2 Plays Foster Russian-American Dialogue

The more the walls break down between East and West, it’s amazing how similar the scenery is on both sides. Now that we can take a closer look at Russia, maybe we can see ourselves better.

That’s one of the reasons for the latest cultural trade between the two countries, a production called “The Russian Connection,” which opens Oct. 20 at Hollywood’s Heliotrope Theatre.

The program, a double entry featuring a classic Russian farce, Alexander Sukhova-Kobylin’s “The Death of Tarelkin,” and American playwright Arthur Kopit’s 1962 “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad,” is a cooperative staging presented by Moscow’s Chamber Forms Theatre, Washington’s Actors’ Ensemble and Mojo Theatre Ensemble (formerly American New Theatre) of Los Angeles.

The trick in the trade is that both Russian and American actors will appear in the plays. The Russians will speak their lines in Russian, and the Americans will speak their lines in English. Will this be confusing? No, maintain Chamber Forms Theatre’s artistic directors, Andrei Malaev and David Shneyderov. The two plays already have been performed in Moscow with the same format and have just completed a run at Washington’s Actors’ Ensemble.

“We hope that our performers . . . will not require absolute understanding of the words, because when you have half the dialogue in Russian and half in English, suddenly you will understand the other half. You can imagine what the character is answering, or what the question was--if you know half the dialogue,” Shneyderov says.

“It was very interesting for the Russian audience,” he says, “in spite of the fact that some of them didn’t understand the English words. But they understood all the relationships, all the situations, the main ideas. That’s our idea of theater, that in real theater the words are not so important.”

Malaev, who is writer Isaac Babel’s grandson, nods. “They’re not the main thing.”

“The most important things in theater are feelings, relationships and action,” Shneyderov says. “That’s the main difference between Russian theater and American theater. I don’t know about L. A. theaters, but in Washington we saw American theater. The actors came to the stage, sat very comfortable, and began to speak. And for all the performance they continued to sit and to speak. In Russian theater we have another tradition, the actors do something.”

Shneyderov is definitely not maligning American theater; he’s speaking from a Russian viewpoint.

“We want to hold the audience not always with the help of the words, but with action, relationships, with feeling, with all those things, as we think, that are very important in the theater,” he says.

Malaev and Shneyderov are graduates of the renowned Tschukin Theatre School, where they met. Shneyderov, now 34, moved toward theater after 10 years as a physics teacher, and by 1983 had formed his own theater group. In 1985 he and Malaev, who had his own group, joined forces to form the Chamber Forms Theatre.

“You can see Andrei is a little younger than me,” says Shneyderov, chuckling. Malaev is 24.

Chamber Forms was one of the first private theater companies in Moscow, Shneyderov says. “We have the onus. We don’t get any money from the government, from sponsors, from somebody else. We get money only from our performances and concerts, classes and so on. Nothing more.”

Their chamber productions for adults are done in a theater seating only 60 to 100 people. They also create and produce children’s theater in larger venues for audiences of up to 1,000.

With the ever-increasing freedoms in Russia in recent years, what they want to accomplish has been increasingly possible. Malaev says, “We are trying to show the Russian audiences many authors, sometimes classic authors, which are not well known in the Soviet Union, because many times we couldn’t perform some titles or some authors. We weren’t allowed to do many foreign plays. Even a play like ‘Oh Dad, Poor Dad’ wasn’t published in Russia until last year.”

Even so, as a private theater they had more freedom than the state theaters. Malaev says with a laugh, “We were more mobile.”

From the beginning of the Gorbachev era--even before the attempted coup, Shneyderov says--private theaters had more freedom than state theaters, except in the area of forbidden subject matter. “We have been absolutely free,” he says. “We are free in changing our repertoire, in changing our actors--and free in money. State theaters get money from the government. We don’t. They don’t need audience. They are half-full of audience in giant halls. But the private theaters are in a very difficult situation. A lot of theaters in Moscow are doing plays with Stalin, Gorbachev, Lenin, anti-Communist plays and plays with lots of naked girls. We don’t want to get money doing such things. That’s why we are very poor. And we are very glad we have met in the United States people who also want to do the real art.”

Malaev says, “The problems of real theater, not commercial theater, are the same in the States and in the Soviet Union. Absolutely.”

The Moscow company is small, but its 15 members are all as dedicated as their artistic directors and their American counterparts in Mojo and Actors’ Ensemble. “We have a place for rehearsal,” says Shneyderov, “but not our own stage. That’s a very difficult problem for us.”

Both artistic directors had to struggle through the three days of transition following the coup attempt.

Malaev was rehearsing a new children’s production, a musical cabaret that is also a parody on socialism. “I thought, if the coup would win, we would not finish this one. But I continued through those three days--and we had our premiere just two days before we came to America.”

As for Shneyderov, he was on the barricades that fateful first night. “What do you want to hear?” he asks with a touch of irony. “In that terrible night we were 70,000 people around the Russian White House, but when everything was finished, there were about 6 million heroes. Everybody became a hero except these people who were on the barricades. That night we saw Rostropovich, Yeltsin--a lot of good people,” he says, referring to cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

“But most of the Moscow population were sitting and watching TV, waiting to see who would win. That is the most terrible thing to me.

“When everything was finished, we went from the barricade to the center of Moscow, and we saw a great line in front of McDonald’s--clean, fat people. They looked at us and saw dirty, tired people. They asked, ‘Who are they ? What are they doing? Why are they so dirty?’ I suddenly understood the feelings of Vietnam and Afghan veterans returning home.”

“The Death of Tarelkin” plays at 8 p.m. Oct. 20, 21, 25, 26 and 31 and Nov. 1 and 3; “Oh Dad” plays at 8 p.m. Oct. 22, 24, 27, 29 and 30 and Nov. 2, at the Heliotrope Theatre, 660 N. Heliotrope Ave., Hollywood. Friday and Saturday tickets are $15; all other performances, $12. Call (213) 660-8587.