The Gospel at Saratov

Lee Breuer on the Volga

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Oct 21 2010

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The ensemble is uniformly strong, thanks in large part to Mitchell coaching the actors through traditional character motivation, juxtaposed against Breuer's conceptual staging. Psychological Stanislavsky meets symbolist Meyerhold. Both approaches came from Russia, which is why this particular whacked rendition of Shepard's play is so at home here.

The play is rarely done because it calls for a live lamb. Here, the beast — an adult sheep, actually — parades along the upstage wall chewing the scenery. (This is one of those rare moments when a critic can employ that cliché and be on the mark.) In a later scene, a bathtub filled with soil and flowers emerges from the stage floor — a kind of grave — containing the sheep, which gazes out over the audience, plaintively munching on one of the flowers. An actor brushes and embraces the sheep — his only friend. And this is where the production makes a soft landing, after being buffeted by crosswinds of parody and cynicism. Though a sacrifice of the beast (no, the sheep is not actually slaughtered, or it couldn't perform in rep) is as inevitable as it is mythological, part of that mythology is redemption, and the sight of a living creature adds a layer of tenderness that could be said to reside beneath the prickly veneer of the most hardened heart — which so many of Shepard's characters have.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL GARRYUSHOV

The glory of the Curse

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At curtain call, the audience gives the production one of those Eastern European ovations of simultaneous clapping that's a sign of admiration and respect.

Sometimes it takes going across the world to see what's in our own backyard. At a press conference following the opening performance, Breuer (who grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1940s) talked about how the cynical humor of our age (born of the Vietnam War quagmire) has replaced the earnest, romantic optimism of earlier American generations, and how his production aims to appeal to and cut through that very cynicism.

Breuer, who stands at the vanguard of American experimental theater with Richard Foreman, Elizabeth LeCompte and Canadian Robert Wilson, also addressed the war in contemporary American theater that may be stultifying the progress of the form. This also may explain why Breuer, a radical conceptual director, finds more work outside the United States than in it.

There are the "traditionalists," he explained, and the "inventionists" — "those who believe that nothing should be changed and those who believe that everything should be changed."

What's so telling about Breuer's productions of both Dollhouse and Curse of the Starving Class is how, through all the rattling and rolling of concepts, the cast of Amazons and little people, the blowing up of cars and the sacrifice of sheep, the plays still emerge intact, speaking soulfully to new, more skeptical generations.

"A new play," he said, "should be done exactly the way the playwright intended it for the first four or five productions." But once it gets to be known, it has to be reinterpreted, or it will die.

Breuer is off next to Paris, to the Comedie Français, to stage Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, scheduled to open in February — presuming the Williams estate will tolerate Breuer's directorial flourishes.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS | By SAM SHEPARD | Staged by LEE BREUER at the SARATOV THEATRE YUNOGO ZRITELYA | Saratov, Russia; in repertory, indefinitely