Russian Arts for Ukraine

The Russian Arts Theater and Studio was the first place I went for live indoor theatre once the lockdown was eased. Their adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol short story The Overcoat was one of the first plays allowed inside in New York in 2021.

Of course Gogol, one of the greatest writers in the history of Russian literature, was actually born in the town of Sorochyntsi in central Ukraine. The world is watching (and weeping) as Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine wrecks incredible damage and causes so much loss of life to both sides.

Certainly, not all Russians support Putin's invasion, and Aleksey Burago, the Artistic Director of the Russian Arts Theater and Studio in New York, recently issued this statement:

The artists of The Russian Arts Theater and Studio stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Our studio is made up of actors from around the world, united by the common desire to create theater that uplifts those around us, not to destroy. There is never a justification for the invasion of a sovereign country. Our hearts are with all those affected by this tragedy.

Not only that, but the company has altered its spring programming to protest what Burago described as "the atrocities committed under Putin's regime" and will soon be presenting an adaptation of George Orwell's novel Animal Farm. A portion of the ticket proceeds will be donated to organizations aiding refugees of the Ukrainian crisis.

You can get tickets here. The production will run at Pushkin Hall from May 12 through June 4th. It looks like an excellent way for drama to bring us together, even as war is tearing the world apart.

Pushkin

I recently read The Moor of Peter the Great by Alexander Pushkin, the playwright, poet, and fiction writer who became the central figure of Russian Romantic literature.

The fragmentary historical novel tells the story of Pushkin's great grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal. From what we know about Gannibal, he was born in Africa, forcefully brought as either a slave or a hostage to the Ottoman Empire, and then sent by a Russian ambassador to the court of Czar Peter the Great.

In Russia, Gannibal rose to become a prominent member of the czar's court. Pushkin was proud of his  ancestor, and wanted to pay homage to him by writing a fictionalized version of his life. Walter Scott had already made historical fiction popular, so Pushkin also had every reason to believe the book would sell.

The Moor of Peter the Great involves more imagination than fact, but it's still an entertaining read. It begins in Paris, where Ibrahim is carrying on an affair with a fashionable countess. When she gets pregnant with his child, however, they have to arrange for the baby to be switched with the white infant of a poor family so her husband doesn't get suspicious. After this deception, Ibrahim decides to return to Russia, as his godfather the czar has been entreating him to do.

Back in Russia, Ibrahim becomes depressed over his separation from the countess, and wanting to cheer him up, the czar arranges for Ibrahim to marry a charming young woman he danced with at a ball. This turns out to be a terrible idea. The lady in question is already in love with someone else, plus her racist family is not keen on her marrying a black man. Unfortunately, the manuscript breaks off in the middle of chapter seven, and Pushkin never completed the work.

He went on, however, to revolutionize Russian poetry, prose, and drama. Pushkin's writing provided the stories for two of the most famous operas by Peter Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. Around the time he wrote The Moor of Peter the Great, Pushkin also wrote a historical drama, Boris Godunov. The massive verse tragedy was later turned into an opera by Modest Mussorgsky. During Pushkin's lifetime, however, the play was censored by the government.

Also influential were Pushkin's brief plays known as "little tragedies." One of those dramas, The Stone Guest, tells the story of Don Juan. Another, Mozart and Salieri, later inspired Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus. Toward the end of his life, Pushkin even supplied the plot for a new play to his friend Nikolai Gogol. That play ended up being Gogol's The Government Inspector, one of the most famous comedies in the history of Russian theatre.

Unfortunately, Pushkin was constantly getting into trouble with the czar's government. In 1837, he got into a duel with a French military officer in the employ of Czar Nicholas I. In spite of the fact that duels had been outlawed, the czar's guards declined to intervene. Not being as skilled with a gun, Pushkin was mortally wounded and died two days later. 

Pushkin's death only added to his fame, and today he is revered in Russia as the country's greatest author. He is also remembered for his descent from Ibrahim Gannibal, made famous by one of Pushkin's own works.

The Overcoat

I just got back from seeing live indoor theater for the first time in more than a year. Though vaccinations have protected many of us, it's going to be a long time until the arts--and indeed humanity--can recover.

The play I saw was The Russian Arts Theater and Studio's production of The Overcoat, adapted and directed by Aleksey Burago from the short story by Nikolai Gogol. I enjoyed Burago's staging of the Bulgakov novel The Master and Margarita, so I had high hopes for the evening.

Actor Tom Schubert appears onstage as Gogol, joyfully narrating the story of an ill-fated clerk, Akaky Akakievich. While Schubert gives us a feel for the wacky weirdness of the author, we get little sense of the dark, haunted soul who gave us such plays as The Government Inspector and Marriage as well as some of the best short stories ever written in Russian.

Since Schubert mimics the light, airy quality of Gogol's narration, the production relies on Christopher Zach to provide depth to the play through his portrayal of Akaky Akakievich. The poor old clerk is ridiculous, but genuinely sympathetic when his overcoat wears out beyond repair and he is forced to spend all his savings on a new one. After his coat is stolen by a robber (one of numerous parts played by Roman Freud), Akaky Akakievich slowly declines into sickness and despair.

That decline is not sped up in this production, no matter how desirable it might be for dramatic purposes. Instead, Burago's adaptation expands on Gogol's tale, even introducing the titular olfactory organ in the author's "The Nose" which makes an appearance in the person of Di Zhu, a talented actor and pianist who supplies several small roles as well as providing live music. Burago mixes live and recorded music, which is not generally to my taste, but the use of a motif from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is a highlight of the show.

The sold-out production has to keep the audience socially distanced, and masks are required at all times for audience members, though thankfully not for actors. "It's the new normal," one usher said to me, as patrons were allowed up the stairs one at a time. In spite of these restrictions, we were happy to be able to be there.

I noticed several people taking photos during the show, perhaps an indication that after more than a year of isolation, no one is sure what the basic rules of civility are anymore. As spring arrives, signs of life are returning, but they are modest, indeed.

Marriage

Before he wrote The Government Inspector, arguably the funniest play ever written in Russian, the writer Nikolai Gogol began another comedy called Marriage.

Gogol started the piece in 1833, but he was reluctant to submit the first draft for production. In the meantime, The Government Inspector had its premiere in 1836, with the czar himself in the audience. Marriage didn't have quite as lavish a reception, but it was performed in 1842 at the Aleksandrovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

The plot of the play is rather light, but it delights audiences with the comic characters it presents. The bachelor Podkolyosin begins the play by complaining that he has waited too long to get married. "Now I've gone and missed the marrying season again," he laments. Not wanting to put things off any further, he calls in the matchmaker, Fyokla, who offers him Agafya Tikhonovna as a potential bride.

Podkolyosin's recently wed friend Kochkaryov runs on and berates Fyokla for getting him married when he had been perfectly happy single. Once he learns that his friend is considering matrimony, however, Kochkaryov seems to think this is a great idea. (Perhaps this is because misery loves company!) He resolves to play matchmaker himself and get Podkolyosin married to Agafya without Fyokla's assistance.

The scene shifts to a room in Agafya's house, where Fyokla brings in a string of ridiculous suitors. Podkolyosin likes the young woman well enough at first, but when he hears some of the other men making negative remarks about her, he begins to rethink the whole thing. The curtain falls on the first act with Kochkaryov convincing his friend to get married so long as he can arrange things for him.

Those arrangements rise to a frantic pace, as Kochkaryov manages to eliminate all of the other suitors and get his friend some one-on-one time with the blushing beauty. Blushing is right, too, since neither one of them can think of much to say to each other. Kochkaryov pushes on, and manages to get both to agree to a wedding that very day.

In a classic example of cold feet, Podkolyosin ends up leaping from the window and running away rather than facing a hasty marriage. Poor Agafya is left alone in her wedding gown, and Fyokla gets the last word, shouting out a final I told you so....

Though Marriage with its large cast is not likely to be produced soon in the current pandemic environment, The Russian Arts Theatre and Studio will be performing a socially distanced adaptation of Gogol's short story The Overcoat starting at the end of next month. It should be a triumphant return of live performance to New York!

Best Plays of 2017

It's that time again when I look back on the best new productions that opened in New York City over the past year.

This list is only for plays in the five boroughs, so great productions farther afield like The Secret Theatre and Romeo and Juliet as well as the productions at the Shaw Festival are ineligible. My own play Capital which opened in Detroit this year doesn't qualify either, even though it was named one of the Best of the Season for southeastern Michigan.

Also not included are shows that opened in 2016 but that I didn't get to see until this year, like Dear Evan Hansen and the Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Last year, A Doll's House, Butler, and Hadestown topped the list. But what were the best productions of 2017? Read on to find out!

10. The Liar - Truth is, this adaptation by David Ives of the classic comedy by Pierre Corneille was one of the best (and first) plays I saw in 2017.

9. Fucking A - Of the three Suzan-Lori Parks plays the Signature Theatre Company produced this year, this was by far the best. A riff off of The Scarlet Letter, the play had its first off-broadway run back in 2003, but its dystopian view of a society where abortion is legal but practitioners are literally branded seems all-too prescient.

8. Once on This Island - This beloved Ahrens-Flaherty musical is currently getting an amazing production, so get your tickets now. Lea Salonga is excellent as Erzulie, the goddess of love and beauty, but the rest of the cast is strong as well, and Dane Laffrey's set makes the most of Circle in the Square's intimate space. If you're concerned about seeing a play in the round, don't worry. Director Michael Arden makes sure there isn't a bad seat in the house.

7. The Government Inspector - The Red Bull Theater Company is dedicated to the aesthetic of Jacobean drama, but this year they put on Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century farce about a minor bureaucrat mistaken for the Inspector General from the capital. The split-level set was best viewed from further back in the audience, but even if you sat up front like I did, you got to see some amazing performances from the likes of Michael Urie, Mary Testa, Michael McGrath, and Talene Monahon.

6. A Midsummer Night's Dream - It wasn't too long ago (ten years) that The Public Theater previously did Shakespeare's supernatural romantic comedy in Central Park, but the 2017 production was indeed a dream. Annaleigh Ashford gave a stand-out performance as Helena, which is saying a lot, considering that the show's headliner was Phylicia Rashad as a queenly Titania. The most memorable aspect of this production was having the attendant fairies played by older actors wandering around the forest in what looked like their pajamas. It was creepy in all the right ways.

5. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me - Two-person musicals are hard to pull off, and it's difficult to imagine this one with anyone else in the lead but Val Vigoda, the show's lyricist who also acts, sings, and plays the drums, keyboard, banjo, and electric violin! The book by Joe DiPietro tells the story of a sleep-deprived single mom composing music for video games who tries Internet dating and ends up being matched with the early-twentieth-century explorer Ernest Shackleton. Who cares that they're 100 years apart and he's currently in Antarctica? This witty and wonderful piece was a ray of sunshine in a dark year.

4. Desperate Measures - Speaking of witty and wonderful new musicals, the surprise hit of 2017 was Peter Kellogg and David Friedman's Desperate Measures, which sadly closes today at the the York Theatre Company. Based very loosely on Shakespeare's problem comedy Measure for Measure, the play is reset in the Old American West, where an un-elected governor is able to abuse his power and try to force a virtuous young woman about to enter a convent to sleep with him. If she refuses, her brother will hang. That might not seem like the stuff of musical comedy, but joyous music and dialogue in perfect rhyming couplets keep the laughs coming even through bleak material.

3. Julius Caesar - No doubt the most controversial production in New York this year was also one of the best. Conservative snowflakes cried foul over a play showing a Trump-like figure being assassinated. (Never mind the numerous past productions of Julius Caesar with Clinton and Obama stand-ins as Caesar.) Few--if any of them--actually saw the production. Had they gotten off of their hypocritical high horses long enough to actually see the show, they would have witnessed a biting critique of the left, and a warning that political violence, as tempting as it may seem, only leads to more violence, and ultimately despotism. The brutal assassination scene left some audience members physically sick to their stomachs. Julius Caesar was truly visceral theatre.

2. HOME/SICK - This collaborative project by The Assembly has been around for a while. (The group first workshopped it in 2010.) However, the production that opened this year at JACK in Brooklyn benefited from a long incubation process and past exploratory runs across the country. The story it tells of the Weather Underground in no way romanticizes the movement. Instead, much like the Public's Julius Caesar, HOME/SICK presents a cautionary tale of what happens when well meaning people turn to violence. During intermission, the audience watched a recreation of an event members of the Weather Underground had planned to bomb. It was chilling. Director Jess Chayes deftly led her cast to explore the complexities of taking on the injustices of the world when you yourself might through your own strident militancy become part of the problem.

1. Sweeney Todd - While Ernest Shackleton Loves Me and Desperate Measures were massively entertaining, and Julius Caesar and HOME/SICK were deeply disturbing, the Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre managed to be both. The show is still playing through the end of May, though sadly not with Norm Lewis, who opened this New York production as Sweeney. Fortunately, you can still catch Carolee Carmello as a hilarious and horrifying Mrs. Lovett. The Stephen Sondheim musical has a brilliant score, and you might think a stripped-down version in a reproduction of an actual London pie shop would lose something. Instead, this intimate production allows you to appreciate the music in a deeply personal way. Having the actors literally leap up onto tables right in front of you is shocking, but no more so than some of the acting choices, which remind you of the true trauma some of the characters suffer in this story.

So those are my picks for this year. Honorable mentions go to The Tempest at St. Ann's Warehouse, Everybody at the Signature, and the Metropolitan Opera's production of Fidelio. Hopefully 2018 will be an even better year for theatre in New York City!

Free Kirill Serebrennikov!

Recently, many people have become concerned over the arrest of the Russian director Kirill S. Serebrennikov. Until his arrest, Serebrennikov led the Gogol Center in Moscow, which produces a lot of politically charged plays.

The recent arrest could be a prelude to an even harsher crackdown on Russian artists who criticize their government. According to the European Film Academy, "There is every reason to believe that Kirill Serebrennikov's arrest is politically motivated." The academy has respectfully called on Russian authorities to have him released and to guarantee his free movement and artistic expression.

An article about Serebrennikov by the New York Times said that authorities accused him of embezzling money meant for such things as a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a production the authorities claim never occurred. Yet the Times claims the play not only ran in 2012, but that it got rave reviews and was even nominated for awards.

You would think the reviews would be enough to derail the government's case. History can't be re-written, right? Well, apparently the government is saying all those reviews were just "fake news" and the production never happened. According to an article in The Moscow Times, prosecutors said: "In itself, a newspaper article cannot confirm that the performance took place."

Artists in Russia are rallying around Serebrennikov, but the government seems to be going ahead with its charges nonetheless. Theatre critic John Freedman has called the charges a "show trial" and accused the government of using arrests ahead of an election year as a way to scare people in prominent positions away from criticizing the government.

In addition to directing plays, Serebrennikov is also a film director, and his movie The Student won a special prize at Cannes last year. He was making a new film about the Soviet-era rock star Viktor Tsoi when authorities arrested him in St. Petersburg and took him back to Moscow for questioning.

One of the productions Serebrennikov directed that caused a great deal of criticism was a staging of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. Authorities criticized it for depicting Russian authorities as incompetent and corrupt. Umm... but isn't that exactly what Gogol wrote in the nineteenth century?

And isn't that exactly what officials are proving true with these trumped-up charges?

Perhaps some things never change.

The Government Inspector

Last night I saw Red Bull Theater Company's production of The Government Inspector, Jeffrey Hatcher's adaptation of the classic farce by Nikolai Gogol.

Designer Alexis Distler has created a split-level set for the piece that is probably better viewed the further back in the audience you sit. (I was in the front row, so it was a bit of a strain.) The frantic physicality of Michael Urie, however, is bound to be hilarious no matter where you're seated.

Urie plays Ivan Hlestakov, a lower-level bureaucrat from St. Petersburg who visits a small provincial town and gets mistaken for a powerful government inspector sent by the Czar. The mayor (played by Michael McGrath) tries to get everyone in the town to act like they're a model community, while simultaneously plying Hlestakov with bribes.

The mayor's wife (played by Mary Testa) flirts shamelessly with the visitor, while his daughter (played by Talene Monahon) is simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to this would-be government inspector. Monahon, who was superb as the by turns icy and fiery Blanche Sartorius in Widowers' Houses last year, gives a stand-out performance, showing her disdain and fascination for Hlestakov at the same time. The scene where he tries to woo her with song is hysterical.

Director Jesse Berger keeps the play in a remote 19th-century-ish Russia-ish setting, but still manages to drive home the parallels between kleptocracy and incompetence in Gogol's day and our present historical moment. Unlike The Public Theater's recent Julius Caesar, none of the figures look or talk like contemporary politicians, but they certainly act like them, making The Government Inspector imminently relevant.

The play is only running until August 20th, so see it soon. You can find out more information at:

Red Bull Theater

North African Dramatists

Egypt has long been the most important center of northern African theatre. Though Egypt has a considerable history of dramatic writers (going back at least to the 13th-century playwright Muhammad Ibn Daniyal) the first major playwright of modern Egypt was Tawfiq Al-Hakim. Critics hailed his 1933 play People of the Cave as a major breakthrough in Arabic drama. Though the play is based loosely on a legend that appears in the Koran, Al-Hakim departs from canonical versions of the story to pursue his own philosophical meditations.

Al-Hakim wrote a number of plays based on ancient sources, including his 1949 play King Oedipus, but one of his best pieces is the 1966 absurdist drama The Tree Climber. The play involves a detective who shows up at a man's house to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his wife. An enigmatic dervish appears and says that either the man has killed his wife or he has not yet killed her. After much consternation, the man's wife finally shows up, but flatly refuses to explain where she has been during her mysterious absence. In bitter frustration the man throttles his wife, inadvertently killing her and thus fulfilling the dervish's prophesy.

The Tree Climber is heavily influenced by the absurdist writers of the post-war period. However, Al-Hakim was able to take Western influences and integrate them into a new and definitively Egyptian drama. This would impact later playwrights, including Yusuf Idris, best known for his play Flipflap and His Master.

Next to Al-Hakim, the most famous playwright from Mediterranean Africa is probably the Algerian dramatist Abdelkader Alloula. A great lover of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, Alloula wrote adaptations of Gogol's Diary of a Madman and The Government Inspector. In the 1980s, he wrote The Generous Trilogy, consisting of three plays (The Sayings, The Generous, and The Veil) about good people living in an unjust and corrupt society. The last of these plays, The Veil, makes reference to the Gogol short story "The Nose" and contains much of the Russian writer's absurd humor.

Alloula was working on an adaptation of Moliere's Tartuffe when he was cowardly gunned down by religious extremists later identified as members of the Islamic Front for Armed Jihad. Clearly, hypocrites and bigots are not confined to 17th-century France. In Alloula's The Veil, any person who actually does something useful and tries to find some meaningful work in life is hounded by extremists both inside and outside the government. At the end of the play, the only way decent people can escape the injustice of armed thugs is to crawl inside a tomb.

Tunisia also has a thriving theatre scene. The Tunisian playwright best known in the West is probably Jalila Baccar, who in 1976 helped to found the experimental New Theatre in Tunis. In 1993, she helped found a new theatre group called Familia. After the Tunisian Revolution that began the Arab Spring movement, Baccar was offered the post of Minister of Culture in the country's transitional government. She turned down the job, claiming her only true home was in the theatre.

Baccar is most known in the West for her post-9/11 drama Araberlin, about a family of Arab descent living in Germany amidst suspicion and and mistrust. The play was originally staged in Berlin in 2002. An English translation was later commissioned by Horizon Theatre Rep in the United States.

One final dramatist from northern Africa I should mention is the Moroccan playwright Tayeb Saddiki. Born in Casablanca, Saddiki traveled to France to study architecture and ended up getting involved in stage design. When an actor got sick, Saddiki took over the part. He got bitten by the theatre bug and has been acting, directing, and writing plays ever since.

Saddiki has a wonderful play called We Were Created to Understand Each Other, which is available in English under the title The Folies Berbers. Though written in a very theatrical style, the play tells the true story of an attempt by diplomats to get King Louis XIV of France to marry his daughter Marie Anne de Bourbon to Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco. The 1993 work features the playwright Moliere as the only one who can bridge the gap between the countries' two cultures.

Biomechanics

Avant-garde directors of the early 20th century frequently pushed the theatre into non-realistic directions, but usually these directors were following leads they found—rightly or wrongly—in the plays they were directing. That was not the case with Vsevolod Meyerhold. A former disciple of Stanislavski, Meyerhold invented a non-realistic acting method he called Biomechanics. Instead of teaching actors to begin with an internal emotion that manifests in the body, Meyerhold advocated athletic physical movements that would then be mirrored in the performer's psychology. Biomechanics emphasized a kinesthetic vision in which performers practiced tension and relaxation of their bodies as a way to achieve a more full expression of emotions.

In formulating the new method, Meyerhold was heavily influenced by circus and commedia dell'arte. This was apparent in his 1906 production of The Puppet Show by Alexander Blok. A poet, Blok was associated with the Symbolist movement, but his plays fit perfectly into the extremely physical theatre envisioned by Meyerhold. In addition to directing The Puppet Show, Meyerhold also played the leading role of Pierrot in the piece. At the end of the play, the set was exposed as mere stage machinery, and Meyerhold as Pierrot was alone with the audience, the actor's body being all that was left.

Meyerhold fully embraced the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and with the support of the new government founded his own theater in 1920, which was subsequently named the Meyerhold Theatre. In 1922, he staged to great acclaim The Magnificent Cuckold by the Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck. His most famous production, however, was of Gogol's The Government Inspector. In Meyerhold's 1926 staging of the play, the small-town comedy was moved to a large city. A massive wooden screen at the back of the set facilitated quick changes in scenery, and in the most famous part of the production, fifteen doors opened in the screen out of which came fifteen people all offering bribes to the inspector.

Under Stalin, however, the Soviet Union rejected such experimentation in favor of a drab style hailed as Socialist Realism. In 1938, the government shut down Meyerhold's theatre. He was arrested the following year and subsequently executed. Sadly, much of Meyerhold's work has been lost to history, though a few people today do still try to practice his method of Biomechanics.