On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage BANNED IN MOSCOW BY LEO SAUVAGE Hope Against Hope, the first volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam noted that her husband?the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who fell victim to...
...With a renewed zest for living, Semyon Semyonovich eagerly does some calculations on paper and decides that he can earn enough rubles with his "art" to support himself...
...There is the stock priest of Soviet farce, cringing and unappetizing, and a pompous little writer on whom the anta production, for some incomprehensible reason, confers a strong resemblance to Leon Trotsky...
...Nikolai Erdman's work, first produced in the U.S...
...But the coherence of Erdman's farce, if there is any, is less important than its surface energy, and for conveying this Jacobi's technique proves to be exactly what is needed...
...He also knows—as I believe Jacques Copeau has said—that a farce has to tick like a Swiss clock...
...Then she adds: "Allof us, whether mad or not, never give up this one hope: Suicide is the last resort which we keep in reserve, believing that it is never too late to use it...
...Laboring in a "worker-owned" factory distresses him less than coming home to his shrewish wife and irritating mother-in-law, who make life a burden to him...
...The political and philosophical waters in which The Suicide swims are, in fact, shallow, but the play is a joy...
...Derek Jacobi's interpretation of Semyon Semyonovich is certainly closer to Schweik's peasant simplicity than to the terrifying helplessness of Joseph K. Maybe Jacobi somewhat overdoes his Schweikism...
...Like Semyon Semyonovich Podsekal-nikov, Nikolai Robertovich Erdman endured...
...he portrays Semyon Semyonovich as a village idiot without giving us a glimpse of the shrewdness that will in the end make him a winner...
...This might appear "counterrevolutionary" for a citizen of a workers' paradise, but his dissatisfaction cannot be laid at the door of the Socialist state...
...Semyon Semyonovich cheats all of these parasites by playing along with them, and the game does give him a good reason to stay alive...
...Indeed, a sensitive spectator at the 1932 dress rehearsal might well have been shocked that a light-hearted farce on taking one's life was being staged by the closest friends of Vladimir Mayakovsky so soon after his suicide in 1930...
...Then his hopes are dashed by an unforeseen obstacle: His booklet of tuba lessons, written by a German professor, requires a piano to practice scales...
...With the aid of Ara Fitzgerald's choreography, Jurasas orchestrates everything like a ringmaster with a whistle and a stopwatch...
...Mayakovsky shot himself less than a month after the March 16, 1930, opening of The Baths at Meyerhold's Theatre...
...He obviously has studied the grotes-queries, pantomimes, acrobatics and constructivist principles associated with Meyerhold...
...Perhaps The Suicide really should be called The Survivor...
...Moreover, Mayakovsky's The Bedbug and The Baths tore the bureaucrats themselves to pieces, while Erdman's satire was directed at easy, recommended targets...
...and the frustrated tuba player has only to thwart powerless dummies...
...Stage designer Santo Loquasto has given him a witty and very Meyerholdian set, with plenty of swinging doors, paintings that become peepholes, and a wonderful oscillating table that slowly ascends during the hilarious farewell banquet...
...They are fools who have been taken before and deserve to be taken again...
...Thus The Suicide does not exactly evoke "the last resort" Nadezhda Mandelstam spoke of...
...The sense of power it gives him is intoxicating...
...He is the perfect focal point for the magnificently frenzied set and the typically Meyerholdian theatrical fireworks...
...his pestering mother-in-law is not far away, and there is no tuba anywhere in sight...
...The hero of The Suicide has inspired comparisons with Joseph K. I think he bears a greater resemblance to Jaroslav Hasek's good soldier Schweik —although Schweik had to deceive the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in order to survive...
...It is both less and more than that...
...Had the high Party officials who forced its immediate withdrawal possessed the slightest sense of humor, they would have cut a few lines here and there and let it open on schedule...
...Unfortunately, he did not blow the whistle on Erdman's tedious speeches over the suspended coffin from which Semyon winks at the audience to let everyone know that he has faked his demise...
...Even the "Marxist" in the play, who sees everything from Paris to the female buttocks "from a Marxist point of view," is quite insignificant in relation to the Party line...
...Meyerhold was executed, it seems, in 1942...
...Nevertheless, Nikolai Erdman was labelled an irreverent playwright who could not be trusted in Soviet theater...
...But Nadezhda Mandestam, who met him during his last years in various remote corners of the Soviet Union, reports that he was never deprived of vodka...
...So, to spite his wife, her mother, and above all the tuba, Semyon Semyonovich announces his intention to commit suicide...
...Only at the full dress rehearsal did high Party officials—in attendance along with friends of the playwright, director and actors—suddenly decide that the second play by the widely acclaimed young author of The Warrant was unacceptable, and shut it down...
...Another acceptable satirical victim is Aristarkh Dominikovich Grand-Skub-nik, "an intellectual...
...But by no means do they represent the regime in power, much less anything approaching "executioners...
...The Party hacks who closed the play, on the other hand, could have drawn satisfaction from the proximity of Mayakovsky's tragic end with such a comedy...
...On Stage BANNED IN MOSCOW BY LEO SAUVAGE Hope Against Hope, the first volume of her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam noted that her husband?the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who fell victim to Stalin's purges —had "hoped to cheat his executioners...
...His announcement becomes a powerful catalyst—and a prodigiously effective theatrical device...
...In a further lapse, the play concludes with the cliched suggestion that the whole escapade was only a dream: Semyon Semyonovich wakes up in bed alongside his nagging wife...
...And she tells us: "Not for nothing was the best play in the Soviet repertory entitled The Suicide...
...Two characters straight out of a hackneyed boulevard comedy antedating the Revolution, "a beauty who has seen better days" and her "rival," want Semyon Semyonovich to proclaim that he has died of unrequited love for them...
...When the news gets around that he has exchanged a razor for a revolver on the black market, a parade of losers implores him to boost and flatter them in his suicide note...
...The director of the anta production, Jonas Jurasas, is a Lithuanian who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974...
...It was banned by official decree after a dress rehearsal at Vsevolod Mey-erhold's Moscow Theater in 1932, a fact that has prompted some reviewers to see it as an anti-Stalinist satire...
...His wife still nags him and his mother-in-law is no less of a pest, but he sees a way out of his dismal circumstances now...
...The Soviet authorities, who controlled the theater doors no less than the gates of the Gulag, approved the script before the production began and allowed Meyerhold to go on directing it for 18 months without intervening...
...There is a 1929 photograph depicting Mayakovsky, Meyerhold and Erdman as an inseparable trio...
...earlier this year by the Trinity Square Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, and now at the anta Theater on Broadway, never actually opened in the Soviet Union...
...The American adaptation makes clear that although The Suicide could not fit a rigid definition of Socialist Realism, it was still sufficiently ambiguous to pass as an "anti-bourgeois" farce...
...John Heffernan cleverly—and in this context correctly—plays the role as a crudely conniving, desperate ass who tries to cajole Semyon Semyonovich into writing in his suicide note that his act is a protest against the regime for not giving Aristarkh Dominikovich Grand-Skubnik the banner position in society that he so richly deserves...
...Semyon Semyonovich Podsekal-nikov is unhappy...
...Accordingto Na-dezhda Mandelstam, the Soviet press at the time constantly caricatured intellectuals, presenting them as "puny" and "spineless": "The prime task was to hold them up to ridicule in literature...
...His first feeble threats of suicide are banished when the leggy commissar of a band of gypsy entertainers, the mistress of an upstairs neighbor, generously provides him with a tuba...
...He was not allowed near a stage again up to the time of his natural death in 1970...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 20
