Mark Jackson's "The Death of Meyerhold" is a play on the march, a bristling, witty phalanx of old Russian poses advancing, at its best, with the force of a tank. It's part fantasia on the life and political assassination of the pioneering theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and part biography of the great theatrical figures of early 20th-century Russia.
Watch as the great Konstantin Stanislavsky's fussy direction of Anton Chekhov's "Sea Gull" drives the playwright crazy! See the flaming young actor-director Meyerhold shatter the fourth wall en route to his wholesale overthrow of naturalism in the theater!
Joel Reuben Ganz and Richard Henrich, foreground, with Jon Townson in Mark Jackson's "Death of Meyerhold."
(Scott Suchman -- Studio Theatre Secondstage)
|
|
"I hate pretending you're not there," he says soulfully to the audience.
This uneven but agreeably freewheeling "Meyerhold" is perfectly placed, and not just because it's well into Studio Theatre's ambitious "Russian Winter" season. This play about notable theater experimentalists also happens to be inaugurating the Studio's latest performance space, Stage 4, an ample raw brick and concrete room on the top floor of the company's complex at 14th and P streets. That's likely to be the chief venue of Studio's Secondstage, which has long been a playground for emerging directors and actors (and, naturally, some of its riskier experiments).
And of course there is the Studio's abiding affinity for things Russian. That hallmark gets cheerfully tweaked in the play's fake opening sequence, in which an actor playing "Mark Jackson," the playwright, sits for an interview introducing the show. Somehow in the course of "Mark Jackson's" thumbnail sketch of Russian theater and revolutionary politics, Studio's Stanislavskian acting classes get shamelessly shilled.
Not that the play and director Rick Simas's often inspired production are strictly inside baseball. Jackson takes pains to guide the audience along through the personalities and theories that animated Russia a century ago. The pseudo-interview is a fabulous start: It's fast and funny, yet it's also one of those anti-naturalism devices -- something that distances the audience from the action, exposing the drama as something staged while perversely drawing us in by our collusion.
Like a mischievous graduate student, Jackson gets his characters to expound their theories even as he impishly deploys them or sends them up. Chekhov complains that Stanislavsky is ruining one of his characters' speeches with staging that's too realistically literal, marred by a discontented clamor of hammering and coughing in the background. But his complaint is accompanied by -- what else? -- the same pounding and hacking. Only the effect is entirely different the second time around: It's satiric, pushing to an extreme Chekhov's argument in favor of heightened theatricality.
Meyerhold would drive still further, ultimately devising a system of acting known as "biomechanics," which rigorously emphasized movement and gesture. The examples here range from a woman auditioning for Meyerhold by cleverly performing "Hamlet" in a single minute (climaxing with a nod to the esteemed silent "Hamlet" by D.C.'s local Russian troupe, Synetic Theatre) to wildly extravagant acting that sometimes looks like melodrama run amok.
The initial result of this breathless theorizing and stage-playfulness is a giddy sense that anything is possible in this show, even in front of a homely wooden set (a raised platform with steps on either end) and nothing fancy in the way of the lighting (by Colin K. Bills) or costumes (period clothing effectively designed by Robyn Shrater Seemann). The play in general, and Meyerhold in particular -- played by the serious-browed Joel Reuben Ganz in a resolutely earnest performance -- seem to be surging toward an ideal, art bound inextricably with a forward-moving socialist society.
Too bad Stalin saw things the same way: that art and politics need to move in lockstep. "The Death of Meyerhold" displays the swoony appeal of revolutionary art, and shows how it degenerated under tyranny into Soviet Realism, intimidating and diminishing the artist in the process.
Unfortunately the show diminishes along the way, too. Jackson's script relies a few times too many on the recitation of letters or excerpts of criticism. There is a fair amount of what Meyerhold initially disparages as two faces exchanging "Blah blah blah" dialogue. As the story grows more personal, the play grows more conventional, but Simas's company doesn't manage the shift well. They are better collectively than they are individually. The sweep of theory feels more urgent than the individual lives -- a real problem, since the tragedy here is that individuality is squashed first in the art, then by the state. The breezy feeling created in the first act becomes a bit of a slog as the show reaches almost three hours.
Still, "The Death of Meyerhold" has more than its share of ambition and brio. The writing is expansive and sophisticated, with humor that keeps pompousness at bay. The production's 12-actor ensemble is extremely well drilled by Simas and choreography director Beth Wilmurt. Frequently accompanied by the Russian symphonies employed in Jake Rodriguez's sound design, the cast sharply handles everything from cheeky Ibsen tableaux to a brilliant finish as Meyerhold's life flashes before his eyes, and ours.
The Death of Meyerhold, by Mark Jackson. Directed by Rick Simas. Approximately 2 hours 50 minutes. Through Feb. 13 at Studio Theatre's Stage 4, 1333 P St. NW. Call 202-332-3300 or visit www.studiotheatre.org.
