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The School Of Dramatic Art / For MT
The Bittsevsky Park maniac kills the seven choir members in his "signature" style.
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Modern City Collage
"Little Russian Songs" is an intriguing puzzle of images and sounds describing contemporary Moscow.
By John Freedman
Published: May 8, 2008
What do you make of a show like Alexander Ogaryov's "Little Russian Songs" at the School of Dramatic Art? This theatrical collage of songs, film clips, poetry recitals, narrative stories, courtroom minutes and dramatic skits often seems determined to defy logical comprehension. The episodes are not connected directly, although, like pieces of a puzzle, they contribute to a larger, unified picture. Sometimes that image comes into focus, at others the abstraction is so great that spectators may feel they have been left on the outside of an inside joke.
One's basic attitude toward this performance -- it's good or it's bad, I liked it or I didn't -- will doubtless be colored by the degree to which one believes theater must "make sense." The more you expect this production to tell a coherent story, the less you will be likely to accept it. Those who are willing to let images and sounds flow over them, and can draw from that what they will, are more liable to find "Little Russian Songs" to be an intriguing two-and-half hours of theater.
Two of this show's most prominent and effective visual features are the set by Vera Martynova and a recurring cinematic loop projected on a large screen at the back of the stage. The simple and evocative loop provides a quintessential urban picture: massive Moscow traffic jams of automobiles on the Garden Ring Road pulsing slowly like blood through veins. Martynova, with her sculpture-like design of the performance space, provides another viewpoint of a modern city. She covered the floor of the stage and hall with evenly distributed rows of pillars that progress from heights of approximately two meters at the back of the hall and "shrink" to nearly floor-level at the other end. When viewed from above -- some spectators are seated high in the second and third balconies -- it creates the impression of a skyscraper reaching into the sky. But these pillars are as functional as they are decorative. Half of the audience sits on them for the duration of the show, while the actors continually move among them, climb on top of them, hide beneath them or even rise above them on an industrial lift.
But Ogaryov's general approach to these and other aspects of the modern city is made by way of texts that have been around for centuries and originated in the sleepy countryside of what once was called Little Russia, which we now call Ukraine. A choir of seven punctuates the scenes of the production with Ukrainian folk songs, while Ogaryov takes the lead in the first extended scene by delivering a text that Ukrainian-born writer Nikolai Gogol wrote about Ukrainian music in the 1830s. "Songs for Little Russia are everything," Gogol wrote, "poetry and history and a father's grave." Ogaryov's slightly inflated manner of speech and his playful glances add equal parts of irony and pathos to his delivery.
Before long, however, the parts of this story break into discrete segments, rather like the components of the set that add up to a single picture of a building. A woman claiming she is sick of living (Natalya Kudryashova) takes us on a fretful journey through modern Moscow, paying visits to Red Square, the opera theater and a lonely man sitting in an empty field. A man (Oleg Malakhov) opening new commercial enterprises -- from a fish store to a pet cemetery -- entertains the audience with silly jokes, corny games and giveaway "prizes," such as purses that he steals from one spectator to give to another. The Bittsevsky Park maniac (Alexander Lapty) strangles the seven choir members as he boasts that his method of killing was not cruel, it was merely his "style and signature." From time to time, a group of four actors playing spectators eagerly watch the goings-on or exchange lines from various poetic works.
This is the modern world as it often appears to us -- fractured, confusing, dangerous, ridiculous and occasionally touching.
But there is another layer here, one that has made its way into nearly every new show at the School of Dramatic Art since city authorities began acting a few years ago to remove the theater's founder Anatoly Vasilyev from his post as artistic and managing director. Vasilyev's ouster, which was finalized at the beginning of this season, and the trauma that this caused for his former students and colleagues clearly is something that will haunt everyone involved for some time. In "Little Russian Songs" the event takes its place as one of those events characterizing modern Moscow, an abrupt, damaging change in the course of life that must be accepted, dealt with and set aside in order to go on.
The theater itself evolves early on as a character in the show by way of a film clip depicting what appears to be a computer-adapted shot of the building as it may have looked decades ago when it was still the Uran movie theater. A live actress (Olga Korneyeva) approaches the screen and appears to step into the picture, where she wanders the building's corridors until she sits down to play a piano. As the show ends, Vasilyev makes his appearance through comments drawn from a recent interview. The actors perform Vasilyev's remarks as if they are dialog in a play: "The theater that existed is finished ... I want to say, 'bon voyage.'"
Vasilyev, bitter about the way he was removed from the theater he created, understands better than anyone that life -- whether it is good, bad or indifferent -- goes on.
Contemporary Moscow changes its face daily as entire blocks of buildings are destroyed or built, thoroughfares are rerouted and traffic jams bring all of that to a temporary halt several times a day. But life does go on. And it continues to intrigue and raise some up while it simultaneously discourages and jettisons others. It's up to us to take that in and make sense of it.
That, at least, is what Ogaryov seems to be saying with this challenging production of "Little Russian Songs."
"Little Russian Songs" (MaloRossiiskiye Pesni) plays May 30 and 31 at 8 p.m. at the School of Dramatic Art, located at Ulitsa Sretenka 19/27. Metro Sukharevskaya. Tel. 632-9344. www.sdart.ru. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
Copyright © 2008 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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May 8 - 15, 2008 
