<i> Glasnost </i> Keeps Pace With Soviet Playwright Galin

What was life like for Soviet playwrights before glasnost ? A fable-like glimpse was offered by Gleb Panfilov’s recent film, “Theme,” in which a refusenik dramatist prepares to emigrate, while his friend writes popular, state-approved hackwork.

Those were the extremes. Alexander Galin’s life as a Soviet playwright falls somewhere in between these poles. He had early success (“A Delusion” in 1978), and, three years later, his comedy “Retro” was the most-staged work in the country. But four years went by before the Mikhail Gorbachev-led thaw allowed a production of his portrayal of the underbelly of Moscow during the 1980 Olympics, “Stars in the Morning Sky,” by Leningrad’s Maly Theatre.

That was 1986, “the year everything changed, when there was a rapid intellectual shift,” Galin said in an office at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where the English-language premiere of “Stars” opened Friday. “Sasha,” as he likes being called, was accompanied by his wife, Galina, and “Stars” translator Elise Thoron.

On their first trip west of Europe, Sasha and Galina may have thought they were coming to America the Beautiful. Yet it was hard to find evidence for the mythic slogan as Galin looked out of the downtown L.A. office window. Grimy streets, decaying brick buildings and forlorn street people filled the window view, and the playwright’s eye was constantly drawn to it, seeming so close to the world of his play.

“Stars in the Morning Sky” examines four prostitutes who are relocated to an abandoned mental hospital in Moscow’s shoddy outskirts as the Olympic torch is being carried to the Games’ opening ceremonies. They are victims of the Brezhnev regime’s plan to rid the capital of any “undesirables.”

“They just swept them off the streets,” Galin said, recalling the play’s genesis, “but after the Games were over, the prostitutes came back into town.”

He stressed, though, that “Stars” is neither about women who sell their bodies nor about sport as patriotic event.

“The play is about responsibility of all kinds--personal, sexual, social--and that extends to the homeless, wherever they are,” he said, pointing out the office window at the destitute streets below. Galin hoped that audiences would come away with a clearer sense that “society has to be responsible not only to build spaceships and factories, but to guarantee that the oppressed are helped.”

The playwright talked with none of the circumspection heard from recent L.A. visitors, such as Vladimir Gubaryev (“Sarcophagus”) or Mikhail Shatrov, the dean of Soviet dramatists. They are older men, and Galin made it clear that a new, more frank generation is asserting itself.

“The plays of the past built myths that blinded people and depicted life as wonderful,” he said. “They lied to audiences.”

At 41, Galin is part of a “new wave” of writers who have been attempting to recover the naturalistic art of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the patriarch of the Soviet stage in the 1920s. While this may suggest a conservative trend to many American theater artists who have been bucking naturalism for years, it means something very different to Galin’s comrades.

“We don’t ignore the masters, of course, but what’s closest to me are the new plays. And the basis of them is truth, that is, the way life is now lived. The language I’m after is everyday speech, but theatricalized, so it’s made vital.”

Just as the social ills were ignored under Brezhnev--and the Olympics sweep, for Galin, explicitly symbolized this--so theater followed in line. “Years and years of problems built up,” he noted, “and people tried to run away from them. But they’ll catch up with you sooner or later.”

Eventually, success caught up with “Stars in the Morning Sky.” Since the Maly Theatre production, the play has received more than 100 Soviet stagings. “When it came to Moscow,” Galin said, “there was such a demand for tickets that members of the U.S. Embassy couldn’t go as a group. They had to come one at a time!” The Maly company took it this spring to Glasgow’s Mayfest arts festival and then to New York’s International Festival of the Arts. The LATC edition is in American hands, under Bill Bushnell’s direction.

Harlow Robinson, associate professor of Russian literature at the State University of New York at Albany and an observer of the current Soviet theater scene, attributes much of the play’s popularity to its topicality and some daring nude scenes. “He’s the closest thing to Neil Simon in the USSR,” Robinson noted.

Galin has been sitting in on rehearsals, but admitted that he has no idea how the show will turn out. “Not before there’s an audience. But it doesn’t matter to me if they don’t laugh and react the same way as a Moscow audience.”

What does matter to him is professionalism, and he is just now in awe of the American theater makers he’s worked with.

“They do everything professionally--it is kind of a law here,” he said, breaking out into his characteristically knowing grin. “It is something Russians could learn.”

Indeed, some real learning could go on next summer. At that time, LATC plans--”if we can get the travel money together,” said artistic director Bushnell--to send its Latino Theatre Lab, its production of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “Stone Wedding,” and Shabaka, director of LATC’s Black Theatre Artists Workshop, to Moscow’s Yermolova Theatre as part of an exchange program. In return, according to Bushnell and Galin, the Yermolova will send one of its experimental workshop productions and members of the playwright lab that Galin runs.

Galin said it will be “nearly impossible” for Soviets to return to pre- glasnost times, but added that “it’s better for (Soviet artists) now than in many bourgeois countries.” He cited greater intellectual openness, the existence of more than 500 government-funded (but not controlled) acting companies, and a writers’ union. “But success,” he hastened to add, “depends upon yourself.”

In that light, even though he considers himself a man of the theater, Galin is fond of calling himself a homebody. “When a playwright closes the door to his study--if he has one--and writes, he is alone. There are no directors. No actors. No producers.”

Has glasnost , then, changed him at all?

“Look! I’m here in California ,” he said, almost mystically. “We couldn’t have done this before. It’s opening my vision. Maybe it’ll make me smarter!”