STAGE REVIEW : ‘Breaking the Silence’ Shatters the Barriers of Displacement

Last season, the Pasadena Playhouse had such a popular hit in the musical “Mail” that its success impeded a proper evaluation of the 60-year-old theater’s comeback.

“Mail” is now remanded to Broadway (it’s in previews, opening April 14) and the Playhouse’s 1988 main stage season was launched Sunday with something entirely different: Stephen Poliakoff’s “Breaking the Silence.” We now know “Mail” was not an aberration. Both the play and the production are superb.

Poliakoff’s “Silence” was “suggested” (a word carefully chosen) by Poliakoff’s grandfather’s own flight from the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. By retracing a few sketchy facts and fictionalizing the rest, the playwright has created an extraordinary image of quintessential displacement--in one’s skin, in one’s beliefs and in one’s world.

“Silence” shatters a number of sound barriers: the emotional gulfs between husband and wife, father and son, master and servant, nation and subject, old worlds and new. Persons caught in the maelstrom have a choice: to adapt or not. Far more than the story of one family, this is a parable of our parabiotic 20th Century, with its global uprootings, inquisitions, refugee camps and expendable lives.

Poliakoff thrusts us into the turmoil of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. More appropriately, he confines us, along with the once-wealthy, land-owning and now dispossessed Pesiakoff family, to a movable railroad car whose former grandeur, not unlike theirs, has crumbled as violently and completely as the czarist fortunes. Adding insult to injury, Commissar Verkoff (Howard Witt) appoints the father, Nikolai (Ken Ruta), as telephone examiner of the Northern Railroad--a job about as senseless and undignified as it sounds.

It condemns him and his family to aimlessly roaming the northern district in the faded splendor of this prison on wheels. Nikolai has no intention of doing the job, having far more important uses for his time, such as developing a way to put a voice onto the silent screen.

Faced by this refusal, his terrorized wife Eugenia (Kandis Chappell) and their spunky maid Polya (Sally Smythe) understand that it will be up to them to keep up a semblance of telephone work.

All of these players are wretchedly unprepared for this fall. Nikolai is an aristocratic oak, ready to break before he’ll bend. Eugenia is a timorous violet who had never doubted the correctness of her subservient role--until now. And Polya, like J. M. Barrie’s Crichton, becomes their equal in the struggle to survive.

The fourth member of this family is Sasha (Scott Fults), Nikolai’s and Eugenia’s teen-age son. He goes from spoiled but docile to rebellious and proletarian. His revolt, chiefly aimed at his father, prompts him to commit an act of vandalism that catapults all of their lives into still greater chaos.

Poliakoff’s shifts of character are subtle and extremely skillful. We watch the balance of power among them slowly change in adversity. Polya dominates. Then Eugenia bends and grows; she’ll survive. So will Sasha, who is too young not to adapt and conquer. But Nikolai, who won’t budge, stumbles--imperceptibly at first--but we know, for all his unyielding calm, that he’s the one who’ll break.

Chappell, an actress who has never been less than good, is dazzling as Eugenia. A walking nervous breakdown at first, she becomes an unstoppable force as she releases years of pent-up emotion, climaxes the performance in wrenching defiance of the enemy and exits on a strident shout of terror and triumph into the uncharted territory of the future, all her silences broken.

Ruta is only slightly less impressive as a powerful man caught in a time warp--a witty, sometimes exacerbating sophisticate, hopelessly clashing with forces that won’t be resisted. Sally Smythe’s Polya is a match for them both, a spirited mixture of energy and indignation. Fults’ voice is too mature for the young Sasha, but it’s a relatively minor hiccup in the production. Witt is not without humanity as Verkoff, and Mark Herrier and Tim Donoghue create believable portraits as guards.

The symbology of the railroad car (a sensational, oblique design in withered elegance by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio) is exquisite and inescapable: The Pesiakoffs are the wandering Jews, locked in the visible disintegration of their own former glories. And when, at the end, they are liberated into the so-called free world--a world they are wise enough to dread--the moment is astonishing.

Shigeru Yaji and Martin Aronstein have provided apt costume and lighting design, respectively. But Jon Gottlieb’s grinding, rending sound of trains coupling and uncoupling is an integral part of the symbolism, emblematic of the pain and difficulty of release. It is augmented by the Russian bridge music that sounds like baleful recordings by the Red Army chorus.

This is a thoughtful, provocative play, layered like a rich dessert whose flavors you linger over long after it has been consumed. At nearly three hours, it is also long, but under Warner Shook’s finely tuned direction, the pace only slackens once or twice. In addition to creating an articulate and wise piece of theater, Poliakoff also knows how to make it suspenseful.

If things keep on this way, the Playhouse will have made an impressive comeback indeed as a very real contender in the playing fields of serious and creative theater.

Performances at 39 S. El Molino Ave . in Pasadena run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m., with matinees Saturdays at 5 p.m., Sundays at 2, indefinitely. Tickets: $17-$25; (818) 356-PLAY.