Soviets Bring Play to Cal State

With hammers and chalk lines, a Soviet designer and an American carpenter worked together this week to put the final touches on the set for the first modern Soviet play to be staged by a Soviet company in the Los Angeles area.

“I had to look at the plans and guess at everything,” said Larry Dewey, a theater technician at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

All the measurements had to be converted from the metric system, but the result was fine.

“We are happy,” said Nikita Tkachuk, the designer who had sent plans and photographs from Moscow.

The play, “Dear Yelena Sergievna,” restricted during the Leonid I. Brezhnev era because of its controversial Soviet themes, will be performed six times, beginning today, at University Theater on the state college campus in Carson.

On Thursday, beaming city and university officials presented the Soviet troupe with a Southern California wardrobe of sunglasses, sandals, T-shirts and a surfboard--and instructed them how to sound like a native.

“Surf’s up, dude!” the Soviet visitors chorused in heavy accents, tentatively wiggling thumbs and pinkies in the correct salute.

The path that led to this intercultural exercise began in an apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard where building manager and budding playwright Steve Morris lived and watched a Soviet emigrant boy come to grips with American culture and adolescence.

Morris’ emigrant-coming-of-age play, “Aliens,” was performed at the Mark Taper Forum’s 1988 New Works Festival, where a Soviet theater official saw it and liked it.

He proposed an exchange: “Aliens” would run at the Moscow Theater on Spartacus Square. “Dear Yelena Sergievna” would come to Los Angeles.

In the Soviet play, written by Ludmila Rasumovskaya, four students come to visit a teacher, ostensibly to honor her birthday. But their real goal is the key to a safe, so that they can get test papers that could mean the difference between college and a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The students are willing to resort to blackmail, bribes, even violence.

The 1980 play was so disturbing to authorities that they refused to grant permission for anything other than two-night stands in provincial theaters until the full flowering of glasnost, or openness, in 1988. By the time approval came through, word-of-mouth publicity had paved the way for a smash.

The play still runs to full houses as part of that Moscow theater’s regular repertory and went for a month’s tour in Yugoslavia, where residents took it as proof that perestroika, the social and economic restructuring, was genuine.

But hurdles had to be overcome before its Los Angeles debut.

Initially, the Soviet actors union required $20,000 up front, and the proposed exchange was sidetracked for months. But early this year, the Moscow theater lined up a booking in Chicago and contacted Morris to see if interest could be renewed. Suddenly, the $20,000 was “no problem.”

The deal then came together.

Morris, now a theater faculty member at Cal State Dominguez Hills, got in touch with university officials, who offered the 475-seat University Theater. Morris’ play is tentatively scheduled to be performed in 1991 in Moscow.

The city of Carson contributed $11,000 toward expenses here, estimated at $25,000. Among them is the cost of rental earphones for the audience to hear the English translation of the Russian play.

“I’ll need the earphones,” Carson Mayor Vera Robles DeWitt said.

DeWitt said she believes the play will reach its U.S. audience. “There is a message there. We can see ourselves in it,” she said.

The Soviet actors have noticed a difference in American reaction:

When the play is over, Soviet audiences are initially too stunned to applaud. “They are in a state of shock. That’s how we know it is a success,” said Giorgi Tovstonogov.

American audiences, he said, begin clapping immediately.