Soviet Opera, Play Open San Diego Arts Fest : ‘Slingshot’ Takes Emotional, Authentic Look at Homosexuality

The first rule in foreign travel is not to expect things to be like home. That goes for foreign theater as well. And it’s easy for the visitor watching Nikolai Kolyada’s “Slingshot,” in its world premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, to imagine that he’s sitting in a theater in Moscow or Leningrad.

This is an intensely Russian play, with nothing left unexpressed. And its American cast, under the guidance of Soviet director Roman Viktyuk, have all the physicality and emotion that the script demands.

In fact these American actors (John David Bland, Jon Matthews, Mary Forcade) teach us something about the uses of emotion. In our theater, and in our national life, we’re embarrassed by too much of it: it strikes us as self-indulgent. Say it once, keep it short.

But there are scenes in “Slingshot” where it is clear that the characters in the play are expressing big emotions--love, hate, self-hate--not in order to indulge themselves, but in order to purge themselves of confusion, to discover their heart’s true position. We talk about “thinking through” a situation. These young people are feeling it through.

The play feels authentic then--authentic to what it would have been were we to see it in the Soviet Union. But in another sense it’s hard to imagine seeing it there. Taboos have been tumbling all over the place under glasnost , but “Slingshot” investigates one of the largest taboos of all--homosexuality. It is not unknown in the Soviet theater, but it is certainly unknown on its stage.

The play apparently came over the transom to director Viktyuk, who decided to substitute it for a previously chosen work as the San Diego Rep’s entry in San Diego’s Soviet Arts Festival. If it ever does get back home to Moscow, it will definitely be the talk of the town.

The taboo is not operative in the American theater, but no American playwright would treat same-sex love as it is treated here. This is not the story of two people bravely coming out. It is not the story of two people involved in a demonic fatal attraction. It is not about AIDS.

It is about two young people who begin their relationship as friends, “talking their hearts out” to each other (and how well both Matthews and Bland convey the relief of that) and who then find their friendship assuming another form--taking them deeper than they meant to go; deeper, even, than they conceived they could go.

For all the mannerisms of Vikytuk’s production (visually, it’s a “director’s show” to a fault, with dream sequences and electronic music and dazzling light changes galore), there’s an innocence to the story that will strike some spectators as sweetly old-fashioned. This was the way that all love stories used to be conceived, before the sexual revolution. The characters in this story actually believe that they have souls.

Who will meet again, one day. “Redemption” might, indeed, have served as the play’s title, had the title not already been taken. The love affair does end in calamity. But it is also seen as the characters’ salvation--the event that broke their shells and brought them into God’s light. Here, too, a non-Person seems to have been rehabilitated on the Russian stage.

If the reader is envisioning a curious kind of evening, he is right. Vikytuk’s director’s eye seems particularly strange: the production is a hodgepodge of dance effects, sound effects, gymnastic effects, symbolic groupings and odd bits of symbolism (a swing with two huge wings on it--a bat’s wing and a wing that could have come from Chekhov’s “Seagull.”)

Does it work? Not in the way of an American play. Many of Viktyuk’s visuals do seem self-indulgent. Emotionally, however, once the viewer has accustomed himself to its larger scale, the play does work--Matthews’ scene, for instance, when he rejoices that he has finally “proved” himself with a girl and will henceforward be pure until his wedding day. The denial is so evident and so strong that it hurts.

So there are moments to recognize in this “Slingshot” and moments where we might be on another planet--or in another century. That’s what travel is about.

Plays at the Lyceum Stage, 79 Horton Plaza, San Diego. Closes Nov. 12. Performances Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets $14-$22. (619) 235-8025 or (800) 245-FEST. ‘SLINGSHOT’

Nikolai Kolyada’s play, at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Translator Susan Larsen. Director Roman Viktyuk. Scenic design Vladimir Boyer. Costumes Sally Cleveland. Lighting Brenda Berry. Sound Lawrence Czoka. Stage manager Raia Rechaim With John David Bland, Jon Matthews and Mary Forcade.