Krymov's Dramatic Invention

Dmitry Krymov from the Moscow Theatre School of Dramatic Art brought to St. Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn his two-part production, Opus No. 7.  I found his inventiveness phenomenal.  The spectacle was magical as it is hard to describe.

Part I, entitled Genealogy, was a dirge to the persecuted Jews who perished under Stalin; Part II, Shostakovich, meditated on the tribulations of the composer, denounced time and again, and humiliated even when honored by the State. Both deployed reading, mime, music, dance, singing/chanting, photography, film projection, acrobatics, painting/smearing, puppetry, and installations, and the effect they achieved was sad, now melancholic now sinister, occasionally funny, and ironic throughout.

The theater’s black box was divided lengthwise to set off the bleachers seating on one side so that the stage is a lengthy floor in the 1:4 proportions. The set consists only of a patchy crudely constructed 8-ft. plywood panels running full length at the back. The first dramatic moment, which also introduces the subject, happens when the seven actors of the cast -- three men and four women -- line up with a bucket of black paint, which they splash on the plywood wall.  The smear makes shadow figures, which the actors then complete by stapling sleeves and yarmulke (one with painted peyos), accompanied by the vocalise of the singers among the actors, high soprano and deep baritone, and at times by a horn. When the figures are complete, arms come through the sleeves supplied by actors behind the panels, making the mockup figures appear like ghosts of the perished Jews, and the fictive and real people join hands and dance a hora.  A little later, eye glasses appear pressed out from slots on the plywood wall, and the actors paint bodies to make silhouette images of children arranged like a class picture.  Then, there is an explosion that shake the theater and a blast of newspaper chips blown from behind the wall fall on the audience and fill up the whole place, the stage and the bleachers.  They also contain photographs and negatives.  When the negatives are held up to the projected light lifesize figures of orthodox Jews appear on the wall between the shadow figures, and the photographs soon turn into moving images. Another dramatic moment follows when a prowling SS officer projected on the wall kicks a pram, and with a bang a real pram is pushed out through a hatch piled high with baby shoes.  Some actors pick up pieces of papers and read names of relatives and friends and describe their idiosyncrasies.  Speeches are in Russian; but subtitles are almost superfluous. With minimal words, the drama is powerfully felt and understood. 

In Shostakovich, Mother Russia is a huge puppet, like those of the Bread and Puppet, ample and magnanimous in appearance but tyrannical in action, manipulating Shostakovich, a bespectacled diminutive actress comporting the boyish look of the young composer; he escapes from the grip of the puppet and escapes into the crude plywood model of a grand piano, the only prop on the floor. Later he runs away around the stage from the handgun aimed at him and at one point hides within the audience.  Toward the end, he is honored with a medal which is mounted on a dagger which pierces his body and kills him.  His public statements, often ironic or otherwise quoted ironically, are read voice-over in Shostakovich’s own voice to outline the incidents in his life.  Mother Russia clasps the dead body on her laps; but in the end she is shot from the back and collapses like a mound in center stage. Both plays accomplished a political theater without politically rhetoric -- a contrast to the Public’s earlier presentation, Nathan Englander’s discursive The Twenty-seventh Man.

It was an event with a deeply felt lasting impact; it will not be easily forgotten.  A Vimeo of the play in four parts -- two hours long -- is currently available on line.