Making Up for Lost Time, Under Glasnost : A worldwide demand for his plays keeps Soviet director Lev Dodin challenged and busy

Maly Drama Theatre director Lev Dodin is a man on the run. For more than a year now he has been taking his shows on the road--first the controversial play about Moscow prostitutes forced into exile during the 1980 Olympics, “Stars in the Morning Sky,” and more recently the despairing performance of “Brothers and Sisters,” Fyodor Abramov’s epic about Soviet life in the Stalin era.

His schedule began last year at the Glasgow Mayfest in May and has since taken him to London, Toronto, New York, Rotterdam, Hamburg, West Berlin, Salzburg, Munich and Tokyo. On Oct. 22 “Brothers and Sisters” will open at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre as part of the city’s Treasures of Soviet Art Festival.

The worldwide demand for performances of Dodin’s plays--or spectacles as they are fittingly called in Russian--is a tribute to the man as a director, a teacher of drama, and most importantly a rebel with a cause. And the standing ovations he receives are a triumph of art overcoming discomfort, for the plays are performed in Russian, with the audience hearing a translation of the text through earphones. This is especially a challenge in the case in “Brothers and Sisters,” which is more than six hours long.

Just back from Munich with only a few busy days before he leaves for Tokyo, Dodin’s luggage remains unpacked in his office. During the interview, he is repeatedly interrupted by phone calls regarding the problems of getting airline tickets from the Soviet airline Aeroflot for the upcoming trip. It is a problem caused by glasnost, Dodin’s literary manager, Michael Stronin explains: The new freedom to travel has deluged the airline with requests for tickets.

Nevertheless, the charming, bespectacled and bearded Dodin seats himself in a maroon velvet arm chair that vaguely and appropriately resembles a throne. After more than 10 years in a government-imposed no man’s land, Dodin has come home to roost and to crow at the Maly Theatre.

Where once the government wouldn’t give him a job, it has now rewarded him with a beautifully appointed office next to his theater. The times have changed, and Dodin, at 45, is enjoying it.

Asked why he couldn’t get a job during the 10-year exile between his first job as a director at Leningrad’s children’s theater and his 1983 return to a full-time job as the artistic director at the Maly, he responds with humor: “You should ask those who didn’t give me work!” The reasons, he claims, were “absurd and not political.” Still, had Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost existed at that time, he thinks he would have been given work.

Finally Dodin’s day came. Twice. “I was invited to work at the Moscow Art Theatre. Then Leningrad got jealous and offered me the position of the Maly Theatre Artistic Director. So after a long while without work, I had to work in two places at the same time--now that was interesting!”

But exile had its advantages. “Though I had no fixed place to work, I felt very free. I could do what I chose,” he explains. “One doesn’t know what is more valuable, to have freedom or regular work.”

At this point, it would seem, Dodin has both. And he is using every minute of glasnost with a fierceness brought on by the fear that it may not last long.

“Tomorrow they may order the bureaucrats to come back to the past mentality and it wouldn’t surprise me if they came back to that with great pleasure. If a man prohibits something, he feels he has power. When he allows something, he feels people can do without him.”

What was so controversial about the plays Dodin wanted to direct? “Bureaucrats had to get used to my style. They had to get used to a certain degree of truth. The truth not only of a social kind, but the truth of a man’s life in general and how to express this life.

“When I work at the production I don’t limit myself to one means of expression, I don’t restrict my feelings. I think this is the only sense of life in the theater, to share one’s own feelings, one’s own anxieties--fear, despair, hopes . . . .

“Suffering is full of abrupt developments and the mass audience and the bureaucrats don’t like unpredictable movements. This is what the artist fights for, not only against the authorities. We fight the banal and trite while understanding that the main thing that theater is supposed to do is not divert people from life, but involve them.”

If Dodin can make people pay to sit through almost seven hours--sometimes in one sitting, sometimes over two evenings--of a performance in a foreign language about events they can not possibly have lived through, he has obviously succeeded in his goal of involving the audience in his “truth of man’s life.”

“To achieve any sort of pleasure,” he says, “requires certain efforts--even in love. I think theater is analogous to the process of love.”

Certainly his audience is as devoted to him as any lover is to his loved one. Across Europe audiences rose--on what must have been wobbly legs after so many hours of sitting--to give Dodin and his cast standing ovations for his production of “Brothers and Sisters.”

Why? Why do people identify with the play so intensely? “If I could tell you the message of the play, I wouldn’t have to put on a production,” Dodin says. “We wanted to track down what happens with a human being in inhuman conditions; how he manages to survive and what changes he undergoes in these inhuman conditions. What helps him maintain his humanity--this is the question of art.

“I don’t know any other example in the ‘legal’ literature of the time (that permitted by the censors) which could give so profound and so great an analysis of what happened with us during Stalin’s time. This book is full of life, passion, humor--of everything that makes life life despite unpleasant things.”

Opening on Victory Day at the end of World War II, the play follows the lives of peasants living in northern Russia and their struggle to survive oppression, starvation, and the system. Is it critical of Stalin?

“Of course it is. We don’t praise him! But I don’t like it when everything is concentrated on Stalin. It wasn’t just Stalin. There was a social system. It is critical of the social system which is now associated with Stalin.

“We put the play on before glasnost ,” Dodin offers as a reminder. “It was ready to be performed in 1984, we overcame certain bureaucratic difficulties by March 1985 and performed it two days before Gorbachev came to power. We paved the way for him.”

Though he jokes that it would take four years to describe the techniques he teaches to both the actors in his drama company and his students at the Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, he agrees to discuss it a little. “They have to live in art and to live on art--that is the first step in creating a spiritual atmosphere. It’s a very intensive process that results in the resetting of a young organism for another life, for an artistic life. You have to reset soul and body.”

The resetting of the soul they accomplish if they “live in art and they lie on art to create a spiritual atmosphere.” The resetting of the body is accomplished through dancing, voice, speech and drama lessons.

“I’m convinced an actor should be a master of his body,” Dodin says. “In some productions an actor has to both solve psychological problems and do somersaults or walks on ropes. Apart from that we stack the actor’s brains. He must be an intellectual and a highly educated person. I’m sorry that there is a concept of an actor as a mentally limited man.”

Though Dodin says he worries about the stress of travel on his company, he is renowned for putting them through their paces. In fact, while they are on the road, often performing the entire production of “Brothers and Sisters” in one day, they are rehearsing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed” which will open their season at the Maly in the middle of December--only one month after they return from San Diego.

Since Dodin has always directed the plays he has chosen, the major effect of glasnost for him is that he is now employed.

Up to this point, Dodin says, glasnost has not affected the quality of plays currently being written in the Soviet Union. “It has been in existence for too short a time.” Besides, “the best conditions for artistic truth are unpredictable.”

What has affected him most since glasnost is the possibility of travel. “You discover that your art is wanted all over the world. That there is a commonality of art is very stimulating. It confirms my conviction that life is life everywhere. People suffer and experience joy in the same way.

“For many years people here tried to convince us that people elsewhere were different. It’s a crime, to instill such ideas! We have the privilege and the joy of ruining this premise.”

But will Californians be able to identify with the sufferings of Russians? Are they prepared for art that takes almost seven hours (the play will be performed in whole on some days, and over two evening performances on others)--that is not instant gratification?

Dodin is certain of it. “Hard art gives rise to genuine human feelings. It makes people laugh and cry sincerely, and this is very natural for man.”