Tag: Moira Buffini Page 1 of 2

Review | Dying For It by Moira Buffini | A Free Adaptation of The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman | Directed by Neil Pepe | Atlantic Theater Company

On December 16, 2014

… the arrow of disillusion …

Dying For It is an all-out, hilarious satire of life under the rigid Soviet regime with vivid characters and a fascinating turn of plot — but it’s not all funny.

Semyon Semyonovich, unemployed, lives drearily, supported by the pittance of money earned by his wife, Masha who’s also supporting her live-in mother. No wonder Masha’s got a bitter streak, making Semyon’s miseries worse. Seeing no other way out, Semyon decides to commit suicide, and is all the more determined after a brief reprieve from despair: raised hopes followed by utter failure to learn to play the tuba. Like Molnar’s Liliom, but with an eye to the absurd, the play takes up the psychological import and strains on family life when a man is out of work.

But — wait: the play reminds us that death holds a great deal of power. Don’t waste it.

The strong-man who rooms upstairs, Alexander Petrovich, corrals off the streets characters, each representative of a segment of Russian society that has become disillusioned with the promises of the Russian Revolution (the Russian Revolution put the Soviets in power in 1917 and Erdman’s play was written in 1928). Alexander gives them each, for a price, the chance to persuade Semyon to give his suicide purpose by dying in protest for his or her particular cause.

The aristocratic intellectual, the Priest, the girl looking for “pure love,” the writer wanting to write honestly instead of propaganda — each of them urges Semyon to die a “meaningful heroic death” as a martyr. Each, though, has a different cause because each, depending on vocation and personality, has become differently disillusioned. Nothing, it seems, is working right. The sheer parade of lost illusions attributed to the Soviet system is powerful. No wonder Stalin banned Erdman’s original play

But where they all agree is that the post-Revolution society has become so repressive, and they are so desperate that the only way to fight the system is by the dramatic act of suicide. The rub, of course, is that none of them wants to die. How fortunate that Semyon’s so keen on it: he’s a weapon for all, “the arrow of disillusionment.”

Well, almost all — let’s not forget about the Postman who lives on the top floor and given to peeking through the keyhole at women using the bathroom and is a Communist loyalist. He won the Good Postman Award and, popping up and peeping in unexpectedly — we can take him for being a government spy, real or wanna-be.

Any play which generates so much taken-by-surprise laughter deserves to be called a “comedy” but that’s not the whole story. In its representation of key segments of society suppressed under Stalin, it’s a kind of parable and, in reflection, its vision is tragic — laughing all the way, almost. The paradoxes of laughter and tragedy find a haunting union in poignant violin and accordion music by Josh Schmidt, played by Nathan Dame and Andrew Mayer, woven through the play and enlivening a great party scene. The play’s final impact is powerful.

Joey Slotnick as Semyon strikes the right balance between zany clowning and the serious sensitive acting the part of the desperate man requires. Among the fine ensemble cast, I particularly enjoyed the toughness and vitality of Mia Barron as Margarita who keeps a shady bar and can’t help loving the macho muscle man Yegor, played strongly by Ben Beckely.

Jeanine Serralles as Semyon’s wife is so ratty it’s easy to see why Semyon would be drawn to suicide, though it’s hard to reconcile her nastiness with her professions of true love for her husband. Though Mary Beth Peil, playing Masha’s mother, seems a little too elegant to be toting around the slop bucket, her takes are so right on I’m happy to have seen her in the part. An all-star cast fills out the ever-surprising array of characters who, while standing for something beyond themselves are all are vividly individualized.

Walt Spangler’s set of the dilapidated peeling wall-paper rooming house echoes and supports the play, suggesting the mystery and complexity of the varied characters and puzzles of existence.

I’m not sure what the outstanding playwright, Moira Buffini, did in terms of freely adapting Erdman’s The Suicide — as it is, if feels very “Russian,” though I’m sure she included the element of music, but in any case, this is a fine, satisfying play and that it gives a glimpse into a place and time of special historical interest is a bonus.

Dying For It plays at the Atlantic Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea district through January 18, 2015.

Review | Gabriel by Moira Buffini | Directed by David Esbjorn | Atlantic Theater Company

By Yvonne Korshak

On May 15, 2010

In Off-Broadway Theater

… archipelago …

There’s an archipelago in the English Channel, nearer to France than to Britain, that England felt it could not defend during World War II and so it fell under German occupation. Gabriel takes place in February, 1943 on one of the small, occupied islands, populated by natives, the German occupiers, and slave laborers the Germans imported from Eastern Europe to construct fortifications. We never see the slave laborers but their presence is felt in the looming, bunker-like backdrop with its slit-eye.

Jeanne Becquet is trying to keep her hearth and home together in the face of food shortages and the ever-threatening arbitrary violence of the Nazis who, in this small scale slice of large scale totalitarian life, are their own law. As the poetic but ideologically Nazi German officer, Von Pfunz tells Estelle, Jeanne’s willful daughter who believes she can’t be killed because she’s a child, “My dear, there’s something you have not yet comprehended about war.”

Von Pfunz is powerfully attracted to Jeanne, letting her — and her daughter who’s up to nasty quixotic pranks in the cause of freedom — off the hook. Yet he’s always the Nazi, revealed in full horror in his purloined diary and in the final choice he throws Jeanne. She berates him while flirting with him, hating him and what he stands for while leading him on to protect her family — and at the same time she’s genuinely drawn to him — one thinks of Salvador Dali’s sense of the sex appeal of fascism.

In contrast to the complexities of Von Pfunz, Jeanne and Estelle, Margaret Lake, an older woman who helps out around the house, is there mainly, I think, to broaden the view of the occupation beyond those in Jeanne’s family. And Lilian Becquet, the wife of Jeanne’s son who’s presumed dead in action, is totally good — although she does have one serious imperfection in Jeanne’s eyes as well as Von Pfunz’s: she’s a Jew. That aside, she’s rather angelic.

And speaking of angels, Gabriel, a man handsome enough, and ambiguous enough to be an angel is washed up on the island’s shore and brought home by Lillian and Estelle where he lies unconscious in Jeanne’s home while Lillian and Estelle fall in love with him, each in her own way. He awakes, but is amnesiac. Who is Gabriel?

Since Gabriel speaks fluent German, Von Pfunz believes he may be “one of ours,” a missing German SS leader. But he speaks English equally fluently and so may be a recently downed British airman. German or British, discovered between life and death, he seems both of this world and of some other, Gabriel the angelic messenger who links heaven and earth — at least we hope he’s from the heavenly realm, but it could be otherwise.

Buffini, a daring and almost shockingly inventive playwright, derives suspenseful plot turns from these characters thrust into a dangerously close situation. Will Von Pfunz discover that the Becquet’s are harboring a fugitive? And will that work to or against their advantage? What still worse trouble will the volatile Estelle get her family into? And to what extent and for how long will Pfunz’s attraction to Jeanne save this family from itself?

Like Buffini’s play Dinner (the recent production in Sag Harbor reviewed here), Gabriel is presented as realistic but drenched with symbols, some clearly recognizable as Christian and others more ambiguous. In Dinner, the young man who arrives at the party, an outsider and object of fascination and love, is (among other things) a Christ figure, and here, too, the young man thrown up on the beach, again an outsider and object of fascination and love, has the name of an angel. The language of the play is filled with images of flickering light: is Gabriel a starry messenger or a fugitive from the flames of hell? Since the young girl’s name — Estelle –means star, does that throw the balance toward hope?

I won’t reveal whether or not Gabriel saves the day but he uses the same device to do it as in Dinner — something found around the kitchen that can easily do double duty as a weapon. Dinner is, if anything, bolder in its wild inventiveness and symbolic power, but Gabriel holds the special interest of revealing a situation of World War II not well known. This is a near-to-flawless production of a fascinating play by a highly original and intriguing playwright.

Gabriel plays at the Linda Gross Theater of the Atlantic Theater Company in NYC’s Chelsea through June 20th.