All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station
Adapted & Directed by Emil Varda
Vienya – Elliott Morse
Megeara – Rivers Duggan
Tilphousia – Mia Vallet
Yurodivy – E.V.
In the most comedic—and shocking—scene of All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station, two angry, vengeful Furies ask, "What about the States?" – and the main character, Vienya, who has been struggling helplessly in a kind of Russian Odyssey, transforms into the recognizable American President You Know Who. The anguish of Vienya, a character from V. Yerofeyev’s book, Moscow-Petushki, written in the 20th century, becomes the torment of a contemporary figure, who can be a Russian but also an American or a Citizen of the World. Or he can be a contemporary artist—not one to whom the kindly Muses bring inspiration, but on whom the cruel Furies wreak vengeance.
Throughout the past year, the three young New York actors in E.Varda’s production persuaded their hesitant director to continue rehearsals and improve the spectacle they had staged for friends last spring. Now the performance is colorful and dynamic, reminiscent of the methods of Brecht, Kantor or Grotowski. It is a poor, alternative theater, similar to Varda’s artistic experiments during his university days forty years ago. All Roads is a performance like a dream, full of darkness and harsh lights, imitating Caravaggio's paintings, a spectacle as changeable as a kaleidoscope, as the Furies, or Erinyes, take the form of angels, or Vienya’s erotic visions, or dancers from the Paris cabaret, or convicts in Siberia. They also turn into famous ladies who accompany You Know Who.
There are few props on stage, but each has different symbolic meanings that change every few moments: for example, an authentic rural carrying pole turns into a cross of suffering, a carousel, or a machine gun. All in all - a very modest and very creative performance.
In Yerofeyev's book, the hero is killed under the Kremlin Wall by four apocalyptic bandits who pierce his throat with a screwdriver (a terrifying prophecy, because 20 years after writing the book, Yerofeyev died of throat cancer). In Varda’s production, the murdered Vienya appears as a figure from the afterlife. But, unlike the book’s hero, he is not a drunken Ulysses in Moscow, who does not see the Kremlin, and does not commute to Petushki, a suburb of Moscow, to see his beloved. In All Roads he is a Sisyphus who pushes a stone of love up a hill (in New York City? in the States?), but brings illusion to the top, who pushes a stone of goodness, but manifests a boulder of politics, who pushes a stone of unrequited art, that turns out to be unfulfilled drunkenness. And he must repeat this action again and again, for eternity.
The performance is not a stage adaptation of the book, which was the most famous samizdat (a Soviet-era underground illegal book) of its time. Instead, All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station is a poetic vision (like Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) in which, as the director writes, each viewer can freely interpret from a political or artistic point of view.
photos by Ewa Kowalska, 2018
by Bronek Kowalski
tweaked by Cait Johnson