TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.063

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.3 KB | 137 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 112

VOICES FROM THE INNER DEPTHS


Topical invective aside, the stage is rediscovering its true
concern, the human soul

By William A. Henry III/MOSCOW


    In a long-suppressed and now acclaimed production of
Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground at Moscow's Theater for
Young Spectators, the withdrawn and embittered central
character repeatedly pushes with all his might against the
immovable proscenium arch at the side of the stage. The gesture
is an apt visual metaphor not only for a melancholy nobody's
passion to smash the barriers of loneliness but also for the
yearning of the whole Moscow drama world to break down the
confines of habit and tradition. Everywhere one goes in the
theater these days, the same artistic self-criticism is heard:
there are almost no vibrant new playwrights or imaginative
directors, the basic style and format of productions have not
changed in the past quarter-century, beauty and splendor have
been forgotten.

    In fact the quality of theater in Moscow is very high.
Playwriting, if at times too grandiosely spiritual, at least
concerns itself with bigger issues than middle-class marriage,
the preoccupation of the commercial stage in the West. Acting
is certainly of the caliber of Broadway or London. So is stage
design, if a bit too dependent on imaginative metaphor rather
than money. True, productions tend to look a lot alike,
regardless of content: perhaps as a reaction against the easy
intimacy of TV's close-ups, almost every company seems
infatuated with mounting shows in gloomy near darkness or in
silhouette behind a scrim. Moreover, many of the popular tricks
of stagecraft (a costumed mannequin standing amid the audience's
seats, a door flinging open to reveal a burst of light) are
recognizable even to Westerners as derived from the 1960s work
of such still active directors as Yuri Lyubimov and Oleg
Efremov, who today runs the venerable Moscow Art Theater. The
one true innovation of recent years, nudity, has become
similarly cliched: bare breasts or bottoms, and even crotches,
are on view in at least five Moscow theaters, never as an
essential to the plot.

    Having justified itself for two decades and more as a
medium of political expression -- obliquely during the Brezhnev
years, sometimes rantingly during the current thaw -- the Soviet
stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the
human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers
continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to
respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love,
betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in
quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers
performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe, the
Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater. Says Konstantin Raikin,
artistic director of the Satirikon Theater, where the
Russian-language debut of Jean Genet's psychosexual drama The
Maids is Moscow's hottest show and among the least political:
"These days, a measure of a play's appeal is to be able to say
that it's not only about perestroika."

    Relevance is certainly the least of the virtues of The
Maids, which features men in eye makeup and flamboyant drag
playing women. The aggressive gender bending, laced with
homoeroticism, brings spectators in for the scandal value but
sends them out having seen a world-class display of theatrical
wit and invention. Just as Genet speculatively derived his
sadomasochistic rituals from an actual news story of a murderous
plot by two maids against their mistress, so director Roman
Viktyuk subordinates the text to an evocative extravaganza about
sex and power, seduction and display. Within the script he finds
moments both of striking visual imagery (two chairs and a long
red dress abruptly become a casket) and of serene reliance on
the words (Raikin, motionless and in shadow, performs a long
lament in a hypnotic near monotone). But the evening opens and
closes with interpolated mime and dance sequences, alternately
brooding and confrontational or jokey. (The funniest moment:
flashers open their raincoats to reveal long underwear with
sewn-on fig leaves). Even in flouncy dresses, the performers are
unmistakably men: profuse body hair is visible as they barrel
through somersaults and backflips, or wiggle limp-wristed
through parodies of enticement. If it's not always easy to tell,
moment to moment, what message is meant, the show is
compulsively watchable.

    Austere and philosophical where The Maids is lavish and
sensual, Notes from Underground typifies more conventional
Soviet staging at its best. The set looks like a rummage sale
in a czarist attic. The dimly lighted action features recurring
glimpses of a grinning peasant, a swanking bureaucrat, a howling
madman. A virtual monologue in its first half, the piece evokes
the wounded vanity and urge toward vengeance of the sort of man
who nowadays might become a serial killer. Yet in the mind of
director Kama Ginkas, who has been developing his adaptation for
some 20 years despite official disapproval, both his version and
the Dostoyevsky original comment on "the inevitable alienation
resulting from extremes of socialism, the drive to violence
underlying the pursuit of universal happiness." Westerners will
more likely find the show a poignant portrait of one of life's
losers, but every phrase rings true.

    At the richly talented Sovremennik, which seems on balance
Moscow's most interesting theater, the men of the company
dominate A Humble Cemetery, a melodrama about the travails of
ordinary workingmen, while the women adorn Stars in the Morning
Sky, a lament of the cleanup campaign that swept prostitutes,
drunks and the deranged off the streets just before visitors
arrived for the 1980 Olympics. Both plays combine the hortatory,
sentimental style of Stalinist social realism with a topical
disregard for those in power. Stars, seen in a different
production as part of last summer's New York International
Festival of the Arts, has two moments of emotional clout: one
utterly quiet, when each woman seems to ponder her mistreatment
by men, and one noisily jubilant, when the hookers are blocked
from even seeing the Olympic torch go by yet break into
spontaneous cheers for the Soviet team.

    In Sergei Kaledin's A Humble Cemetery, the pressures on the
hulking workman Sparrow (Mikhail Zhigalov) include a legacy of
family violence, a stretch in a work camp, virtual gangsterism
in the cemetery where he works as a gravedigger, and a
dangerous weakness for vodka. There are performances of
enchanting sweetness from Anton Tabakov as a young co-worker and
of feral malignity from Valeri Shalnykh as a mock-friendly gang
enforcer. But the most memorable scenes show Sparrow alone with
his cacophony of fears, climbing arduously up to a bell tower
where he can hear the euphony of wind and birds and a distantly
remembered lullaby, until a screeching train cuts off his
reverie. Emotive yet astringent, these are moments worthy of
Charles Laughton in a play sometimes deserving of comparison
with Gorky's The Lower Depths. If Soviet theater remains for the
most part an art in search of significant new voices, in this
play and production it has found one.