white lace and red poetry
by Douglas Messerli
Murray Mednick (author and director) Mayakovsky and Stalin / Los Angeles,
Lounge Theatre / I saw the production with Pablo Capra on July 22, 2018
The legendary Murray Mednick’s most recent
play, Mayakovsky and Stalin, which I
attended yesterday with my editor Pablo Capra, might be described as less a
traditional drama than as a kind of “parade” of figures in the early decades of
Stalin’s long and brutish rule of Russia. Indeed, except for brief interchanges
between the dictator (Maury Sterling) and his wife, Nadya (Casey
That is not to say there is no heart or emotional energy to the work. The great Soviet poet is impassioned with his homeland in Georgia, with language, with—to a certain extent—with the Communist Party, and his love of Lilya, as well as his friendship with her complaisant husband, Osip (Andy Hirsch). And Mayakovsky, despite his belief in the party, is also doubtful of the ability of his fellow countrymen to make the necessary changes and, like everyone else, is quite terrified by Stalin and his henchman. After all, even though Mednick’s play does not represent this, Stalin would eventually kill and destroy almost all of the early believers in Communism who worked as writers, artists, dancers, and in theater (as Mayakovsky himself did).
The poet’s cynicism,
voiced several times in this work, is perhaps best expressed in a comic poem
which I, myself, translated several years ago:
the tale of the little red hat
Once upon a time there
was a Cadet*
a little Cadet who had a
red hat.
But apart from that hat
that capped
his head there was in him
no shred of red.
But quick as revolution
began
the Cadet ran home to get
his red
tam. They all lived
happily—
brother, father and Cadet
granddad—
as they had until one day
a wind blew
right through his hair to
tear the red
hat from his head and
reveal his black
roots. The revolting red
wolf got his licks
of the boots and ate his
way up to that Cadet’s
knees but was still so
starved he carved
up to the heart. So
please when you’re about to start
politics don’t forget how
that Cadet got et.
*Cadet was the nickname for the Constitutional
Democrats, the part of the political center.
As Maykovsky notes in Mednick’s play, he likes
to rhyme.
Stalin’s shuttered wife, Nadya, is represented by the playwright as a
parallel version of Mayakovsky. An intelligent and sophisticated woman raised
herself in a Communist family, Nadya might like better to live the sexual
openly and more feminist-oriented Lilya Brik. But, of course, as the wife of
the supreme leader, she is now allowed such choices; either she joins him in
his social forays or lives only as a dedicated mother to his children, Vasiliy
and Svetlana (the latter of whom later emigrated to the West). Closeted in a
world of lace collected by Stalin’s first wife, who died under mysterious
circumstances, Nadya increasing displays her dissatisfaction, not only with her
personal life but with the various purges of individuals (doctors, artists,
etc.) by her husband. She is aided by her trusted servant, Masha (Ann Colby
Stocking), who is a true-believer in religion of the Orthodox school. But like
Mayakovsky, she increasingly is given over to bouts of despair and disbelief.
And
then, of course, there is Stalin, a crude and rude dictator who sees himself as
the representative of history itself. Like all such leaders his entire life is
given over the great “cause” he believes he represents. There must be someone
at the top, he declares, to make sure the Party progresses and moves forward in
its intended path—even though Mednick makes clear that that “path” is something
that is constantly shifting under the feet of the would-be believers. Sound
familiar? (At least our current leader has only a made a “killing,” to our
knowledge, in the marketplace; although his has bragged that nobody would take
him to account if he might gun someone down in the street). Fortunately,
Mednick does not milk the slight similarities, and centers his work on the
subject at hand.
Serving as a kind of chorus and, one might argue, as a cabaret host to
these harangues and interchanges is Max Faugno, a Russian Jew who was born
years later in the US of figures who left the Soviet Union to escape Stalin’s
endless wrath. Mednick, however, gives him wide range to speak in the present
and the future, commenting on and connecting the “parade” of figures he puts
before us.
Obviously in such a culture, the center cannot hold. Mayakovsky takes a
gun to his heart in an apparent suicide in 1930—although some claimed that they
heard two gunshots, and many suspected that it was Stalin’s thugs who oversaw
his “suicide.”
In
the 1932, Nadya took the same kind of gun and shot herself in the heart as
well, a self-admitted victim to her husband’s reign.
Mayakovsky’s great poems and plays were banned until Lilya wrote Stalin
(also, incidentally a Georgian by birth) asking him to redeem the poet’s
career. Amazingly, he did, declaring him the only great poet of the revolution.
If
Mednick’s work, accordingly, is somewhat static in the telling of this complex
series of tales, it is centered upon matters of the heart, a work about people
who had given their hearts to Communism, Stalinism, and their comrades, all of
whom, in turn, broke their hearts before they were driven to explicitly
demonstrate that in their desperate actions.
With projected photographs (some of them, such as Mayakovsky’s body
after his death, quite amazing) and a wonderful cast, Mednick has taken history
and brought it to life through the telling rather than the showing. How can you
“show,” after all, such broken hearts?
Los Angeles, July 23, 2018
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (July 2018).
