Theater History Emerges From Jottings

Theater – nay, life – is not all about triumphs.

I stoop to such banality to lead into a particular theatrical memory of mine.

As was the case with a few shows, about which I reminisced in my last column, this one floated to the surface after I pulled out thousands of dusty old theater programs, spread them over my study floor and began to rifle through them.

How could I ever forget “Wandering Conflagrations” at the Mossoviet Theater? The wonder is that I saw it at all. Talk about a flash in the pan. It played one time, and one time only. That’s how bad it was. They played it once and everybody, spectators and participants alike, ran from the building screaming, “Never more!”

“What a mess!” I wrote in a short review in The Moscow Times in May 1997. And I have it on good authority that I was right. Boris Milgram, the man who directed it, told me later that he felt the same way.

Sometimes things just go wrong at the office.

Someone probably should have known disaster was lurking. The show was slated to open April 12, as you can discern by looking in the upper left-hand corner of the program. There it is blithely printed that the premiere took place on that fine spring day in 1997.

In fact, that date came and went with no such event occurring. It was April 20 before the theater mustered the courage to open the doors and part the curtain on this play by Luka Antropov that was a hit in the 19th century but had not been remembered by anyone since. That was the day – a Sunday, according to my planner – that I sat down and watched the theatrical equivalent of a train wreck, all four hours of it.

The first words in my critic’s notebook for that evening describe the set designed by Yury Kharikov: “Something like an underwater or swampy Stonehenge. Phalluses wrapped at bottom in green. Mist drifts. A rock protrudes at center. A ballet bar [sic] at fore.”

My last scribbled words were: “Song becomes pretty by end – but where’s the pathos [come] from after all the gunk?”

Need I really say more?

The exact opposite kind of memory comes to life when I hold in hand the program for “The Possible Meeting, or, The Four Hand Dinner,” which I attended at the end of 1992 at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater.

This show did not go down as a landmark of its era, although I would be willing to argue it should have. It starred two of the greatest legends of Soviet theater – Oleg Yefremov playing George Frideric Handel, and Innokenty Smoktunovsky playing Johann Sebastian Bach.

The play by German author Paul Barz posited a tete a tete between the two composers that, in fact, never happened.

In a sense, that meeting didn’t happen during the performance of this play in Moscow, either. Because who sitting in that hall that night ever gave any thought to Handel or Bach or what they might have been up to? No one, I wager.

This was a towering duel between two actors who had spent so many decades on stage that neither of them probably even remembered by then what one had to do to “act.” What they knew profoundly was how to be themselves, and how to let their personalities illuminate a hall with brilliance.

Smoktunovsky, quiet, soft and crafty, laid traps everywhere for Yefremov, a man in whom integrity, intelligence and clarity jostled for the upper hand with cynicism and tough humor.

The point is this: Those two actors had a blast together. Imagine Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking kicking around mathematical formulas. Pele and Maradona kicking around a soccer ball. That’s what it was like to see Yefremov and Smoktunovsky kick up their heels on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater.

Sublime!

The program for a show called “Judith” is on a flimsy piece of paper. At the top of the cover page, it states: “The Playwright and Director Center under the direction of Alexei Kazantsev and Mikhail Roshchin and the Russian House Theater present…”

I had forgotten that. That is, I had forgotten that the Playwright and Director Center began its highly influential life in a rather uncomfortable liaison with a slot-machine-salon-turned-theater called Russian House. Within a year or so, the Center began renting the stage at the Vysotsky Center near the Taganskaya metro stop, and that is where it ultimately rose to prominence.

Nowadays, of course, it performs on its own stage at its relatively new, municipally funded digs at 5 Begovaya Ulitsa.

But those very first shows – Yelena Isayeva’s “Judith” and Mark Ravenill’s “Shopping and F***ing” – were performed in the cramped space known then as the Russian House.

Inside my program is a handwritten note reminding me of something Alexei Kazantsev said to me, probably before the show, since it is my habit to leave theaters immediately after a performance ends.

Scribbled in the wide right margin are the following words: “Kazantsev: we opened up in revolutionary manner. I.e., when it’s absolutely impossible, but necessary. No money, no sponsors, no govt. money.”

A better translation (because Kazantsev made these comments to me in Russian and I jotted them down in English) of that second phrase would be: “When it’s absolutely impossible, but it has to be done.”

What was “impossible,” of course, was the notion of opening a new theater in the difficult post-default days and months of late 1998. What “had to be done” was send a wake-up call to the theater world, which at that time had virtually forgotten what a live playwright looked and sounded like.

There it is, a moment of hubris that leads to a change in the course of history, jotted down in black-and-white in the corner of an old program.

The photo gallery above offers images of the programs I describe in today’s column.