What follows is a fragment of an article I never finished, never even wrote, really. My intent, many years ago, was to write an appreciation of Nikolai Kiselyov, a scholar in Tomsk, whose work had a large influence on me, whom I tried to meet, but never did. I wanted to record for posterity the importance of this strange relationship, and so I sat down to do it. I chose to start from afar, to start from my very first encounter with Nikolai Erdman – which was through Jonas Jurašas‘s production of The Suicide in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980. As it turns out, I got carried away with my memories of that stunning production, and never got around to saying what I wanted to say about Kiselyov. So the five graphs below are nothing more than an intro to an abandoned article. But when I discovered them this morning and reread them, I realized that they may be the best recollection I will ever write about what happened to me the night I saw Jurašas’s The Suicide at the Trinity Square Repertory Company. I might be able to do something in more detail, but I doubt I would get as close to my topic as I do even in these truncated notes. I see in these few words a path and a thread through my entire life. The influence of this evening on me was not just in setting a course in my life, which would be plenty (I wrote a dissertation about Erdman, wrote a book about him, moved to Russia and spent 30 years writing about Russian theater). What I took away from the play (see, primarily, the fourth graph below) ended up having enormous influence on my moral makeup as well. It didn’t create it – it was there already, I had already manifested my deep beliefs by refusing to participate in evil – but it’s clear to me that The Suicide gave depth and clarity to my sometimes annoyingly uncompromising self. However. I am not the topic of the discussion today; Nikolai Erdman is, Jonas Jurašas is, and so is Derek Meader, the actor who played the writer Viktor Viktorovich in Jurašas’s production. All three of them are alive in me today as they were that night in 1980. The photo above was sent to me by Trinity Square Rep. Derek Meader as Viktor Viktorovich stands over Richard Jenkins as Podsekalnikov. Meader died years ago, I am sad to say. Jenkins just keeps getting better, starring in films like The Shape of Water. Jurašas, after many years working in the U.S. and Canada, went back to his native Lithuania, where he still lives and works at the age of 83.
Jonas Jurašas Directs Erdman’s The Suicide
By John Freedman
I saw a theater production in 1980 at the Trinity Square Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, that changed my life. It was Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, as directed by Jonas Jurašas, a Lithuanian director who had emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States after his production of Macbeth was closed down at the Sovremennik Theater in Moscow. I had, to that time, studied Russian literature and drama at two American universities with good professors for four years. I had spent six months in Leningrad, attending the theater and attending lectures at Leningrad State University. But I had never heard of Nikolai Erdman, not from any of my teachers, not from any of the books I had read, not at any of the theaters I had attended.
When I saw Jonas Jurašas’s production of The Suicide, I knew instantly that I was in the presence of greatness. This was a play unlike any I had ever seen. I had never encountered this kind of comic poetry that hit so hard it achieved the breathtaking heights of tragedy. It was a terrifying play for what it said about the loneliness of every human being, for what it said about how easily political causes can become cruel and inhuman, and about the responsibility that every one of us bears for everything we do.
I will never forget watching the reaction on the face of Derek Meader, the actor who played Semyon Podsekalnikov in Providence, when the writer Viktor Viktorovich entered with the news that Fedya Petunin had shot himself dead and left a note proclaiming that “Podsekalnikov is right. Life is not worth living!” All of a sudden, the entire play was turned inside out. Right there, right at the very end. After the final words had been spoken. We in the audience were forced to reconsider everything we had encountered once those words were uttered. For five acts and three hours, Podsekalnikov had been a victim. He had been assailed and harassed by everyone. His only desire was to find a quiet place to live his life in peace. But no one would let him do it. He was hounded, bullied, chased and mocked. He was a victim of social injustice, human cruelty, indifference and greed. We identified with him and we sympathized with him. His plight was so dire that we even excused him his pathetic outburst that he would send his mother-in-law to work in the mines. There’s nothing admirable about that, but this man has been hounded so mercilessly for so long that we understand why he was capable of such a shameful, even contemptible, thought at the moment that he utters it. This was a man driven over the edge, beyond the bounds of decency, beyond the limits of cultured behavior. Podsekalnikov at this moment stood naked before fate and God. Since he was human, we were duty bound to allow him a slip of the tongue and an unworthy thought.
But that all turned upside down when we learned that, somewhere, offstage, Fedya Petunin had killed himself, using Semyon as his model and inspiration. Suddenly, Podsekalnkov’s innocence is bespattered in blood. Suddenly, he is transformed from a victim into a perpetrator of evil. He is, for all intents and purposes, to blame for the death of the young Petunin. By playing the game foisted on him by Aristarkh Dominikovich, Viktor Viktorovich and others, he became one with them, having no idea it was happening. He could have refused them; the choice was there for him to make time after time. But repeatedly he was seduced by his vanity, by visions of white horses decorated with pom-poms, by Raisa Filippovna’s pretty stomach, by Aristarkh Dominikovich’s intoxicating words.
The expression on the face of Derek Meader-Viktor Viktorovich in Providence as the performance of The Suicide ended said all of this and more. It was a revelation. Here was theater that figuratively threw a bucket of cold water over us all in the final moments. It was theater that said, “You cannot live anymore as you have lived until now.” That is what Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide said to me in 1980 in Providence, Rhode Island.
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