THEATER REVIEW : Questions Unanswered in Kushner’s ‘Slavs!’

“What is to be done?” That is the question raised by the long-winded apparatchiks at the start of Tony Kushner’s “Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness” now at the Mark Taper Forum. The question still lingers in the air 90 minutes later. No answers are forthcoming, in this brittle, short, funny, maddening, sometimes pretentious intellectual vaudeville. The play branches off from Kushner’s full-bodied “Angels in America” to preoccupy itself with the stalled nature of theoretics when applied to an imperfect, human world.

The setting is the Kremlin, March, 1985. Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov (Barbara eda-Young), the world’s oldest Bolshevik, is a character who appeared in “Angels” and who here delivers an almost identical tirade about “the beautiful theory” of his youth. But his passion is a stingy, selfish one. He recalls the progressive dream of his youth as breathtaking, and he tells us that the rest of us are but the “Pygmy children of a gigantic race” because we have no theory.

While this may be true, it is also a lie. The play--traversing from Moscow to a poverty- and disease-ridden Siberia, 1992--shows us what the comrade’s beautiful theory has wrought. What we really need, Kushner suggests, is not a rigid, intense theory powerful enough to stoke a revolution, but an elastic theory, one generous enough to allow for all of the complexities of life. If the Soviet Union and its theories have failed to serve its people, the show obliquely asks, how successful has our own country been with its beautiful theory?

Aleksii soon keels over, dead from too much speechifying. Another politico takes his place, this one urging everyone to leap forward. “You must leap, or life will toss you in the air!” says Upgobkin (Randy Danson). But, at his age and heft, Upgobkin can only manage a strangulated and awkward little jump, arms hopefully raised. He, too, is soon dead from the effort.

This whimsical seriousness makes for a fairly plodding first act (the play consists of three short acts, a prologue and an epilogue). Director Michael Greif, who premiered this production at the La Jolla Playhouse in August, gets things about as far off the ground as Upgobkin does. Unfailingly smart, “Slavs!” has some difficulty engaging an audience, and it often doesn’t. The actors work very hard in order to deliver a lot of ideas and little dramatic payoff.

The second act is set in a research facility where the brains of Russia’s great leaders are stored in blue liquid (what better metaphor for a country’s theory divorced from its lifeblood?). Guarding the brains is a sexy, nasty, bored young alcoholic named Katherina (Calliope Thorne), who is being unsuccessfully wooed by the slobberingly sentimental Popolitipov (an over-acting John Campion). His jealousy sends both Katherina and her lover, a hard-working and sensible doctor (Danson), to Siberia, where they meet the true Pygmy child, a mute yet silently eloquent 8-year-old girl (Jennie Reid Huston), poisoned from nuclear dumping.

This Siberian-set third act is the heart of the play. It finds a petty bureaucrat named Rodent (Jonathan Fried) on a forced goodwill mission to a place where there is no goodwill. Encountering the mute child, this not terribly bright man repeats, “Hello, little girl,” over and over until the audience is tittering uncomfortably.

Rodent has come up with his own theory, pathetically impoverished though it may be, as a way of avoiding responsibility for the misery wrought by the government he represents. He blames everything on the emergence of the swarthy-skinned races and others who are not true Russians. When he offers the girl’s mother a brochure on his “ideas,” he is greeted with an extraordinary, sputtering rage. The woman (played compellingly by Eda-Young) is a proud Lithuanian, not the Russian he has mistaken her for, and she spits her rage in his face.

While Kushner’s apparatchiks represent theory in human form, the female characters in the play represent the real life that is lived within theories. Kushner mitigates the harshness of this division by casting women as elderly men and men as elderly women in the play’s prologue, first scene and epilogue, which takes place in heaven. The double-casting is one theatrical device employed by the author to save the play from being overly strident (as is the wonderful viola playing of Jill Jaffe). These measures, however, didn’t stop theatergoers from pouring out before the show’s epilogue.

Like the apparatchiks, “Slavs!” sometimes seems to be having a conversation with itself. This is a pristine play that is impossible not to admire. But it often seems as cold and Sisyphean as the snow that the old babushkas sweep away from the Kremlin steps. In “Slavs!,” which ends in an oddly joyless heaven, even the “fretful dead” have no answers at all.

* “Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness,” Music Center/Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 19. $28-$35.50. (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Running time: 90 minutes.

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With Jonathan Fried, John Campion, Calliope Thorne, Randy Danson, Barbara eda-Young, Jill Jaffe and Jennie Reid Huston

A Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum production. Written by Tony Kushner. Directed by Michael Greif. Set and costume design by Mark Wendland. Lighting design by James F. Ingalls. Original music and sound design by Jill Jaffe. Resident sound designer, Jon Gottlieb. Dramaturg, Gregory Gunter. Production stage manager, Mary K. Klinger.