LYRICAL DELIRIUM
By Bronek Kowalski
Translated from Polish by T. Rozanski
Photos by Ewa Kowalska, 2017.
...the word delirium sounds similar to the word lyric...
Incompatibility and harmony appear to be the keys to the play “All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station,” by Emil Varda, performed in the spring of 2017 at Under St. Marks Theater in New York’s East Village.
Phantom visions and delirious revelations are the literary matter of Venedict Erofeev’s "Moscow-Petushki" (“Moscow Stations”) – of which Varda’s play is an adaptation of – the 1973 novel/prose-poem about a poet-drunkard, written with the clinical realism of Charles Bukowski and the metaphysical vigor of T.S. Eliot. It is no coincidence that the word delirium sounds similar to the word lyric, so the lyrical macabre of his confessions and prophecies the author called his poem. He had written it vainly in search of the meaning of ultimate truth, which half-consciously mirrors "The Odyssey” – from Troy (the Kremlin) to Ithaca (Petushki) – in hope that it would brighten the last moment of consolation. Sadly, inevitability doesn't bring any hope.
Elliott Morse
The death of Vienya, in an alleyway not far from the Kremlin, stabbed with a bodkin, or screwdriver, by four awkward apocalyptic thugs, is not the only version of his own death, conceived by the author. In the second variant, drunken Vienya rambles on the tracks and end up under the wheels of a train. The bottom half of his body is crushed and scattered, leaving the upper part intact and stuck vertically along the rails like a memorial bust. This is supposed to be a foreshadowing of idiotic glory, because Vienya prophesied that his dying body would protrude from the tracks, "like the busts of various bastards standing on pedestals all over the city."
While not fashionable in Communist times, "Moscow-Petushki," a book about a lonely poet in drunken Soviet Russia, remained unfashionable as the communist empire-moloch fell into to the garbage dump of history. It is, however, a poem equal to T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land." While Eliot is transforming the beauty of mythological erudition, Erofeev is anti-metaphorizing the monstrosity of real ignorance. The beauty of Eliot is at its most the cruel, but Erofeev’s repulsive encirclement is deadly.
Thanks to Erofeev’s masterpiece, the writer's life did not follow the "autobiographical prophecy” – to die as an anonymous Soviet drunk, but as a famous Russian writer. He was buried among the flowers, not with contempt or negligence.
Varda's spectacle was not a traditional staging of the book, in which the actor Vienya tells about an unfulfilled last journey to a beloved woman in Petushki (more or less imitating an alcoholic blackout). In most of productions in the theaters around the globe, some of them very successful, the artistic axis is a maniacal, phantom-like vision of the plot of the poem.
Varda reaches out to the poetry of the book, utilizing as a formal carrier the poetics of Erofeev's anti-metaphors, but paradoxically accepting the materialistic vision as his own meaningful death. Varda’s production is intended, compared with conventional tradition, to be a kind of anti-theater more popular in New York City in the 1970s and 80s of the last century in the works of The Living Theater, Bread and Puppet, Grotowski, Kantor and many others “Open Theater” groups far less popular here than in Europe.
Varda was already aware during the first rehearsal about the alternative, underground venture of his production. He spoke openly and more seriously than a joke that it wasn't so much Broadway, off-Broadway or even off-off-off Broadway, but closer to West Side Highway, geographically speaking.
Emil Varda
The philosophy of his theater and method of creations, Varda explains in details in a flyer distributed to the audience, reveals a lack of plot, a division of the show into stanzas or separate "songs," calling scenes “dreamy episodes.” During the whole production he did not hesitate to use the word poetry. As such he created a poetic, surrealist, magical theater in which the strange logic of the subconscious is exploited. By the way, the viewer is offered the luxury of freedom of interpretation and will remain in comfortable amazement of the intellectual and emotional opulence of Erofeev’s world, without the compulsion to "understand" these abundances.
In the “Note On The Performance” and “MANIFESTO,” Varda signals not only the tragic affair of the Russian soul, mercilessly sacked in the past by the Soviet system, but also the appalling symptoms of today's spiritual illness in the planet's communities. The spectator, imaginatively minded, is supposed to watch the protagonist dance with – hard to say: could they be angels? Or could they be devils? Vienya, lyrically delirious, cruelly maltreated by the demons and devoid of self-preserving instinct, wades straight into the abyss of death. For the spectators waiting for the so-called curtain call, Varda recommended using less rationality and more in-your-face emotions.
Of course there is no curtain in this kind of theater, and traditional backstage is not required, but what is the point when we, the audience, are instantly inside, in the scenery of the play, when the program did not show the character's name. It’s as if Varda assumed that anyone who had read the title "All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station," clearly and immediately know that it is Vienichka. How many viewers have read the book before coming? And if yes, how long ago? Most likely there were those who did not read at all.
In the program there are no names or other explanations; who are the two female characters who accompanying Vienya all the time? Perhaps the audience has been compensated enough for the strange lack of personalization already in the third minute of the show, when a completely naked Vienya is being washed by a stream of water poured from an old fashioned jar.
The first glimpse at the stage: a beautiful photogenic still frame, seen like the preparation for an ablution: a bucket, a washing bowl, a jar on the chair and a towel hanging on the arm of the other chair. And there are no other props. Bare minimum. Because in the poetic theater – as Varda explain in the program – frugality and unpretentiousness of the setting is used as a canon, and as the reward, exposes its opulence, in the intellectual and emotion world.
The spectacle begins with the piercing crescendo of the trumpet playing penetratingly and sadly a Russian hit – “Ochi Chyornye” – from beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the play, the klezmer, now muffled by alcoholic excess, wants to seduce the half-deaf dull crowd with its music.
The first woman appears on the stage – a manageress? Servant? Madam? A maid? Housekeeper? – clothed in a gray dress like charitable nun, gird by a leather belt, which was rather more suitable for a man’s trousers than anything else, and very loud clomping work boots. She is also adorned in a giant shawl, colored in various tones of blue patterns with fringe. She at once starts to clean up the invisible mess, washing utensils and straightening non-existing asymmetry of the towel on the railing. She walks with rigid dignity and the noisy patter of her heels. She stands on the left side of the stage.
Immediately afterwards, the other woman runs barefoot from the opposite side. She moves quietly and gently in a loose, ruffled dress, ankle length, tight on her breasts, and lightly carmine like a bonfire. The scarf is similar to the first one’s shawl, but in the tone of various reds. She brings in a bundle of clothes, puts it on the floor, reaches for a metal jug and stands like the one on the other side of the stage. Both frozen, waiting… They are like the guards to stop anyone intending to pass the gate of two chairs. The audience is confused: Who are the two actresses?
Rivers Duggan Mia Vallet
In the gray dress is Megaera, in the red one is Tisiphone, know also as Tilphousia – they are the Erinyes, two out of three ancient Greek “Kindly Ones,” also known as Furies. If Varda wanted to stay in complete harmony with the ancient Greeks, then the image of these goddesses, older than Zeus, the image of ugly witches with snake hair would have been given Poetic license and allowed him to show in these roles Mia Vallet and Rivers Duggan, who are young and beautiful – a license, and also mercy on Vienya, to see them sometimes as angels, sometimes as dancers from Babylon, or a mirage of his beloved girl from Petushki.
The Erinyes were engaged in the mythology of persecuting their victims, torturing their conscience, leading them to insanity, suicide, or death in agony. They lived in hell, in the darkest undergrounds; they were guarding the entrance to Hades and lead the dead to its interior.
Let's get back to the theater – the trumpet still sounds sharply when a young man walks on the stage, walking quickly and wearing a black suit and black, polished shoes. Steered, driven by an invisible hand, he approaches the guards, stopping at invisible obstacles. For reasons unknown to the spectators, he strips naked and gets in the washing bowl. At this point “Ochi Chyornye” gets silent. Tisiphone jumps at the chair and pours a water from the pitcher on the naked man’s body. Megaera wipes him with a towel, and then Tisiphone gives him the clothes she brought with her – a wrinkled shirt, dirty trousers, trampled shoes and a tattered coat. Vienya, snappy at first, now spent of energy, can barely sit on a chair, unable to even raise his head. He shows his face only when words fall – Get up Vienya, and go. He struggles to get up from his chair, puts on his coat, lifts his collar as if in the cold wind, and placing his feet hesitantly, struggles toward the suitcase. Next to it lies a yoke; Vienya, with huge suffering, raises the beam and painfully puts it on his shoulders. The dangling chains are attached two large valises, and suddenly, in spite of the weight, Vienya comes alive, recovers his vigor and makes the most famous statement of “Moscow-Petushki”: “I have never seen the Kremlin and I have heard so much about it.”
Events on stage are happening in the order described above, but their chronology seems to be quite the opposite, the clock of time running backwards, and what was past is becoming future.
If Megaera and Tisiphone were actually guarding the gates of Hades, then Vienya stopping before them must be the expected death. So we saw that, Vienya, elegantly dressed for the funeral, reached the end of his time, and since the Erinyes did not let him go in, the only option was to go back, out of time. From now on, instead of going to Hades, we watch a back-up projection of events.
Somewhere behind the spectators’ eyes, somewhere in different, real time, the Erinyes stripped him of his daily clothes; shirt, trousers, and coat, with which Vienya screened himself from bad people and elements, and soothed his wounded soul while roaming the streets with his two pieces of heavy luggage. They then washed his body to prepare him for the next life, next chapter… but what is it going to be? Death? Life? Or rather no-dying?
The Erinyes transform from the guardians into burial celebrants when acting in the reverse order. They do not want Vienya to go to Hades, but to go back where he came from and completed the abandoned journey. For Vienya, succumbing somewhere behind the scene was not easy, so no-dying comes with even greater difficulty.
Recalling the Gospel: Get up and go! – the non-death for which they are preparing him, it would seem that his just-liberated soul is again clothed in materiality. The Erinyes repeat: Talitha cumi! They order Vienya (already back into his body) to dust his coat, his trousers and put his collar up against the wind and go to Kurski Station and set out for Petushki to see with his own eyes that his beloved does not wait on the platform, that she did not come to meet him. In their graciousness, Megaera and Tisiphone are cruel to Vienya; within an angelic miracle of resurrection hides evil, devious subterfuge.
Their actions mean Vienya does not deserve an elegant funeral, nor neat garments for a smooth passage in the luminous tunnel of the theater’s spotlights, to the eternity of the underworld. Not this kind of death was prophesied in the poem for him.
The poet who created Vienya died in suffering, but with serenity and Catholic anointing, and Vienya will not change anything, because once and for all his essence has been composed of the elitist sensitivity of the poet and common submission to addiction, with disgust to Sovietism and tyranny in general.
And in addition, Vienya is an epic character of unrequited love and absurd death, senseless wandering and ineffective rebellion. Vienya does not live truly, or have a chance to be pardoned and changed, but is in the field of literature and theater, where everything is irrevocably the same, no matter how many times one reads the first and last pages, or how often the one sees first gesture and the last show.
The prologue scene, which ends with Vienya’s monologue with the yoke, is a swirling fairy tale, or just a trick known for the last hundred years from the first film, when rotating images move us to another location, another time. In Varda’s carousel, the Erinyes move Vienya on the appropriate theatrical odyssey to the final start. The spectators see these further vicissitudes in a normal perspective of time – from the first "adventure” to the last one. If we are seeking for even a trace of the plot we are wrong, because Megaera and Tisiphone will deceive and torture him until his death. We may be guessing that then, satisfied, they will pass his broken soul to Hades without trouble.
The rest of the performance is a dozen different scenes – events that are not distinguished by their own titles, but in the performance each of them is a separate whole, usually ended with the fall of Vienya, battered, and mocked, or losing his senses for a moment, or unconscious, or just falling asleep dead tired, stunned by alcoholic excess. As a rule, both Erinyes – whoever they are; angels, whores, erotic hallucinations – go aside, as if satisfied by vindictive lusts, and then Yurodivy appears.
This is Holy Fool, or the Blessed Fool know in Eastern Orthodox Asceticism as a Fool for Christ, disguised in a hospital shirt, sometimes with a trumpet, as if he is playing "Ochi Chyornye" in intervals. Once he paints his lips like a clown with a thick red lipstick, sometimes he hums the Okudzhava’s song, sometimes is expressively angry, cursing in Russian at the audience and always threatening Megaera and Tisiphone, indifferent, seated at Vienya’s side. Only to Vienya he refers gently and solicitously, comforting and caressing gently the fallen one. Vienya does not seem to know at all that such a person exists and that he is kind to him.
Who plays this character straight from dark and distant Russian history? The program of the show did not inform or explain, emphatically mentioning that it is a “guest appearance,” but this cameo is Varda.
The Yurodivy did not come directly from Erofeev’s book, but from Dostoevsky and Shestov, and more precisely from the intellectual influence of the late professor Cezary Wodziński, who was en expert on Russian philosophy and specially on “iurodstvo.” Wodziński, in his book “Holy Idiot,” defines the status of the church madman as unstable, elusive, and finally calling the weirdo a “non-frequenter,” having found in Dostoyevsky’s writing this figure for many roles and masks, but not a clear and separate representation of the character. Varda followed the philosopher exactly, risking nothing of the master's vision nor Dostoyevsky's tricks.
Varda tried provocatively a completely different variant in this theater-total literality. If he followed Wodziński’s path, he did so in a separate, more interesting way, as if wanting to be perverse to what extent the concept of a philosopher will be tested in theatrical practice. We are talking about the provocations directed and acted by Yurodivys, about the deliberate creation of disturbing spectacles.
It is necessary to give justice to the creator of the spectacle that, despite this conversion, he fully benefited from the professorial "recipe" of the true Yurodivy. From these ingredients Varda took the following: strange, unexpected appearance and unpredictable sides, silence and gibberish in incomprehensible language, strangeness, going off the stage, power of gestures, attempting to steer the show, and all others.
In one scene a false Yurodivy appears – played by Vienya – like a false prophet, dangerous, disseminating morbid, fabricated ideas, but only for a brief moment, because the Erinyes turn him into Donald Trump and as always he succumbs silently to the floor.
Yurodivy cherishes trampled Vienya on the stage for the same reason his ancestors spit on the gold robes of pop, and kissed the door of brothels and other dens of sin. Since the Erinyes are setting up Vienya’s hell, and the audience does not protest it, Yurodivy curses both audience-witnesses and the Erinyes, the main evildoers. Yurodivy, exposed to vulgarity, humiliation, and repression, sees and knows that Vienya is not guilty. Yurodivy, Varda must know, is Wodziński's insightful solution to Vienya’s case, which is "journeying" in time, "which even death is not able to stop it. It seems that death has just interrupted – for a while – he wandering, so thanks to which she takes on herself the meaning of "temporary excesses.”
For both the artist and the created character, knowledge of the secrets and common discovering and hiding of nuances, makes Yurodivy appear as point zero, a starting place for Varda’s artistic intentions. To place yourself in such a capacity one must balance the reaction of the director's habit, self-sacrifice, and tendency towards his alter ego. Just as Yurodivy is the director, the director is Yurodivy. For sure, artistic peculiarities do not lead directly into the quirkiness of Iurodstvo. I'm not entirely convinced that I can tell exactly who is playing who: Varda by Yurodivy? Yurodivy by Varda? As I did not know a long time ago if real Kantor plays Kantor on stage or on stage plays the real one? The difference being that the capricious Master, in risky scenes, relied on his slovenly scruffy, piggish mannequin, while Varda played the real and va banque. Similarly, in Erofeev’s story, does Vienya in the book tell the story of Vienya the writer, or vice versa?
Considering these subtleties, we went very far from the theater, so let's return to the boards of the stage: Why in Varda’s show do the Erinyes constantly harass Vienya and why are they not giving him peace?
It is not known that Vienya has committed crimes and sacrileges such as Orestes, Oedipus, or Alcmaeon. So what is this vengeance for? What sins is he being punished for? What did he do to them? What sacred laws has he betrayed? They are at his side constantly except for a few moments of "rest" when they lead him to bewilderment, when he falls senselessly or when he drifts off while boozing. They go out in “intermissions," they squat on the edge of the stage, they smoke cigarettes, and give space to Yurodivy, looking like they are obliged by a “secret” pact.
In Erofeev's book, the Erinyes appear in one scene, on the train near Leonowo Station, and do not pursue Vienya, but the tractor-driver Yevtushkin, Varda gives away, makes available his entire show, the main character included, to the creatures barely mentioned by the writer. It is as if contemporary New York's Erinyes had discernment and possibilities incomparably greater than their mythological originals.
Of course, we can say with pride that for 3,000 years we have come to the refinement of the production of sins and knowledge of “how to” has reached its pinnacle.
But, are the Furies of Varda really avengers? They did not find Vienya the criminal, they did not track him down. He went himself to their place of fire posthumously. They do not want revenge, but by suffering, to make his soul worth living in Hades. Or even more ambitious – maybe they want a typical Vienya-drunkard, who got himself on the out-of-living bunch before he has developed his talents, to make a fully pledged artist? Cruel? Therefore “Kindly Ones?”
And Vienya’s theatrical version? What are the differences between the book's pattern of deliriously trying to create his drunken self-image and transforming it to a writer’s imagination? The second one, the theatrical one, actually attains the state of initiation into the passion and anguish of the artist? Is this about that Vienya after finishing life, as in Erofeev’s novel, will not pass the gates of Hades guarded by the Erineys? What becomes of him in the theater, when two of the mythical trio (missing is only Alecto) devote more time and effort to him than the author of the poem ever imagined?
They differ from each other as the heroes of separate poetic works. Varda’s play is not a simple adaptation of the novel. Mostly a collection of the quotes arranged in a story, with additions from other authors – Russian and non-Russian – it is quite unlike a book. It is also a separate translation of Erofeev, although only fragments. But the final piece is a performance. It utilizes different tools and artistic resources. It is a stand-alone poetry piece, whose theatrical hero we're trying to compare with the literary one.
We are going to go after Varda’s famous theater adventures with “Moscow-Petushki.” Thirty years ago he performed in New York City a monodrama (in Polish and English versions) based on the book. It was a truthful, faithful version of Erofeev’s ideas. He returned to the same literary source in 2017 but with another creative intention – directing. Presently, Vienya is portrayed by Elliott Morse, who is the age Varda was three decades ago. Both of them, when playing Vienya’s character, were about the same age as Erofeev, who wrote "Moscow-Petushki" at the age of 31.
At this age one could be an alcoholic for a long time already, but if you have good health, a bit of luck, strong genes, and high accident avoidance, you can preserve youthful beauty forever, especially with a “treaty with the dark one.“ Elliott Morse does not look like an alcoholic nor has he created one. Actually, throughout the whole spectacle he did not drink once, and just put his mouth to the bottleneck slightly; this silences him and calms him down. But not much splatter; puking is barely a pale memory. And where are the visions of cruel hangovers on Fridays taking away the desire to live on Thursday morning already. Is Vienya a drunkard resistant to alcohol?
A man besotted by vodka, in his consciousness, thinks about himself as a non-drunk. On the second day, or even an hour after, he cannot remember what was going on in his dark mind, his imagination, his own thoughts. His own vision is malfunctioning as well as his legs, fingers and the stomach – no alcoholic will ever admit he is, or he was drunk. In a state like that one can write a poetic book with the Russian easiness and swagger. Years ago, in the first version of the play, Vienya was a drunk like the one from the poem, but in this version is the sober consciousness of the old one. His stage adventures are not the physical endings of a person but someone, or something from the outside, something like a soul. Erineys is experiencing Vienya’s sobriety in its second "life,” when it transforms angelically into the soul of the artist. So Elliott does not play someone brought back to carnality, but he presents a “don’t get drunk” non-corporeality.
On the scene, the main character usually does not see Erinyes, their presence barely sensed, he only hears their voices. Several times he thinks he sees them, and then he would like to have them in front of his eyes neither horrible nor repulsive. Sometimes he experiences the incomplete evil from their side, when they are angels, dancers in the variette, or the image of the beloved one, or the ladies of the court bestowing a knighthood. These are just moments of unrecognized illusion, or when evil is temporarily not overdosed.
Definitely, these are unpleasant companions. They turn him in a crazy whirlpool, in a carousel of trolling suitcases, until he loses his senses. Tempted mercilessly and vulgarly to board the train to Petushki and to the common orgy in the compartment. As mockery priestess they assist in the blasphemous, by the bottles, of Consecration of the Holy Eucharist, and they urge him to get drunk. They circle around him, like vultures above the carcass. They turn out, one in the fanatical Soviet pioneer, the other in the disgusting symbol of social realism art in the form of a kolkhoz reaper. Tisiphone, disguised as a street-buddy, incites Vienya to go to the party committee office at night, take off his trousers, drink a bottle of ink and “go home to the woman he loves.” Both, pretending to be suicidal convicts in Siberia, tempted him to commit suicide by hanging. They entangle him in the Stalinist coup and Putin's wars.
To fill the bitterness they transform him into a repulsive president of the USA. They lure him with the licentious phantom of an erotic temptress. They wrap him in a cage and hurl painfully with the shawl-wings to Kurski Station. They mock and torture the drunk, they waterboard him, they cruelly, bandit-like kill him with the sharp edge of a broken bottle, and finally drag the inert limp in agony like the barbarians of the disgraced adversary.
Vienya succumbs to invisible elements, undefined phantoms appear in his imagination, or their voices are heard inside his self. He behaves like someone who cannot discern that benevolent angels and merciless witches are created from one substance. Are they the evil of this world, the subject of tiring lessons that someone has given to him as homework? Perhaps they are the creation of Vienya, who wandered through the torment himself, and now, offstage, he reveals the mystery of banality – namely, that there is no chance for the condescension at the Gate guarded by Erinyes for such an artist who, with the inseparable luggage of vodka, deludes himself that in this world he will find a respite and a place of peace and tranquility.
The above conclusions, although excusable by the arbitrariness of interpretation, are subjective because the course of complications can be considered in a different way. Thus, from the first scene we see Vienya-as-artist and the Erinyes stop him because of a reasonable suspicion of impudent genius. He came as a writer, maybe a director, perhaps an actor. The Guardians know from experience, that among the others who tried to enter here previously: Orpheus, Apuleius, Dante, Villon, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Mozart, Blake, Von Gogh, Modigliani, Celine, Mayakovsky, Pasolini, Kantor and now Vienya is trying to join them. He came for timeless solace to Hades and he, genuine fun of the eternity, must also be shown immediately that he is really not welcome here. They are tormenting him by his own hell, in which he has been for a long time, and to where he has gotten himself.
They do not punish for anything, they are not going to change him into the other person, revenge is not a main concern here. Creativity is parallel to Hades, just another address. Their actions mean: Go back to where you came from. We will show you graciously what you have to offer for eternity and goodbye for now. “All roads lead to…” you know where, so “…put your collar up against the wind and keep going Vienya… keep going.”
Vienya in Erofeev’s poem ended his story with a confession not so perverse as very cockily, that since he had been killed by bastards who pierced his throat with a screwdriver or awl, he did not regain consciousness, and he claimed that he would never regain it. It supposedly was a comfortable and final solution, but he did not anticipate that there are creatures of artistic imagination that will bring him back, even for one and a half hours of rehearsal.
Vienya, in Varda’s theater, in his last confession, says that the Star of Bethlehem flickering brighter, stronger than the others is his salvation, but that salvation is a journey, “and requires a constant voyage to Her;… to see her on the platform, with her braid from ass to nape…” even if we do not know whether the star still flashes or goes out. Salvation is not so certain. Also, there is no guarantee of the consciousness or lack of it in the expedition. One hundred years ago in the story “July Night,” Bruno Schulz, having reached Jesus's age, called this wandering "black odyssey," which is unknown whether and when it will end. It was a movie spectacle, but then cinemas were often called theaters. After the last words of Vienya, the lights on the stage go out, the rest really turns black.
One can notice that Varda, choosing the actor for the main character, chose a young man not only in his age but also in his aptitude similar to the traditional image of Jesus. Many aspects of the stage are related to the Christian ethos, as are many in the Erofeev’s book, but their accumulation in the short text of the script makes the assumption that Vienya supposedly is similar to Him on stage. The yoke on the shoulders, like the beam of the cross, the painful road shown allusively in separate pictures, from station to station, the final death and throwing the body in a disjointed pose with scattered arms, the initial ablution, which in a different interpretation can be a baptism, and not posthumous washing, the evangelical order to rise from the dead – this enumeration does not exhaust all the "Christological" references.
Is this blasphemy? Association of the poet-vagabond – flaunting the baggage full of vodka – with the figure of Christ, since His suffering was redemption? Doubt disappears in the final memory of the Star of Bethlehem (this fragment does not play in the structure of a novel as importantly as its role in the play). It is known from tradition that it was the Star that led to the Prophet but was not a guide for Himself. Since someone is strives after the Star, or towards her – you may go to Him, but not with Him. Surely Christ would not say, "I do not know you, people, I have rarely paid any attention to you." This last confession of Vienya frees him from the suspicion that in a similarity he crossed the boundary of heretical usurpation. Probably He was next to Vienya and accompanied him as He and Cendrars were when they wandered together in Easter 1912 through New York City. Perhaps poets should recognize that Christ is the most significant of them. The homeless poet in Bulgakov’s book cursed Him like a true Bolshevik, but he was unable to write that He did not exist.
After a unique scene in which the Erinyes reveal themselves to Vienya as visible figures of angels, fluttering the wings of theirs shawls, Tilphousia, with virulent satisfaction, sweetens her good-natured image. When they stop “flying,” she announces as in a late motto who they really are:
“Part of that power
Which still produceth good
Whilst ever scheming ill”.
Varda answered by quoting from “Faust.”
Are Vienya’s Erinyes similar to the Bulgakov’s devils? Woland raged with his crew through Moscow much earlier before Vienya started drinking his famous cocktails. Woland, Fagotto, Azazello and Behemoth punished the communist Moscow for atheism, or for unbelief in the devil, but also for ordinary human perversions. Their mission was similar to the tasks of the Erinyes of Ancient Greece.
In certain versions of the myths, the Erinyes settled in the deepest part of Hades, fulfilling the role of tormentor for the most sinful, including Sisyphus, constantly precipitating his boulder, barely rolled to the top. These were the roles very similar to the tasks of the devils performed in the Christian hell. However, nothing is certain about the Erinyes, they could be the devil, and as a temptress lure one to sin, sin, and more sin. If they are devils in the spectacle "All Roads ...," they are more like Hella, a half-devil from the crew of Woland, than the goddess of ancient times.
A woman and a man standing side by side in a leaders’ pose pointing to “a bright future” – breasts tilted up, arms outstretched, he is holding a bottle of vodka vertically, she is grasping horizontally a broken bottle, a bandit tool, the triumphant attitude does not change and is rigid and indivertible. The famous sculpture of V. Mukhina comes to mind immediately, 1937 World’s Fair Paris, Trocadero, on one side Hitler’s pavilion with all Nazi symbols and regalia, on the opposite Stalin’s “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman,” when the Mosfilm supposedly took over Hollywood, in 1947, “Father of Nations” choose Mukhina’s sculpture as it logo, and since then, one can sees “worker with hammer and the reaper woman with the sickle” rotating majestically during opening credits on all Soviet movies – even now you can see it on the official site of Mosfilm. Vienya and one of the girls, parodying them, spinning around in the rhythm of crazy Cossacks dance, the second Erinys is parading in front of them in a march, saluting in an army fashion. Vienya can be drawn into a surrealistic presentation, as in other cases without protest, passive as a puppet and not very enthralled.
In another scene Tisiphone touches Vienya’s shoulders with a sword as the bestowing of a knighthood, but this is no sword, this is a horse on a stick with the head from Picasso's "Guernica." She accolades him for the Bolshevik revolutionary fighter, and even more, the soldier of the worldwide "cause" for the liberation of all peoples around the world in “the just wars,” as Russian call all wars they fight. This time, the ironic context of the famous anti-war picture of Picasso, where the militants from the Soviet Russia played a major role, ostensibly for the help of the people's revolt. So Vienya is transforming into a parody of the one of Budionny riders from the famous "Red Calvary," by I. Babel, or perhaps like a modern Russian tanker from Grozny.
Additional irony comes from Picasso being naively, enthusiastically fascinated by Communism and Soviet Union. Perhaps his “White Dove of Peace,” painted from the false inspiration during the communist party congress, appears in Varda’s play as a black crow, bird of death, on the star of Kremlin, which also could be associated with martial law in Poland in 1981 during which Varda personally had his ass kicked quite severely.
Of course this was not the reason Vienya longed for his voyage to Petushki.
The symbol that is much easier to decipher by is the allusion to Guantanamo Bay Prison, in the scene of torture when Vienya is being waterboarded by the devilish Erinyes. The comparisons and the associations with the Russian and Soviet tradition is obvious; Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Yezov, Beria and do not need the further explanations.
I cannot imagine how the theater performance could be supplemented by footnotes, but if Varda, like Erofeev or T.S. Eliot, had complemented his spectacle with it, it would be an interesting addition to the work of imagination, intuition, and erudition.
The abundance of not-explicitly-clear motives, and hidden meanings, is connected with the frequency of transformations, which are subject to few and simple props. The seemingly limited artistic possibilities of the “Poor Theater” multiply when the same objects in almost every scene "turns" into another. Suitcases are, of course, the most common suitcases, but they are an altar, a barricade, a confessional, a carousel. Bottles are also a monstrance, binoculars, tools of murder, hammer and sickle. Chairs change into cages, chamber of torture, rostrum, angelic clouds, serve to build barricades. The pelvis in the beginning is the Styx River, but it may be the baptismal font, or the Jordan River, and Guantánamo Bay Prison by the end. Erynies’ shawls are wings, whips, carpets, and when needed, canopy, or gallows gallop. The yoke first depicts the beam of the cross, it is a rostrum on the tribune or machine rifle, and symbolizes the burden of life resting on shoulders, or as you will; the burden of the whole world resting on Vienya’s shoulders. Instead of the entire Kremlin's decor, there is only a red star, which transforms (possibly) from the Kremlin Star into the Star of Bethlehem.
Will Varda show his spectacle in New York City again? Nobody knows, Theater’s Gods have not decided yet. Outside the theater he is very well know and very successful, the co-owner of the Waverly Inn, one of most famous and popular restaurant among the celebrities and commoners. Very few, only the closest friends know about the fact of his return to the art and theater.
May 2017