Review: ‘Ivanov’ @ UCLA Live

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Fog rolls in throughout the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz’s production of “Ivanov.” But even though the effect is largely confined to the stage area, it’s a sure bet that anyone attending this UCLA Live Seventh International Theatre Festival offering with the hope of encountering Chekhov’s early drama will find themselves completely fogged in.

Maybe it’s better to leave the Russian playwright out of this. Or at least give him lower billing. This is a deconstruction, which ipso facto puts the director in the spotlight. But to be honest, I was only intermittently aroused by the shock of Bulgarian-born auteur Dimiter Gotscheff’s straitjacket interpretation.

The real reason to investigate this work, which runs through Sunday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, is to marvel at a world-class ensemble capable of enlivening a monochromatic canvas with a certifiably antic theatricality. Of course, I’m writing this for that theater-going subset who won’t mind sitting for nearly 2 1/2 hours without intermission glancing at English supertitles as actors howl in German.

Ah, leave it to the European avant-garde to come up with seriously playful solutions to problems of its own crackpot invention. The production, imported from one of Berlin’s leading centers for theatrical innovation, reduces “Ivanov” to a drama of “existential despair,” as the program notes diagnose it. Saddled with a stagnant concept, the actors are charged with rescuing the audience from total stupefaction by deploying as much hyper-theatricality as they can muster, sometimes to a few orchestrated strains of such mawkish pop hits as “My Heart Will Go On” and “All By Myself.”

Chekhov is often erroneously dismissed as “static,” but Gotscheff’s austere version really grinds the action to a halt. The irony is that “Ivanov,” the tale of a neurotic suffering an identity crisis as his universe crashes down around him, is loaded with melodrama. The first act introduces us to “Ivanov” (Samuel Finzi) and his paralyzing melancholy. The second act ends with Ivanov’s wife, Anna (a husky voiced, daringly unangelic Almut Zilcher), who has been cut off by her parents for marrying outside the Jewish faith, discovering her husband in an embrace with the infatuated young daughter of his impatient creditors (Nele Rosetz, looking like a new member of the B-52’s). The third act culminates with Anna being told by Ivanov (in the most vicious manner possible) that she is dying from tuberculosis. And the final act climaxes in, let’s just say, a 19th century bang, which the playwright learned to avoid only after “The Seagull.”

Gotscheff transforms this Chekhovian soap opera into “Endgame.” Now, a Beckettian reading of Ivanov is no more wrong than a Beckettian reading of “King Lear,” as Peter Brook taught us to appreciate. It all depends on how it’s done. The trouble here is that the director would rather take a facile leap into the absurd than match the playwright’s brooding reflection on the imprisoning nature of character.

The cause of Ivanov’s depression is the subject of general dispute among his friends and family. He’s in need of love, he’s the product of his environment, he’s one of Russia’s “superfluous” men (i.e., a Hamlet-like kvetcher who doesn’t see the point in doing anything). When Anna, pushed to the brink by his behavior, accuses him of being the fortune-hunting scoundrel that gossiping tongues say he is, he utters unretractable cruelty that for all intents and purposes seals his doom.

Our protagonist, neither a closeted hero nor an abject villain, is already disgusted by his own moral and emotional failures. He just can’t abide others, especially Lvov (Max Hopp as an evangelical fop), the self-righteous doctor treating Anna, imposing their simplistic definitions on him. In fact, Ivanov feels he got into the mess by trying to lead an idealistic existence he was ultimately incapable of sustaining.

Samuel Finzi, shuffling about as though he were weighed down with ennui, is extremely adept at theatricalizing Ivanov’s alienation — his every gesture reveals what a burden human connection has become. And no wonder when you take a gander at the circus freaks Gotscheff has vibrantly assembled as a stand-in for this provincial Russian society.

Dressed for a Fellini carnival, these ghoulish figures are trapped in solipsistic quicksand — a reasonable assessment, though more effective as an image than as a dramatic experience. The skillfully audacious cast members certainly leave you wondering what double-jointed theatrical trick they’ll do next, but be grateful that the fourth act is replaced with a spray-painted stick figure, a few crashing dummies and some lines interpolated from “The Cherry Orchard.”

Is any of this resonant? Only marginally so. But then postmoderns find new thrills in turning classics into potpourri.

-- Charles McNulty

‘Ivanov,’ Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. $40 - $60. (310) 825-2101 Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (no intermission)

Top photo: Almut Zilcher as Anna Petrovna and Samuel Finzi as the title character in ‘Ivanov.’