STAGE : L.A. to Moscow--A Theater Log

Last month Calendar theater critic Dan Sullivan accompanied a group from the California Theatre Council on a 10-day tour of theater in Leningrad and Moscow, sponsored by the Citizens Exchange Council. His journal follows .

It was snowing as we straggled onto the airport bus, but the sun came out this afternoon, to the surprise of our Intourist guide, Victoria--”You must have brought it with you from California.” Victoria has booked us to see a Georgian dance concert tonight. We wail that we came to see plays!

Harlow Robinson, our American guide, gets me a seat to Ostrovsky’s “Wolves and Sheep” at Leningrad’s flagship house, the Gorky. Top ticket price in the U.S.S.R. is three rubles--$5. Reasonable, though not quite the bargain it sounds: The average Russian only takes home 200 rubles a month.

The theater is a beauty, in the old diamond-horseshoe style. Despite the three galleries, it only seats 1,000. Acoustics are clear and the house is full.

The play isn’t “Wolves and Sheep.” A leading actor died last weekend (there are tulips under his photo in the lobby), so the program has been switched to an old farce, “The Death of Tarelkin,” done to music. The switch is no problem. The Gorky has 25 productions on call at any time, and well over 50 actors on its permanent payroll.

Good actors, too, judging from tonight’s show. If the cast falls into shtick, that’s not wrong for a costume farce. They also can handle the songs, without claiming to be opera singers.

After such a vivacious performance, though, it’s strange to see such a grave curtain call. Just where American actors rush forward to be loved, these actors hang back, as if to remind us that they are artists . Maybe they’re just tired after a long day at the theater.

After the show, I have a Pepsi (very big here) with Nagle Jackson of the McCarter Theatre. He’s here guest-directing “The Glass Menagerie.” Jackson is elated to be working with a big permanent company, the desideratum of every American resident-theater director.

But I can see the language problem when a message arrives in semi-English. Either Georgi Tovstonogov, the Gorky’s artistic director, will be delighted to see our California group in his office tomorrow afternoon, or Tovstonogov doesn’t want us around bothering his actors.

Post-Pre-Censorship

MARCH 9--Tovstonogov is delighted to see us. He has been at the Gorky since ‘56, so he has seen ideological “thaws” before. But he seems genuinely encouraged by Mr. Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

Glasnost means that Soviet theaters no longer need the permission of the Ministry of Culture to do a play. This isn’t an end to censorship, but it is an end to pre -censorship. “We--the artistic committee of the theater--make our own choices.” Tovstonogov, of course, has veto power.

Perestroika means that Soviet actors will sign contracts with individual theaters, rather than being employees of the state. This will make it easier for the theaters to jettison people who aren’t pulling their own weight--what Tovstonogov calls “the ballast.” The downside of a big permanent company, it seems, is inertia.

Tovstonogov’s budget is about 1 million rubles a year, with 30% to 40% coming from the government and the rest coming from the box office. The average actor makes around 250 rubles a month, with stars getting up to 500 a month. Not great wages, but it beats Equity Waiver.

Ted Schmitt of the Cast Theatre asks how the Gorky develops new plays. But the idea of developing a script doesn’t register. You either do somebody’s play or you don’t. Probably you don’t. Literary manager Dina Svartz: “Nine out of 10 new playwrights suffer from graphomania.”

That night, a performance at the Leningrad Young People’s Theatre of Kipling’s “The Cat Who Went His Own Way.” The actors are on automatic pilot and the set is frumpy, but the kids give it a good hand. “What’s better, film or theater?” we ask some kids in the lobby. “Oh! FEELM!”

Still Testing the Ice

MARCH 10--Tell us more about glasnost , we ask some Leningrad theater critics. What if a playwright wrote a script that said, “Down with the KGB”? We’ve had such a play, the critics reply. True, it was about Stalin’s KGB. But it’s not impossible to imagine such a play being set in the present. Not that anyone has actually written one. . . .

They’re not being cagey. They honestly don’t know. Glasnost only goes back to ’86 and everybody is still testing the ice. The pressure from above to produce “positive” plays is definitely off. It’s permissible for theater to acknowledge that the U.S.S.R. has social problems. It’s OK to criticize Stalin and satirize “the bureaucrats.”

Beyond that, it’s a question. There may be more freedom out there than the theater quite knows what to do with, one critic says. (The feeling is that journalists have taken more chances under glasnost than dramatists have.) Again, the lid could come back down tomorrow.

If that happens, our critics say, don’t be too quick to blame an official cabal. Plenty of ordinary citizens don’t like all the muckraking that’s going on, on the stage and elsewhere. If you broke your back for Stalin during the Great Patriotic War, you don’t want to hear what a tyrant he was.

That night: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at a neighborhood theater. We’re told that Tennessee Williams is one of the most popular playwrights in Russia, despite his “pathology.” Williams would cackle his head off at this production. Maggie counts the beats as she moves to the bureau. Brick has gray hair. The No-Neck Monsters serenade Big Daddy with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” To the train station, quick!

On to Moscow

MARCH 11--Moscow. Apartment blocks, blue-domed churches and more snow. The city has more than 40 permanent theaters, most of them repertory operations like the Gorky, and most of them without a ticket to spare at curtain time (7 p.m., a half-hour earlier than Leningrad.)

In memory of Lee Strasberg and the Method, my first stop is the Moscow Art Theatre. Russian theater people speak of “Mahat” as of some aged uncle who should have had the sense to retire years ago. “Academic.” “Dead.”

But the MAT’s “The Lower Depths” has a lot of resonance for the visitor interested in ensemble playing. The first act, especially, shows actors with superb antennae--the ability to concentrate on the task in front of them, while registering a change in pressure as someone new enters the room from behind.

This kind of ebb-and-flow playing may be considered old hat in Moscow: Yesterday’s naturalism, a style that the modern theater has got to get beyond. In the United States, we see it as a perennial style, and wish that more of our companies were fluent in it. It’s reassuring to find the flame still burning in the Mother Church.

Later scenes are more overtly “acted,” with the actors tying into their big speeches and making the most of them. Maybe making a little too much of them, but I rather enjoyed the faint flavor of ham. Gorky’s characters aren’t shy, after all. Also, it’s a reminder that Stanislavsky put as much stress on clear, vibrant speech as he did on emotional truth. The Method tended to see these things as opposites.

The Ladder of Success

MARCH 12--The point comes up again as we chat with some young actors from the State Institute of Dramatic Art. Their teacher, Leonid Heifetz, tells us that they’ve been trained according to the Stanislavsky System--including voice, movement and dance.

We’ve just seen them perform a new musical version of Mayakovsky’s “The Bedbug” at, appropriately, the Mayakovsky Theatre Annex. This is their senior thesis, as it were, and it’s been so well received that they may go into the professional theater world as a unit, as when Patti Lupone and her Juilliard classmates became the Acting Company.

We learn that there are only four theater conservatories in Moscow, graduating fewer than 100 actors a year. Training lasts four years, is free and guarantees the graduate some kind of first job, even if it’s a resident theater in the sticks. (The U.S.S.R. has about 400 resident theaters.)

Compare that with some 27,000 theater majors in the United States, vying for a couple of hundred jobs. On the other hand, in the United States you don’t need official sanction to become an actor. Here, if you aren’t accepted to a state acting school, you probably won’t have a career. And Heifetz tells us that only one applicant out of 1,000 makes it to his school.

“The Bedbug” proves that Heifetz chose this class well. They’re a match in terms of training, but they’re cut to all different physical patterns, so it’s a real world up there on the stage. Prisybkin, the hero, is played by a stocky youth with a gap in his teeth, your archetypal blue-collar actor. The party functionary is a slight red-headed kid who would be perfect for Moliere rascals.

The latter provides the show’s most indelible image. A scene calls for the characters to applaud. No, comrades!, the Party man tells them with a smile--not like that. Like this. In unison. At the curtain call, the actor insists that the entire house clap that way. Big laugh--and we do.

After the show, the students want to hear about theater in California. How long does the average show run? About six weeks, we tell them. They are taken aback. In Russia a production might stay in the repertory for a dozen years.

But the kids don’t want to hear any bad news about American theater. They’ve seen the movie of “A Chorus Line,” and it all looks pretty glamorous. Sam Woodhouse of the San Diego Repertory Company tells them that the average American actor is a waiter. “Ah,” says the redhead, not totally in jest, “that is why your standard of culture is so high.”

Puppets for All Ages

MARCH 13--The only setting for “Catch 46” at the Moscow Central Children’s Theatre is a low bleachers. (The kids in the story are soccer fans--see article on Page 48.) But because it’s placed on a revolve, we get to see it from all angles, and it can support interior scenes as well as exterior ones.

Stage design in the U.S.S.R. hasn’t got out of hand. Scenery exists in order to provide ground for the figure; light exists in order to provide a certain atmosphere; costumes exist in order to define character. The job is to help the actors tell the story. The actors in “Catch 46” are young and delighted to be playing a realistic tale of the streets, rather than a piece about young heroes in the Great Patriotic War.

The audience members are teen-agers, perhaps a little younger than the gang members in the story. But they’re old enough to identify with them, and to pick up on any false notes in how they’re portrayed. Clearly, “Catch 46” passes the test. The kids listen hard and take the tragic ending to heart.

Again, this is one of two dozen productions that the Moscow Central Children’s Theatre has in stock. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum has trouble financing one show a year for its children’s theater unit, the Improvisational Theatre Project. We’re way behind the Russians here.

That night: The Obrazov Puppets. Not a Punch and Judy show in the park, but a 500-seat repertory theater that plays to as many adults as it does children. Our show, in fact, is an adults-only fairy tale from Czechoslovakia. I’m struck by the illusion of depth within the miniature proscenium. When the “horses” ride away, it seems they really are riding away.

Then I realize what a deep stage it is. Similarly, it’s a shock when 18 smiling puppeteers come out to take a bow at the end. They see themselves as actors, not as birthday-party entertainers, and so does the audience. After the show we browse through the theater’s lobby museum. The company has been around almost since the October Revolution.

Instant Interpretation

MARCH 14--We spend the morning watching Mark Lamos of the Hartford Stage rehearsing “Desire Under the Elms” at the Pushkin Theatre. (American directors are hot here--Des McAnuff of the La Jolla Playhouse is the next one expected.)

Mark is officially having a terrific time, but we can see the strain of directing through a translator. Not only can you not make yourself understood instantly, you’re not sure what people are muttering about over there in the corner. Paranoia could loom.

Moreover, Mark has got to work fast, as he’s due back in Hartford in a couple of weeks. So he’s working out the music and light cues in detail with the booth as he goes along, rather than waiting for technical rehearsals.

That makes for some tension when a blast of music from the booth cuts into an intimate scene like a noon whistle. “He is just trying to get it right,” says the translator. “But not while the actors are speaking!” says Mark, semi-aghast.

At a break, we ask his cast what it’s like to work with a American director. Tough, they say, but interesting. Where a Russian director with six months to work on a show will let his actors find their characters by themselves, Mark “knows what he wants and makes us give it to him right away.”

Being pros, they can deliver. There’s a scene in “Desire Under the Elms” where the old man gets down on his knees to pray. Mark tells the actor that it all looks too pious. The actor touches Mark on the arm--I get you, boss. The first time he had knelt straight up, with his fingertips touching and his head held high. Now he bows his head and entwines his fingers. “Yes!” whoops Mark.

In the afternoon, we visit the Chekhov Museum. This involves strapping huge felt sandals to our shoes so as not to mar the floors, and listening to the guide explain every inkwell, picture and manuscript in the collection. Chekhov crossed out a lot.

In the evening, Anatoly Efros’ staging of “The Cherry Orchard” at the Taganka Theatre. Much less involving than Peter Brook’s New York production, and purposely so. This is one of those deconstructivist productions that play against the text, so as to expose it as a sacred cow, or as a mere bundle of signals.

So in the first scene everybody is angry that Madame Ranevskaya is coming home from Paris on the late train, rather than delighted, and when she appears, she’s drunk. Moscow sees so much Chekhov that it’s probably necessary to divorce the text from its accustomed responses from time to time; but one had come to Moscow precisely in hopes of seeing what the accustomed responses were.

I did, once more, enjoy the routine of the cloakroom. It’s a mortal sin in the Russian theater not to check your coat. The practical reason is to keep the auditorium neat and unfrowzy during the performance.

But something else is going on. As we check our coats, we are merging into an audience. Beyond that, Russians seem to enjoy huddling around the cloak room counter. They aren’t in a big hurry and they don’t resent being bumped or pressed from behind. I haven’t heard one “watch it, buddy” or “quit pushing.” There’s a sense that the crowd is a biological mass that will sort itself out with patience.

After the show, there’s a little more urgency to get through the line and out the door, but it’s nothing like the anxiety of a Broadway crowd to make the last train to Scarsdale. There are big mirrors in the lobby and everybody checks himself out before hitting the street, making sure the fur hat is at the right angle.

We are not talking about a herd of ox-like people here. Russian theatergoers simply enjoy taking things at a moderate tempo. They also enjoy being in company. Note how many women you see walking with their arms linked, chummy.

A Faith in Freedom

MARCH 15--Cookies and tea at Theatre magazine. The editors have just published a piece calling for the return of the exiled Soviet director, Yuri Lyubimov, still officially an unperson here. (It has since been announced that Lyubimov will be returning to the Taganka Theatre in May to finish work on a project started four years ago.) A playwright at the table, Grigory Gorin, notes that in the old days it was left to the directors like Lyubimov to make sub rosa comments on forbidden topics, by having the actors pause after a line, or by a light change. Now a playwright can make the point in writing.

But is the party going to let absolutely anybody say absolutely anything? Censorship still exists, we are told, but it is supposed to restrict itself to pornography, the revelation of state secrets, the incitement of racial hatred and “propaganda for war.” A party official might not like something in a play, but the playwright could appeal the matter to a panel from the Union of Theater Workers--with no guarantee, of course, that he would win. Cases have gone both ways.

“It concerns our whole lives, this issue,” an editor says. “Nobody can know what is in the future. But if we keep harboring the thought that reversal is always possible, we won’t manage to accomplish anything. We believe there won’t be a reversal.”

And he adds: “May we hope that you in the United States will maintain the same level of democracy that you have now?” It’s a riposte, but there is a germ of real concern. The first thing that the kids at the Theater Institute had asked us was, “Who is going to be the next President?”

That night, “The Inspector General” at the Maly Theatre Affiliate. No revisionism here. Another solid, bread-and-butter production. I especially liked the Mayor, a swarthy older actor with something “beloved” about him. You can imagine him starring in an American sitcom. An older actress also makes something delicious of the moment where a babushka comes in to make a complaint. There are no small parts in the Russian theater, only short parts.

Hot ‘Heart of a Dog’

MARCH 16--A very frank conversation with a Soviet acquaintance who is horrified to hear what shows we have seen in Moscow--absolutely the most deadly stuff in the city. May perestroika put all such theaters out of business! And next time you come to Russia, call me first!

Vladimir Gubaryev, author of “Sarcophagus,” comes by for a chat later in the morning. His point about glasnost is that much of the secrecy of yesterday was imposed by department bosses trying to cover their behinds, and that those days are gone forever. But, unfortunately, the older generation will continue, by habit, to write for the “editor within.” He, luckily, is of the younger generation--in spirit.

That night, the best show of our stay: A new adaptation of Bulgakov’s great satiric novella, “Heart of a Dog,” at the Moscow Young People’s Theatre.

This could become a hit in the West, another “Strider.” It’s a fable about a stray dog who gets a gland transplant and turns into a man--a low brute who terrorizes the professor who created him. Written a year after the death of Lenin, and not published until recently in the Soviet Union, the fable could be seen today as a slam at Stalinism or at the pretentions of the Revolution itself--because the professor is pretty clearly Lenin.

The director, Henrietta Yanovskaya, gives us tea after the show. She isn’t about to be pinned down on the meaning of the fable. But was it clear as a story? As clear as a fever dream. The professor adores “Aida,” so the back half of the set is a golden Egyptian temple, which somehow becomes the professor’s apartment, whose floor is somehow covered with deep black snow--wonderful stuff for a “dog” to root around in. And when this dog-man pulls a revolver, people in the hall look at each other. It’s the hottest ticket in Moscow.

MARCH 17--On the plane. Conclusions: An American envies the Russian theater its structure, its budget, its seriousness, its talented actors and designers, its place in the society. To be a theater person here isn’t to be in show biz, but to be an artist and an intellectual. It’s also exciting to see Soviet playwrights and directors testing the limits of glasnost . But their tentativeness is quite prudent. Intellectuals in this society have enjoyed the fine weather before, followed by ice and snow.