To go to Moscow for the first time is a strange enough experience in itself, but to go as part of a delegation from Illinois to discuss an artistic exchange with the Moscow theater community, and to attend the First International Conference on Stanislavsky, added a whole other dimension. The ten days that followed proved to be a time of enormous and unexpected contrasts. What should perhaps have been the most predictable turned out to be the most surprising--the theater.
On the first morning of he Stanislavsky Conference, the present director of the Moscow Art Theater, Oleg Efremov, gave a tired but moving speech about the living tradition of Russian theater art. Then a very aged man who had actually been an actor with Konstanstin Stanislavsky recollected memories of working with the celebrated director. He described how Stanislavsky came up to him one day after a performance and apologized to him. During the young actor's only speech in the play, Stanislavsky had apparently made some gesture on stage with his hands which caused the audience to titter. Hence his apology to the actor.
The old man spoke simply and movingly about the ethics of art. For Stanislavsky, the theater had to have an unquestioned morality, even in performance. And it was this marriage of theater and its relation to society that was to preoccupy us throughout our stay.
Artistic Dilemma
In a strange way the Stanislavsky conference seemed to epitomize the artistic dilemmas that we later witnessed on the Moscow stages. Everywhere we were to see an ethical attack on a horrendous past together with an overwhelming pride in having survived that past.
In the course of this article, I will give not so much reviews as detailed impressions of three of the numerous productions that I saw in observations, aspirations, and fears of many of the actors and directors with whom I spoke.
In the afternoon of that first day, our group was given a tour of the Imperial Jewelry Collection at the Kremlin. It was a shimmering, bewildering display of exquisite beauty and astonishing vulgarity. Here were the tiaras, pendants, scepters, and earrings of Nicholas and Ivan and Catherine.
In the evening of the first day, we saw a play about a peasant on a collective farm. The play, called The Survivor, was directed by Yuri Lyubimov, arguably one of the best theater directors in the world. Thanks to glasnost, he had returned from almost six years of "exile" in the West. Ironically, he had staged this play more than twenty years ago in this same theater, the Taganka, but it had been immediately suppressed. The theater now was packed, expectant, and strangely quiet--and Lyubimov was present.
Some twenty figures holding the white birches emblematic of Russia moved onto the stage, creating with the thin, swaying trunks an instant village in the woods. The story unfolded quickly and with wonderful theatrical humor. The protagonist, a Chaplinesque peasant, met the love of his life and kissed her five times, and with each kiss there appeared five delicious children in descending size and order. He could not feed them on the allotment of grain provided by the collective, so he proposed to work
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