STAGE REVIEW : Misreading the Notes From “The Suicide”

When “The Suicide” can play 100 nights in Moscow, glasnost is here. The Friends and Artists Theatre Ensemble has received a letter from Valentine Pluchek, director of Moscow’s Theatre of Satire, confirming that “the show is always sold out and is enthusiastically received by spectators.”

Nikolai Erdman’s satire had been an un-play in the Soviet Union since 1928, when Stalin’s censors killed it after one preview. Watching it at Friends and Artists, one can understand why. Its premise is that the only place where a man dares to tell the truth about the New Russia is in a suicide note.

It’s a macabre play, a funny one, and also a very human one--Gene Wilder would be wonderful as its nebbishy little hero, Podsekalnikov. Pluchek in his letter ranks it with Gogol’s “The Inspector General” (also in town just now, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center). One is inclined to agree.

But not on the basis of the Friends and Artists production.

Director Florinel Fatulescu, a Romanian, sees “The Suicide” as a madhouse farce. From the opening gun, everybody is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, mugging like crazy. There’s some justice to it as a concept--Erdman does think his country has gone around the bend--and it forces these young American actors to hit their marks.

But is it funny? Is it telling? The opening scene could be hilarious: Podsekalnikov (Michael Nehring) and his wife (Darcy Marta) trying to have a satisfactory argument without waking the family in the next room. (In Moscow in 1928 there was always a family in the next room.) But unless we feel the couple veering between the need to sound off and the need to hush up, the joke gets lost. And the joke is the gist of the play: the difficulty of speaking up in a closed society.

At Friends and Artists, we get a lot of shouting, as if that were enough to produce laughs. We also get a set (by Robert W. Zentis) that suggests the Podsekelnikovs are living in a charming wooden cottage instead of a narrow one-room apartment with the toilet down the hall.

This is not the environment of the play, and it’s not the play. Erdman wrote it with a light hand, not a sledgehammer. Why play the mother-in-law as a near-ape (those are Lisa Thayer’s instructions), when she’s funny enough as a whining babushka ?

The noisiness of the fun also keeps us from understanding that Podsekalnikov is not just a dumb bunny--although that, too, of course. Actor Nehring doesn’t make us like him and doesn’t make us dislike him. This is a feat, in a way, but a rather perverse one.

The Punch-and-Judy approach does pay off, slightly, in the second-act party scene, when Podsekalnikov’s new friends see him off to the hereafter. Erdman does want things to get a little surrealistic there. Otherwise, this “Suicide” is so manic that it’s depressing.

Plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Runs indefinitely. Tickets $12. 1761 N. Vermont Ave. (213) 664-0680.

‘THE SUICIDE’

Nikolai Erdman’s play, at Friends and Artists Theatre. Director Florinel Fatulescu. Composer Rodica Fatulescu. Set design Robert W. Zentis. Lighting George Gizienski. Costumes Karen Cockrell. Sound Mitchel Young Evans. Production coordinator Barbara Mello. Associate producers Steve Walker, Maria Rocha, Lois O’Malley. Stage manager Gregory Norman Cruz. Technical directors Artie Gerunda, Clay Wilcox, Robert Hallak. With Michael Nehring, Darcy Marta, Lisa Thayer, Michael David Simms, Pamela Forrest, Ken Hanes, Andrea Stevens, Mitchel Young Evans, Skip Stellrecht, Jon Simpson, Artie Gerunda, Sandy Carlson, Gregory Norman Cruz, Molly Mannix, F. Joseph DeVries, Andrew Barach, Kirk David Scott, Edward John Lowe, Dennis Moynahan, Sydney Katherine Baker, Andre Popa, Mark Holte, Garry Mares, Courtney Gaines, Tony Miller, Tony Foresta, Caren Larkey, Sherry Stipski, Richard Brehm. Musicians Rodia Fatulescu, Peter Lungu, Michael Simms, Mitchel Young Evans.