The Tower of Pisa by Nadezhda Ptushkina, two productions at the Pushkin Drama Theater and the Stanislavsky Drama Theater
A review by John Freedman
Published in The Moscow Times, April 1998
It is certainly a sign of the slowly-but-surely growing interest in contemporary drama that Nadezhda Ptushkina’s comedy of marital strife, The Tower of Pisa, has been simultaneously staged at two theaters, the Stanislavsky and the Pushkin.
There was the aberration in 1994 of Yelena Gremina’s Behind the Mirror being mounted at four different houses—three of them shoestring productions—but the general rule around this town in the ’90s has been that new plays don’t pay.
Ptushkina, a prolific author who at times has claimed to have written as many as seventy plays, has become one of Moscow’s most thriving playwrights. Her intriguing, detective-like By the Light of Others’ Candles was staged at the Stanislavsky in 1995 and her powerful modernization of a Biblical myth, As a Lamb, was produced by Art-Club XXI in 1996. A collection of seven of her works, As a Lamb and Other Plays, has just been published.[1]
Now we have dual—though anything but twin—versions of The Tower of Pisa.
At the Pushkin Theater affiliate, Yury Yeryomin took the strictly traditional route, creating a stock domestic comedy. And with the added detail of a working TV centering Valery Fomin’s realistic set of a kitchen, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether this is theater made to imitate television, or whether television has merely subsumed the lives of the characters.
Vladimir Nikolenko plays an almost charmingly oblivious, supremely self-satisfied Husband who hasn’t noticed his wife in twenty years. Short-tempered and just as quick to cool, this food snarfing couch potato is more than happy with his TV soccer and fishing trips with his buddies. He is incredulous when he learns his wife is leaving him—she has to hammer the message home to get him to realize she is serious.
As the former librarian-turned-bookkeeper Wife, Vera Alentova builds the minimal comic attraction of her character around weepy and mousy mannerisms. She claims to be running off to Pisa with an Italian she met through an ad, but that may be a ruse.
Ptushkina’s play, not nearly on a level with the taut Candles or the resonant As a Lamb, frequently wallows in vulgarity masquerading as low humor. Numbly repeated puns on the word “Pisa” and a rude term for a part of the female anatomy seem especially witless, although the audience at the show I attended was ecstatic over them. Add to that a spate of drunk jokes (also big crowd-pleasers) and the droll complications of wife-beating, and you get a feel for the level of the play’s humor.
Yeryomin’s production serves it up brisk, slick and sentimental.
That makes Boris Milgram’s production at the Stanislavsky all the more rewarding. Here is an uneven, perhaps, yet probing look at two people who come to recognize that they not only know nothing about each other, they know precious little about themselves.
Yury Ustinov’s surrealistic set evolves from a black hole furnished with a few flying kitchen objects into a swirling, magnificent dream world. It, along with Damir Ismagilov’s deep, watery lighting in the second act, keeps us focused on the unfolding human dramas rather than on the petty details of the characters’ interaction.
As the Husband, Mikhail Zhigalov is superb, especially in the first act, creating an utterly infuriating and often disgusting individual who—for all that—is thoroughly likable. He is intelligent, non-judgmental, polite and absolutely blind to any needs his wife may have.
Diana Rakhimova’s Wife appears early as cowed but not quite broken, and ultimately emerges as a strong, complex woman before whom her authoritative husband shrinks like a loose-knit cotton shirt.
But this is no tit-for-tat representation of sinned-against girl meets sinning boy. As played by this pair of actors, these are people with complicated biographies. And Milgram, by avoiding shouting matches and giving us long pauses of silence, encourages us to look beyond their surfaces.
One of the most powerful moments—perhaps the finest stroke in Ptushkina’s play—comes when the Husband admits to having loved another woman for five years without ever touching her. More important than letting his wife know that he is capable of love after all, it is his own devastating admission that his life has gone awry.
Rakhimova here is excellent as she calls forth equal measures of hurt confusion and selfless respect for the mystery that is always another person’s life.
Milgram inexplicably concluded things with a ridiculous epilogue of the two spouses singing how Russia is so much nicer than any other country. Silly as that is, it cannot ruin this production that so admirably brings out the best in Ptushkina’s play.
