STAGE : Children’s Theater--Russian Style

A girl and a boy from warring social and economic classes fall in love. Murder results when the boy is blackmailed by one of his friends, who knows about the affair, for a pair of high-quality designer jeans that the boy has no way of getting.

Call it the dark underbelly of “Valley Girl” or “West Side Story” a la Sherman Oaks Galleria. Based on a real story, it’s one of the latest, hottest tickets--not in the United States--but at the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow.

Objections to the downbeat ending in this new play, “Catch 46,” kept it from getting on the stage 2 1/2 years ago. That, however, was pre- glasnost, before Mikhail Gorbachev relaxed censorship as part of his plan to open up the Soviet Union.

“There was a time when such an ending would not be permitted,” admitted Alexei Borodin, artistic director of the theater. “Now we believe we must tell the truth.

“For many years we didn’t want to keep our eyes open and look at negative events in our contemporary life. Right now the Soviet Union is living through a very special period. Then it was quite difficult to make everybody realize the importance of such a production. But fortunately we managed and this play is in.”

We managed: Two modest little words that deceptively minimize the potential professional cost such an investment in quality children’s theater might have meant. But this commitment on the part of the 67-year-old Central Children’s Theatre, the oldest and largest in Russia, is just a microcosm of the financial investment the Soviet Union offers to children’s theater as a whole--a telling contrast with the near-absence of backing for it in the United States.

There are easily 200 or more children’s theaters in the Soviet Union. They are dotted over the landscape like stanzas in a great epic poem dedicated to Soviet youth. In contrast, there are little more than half a dozen in the United States.

Bill Conner, the executive director of one of the United States’ largest and best-endowed children’s theaters, the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, was in Moscow recently to complete plans for a two-year exchange with the Central Children’s Theatre of Moscow. There he talked with envy about the support Soviet children’s theater gets from the government.

The Central Children’s Theatre receives an annual government subsidy of 600,000 rubles, or the equivalent of $1 million, while 72% of the Children’s Theatre Company budget of $3.4 million comes from ticket sales. The difference means that where the Children’s Theatre must charge $7.50-$16.50 a ticket to get by, the Central Children’s Theater can keep prices down from 80 kopeks to 1.8 rubles, or less than $3 a ticket.

Even so, the budgetary differences are misleading, according to Conner, because money goes further in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Both theaters support two venues, one with 700-plus seats, the other with fewer than 100. But in these spaces, the Central Children’s Theatre’s $1-million pays for a full-time staff of 300, of which 73 are actors and 16 are orchestral musicians, while the Children’s Theatre Company can only afford 80 full-time people, including 10 actors.

At present, the Central Children’s Theatre is developing a new show by the journalist/playwright who wrote “Catch 46,” Yuri Shohokochikhin. Borodin refers to the play, “Between Heaven and Earth Flies the Lark,” as a “landmark” in that it is the first Soviet children’s play that deals with drug addiction.

“You can understand my own frustration,” Shohokochikhin said about his latest work. “I’ve been a journalist for 15 years and two years ago was the first time I could write about this.”

In the moment of silence that followed this statement, a look exchanged between Conner and Shohokochikhin revealed a telling glimpse of what their hopes for this exchange might be. One group with the means, held back from the material. Another with the material, but limited means. And on both sides, a hunger for more.