STAGE REVIEW : ‘Morning Sky’: Seedy Side of Soviet Life

Few contemporary Soviet plays were done in the West during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, not because of the Cold War, but because the plays were so bland. The characters would be faced with a small, local problem and they would solve it by pulling together. The big problems in the Soviet Union had been solved years ago.

Obviously, that is no longer the view. Last season the Los Angeles Theatre Center brought us Vladimir Gubaryev’s indictment of the laziness and corruption that brought on the Chernobyl disaster, “Sarcophagus.”

Now, in “Stars in the Morning Sky,” LATC gives us Alexander Galin’s look at a class of people who officially don’t exist in the U.S.S.R.: streetwalkers. In an attempt toclean up Moscow during the 1980 Olympics, they were spirited outside the city to detention centers, one of which is the scene for Galin’s story.

Story? Anti-story, rather. Galin’s point is that nothing new can happen to these battered women. They have come to the end of the line, like the characters in Gorky’s “The Lower Depths,” a play that must have been in the author’s mind as he was writing--and that would surely be in the mind of a Russian viewer. (The play has been widely seen in Leningrad and Moscow.)

If life for this class of person hasn’t improved substantially since “The Lower Depths,” perhaps this applies to other classes as well?

That’s one political construction that could be put on “Stars in the Morning Sky,” but it’s more likely that Galin is simply pointing out that 70 years of stirring propaganda about the New Soviet Man and the New Soviet Woman have not, in fact, changed the facts of human nature. Men and women remain as frail and error-prone as they have always been, and a certain percentage of them end up broken. These people can’t be discarded because they don’t fit on some bureaucrat’s chart.

The play connects with the American viewer as well--both with our current scorn for “losers” and our current concerns about the homeless, a class that one can’t ignore in LATC’s neighborhood. (Director Bill Bushnell reminds us in a program note that Skid Row was also “cleaned up” prior to the ’84 Olympics and again while the Pope was here.)

All of this makes Galin’s play pertinent intellectually. But it is not a riveting experience in the theater. It holds one’s attention more firmly than “Sarcophagus” did, but the fact that Galin’s characters are going nowhere means that the play is going nowhere as well.

We know immediately that this is to be a study of lost souls, with many speeches in the Russian manner as to how they got that way. Whether we’re held by these speeches will depend on the quality of the actor. The quality in Bushnell’s production is not even.

Deirdre O’Connell wins your allegiance and admiration as a bleary-eyed hooker who has just about reached the point of no return, and blames absolutely no one for her plight but herself. Elise Thoron’s translation somehow becomes idiomatic in O’Connell’s mouth, where it sounds stilted in the mouths of others.

Gregory Wagrowski is also effective as a gentle young man who wanders in from a neighboring asylum and touches the whores’ hearts. This is a different sort of Holy Fool than the one Wagrowski played in “Sarcophagus”--less the clown, more the Christ figure (as is pointed out by a corny lighting effect). Wagrowski does very little in this role, and does it beautifully.

Nora Heflin, though, has problems with the heroine of the piece, whom we’re supposed to see as a delicate little creature under all that brass. All that we can see is the brass. There are many false notes here, partly because the young woman is supposed to be pretentious and partly because Heflin isn’t comfortable with her.

Neith Hunter and Sharon Barr are the other two prostitutes, and again we hear people announcing their lines rather than living them--maybe because Galin does write that kind of line. Madge Sinclair and Robert Beltran are closer to scale as a mother and son who are trying to keep the prostitutes on the reservation.

An interesting design problem here. We’re supposed to see their cell as a drab place. But designer Douglas D. Smith makes it seem as romantic as the Count of Monte Cristo’s tower, especially when the girls scale it at the end as the torchlit Olympic parade goes by. Great visuals--but there ought to be a way to provide visual interest without making the end of the line seem glamorous.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 8 p.m. Closes Jan. 15. Tickets $22-$25. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.