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Method Madness

by Paul Bass | Dec 8, 2006 12:37 pm

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Posted to: Arts

If you, like the character above, wrote a script, you should be so lucky not to have a famous director like the character at left take it on. The Yale Rep can explain.

The madcap tale of what happens to Sergei Maxudov’s novel-turned-play in the hands of director Ivan Vasilievich forms the center of Black Snow, which opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre Thursday night and runs through Dec. 23.

The tale of what happens to Mikhail Bulgakov’s play in the hands of the Yale Rep is neither comedy nor tragedy. Rather, it’s a cautionary tale of about how to revive and update, and how not to revive and update, cutting-edge work from another place and time.

The production is an updating of the satirical script written by Bulgakov, an early Soviet-era novelist and playwright who died in 1940. The play must have been packed with irony and subversion when Bulgakov wrote it. Bulgakov faced the whims of Soviet censors; eventually his work was banned. Stalin denied him power to emigrate. He wrote Black Snow at a time when writers faced life-or-death threats to their freedom of expression, a can’t-miss theme for any revival. Plus, the play highlights one of the most colorful figures in the history of the theater, Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, the father of method acting. He’s always good for a laugh, not to mention passionate debate.

Restaged and updated at the Rep this month, though, Black Snow packs all the power and challenge of a sitcom rerun.

Adam Stein plays Sergei Maxudov, a struggling writer Bulgakov based on himself. Sergei’s landfilled novel, Black Snow, is rescued as a script to be produced by the famous, offbeat, imperious director Vasilievich, played by Alvin Epstein and based on Stanislavsky. In between ego-eviscerating encounters with competitors and dramachniks, Sergei watches in horror as the director, who slept through a reading of the script, gradually rips it apart and substitutes incomprehensible plot twists and scenes with the help of a fawning crew (including Ludmimlla, pictured, played by Tamilla Woodard). The only option left at play’s end is the one Sergei considered at the play’s beginning: killing himself.

Along the way, characters rush on and off stage and fall through the floor, in a succession of fast-paced gags that seemed designed to add up to a confusing, surprising commentary on sycophancy, abuses of power, hopelessness of the lonely author, or ideas of that sort. What surprised me most was how clear and predictable it all was—when the questions mined by Bulgakov are anything but. Even Stanislavsky was boring. High-handed, yes, humorously arbitrary and fawned over, but not in fresh or multi-dimensional ways. There was no sense of what made him great, or interesting, or able to command devotion. No sense of what ideas motivated him, or why had an impact on people.

That’s not Bulgakov’s fault. That’s the fault of the people in whose hands his play (like his character’s script) ends up. A script like this cries out not just for entertaining an audience with slapstick and witty monologues, but for challenging an audience to experience the underlying tensions in its own time and place.

The Yale Cabaret (half of whose crew seemed to be attending or working at Thursday’s Black Snow opening) has succeeded in doing that at least twice in the last year.

It revived Max Frisch’s 1953 The Firebugs, another absurdist comedy, and made it relevant to post-9/11 America, as well as post-community-policing New Haven—all avoiding pat answers to tough questions about fear and suspicion and freedom. (Click here for a review of that show.)

A second Cabaret revival dealt with another aspect of what probably worked so well in the original Black Snow and falls short in its New Haven restaging: inevitability. This past summer the Cabaret restaged Ionesco’s The New Tenant, in which the audience watches an imperious new tenant somehow force furniture movers to fill his apartment beyond its limits, and then some. The audience knows what’ll happen, but remains fascinated in how the ending will look. The staging captured the timeless question, so hard to answer, of why people agree to follow commands they know make no sense and in fact pose a public danger. (Click here for that review.) Watching Black Snow, the audience has a good laugh or three—and remains decades, and a continent, safely away from the writer’s paradise that provoked such a once-challenging story.

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