Commentary : Americans See a Warming Trend on the Soviet Stage : Leningrad’s Bolshoi Dramatic Theater Has Had a Particularly Bright Record Since 1956

“Every country has a capital city and a good city,” says Mikhail, the Gypsy cabdriver. “This is our good city.”

At this hour, with so much snow in the streets, we could be back in Imperial St. Petersburg. Home, please, Mikhail: Over the canal and past the Winter Palace.

Appropriately, I have just come from the theater. If Moscow considers the Moscow Art Theater to be the mother church of the Russian stage, Leningrad can point to the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater, popularly known as the Gorky Theater.

It is a splendid horseshoe-shaped, three-balcony house, again in the Imperial style. After the October Revolution it was the first theater to be renamed and put in the service of the people, and it has had a particularly bright record since 1956, when Georgi Tovstonogov became its artistic director.

That was the period known as “the thaw.” There have been freezes since, but Tovstonogov, 73, has kept his balance and now another thaw has come, known as glasnost.

Will it last? “Hopefully, yes” he told a visiting group from the California Theater Council the other afternoon. What does it mean for Soviet theater?

More freedom, in two ways.

First, and most obviously, more freedom to choose one’s material.

“The bureaucratic structure that reigned previously had a very bad effect on the functioning of a theater,” Tovstonogov said. “Up until last season you needed a special permit from the Ministry of Culture in order to stage a new production, and when the production was ready you had to put it before a special committee to be approved. Now that is over. We make our own choice of play.”

Less obviously, it means freedom to call one’s actors to account. This is still being worked out and it doesn’t apply to a flagship theater like the Gorky, where an actor who is not on the director’s wavelength had probably better start to think about finding another theater, lifetime contract or not.

But in the provincial theaters--and the U.S.S.R. supports nearly 400 professional theaters--the new contracts will make the actor an employee of the house, not of the state. That is not the same thing as privatizing the theater, but it will give the artistic director more command and flexibility in dealing with his troops. In line with the general thrust of perestroika (Gorbachev’s program for restructuring the Soviet economy), the message will be: perform or move over. The state may owe you a job, but not necessarily this job.

Halfhearted work has been the problem and we saw such a performance at the Leningrad Young Peoples Theater, once acclaimed for its artistry. This is not a problem at the Gorky. I was supposed to see a play by Ostrovsky, “Wolves and Sheep.” A leading actor had died the previous weekend however, so another production had to be substituted, a musical based on the 19th-Century farce, “The Death of Tarelkin.”

No problem for the Gorky. There are 60 actors in the company and some 20 shows in its active repertory, including “Amadeus” and Neil Simon’s “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” “The Death of Tarelkin” had humor, style and good singing, although the Gorky hardly ever performs musicals. Singing, however, is one of those skills that the well-trained Russian actor is expected to master. Ask this company to perform magic tricks and they would probably be able to do that as well.

“What is this play about?” I asked Nagle Jackson at intermission. “I have no idea, but isn’t it wonderful?” Jackson said. He is the artistic director of the McCarter Theater Company in Princeton, N.J., here to direct “The Glass Menagerie” at the Gorky for an April opening--another sign of glasnost .

(Mark Lamos, Des MacAnuff and Adrian Hall are other American directors working in Soviet theater this year, part of an exchange program that started with Tovstonogov’s production of “Uncle Vanya” at the McCarter last year.

“It’s what we dream of and will never have,” Jackson said of the Gorky company. “Fine actors who can afford to put theater first; and plenty of time to rehearse.”

No, Jackson doesn’t have any Russian. But he knows the play, and his actors know what he wants. “First, though, everybody gets to say what he thinks the scene means. That includes the stage manager. This really is a collective. Then I blow the whistle and tell them what they’re going to do. It’s a wonderful way to work.”

Jackson even likes the idea that if the Gorky’s artistic committee doesn’t approve of his production, it won’t, in fact, open.

“Every American director has been in the position of wanting to scrap a show,” he said, “except that there wasn’t anything else to put on in its place. Here there are 20 other things ready to go on.”

Tickets for the Gorky costs three rubles (about $5) and there is rarely one to be had. The audience reaction is exactly the opposite of an American one. Where the American audience tends not to pay all that much attention to the performance and to clap its head off at the end, this audience listens deeply and applauds moderately. The actors reply in kind, like laborers who know they are worthy of their hire.

Going to the theater in Russia is not, perhaps, such a big deal as it is in the United States. It is something that cultured people regularly do, like reading books and going to concerts.

“Yes, I go to the Gorky often,” says Mikhail, a cultured person. “The work is a little old-fashioned, but intelligent. A very sound company.”

We arrive at my hotel, which resembles the Pentagon more than anything in Imperial Russia. Mikhail does not have a meter, being in private enterprise. “How much do I owe you?”

“It is for you to say.”

“Five rubles?” He nods, exactly like a Gorky theater actor taking a bow.

“It is enough. Good luck in Moscow.”