This could be a book chapter, but it won’t be. I don’t have the time tonight. This interview – long lost to me, but discovered as I was packing and unpacking things – takes me way back to Chicago in the spring of 1990 when I accompanied my wife Oksana Mysina on a tour of her theater to the United States. The show was Dear Yelena Sergeevna by Lyudmila Razumovskaya, directed by Svetlana Vragova at the Spartacus Square Theater. It premiered in Moscow in 1986. Denis Zacek at Victory Gardens Theater invited it to perform as I suspect no other Russian theater has ever performed in the US before or since – it was a full-fledged entry in Victory Gardens’ regular subscription season. They played it 36 times over the course of 6 weeks. From there they took it to Los Angeles where it played either four or six more times in Dominguez Hills over two weekends in June. Razumovskaya was there only for the opening in Chicago. I figured I would write something about her and her play some day, so I asked her to sit down and talk with me one evening while the actors were performing. (I did use parts of it for the article “Lyudmila Razumovskaya: Playwright by Chance,” in Theater Three, final issue, Nos. 11-12 (1992): 195-201.) The interview survived in the form you see below – mostly just Razumovskaya’s comments, with an occasional question inserted from me (in italics). It looks too neat for it to be my on-the-spot notes. I’m guessing this is a transcript of a cassette recording. Six pages of scribbling, double-sided. It’s going in the trash now that I’ve transferred it to this space. The image immediately above is pulled from the net – an online version of Sid Smith’s review for the Chicago Tribune.
John Freedman interviews Lyudmila Razumovskaya in her Chicago hotel room, not far from Victory Gardens Theater
Spring 1990
I started writing late.
Everything in life happens by chance and happens as it should. My life has been quite dramatic. I won’t try to tell you that everything about my current life is all happiness and satisfaction.
I started my first play when my life had hit a terrible dead end and out of nowhere various scenes began to form in my head. My first play was called The Family.
I was quite afraid to attach my name to it, so I submitted it to a theater under a pseudonym with a good friend. Later the literary director called to say that she had liked the play very much. I was gratified and there was even a chance for awhile that the play would be staged – but in times of stagnation it was too tough and it never made it. It didn’t fit the policy of “official gaiety.”
But the notion that I had support was so important that I continued writing, never giving a thought to whether my work would be performed. And that was good for me. I was so upset by my failure as an actress that the notion of being a playwright had no importance for me, and that was good. One shouldn’t be too attached to anything, that always brings disillusionment and tragedy. Detachment allows one to accept life as it is, and it gives us freedom.
Everyone talks about the time of stagnation, internal censorship, etc. That’s all true, of course, but I never experienced it myself because I never counted on anything. I did whatever I wanted and the fact that something came of it happened by itself. Thus I was fortunate that my first play hit on a friendly reader, which gave me needed support.
[praises Alexei Kazantsev]
Theater, as a rule, ruins plays.
Why write plays then?
I started writing plays because it was the most natural form of expressing myself.
Theater, as a mass art form, is very crude. But real drama is something else. Take Chekhov – his works are musical compositions, harmonious. Everything in them has value and sense. It is truly very difficult [to write like that]. That kind of thing happens very rarely.
When I first saw [the Spartacus Square Theater’s production of Dear Yelena Sergeevna], it amazed me. Something was captured in it, something sacred, which no other production caught. I’ll admit, this isn’t my favorite or most typical play, so I always related to it with a certain disdain.
I don’t very much like to watch it. When I went to Moscow to see the premiere I had no expectations I would see anything of particular power.
The play may appear at first glance to be like all my plays, realistic. But, in fact, they’re not.
I have different kinds of dialogue in different plays – but it’s never common conversational language. I think my plays are theatrical.
That’s why Eldar Ryazanov’s film [of Dear Yelena Sergeevna] didn’t work. It wouldn’t fit into the conventional, contemporary realistic work he tried to make of it. Not only didn’t his film work, but my play suffered too because the stuff of my play resisted his attempt to make a contemporary realistic portrayal of life.
Svetlana Vragova [at Spartacus Square Theater] somehow sensed this genre, the stylistics of the play, and she succeeded in bringing that to the fore. Because in fact it does seem that the play is too declarative, too edifying.
I was amazed that a director appeared who was able to capture what I had put into the play. I was always uneasy when watching other productions because they were always somehow unnatural.
It’s natural that, when staging the play, everyone adds something, changes something or cuts something. But several directors have been unable to justify Volodya’s requesting Yelena Sergeevna’s forgiveness in the 2ndact. They find it psychologically untenable by standards of a realistic work. Yelena Sergeevna would have to be a total idiot to buy that.
In fact, it is a very complex scene and one has to delve into that moment, search deeply to find a justification for her actions – perhaps some sort of supra-psychological approach, I don’t know. One has to understand Yelena Sergeevna’s state at that moment – which is strange, and terrifying. There are already no bounds of logic and reason. If you find what’s needed, then you can justify it and play that scene.
An actor who can’t find that place can’t play that scene, and for that reason many theaters discard the scene. Lenkom Theater in 1982 staged a very solid production in a traditional realistic, psychological style. They couldn’t fine room for that scene and they cut it.
Spartacus Square Theater, with the exception of a small change in Act I and cutting the end short, followed my text quite closely. At the premiere I was struck by how careful the actors were with my text, because such attention to text is unusual in our theater. But it is crucial. I understand full well that I’m not Shakespeare, but nonetheless I write better than actors speak.
At Spartacus Square I heard entire monologues delivered to the letter, and I was very gratified because I had begun to think that perhaps my dialogue could not be spoken. But here I realized that this non-realistic work that I had written could be justified on stage.
As for the role of Yelena Sergeevna, I saw that Oksana Mysina performed it almost exactly as I had envisioned it. Many actors have tried to do it different ways, but Oksana captured the essence of Yelena Sergeevna, her vulnerability, a woman who occasionally appears to be a bit of a fool, the type of person few people ever treat with respect. But she is a person whose moral fiber is extremely strong. She probably doesn’t even know that. It only comes out in extreme situations; in everyday life it’s just the opposite. She seems extremely weak, a person who can be broken, and that’s true, but only to a certain point. When it becomes a matter of crucial principle, she is extremely strong.
You can’t understand this play if you don’t understand that, because such a moral backbone doesn’t exist for these youths. As such on the surface they appear to be stronger, more tenacious. But that’s not true, of course. They’re a lot weaker than she is.
What amazed me most was that Vragova succeeded in uncovering the theme of demonism and debauchery, which is expressed so powerfully by these young actors. I was very pleased by this because it is a crucial theme in our day. Dostoevsky sensed this demonism very early. It is growing in our day. It has been growing for 70 years. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it because it’s obvious for a Russian, but if we are to talk about it – the most important thing that happened in the last 70 years was the disintegration of morality and mankind.
[On Lermontov and Turgenev]
Russian problems may or may not be eternal, but they probably are eternal. The form changes but the essence of the conflict remains the same. This is probably tied up in the Russian idea of existence, the Russian mentality and Russian history. Of course, it is the conflict of fathers and sons, and of society with a cultured person. Don’t forget that the Russian hero is a superfluous man. We have as many superfluous men as you’d ever hope to find in the Soviet Union. All of my plays are about the conflict of society vs. superfluous people.
Dear Yelena Sergeevna is my weakest play, but as an author I am pleased with my plays as literature. I believe my plays are good literature, and most often they are performed badly. The productions don’t correspond to the play. Vragova’s production is a rare exception. Of course it is unfortunate that my most popular play is my weakest. The play is very simple – almost primitive and at the same time it has a very direct effect on people.
[On critics comparing Razumovskaya to Pinter and Stoppard]
A critic’s task is to express his reaction, so whatever images he uses is his own business. I’m pleased by the good reviews, of course, but seriously… it’s not interesting who they compare you to. If I judge my own plays – all of them, not just Yelena Sergeevna– I sense an affinity to Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, much more so than those the critics named. But the critics only know Yelena Sergeevna, so judging by it, maybe it’s true as far as Yelena Sergeevnais concerned.
American audiences tend to laugh at odd places in the performance.
First of all, Russian audiences don’t always respond they way I’d like them to. But if we’re talking about laughter, it is merely a direct response to a powerful emotional stimulus. I was present once in 1982 at a discussion where we learned that someone was dying and for some reason we started laughing, not that we went into peals of laughter, but there was some sort of stupid, unnatural, illogical giggle. Even though the topic was horrible. So don’t think that audiences laughing means they don’t understand something. It’s merely an odd reaction that only seems to be an inadequate response.
Americans aren’t theatrical in the European sense, although I’m amazed that such a great tradition of playwrights hasn’t given birth to a corresponding theatre. American theatricality manifests itself in all kinds of ways – sports, dress, festivals, musical concerts, nightclubs…
I think there’s a great deal in Yelena Sergeevna that can’t be grasped by an American audience – Yelena Sergeevna living with her mom, nothing in the stores… It’s difficult when the spectator’s attention is split between headphones and the on stage performance. I can’t watch with them. Nonetheless, the play is being perceived with interest.
Do you feel like it’s your play?
I don’t know how to answer. When I saw the first-ever production in Estonian, it was so alien to me. I disliked it so much, even though it was considered successful. When I like a production, I like it as any other spectator would. But I have no sense that this performance belongs to me.
You’ve written several other plays, including a recent one about Maria Stuart, and I know you’re finishing another now.
Even now I consider myself a failed actress, not a writer. It was by chance that I became a writer – it was fate – I don’t know what will happen in the future. I am not one of those people who can achieve their goals. I learned that very late. I spent half my life trying to be an actress. I know that I have a great potential to be an actress, but it wasn’t in the cards, and so my actor’s potential has emerged in the way it did. Every one of my plays has a central, lyrical heroine through which I express myself, although they would all seem to be quite different.
Would you ever ban a production of your plays?
No. Here’s why. A play is the basis of a production, but a director is the author of a production. Everything that concerns theater – the spectacle – belongs to the director. The playwright answers for the text. If someone doesn’t like the production he can always go back to the text. It is a completed, integral work.
Whether we like it or not, a production is the domain of the director. But the most important element is the actor, since the audience perceives the play through the actor, although in contemporary theater the actor is a dependent being. Only in the 19thcentury was the actor the prime mover.
The playwright cannot mess with the production because no matter what you do, a director will stage the play to the extent of their talent and understanding, nothing more, nothing less. Essentially, nothing will change if a playwright intrudes.
Only one time did I try to stop a production despite my soft character. A very bad company tried to stage an early play of mine about phantasmagorical, strange Petersburg. This was in 1986, Gorbachev was already in place, but censorship and the stress on a “happy end” were still in place too. In my play everything falls apart and all the characters die in their own way. It was very interesting.
I was taken to the Leningrad arts boss (it was a theater not in the city but in the oblast). He said I’d written a great play, but I had to do something to make it more joyous. The devil tempted me to try. I thought, maybe it’s really true. I’ve got to try.
The director was a problem, too. He was the type that liked cruel realism – gloom and doom (chernukha). He told me, “you were young when you wrote it. Don’t think we’ll try to stage it as you wrote it. You’ve got to rewrite it all.” I said, “Okay, I’ll try.” I rewrote endlessly and the result was horrendous. When I watched the dress rehearsal of this monster we had created together, I was in such a state of shock that I said I can’t allow this monstrosity to go on.
In the end I was talked out of it. Too much money, effort, work, hope had gone into it. I didn’t have the right to kill everyone’s work.
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