Russia’s scene is revised

Chechen terrorists understood that to invade a Moscow theater was to attack a Russian cultural emblem. In October 2002, they held about 800 audience members hostage at the Theater Center on Dubrovka, where the musical “Nord Ost” was performing. After the tragedy, which left nearly 130 dead, the producers defiantly kept the show going. But audiences were spooked, and “Nord Ost” withered away.

Still, not even terrorism could keep Muscovites out of their theaters. The desire of Russians to escape their tiny Soviet-era apartments helped establish strong theatergoing habits. And though pop music -- blaring in parks, taxis and shopping centers -- now overshadows every art form, theater remains hip and well attended in Moscow.

Today, many of the city’s grand old theaters and directors who made their reputations during the Soviet era are struggling to remain relevant. Tradition may be honorable, but there is no arguing with box office receipts or the need to bring in young audiences.

The Soviets left Russia with a network of midsize to large theaters (300 seats or more), of which 60 now thrive in Moscow -- a metropolis of about 11 million people. By contrast, the L.A. megalopolis, with its population of 16 million living in comparatively spacious homes, has about half as many comparable venues for professional theater.

As an indication of how Russia still regards theater, the government’s TV Channel 2 broadcasts a two-hour monthly program, “Theater Plus TV,” devoted to actors and directors working on stage and screen.

Attendance at the midsize to larger venues runs from 85% to sold out -- crowds of 15-year-old schoolgirls gawking at the bare-chested male dancers in Alexander Ostrovsky’s “Country of Love” (adapted from the fairy-tale “Snegorochka”) at Satirikon Theater; fur-coated matrons sitting next to pensioners and teens (text-messaging on cellphones during the show) at Sovremennik Theater’s “The Possessed.” Tickets range from $7 to $100, though artistic director Galina Volchek says the lower-priced tickets sell out instantly.

In a guest room off the lobby of the Sovremennik, about an hour before a performance of Nikolai Kolyada’s “Murlin Murlo,” Volchek, who staged the show, sits at the head of a table. On the wall hang photos of Volchek in New York with Al Pacino; with Arthur Miller. Volchek as a young woman with her mentor, Oleg Yefremov. Volchek with Boris Yeltsin, with Vladimir Putin. Volchek, head slightly bowed, holding Queen Elizabeth’s gloved hand.

As she speaks in a soft voice, husky from chain-smoking, she lifts one arm as though it carries the weight of the world -- which, in a way, it does. Having taken over the Sovremennik from Yefremov in 1972, Volchek is one of the few Russian directors -- and the only woman running a major theater -- who has weathered the storms of Soviet bureaucracy and its collapse, the mixed blessings of Russian capitalism, the free fall of the ruble in 1998 and the subsequent realignment of both the economy and the culture with the West.

Volchek was the first Soviet theater director to visit the United States, staging American actors in a production of Michael Roschin’s “Echelon” at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1978. In 1996, her touring Sovremennik repertory of Eugenia Ginzburg’s “Into the Whirlwind” and Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” performed on Broadway, earning the first Drama Desk Award ever given to a foreign company. All the while, she has held together a repertory company that continues to present a dozen or so shows a month and in a theater town akin to London and New York for intensity, enthusiasm and combativeness.

Cutbacks have a price

Since the doors to the West swung open about 15 years ago, a trio of crosscurrents has been buffeting Russia’s old school repertory system that Volchek embodies.

First, cutbacks in government funding have, to the artists’ relief, removed the government’s license to interfere in the art. But the cuts have forced artistic directors to scramble for private sponsorships to maintain standards and payrolls. As with financial arrangements at many theaters in the U.S., Sovremennik’s corporate sponsor, Rosbank, is credited in every playbill. Downtown’s tony Lenkom Theater has a running program note thanking its “partner,” designer Bosco di Ciliegi.

Despite such private support, Volchek’s payroll has not kept pace in a battered economy. In earlier years, an actor could live comfortably on the theater’s salary. Today, film and TV work is a stage actor’s only road out of poverty -- creating tensions all too familiar in America.

When Gordon Davidson tried in the ‘70s to create a repertory company at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he found he couldn’t get actors to commit to an Actors’ Equity salary for an extended period if they risked sacrificing film and TV work. Similarly, Volchek now finds herself in the company of Russian actors who no longer wish to work in an artistic monastery.

Under the Soviets, artistic directors ruled and guided a salaried ensemble that worked only in one government-funded theater it called home. Volchek’s “Murlin Murlo” features an ensemble that’s been performing the play for 15 years. Two cast members have never performed in any other theater. But such loyalties are waning. As in the West, Russian actors and directors now work in many theaters, in various countries.

And finally, what’s called the enterprise system is flourishing in Russia: Independent producers and commercial backers throw a pair of celebrities onto a rented stage in profit-motivated, crowd-pleasing light comedies. Producer-director Leonid Trushkin is known as Moscow’s king of the enterprise system, staging hits such as Alexander Galin’s “Delusion” and L.A. playwright Richard Baer’s “Mixed Emotions” -- which has toured Eastern Europe, thanks to the enterprise system. If this system hadn’t existed under Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s, you’d swear the Russians had imported it from America.

A raging debate in Russian theater today pits the classical repertory against the enterprise system. According to Ekaterina Ufimtseva, host since 1991 of “Theater Plus TV,” Russian rep is centered on an artistic director, who sets the aesthetic for the theater. He or she provides an artistic home, training and constant employment for dozens of actors. “Emotions and tempers run high because the enterprise system raids actors from the theaters that trained them,” Ufimtseva says, “while offering nothing in return.”

The debate raises a larger question: Is it necessary to rehearse one play for three to four months, as Volchek’s company does, when commercial producers get their shows up in three to four weeks? Even Volchek concedes she created quality theater over a month of rehearsal in Houston, where she directed “Echelon” at the Alley Theatre with actors who hadn’t worked together before.

American actors, she observes, are more eager and distracted than Russian actors because Americans are always fighting for the next job. What concerns Volchek is how market pressures have affected the mentality of her own actors.

“In the old days, the theater was a priority. Film and TV always paid more, but it was inconceivable an actor could come in on the day of a show and say, ‘Sorry, I have to do a shooting.’ ”

Sergei Garmash, one of Russia’s most distinguished actors, graduated from the Moscow Art Theater Institute in 1984. He floats from stage to TV and film and has been part of the Sovremennik stable for 20 years.

“A contract is a contract,” he says, insisting that Russian actors don’t renege on theater commitments to do film or TV. Nor do Russian theater contracts have an “out clause,” as in the U.S., allowing them to bolt from the stage if the movies call.

“My first love is the theater,” Garmash insists, “and I schedule my movie work around my theater obligations.” But, he points out, sometimes theater directors call rehearsals that intrude on prior movie commitments, and that’s when tempers flare.

At the Satirikon Theater, Konstantin Raikin inherited the post of artistic director from his actor father, Arkady. Critics call Konstantin one of Russia’s greatest living actors. From his title role performance in Carlo Goldoni’s comedy “Sior Todero Brontolon,” it’s clear why.

Portraying an old merchant, looking and acting like a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and one of Moliere’s crotchety hypochondriacs, Raikin enters from an upstage corner like a living gargoyle: eyes bulging, tongue rolling, head wrapped in a stocking cap. Center stage, a walking stick stands upright, all by itself. Raikin’s goal is to reach it, impeded by the free will and entropy of his limbs. A monument to grotesquerie, humor and technique, he staggers with legs splayed, spine swiveling to various 45-degree angles, while wheezing emphysemic gasps that seem to rattle the theater’s ancient girders and ropes.

In an indication of how Russia’s directors have become traveling salesmen, the production is staged by a guest director, Robert Sturua. Ufimtseva credits Raikin for cracking the Soviet one-director/one-theater mold by inviting outside directors into his repertory and propelling their careers -- directors such as Valery Fokin and Roman Viktuk, both international theater stars weaned in the Sovremennik.

Raikin has opened his theater to younger directors, such as Nina Chusova and Yuri Butusov, who’s directing Raikin in the title role of “Richard III.” Trendy Chusova has standing invitations at the Pushkin, the Sovremennik and even the stalwart Moscow Art Theater, while newcomer Kirill Serebrennikov, known for directing plays in a variety of styles, is making the rounds.

Nobody pretends this new generation of Russian directors even approaches the stature of the Soviet-era greats -- Vsevelod Meyerhold, Yuri Lyubimov and Volchek. Television producer Sergei Varnovsky, who’s also Ufimtseva’s husband, says it’s unreasonable to expect a new generation to match the brilliance of its predecessors.

The Soviets didn’t inspire the genius of their artists with love and support. They shot poets, banned playwrights. They arrested Meyerhold and closed his theater. For daring to work in the West, they exiled Yuri Lyubimov from his Taganka Theater and let him return only after his successor, Anatoly Efros, died. These artists endured a kind of stubborn determination and defiance. This raises the discomfiting question of whether great art is produced by generosity and cross-pollination, such as the Russians are experiencing now, or by suffering and hardship, which the Soviets provided in abundance.

Director Mark Zakharov has adapted just fine to the new Russia. He’s one of the few legendary Russian stage (and film) directors besides Volchek who’s still working, and his swanky downtown Lenkom Theater is so popular with tourists, you can get a ticket only through scalpers or insiders.

Zakharov’s production of “Va Bank,” based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play “The Final Sacrifice,” is a satirical meditation on the intersections of love and money that, unfortunately, smacks of Boulevard Theater -- an art nouveau costume parade by TV personalities lacking stage presence. The performers play on and around seven horseless carriages and a few mirrors -- metaphors that give the actors little room to do much more than climb up and down the props. When gunshots are fired, you get, well, smoke and mirrors. The sloppy effort serves as a warning for what can happen when theater’s larger purpose gets lost in privilege and complacency.

Poland’s favorite-son movie director Andrzej Wajda’s staging of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” at the Sovremennik exemplifies a new international style of directing, emphasizing the look over the heart. The performances crackle on a beautiful, open stage against a backdrop of clouds -- the gathering storm of the Russian revolution. The story unfolds while, curiously, the actors don’t, occupying the same emotional space throughout the production. This is what separates it from Volchek’s “Murlin Murlo” -- a claustrophobic, modern tragicomedy about people trying to escape an impoverished province.

Garmash performs in both plays and explains how Wajda demands that the actors deliver what he wants quickly, whereas Volchek -- in the old Stanislavsky directing style -- nurtures. “She reaches into her lifetime of experience to help her actors discover the inner life of their characters.”

This explains her three-month rehearsals, the unique humanity of her productions, and “Murlin Murlo’s” 15-year lifespan with the same cast. You can feel its age in the effortless, wordless cues the actors send one another. Yet regardless of how soulful the work, Garmash hints that 15 years of playing any role is really enough.

“I feel we’re now approaching the end of the run,” he says.

Volchek’s attitude toward time passing is more regretful. “What can I say when some lip-syncing pop star makes more money in one night than one of my actors makes in three months?” she says. “Before, we were a team. Now we live in a world where everyone’s out for themselves.”

Steven Leigh Morris is theater editor of the LA Weekly.