“SHOSTAKOVICH IN NEW YORK” by MICHAEL MAXWELL STEER, adapted and Directed by TATIANA KORINFSKY, produced by Corinth Productions with Dikran Tulaine, Gracie LeClere and J.B. Alexander was performed at Polaris North Studios Friday, June 27th, through Sunday, June 29th at 245 W. 29th St., NYC.
This was more than a bit of a surprise. It came to my attention through the cast member of the acting trio of this production, Gracie LeClere. I‘d recently been dazzled by her performance in “Chagall in New York” at Theater for The New City merely a month ago. It appears that she’s made a career focused on celebrated 20th century Russian artists visiting the Big Apple. But she has a far more varied resume that speaks well of her training and skills. In this deft adaptation of a BBC Radio play for the stage by the director, Ms. Korinfsky, Ms. LeClere engagingly portrays a radio announcer/host of a WNEW program circa 1949 providing news, charming commercials, and a fairly incisive interview with the Soviet Union’s preeminent symphonic artist (in terms of output in that form) who had been sent by Stalin himself to represent the cream of Soviet culture at a post-war peace conference taking place at The Waldorf Astoria in February of that year. (This was a little more than a year prior to the North Koreans invading the southern peninsula of those two parts of that troubled nation and as a stepchild of Stalin’s post war empire.)
The composer’s translator in the radio interview that occurs halfway into this play, was well executed by J.B Alexander. My use of the verb is intentional since the menace that the official government person to accompany Shostakovich was acute and clearly threatening to keep the great artist in “Soviet Socialist line”.
And now we come to the esteemed musical genius himself, Dimitri Shostakovich, whose roller coaster of accolades and damnation, depending on the year, the particular work, and circumstances at home and worldwide, kept the intellectual giant as bound as Gulliver by the Lilliputians, in terms of his critics’ dirth of imagination, if not their lethal might.
I’ve held the opinion for decades that one does not need to be a genius to effectively portray one, although it helps, as was the case when Richard Easton played A. E. Houseman in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s, ” THE INVENTION OF LOVE”. Still, one does need to be bright enough to bring it off convincingly. With this assignment, Dikran Tulaine did an extraordinary job! His musings to the audience of excerpts from his journals revealing the profound consternation he was forced to deal with, the erratic convulsions of political favor that he endured over six decades, the worst under Stalin who terrified, murdered and imprisoned millions of citizens from every walk of Soviet life. Included were the ordinary workman and housewife, to the greatest stage director they had after Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who with his wife was arrested in 1939 during one of the great purges. Both were murdered the following year.
Such was the constant threat that Prokofiev as well as Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and the innovative filmmaker, Eisenstein, dealt with virtually every living, and for the unfortunate, dying day. Mr. Tulaine captured the cerebral and emotional heft of this heroic artist, who searched constantly how to maintain a sense of integrity and serving only Truth, as he perceived it, while such a concept was being questioned unrelentingly by those in authority in an autocratic regime.
How frighteningly resonant this seems in our nation at this time, when who won a pivotal election threatens the value of birthright. Even the concept of Germ Theory is being called into question by our present governmental authorities.
This performance held me riveted and I believe it would do so were it augmented by another half hour of materials that surely could be gleaned by the volumes available in numerous books, journals and articles of one the truly greatest artists of the previous century, with whose music I am blithely engaged as I write these words. Dosvidanya!
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