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The Plodding Existence Of Yakov, Who Too Late Realizes
It Might Have Been Different.
Story theater turns a new page - in Russian, yet - at Yale
Repertory Theatre with Kama Ginkas' penetrating
and visionary adaptation of Anton Chekhov's short story
"Rothschild's Fiddle."
This
stark but oddly moving portrait of peasant life, a grim
ordeal lightened only by music and the inspirations
of nature, projects an almost Pinteresque feeling, with
its spare language punctuated by telling pauses.
Taken
almost word for word at times from Chekhov's tale of
coffin-maker Yakov Ivanov, Ginkas' production weaves
together narrative and fragments of dialogue, delivered
mostly by Valerii Barinov, a bearlike theater veteran
who plays the bitter, seemingly brutish central figure.
Surrounded
by the oddly eloquent blond woodwork, coffins and buildings
representing the small village artfully designed by
Sergei Barkhin, Yakov (or Bronza) enacts a drama of
life and death as the meaning of his poor, narrow existence
at last becomes clear to the carpenter and sometime
musician.
A
mordant humor pervades this portrait of a mostly unexamined
life. Yakov's greatest regret, at least at the start,
is the paucity of clients for his handiwork and the
laws that force him to curtail his labors on sacred
days.
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The
play, and Chekhov's short story, begins: "The town
was a small one. Worse than a village. Almost the only
people in it were old folks who died so rarely, it was
even aggravating." Barinov and the three others in
the cast speak entirely in Russian, but English supertitles,
translated by John Freedman for the co-production of the
Rep and the Moscow New Generation Theater, make every
word clear, and at a deliberate but never slow pace.
The
large lead actor, clad by Barkhin in drab working clothes,
fills the humble, sorry, plodding existence of Yakov with
a fierceness of attitude, an angry regret, a miserly selfishness.
He
sets out a deep sense of what life must have been like
for so many of our poor European forebears, hour after
hour, day after day, month after month of sameness. And
for Yakov, who broods on his penury, holidays and weekends
provide only more aggravation as he is forbidden from
fashioning his handsome boxes of bleached wood.
Work
is everything for Yakov, and Barinov handles a board or
a plane or a saw with thorough skill, so that he becomes
one with the carpenter. Even his fiddle, which he sometimes
plays for weddings at the behest of tinsmith Moishe Shakhes,
is not a stringed instrument at all but a keening musical
saw.
When
called upon to play, Yakov finds himself in the company
of the man who gives the play its title, the spindly Jewish
flautist Rothschild. Through this little man, a far more
blithe spirit than the coffin maker, the virulent anti-Semitism
of so many small-minded villages echoes the pogroms and
foreshadows the genocides of Hitler and Stalin. As Bronza
says: "Yakov began to hate Rothschild and all his
kind. He began picking on him, baiting him with rude words."
Igor Yasulovich's impish scarecrow Rothschild adds, "Once
he even tried to give him a beating."
Yakov
shares his miserable one-room hut with his wife, Marfa,
a cowed and cowering wraith in a babushka played by Arina
Nesterova, who contributes to the early descriptions of
Yakov's lot. The poor woman receives little better treatment
from Yakov than the Jew.
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After
a visit to the hospital and an encounter with an arrogant,
vodka-swilling doctor's assistant coldly acted by Alexei
Dubrovsky, the suffering woman explains: "Marfa
stood holding onto the stove for 10 minutes. She thought
if she lay down, Yakov would attack her for losses incurred,
he would criticize her for just lying there."
When
Yakov transports her to the hospital, Barinov lays her
atop a plank, in one of Ginkas' reinforcements of the
man's attachments to his craft. But when Marfa falls
ill, and dies, Yakov begins to reconsider his life,
to feel regret for his concentration on woodcraft and
money. He remembers better times, amid the beauties
of nature, and relives an early idyll with Marfa and
the terrible loss of the only child. Here Barinov reaches
into the poor man's dark soul, the terrible buried heart
of Russia.
Ginkas
ends "Rothschild's Fiddle" with triple epiphanies:
a frantic, madcap dance by Yasulovich's eternally upbeat
Jew, Yakov's dying gift to him of the fiddle/saw, and
the coffin maker's entombment of himself in a hollow
tree upstage.
But
throughout, Gleb Filshtinsky's lighting bathes Barkhin's
sculptural setting in a golden light, with momentary
diffusions from the dark heavens.
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