Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov, April 2022. (Courtesy Voice of America)
WashU’s Center for the Humanities hosted an event last week titled Fragment, by Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov. To be honest, I did not know beforehand what I was going to see. The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I had hopes it would be live theater and that maybe Krymov would appear, if only remotely—he seems to have a new play in New York to promote—or that a scholar of theater or Slavic studies might be there to explain what was going on. Tickets for faculty and staff were free but had to be reserved online; the platform for reservations had the depressingly mysterious dysfunction of a rumor that the supermarket across town has eggs.
As it turned out the event was a film of a play, shown on a pull-down screen in a seminar room. There was an abundance of open seats, and tickets were not checked. Krymov was not there. The play had been put up at some point by the Klaipėda Drama Theatre and was presented in Lithuanian with subtitles in Russian and English. Eight students came, perhaps for credit, along with one young guy with an odd grin who told the screener he was not a student but refused to say where he was coming from or what his interest was. Sometimes I wonder who in St. Louis would want to see this kind of thing with me; now I know.
Fragment has three acts. In the first, a woman waits eternally for an elevator in one of those Moscow apartment houses converted from something grander. Nothing else happens, and there is no real dialogue. The tedium of it is purposely accentuated by a surreal, repeating event: a young woman runs down the stairs that twist around the elevator core. When she is two steps from our heroine she loses her balance, drops a basketball, and runs on. She never comes back up the stairs but does keep coming down. The first act went on so long I broke out into a prickly-heat sweat, began coughing, and had to take off my sweater. The young woman next to me gathered her coat and purse and left. The protagonist finally gives up on the elevator and goes to the door of her apartment, a few feet away, searches desperately for her keys, drops her bags, and scrabbles to pick up her things. Scene.
In the second act she is in her musty but high-ceilinged apartment. She stretches like a former ballerina. This goes on a while, until she pulls her back. (With that, the play had me.) Then the building catches fire, and she thrashes around in her room in the flames and smoke as others race in to help her save every stick of furniture, the rug, the mirror—but not, for some reason, the thing she wants most: a portrait of her father, which someone takes off the wall then puts back. The protagonist collapses, sobbing, in the stage smoke and lies there as people run in and out, and silk flames flutter above fans.
In the third act she has been moved to some outdoor space. She has gone whacky noodles. The other members of the cast try to get her to snap out of it by telling her to cheer up, they will show her favorite movie on a wall. It does not go well and ends prematurely. A man says he does not know if he exists. The protagonist claws at a poster of the film’s hero, shrieks, collapses, and climbs out over the chairs through the audience. (I cannot think of another stage actor I have seen work that hard.) The cast mill about in panic.
Curtain call.
Chekhov, in both his plays and his stories, has a fetish with not-knowing. It is one reason I am drawn to his work. But damn.
A flyer handed out at the event has a brief statement by Dmitry Krymov. Fragment, he says, is a magnifying-glass look at Olga, the oldest sister in Three Sisters, on the night of the fire in the third act. (In Chekhov’s play, the house does not burn in the fire in town, and Olga may be the most grounded of the sisters.)
“In this dramatic piece of work, axon, fear, foreboding and struggle ensue. The struggle is hopeless,” Krymov says. “When standing in front of any painting I admire, I am interested in taking a good look at its parts, maybe even more than at the whole picture, so that there, like in a drop of water, I may discover the artist’s ideas and individuality. And since in my opinion A. Chekhov is neither sluggish nor apathetic, but, in fact, very energetic, bright, and even fierce, the fire scene is the best for my game. Just relax and watch.”
The whole thing made me quite happy.
