Lenin's Embalmers, at Ensemble Studio Theatre

What follows isn't a review—a reviewer looks at a play and (ideally) tries to give his or her readership a concise and objective notion of its nature. I, on the other hand, only want to pick out one or two things that interest me about a production and expand on them, so as to work them out for myself but also in the hope that someone will be interested. If I go on at length about some particular aspect of a production to the exclusion of all else, it doesn't necessarily mean that I think that aspect is the most important; it's just the one that I thought I might have something interesting to say about. And if I seem gushy and breathless and not to dislike anything, it's because I don't particularly want to write about things I don't like because they usually don't interest me—also because I don't want to be some jerkwad who dishes everybody in his blog—I wouldn't necessarily mind making enemies, but I would have to be paid by an editor to do it.

That having been said, I did enjoy Lenin's Embalmers at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, by Vern Thiessen, directed by William Carden. This play, which follows Boris Zbarsky's and Vladimir Vorobiov's successful efforts to embalm Lenin and their subsequent inevitable (this being Stalin's USSR) doom, is part of EST's partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a partnership whose mission is to present works which explore the role of science in the modern world, and which last year produced the well-acted and well-written but overly wholesome End Days. Neither this play nor End Days seemed to me to do much grappling with the nature and role of science, other than having (in End Days) characters who are interested in science or (in Lenin's Embalmers) are scientists. Theissen's play is really interested in history, and, I think, the joy of stagecraft.

Although the cast was great—especially good are Scott Sowers as Boris and Zach Grenier as Vlad, and the alternately hilariously and movingly understated James Murtaugh as Krasin; and Polly Lee is a lot of fun, doubling as Nadia, the other Nadia, and a third Nadia—what interested me most about Lenin's Embalmers was its structure, its fluid staging, and (because I've been thinking about this stuff generally lately) the ways that structure differs from and is similar to that of the movies.

Lenin's Embalmers does take advantage of the cinematic training its audience has received. For instance: the set contains three tall window units on wheels, which are moved into various configurations throughout the play by the cast. During the scene in which Vlad and Boris are actually embalming Lenin, all three window units are rolled into a row, creating a wall; Vlad and Boris work behind the translucent windows, so that, while our view of them is distorted, we can make out what they're doing. Before the wall stands a Soviet sentry. I don't think anyone in the audience could have misunderstood and thought that the sentry was literally meant to be standing three feet in front of the window; it's clear that he's in a symbolic “outside.” At one point the lights are down behind the windows and we can't see in. One of the Nadias comes on-stage and gives the sentry a picnic basket. The sentry walks off stage left. As soon as he's off-stage, the lights come up on the embalmers, with the picnic basket already uncovered, eating the food that Nadia's brought them. I don't know how a theater audience would have responded to this sequence a hundred years ago, but we can all recognize this as a cut, as a technique borrowed from cinema, and we know that some time has passed, that the sentry has entered the building, knocked on the door, delivered the basket, etc., but that we've skipped all that and gotten to the important action. . . . Anyway, that nit-picky little detail is hardly the soul of the show, but I thought it was neat.

But, despite its many locales and quick jumps from one scene to another, the play doesn't “feel” like a movie. After an opening scene in which Lenin tells an old Soviet joke whose significance becomes clear by the end of the play, the rest of the actors come on-stage and begin moving around and shifting scenes and identities frenetically, looking through the fourth wall and helpfully keeping us on track; “I am Lenin,” says Lenin, “and I am dying,” whereupon he sits in his wheelchair and hunches over in pain. Boris and Vlad appear, each of them explaining that “I am the hero of this play,” then glaring at each other. Polly Lee, playing Lenin's wife, comes on-stage and tells us “I am Nadia.” Moments later she appears as Boris's wife and says “I am Nadia . . . but not the same one as before.” Moments after that she reappears as Vlad's shy, besmitten admirer and says, “I am Nadia . . . but not the same one as before. All the women in this story are named Nadia.”

That sort of self-conscious theatricality—calling attention to the fact that this is a story with (perhaps) a hero, that the same actors are doubling as multiple characters—persists through the first several minutes of the play, and at times things verge on the hammy. I was starting to get restless—it was amusing and all, but I foresaw two hours of that kind of thing, a kind of cutesy cop-out, a way of avoiding the hard work the play called for by wallowing in irony. Instead, the show, while always remaining funny, quickly enough eases up on that “fakiness;” but those first few minutes of over-the-top self-conscious theatricality were well-spent, for they create the foundation upon which the structure of the show is built.

For one thing, those first few minutes, with their straightforward asides, have created a precedent for an expository shorthand, when the need for one comes up. From a thematic point of view, it establishes the absurdity at the heart of the historical events being recounted (themselves being theatrical, with Lenin's corpse a monstrous prop; and Stalin's regime, with its kangaroo courts and cult of personality and slapped-together conspiracy theories, being sort of grotesquely theatrical), giving the moment resonance at the end when Boris renounces his claim to be the “hero of this story” (because this is a story with no heroes). And it releases the play from the kind of pious hermetic trap that period-piece films fall prey to—if this had been a movie, a major concern would have been finding an actor who looks like Stalin, another who looks like Lenin (in the movies, when it comes to depicting famous people, Anthony Hopkins as Nixon seems to be about as far-out as it gets—except for Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison—if it's been a few years since you laughed at that go ahead and take a second to do so now); set and costume designers would have slaved away to persuade us that we were “really there,” in the Moscow of 1924; the price of that kind of illusion is that it'll be broken by any direct comment on how that historical moment is related to our own; it's meant to provoke a dream, not thought. Lenin's Embalmers is free from obligations to that kind of illusion. There's a moment towards the end of the play when we flash forward to 2010 and see today's Muscovites filing by the corpse of Lenin; the moment would feel unbelievably audacious in a movie, but the play has put itself in a position where it feels natural to us that it should make this type of commentary.

The distancing from the visceral experience of the characters, as well as the humor, to me heightens the tragedy of the piece. The distance urges us to take a more clear-eyed, unsentimental view of the human cost of the story, than a less discreet appeal to the heartstrings would do. (As kind of a wild idea that I don't really feel like expending a bunch of energy defending, I wonder if the humor and let-'em-see-the-strings theatricality of this kind of show can achieve an effect similar to what, in another culture, might be achieved by formality, i.e the courtly language and non-naturalistic chorus of Sophocles—anyway, both strategies have the effect of giving me a more austere view of the material.) (Please note: wonderful as he is, I am not saying that Thiessen = Sophocles.)

Well, I only wanted to articulate a few thoughts that were prompted by the show last night. If you'd like to read a real review of this show, you can go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/theater/reviews/13lenin.html or http://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/news/03-2010/lenins-embalmers_25506.html ; if you went to https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/710855 , they'd probably sell you a ticket to it. I would wrap things up more artfully, but I've said what I was interested in saying, and faking my way elegantly through an ending would take thought, attention, care, and a host of other attributes alien to the blogosphere.