If anyone knows anything about developing new work for theater, it is Jim Nicola.
Nicola has been the artistic director of the famed New York Theatre Workshop since 1988. He has overseen the premieres of new plays by such significant writers as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill and Doug Wright. He was instrumental in bringing the important Flemish director Ivo van Hove to work in the United States, and he nurtured and oversaw the development of one of the most influential American musicals in recent decades — Jonathan Larson’s “Rent.”
Last week Nicola was in Moscow with a group of American theater practitioners, all of whom had a specific goal in mind. As participants in New American Plays for Russia, an initiative funded by the U.S. embassy in Moscow under the auspices of the bilateral Russian-American presidential commission, they were here to find out all they could about the current state of theater and playwriting in Russia. They attended performances. They met with playwrights, directors, administrators, journalists and actors.
For the record, I know so much about this program because I am its director. As such, if you wish to doubt the value and veracity of what I have to say about it, you are welcome to do so.
Jim Nicola, though, is a different matter altogether. Rather like that old stock broker company, Jim is one of those individuals whom people listen to when he speaks.
On Saturday, as Jim was preparing to head out for the theater one last time, I asked him to sit down and tell me about what he had seen.
Valery Fokin’s “The Overcoat” at the Sovremennik Theater impressed him as a show that highlighted the vast differences between Russia and America. The show was, he said, “an image of someone struggling to gain something and then having it taken away.” This, he pointed out, was the opposite of what one might expect to see in American theater.
Another production that caught his eye was Mindaugas Karbauskis’ “A Stalemate Lasts But a Moment” at the National Youth Theater. This piece is a dramatization of Icchokas Meras’ novel about death and survival in a Jewish ghetto during World War II.
Suggesting that he thought he had seen enough about Nazi crimes, Nicola admitted that this particular work “surprised” him for the “new and interesting way” that it went about telling its story.
After attending productions of “The Cow” and “Donkey Hot” at the School of Dramatic Art, Nicola called director Dmitry Krymov a “unique character in the landscape,” whose graphic images were compelling and unlike anyone else’s.
To hear these and many more of Nicola’s comments on his week of observing Moscow theater, click on the picture below.
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