‘Russian Teacher’ Mirrors Societal Ills in Soviet Union : Stage: Alexander Buravsky’s play will be given a reading tonight at South Coast Repertory.

Horrified at being locked in her rented room, and shocked that her fellow prisoner Tolya won’t do anything about it, Elizaveta shouts: “What is amazing is that I offer you freedom . . . but it seems that a Russian will always think up a thousand reasons why he really doesn’t need it!”

Day after day, these lines resound on the stark, claustrophobic stage through tightly directed rehearsals in preparation for Tuesday’s opening of “The Russian Teacher.” Day after day, the intractable, masochistic side of the Russian soul unfolds and is perfected by four actors at one of Moscow’s newest theatrical studios, the Tabakova.

The play concerns an evil doctor who illegally rents out hospital beds near a seaside resort, and two troubled vacationers who have no better place to stay. It is about internal, psychological barriers, and the prisons people create for themselves. “The play is against the slave in each of us,” said its author, Moscow writer Alexander Buravsky, in Costa Mesa, where his play will be given a NewSCRipt reading tonight at South Coast Repertory in an English adaptation by Keith Reddin.

The perennial themes of responsibility, morality and love are nothing new to the Russian stage. The theater has long served as the conscience of the nation, and more than a century ago Russian socialist Alexander Herzen characterized the stage as the parliament of a country lacking democratic institutions. During the years of “stagnation”--Leonid Brezhnev’s torpid rule of the 1960s and ‘70s--anything politically sensitive was masked in Aesopian language and subtle allusions. But under glasnost , the harshest words about Soviet reality are being heard on the Moscow stage.

However, Soviet theater has recently languished, outpaced by the boldness of television, newspapers and books. Only now is it reviving, changing from a forum for simple political oratory to a medium that probes the full complexity of human and societal ills.

Earlier, Buravsky explored the theme of collective responsibility for the failures of socialism. “Speak Up!,” a sensation when first staged in 1986, entreated peasants to recognize the idiocy of taking orders from Stalinist bureaucrats who drove the country close to starvation with their petty tyranny. The drama was set in 1956, the outset of Nikita Khrushchev’s ill-fated reforms. On the back page of the play’s program was printed Lenin’s 1917 decree giving the land to the peasants, a reminder that he who holds the land legally also bears a great personal responsibility.

“The hero was an optimist, but the audience understood that it was 1956 and nothing ultimately happened except stagnation, tragedy and censorship,” said Buravsky, 37. “I wanted to provoke viewers to understand that we can’t wait for the nachalstvo (the top bosses) to give us freedom, because if we do, things will end badly again.”

Ironically, it was the nachalstvo that gave Buravsky his first break. Terrified of “Speak Up!,” small-minded bureaucrats blocked its showing on the eve of the 27th Communist Party Congress at which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev laid out his reform platform. The play finally opened late, amid much nervousness, and the premiere was attended by maverick politico Boris Yeltsin, at the time Moscow’s party boss and a rising star.

Yeltsin’s entourage, KGB included, took over the director’s office and Buravsky came by after the show. “We were nervous. There was good cheese, chocolate, caviar and tea, but we didn’t touch anything,” Buravsky said. “Yeltsin talked an hour about the play, politics, the whole thing. We said the play was very serious.” After that, Buravsky had nothing to fear. Yeltsin has continued to attend Buravsky’s plays, even after falling from political grace in 1987. “(Yeltsin) launched my career,” Buravsky said.

For “The Russian Teacher,” his seventh play, Buravsky needed no permissions, and the play exposes raw nerves. Tolya, a drinker suffering from paranoid delusions, believes he was fired from his job teaching Russian because he gave a bad grade to the son of a high party official (who, it is hinted, is Gorbachev). He stays in the hospital’s trauma ward, eventually to have his bones actually broken by the sadistic doctor who fears that inspectors will discover his illegal guests.

Elizaveta is a grandmotherly sort who prevented her physicist husband from poking around in politics (a clear reference to Andrei Sakharov). She has followed her grandson to the seashore to persuade him to use condoms--she is sure he is going to catch AIDS--and wants Tolya to talk to him. She later regrets that her whole life has been spent shielding people from themselves.

The problem, described by one contemporary Moscow philosopher as the nation’s “slave consciousness,” is tackled daily by Mikhail Gorbachev as he entreats people to take initiative, to take their fate and that of perestroika into their own hands. But people are used to the feeling of prison, so used to it that they imprison themselves.

“It was the same with me,” said Buravsky. “I was my own censor--I threw the lines out of my own plays before they went through the censor. I was a real slave. But I have no more the strength to be afraid.”

In a society where professions are decided early, the playwright believed until the age of 14 that he would be a cellist like his grandfather, Isaac Buravsky. But after studying cello for 10 years at the Moscow Central School for gifted children, Buravsky made a discovery: “I wanted to read words in my books, not only notes.”

Shifting to language studies in high school, he went on to Moscow University and graduated with a journalism degree in 1975. For several years he worked at Soviet Screen magazine as a feature writer. Eventually, he began turning out unproduced play scripts.

Getting nowhere with his plays, Buravsky managed to shift course once again. In 1984 he gained admission to the Soviet Union’s sole graduate school for film makers and screenwriters, and has four produced movies to his credit: “Down Main Street With an Orchestra,” “The Amateurs,” “Freedom Is Paradise” and “The Gambler,” which he co-directed. (“The Gambler” is still in post-production.)

Despite all the glamour of the movie world, the theater remains his first love. To write screenplays, he said, “is to work as a professional. But to write plays is to be an artist.”

Both Buravsky and South Coast Repertory dramaturge Jerry Patch believe that “The Russian Teacher” has something for both Soviet and American audiences. “It’s valuable to know how we’re alike,” Patch said. “(Playwright and new president Vaclav) Havel said it to the Czechs. They have to change themselves first.”

Jan Herman of The Times’ Orange County Calendar staff contributed to this article.