Once-Banned Soviet Play to Open in Chicago : Stage: Play, with all Russian cast, depicts Lenin as a fallible, scheming politician.

A play once banned by Moscow for depicting V. I. Lenin as a fallible, scheming politician will make its U.S. premiere here Monday night.

“The Peace of Brest-Litovsk,” written by Mikhail Shatrov in the mid-1960s, was first seen by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 and later toured Europe in 1988 with its 14-member all-Russian cast.

“This is excellent theater--entertaining, provoking for the audience--and it’s produced, staged and acted by Russians,” the show’s American producer, Randall Green, said Thursday.

“And I think there is a little history lesson here,” he said.

Lenin is shown in 1918 wrestling with his conscience and with the now-resurrected Bolsheviks Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin and an obscure Josef Stalin bathed in orange light. Lenin debates the choice of war with Germany or signing a peace treaty granting the Weimar Republic extensive lands and 3 billion rubles.

“The irony is Lenin was willing to give away lands for peace, and now Gorbachev seems willing to entertain the idea of independent states under the right conditions,” Green said.

“The parallels between 1918 and 1990 are startling,” he said.

The entire set was shipped from Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater for the 17 performances scheduled for Chicago’s Civic Theater.

Lenin will be played by Mikhail Ulyanov, the most famous actor in his country who also serves as chairman of the Theater Workers Union of the Russian Federation and as a member of the Central Committee.