Seeing Red

The intersections of these stories are as dazzling as they are unwieldy. Given that the novel is a masterpiece, it’s not surprising that Helweg and Franco‘s very respectful adaptation, staged by Loren Rubin, is something of a reduction. The biblical scenes tend to fare poorly. Gone is Jerusalem’s blistering heat; and Pilate‘s agonizing headaches, which so affect his judgment in the novel, are here glossed over. Gone also is much of Bulgakov’s wry humor in these scenes. The love story, however, is still beautiful, and the demonic saga, in particular, contains much mordant, gothic wit. The piece never bores -- a remarkable accomplishment, given the scale of the enterprise -- thanks as much to Jeff Bek‘s live musical accompaniment as to the actors’ intelligence and the director‘s swift pacing.

Los Angeles has always represented a challenge to writers. In this sunny clime, the literary gifts of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann were ground down to pulp. Heroic fiction fares better in places where there’s a readily identifiable source of human misery -- something on the order of Stalin or Hitler -- to write about.

Instead, L.A. offers a more general desperation and psychic malaise, often attributed to its predictable climate, to an excess of pop culture or to any number of unreturned phone calls -- all of which are certainly worth complaining about, but are hardly a wellspring for the kind of oppositional art generated, to cite an extreme example, by the likes of Vaclav Havel. It‘s hard to imagine the Czech president-playwright-philosopher enjoying the respect he now commands had he lived his life on the corner of Wilcox and Selma and written scripts about the denizens of the neighborhood YMCA, or about the follies of the film industry. No, it’s far easier to win a Nobel Prize when one has the bureaucratic malevolence of communist Czechoslovakia to contend with.

Stalin represents an era when artists were feared, and consequently respected. That‘s surely part of the reason why he’s showing up on our stages, in a culture where the fine arts are often treated with indifference, if not disdain. He is a lightning rod, a reminder of a time and a place where creating art was neither a career move nor a casual dalliance, but a matter of life and death.