STAGE REVIEW : Into the Terror in ‘Whirlwind’

Imagine a crowd of women, their ravaged faces pressed like hungry children against the metal fencing of a prison yard, staring in devastation at unattainable freedom on the other side.

That is the closing image of the Sovremennik Theatre of Moscow’s “Into the Whirlwind,” and it’s hard to forget. Adapted by Alexander Getman and staged by the company’s artistic director, Galina Volchek, in the Bagley-Wright Theatre of the Seattle Center, “Whirlwind” is a co-presentation of the Intiman Theatre and One Reel, producers of the Goodwill Arts Festival.

This issue-driven piece, based on the chilling first half of Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg’s memoirs of 18 years in Stalinist prisons, is the theatrical centerpiece of this festival. Like so many other political hot potatoes, it had been banned in the Soviet Union until glasnost relaxed the rules and the Sovremennik was able to commission the adaptation and put it before the public in February, 1989.

What comes across clearly in the telling of this tale of systematic and dehumanizing punishment, is the smoldering passion of artists suddenly free to express pent-up indignation and rage. It is Russians pointing horrified fingers at Russians in their own immediate past--and vowing that such history must not repeat itself.

Ginzburg’s nightmare was one of thousands that happened in a particularly frenzied period of political purging in the ‘30s and ‘40s. She was a professor who had the misfortune of praising publication of the wrong book by a colleague and who became one more guiltless target of Stalinist paranoia.

Her true story reads like a bad novel. It is a series of horrific events from the moment, in 1934, when she became suspect (even though married to a leading member of the Tartar Province Committee of the Communist Party) to the time of her incarceration in Kazan three years later, and her mental and physical torment over the next 18 years--through imprisonment, deprivation, interrogation, torture, disease and the Gulag.

Ginzburg, who died in 1977, did not live to see her book published in the U.S.S.R., let alone performed on stage. But she might have approved of what the Sovremennik has achieved, re-creating not so much the events as their psychological implications and damage. If we know that a dramatization can only inspire outrage, there is always the danger that it will be robbed of its drama. It is theater for the already-converted. But the combination of articulate acting and Volchek’s swiftly-paced direction, supported by a sound score of metal clanging and grinding against metal (to the amplified screams of torture), plunges us viscerally into the terror. This is not a play you just watch, but a play you experience.

“Whirlwind” is performed in Russian, with subdued simultaneous translation over headsets--an imperfect but satisfactory arrangement. Marina Neyolova plays Ginzburg in a performance of gradual but calamitous deterioration. This is a woman who simply couldn’t take the easy way out, not from a pretentious sense of personal integrity, she protests, but out of an incapacity to falsify her behavior. She wonders what might have happened if the torture had become more intense. But it apparently did not and the journey remains one of spiraling, anguished decline into her own personal whirlwind.

When the play closes with the announcement that these women will trade a prison for a labor camp in Siberia, a kind of frantic joy busts out all over. It means surrendering the stench and dankness of the cells for the great outdoors, icy or not. The stage is suddenly bathed in light and these women rush forward to embrace the limited promise of freedom, only to have the gates slam in their faces and their hope fade with the lights.

It is an indelible image.

The unsettling lighting design and armored environment of Mikhail Frankel’s set contribute greatly: Everything threatens, confines and restricts, making the moment of false hope at the end all the more shocking for having been illusory.

But it is Volchek’s ability to reproduce the psychological disintegration so palpable in the book that makes this “Whirlwind” affecting. She re-creates the sense of a society devouring itself in an orgy of accusation and recrimination, fostering a form of emotional cannibalism. The irrationality is all the more horrifying for being explainable. As with the Maly Theatre of Leningrad’s “Brothers and Sisters,” seen at the Old Globe last fall, we are invited to watch the breakdown of reason and note how quickly it can spread.

An unusual dimension of “Into the Whirlwind” is its all-female component of prisoners. The interaction among them cuts deeply into issues of motherhood and sisterhood (though oddly enough, not rape or sex). A silent member of this cast is 83-year-old Paulina Myashnikova, Ginzburg’s friend and cellmate during some of her ordeal. Myashnikova’s presence is a testament to its reality.

Such an element of theatre-verite in a decidedly non-realistic presentation seems to be part of the Sovremennik’s effort to continue to define itself as a theater on the cutting edge. Sovremennik (meaning “contemporary”) was founded in 1956--coincidentally, the year Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s purges at the 20th Party Congress--and it has had Volchek as artistic director since 1972. If it gives in to mild sensationalism now and then, it is in the pursuit of passionate issues. This is not a company that preaches. It puts its audience through the play--no matter how uncomfortably. The more so, the better.