[Mb-hair] Russian theatre

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Los Angeles Times Calendar Sunday, 06 March  2005
_http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-ca-russian6mar06,2,7342250.story_ 
(http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-ca-russian6mar06,2,7342250.story) 

 
STAGE
 
Russia's scene is revised
Money matters, popular tastes, even competition  from film for the services 
of actors put challenges to a repertory system that  long has nourished a vital 
stage tradition.
By  Steven Leigh Morris
Special to The Times

MOSCOW -- Chechen terrorists  understood that to invade a Moscow theater was 
to attack a Russian cultural  emblem. In October 2002, they held about 800 
audience members hostage at the  Theater Center on Dubrovka, where the musical 
"Nord Ost" was performing. After  the tragedy, which left nearly 130 dead, the 
producers defiantly kept the show  going. But audiences were spooked, and "Nord 
Ost" withered away.

Still,  not even terrorism could keep Muscovites out of their theaters. The 
desire of  Russians to escape their tiny Soviet-era apartments helped establish 
strong  theatergoing habits. And though pop music — blaring in parks, taxis 
and shopping  centers — now overshadows every art form, theater remains hip and 
well attended  in Moscow.

Today, many of the city's grand old theaters and directors who  made their 
reputations during the Soviet era are struggling to remain relevant.  Tradition 
may be honorable, but there is no arguing with box office receipts or  the 
need to bring in young audiences.

The Soviets left Russia with a  network of midsize to large theaters (300 
seats or more), of which 60 now thrive  in Moscow — a metropolis of about 11 
million people. By contrast, the L.A.  megalopolis, with its population of 16 
million living in comparatively spacious  homes, has about half as many comparable 
venues for professional  theater.

As an indication of how Russia still regards theater, the  government's TV 
Channel 2 broadcasts a two-hour monthly program, "Theater Plus  TV," devoted to 
actors and directors working on stage and  screen.

Attendance at the midsize to larger venues runs from 85% to sold  out — 
crowds of 15-year-old schoolgirls gawking at the bare-chested male dancers  in 
Alexander Ostrovsky's "Country of Love" (adapted from the fairy-tale  
"Snegorochka") at Satirikon Theater; fur-coated matrons sitting next to  pensioners and 
teens (text-messaging on cellphones during the show) at  Sovremennik Theater's 
"The Possessed." Tickets range from $7 to $100, though  artistic director 
Galina Volchek says the lower-priced tickets sell out  instantly.

In a guest room off the lobby of the Sovremennik, about an  hour before a 
performance of Nikolai Kolyada's "Murlin Murlo," Volchek, who  staged the show, 
sits at the head of a table. On the wall hang photos of Volchek  in New York 
with Al Pacino; with Arthur Miller. Volchek as a young woman with  her mentor, 
Oleg Yefremov. Volchek with Boris Yeltsin, with Vladimir Putin.  Volchek, head 
slightly bowed, holding Queen Elizabeth's gloved hand.

As  she speaks in a soft voice, husky from chain-smoking, she lifts one arm 
as  though it carries the weight of the world — which, in a way, it does. 
Having  taken over the Sovremennik from Yefremov in 1972, Volchek is one of the few 
 Russian directors — and the only woman running a major theater — who has  
weathered the storms of Soviet bureaucracy and its collapse, the mixed 
blessings  of Russian capitalism, the free fall of the ruble in 1998 and the 
subsequent  realignment of both the economy and the culture with the West.

Volchek  was the first Soviet theater director to visit the United States, 
staging  American actors in a production of Michael Roschin's "Echelon" at 
Houston's  Alley Theatre in 1978. In 1996, her touring Sovremennik repertory of 
Eugenia  Ginzburg's "Into the Whirlwind" and Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" 
performed on  Broadway, earning the first Drama Desk Award ever given to a foreign 
company.  All the while, she has held together a repertory company that 
continues to  present a dozen or so shows a month and in a theater town akin to 
London and New  York for intensity, enthusiasm and combativeness.

Cutbacks have a price

Since the doors to the West  swung open about 15 years ago, a trio of 
crosscurrents has been buffeting  Russia's old school repertory system that Volchek 
embodies.

First,  cutbacks in government funding have, to the artists' relief, removed 
the  government's license to interfere in the art. But the cuts have forced 
artistic  directors to scramble for private sponsorships to maintain standards 
and  payrolls. As with financial arrangements at many theaters in the U.S.,  
Sovremennik's corporate sponsor, Rosbank, is credited in every playbill.  
Downtown's tony Lenkom Theater has a running program note thanking its  "partner," 
designer Bosco di Ciliegi.

Despite such private support,  Volchek's payroll has not kept pace in a 
battered economy. In earlier years, an  actor could live comfortably on the 
theater's salary. Today, film and TV work is  a stage actor's only road out of 
poverty — creating tensions all too familiar in  America.

When Gordon Davidson tried in the '70s to create a repertory  company at the 
Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he found he couldn't get actors  to commit to 
an Actors' Equity salary for an extended period if they risked  sacrificing 
film and TV work. Similarly, Volchek now finds herself in the  company of 
Russian actors who no longer wish to work in an artistic  monastery.

Under the Soviets, artistic directors ruled and guided a  salaried ensemble 
that worked only in one government-funded theater it called  home. Volchek's 
"Murlin Murlo" features an ensemble that's been performing the  play for 15 
years. Two cast members have never performed in any other theater.  But such 
loyalties are waning. As in the West, Russian actors and directors now  work in 
many theaters, in various countries.

And finally, what's called  the enterprise system is flourishing in Russia: 
Independent producers and  commercial backers throw a pair of celebrities onto 
a rented stage in  profit-motivated, crowd-pleasing light comedies. 
Producer-director Leonid  Trushkin is known as Moscow's king of the enterprise system, 
staging hits such  as Alexander Galin's "Delusion" and L.A. playwright Richard 
Baer's "Mixed  Emotions" — which has toured Eastern Europe, thanks to the 
enterprise system. If  this system hadn't existed under Lenin's New Economic 
Policy of the 1920s, you'd  swear the Russians had imported it from America.

A raging debate in  Russian theater today pits the classical repertory 
against the enterprise  system. According to Ekaterina Ufimtseva, host since 1991 of 
"Theater Plus TV,"  Russian rep is centered on an artistic director, who sets 
the aesthetic for the  theater. He or she provides an artistic home, training 
and constant employment  for dozens of actors. "Emotions and tempers run high 
because the enterprise  system raids actors from the theaters that trained 
them," Ufimtseva says, "while  offering nothing in return."

The debate raises a larger question: Is it  necessary to rehearse one play 
for three to four months, as Volchek's company  does, when commercial producers 
get their shows up in three to four weeks? Even  Volchek concedes she created 
quality theater over a month of rehearsal in  Houston, where she directed 
"Echelon" at the Alley Theatre with actors who  hadn't worked together before.

American actors, she observes, are more  eager and distracted than Russian 
actors because Americans are always fighting  for the next job. What concerns 
Volchek is how market pressures have affected  the mentality of her own actors.

"In the old days, the theater was a  priority. Film and TV always paid more, 
but it was inconceivable an actor could  come in on the day of a show and say, 
'Sorry, I have to do a shooting.'  "

Sergei Garmash, one of Russia's most distinguished actors, graduated  from 
the Moscow Art Theater Institute in 1984. He floats from stage to TV and  film 
and has been part of the Sovremennik stable for 20 years.

"A  contract is a contract," he says, insisting that Russian actors don't 
renege on  theater commitments to do film or TV. Nor do Russian theater contracts 
have an  "out clause," as in the U.S., allowing them to bolt from the stage 
if the movies  call.

"My first love is the theater," Garmash insists, "and I schedule my  movie 
work around my theater obligations." But, he points out, sometimes theater  
directors call rehearsals that intrude on prior movie commitments, and that's  
when tempers flare.

At the Satirikon Theater, Konstantin Raikin inherited  the post of artistic 
director from his actor father, Arkady. Critics call  Konstantin one of 
Russia's greatest living actors. From his title role  performance in Carlo Goldoni's 
comedy "Sior Todero Brontolon," it's clear  why.

Portraying an old merchant, looking and acting like a cross between  Ebenezer 
Scrooge and one of Moliére's crotchety hypochondriacs, Raikin enters  from an 
upstage corner like a living gargoyle: eyes bulging, tongue rolling,  head 
wrapped in a stocking cap. Center stage, a walking stick stands upright,  all by 
itself. Raikin's goal is to reach it, impeded by the free will and  entropy 
of his limbs. A monument to grotesquerie, humor and technique, he  staggers 
with legs splayed, spine swiveling to various 45-degree angles, while  wheezing 
emphysemic gasps that seem to rattle the theater's ancient girders and  ropes.

In an indication of how Russia's directors have become traveling  salesmen, 
the production is staged by a guest director, Robert Sturua. Ufimtseva  credits 
Raikin for cracking the Soviet one-director/one-theater mold by inviting  
outside directors into his repertory and propelling their careers — directors  
such as Valery Fokin and Roman Viktuk, both international theater stars weaned  
in the Sovremennik.

Raikin has opened his theater to younger directors,  such as Nina Chusova and 
Yuri Butusov, who's directing Raikin in the title role  of "Richard III." 
Trendy Chusova has standing invitations at the Pushkin, the  Sovremennik and even 
the stalwart Moscow Art Theater, while newcomer Kirill  Serebrennikov, known 
for directing plays in a variety of styles, is making the  rounds.

Nobody pretends this new generation of Russian directors even  approaches the 
stature of the Soviet-era greats — Vsevelod Meyerhold, Yuri  Lyubimov and 
Volchek. Television producer Sergei Varnovsky, who's also  Ufimtseva's husband, 
says it's unreasonable to expect a new generation to match  the brilliance of 
its predecessors.

The Soviets didn't inspire the genius  of their artists with love and 
support. They shot poets, banned playwrights.  They arrested Meyerhold and closed his 
theater. For daring to work in the West,  they exiled Yuri Lyubimov from his 
Taganka Theater and let him return only after  his successor, Anatoly Efros, 
died. These artists endured a kind of stubborn  determination and defiance. 
This raises the discomfiting question of whether  great art is produced by 
generosity and cross-pollination, such as the Russians  are experiencing now, or by 
suffering and hardship, which the Soviets provided  in abundance.

Director Mark Zakharov has adapted just fine to the new  Russia. He's one of 
the few legendary Russian stage (and film) directors besides  Volchek who's 
still working, and his swanky downtown Lenkom Theater is so  popular with 
tourists, you can get a ticket only through scalpers or  insiders.

Zakharov's production of "Va Bank," based on Alexander  Ostrovsky's play "The 
Final Sacrifice," is a satirical meditation on the  intersections of love and 
money that, unfortunately, smacks of Boulevard Theater  — an art nouveau 
costume parade by TV personalities lacking stage presence. The  performers play on 
and around seven horseless carriages and a few mirrors —  metaphors that give 
the actors little room to do much more than climb up and  down the props. 
When gunshots are fired, you get, well, smoke and mirrors. The  sloppy effort 
serves as a warning for what can happen when theater's larger  purpose gets lost 
in privilege and complacency.

Poland's favorite-son  movie director Andrzej Wajda's staging of Dostoevsky's 
"The Possessed" at the  Sovremennik exemplifies a new international style of 
directing, emphasizing the  look over the heart. The performances crackle on a 
beautiful, open stage against  a backdrop of clouds — the gathering storm of 
the Russian revolution. The story  unfolds while, curiously, the actors don't, 
occupying the same emotional space  throughout the production. This is what 
separates it from Volchek's "Murlin  Murlo" — a claustrophobic, modern 
tragicomedy about people trying to escape an  impoverished province.

Garmash performs in both plays and explains how  Wajda demands that the 
actors deliver what he wants quickly, whereas Volchek —  in the old Stanislavsky 
directing style — nurtures. "She reaches into her  lifetime of experience to 
help her actors discover the inner life of their  characters."

This explains her three-month rehearsals, the unique  humanity of her 
productions, and "Murlin Murlo's" 15-year lifespan with the same  cast. You can feel 
its age in the effortless, wordless cues the actors send one  another. Yet 
regardless of how soulful the work, Garmash hints that 15 years of  playing any 
role is really enough.

"I feel we're now approaching the end  of the run," he says.

Volchek's attitude toward time passing is more  regretful. "What can I say 
when some lip-syncing pop star makes more money in  one night than one of my 
actors makes in three months?" she says. "Before, we  were a team. Now we live in 
a world where everyone's out for  themselves."

Steven Leigh Morris is theater editor of the LA  Weekly.
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