Commentary : Desire Under the Realm : Soviet Theater Rides on Cutting Edge of Social Change

Fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit may be enough to make a San Diegan cry “winter,” but at this time of year, Muscovites are eating ice cream under their fur hats while the wind blows 20 below zero.

It is awesome in its way, this vision of a hardy folk seemingly untouched by the winter that defeated the mighty Napoleon. But one shouldn’t confuse the ability to endure with invulnerability. The tough exteriors get the Soviets through tough times.

Underneath, they are sentimental and idealistic to a point that hearkens back to the American ‘50s and early ‘60s. Or at least that was the impression some of us got from Soviet theater during an 11-day tour of Leningrad and Moscow. The tour was co-sponsored by the California Theatre Council and the Citizens Exchange Council.

The Russians’ favorite American playwrights, we were told, are Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (who is referred to by some Russians as the “American Chekhov”). Their favorite Russian playwrights are ideological and idealistic. And their presentation is modest to the point of being chaste--something which makes for some interesting reinterpretations of emotionally charged American classics.

Mark Lamos, who last week became the first American to direct a play in the Soviet Union, recalled a revealing conversation with Yuri Yeremin, the artistic director of the Pushkin Theatre. Yeremin, who had given Lamos the historic job of directing O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” at his theater, had lent Lamos his acting company and circumscribed his work--subtly but significantly--with his advice.

Lamos wanted to play up the erotic elements in the play but found himself wrestling with the Soviet translation of the work that was used when it premiered at the very same theater 62 years ago.

The “desire” in the play was so watered down in the translation that even the title ended up as the Russian equivalent of “Love Under the Trees.” Lamos tried to get the word “love” changed to the equivalent of “passion” but failed.

“Love is more important to Soviet audiences,” Lamos remembered Yeremin telling him. “They lead such hard lives. They’ll come to a play with love in the title.”

Over dinner at the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow, the boyish, blue-jeaned Lamos, who turned 43 during the tour, made it clear that he did not take Yeremin’s reference to hard lives as a comment on the wind-chill factor.

He talked about the long lines Russians must face for limited goods, about their drab utilitarian apartments and about the subject that agitated him most--the limitations placed on their freedom that are just beginning to lift slightly under glasnost.

“Americans think that everything’s changed here, that everyone’s so friendly and everyone’s so free,” Lamos said. “They’re not, they’re not and they’re not. There’s a lot of warmth in the Russian personality, but there’s also just as much fear.

“The most depressing thing is that there are still subjects they won’t deal with--homosexuality, sexual aberration.

For Lamos, glasnost was clearly a mockery of what freedom is in America. But in certain ways, glasnost is like the Russian winter. The chill that Americans feel is embraced by Soviet artists as a thaw worth celebrating.

Repeatedly, as the American directors, actors and critics on the theater tour questioned their Soviet counterparts on the realities of the changes, the answers shared the hope that a process of freedom had begun. The mood, however, was one tinged with the fear that there would be reverberations for the daring if the changes did not continue.

Certainly, all who lived through the reforms of Khrushchev and the retrenchment of Brezhnev recognized that glasnost may end as quickly as it began. Soviet critics on the staff of “Teatr,” the leading theatrical magazine there, pointed out that for the first time, plays do not have to be approved by the Soviet minister of culture. And artistic directors are able to choose their own plays.

Homosexuality may be an untouchable subject, but for the first time, audiences are seeing plays dealing with such formerly taboo subjects as drug abuse and Stalin-era atrocities.

The exchanges between Soviet and American artistic directors is having a significant impact on the way American plays are being presented.

Lamos, the artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, is just the first of these. On deck is Nagle Jackson of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., who is now rehearsing Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” for an April 19 opening in Leningrad.

Des McAnuff of the La Jolla Playhouse is also scheduled.

There remains some uncertainty, some distrust, perhaps. But one thing is certain: The Russians, who readily slap down their three rubles ($5) a ticket for theater seats will be watching the works of American and Soviet directors for clues as to just how open they themselves can dare become.

In that sense, the theater can be looked on as the “cutting edge” of glasnost in Soviet society.

“The theater is very much in the forefront of change,” said Edith Markson, who, as president of the Theater International Exchange Service (TIES) in New York, introduced most of the participating Soviet and American directors to each other.

“Everyone is wired,” Markson said. “It’s a time of experimentation. That does make it exciting.”

What is apparent, however, is a change mixed with trepidation, and American directors are both alternately exhilarated and unnerved by being caught in the middle. Being on the cutting edge is risky business.

McAnuff, who will be directing at Moscow’s Sovremennik Theater in October, is already having his share of frustration. Most of his U.S. colleagues are being asked to direct American classics, but McAnuff bucked the trend by proposing the controversial “A Walk in the Woods,” Lee Blessing’s play about nuclear arms negotiations that McAnuff just brought to Broadway.

The proposal was turned down.

McAnuff believes the objection to “A Walk in the Woods” may be due to Soviet sensitivity about the event upon which the play is based--the independent agreement on arms control reached by a Soviet and an American negotiator, and later rejected by both governments.

“I don’t think the Soviet Union has ever really acknowledged that the walk in the woods ever really happened,” he said.

In Moscow, Lamos found that some confrontation was inevitable in the process of exploring the differences between the two nations. One difference that works in favor of the state-supported Soviet theater is that money, manpower and time aren’t the production killers they are in the U.S.

Lamos, for example, has been able to stage a crowd scene in “Desire” that the Hartford Stage Company had to cut because they couldn’t afford the actors’ salaries.

On the other hand, Lamos also had to deal with Soviet resistance to the themes inherent in “Desire Under the Elms.” In the original Soviet version, one of the central characters was portrayed as a villain simply for wanting land. Lamos revived the American slant of the character for his production.

Lamos lost his battle to keep “passion” in the title, but he did infuse it in the play itself. In the scene where Eben is seduced by his stepmother, Lamos successfully defended a brief moment of nudity.

That in itself was not unique. But watching what Lamos pulled out of his Soviet actors was. Each time he stopped the rehearsal in the elegant 870-seat venue to give instructions, through a translator, one sensed the sudden crackle of electricity in a world lit by candles.

When Lamos’ play opened last Wednesday, some audience members told Reuters that they objected to the crudeness of the his translation, but the overall response in the packed theater was polite applause for the actors and a standing ovation for the director.