|
Kama Ginkas is in the thick of what we might call his
American Season and I cannot possibly be impartial about it.
Last
August, Ginkas took his famous production of "K.I.
from 'Crime'" on tour to the Fisher Center for the
Performing Arts at Bard College in New York, and I tagged
along because my wife stars in the show. I had nothing
to do with his September production of Anton Chekhov's
"The Lady With the Lapdog" at the American Repertory
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, although a book I
wrote with Ginkas was published in the United States during
that run.
Now
Ginkas has opened his dramatization of Chekhov's story
"Rothschild's Fiddle" at the Yale Repertory
Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and I have been compromised
again. This time I agreed to create English supertitles
for the show, which is performed in Russian by Russian
actors. To do so meant sitting in on rehearsals for two
months in Moscow, traveling to New Haven for the premiere,
and entering into the kind of intimate relationship with
the show and its makers that made mincemeat of my critical
impartiality.
This
certainly is not the first time I have been worthless
as a critic, although it is, to my recollection, the first
time I have rendered myself useless on purpose and so
willingly. What a joy it has been! -- taking off the sour
professional face, jettisoning the judgmental skepticism,
rolling up my sleeves and getting down to do some (let's
be honest) real work.
The
American critics in the first days following the Jan.
15 opener were tossing around superlatives -- "a
penetrating and visionary adaptation," said The Hartford
Courant; "physically simple" and "visually
poetic and arresting," wrote the New Haven Register
-- but let's go whole-hog and forget critics altogether.
More to the point are the pilgrimages directors and producers
are making to New Haven from Seattle, Washington, D.C.,
Baltimore, Boston and New York to see the world premiere
of Ginkas' latest show. The director has established himself
as a force in the United States and negotiations are under
way to continue his American collaborations with multiple
projects in the future.
| |
"Rothschild's
Fiddle," a compelling tale about an unthinking coffin
maker, whom life bullies into taking stock of his life,
closes out a trilogy based on Chekhov's prose that Ginkas
has been creating since the 1990s. It was preceded by
"The Lady With the Lapdog," which Ginkas has
staged in Turkey, Finland, the United States and Moscow,
and "The Black Monk," also in Moscow. Overall,
it is the ninth time that Ginkas, who is 62, has staged
a work by Chekhov and it will not be the last. He is already
gearing up to stage "The Cherry Orchard" with
his students at the Moscow Art Theater School. "Rothschild's
Fiddle" will run in New Haven through Jan. 31. Minus
the English aid, it will enter repertory at the Theater
Yunogo Zritelya in Moscow in February.
Ginkas
allegorically classifies the parts of the trilogy according
to three basic times of day. "The Lady With the Lapdog"
represents morning, a time, the director says, when the
shape of the coming day is still not clear. "The
Black Monk" represents daytime, a period when a person
knowingly takes chances, fails and answers for those failures.
"Rothschild's Fiddle," according to Ginkas,
corresponds to evening, a time given to a person to look
back and ponder the losses of the day.
Ginkas'
theater pulls no punches. Through his art, he stands up
to God and Fate and he demands to be heard. As a miraculous
child survivor of the Holocaust, he experienced violence.
As a nonconformist and a Jew who only sporadically had
the right to ply his trade in the Soviet years, he endured
injustice. As a thinking man, he knows that banalities
and sentimentality will not describe adequately his or
anyone else's experience.
"Rothschild's
Fiddle" is unquestionably one of the most powerful
in a long line of hard-hitting Ginkas productions. Not
only does it explore a man's reactions to death and his
stunning recognition that he has wasted his life, but
it rips back the facade of anti-Semitism with a directness
that Ginkas has never before applied to this topic. The
Russian coffin maker Yakov blames everything that goes
wrong on a Jew named Rothschild until it finally occurs
to him before death to make peace with him. Holding faithfully
to Chekhov's text except to shorten it by about 10 percent,
Ginkas torques the tale to a white heat by developing
nuances in speech patterns and intonation, and by adding
expressive, sometimes jarring, scenes of wordless action.
This
is Chekhov, all right, make no mistake. But it is all
Ginkas, too, surging in waves of hot and cold, comedy
and tragedy. It is common at a Ginkas show for audiences
to be convulsed with laughter while tears of pain well
in their eyes. Caught defenseless in this state of limbo,
they are primed to receive the hard truths that Ginkas
invariably tackles. During the performances at Yale, one
can hear the telltale signs of deathly silence broken
by the sound of people sniffling about a half-hour into
the show.
| |
It is easy to see where that comes from when watching
Ginkas rehearse. He himself is a fount of hot and cold.
He is all over the auditorium, exhorting his actors
on with furious cries and intimate whispers, laughing
uproariously when there is reason, and nervously stalking
the floor or squirming violently in his seat during
crushingly dramatic scenes.
One November day during rehearsals, Ginkas leaped up on
stage as Valery Barinov's Yakov and Igor Yasulovich's
Rothschild approached the end of an emotional and physical
scene in which the former gives the latter a beating.
He wanted to be right there with them, right in the
thick of things. As the actors huffed and puffed and
hugged each other to get over the difficulty of the
altercation they had just rehearsed, Ginkas stepped
up and began throwing fake, though earnest, punches
at Barinov until everybody dissolved in laughter.
This
brings us to what "Rothschild's Fiddle" is
about as much as the catastrophes of prejudice and unexamined
lives: the great mystery of doing and making. The clumsy,
ignorant Yakov has two saving graces -- the coffins
that he makes so conscientiously and the fiddle on which
he occasionally accompanies his nemesis Rothschild in
a Jewish wedding orchestra. In fact, in Yakov, who is
at least partially redeemed by work and art, one might
see tantalizing reflections of Ginkas himself.
If
I am not mistaken, "Rothschild's Fiddle" will
go down as one of Ginkas' greatest, most challenging
and most powerful shows. But don't just take the word
of a biased and corrupted critic. Go see for yourself.
"Rothschild's
Fiddle" (Skripka Rotshilda) runs through Jan. 31
at the Yale
Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut (Tel.
203-432-1234; www.yalerep.org).
It opens in February at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya,
located at 10 Mamonovsky Pereulok. Metro Pushkinskaya.
Tel. 299-5360. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
| |
