Voices From the Inner Depths

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III MOSCOW

In a long-suppressed and now acclaimed production of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground at Moscow's Theater for Young Spectators, the withdrawn and embittered central character repeatedly pushes with all his might against the immovable proscenium arch at the side of the stage. The gesture is an apt visual metaphor not only for a melancholy nobody's passion to smash the barriers of loneliness but also for the yearning of the whole Moscow drama world to break down the confines of habit and tradition. Everywhere one goes in the theater these days, the same artistic self-criticism is heard: there are almost no vibrant new playwrights or imaginative directors, the basic style and format of productions have not changed in the past quarter-century, beauty and splendor have been forgotten.

In fact the quality of theater in Moscow is very high. Playwriting, if at times too grandiosely spiritual, at least concerns itself with bigger issues than middle-class marriage, the preoccupation of the commercial stage in the West. Acting is certainly of the caliber of Broadway or London. So is stage design, if a bit too dependent on imaginative metaphor rather than money. True, productions tend to look a lot alike, regardless of content: perhaps as a reaction against the easy intimacy of TV's close-ups, almost every company seems infatuated with mounting shows in gloomy near darkness or in silhouette behind a scrim. Moreover, many of the popular tricks of stagecraft (a costumed mannequin standing amid the audience's seats, a door flinging open to reveal a burst of light) are recognizable even to Westerners as derived from the 1960s work of such still active directors as Yuri Lyubimov and Oleg Efremov, who today runs the venerable Moscow Art Theater. The one true innovation of recent years, nudity, has become similarly cliched: bare breasts or bottoms, and even crotches, are on view in at least five Moscow theaters, never as an essential to the plot.

Having justified itself for two decades and more as a medium of political expression -- obliquely during the Brezhnev years, sometimes rantingly during the current thaw -- the Soviet stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe, the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater. Says Konstantin Raikin, artistic director of the Satirikon Theater, where the Russian-language debut of Jean Genet's psychosexual drama The Maids is Moscow's hottest show and among the least political: "These days, a measure of a play's appeal is to be able to say that it's not only about perestroika."

Relevance is certainly the least of the virtues of The Maids, which features men in eye makeup and flamboyant drag playing women. The aggressive gender bending, laced with homoeroticism, brings spectators in for the scandal value but sends them out having seen a world-class display of theatrical wit and invention. Just as Genet speculatively derived his sadomasochistic rituals from an actual news story of a murderous plot by two maids against their mistress, so director Roman Viktyuk subordinates the text to an evocative extravaganza about sex and power, seduction and display. Within the script he finds moments both of striking visual imagery (two chairs and a long red dress abruptly become a casket) and of serene reliance on the words (Raikin, motionless and in shadow, performs a long lament in a hypnotic near monotone). But the evening opens and closes with interpolated mime and dance sequences, alternately brooding and confrontational or jokey. (The funniest moment: flashers open their raincoats to reveal long underwear with sewn-on fig leaves). Even in flouncy dresses, the performers are unmistakably men: profuse body hair is visible as they barrel through somersaults and backflips, or wiggle limp-wristed through parodies of enticement. If it's not always easy to tell, moment to moment, what message is meant, the show is compulsively watchable.

Austere and philosophical where The Maids is lavish and sensual, Notes from Underground typifies more conventional Soviet staging at its best. The set looks like a rummage sale in a czarist attic. The dimly lighted action features recurring glimpses of a grinning peasant, a swanking bureaucrat, a howling madman. A virtual monologue in its first half, the piece evokes the wounded vanity and urge toward vengeance of the sort of man who nowadays might become a serial killer. Yet in the mind of director Kama Ginkas, who has been developing his adaptation for some 20 years despite official disapproval, both his version and the Dostoyevsky original comment on "the inevitable alienation resulting from extremes of socialism, the drive to violence underlying the pursuit of universal happiness." Westerners will more likely find the show a poignant portrait of one of life's losers, but every phrase rings true.

At the richly talented Sovremennik, which seems on balance Moscow's most interesting theater, the men of the company dominate A Humble Cemetery, a melodrama about the travails of ordinary workingmen, while the women adorn Stars in the Morning Sky, a lament of the cleanup campaign that swept prostitutes, drunks and the deranged off the streets just before visitors arrived for the 1980 Olympics. Both plays combine the hortatory, sentimental style of Stalinist social realism with a topical disregard for those in power. Stars, seen in a different production as part of last summer's New York * International Festival of the Arts, has two moments of emotional clout: one utterly quiet, when each woman seems to ponder her mistreatment by men, and one noisily jubilant, when the hookers are blocked from even seeing the Olympic torch go by yet break into spontaneous cheers for the Soviet team.

In Sergei Kaledin's A Humble Cemetery, the pressures on the hulking workman Sparrow (Mikhail Zhigalov) include a legacy of family violence, a stretch in a work camp, virtual gangsterism in the cemetery where he works as a gravedigger, and a dangerous weakness for vodka. There are performances of enchanting sweetness from Anton Tabakov as a young co-worker and of feral malignity from Valeri Shalnykh as a mock-friendly gang enforcer. But the most memorable scenes show Sparrow alone with his cacophony of fears, climbing arduously up to a bell tower where he can hear the euphony of wind and birds and a distantly remembered lullaby, until a screeching train cuts off his reverie. Emotive yet astringent, these are moments worthy of Charles Laughton in a play sometimes deserving of comparison with Gorky's The Lower Depths. If Soviet theater remains for the most part an art in search of significant new voices, in this play and production it has found one.