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Two Dark but Gripping Performers

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The American writer Ruth Margraff, who this week will bring two of her works to the American Center at the Library of Foreign Literature, must hold a record for pulling down ecstatic and wildly divergent notices.

Depending upon the source, Margraff, collaborating with various composers, writes librettos and lyrics for "edgy," "confrontational," "brutal," "odd" and "sexy" "new operas," "folk operas," "avant-garde operas," "new wave operas," "post-modern," "experimental," even "hysteric" operas or operettas.

As far as I can tell, the only label not yet hung on Margraff is the "new Bob Dylan," although, by way of Margraff's sometime collaborator, there is a hitch there, too, which I will come to in time.

But for someone who has never seen Margraff's work -- and I have not -- the praise and descriptions can be bewildering. For someone who has seen it, such as Rachel Perlmeter, an American playwright and actress studying in Moscow on a Fulbright grant, it makes perfect sense.

"Her plays produce a wallop of text and image and sound that resonates with the viewer long after the performance," Perlmeter says.

"I think her voice is audaciously original. She is a fascinating performer of her own writings with a half-sung and half-spoken delivery."

Joined by guitarist, vocalist, composer and actor Nikos Brisco, Margraff on Tuesday will perform "Judges 19 (Black Lung Exhaling)."

By all accounts, this is a rough -- as in no-holds-barred -- treatment of the biblical book as filtered through the experiences of a man and a woman from a West Virginia coal-mining town.

On Thursday, Margraff and Brisco will follow with a workshop of "Red Frogs," a dramatic piece drawing inspiration from Marxist propaganda, Aristophanes and Dante. Both events will be followed by open discussions with the artists.

"Judges 19," a 40-minute performance for which Brisco wrote the music, is drawn in part from the author's personal experience. Margraff's father was an itinerant Baptist preacher and her mother grew up in West Virginia.

"The character of the Concubine from 'Judges 19' is inspired by my mother's sister Pearl, who died in West Virginia at the age of 45 of a collapsed lung and a liver full of whiskey," Margraff writes in response to questions sent by e-mail.

"Two months before that, my grandfather had died with a black lung from coal mining (and smoking and drinking) so the operetta grew out of that time.

"The two pictures I use in the text which we sing at various points in 'Judges 19' I took from Pearl's house as we were changing our clothes for her funeral. I think they are completely perfect and sad and mysterious. I hang them in the windows right away when I move somewhere, which may be why she haunts me still. I feel her spirit when I'm lying in the coffin before the show and she teaches me things every time."

Brisco first met Margraff in Dallas, where he was playing a character called the Perpetrator in Margraff's "Wallpaper Psalm." She was so impressed by his passion for music that they began collaborating. They define their first work, "Centaur Battle of San Jacinto," as "an extended bar room brawl."

"When I first read Ruth's words, they were so bloody and violent yet poetic, I could not believe that a woman could be capable of such terror," Brisco explains, also in response to an e-mail. "I thought of Henry Miller's cutting prose style. I imagined everything from Medusa to Persephone."

Margraff, who will admit to no more than being close to Brisco's age of 33, is currently on leave from the University of Texas at Austin to teach playwriting at Brown University and the Yale School of Drama.

She is a prolific author who has written more than 15 theatrical works since penning her first "adult" play at age 20. She has been produced by such prestigious New York venues as Joseph Papp's Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York Theater Workshop, La Mama Galleria, Mabou Mines and others. Outside of the United States, her work has been shown in New Zealand, Turkey and Serbia, where her mother has lived for four years.

But despite her success, Margraff bemoans the fact that American theater is "about two centuries behind the times" with its dependence on "blue-haired subscribers that go to show off their wealth and be patted on the back for their lukewarm political correctness."

Nevertheless, the Texas connection has emerged as a strong and fruitful one, she says. "Judges 19" originated there in Austin at Frontera Fest, a fringe festival, and "Centaur Battle of San Jacinto" calls up the ghosts of Davy Crockett, Crazy Horse and the men who died at the Alamo.

"There are some small theaters in Austin that have been quietly producing some of the most radical work in the nation," Margraff explains.

"Their audiences are young and ripe from the live music scene, so they watch plays like music. The critics have educated themselves on the new styles as quickly as they emerge and don't need to hunker down into blockbuster family entertainment as a yardstick."

The music scene in Texas has been a professional home to Brisco on and off for the last 10 years. Since 1992, he has put out five official albums, ranging from gypsy jazz to rock, folk and country, and several self-made bootlegs. And since no true American artist can escape comparison to Bob Dylan at some time, Brisco can feel right at home. Reviewing the album of "Centaur Battle of San Jacinto," a critic for the Dallas Morning News wrote: "Mr. Brisco's songs ROCK, and he brings a salty early-Bob Dylan twang to them."

In fact, Brisco's influences are deep and wide. "I love real country and folk," he states. "Texas has a song and style like nothing else in the world. A slow kind of poetry that settles like a cactus full of water in the middle of a desert." But, being half-Greek, he also has become fascinated with Greek music, taking up playing the bouzouki and studying the Greek and Turkish Dalgas and Eskenazi styles of singing.

According to Perlmeter, who has helped to organize Margraff's and Brisco's local appearance, in part with the help of a travel grant from the public affairs section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, "Nikos' music in 'Judges 19' sustains the edgy energy of the words and propels them, hurtles the lingo and teases the ear with a bluesy West Virginian lick or two."

Asked about the myths that often have formed the basis of her work, Margraff responds that she is interested in creating "new myths and especially new worlds that honor people or histories that get erased."

"With 'Judges 19,'" she continues, "maybe when the real Pearl was lowered into the coal of West Virginia she could become part of a larger fossil imprint of other concubines all the way back to the biblical time of the judges. I am interested in the kind of oral cries that run deep across time and languages."

"Judges 19 (Black Lung Exhaling)" plays in English on Tuesday at 7 p.m. A workshop of "Red Frogs" will be held in English on Thursday at 7 p.m. Post-performance discussions follow both events, which are supported by the American Center and will take place in the Great Hall of the Library of Foreign Literature located at 1 Nikoloyamskaya Ulitsa. Metro Taganskaya. Tel. 755-6530.

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