The Songs of a Trunk by Innokenty Afanasyev, Playwright and Director Center
By John Freedman
Published in The Moscow Times, January 2005
It is easy to forget that the simpler things are, the more they tell us. Take, for example, the back page of the program for The Songs of a Trunk, the latest production from the Playwright and Director Center. There we find a no-frills list of the theater’s repertoire: author, title, director. And what a list it is! It is unlike any offered by any other theater in Moscow. Alongside plays by some of the hottest writers in Europe, we find new works by many of the top new writers in Russia – the Presnyakov Brothers, Mikhail Ugarov, Maxim Kurochkin, Vasily Sigarev and others. The list of directors includes some of the most adventurous figures of the new generation – Ugarov, Olga Subbotina, Vladimir Ageyev, Igor Selin and Kirill Serebrennikov.
What is particularly striking is that none of the 16 shows in the active repertory can truly be said to have great commercial potential. That’s not to say that many of the theater’s shows have not been successful. Some have been successful beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The Center’s production of Sigarev’s Plasticene launched a bonafide international hit. Its production of the Presnyakovs’ Captive Spirits played a key role in these writers’ sudden rise to stardom throughout the world. These and a host of other shows, including Ugarov’s Oblom Off and Alexander Zheleztsov’s Red Thread, have ridden a long wave of popularity at festivals throughout Russia and Europe.
But from the day of its founding almost exactly six years ago, the Playwright and Director Center has kept its sights set on something other than popular or commercial success. Its purpose has been to take chances; to give unknown people a chance to show what they can do; and to see if, in the process, they might just discover someone or something of talent. The success rate has been nothing short of astonishing. Many of the writers, directors and actors whose reputations were made or significantly enhanced by working at the Center have since been snapped up by bigger theaters looking to capitalize on their successes.
On top of all of this, there is one more crucial piece of information to be mined from the simple list of the theater’s repertoire – the extraordinary range of styles it presents. There are harsh, in-yer-face dramas, poetic forays, sentimental explorations, sophisticated literary adaptations, experiments in form, pieces founded in live music and even a movement-oriented show. This is not a theater that pushes a single aesthetic, but rather encourages its artists to find their own.
The Songs of a Trunk marks the debut of playwright Innokenty Afanasyev and brings back director Ageyev for his third production at the Center. It is easy to see what brought the writer to the attention of Ageyev, who has an affinity for the poetic, the abstract and even the esoteric. The play is fragmentary and only loosely based in plot, and apparently Ageyev intensified this aspect by adding in bits of poetry by Genrikh Sapgir. Afanasyev wrote a ragged, often difficult-to-follow play of memory and fantasy and Ageyev, together with the set designer Marina Filatova and lighting designer Andrei Shepelyov, gave it a polished luster that always makes it visually attractive.
The story, such as it is, focuses on Ritin Buk (Alexei Bagdasarov), a man who seems traumatized by life, although he rarely shows that from behind a ready smile and a usually calm demeanor. Buk is joined from time to time by his wife (Larisa Pylayeva), his daughter (Maria Malkova), a musician named Gleb Petrov (Igor Churikov) and another man who appears in various guises (Nikolai Malayev).
Perhaps Buk is something of a modern throwback to one of the characters in Anton Chekhov’s influential story “The Man in the Case.” He is a prisoner of his memories, some good and some bad, but more importantly, he also has made a psychological prisoner of his wife and has gone so far as to lock his daughter in a trunk. She is safer there until she comes of age, he insists. Why let her out to be contaminated by the world?
Bagdasarov is especially convincing as the mild-mannered man whose fear of life never seems, but always is, dangerous. His friendly eyes clearly betray flashes of inspired madness. He is a walking example of how easily and how tragically people willingly give up their own lives and unthinkingly destroy those of others.
The performance begins with what is best called a long prologue in which all of the characters gather at the front of the stage and engage in remembering the past. There are common memories of swimming at the beach and there are seemingly personal, individual moments, such as recalling what it was like to see a dragon fly in flight as a child. Buk, especially, is fascinated with the various effects and meanings words can have when they are pronounced in various ways or when they are deconstructed into familiar, though incoherent, sounds. Later, the group of five gather around a figurative camp fire and tell each other scary stories, such as the one about the woman who cut off her dead husband’s finger before burying him and then was shocked to see him come back to retrieve it that night.
Ageyev makes the tale-telling as theatrical as possible by “opening up” dark corners of the stage with localized spots. A kind of sail fans out at center stage and it changes in appearance depending upon the color and intensity of light directed at it. Several objects on the back wall appear and disappear thanks to the lighting – a wheel, an ax, a shovel, a spider and a toy carousel. The trunk itself stands in front of the sail and on occasion glows ominously from within. The impression is that we have descended into a physical representation of the splinters of someone’s imagination.
Still, the telling of the stories takes us nowhere fast. By the time we arrive in the second half of the show at the more traditional theatrical portrayal of Buk’s daughter striving to break out of her prison of the trunk, the production has become almost too arcane to bring back from the brink of incoherence.
Buk’s daughter is encouraged in her quest for freedom by the enigmatic Gleb Petrov – it is never certain whether he really is the world-class musician he claims to be or whether he is hallucinating on that account – and by her mother, whose life has been reduced to washing her husband’s socks. As the characters talk about this and other things, the world around them comes to life in strange ways – colors flickering on the sail; two faceless “snowmen” bringing in or moving props; a film clip of rain falling projected across the set.
For a first-time playwright, Afanasyev has proven he is a sensitive observer, if not yet a confident craftsman. And Ageyev gave attractive form to his author’s scattered ruminations. For all of its flaws, The Songs of a Trunk is very much the kind of play that the Playwright and Director Center is apt to take on – it is challenging and unique.
