STAGE REVIEW : Beyond Anatevka in Leningrad’s ‘Brothers, Sisters’ : Theater: Abramov play at the Old Globe is a stunning centerpiece in San Diego’s Soviet arts festival.

“How shall we live?” A familiar question in Russian drama, from Chekhov on. But the villagers portrayed in the Maly Theatre of Leningrad’s “Brothers and Sisters” are not debating it over the tea-table. Five years after the defeat of the Nazis, these people are still feeding their children “bread” made of moss and sawdust. How shall we live?

The surprise of this two-part, six-hour saga at the Old Globe Theatre, a centerpiece of San Diego’s Soviet arts festival, is that it’s not more of an ordeal. It would have a right to be, considering what the village in the story is going through. But director Lev Dodin and his company--41 actors!--realize that a theater audience can only absorb so much suffering.

So “Brothers and Sisters” is first of all, and quite consciously, a theater piece--an entertainment. Indeed, there’s so much gaiety and color on stage at times that the village in question might be named Anatevka. There is also a healthy amount of sex, observed far more frankly than used to be the case in Soviet theater.

Without quite being a spectacular, “Brothers and Sisters” consistently rewards the eye and the ear. Anyone with the slightest sense of theater will respond to the great scene at the end of Part 1 when the soldiers of the village finally come home from the Great Patriotic War, and the play’s teen-age hero, Mikhail (Pyotr Semak), gets to stand up at the marriage table with the woman of his dreams, Varvara (Natalya Fomenko.)

And anyone who has been paying any attention to the story will realize that the scene is happening in Mikhail’s head--Mikhail who, up to now, has appeared to be about as fanciful as a plow horse: a young fellow who doesn’t even have time to read the newspaper.

The scene is not, however, the dreaded “dream sequence” that another director might have ordered. Dodin is much more sophisticated than that. He and his designers (Eduard Kochergin, setting; Oleg Kozlov, lights; Inna Gabai, costumes) fill the show with strong theatrical images, but they are arrived at the hard way, using the wood and the straw and the snow of the village. No smoke bombs, no glitz. The craft is all above the table, and the acting is just as honest.

That’s a matter of pride and also a matter of respecting the material. “Brothers and Sisters” is not to be confused with “Fiddler on the Roof.” The suffering is there, because it did go on. And something in the faces of the actors--even the children--suggests that each of them has personal knowledge of it. The message is there as well. Life in the U.S.S.R. did have to be hard after the war, with 20 million dead and the cities in ruins.

But it didn’t have to be this hard. Choices were made that resulted in sawdust bread. And the men who made these choices--men sitting at desks 1,000 miles from the villages--didn’t have to eat the results.

An American viewer will naturally see “Brothers and Sisters” as a glasnost play. Actually it goes back a little before glasnost , to 1985. Its source, a trilogy of “village” novels by Fyodor Abramov (who grew up in just such a village), goes back farther than that, to the late 1950s.

There is nothing radical in the form of the play. It is rooted in the tradition of heroic Soviet drama, where a group of ordinary people make themselves into “one fist” in order to do their duty on the home front and beat the Nazis. It shows enormous respect for the effort and the victory.

But a fist is not the normal condition of the human hand. (The observation is made by one of the play’s strongest female characters, a former village leader now forced to take a back seat to the men--Tatyana Shestakova.) Eventually a fist will cramp. The fingers will want to go back to being fingers.

Having paid its respects to the the war effort, “Brothers and Sisters” (the title comes from Stalin’s exhortation to the Russian people after the Nazi invasion) goes on to protest the notion that a nation’s people can be ordered about like soldiers for 10, 20, 30 years on the excuse that the larger society is engaged in a heroic, warlike struggle that will one day transform the world.

“I have only one life,” a villager points out to a Party official arrogantly collecting for the latest “voluntary” national loan. The official (Sergei Bekhterev) naturally finds this a symptom of counterrevolutionary tendencies.

Meanwhile, the men in the offices back in the city are watching--and, human nature being what it is, believing--the films that they themselves have commissioned about the happy life on the collective farms. When a nation’s leadership gets this divorced from reality, something has to give.

Part 2 of “Brothers and Sisters” ends with an image familiar in Russian literature and films--that of a young man looking yearningly at the sky, as the cranes pass overhead. At one time, the sub-text of that image was: Hope. Endure. Today, the image perhaps something else. We have endured. Now we expect to live.

All this without shaking a fist. Again, Dodin is above that sort of obviousness. It’s clear, watching this play, that glasnost had to come. But it’s equally clear that Dodin and his actors see their immediate job as telling a story. They are first-class storytellers.

Some people have compared the play to “Nicholas Nickleby.” No and yes. It is not as long a sit, for one thing--six hours, as opposed to eight. Nor does it have the panache of Dickens’ tale. There are few eccentric characters in “Brothers and Sisters,” simply normal people trying to get their work done and have a little something with their tea.

But there are similarities. Again, we have a conscientious young man (Semak) and his mild-eyed sister (Natalya Akimova) discovering, through various adventures, what a cold and deceiving world it can be. There are no conscious villains in the story, but there are certainly negative forces--the prissy, revengeful party official (Sergei Bekhterev), the willful young hustler who marries the hero’s sister (Igor Tupikin). (In the way of the theater, he is also one of the most entertaining people in the show--rascals always are.)

Though long, the story is not complicated. One can follow the spoken translation with one earphone, leaving the other ear free to pick up the actors’ voices, and the voices and body language tell you exactly where you are.

The acting is in the very best realistic Russian tradition, which is to say that when an actor touches a piece of cloth or wood, or hugs a child, the touch registers on the viewer’s nervous system. This is all the translation that “Brothers and Sisters” needs to come across as an experience that we, with worse luck, might have undergone ourselves in the 1940s.

Perhaps there are moments when the acting becomes too detailed--cadenzas where the actor is allowed to linger over a piece of business not strictly necessary to the story. (The playful business with the cigarette lighter when Vladimir Artemov’s Grigori comes home from the war, for example.)

There are also moments when the actor or actress gets too general. Natalya Fomenko establishes Varava’s allure and devil-may-care ways, and it is all too easy to see why she is the scandal of the village. But do we also see her as the hardest worker in the village? I didn’t.

No matter. “Brothers and Sisters” is an uncommonly satisfying theatrical event, a banquet that doesn’t allow us to forget the taste of that sawdust bread. Broadway couldn’t afford to import this piece. San Diego has its priorities straight. Plays at the Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego, through Nov. 19. Tickets: $75. Performances Tuesdays/Wednesdays and Thursdays/Fridays at 7:30 p.m., with all-day performances Saturdays and Sundays, starting at 2:30 p.m. (619) 239-2255.

“BROTHERS AND SISTERS”

A dramatization of Fyodor Abramov’s trilogy, presented by the Maly Theatre of Leningrad at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego. Adaptation L. Dodin, S. Bekhterev and A. Katsman. Translation Mikhail Stronin and Elise Thoron. Director Lev Dodin. Scenic design Eduard Kochergin. Associate directors Roman Smirnov, Sergei Bekhterev. Costumes Inna Gabai. Speech and voice coach Valeri Galendeev. Sound design Boris Freidson. Stage managers Olga Dazidenko, Irina Lyapunova. Technical director Alexei Porai-Koshitz. Dressmaker Anna Izovich. Properties director Julia Zverlina. Makeup artist Galina Varukhina. Stage mechanic Ilya Cherkasov. With Tatyana Shestakova, Mikhail Samochko, Nikolai Lavrov, Sergei Vlasov, Natalya Fomenko, Vladimir Artemov, Igor Ivanov, Alla Semenishina, Anatoli Kolibyanov, Galina Filimonova, Natalya Sokolova, Felix Rayevski, Lidia Goryanova, Marina Gridasova, Svetlana Gaitan, Aleksandra Kozhevnikova, Sofya Betekhtina, Dmitri Grankin, Mikhail Krutik, Kiril Nurski, Vladimir Osipchuk, Ylena Vasilyeva, Irina Seleznyeva, Liya Kuzmina, Bronislava Proskurnina, Svetlana Grigoryeva, Evgenia Barkan, Irina Nikulina, Vladimir Artemov, Michail Samochko, Sergei Muchenikov, Sergei Kosyrev, Vladimir Semichev, Igor Skylar, Vladimir Zakharyev.