Friday 16 May 2014

T.O. Festival 2014 # 2: "Lenin's Embalmers"

This is the second of a series of four blog posts about the competing plays in Theatre Ontario Festival, featuring the winning plays from the four regional festivals.


LENIN'S EMBALMERS


by Vern Thiessen
Presented by Curtain Club Theatre
(ACT-CO entry)


On the second night, we got knocked down, heaved up, and tossed every which way by a really high-stakes performance of a play that defies conventional categories.


Vern Thiessen is a Canadian writer of fairly recent prominence, and this is the first play of his that I have ever seen.  I've been told that he eschews any kind of certainties, and this script fairly teems with turns on the proverbial dime.  Even when you guess that they are coming, these sudden 180-degree swerves shock you because they happen so suddenly.  In part, this is a result of a particular writing convention.  It's a technique familiar from the writing of -- of all people -- Bernard Shaw, whose plays make a specialty of undercutting the expectation.  In Thiessen's case, he doesn't so much demolish conventions that already exist.  Rather, he creates recurring patterns of text, applies them to different situations, then destroys them to devastating effect.  As a script, it is a spectacular tour de force of writing, but it is loaded with traps for director and actors alike -- not to mention designers, technicians, and stage crew.


So, just what kind of a play is this?  Lenin's Embalmers actually reminds me of David Ives' brilliant, brittle one-act play, Variations on the Death of Trotsky.  This is partly due to similar subject matter, but also due to the downright absurd tone both writers have adopted in dealing with some pretty heavy-duty historical events that nonetheless invite absurdist treatment.  Indeed, Thiessen threads a half-dozen typically mordant Russian jokes about Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, and others throughout the script, which clearly establishes an authentic pedigree for the theatre-of-the-absurd convention.  The result is a first act which is uproariously funny, about things that aren't normally thought funny.


But then, unlike any other play I have ever seen or read, this one abandons absurdity in the second half and descends into the tragic black maelstrom of madness that engulfed Stalinist Russia.  One by one, the major characters get sucked into this trap, and the tragedy is only alleviated a little by one or two lighter touches.  The exact same techniques are still being used in the writing, but nobody laughs any more.  The turning point comes when the drunken Vlad kisses Stalin right on the mouth as he receives his medal.



Which brings us to the Curtain Club's production, under the direction of Joan Burrows.  Burrows made a decision to take the show into the vaudeville era, complete with footlights across the stage and silly visual gags to complement the textual silliness.   The set, by contrast, eliminated the elaborate fake-Grecian scenery so beloved in the vaude theatres, and replaced it with a series of bare beige panels.  With time, though, we came to realize just how versatile this set could be.  Backdrop panels slid back and forth on tracks to different positions, like sliding doors.  Side panels concealed a whole series of practical cupboards which mostly seemed to contain an endless supply of vodka bottles and shot glasses (but were used for other purposes too).   Upstage centre, one extra-wide panel was revealed at the end of Act I as a huge scrim, turning the entire scene of Lenin's embalming into a semi-silhouetted shadow play inside the brilliantly lit and colourfully decorated laboratory.  The climax of this scene was not the endless sausage of Lenin's guts, as they pulled and pulled and pulled (funny as that was).  For me, it was the moment when they held his heart aloft, partly in wonder and partly in triumph, turning it from side to side so we could see it from all angles.


The play teemed with lighting and sound cues, well over 200 of them in total!  (That sound you just heard was the sound of thousands of technicians cringing!).  My sense was that any slight delays were just that, so slight that they did not impede the flow of the play.  A good friend said that the constant shifting of furniture after each of the many short scenes drove her to distraction, but (for whatever reason) it didn't bother me at all.  That's because the actors themselves did all the shifting, in teams, and never in a blackout.  Consequently, the play at all times kept moving, and the overall running time was not inordinately long.  Frankly, I have trouble imagining such a cinematic script being performed with any kind of permanent multi-area setting -- the scene shifts happen far too often for that.


There are 11 characters in all, but in the first act only two show any sort of character development.  These are the two embalmers, Boris (played by Phil Dionne) and Vlad (played by Mark Hayward).  At first, even they seem scarcely real.  The characters step forward one by one to announce who they are.  The short scenes unfold in a series of zany comedic routines, with running gags provided by vodka bottles, the lockstep-marching Krasin (Brandon Moore) with the two Agents (Chuck Therrien and Cam Lund), and the truly ubiquitous Nadia 1, 2, and 3 (all played by Tamara Van Bakel).  Indeed, she got one of the best laughs in the entire show on her third appearance with her perfectly-timed line about every woman in the story being called Nadia.  This was only one of many examples of characters stepping out of the story to address the audience, but these asides were understated and never overt. 


Our two key figures began to develop a life of their own whenever they were alone together.  The script gave us a certain amount of back story, and the faces, voices and actions of the two men told us much more.  Their wrestling match in Act I came across like a childrens' play fight, but when the bout was repeated in Act II it was in deadly earnest, the stakes raised right through the roof.


Lenin (Brian Moore) kept popping up throughout the show, at intervals, and was the main presenter of those Russian jokes, with the actual lines delivered by several company members who appeared variously as peasants, soldiers, lab assistants, and tourists. 


Krasin, too, had to develop many sides to his personality.  In official circles, he had to be the socialist operative par excellence, but in his meetings with Boris he turned much more human.  It was precisely this duality that eventually led to his downfall, his bewilderment most apparent at the moment when he was prevented from grabbing his stack of file folders (lovely touch!).


Which brings us to Stalin (Fabian Levy-Hara).  In Act I he was like a petulant cartoon of a dictator, swerving wildly between explosions of anger and moments of extreme good fellowship and jollity.  After the kiss, he became the thing itself, a subtle shift executed in a masterly way.  The extremes were trimmed back a bit, but what his character lacked in breadth it now developed in depth.  By the time he reached his last interview with Krasin, the man had thoroughly become a monster.


This is definitely not history as it really happened (does anyone know for certain what did happen?  Of course not!).  Thiessen, like all writers producing so-called "historic" plays, has compressed times, conflated events, and combined characters.  It seems superfluous to add such notes to the program, but in our time it seems more and more people accept unthinkingly at face value whatever they are shown as reality.  The particular genius of this script is that it solves that problem by staying so blatantly outside of reality at all times, and the special strength of Burrows' direction and the Curtain Club's performance and presentation is that the show went there instantly, stayed there firmly throughout, and never pretended to be other than what it was: a kaleidoscopic, blackly comic riff on history.

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