Seeing Past the Present, Part Two

Theater Plus blog No. 79. Here comes the second of two pieces I did about memorial plaques. It’s pretty self-explanatory. The nicest part for me now is that it started with a few words about one of my favorite Harvard professors, the poet Stanislaw Baranczak. He died 2 1/2 years ago after a long, debilitating illness. In better days, in the mid-1980s, I took Stanislaw to a couple of Red Sox games at Fenway. Once we sat on the first base side, another time we did the bleachers. He loved seeing a side of American culture he knew was worth appreciating, but which he couldn’t fathom to save his marvelous Polish soul. He never asked me to explain anything, he just wanted to take in the experience by himself. It goes without saying that I took much more than I gave to my professor of Polish literature and language. Above: A plaque honoring the poet and social activist Nikolai Ogaryov.

07 July 2010
By John Freedman

Once on an early morning I was walking around Warsaw and thinking about Stanislaw Baranzcak, the man who taught me most everything I know about Polish language and literature. Now, Baranczak, a poet, scholar and professor, is not to blame in any way for what I do not know about Polish culture. As you may imagine, Wikipedia couldn’t hold all that.

But a few things have stuck in my cranium, and for all of them I can thank Professor Baranczak.

One came roaring back to me that morning in Warsaw. The year was 2008. It was a drizzly, lonely autumn Sunday. I had left the Stare Miasto, or Old Town, and was walking back to my hotel when something compelled me to look up at a building I was passing. There, just above eye level, as I remember it, was a plaque. On it were engraved the words that on this very spot the poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski fell in battle on the fourth day of the Warsaw Uprising.

It was as though my feet had turned to stone. I could not move. Here I was, a free, modern man of the world, an American living in Moscow and traveling in Poland, and I stood right there where this horrible, famous event took place in 1944.

In the 1980s I read Baczynski and dozens of other Polish writers with Professor Baranzcak in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now, thanks to a simple plaque and a few short words, it seemed as though I had slipped out of time and space. Baczynski, Baranczak and I were all here together for one split second.

Moscow, too, is filled with memories of the past. And the reminders of it are everywhere. Following are some observations to accompany the photo gallery of historical places that you can access above.

One of my favorite plaques in Moscow is the one honoring the poet and social activist Nikolai Ogaryov. I think I like it so much because it seems so incongruous. More like a gravestone slab than a cultural marker, it actually has more blank black marble than writing. It looks marvelously old-fashioned. It always takes me back in time when I stand before it.

Born in 1813, Ogaryov died in Greenwich, England, in 1877. He lived in the building at 23/9 Nikitsky Bulvar from 1822 to 1834. It doesn’t say so on the plaque, but the reason he left that location in 1834 was that he was sent into exile for helping to organize a radical student group. Eventually he joined his friend Alexander Herzen in London where he was active in revolutionary pursuits aimed at making Russia a democratic state.

Just across Nikitskiye Vorota Square and up the street known as Malaya Bronnaya is one of Moscow’s most famous playhouses — the Theater na Maloi Bronnoi. Presently run by artistic director Sergei Golomazov, it has, in the past, been home to many famous theater artists. Andrei Goncharov and Anatoly Efros worked there in the 1960s and 1970s, and Sergei Zhenovach tested his mettle as a theater leader there in the 1990s.

But an elaborate plaque on the theater’s facade honors a great actor who worked on stage there in the years following the revolution.

Solomon Mikhoels, one of the great Jewish actors of all time, famed for performances of King Lear, Tevye the Milkman and many others, performed in this space when it was the home of the State Jewish Theater. There are rumors that his ghost still walks the backstage corridors, and another small plaque outside the dressing room closest to the stage marks the place where he supposedly donned his costumes and makeup.

The plaque outside the building at 4 Malaya Bronnaya Ulitsa indicates that Mikhoels worked there from 1922 to 1948. What it doesn’t say, naturally enough perhaps, is that 1948 was the year he died. As we now know, he was murdered in Minsk by the Soviet secret police as one of the first salvos of a coming crackdown on Jews.

Just a few blocks from that theater, on the corner of Tryokhprudny Pereulok and Bolshoi Palashevsky Pereulok is an imposing reminder of one of the great actors of the Maly Theater — Alexander Yuzhin-Sumbatov.

The noise and fury of Sumbatov’s acting glory, coming at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, died down long ago. What is curious is that his fame as a playwright, long forgotten, may be on the verge of a revival. This spring the Sovremennik Theater staged the actor-writer’s play “The Gentleman” and it was surprisingly witty and timely.

Next time you make a turn passing by this plaque, think about the vagaries of fame — how it can come, can go, and, sometimes, come back again.

A few blocks north of Yuzhin-Sumbatov’s old home is a reminder of a man that Russia will never forget. The great comedian and actor Arkady Raikin lived just a stone’s throw from Tverskaya Ulitsa on Blagoveshchensky Pereulok between 1966 and his death in 1987.

I saw Raikin perform in Leningrad at the Estrada Theater in 1979 when my Russian was barely good enough to get me across the Neva River. That didn’t hinder my appreciating one of the funniest humans I have ever seen. I knew he was that for two basic reasons: 1) the audience never stopped laughing for more than a few seconds throughout the entire performance, and 2) all you had to do was look at Raikin (below) to know that this man knew timing inside-out and upside-down.

Another of Russia’s favorite funnymen lived a little less than a kilometer away at 13 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ulitsa. This was Mikhail Rumyantsev, whose name hardly a soul would ever recognize. Why? Because Mr. Rumyantsev, when he stepped into the ring at the Moscow Circus as a clown, was known to, and adored by, every man, woman and child as Karandash — or Pencil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bringing Russian Theater to Texas

Theater Plus blog No. 78. The video blog you can watch below does not fix in time my first meeting with Graham Schmidt. That happened in my study in my Moscow apartment a couple of years earlier. But our meeting at a Wordbridge Playwrights Laboratory in the summer of 2010, probably our second, was pretty important for both of us. I know it was for me. After this, Graham took an idea he had been working on for awhile, the Breaking String Theater that produced Russian drama exclusively, and really ran with it. Over the next four or five years he mounted several New Russian Drama festivals in Austin, TX, produced five or six extremely successful stagings of new Russian drama (Olga Mukhina, Yury Klavdiev, Maksym Kurochkin) and mounted dozens of readings of plays by other contemporary Russian playwrights. Austin really took to the idea of a theater staging Russian drama – something it never knew it had a craving for. Frankly, I think Graham’s work in this are is the very definition of success: He made an entire city need something they had no idea they needed. None of that “give the folks what they want,” or, “find out what the market can bear.” No. This was true visionary stuff. It was a true artistic venture. “This is what I love. This is what I can do. Come see what you think.” Graham put Breaking String on hold when he went back to school a couple of years ago to get a graduate degree in theater making. I have no idea if the Russian half-decade will ever be revived in any way, shape or form. But I am already eternally grateful to Graham for what he did. Like no one else, he gave me an outlet for the work I had been doing. He helped me realized a dream of putting Russian writers on American stages. It was a great ride while it lasted. Above: I took this photo of Graham (right) and his British counterpart Noah Birksted-Breen, who also runs a Russian drama theater – Sputnik – in London. The photo was taken Sept. 6, 2012 in the stairwell of the old Teatr.doc in Moscow. 

28 June 2010
By John Freedman

Ever since Graham Schmidt encountered the plays of Anton Chekhov, he has been a man on a mission.

And several trips to Russia later — including earning an MA degree in Russian studies at the University of Texas at Austin and completing a nine-month residency at the Moscow Art Theater school in 2008 — Schmidt is still on a roll.

In recent years in Austin, he has directed three of Chekhov’s four major plays, as well as Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s “Cinzano.” His production of “The Cherry Orchard” in 2009 was an award winner for excellence in acting, while his production of “The Seagull” was mounted at Off Center, best known in Austin as the home of the popular experimental Rude Mechanicals company.

During a break on Friday in a series of readings of new American plays at the Wordbridge playwriting laboratory in Clemson, S.C., Schmidt talked to me about the deep tradition of staging Chekhov in Russia and how it differs from other countries, including the United States. One would expect him to know what he is talking about, since he is the author of a thesis on Konstantin Stanislavsky’s production score for Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”

But, as he also explained, he is now increasingly interested in working with writers “who are envisioning the future.”

Specifically, he is intrigued by encounters with new plays by Olga Mukhina, Yury Klavdiyev and Vyacheslav Durnenkov. In a commission for a European new play festival, he recently translated “Chocolate Wall,” a comedy about Russians emigrating to Europe by Rodion Beletsky.

One or more of these writers are soon likely to wind up on the marquee of Breaking String Theater, a company that Schmidt has founded to explore his interest in Russian drama. The name is drawn from one of Chekhov’s most famous stage directions located in Act Two of “The Cherry Orchard.”

Schmidt, who turns 28 on July 6, is particularly interested in “unpacking” Mukhina’s “Flying” at the present moment, although he also finds the plays of Klavdiyev intriguing.

To hear more of the director’s thoughts about Chekhov, Klavdiyev and Russian theater in general, click on the picture below.

Seeing Past the Present in Moscow, Part One

Theater Plus blog No. 77. This was a dry run for me, although I didn’t know it at the time. Because I was so fascinated by them, I had begun to photograph cultural landmarks in Moscow. I love anything that can give my mind the stimulus to go back in time to visit the streets, doorways and windows that artists, writers, actors and musicians I can never know visited and frequented in another era. I didn’t yet know what I was going to do with them, but I was collecting photos and getting the itch to say something about them. As such, about four years before I began my Russian Landmarks blog site, I began doing a bit of writing about memorial plaques on my Theatre Plus blog. As the Russians say about bliny, the first one came out a lumpy ball of batter. But at least it was a start. Above: The plaque identifying one of the Moscow homes of novelist Mikhail Bulgakov.

22 June 2010
By John Freedman

Russia is a place that wears its culture on its sleeve. I once spent a week in Yekaterinburg and right out the window of my hotel was a small, yellow, two-story building with a plaque on it. This was where Anton Chekhov stayed a few nights before continuing on his soon-to-be famous journey from Moscow to the Siberian penal colony at Sakhalin in 1890.

It colored my outlook for my entire stay in the city. Every day when I walked past that small building, I metaphorically tipped my figurative hat to Mr. Chekhov as if he were still there. In a sense he was.

Moscow, too, is filled with little corners that bring the past to life. And although bronze, marble and iron plaques of various sizes and designs are there to remind us of this, we tend to walk right past them without taking notice. The modern metropolis encroaches from all sides on these modest attempts at remembrance.

Over the course of the coming summer, while most everyone in Moscow theater is hibernating, waiting for the fall and winter to bring back the theater season, I will lead you on a few walks around Moscow to offer some glimpses at the past lives that continue to live among us.

Following are some observations and thoughts to accompany the photo gallery that you can access above.

Mikhail Bulgakov is a cult figure throughout the world. When Mick Jagger wrote the first lines of “Sympathy for the Devil” — “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste” — he was thinking of Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”

One of the most famous and long-running theater productions in Moscow is Yury Lyubimov’s dramatization of “The Master and Margarita” at the Taganka Theater. Believe it or not, it has been running at the Taganka since 1977. In fact, you can see that show at the Taganka on Saturday this week, and three more times in July.

Between 1921 and 1924 — well before work began on “The Master and Margarita” — Bulgakov lived at the address that is now 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa. The stairwell leading to his apartment there has been decorated by decades of enthusiasts and graffiti artists, and the site has become a genuine tourist draw.

These days, the plaque commemorating Bulgakov competes for attention with one of the most ubiquitous phenomena of contemporary cultural life in Moscow: a coffee house.

The life and death of Alexander Fadeyev makes for one of the more unsettling and tragic literary stories of the Soviet period. Fadeyev was a talented writer who made his reputation quickly after his debut in 1923. But he was also drawn to power, as is witnessed by his involvement in various official literary organizations throughout his life.

Most famously, Fadeyev was first a secretary and then the general secretary and chairman of the board of the Writers Union during the years when hundreds of writers that did not toe the Communist Party line were persecuted. When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Fadeyev, a heavy drinker by then, took his own life.

The plaque commemorating the years when Fadeyev lived at 27 Tverskaya Ulitsa is surrounded by symbols of what now represents the seat of power in Russia — high and low finance.

Emil Gilels was one of the best in a long line of great Russian pianists. Born in Odessa in 1916, he lived the last 35 years of his life — from 1950 to 1985 — just a stone’s throw from Pushkin Square at 25/9 Tverskaya Ulitsa. This was an elite building erected to house many of Moscow’s top performers in the late Stalin era. The attractively decorated columns on the building still mark this as one of the most elite addresses in the city.

You will be forgiven if you do not recognize the name of Alexei Surkov. A poet who served alongside Fadeyev in the Writers Union, he was known for his stridently patriotic poems, many of which were put to music and became popular songs during World War II. He twice won the Stalin Prize and was one of those who translated the poetry of Mao Zedong into Russian.

The plaque reminding us that Surkov lived at 19 Tverskaya Ulitsa across the street from Pushkin Square from 1949 to his death in 1983 is nearly lost in the chaff and chaos of modern Moscow.

Lyubov Orlova was one of the great sirens of the Soviet silver screen. Her husband Grigory Alexandrov made numerous hit films with her in the lead — “Jolly Fellows” (1934), “Circus” (1936), “Volga-Volga” (1938) and “Spring” (1947) are just a few of them.

Blonde, beautiful, and both stylish and down-to-earth at the same time, Orlova continues to be an icon of Russian culture. She has had ships named after her, a stamp issued in her honor, and even a planet named for her — 3108 Lyubov.

A commemorative sculpture — it is more than just a plaque — hangs imposingly above one of the corners of another Moscow landmark: the first McDonalds restaurant ever opened in Russia. Orlova lived in this building at 29 Bolshaya Bronnaya from 1966 to 1975.

Incidentally, in the photograph of the Orlova sculpture you can also see a plaque erected last year to honor Mikhail Ulyanov, the popular actor and former artistic director of the Vakhtangov Theater.

Lyubov Orlova.

Emil Gilels.

Alexander Fadeev.

Alexei Surkov.

Mikhail Bulgakov.

 

 

 

Brian Friel’s Russian Connection

Theater Plus blog No. 76. Some basic info on Brian Friel in Russia; not much more frankly. Although I do very much like the tidbit about our old friend Lyosha Zuyev at the end… Above: Marina Kangelari and Alexei Zuyev directing and performing in a production of Brian Friel’s “Afterplay” in Moscow.

14 June 2010
By John Freedman

Brian Friel is no stranger to Moscow. And Moscow — or, at least, Russia — is no stranger to the Irish playwright.

Friel’s work has often been compared in style and temperament to that of Anton Chekhov, and Friel has translated Chekhov twice — “The Three Sisters” in 1981 and “Uncle Vanya” in 1998. An even more intimate relationship between the writers emerged in the early 2000s when Friel created three original adaptations based on Chekhovian themes — “The Yalta Game” (2001), “The Bear” and “Afterplay” (both in 2002).

Two of Friel’s most famous plays, “Molly Sweeney” and “Dancing at Lughnasa,” were produced at major Russian venues. Lev Dodin mounted “Molly Sweeney” at the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg in 2000. The following year, Estonian director Priit Pedajas directed “Dancing” at Moscow’s popular Fomenko Studio.

Pedajas’s staging featured virtually every one of the top actors of the Fomenko Studio at the time. Most noteworthy, perhaps, it was a rare instance of all the troupe’s accomplished actresses working together in the same show — Polina Agureyeva, Madlen Dzhabrailova, Polina Kutepova, Ksenia Kutepova and Galina Tyunina.

When Dodin’s production of “Molly Sweeney” was nominated for five Golden Mask awards in 2001, Dodin described the play as being so “saturated with life” that it “drips life as ancient tragedies drip blood.”

Two productions of Friel plays are currently running in Moscow, which brings us to the point of this small excursus: Brian Friel arrives in Moscow this week for a brief visit in the city.

According to his translator Sergei Task, he will not give interviews, but he will attend performances of his plays.

Yury Klepikov’s production of “Molly Sweeney” has been in repertoire at the Dzhigarkhanyan Theater since November 2007. It next plays Thursday, June 17, at 7 p.m.

Alexei Zuyev and Marina Kangelari’s production of “Afterplay” opened in 2006, mounted by the Alexei Zuyev Production Center. It plays Saturday, June 19, at 7 p.m. at the Vysotsky Center.

“Afterplay” is a clever and intimate character study that forms something of a sequel to both “Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya.” In it Sonya, Uncle Vanya’s forlorn sister, runs into Andrei Prozorov, the brother of the three sisters, several decades after the action of the two plays has concluded. The piece also includes segments of Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Lapdog.”

I would not hazard to guess whether Sonya and Andrei find true love, but Friel’s power for bringing people together did work its magic during the Moscow rehearsals of “Afterplay.” Following the show’s premiere, Zuyev and Kangelari were married and began a family.

Anton Chekhov in Wood

Theater Plus blog No. 75. The world sometimes works in wondrous ways. I have visited Leonty Usov’s workshop in Tomsk two or three times and have had the distinct pleasure of listening to Usov talk – always with a twinkle in his eye and his tongue in cheek – about his fantastic sculptures. A former actor who is now one of Russia’s best-known wood sculptors, he has created quirky, humorous, moving and always true images of virtually all Russian literature and culture, with half of world literature tossed in for good measure. I smile even now to recall Usov, hand on Chekhov’s or Tolstoy’s head, leaning on one foot, a smile beaming down on everyone listening to him, as he talks about his work and where it comes from. But for some reason I took very few photos while there in that wondrous place. I’ve taken plenty of pictures of one of Usov’s most famous sculpture – a drunken Anton Chekhov standing on a riverbank sidewalk in Tomsk – and you can read a little bit about that in my other blog space. But just about 7 years ago now, Usov exhibited his work at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater in Moscow and I was able to get some good photos there. I find it interesting that about five years after these photos were taken, I left my longtime job as a newspaper reporter and began working at that very theater. 

08 June 2010
By John Freedman

Leonty Usov works in a large hall on the first floor of a common-looking apartment building in Tomsk. It may have been a produce store in a previous incarnation, but if so there are no traces of that left now.

With light flooding in from all sides through the large ceiling-to-floor windows, this space could not be confused for anything but a sculptor’s workshop. The exuberantly chaotic space is covered with wood chips, and stacks of sculptures, some completed and some still in progress, are packed away in niches on shelves against the back walls.

Usov, who was born in 1948, began his career as an actor. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s he acted in various cities, including such colorful-sounding places as Achinsk, Gorno-Altaisk and Ioshkar-Ola. The last city in which he acted was Tomsk, and that is where he now makes his home.

Theater runs in this sculptor’s blood, something that is evident not only in the themes of his sculptures, but in their execution. Extravagant wood busts of Shakespeare, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Cervantes and many other writers, composers and artists are filled with humor and attitude. They almost always have a story to tell in addition to providing the likeness of a face.

Of all the subjects Usov has taken on over the years, Anton Chekhov is clearly a favorite.

His most famous Chekhov statue stands on the banks of the Tom River in Tomsk. Entitled “Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Through the Eyes of a Drunken Peasant Who is Lying in a Ditch and Has Never Read the Story ‘Kashtanka,’” this work caused a bit of a scandal when it was unveiled in 2004. Its depiction of a disheveled Chekhov with monstrously bare feet struck some as sacrilege. The sculpture, an utter delight to behold — I spent twenty minutes walking around it and didn’t want to leave — has stood the test of time, however. It is now one of the top tourist draws in a city with many reasons to attract visitors.

In connection with the Chekhov International Theater Festival, Usov is now exhibiting a large collection of his wood sculptures of Chekhov. The exhibit is being held in the second-floor foyer of the Stanislavsky Drama Theater and it is open until June 20.

Holding down the central position of the exhibit is a wood copy of the famous bronze statue in Tomsk. Around it are another dozen or so fanciful pieces that play with themes from Chekhov’s life and works.

The next stop for this small exhibit, incidentally, is London. It will open at the Pushkin House on Bloomsbury Way in October.

To see images of Usov’s work browse through the small gallery of photos below, or go to Usov’s site and click on the dates that are listed in the left-hand column.

 

Remembering Andrei Voznesensky. America. 1987.

Theater Plus blog No. 74. One of the perqs being a grad student at Harvard was that there was always a fairly steady stream of great guests coming through town. I usually took notes after seeing these guests speak, and I went back to my notes to pull out some memories about Andrei Voznesensky when he died a full seven years ago. The photo above is pulled from a book of Voznesensky’s poetry that I used to own. 

02 June 2010
By John Freedman

The death of Andrei Voznesensky on Tuesday couldn’t help but send me back to my memories. Voznesensky, with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava and a few others, personified Soviet poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. They were “rock stars” before anyone in the world knew what that term would come to mean.

Over the last 20 years I often saw Voznesensky in Moscow theaters — he frequently attended the theater with his wife, Zoya Boguslavskaya.

Throughout the years, he cultivated working relationships with various playhouses. Yury Lyubimov’s production of “Anti-Worlds,” based on the poet’s works, enjoyed more than 700 performances at the Taganka Theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Mark Zakharov’s production of the musical “Juno and Avos,” with lyrics by Voznesensky, is still in repertory at the Lenkom Theater after nearly 30 years.

But my most vivid memory of the poet dates back to a three-hour reading he gave at Tufts University near Boston on March 26, 1987. The following account of that evening incorporates notes I jotted down after returning home.

The first words Voznesensky spoke when he took the stage at Tufts were in English. His English was not perfect, although he spoke fluently.

“I didn’t expect to read ‘I Am Goya,’ but they raped [sic] me to do it,” he said of one of his most famous poems. “So I do it for you.”

A young woman stepped to the microphone and read a quiet, pleasant English translation. Voznesensky then boldly stepped to the microphone and chanted, cajoled and whispered his way through the Russian original.

It was nothing less than stunning.

Unlike the traditional Russian delivery — an unrelenting chant, for which Joseph Brodsky was famous, for instance — Voznesensky actually performed his poems. He snapped his fingers, waved his hands, flailed his arms, touched his face, leaned forward, leaned backward, shouted, whispered, talked, teased and growled.

It was a genuine theatrical performance.

As Voznesensky recited “I Am Goya,” I glanced at the young woman who had read the English translation. She smiled and shook her head. She must have been thankful that she had gone before Voznesensky and did not have to follow him.

After reading “I Am Goya,” Voznesensky chatted for a while, as he did between the reciting of each of his poems. He talked at length in good English about the “shame” of Marc Chagall’s lack of recognition in the Soviet Union and about his own efforts to open a museum in Vitebsk.

“Can you understand my jet-lag English?” he suddenly inserted as a non sequitur. “I came home at 6 this morning after drinking gin and vodka all night with Norman Mailer.”

After that, he dropped many a name.

He introduced one poem by talking about meeting Pablo Picasso in Paris, and then of a later incident when he stayed with the painter’s widow.

“I slept in the very bed in which the great man had slept,” he declared proudly.

Introducing the poem “A Conversation in Rome,” he revealed that he once was invited for a tete-a-tete with the Pope.

“There were just the two of us in the Vatican library. We talked about Berdyayev, Shestov and Rozanov,” he said, referring to three Russian philosophers. “I wanted to know something special from him. So I asked, ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ The Pope replied that he did not.”

“Yesterday, I was in Yoko Ono’s house,” he informed us somewhat later.

Over the course of his three-hour performance, I could not help but feel that the “Norman Mailers” and “Yoko Onos” were a bit much. I felt as though someone was leading me to the well of fame and forcing me to drink.

I must admit I began to feel resistant to his stories.

After talking about perestroika (of which he was skeptical), Joseph Stalin (whom he abhorred), and other sociopolitical topics, he came to a new poem based on the true story of mass graves that had been dug open and robbed. He spoke of the horror of the incident that prompted him to write the poem.

“Terrible, terrible,” he exclaimed.

But in my perhaps exaggerated, youthful stridency, I found myself wondering, what has this to do with poetry?

One week earlier, I had heard the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz say something that struck a chord and has remained with me ever since.

“I have a feeling that poetry is popular in so far as it appeals to political passions,” Milosz had stated. “This is not a good recommendation for poetry.”

And yet it was impossible to resist Voznesensky’s warmth and charm. The expansiveness, openness and forcefulness that had been associated with him since the 1950s were still evident in the late 1980s, particularly when he was reciting the best of his work.

Voznesensky had a marvelous ability to communicate. I can’t imagine a listener remaining indifferent to his spoken poetry. He actively went out to win his listeners over, heart and mind. You can watch a clip of him reading here and listen to an audio recording here.

After the reading, I was among a small group that accompanied Voznesensky to a party. His manner, now that he was offstage, was harsher and blunter, yet quieter and calmer.

The charm that he worked so hard to cultivate during the performance, and which he displayed during a short interview with a reporter from the Boston Globe, was almost entirely gone. He was now more natural. Perhaps this was because he was speaking Russian again. His answers to questions were short and his talk was straight.

I left Voznesensky that night feeling that he was a man who was obliged to live up to an image of himself that had grown larger than he was himself. I suspected that at some point in his life, long ago, he bought into that image. He accepted it as an immutable part of himself, and he considered it his responsibility to fulfill the expectations put on him.

Through the ages such onerous missions have destroyed men and women of great and small stature. It is to Voznesensky’s credit that his burden never crushed him. His integrity remained intact. Especially when he was performing his poetry.

In Memory of Roman Kozak, 1957-2010

Theater Plus blog No. 73. Still another blog reminding me of the great losses time keeps bringing us. Roman Kozak, even in an imperfect world, should never have died in 2010, still short of the age of 53. Even now, seven years later, the news, the information, still strikes one as shocking. Roma’s widow Alla Sigalova was heard recently to say that she is writing a book about her time with her husband. I don’t exactly when they were married, but they were together before he took over the Pushkin Theater in 2001. She said Roman knew he had cancer from the very beginning of his tenure at the Pushkin. He told no one, and he lived as if he was not ill, not always taking his medicine, cursing the pain and difficulties that cancer brought him as if that would be enough to banish it. Virtually no one in the theater community knew he was sick until they heard he had died. What a blow that was. Above: The casket bearing the body of Roman Kozak is put into a hearse in front of the Pushkin Theater on Sunday as mourners honor the deceased with a traditional standing ovation.

01 June 2010
By John Freedman

One of many exceptional memories I have of Roman Kozak is from the year 2000. He still had not yet accepted the appointment as artistic director at the Pushkin Theater; that would come one year later. At this point he still was working as a staff director at the Moscow Art Theater.

But this particular memory has to do with another theater altogether — the Chelovek Theater Studio, a tiny venue that had enormous meaning for Moscow and Russian theater in the 1970s and 1980s. Kozak was involved in several famous productions at the Chelovek. He performed brilliantly as an actor in Mikhail Mokeyev’s landmark production of Slawomir Mrozek’s “The Emigrants” in 1984. He himself staged and acted in a famous production of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s “Cinzano” there in 1987. Both shows toured Europe in the Perestroika era as examples of a newly revived Russian theater.

But in 2000, 15 years older and perhaps that much wiser, Kozak and his cohorts got together once again to perform these shows as part of a 25th anniversary of the mighty little Chelovek Studio.

It was a revelation. Their performances were inspired, rich and full-blooded. This was no mere exercise in shadow boxing with former glory. All of the actors — and Kozak was their obvious leader, on stage and off — delivered hilarious, powerful, devastating performances.

Many questioned whether it was worth it for the “old men” to go back out on stage in their old roles. I, perhaps, wondered that myself. I had seen the original “Emigrants” in 1988 during the original run and the brilliance of Kozak and his acting partner Alexander Feklistov was etched forever in my mind.

But if anything, the 2000 performance was even better. Both actors brought to it an urgency and a wisdom they simply could not have had 15 years earlier.

I’ll never forget seeing Roman and his wife Alla Sigalova come waltzing out of the theater after the last of a full month of performances. Neither Alla nor Roman had ever been the kind of people who express great emotion publicly, but at this moment, as they got into their car on the darkened, empty street, they looked like kids going dancing after the prom, or, perhaps, like athletes who had just won a world championship.

There was elation and strength and eternal youth in their step, their gazes and their voices.

Kozak, a director, actor and teacher who had an enormous impact on Moscow theater over three decades, was buried Sunday at the Troyekurovskoye cemetery in Moscow. He died late Thursday evening of cancer of the throat. He was 52 years old.

At a memorial service Sunday morning at the Pushkin Theater, which Kozak ran for nine years, actors, directors, journalists, producers and friends spoke words of love and respect for the man they had known and worked with.

Vera Alentova, the leading actress at the Pushkin, noted that Kozak renewed the theater when he took over the reins in 2001. “When Roman Kozak came,” she said, “he brought a whole new audience with him. And critics began noticing us again, too.”

Konstantin Raikin, fighting back tears, spoke about how he first was amazed by Kozak’s talent when he attended a performance of “The Emigrants” in the 1980s, how in the 1990s he came to marvel at Kozak’s prowess as a teacher at the Moscow Art Theater School and how the two became fast friends when in 2005 they both performed in a show called “The Cosmetic of the Enemy.”

“Roman was younger than I,” Raikin said as he struggled to maintain composure, “But I will always consider myself his pupil.”

Genrietta Yanovskaya, the artistic director of the Young Spectator Theater, told of seeing Kozak frequently in Europe in the 1980s. Yanovskaya then frequently toured to festivals with her famous production of “The Heart of a Dog,” while Kozak often performed at the same festivals in “The Emigrants” and “Cinzano.”

Kozak made “beautiful, elegant art,” Yanovskaya said. “And everything about Kozak and that art spoke of a beautiful, elegant future. How horrible it is that Roman Kozak has now ceased to be a part of the future.”

Indeed, everything about Kozak had to do with renewal and revival. He first appeared on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in the early 1980s along with several other young actors who made it clear that a new generation was ready to be heard. Then came his collaboration with Lyudmila Roshkovan’s Chelovek, or Human, Theater Studio. Throughout the 1990s, Kozak worked as a staff director at the Moscow Art Theater, providing new blood and new direction for a playhouse that was struggling to find its way in a vastly changed society.

At the Art Theater, he made several attempts with varying degrees of success to merge experimental theater with the needs of a large repertory house. His production of Mrozek’s “Love in Crimea” in 1995 was a huge, beautiful piece that never quite found its rhythm. Another large, quirky, often funny and beautiful production was Nikolai Yevreinov’s “The Main Thing” in 1999.

Kozak’s most popular work at the Art Theater was arguably his star-studded interpretation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Marriage” in 1997.

Also in the 1990s, Kozak staged numerous interesting productions for independent companies. His rendition of Mrozek’s “Widows,” under the title of “Banana” was not only one of the most intriguing productions of 1994, but it also brought Kozak together with choreographer and dancer Sigalova, whom he subsequently would marry.

In 2001, Kozak took on a task that many considered “mission impossible” when he accepted an appointment as the artistic director of the Pushkin Theater on Tverskoi Bulvar. For decades, the Pushkin had been known as a “dead” and “cursed” theater, a house to which no success could come and few spectators ventured.

Kozak hit the ground running, mounting a spectacular small-stage show called “Academy of Laughter,” by the Japanese playwright Koki Mitani. It was a sensitive and funny piece that caught two people locked in a battle that ultimately made them partners in a shared nightmare. Most of all, it was a tour de force of acting by Kozak’s two-man cast. It was a monstrous hit and, all of a sudden, Muscovites were beating down the door at the box office at the Pushkin Theater.

Kozak followed in 2002 with another hit — Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” featuring numerous actors making their professional debuts. Several of them have since gone on to stardom.

In short, the curse was broken, and the Pushkin had become one of Moscow’s most popular venues again. Over the next nine years, Kozak and others staged countless shows that have been among each season’s top draws. Foremost among them was the moving dramatization of Amelie Nothomb’s novel “The Cosmetic of the Enemy.”

Just 20 days before his death, Kozak premiered his last production, Alexander Ostrovsky’s “Mad Money,” a fast-paced, colorful comedy.

 

Repertoire, Innovation Found at Saratov Theater

Theater Plus blog No. 72. Another wonderful time and place that have drifted into the irrevocable past for me – the Saratov Young Spectator Theater. I traveled here several times over the period of a couple of years and saw some tremendous work – if you follow the reposting of these old blogs you’ll get to read about Lee Breuer’s wonderful production of Sam Shepard’s “The Curse of the Starving Class” before too long. I saw a couple of wonderful new play development projects here – one of them turned out to be my first encounter with the young director Dmitry Volkostrelov. For years the Saratov Young Spectator Theater was run by managing director Valery Raikov. He did wonderful things, as you’ll see by reading what follows. Unfortunately, he was, perhaps, too successful. He made some enemies by doing a lot of important international work, and when a reason came along a few years later to get rid of him, the higher-ups didn’t miss their chance. There was a fire in the theater that caused a great deal of damage and it was hung on Raikov. Fortunately for him and for Russian theater, he has since moved to Moscow where he has continued his career. But it was a huge mistake for Saratov. The theater there went from one of the most visible, active theaters in the Russian hinterlands, to just another of hundreds of easily ignorable playhouses. I’m grateful that I got to see the theater at its high-water mark. Above: a photo of spectators gathered outside the Saratov Young Spectator Theater before a show.

25 May 2010
By John Freedman

It is the oldest professional children’s theater in the world. But it is a lot more than that.

A list of the international projects of the Saratov Theater Yunogo Zritelya for the first decade of the 2000s shows nearly two dozen major productions, laboratories or tours that the playhouse has engaged in with partners from six countries.

One of the biggest-ever projects of this theater, founded in 1908, will take place in the fall when famed American director Lee Breuer arrives to stage a new translation of Sam Shepard’s “The Curse of the Starving Class.”

This production, which will rehearse throughout September, is expected to open Oct. 11. That bit of information was revealed to me by the theater’s managing director Valery Raikov last weekend while I was in Saratov. And if dates in Russian theater have a way of slipping and sliding with the passage of time – premieres often are put off at the last moment – you get the feeling that there will be none of that with this project.

You get the sense that when Raikov, who is soft-spoken but clear in everything he says, sets a date for Oct. 11, it is going to happen.

The relationship with Breuer grew out of a master class that the director and his actress wife Maude Mitchell conducted in Saratov almost exactly a year ago. The director and the theater hit it off, and plans were made for bigger things.

It turns out to be a significant opportunity for Sam Shepard, too. Shepard, one of the most influential American playwrights of the last five decades, has never quite caught on in Russia. A few minor productions in Moscow have come and gone without attracting lasting attention. Breuer’s interpretation of “Starving Class” at one of Russia’s top regional theaters is bound to have an impact.

But the Saratov TYuZ, as most people call it, is anything but a one-trick theater.

Previous collaborations with American theater include a 2008 production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” by Walter Schoen, a director and actor from Virginia. The theater then toured to Richmond, Virginia, with productions of two Russian classic plays, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Uncle’s Dream” and the beloved children’s fairy tale “The Humpbacked Horse.”

Raikov has organized numerous collaborations with French artists and theaters in connection with the current Year of France in Russia and Russia in France. At the end of December the theater unveiled a production of French writer Jean-Marie Chevret’s “SQUAT.” In July French director Jean-Claude Fall will stage a new interpretation of Edmund Rostand’s perennially popular “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

Among other international collaborations, a production of Eduardo de Filippo’s “Marriage Italian Style” by Italian director Paolo Emilio Landi was awarded the coveted Russian State Prize in 2003.

Some cross-cultural projects originate closer to home.

Georg Genoux is a German director who has lived, studied and worked for more than a decade in Russia. The founder of the edgy Joseph Beuys Theater that performs in Moscow at the popular Aktovy Zal venue, he also has established a working relationship in Saratov.

His most recent outing there was a bold production of Erich Maria Remarque’s “Three Comrades,” a gritty tale of three German World War I veterans struggling to make a life as Fascism and World War II loom large on the horizon.

“Three Comrades” opened in March and, despite some controversy, the show plays to packed and mostly enthusiastic houses.

When I attended a performance on Friday night, one woman in a hall seating 500 stood up and left the theater demonstratively when actors playing a group of Fascist soldiers marched through the hall shouting slogans. The other 499 remained to give the show a standing ovation during the curtain calls.

Raikov explains that after the early performances in May, as many as a quarter of the people he talked to were upset and wanted to know why he had allowed this picture of Weimar Germany to be staged just before the 65th anniversary of Victory Day.

“But,” the managing director added with satisfaction, “three out of four were very moved by the story.”

Indeed, under the quirky and strong direction of Genoux, this show filled with songs sung in German comes across as a story of individuals remaining human against all odds in a society that is becoming increasingly inhumane. It is that personal, human touch that makes the show so impressive.

These characters could be people of any nationality. The fact that they are German seems to be little more than an afterthought in the context of Genoux’s production.

The personal, human touch is very much evident in everything about the Saratov Theater. Genoux insists that the seven weeks he spent rehearsing “Three Comrades” were “the most satisfying seven weeks of my life.” The reasons for that are the commitment and the enthusiasm of everyone who works in the theater.

The Saratov Theater Yunogo Zritelya is as busy now as it ever has been. With a troupe of 66 actors, Raikov keeps an extraordinarily large repertory running on three different stages. At present there are 41 shows playing in rotation. Many, Raikov points out, have been in repertory for 10 or 15 years and have been performed 400 times or more.

(George Genoux among the stalls at the Saratov Young Spectator Theater.)

Theory Meets Practice at Towson University

Theater Plus blog No. 71. What follows below bears witness to an extraordinary event. I only wish I had done a more comprehensive job of recording it. The coming of Russian drama, in the persons of Yury Klavdiev and Vyachslav Durnenkov, to a group of ready and primed American students, was really something to see. The students had been reading, thinking about, talking about writing about, analyzing and, in some cases, rehearsing the works of these and other Russian writers for a period of three years. When the two worlds came together it was something to see. 

17 May 2010
By John Freedman

Robyn Quick, a professor of dramaturgy in the Department of Theater Arts at Towson University near Baltimore, was introducing two Russian playwrights to a theater full of students. She had been teaching the works of these writers, Yury Klavdiyev and Vyacheslav Durnenkov, in her classes for about three years.

For the writers, it was a step into the unknown. They had no idea what an impact their work had made.

For the students, it was a moment of reckoning. Theory was about to slam up against practice.

Professor Quick introduced the two playwrights in — sorry, this is no pun — quick succession. The name “Yury Klavdiyev” was followed by an explosion of shattering, hot buttered applause punctuated by guttural shouts and shrieking yells. Lady Gaga couldn’t have done half as well.

A moment later, the name “Vyacheslav Durnenkov” was followed by the same withering, enthusiastic eruption of rhythmic sound.

I was on stage to help translate for the writers, and I swear that heat poured down on us from the raked rows of black seats rising up in front of us.

Klavdiyev, Durnenko, about 100 American theater professionals and I were at Towson University from May 7 to May 9 for “New Russian Drama: Translation/Production/Conference (2007-2010),” a 3-day event hosted by Towson and Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theater Development.

The purpose of the conference was to wrap up an entire Russian season at Towson, during which 10 plays by six important Russian writers were staged as full productions, workshops or readings, and to present highlights of the season’s results to an audience of American producers, writers, directors and critics. The writers and I kicked off the conference with a preliminary event at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center in New York, about which you can read more here. (http://blog.mestc.gc.cuny.edu/blogs/)

Now, this is all impressive and important. And I have a feeling that we will now see numerous Russian projects taking place in locales as diverse as San Francisco, Austin, Washington and several other cities in between.

But one of the strongest impressions I took away from Towson were the looks on the faces of the students as they engaged the writers whose plays they had studied, and the looks on the faces of the writers as they were confronted by the love and respect of readers, spectators and artists they had never before imagined to exist.

Many of the students also worked on the productions as actors, stagehands, lighting engineers and in other capacities. Their immersion into the worlds of the various works had been profound.

Durnenkov admitted that he had no idea that young Americans could possibly be interested in the characters and plot complications he had created in “Frozen in Time (Exhibits),” a play about the convulsions a small Russian town experiences when two businessmen attempt to turn it into a living museum.

Klavdiyev bonded with the students over tastes in music and movies. He admitted that, like Quentin Tarantino, he was educated in a video salon, something that was quite evident in the fast-paced, shoot-’em-up, hilarious and harrowing production of his play “Martial Arts.”

Following the performances of each production, the writers went backstage to greet the student casts and crews. There were some marvelous, memorable moments that reminded everyone present of the power of cultural diplomacy.

In fact, after I returned to Moscow I received a letter from Professor Quick, who wrote, “The students had the kind of amazing, mind-expanding experience we hoped to give them. They are still aglow with what many of them have called something they will remember for the rest of their lives.”

To see what Dr. Quick had in mind, browse through the gallery of photos below.

(The four photos above show Vyacheslav Durnenkov meeting the cast of “Frozen in Time (Exhibits)” following the premiere performance at Towson University in May 2010.)

(Yury Klavdiev and Slava Durnenkov in a Baltimore back alley. Philip Arnoult is in the light shirt in the background.)

(Yury Klavdiev meets the cast of his play “Martial Arts” after the premiere in May 2010 at Towson University. Translator David M. White is the guy with the beard in the checkered shirt.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keeping Track of Russian and East European Performance

Theater Plus blog No. 70. In my last repost I mentioned how a discussion of Lena Tupyseva’s Aktovy Zal in Moscow reminded me of how time flies. That is triply true of this one. Daniel Gerould was a very important person in my professional life for many years. I submitted countless articles about Russian (Slovak and Georgian) theater to him for publication in Slavic and East European Performance (which is now defunct, I might add). I wrote for his journal over 20 years before actually meeting him – the day I recorded this video blog. Lest then two years later Daniel died. And everything that I associated with him went sliding helter-skelter into the past. Daniel was a wonderful man and an important scholar (Polish drama was his specialty), and I’m very happy to turn the spotlight back on him for a few moments today. 

11 May 2010
By John Freedman

For nearly 30 years, a small journal published at the City University of New York has closely followed the development of theater and performance in Russia and East Europe. Here is a place where you can read studies of theater studios in Ukraine, reports of theater festivals in Slovakia, reviews of experimental cinema in the Baltic States and accounts of Russian theater being staged and performed in the American Midwest.

Slavic and Eastern Europe Performance, as the journal is called, has been edited or co-edited for all of those years by Daniel Gerould.

I was at CUNY last week, appearing with Russian playwrights Vyacheslav Durnenkov and Yury Klavdiev at the Martin E. Segal Center. But before the writers and I took the elevator down to the center’s small hall just off of Fifth Avenue, I knocked on Professor Gerould’s third-floor office door and asked if I might have a few minutes of his time.

“How much is a ‘few minutes?”’ he asked politely but warily.

“Six minutes,” I said.

“That I can spare,” he said with a smile and asked me to sit down.

I have known Gerould professionally as a reader and an author for some 22 years. But I first actually met him in person just two years ago when I spoke at the Segal Center with Kama Ginkas. Since then, Gerould and I have crossed paths several times, although, as it turns out, I still had plenty to learn about him.

Sitting in front of an impressive bank of books that would do any office proud, Professor Gerould explained that he became interested in things Russian mostly by accident. And, as he pointed out, many of the best things in life happen by accident.

While Gerould was teaching in San Francisco in the 1960s, a friend “taught him some Russian.” It was enough to change his life. Shortly thereafter, he spent time in Poland and a few years later he lived and worked in the Soviet Union for a semester, meeting and befriending the popular Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov, among others.

As a translator, Gerould has made a major contribution to Slavic studies with his English versions of the plays by the Polish iconoclast, painter and playwright Ignacy Witkiewicz.

In addition to his teaching and editing duties at the CUNY Graduate Center, Gerould oversees the publishing of a series of books involving theater from all over the world that is put out by CUNY’s Segal Center.

To hear some of this and more in Professor Gerould’s own words, click on the picture below.