkova, Alexandra, 68 Skorokhod, Natalya, 58 Skudar, Oleg, 30 Skvortsov, Vladimir, 87, 88 Slade, Bernard, 48 Smoktunovsky, Innokenty, 63 “Snowstorm, The” (story), 78 Solomin, Vitaly, xii, 71, 72 Solomin, Yury, 25 Sonechka and Casanova, 6–7, 83 Soros Foundation, 62, 108 Sorry, 51 Sovremennik Theater, 50, 51, 52, 80, 81, 91, 92 Spivak, Semyon, 26 Stakhovich, Alexei, 7 Stalin, Joseph, 6, 100 Stanislavsky Drama Theater, xiv, xv, 26, 86, 88, 95, 97, 102, 103, 104 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, xiv, 50, 51, 91, 105 Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater, 99 Stars in the Morning Sky, 51 “Stationmaster, The” (story), 78 Steblov, Yevgeny, 63, 64 Stein, Peter, 3 Steklov, Vladimir, 38, 49 Steklova, Agrippina, 35 Stepanov, Yury, 11 Stone Guest, The, 55 Storm, The, xiii, 19, 45–8, 83 Storozhik, Valery, 9 Story of a Horse, The, 29 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 65 Strelkov, Garold, xiii, xv, xvii, 20, 21, 60, 61 Stremovsky, Vitaly, 18 Strindberg, August, xv, 24 Stulnev, Alexander, 95, 97

INDEX 119

Sturua, Robert, 29 Sublimation of Love, 80–1 Sukhanov, Maxim, 80, 103, 104 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, 71, 72 Sulyagin, Vladimir, 87 Sunset Boulevard, 92 Svezhakova, Yulia, 46, 47, 48 Symphony in C (ballet), 99 Syomina, Yekaterina, 74 Tabakov Theater, xii, 48, 49, 65, 66, 67, 80, 82, 91, 97 Tabakov, Oleg, 48, 49, 80–1, 91 Taganka Theater, xvii, 5–6, 80, 83, 91, 94, 97, 101 “Tale About Sonechka” (story), 6 Tales of Belkin, The, 77–8 Tallerov, Vadim, 34 Taming of the Shrew, The (ballet), 99 Tanya-Tanya, 11, 57, 59–60, 107 Taramaev, Sergei, 43–4 Taranda, Gediminas, 2–3 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 83 Tartuffe, 16 Tashkov, Andrei, 78 Tchaikovsky (ballet), 99 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, xvii, 10 Tenyakova, Natalya, 68 Terekhova, Margarita, 83 Terrible Parents, The, 37–9 Terrorists, The, 26–7 That, This Other World, xviii, 86, 102, 103, 104 Theater na Pokrovke, xvii, 95 Theater Near the Stanislavsky House, xi, 64, 97 Theater of Nations, 95 Theater of Rock Opera (St. Petersburg), 100 Theater u Nikitskikh vorot, 29, 35–6, 97 Theater Union of the Russian Federation, 92, 95 Theatrical Vertical, The (book), 98 Three Sisters, xiv, 49–51, 54, 57, 59, 93 Threepenny Opera, The, xii, 3–5, 7–8, 31– 3, 70, 91, 92–4, 96 Titova, Lyudmila, 71

Tolstoganova, Viktoria, 103 Tolstoy, A.K., xiii, 16–8 Topolyansky, Oleg, 54 Toptsov, Vladimir, 44, 69 Torikos Theater (Gelendzhik), 28 Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater in Russia, The, 55–7 Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, 28 Traviata, La (opera), 99 Tribute, 48 Trushkin, Leonid, 48, 49 Tsurkan, Alexander, 6 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 6–7 Tulchinsky, Viktor, 53 Tumanishvili Film Actors Theater (Tbilisi, Georgia), 29 Tumanishvili, Mikhail, 29–30 Tumanov, Vladimir, 59, 60 Turgenev, Ivan, xvii, 10, 11, 12, 42, 44 Tutor, The, 8 Twain, Mark, 60 Tyunina, Galina, 10–3 Udalov, Leonid, 41 Ugarov, Mikhail, xiv, 86–9, 100, 102, 107 Ugryumov, Sergei, 68 Ulanova, Galina, 101 Ulyanov, Mikhail, 13, 15, 92 Unattainable, The, xii, 48–9 University of Michigan, 104 Unseen Minority, The (t.v. documentary), 104 Usov, Alexander, 87, 88 Vainberg, Mikhail, 62 Vakhtangov Theater, 21, 80, 92, 99, 100 Valikov, Fyodor, 32 Valuev, Boris, 49 Vasilyev, Anatoly (actor), 70 Vasilyev, Anatoly (director), xi, xvi, 78 Vasilyev, Yury, 8 Vasilyeva, Tatyana, 39, 40, 84, 85 Vasilyeva, Vera, 73, 74, 75 Vasilyevsky Island Satire Theater (St. Petersburg), 57, 59 Vasyutinsky, Alexander, 54

120 INDEX

Vdovina, Natalia, 4–5 Verberg, Viktoria, 46 Verdi, Giuseppe, 99 Vernigorov, Boris, 59 Victor/Victoria, 92 Vieux Carré, 65–8, 82 Viktyuk, Roman, 82, 83, 92 Vinogradov, Sergei, 86 Vitorgan, Maxim, 46 Volchek, Galina, 92 Volkov, Alexander, 94, 96 Volkova, Olga, 49 Volodin, Alexander, 39, 68 Wagner, Richard, 56 Wandering Conflagrations, 69–70 Warsaw Melody, A, 18–9 Wedding, The, 31, 44–5 Weill, Kurt, 3, 5, 8, 32 What a Lovely Sight!, 21 What’re You Doing in a Tux?, 40 Whim, The, 73–5 White Acacia, The (operetta), 98, 99–100 Widows, xv Wilder, Thornton, 29 Williams, Tennessee, 65, 66 Woman in the Dunes, The, xvi, 57–8, 98, 100 Yakovleva, Marina, 74 Yakovleva, Olga, 16 Yampolskaya, Yelena, 93 Yankovsky, Oleg, 73 Yanovskaya, Genrietta, xiii, xvii, 45–8 Yanushkevich, Mikhail, 75 Yarmolnik, Oksana, 69 Yasulovich, Igor, 46 Yatsko, Alexander, 9 Yefremov, Oleg, xiv, 49, 50, 54, 63, 92, 93 Yegorov, Pavel, 60 Yegorov, Vitaly, 67, 81 Yegorova, Natalya, 51 Yekaterinburg Theater of Musical Comedy, 99 Yekaterinburg Young Spectator Theater, 57, 58, 98 Yelanskaya, Yekaterina, 85, 86

Yeltsin, Boris, 67 Yermolova Theater Center, 7–8, 31–2 Yermolova Theater, 30, 37–8 Yerofeev, Venedikt, 6 Yeryomin, Yury, 26, 77, 78 Yevgeny Gerchakov Theater, 27–9 Yevgeny Panfilov Ballet Theater (Perm), 99 Yevreinov, Nikolai, 24 YoU, 107 Young Spectator Theater (Moscow), 45, 47, 83, 99 Young Spectator Theater (St. Petersburg), 98 Yurin, Rodion, 38, 39 Yurovsky, Yakov, 13, 15 Yushchenko, Vasily, 79 Yuskaev, Rustem, 11, 12, 13 Zakharov, Mark, xiii, 70, 71, 73, 91 Zakharova, Alexandra, 73 Zakurdaeva, Natalia, 41, 74 Zamaraeva, Svetlana, 59 Zaslavsky, Grigory, 93 Zazerkalye Children’s Musical Theater (St. Petersburg), 99 Zbruev, Alexander, 14–5 Zemlyanikin, Vladimir, 53 Zharkov, Alexei, 19, 51 Zhenovach, Sergei, xvii, 10–3, 42–4, 68, 69 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 67 Zhitinkin, Andrei, 65, 66, 67, 82, 83 Ziganshina, Era, 46, 48 Zorin, Leonid, 18 Zudina, Marina, 49, 67, 80, 81 Zuev, Mikhail, xv

Moscow Performances II: The 1996-1997 Season (Russian Theatre Archive)

Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (Russian Theatre Archive Series)

Russian Comedy of the Nikolaian Era (Russian Theatre Archive (Paperback M.E. Sharpe))

Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre: Archive Illustrations of the Original Productions

Archive

Archive

Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama (German Theatre Archive)

Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Greek and Roman Theatre Archive,)

Wandering stars: Russian emigré theatre, 1905-1940

The Moscow Vector

Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

The Moscow Vector

The Moscow Vector

Moscow Rules

Moscow Sting

Moscow Sting

Moscow Diary

Moscow Noir

Archive Fever

the dalkey archive

Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

The Moscow Vector

Moscow Sting

Moscow Diary

Moscow Rules

Moscow Rules

The Season

The Moscow Vector

The Moscow Vector

The Season

The Season

Moscow Performances II: The 1996-1997 Season (Russian Theatre Archive)

Moscow Performances: The New Russian Theater 1991-1996 (Russian Theatre Archive Series)

Russian Comedy of the Nikolaian Era (Russian Theatre Archive (Paperback M.E. Sharpe))

Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre: Archive Illustrations of the Original Productions

Archive

Archive

Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama (German Theatre Archive)

Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Greek and Roman Theatre Archive,)

Wandering stars: Russian emigré theatre, 1905-1940

The Moscow Vector

Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

The Moscow Vector

The Moscow Vector

Moscow Rules

Moscow Sting

Moscow Sting

Moscow Diary

Moscow Noir

Archive Fever

the dalkey archive

Women, Politics and Performances in South African Theatre Today (Contemporary Theatre Review)

The Moscow Vector

Moscow Sting

Moscow Diary

Moscow Rules

Moscow Rules

The Season

The Moscow Vector

The Moscow Vector

The Season

The Season

Recommend Documents