DOSTOEVSKI'S SHADOW
Wren, Celia
and Desire was apprentice work, scarcely seen at all.) This gangster movie is nothing but an exercise in moviemaking-Kubrick teaching himself to shoot a boxing match, then a love scene,...
...Roughly concurrent with the cellarbound Notes, New York's Storm Theater Company mounted Stavrogin's Confession, based on a censored chapter from The Devils (the director was Peter Dobbins...
...The idea," he remarked in a postperformance interview, "was that, as much as theater is about interacting with people in the outside world, so it is about dealing with the voices inside one's head...
...We must honor everything that came between...
...Most of his novels are sprawling, and their melodrama is knotted up in lengthy conversations about philosophical and theological concepts, or theories on the mystical identity of Russia...
...the title character inquired of the bishop at one point...
...He wills his own misery, shunning comforts, deliberately alienating sympathy, and behaving irrationally, in order to prove to himself that he is free...
...The audience, in short, was treated to a dose of angst to rival that of Dostoevski's chronically tortured protagonist...
...And yet, Gardner's Notes did provide the audience with intriguing physical counterparts to the novel's metaphysics...
...Chicago's Lookingglass Theater Company scored a hit with a 1998 staging of The Idiot, and Atlanta's Actors' Express mounted an acclaimed The Devils last January, to name just two...
...Baiting the monk and spinning out his own shocking confession, Stavrogin opened the floodgates to such questions, presenting the audience with an eerie uncertainty: Either the character was insane, or he was possessed by the devil...
...Humans will choose choice over happiness, the Underground Man insists, and he glories in his anguish...
...Misgivings about a fire hazard can hardly compare...
...Hank Johnson ear rarely figures in the theater experience...
...The play, in which Tikhon critiques Stavrogin's confession on literary grounds, hints at an alternate, aesthetic interpretation for the quote...
...Some readers do feel that Dostoevski's writing is intrinsically dramatic...
...Since ten, a silent group has drifted up to stand in line like broken teeth, clot still and beaten...
...But his books do make their way before the footlights...
...Passers by who've eaten well don't feel beneath their soles the bottom line of hunger perforate and tear, nor think to wait upon a meal's divine forgiveness...
...Risk-taking art, even when it doesn't quite succeed, even when it might appall the fire department, can satisfy more richly than the tidy, crafted kind--art that is safe, but just lukewarm...
...I'm not talking about the frisson of suspense, or cathartic pity and terror, but real fear: the feeling that you may not make it through to the closing curtain alive...
...For the audience, the basementtheater began to feel like the inside of someone's mind---exactly what Gardner intended, as it happens...
...This blood is soup, this body bread...
...As faultlessly portrayed by Laurence Drozd and Dan Berkey, respectively, Stavrogin and his idiosyncratic confessor, Bishop Tikhon, ushered the mysostoevski's works may be unlikely fodder for the stage...
...If a few hard-core Dostoevski enthusiasts had heard about this no-budget production, the New York City Fire Department, evidently, had not...
...Complete atheism is much more acceptable than such worldly indifference," the bishop retorts, and proceeds to quote Scripture: "Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth...
...Commonweal 2 6 September 10, 1999...
...this Underground Man was really underground, after all, and while ranting about the "wall" (the limits of Commonweal 2 4 September 10, 1999human behavior, as predicted by science and sociology), Honeywell was constantly running at full tilt into the walls...
...Behind the Basilica At noon the sisters hand them sandwiches and soup...
...Are we responsible for each other's evil...
...And, to reproduce the book's tortuous monologue, riddled with contradictions and the objections of imagined listeners, Gardner had scripted lines for other voices, which mocked and interrupted the Underground Man's testimony...
...This gangster movie is nothing but an exercise in moviemaking-Kubrick teaching himself to shoot a boxing match, then a love scene, then a chase, and so forth...
...The drama that divides thought and action must be what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote that "Between the idea/and the reality...falls the Shadow...
...theater are "a perfect match" according to Gardner, who observes that, "as much as he's a philosopher, [Dostoevski] has an innate sense of how one scene connects to another...
...Playing a creepily elegant, tense Stavrogin, Drozd exploited this ambiguity...
...But what Dostoevski depicts in Notes from Underground-and what Gardner's production, to a certain extent, reproduces--is the drama of consciousness working its way toward either action or inertia...
...During seventyfive minutes of delirious pacing, the actor lit and extinguished the candles that provided the only light...
...The occasion was a dramatized Notes from Underground, performed solo in near obscurity by actor Robert Honeywell, from a script by director Michael Gardner...
...As on-the-job training it's successful, but it's not a work of art...
...But not enough of a difference...
...Dostoevski and Commonweal 2 5 September 10, 1999teries of sin and salvation into the tiny Red Room Theater (situated above an East Village bar...
...The idea may sound odd--we often think of theater as a medium for actionand Underground Man's dictum that the "fruit of consciousness is inertia" seems hardly stage-friendly...
...Regis, in discussing his play, has remarked on the sinister resonance the character of Dostoevski's nihilist has taken on since the Littleton shootout, and Stavrogin's Confession was indeed a wrenching meditation on how embodied the problem of evil can be...
...Oh ye dead arisen from the flood of traffic, take...
...When do abject remorse and the quest for suffering become a kind of pride...
...But there was ample opportunity for trepidation, earlier this summer, in a tiny cellar-turned-stage on New York's Lower East Side...
...Of course, the quality of the distress was different: The "spiteful" narrator of the 1864 Notes suffers existentially, for no good reason except that he is...
...Since the space was awash in ink-blotted paper, bearing illegible scrawls, and since HoneyweU's role involved skidding back and forth, candle in hand, sometimes barely keeping upright, the tiny audience, seated along the walls, had good reason to cringe...
...Neither Kubrick's first film nor his last is a work of art...
...Self-conscious people know the wrenching deliberations that can precede even trivial actions, like speaking up in a meeting...
...Precarious candles were only the starting point...
...Is belief in the devil coupled with a complete indifference to God...more acceptable than complete disbelief...
...The Shadow, the Underground Man would consider, is the experience of choice...
...in one particularly effective moment, he lapsed into a trance, abandoning the stage to a pause that, as the seconds ticked by, began to seem increasingly uncanny...
...Forty-five years of experience and a bigger budget make a difference: Eyes Wide Shut is more imposing than Killer's Kiss...
...Playwright and actor John Regis, who previously penned a Kabuki-influenced adaptation of The Idiot, has turned the episode into an intriguing one-act play that is quintessential Dostoevski: packed with thought and talk about crime, repentance, self-punishment, forgiveness, and pride...
...The scene, in which the antihero Stavrogin visits a monastery to confess to the rape of a child, was so controversial that it appeared in print only in 1922, after Dostoevski's death...
...Now, forty-five years later, with a lifetime spent making one truly affecting, disturbing film after another, Kubrick has left us a strange memento: another technical exercise, photographed in that slightly veiled style he favored (with a wonderful strawberryblonde tint for the early party scenes), streaked with his usual sardonicism, studded with funny supporting performances that abet that sardonicism, and underlined with music shrewdly excerpted from already composed pieces...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
