Raucous Gogol Evening Tells Tales of Slavic Town

Vladimir Pankov has found a groove in Nikolai Gogol, and he is working it for all it is worth. His “Gogol. Evenings. Part 3” is the third installment of a series of productions based on Gogol’s famous story cycle, “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.”

Formally, there is no appreciable difference among the shows — all are steeped in the rhythms of Slavic folk music and dance; all are dark tales exploring the power of the supernatural on the lives of common people; all, to varying degrees, are stories of the trials that young lovers face.

Like all shows created by Pankov for his SounDrama Studio, “Gogol. Evenings. Part 3” is as much music and dance as it is theater or literature. And yet, the literary element — Gogol’s text — is crucial to the shape of the performance.

I found myself recoiling at times from the extraordinary volume of the music, singing and spoken — call that “shouting” — voices. The chaotic, unrelenting din emanating from the stage was downright aggressive in its attack on my ears.

But just as I was prepared to let myself perceive this in a negative way, I got to thinking about Nikolai Gogol.

Gogol’s prose is a glorious mess. It is a mouthful of rattling consonants, interrupted phrases, “pointless” extended digressions, clusters of richly evocative but meaningless interjections, oddly out-of-place exclamations and hardscrabble words rattling off the tongue like marbles falling on a marble floor. There may never have been a writer — in Russian or any other language — who spun such hairy tales in such wild and exquisitely clunky prose.

In short, Gogol’s prose was anything but quiet. I understand Pankov’s impulse to transform that into a sonic attack, even if I suspect that deadens our perceptions as much as it enhances them.

Of the three tales that Pankov has dramatized so far — using scripts created by Irina Lychagina — this third seems the simplest of them all. Based on the story, “On the Eve of Ivan Kupala,” it again shows a village of simple folk with common desires and prejudices who are thrown out of their rut when confronted by a figure with satanic tendencies.

On the magical eve of the summer solstice, the town is up to its usual business of drinking, lazing around and flirting when a stranger appears that some think might be the devil. The priest Afanasy (Alexander Gusev) declares that anyone associating with this mysterious Basavryuk (Alexei Chernykh) will be branded a “Catholic,” that is, a heretic.

Pankov takes that image and runs with it. Not only does his earringed Basavryuk change out of a slick, gangster’s outfit into a Catholic cardinal’s raiment, he tosses around fistfuls of U.S. dollars and hands out packs of Marlboro cigarettes.

Few things in a small Slavic village may ever have looked so much like hell as a wave of temptations flooding in from the West.

The set designed by Sergei Agafonov and Natalya Zholobova consists primarily of wooden crosses that can be turned into most anything — a well, supports for laundry lines, the trees of a forest. The lighting by Andrei Tarasov gives all the scenes an eerie, otherworldly feel.

For all his gothic instincts, however, Gogol was a highly subtle writer. The role of the devil in his stories was always impossible to pin down.

And so it is the couple of Petro (Pavel Akimkin) and Pidorka (Alisa Estrina), around whom most of this tale turns. He works for her imposing father Korzh (Pyotr Markin); she has her eye on him and is willing to overcome her timidity to let him steal a kiss.

Kisses, however, can lead to all manners of disaster, pregnancy and infuriated fathers included. In this case, it leads to both, as well as to Petro’s banishment and Pidorka’s suicidal despair. Petro’s subsequent meeting with Basavryuk in a forest haunted by spirits and witches may bring him wealth, but does it bring him back to his beloved Pidorka?

In the finale of this tale of interrupted love, Pankov seems to stray as far from Gogol as he ever has. Gogol, of course, is vague as to what befalls his heroes and heroines. But Pankov really leaves it hanging. Is there any resolution to this story of lovers seeking a way back to each other? I’m not sure that there is. Perhaps Pankov is right, and these things are never resolved.

“Gogol. Evenings. Part 3” (Gogol. Vechera. 3-ya Chast), a production of the SounDrama Studio, jointly with the Meyerhold Center and Theatre Solutions Company, plays Jan. 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. at the Meyerhold Center, located at 23 Novoslobodskaya Ulitsa. Metro Mendeleyevskaya. Tel. 363-1048, 363-1079, www.soundrama.ru, www.meyerhold.ru. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.