Black Snow

by Keith Dewhurst

based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov

directed by Richard Jones

at the American Repertory Theater

through January 23

Black Snow is at first glance a serious play. It's a story of censorship, blood baths, theater, repression, and manipulation. The play's premise is promising: identifying and particularizing the era of Stalinist paranoia and censorship in the trials of one man trying dangerously to write about history. And it's one that you want to see succeed, dramatizing as it does the incredible events culminating in the play as it now stands.

The difficulties of the fictionalized writer Sergei Leontevich Maksudov, played by Derek Smith, only hint at the real story behind Black Snow. Robert Scanlan, the ART's literary director, has explicated the fascinating history of this play. Black Snow began as White Guard, a war novel Bulgakov wrote after serving for the defeated White Guard during the Russian Civil War. Censors stopped the serialized publication of the novel in 1925, but the Moscow Art Theatre defiantly decided to stage the novel as a play titled The Day of the Turbins. Bulgakov was consequently subjected to a decade of persecution under Stalinist rule.

The writer then drafted a novel entitled The Diary of a Dead Man satirizing the experience of adapting The White Guard for the Moscow Art Theatre. The text resurfaced in 1965 and had its first Russian publication under the title A Theatrical Novel. The publication of an English translation under the title Black Snow ensued in 1967, followed ultimately by Keith Dewhurst's adaptation of the English novel into this play. The premiere production of a play that's only a year old but has been germinating for 60 years should and does feel momentous.

It doesn't, however, feel altogether successful. Some weaknesses in transmission and translation are to be expected and perhaps forgiven, due to the battered past of this play.

But too much of the history is presented flatly; neither the faceoff between the Red Guard and the White Guard nor the constraint by censors of the protagonist writer Sergei Leontevich Maksudov feel effectively threatening or looming or tragic. The play, in fact, ultimately derives its strength not from the drama of its history but in spite of it. What is most engaging about the play is not the main plot but the subplot, not the tragic sequences tracing Stalinist repression but the comic theatrical sequences woven into the interstices. The comic representation of life at the Moscow Art Theatre and of the rise of Stanislavsky is hysterically funny and unremittingly enjoyable.

That the tragic elements seem ineffective can't really be blamed on the company, who turn in performances ranging from serviceable to superb. The sheer number of minor characters and the indistinguishability of their names does not prevent certain actors from achieving distinction: particularly wonderful were Candy Buckley as the secretary Polixena Vasilievna Toropetskaya, Margaret Gibson as the cat-hurling actress Lyudmila Silvestrovna Priakina and Jeremy Geidt as Romanus, the conductor at the Independent Theatre. Derek Smith is not a very dynamic Maksudov; although he expresses his suicidal desperation nicely, his creative anxieties and joys are only sketchily delineated. Alvin Epstein as Ivan Vasilyevich, the director of the Independent Theatre conspicuously modeled on Stanislavsky, is eminently believable in the imperiousness of his manner, the dignity of his posture and the passion of his speech.

The production values of Black Snow scream for attention. The stark stage design by Antony McDonald and lighting design by Scott Zielinski are stunning in combination, but unlike other grand gestures like the sets for When We Dead Awaken and Misalliance, these sets aren't particularly illuminating of the themes or larger symbols at work in the play. The conversion of the ART stage into backstage at the Moscow Art Theatre is the one meaningfully creative exception.

Black Snow, in its plot, form and characters, feels highly disjunctive, and very unfinished. Perhaps it should, since Bulgakov left the novel unfinished and Dewhurst only frames, but does not finish or conclude, the story. For all its moments of brilliance, and for all the justifiable explanations of its weaknesses, Black Snow catches the eye, but it ultimately fails to engage our imaginative sympathies.