Soviet Director a Risk-Taker in Any Language : Stage: Kolyada’s “Slingshot” will receive a world premiere as part of San Diego Arts Festival: Treasures of the Soviet Union.

“Yescho , yescho , yescho!” insists Soviet director Roman Viktyuk, spinning his arm as he stares intently at John David Bland, who is twirling Jon Matthews around in a wheelchair.

“More, more, more!” Susan Larson swiftly translates at Viktyuk’s side.

Viktyuk, who speaks only Russian, and the American actors, who speak only English, look only at each other--never at the translator--during rehearsals of “Slingshot,” Nicolai Kolyada’s three-character play about a handicapped dock worker. The play will have its world premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre Sunday in conjunction with the San Diego Arts Festival: Treasures of the Soviet Union.

The show marks his first directing job in the United States--and in English--but Viktyuk said during a rehearsal break that working in a different language is no problem.

“The principle of my directing and my work is from heart to heart,” said Viktyuk, whose words were translated by Raia Rechaim. “If I feel the heartbeat of the actors, then the language means nothing to me. Out of all the people we were choosing, these people, their nervous systems are so clear and pure that we can see them as if they were an X-ray.

“It is as though I am holding their hearts in my hand and their hearts are beating as if they are birds in my hands. They still do not know how to fly yet, and I am not letting them go. Their little legs must get stronger. That should happen any day now. Maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”

So far, the only part about working in America he loathes is the Actors’ Equity rule that gives actors 15-minute breaks every 90 minutes.

“I hate breaks,” said Viktyuk. “As soon as the heart starts beating, as soon as there is a correct taking of breath, as soon as the eyes start shining . . . the stage manager says it is time for a break, and we have to start all over. When there is surgery, no one takes a break. If the nurses and the surgeon and the machinery just shut down, the patient would die.”

The gambles he takes, the choices he makes, have given Viktyuk the brand of being one of the most risk-taking directors in the Soviet Union.

He knows he could have made his first directing job in the United States a lot easier if he had gone for well-known actors or even a well-known playwright--which Kolyada is not.

The artistic team at the San Diego Rep told Viktyuk they wanted to present “the best contemporary Soviet play.” They were so certain from previous conversations with the director that his choice would be “Smirnova’s Birthday Party,” by one of his favorite playwrights, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, that the offering was printed in the festival brochure before Viktyuk arrived in San Diego on July 29.

But, typical for him, Viktyuk came into town with a surprise. An actor living in Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains had sent him a new play about an embittered 33-year-old Soviet dock worker named Ilya, crippled in a work-related accident, who learns to love again through a troubled but growing friendship with Anton, a teen-age boy, and Ilya’s neighbor, Larisa (played by Mary Forcade).

Viktyuk read it just two weeks before his flight to the United States and, even though the Kolyada had never been produced in Moscow or Leningrad, he was convinced that in “Slingshot” he had at last found “the best Soviet play.”

He read it--in Russian--to the Rep’s artistic director, Doug Jacobs, to producing director Sam Woodhouse and managing director Adrian Stewart, with simultaneous translation by Rechaim, and convinced them all that this was the play they ought to present. (Larson made the final translation used in this production.)

“I read it at night,” Viktyuk said of the play, “and I called him (Kolyada) in the morning and I told him who was calling. There was a long pause, and then he started yelling, ‘It is a dream!’ ”

Viktyuk smiled at the memory.

“It would be easier to take a well-known play, a classic, well-known experienced actors, and maybe even take a play that I did before,” Viktyuk said. “And then we would know what is going to come out.

“But here we don’t know the way. We don’t have the transportation. We must find our way with our own hands and legs. I like that feeling because in this danger is the heartbeat of life. If the machinery which checks the EKG waves is only a straight line, that is death. We need to make the zig-zag line. Then we know we are alive.”

If risk is something Viktyuk feels comfortable in courting, it’s mainly because he’s had plenty of training: Danger has never been a stranger from the moment his life as an artist began.

For years before glasnost lifted censorship in Russia, he directed plays that were closed by Soviet officials because of the way they mocked modern life in the Soviet Union. Fourteen years ago, during the Brezhnev period, when “there was censorship of everything,” Viktyuk said, he directed a play by Petrushevskaya at a university theater because her works were banned in official Soviet houses.

“Even though all the press said the play was wonderful, the bureaucrats from the party closed the show and they closed the theater,” Viktyuk said.

The director and crew took the props and stage designs and fled to another part of the city. For 10 years, he and his friends performed underground, keeping the work secret from government officials.

Then, all restrictions came undone under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika . Still, Viktyuk’s memories of the pre- glasnost era are, like much of his work, unexpected.

“As funny as it sounds, it was the happiest time of my life, because we knew why we were doing this,” he said. “This was our resistance to the official view of the arts in the Soviet Union. I just wanted to yell out the truth.”

He sees “Slingshot” as an opportunity to bring Soviets and Americans closer together. The play, he tells his three actors during one of many impassioned speeches, “expresses the Russian soul.”

As the actors come closer to capturing that soul in rehearsal, Viktyuk expresses increasing determination to have the American cast perform in Moscow when he premieres the play there in the spring of 1990. No visas have been acquired as yet, but he refers to it as accomplished fact, explaining that he wants the production to be the same, using longtime collaborators Vladimir Boyer as set designer and Ury Butsko, who wrote original music for the work.

“We only need these three hearts and they will conquer any borders,” Viktyuk said. “I feel there is a tremendous need for art to be taken to the Soviet Union so people can see that the Americans care about problems in the Soviet Union. Then they will know the American hearts are just as open and tender as Russian hearts.”