Moscow Theater Folk Turn the Spotlight on Themselves

Curtain time here is 7 p.m. Just before that, a flurry of people can be found outside every theater, hoping that somebody has an extra pair of tickets to sell.

You would think it a sight to gladden an actor’s heart, but Oleg Tabakov of the Moscow Art Theatre considers it a disgrace.

“This deficit of theater tickets is artificial,” Tabakov said the other afternoon at the Actors’ Club on Gorky Street.

“For a city with a population of 9 million, we need not less than 90 theaters. That would be the standard for a civilized country!”

The actual number of theaters in Moscow, he is ashamed to say, is a mere 40. He pauses for effect, and his visitors from the California Theatre Council reflect that each of these 40 theaters carries 60 or so full-time actors on the payroll and offers about 25 shows a year in repertory. If that’s a meager theater scene, what would you call ours?

But then Moscow theater is in a self-critical mood just now. For example, when you tell people that you’re off to see “The Lower Depths” at the Moscow Art Theatre (not with Mr. Tabakov), they cringe. Talk about museum theater.

One would think that “The Lower Depths” had been playing at the Moscow Art Theatre every night since its premiere in 1902, with the original cast. In fact, the cast turns out to be reasonably young and far from brain-dead. They play the story fully and sensitively, as alert to what’s going on at the other side of Gorky’s flophouse as to what’s happening in their corner.

Do they linger a bit too long on some moments? Maybe, like a pianist overdoing his rubato. But the woman in the lower bunk reminds us how hard it is to find a comfortable position when one has been ill for days, and the ebb and flow in the flophouse is convincing.

An American theatergoer is not in a position to find this kind of ensemble acting old-fashioned: We rarely see ensemble acting at all. They learn it early here. An example was a terrific student performance of a musical based on Mayakovsky’s “The Bedbug” at, appropriately, the Mayakovsky Theatre annex.

The players, all in their early 20s, were about to graduate from one of Moscow’s four theater conservatories. Here were tomorrow’s stars, but also tomorrow’s character actors--the skinny kid who will one day be superb in “The Lower Depths.”

Their training, we were told, was based on Stanislavsky’s precepts, with emphasis on singing, dancing and improvisation. A fuller approach than the American “Method,” obviously. These kids had it all, and there would be work for them when they got out.

But their first job might take them miles from Moscow, and some of them might still be playing there 20 years from now.

We asked them how they would like to take the actor’s route in America, like the hungry kids in “A Chorus Line.” (The film is playing here.) Said one young man: “I’d love to.”

Guaranteed employment in theater can breed battle fatigue, something that Mark Lamos has observed in his stint as guest director of the Pushkin Theatre’s production of O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.” Back home, Lamos is artistic director of the Hartford Stage. He is having a terrific time staging O’Neill in Russian--O’Neill sounds better that way--and his actors are enjoying working to a faster rehearsal tempo than they’re used to.

But Lamos finds some Moscow companies all too permanent. And a lot of theater people here agree with him. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) movement strikes them as very timely--a chance to shake out the deadwood and make individual theaters more responsible for their work. When you’re not taking orders from the Ministry of Culture, you can’t blame the ministry for your bombs.

Under Gorbachev, the nation’s playwrights can also poke into problems that five years ago had no official existence. “Catch 46” at the Moscow Central Children’s Theatre concerns Moscow street gangs and it ends in tragedy, not with a scene where everybody joins the Young Pioneers.

Glasnost also means examining Soviet history, and particularly Stalinism. No one can miss the implications in Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog,” when a half-man, half-beast turns a gun on the brainy theoretician who invented him, and this too is playing at a young people’s theater.

Says Vladimir Gubaryev, author of “Sarcophagus,” a play that Los Angeles knows better than Moscow: “Even under glasnost , it’s hard for the older generation not to write with an eye to pleasing the editor within. Young people don’t find this such a problem.”

Censorship has not disappeared. Scripts can be proscribed for being pornographic, for revealing state secrets, for inflaming racial tensions and for encouraging war. If a play should offend a party leader in the provinces, a delegation from the Soviet Writers’ Union might be able to work out a compromise or might not.

What if it offended a highly placed official in the Kremlin? Nobody knows what if, and nobody much wants to think about it. Said Afanasi Salynski, editor-in-chief of Theatre magazine, “You can’t forge ahead to the sound of a funeral march.”

Gubaryev, for instance, has just finished a new play, “Stalin’s Dacha” (country place), exploring Stalinist tendences in the U.S.S.R. today, a riskier topic than a piece about the historic Stalin.

“Some people have raised their eyebrows at the subject, but as I say, we young playwrights can’t be bothered about that.” He is in his early 50s.

Says Oleg Tabakov, back at the Actors’ Club: “There’s no bloodshed, but what’s going on in my country these days is still a revolution. If Gorbachev is taking a risk, why shouldn’t I take a risk too?

“It’s my last chance in life to change life, so that my country can become kinder and more humane. It’s a very long road. I think you should wish us a happy journey.”