The Last Days of the Russian Revolution

While the world watches a real-life drama about the love invested in a homeland and the blood shed over it, the Open Fist Theatre Company is wrestling with those themes in a staging of “Flight,” by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

Written in the mid- to late 1920s and banned before it could be presented in the fledgling Soviet Union, the play revisits the final days of the Russian Revolution and civil war, as the opposing armies murder and lay waste to the very things they profess to hold dear.

In a version freely adapted by Steven Haworth and staged by Charles Otte, the story unfolds as a fevered dream. The actors are mirrored in glass panels, and the world around them keeps dissolving--effects achieved by the evanescent interplay of Bill Eigenbrodt and Meghan Rogers’ set and Robert Conner’s projections.

Yet while the presentation is haunting and beautiful, it is also messy and baffling. Abrupt stylistic shifts and elliptical meanings make the proceedings difficult to follow, and not all 16 performers are equal to the complex tasks set out for them.

In “Flight,” Bulgakov--whose later masterwork would be the novel “The Master and Margarita”--follows the last remnants of pre-revolutionary Russia as they are pushed out of their homeland by the Red Army’s advance.

Key characters include Maj. Gen. Grigory Charnota (Patrick Tuttle) and Gen. Roman Kludhov (Will Kepper), White Army commanders who are bitterly frustrated by their inability to stem the Red tide, and Sergei Golubkov (Joe Zanetti) and Serafima Korzukhina (Arizona Brooks), civilians seeking what little protection the defeated army can still provide.

Both the Red and White armies commit atrocities as they pass across the land, murdering those they suspect of sympathizing with the other side. Haunted by guilt for the zeal with which he ordered his countrymen hung, Gen. Kludhov will later realize, “It was all for nothing. It was all pointless.”

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Open Fist Theatre, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends May 18. $15. (323) 882-6912. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.