Russian Plays by Richard Crane has Fun with Adaptation

This is the first time I’m reviewing a collection, so I’m not entirely sure where to start.

The book Russian Plays is a compendium of four adaptations of classic Russian literature. Playwright Richard Crane partnered with director Faynia Willaims to stage them, beginning with Satan's Ball in 1977 and ending with The Brothers Karamazov in 1981. Each play is very different, and so are my opinions of them, so it’s probably best to explain a little about each play individually.

The adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov demonstrates Crane at the height of his powers. His play condenses the dozens of characters from Dostoyevsky’s original novel into four actors—including a young Alan Rickman as Ivan in the 1981 production—who take turns embodying their buffoonish father and other side characters. The use of doubling emphasizes the story’s psychological themes and beautifully twists the relationship between the four brothers, who profess very different philosophies but who each have inherited the “Karamazov Curse.”

Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha and Smerdyakov are also occasionally united in song. Crane weaves music into the plot of the play, including an English translation of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” But since Russian Plays doesn’t provide sheet music for these songs, I don’t know how they would be performed today.

The play’s language is also quite musical. Recently my high school chose to stage a modern adaptation of Antigone, and the translators used a very lyrical style to convey the quasi-mythic implications of the story. The final speech from that play(“We can’t bury hate in the hollow mountain/and we can’t leave grief to rot in the sun”) is very similar to the one at the end of The Brothers Karamazov (“Let it take twenty years, the seed of Karamazov will grow to a tree and bear much fruit. We never die, brothers”). Although the gods have changed considerably between the settings of those two plays, the human themes—religion, justice and family curses—have not. Perhaps one play influenced the other, but I suspect both borrow from a theatrical tradition which uses a lyrical style.

Vanity, the second play, is self-consciously poetic but much more stilted. As an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin, it retells the courtship between the title character, an apathetic nobleman, and Tatiana, a novel-reading ingenue who falls head over heels for him. In order to emphasize the conflict between ritual and authenticity, all three characters—Onegin, Tatiana and the poet Lensky—deliver their lines in verse and only slip into prose as their social faꞔades disintegrate. This technique may be thematically resonant, but it makes the lines themselves terribly awkward to deliver. Rhymes are occasionally forced and the transition between meters highlights the artificiality of the theater itself, which is probably not what Pushkin intended.

Additionally, the character of Lensky is particularly puzzling: was he this obnoxious in the original poem? I understand that he’s not supposed to be a good poet, but it’s strange that the embodiment of 19th-century Romanticism cannot speak authentically about love, and I suspect that this deficiency is Crane’s fault

The third play, Gogol, is probably the one I understand the least. This one-man show combines several of Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s stories into three frantic monologues. Borrowing from famous works like The Nose and The Overcoat, a single actor narrates his successes and failures in a modern-day British corporate setting. Clarke’s words (Gogol’s words?) are intense and beautiful, but the play itself is mostly just confusing. Maybe long monologues are not my thing, or maybe I’m not properly informed.

Unlike the other plays, I’m not familiar with its source material: I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov and The Master and Margarita, and while Eugene Onegin is still To-Be-Read I’ve seen the 2013 production of Tchaikovsky’s operatic adaptation, but the closest I’ve come to 19th-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol is reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake. After reading Gogol-the-play, I didn’t understand him or his stories any better. I suspect the smallness of the play works against it.

Satan’s Ball, an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, is anything but small. Its the dual stories of Satan and Jesus (here called Professor Woland and Yeshua Ha-Notsri) unfold on a massive four-level set connected by flights of stairs. Satan’s Ball is also a musical with a cast of fifteen actors playing more than forty roles, including some very clever doubling. Like in The Brothers Karamazov, the doubling and other changes mostly help to streamline the plot and reframe the novel’s most iconic scenes. Crane claims that writers like Bulgakov and Pushkin “were all theater people, and would understand that ours is a disrespectful art” (11).

As a result of this “disrespectful art,” certain themes are inevitably pushed to the forefront. Satan’s Ball focuses much more on thematic conflict between individualism and conformity than Bulgakov’s original novel. I’m not sure if Crane was an admirer of Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand—Margarita’s complacent husband is transformed from a doctor into an architect in a possible nod to The Fountainhead—but unlike Rand, Crane knows how to have fun. Even in the absence of sheet music, songs like “Without Joy” and “Trucks and Trains and Trams” rattle with rhythm and melody. The songs written for Margarita, the female lead, are generally weaker, and her character doesn’t seem as dynamic as she did in Bulgakov’s original, but that’s nothing a strong actress can’t remedy. The show is a mixed bag, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it onstage.

Two of the four plays in Russian Plays—Satan’s Ball and The Brothers Karamazov—are worth adapting. The other two aren’t especially bad. None are particularly suitable for the high school theater, which I tend to consider while reading, but I’ve begun to dream about staging a production of The Brothers Karamazov one day. And if I can find one good play in a collection like this one, then it was worth reading.