Playhouse’s McAnuff Set to Direct Play in Moscow

La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff has accepted an invitation to direct a play next fall at the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow.

That will apparently make McAnuff the first American to direct a Soviet company. Known as an innovator and iconoclast, McAnuff just returned from several weeks in Moscow, where he discussed the project with the company members of the Sovremennik and its artistic director, Galina Volchyek.

Volchyek is the first Soviet director to stage a U.S. production of a Soviet play, “Echelon,” which she directed in 1978 at the Alley Theatre in Houston.

Volchyek invited McAnuff last year while he visited the Soviet Union as part of a delegation of U.S theater artists. Later, when a delegation of Soviet artists toured the La Jolla Playhouse in May, an official of the Ministry of Culture took McAnuff aside and told him the Sovremennik and the ministry wanted him to direct in the Soviet Union. The agreement was finalized during McAnuff’s most recent visit.

The Sovremennik Theatre produces contemporary plays, including American plays such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The company is translating into Russian “The Death of Von Richthofen As Witnessed from Earth,” a play with music McAnuff wrote, scored and directed for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York.

McAnuff has not settled on the play he will direct, but is leaning toward directing a musical.

“There was a lot of discussion about doing ‘Big River,’ ” he said Friday from New York, where he is working on the musical “80 Days.” He noted that some of the theater members had seen the Tony Award-winning musical he directed for the La Jolla Playhouse and on Broadway.

Although he is elated over the opportunity afforded him, McAnuff was cautious about the ability of such cultural exchanges to immediately affect U.S.-Soviet relations.

“I just don’t see what harm they can do,” he said. “I’m not saying we should get cozy with the Soviets. But I think the better we understand the Soviet Union, the better choices we’ll have.”

McAnuff, who directed “Macbeth” for the Stratford Festival in Ontario, said it will be the first time he has directed in a foreign language.