With six successful mid-May performances of his production of "A Hotel Room in the Town of N" in Washington behind him, director Valery Fokin shows no signs of slowing down in Moscow.
Last week, Fokin presented a lavish new book containing detailed notational descriptions of two of his most important productions of the 1990s and announced plans for a joint production next season with the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Moscow.
"Old-World Landowners," one of Nikolai Gogol's earliest and best-known stories, will bring together Fokin, Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka and Moscow's Lia Akhedzhakova for a stage adaptation by the contemporary playwright Nikolai Kolyada. At a press conference Tuesday, Kolyada explained that he wrote the play - "not a dramatization, but a variation on the theme of Gogol" - expressly for Akhedzhakova, who expressed a desire to play the character of Pulkheria Ivanovna.
The story tells of a simple, loving couple whose way of life in early 19th-century Ukraine is doomed. For Kolyada, the play's key image is the mother Pulkheria whose overriding desire is to see her children "dressed, fed and alive." Fokin said he hopes the production will strike a "humane note," something, he added, that "has been lost at the end of our terrible century."
"Old-World Landowners" is expected to open in Moscow in mid-December, probably at the Mayakovsky Theater. It will also be performed in Kiev.
"Scores for Two Plays: 'A Hotel Room in the Town of N' and 'The Metamorphosis,'" published by Fokin's Meyerhold Arts Center, seeks to provide a written record of the productions that Fokin created with the composer Alexander Bakshi. The text and notations were compiled by Lyudmila Bakshi, the composer's wife and a vocalist in the productions. Detailed descriptions of the actors' movements on stage are set against the running musical score including such exotic sounds and instruments as a lion's roar and a "quica."
Fokin said the book attempts to revive a movement begun in 1933 by the great Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold - but stopped by Soviet authorities in 1936 - of discovering ways to record theatrical performances on paper.
- John Freedman
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