Life After a Time of Death : A Russian-speaking company’s tale of postwar suffering speaks to San Diego audiences loud and clear : Amid the suffering, there is dignity, nerve, laughter and songs--and even a bit of vicious gossip.

Even today, life in Leningrad is austere, particularly during the winter. People go to work on the trolley, live in small apartments and are thrilled to find a couple of oranges at the grocer’s.

Picture the city in 1944. The Nazi siege is over, but people are still living in cellars, eating roots and melted snow. After the war, they tell each other, things will be better.

As a gesture of hope, they start a theater. Forty-five years later the Maly Theatre of Leningrad brings a play called “Brothers and Sisters” to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, as part of that city’s Soviet Arts Festival. Miss it (the production runs through Nov. 19) and you will miss an experience.

Ah, but what kind of experience? That was my reaction, when the play was announced for San Diego. It had previously been announced for Broadway, a project that got canceled when the American producer ran out of funds. One had heard at the time that the Maly Theater actors themselves had their doubts about bringing the play across the Atlantic. Would American theatergoers really want to sit through a six-hour demonstration of the miseries of life on a Soviet collective farm after World War II, especially when they would have to listen to the translation over earphones?

It is no problem to do so at the Old Globe. To begin with, the play doesn’t put a strain on the sitting apparatus. If you see it all in one stretch, which is how it’s presented on weekends, there’s a long dinner break between Part One and Part Two. Or it can be seen over two separate evenings.

Second, the production doesn’t put a strain on the ear. The earphone translation is no more distracting than the words of a good golf commentator. By keeping the volume low, the listener can give his basic emotional attention to the sound of the actors’ Russian. It is a vigorous language, and the message gets through.

Third, the production is continuously interesting to look at. This must have taken considerable ingenuity. A collective farm in northern Russia circa 1945-49 presents a rather bleak visual prospect--all browns and blacks and whites. Yet we never get tired of looking at this village. One reason is that director Lev Dodin groups his players so well, and because each of the players presents himself so distinctly--both as a type (grandmother, strong youth, comely girl) and an individual.

Still, the players need an environment. What keeps the village interesting to watch, without false splashes of local color, is set designer Eduard Kochergin’s skill in showing the environment of each scene from different angles, as a good cinematographer would.

His major device is a log wall that can float up to become a ceiling, or crank down to become a bathhouse floor, or tilt to a 45-degree angle to become a grain chute. The wall finds a new use in every scene, and yet it maintains its basic integrity as a square shape. Indeed, after a while, it almost seems to acquire a meaning of its own, like the obelisk in “2001.”

How to read it? One reviewer saw it as an emblem of the political forces pressing down on these farmers. It could equally well be seen as a symbol of the heavenly forces looking after them--not that the play ever gets metaphysical. In any case, the wall adapts and endures, like the villagers.

Director Dodin must have been tempted to stress their suffering. That, after all, is the burden of the play: that such villages underwent terrific privation after the war--worse, in fact, than during the war--as the result of bureaucratic decisions made by party officials ignorant of local conditions, and often just plain ignorant.

The viewer doesn’t lose sight of that suffering. But it is never belabored. And it is never seen in the abstract. We see individual faces--strong faces, weak faces--and we touch individual lives. Deprivation is not just an annoyance to these people, but they never let it become the main theme of their existence. Hungry as they are, they still have their work to do, their children to raise, their love affairs to prosecute, their jokes to play.

Laughter doesn’t desert the village. Neither does song--the old songs, that come up out of nowhere like the wind, especially when the girls are together. The village families still know how to celebrate, they still love to heat up the bathhouse, they still love to gossip. Nor are they over-idealized. The gossip can be vicious. Life is poorer than it used to be, poorer every year, but life goes on, for good and bad.

Good or bad, the villagers remain somebodies in their own eyes--not figures on a chart. They keep their dignity, their self-possession and their nerve. The women, particularly. During the war, women ran the village. As the play goes on, and living conditions worsen, we begin to see that the woman ran things with more courage and common sense than the men are doing, now that they are back from the war.

There’s a marvelous scene where a wife watches her husband cave in to a party official. Then she shoves a wooden bowl full of unspeakable “bread” under the official’s nose. Here-- you feed this to my children.

The brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers of this play are not the mute, animal-like peasantry of Tolstoy’s time. These are men and woman qualified to govern themselves, who are about to demand that right. “Brothers and Sisters” does not end on a note of acceptance for the inevitable slow course of the Revolution. It speaks to the impatience of the Soviet people right now, and its popularity in Leningrad has little to do with nostalgia. Its popularity in San Diego says that its citizens know a nourishing show when they see it.