BLACK SNOW
From James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to the Who’s Tommy, the frustrated artist incarnates the corruption of genius by power. Bulgakov (author of The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog) knew this scenario well; the state virtually silenced him following the 1926 failure of Days of the Turbins, a play that seemed to sympathize with the despised White faction in the postrevolutionary civil war. But Bulgakov also worked to silence himself, burning his own manuscripts and demanding permission from Stalin to leave the country.
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Unfinished at Bulgakov’s early death in 1940, Black Snow (ironically first titled Diary of a Dead Man) bears a sad, posthumous message: repression relies on do-it-yourself censorship–but if a writer won’t do it, the state’s theater will. The novel satirized Bulgakov’s turbulent career with the Moscow Art Theater and its quirky guru, Konstantin Stanislavsky, the inventor of the Method system, a pseudoobjective technique of emotional recall or inner realism that depends dangerously on the actor’s channeled subjectivity or “motivation.” Bulgakov indicts the pointlessness of this laborious, self-indulgent approach: endless, aimless rehearsals (290 of them for his homage to Moliere, A Cabal of Hypocrites) during which actors pondered everything but the play.
But Sergei’s true nemesis is Ivan Vasilievich, Bulgakov’s Stanislavsky stand-in, a tyrant whose gorgeous smoky entrance (lifted right out of The Wizard of Oz) ends the first act on a note of oriental magnificence. Ivan combines booming megalomania, multifaceted eccentricities, and an unerring instinct for the artistically irrelevant. He orders an elderly actor to emote love while riding a bicycle and commands the cast to practice presenting bouquets to one another, a scene that’s nowhere in Sergei’s script.
The technical wizardry here serves the script like a dream, though that isn’t always the case at the Goodman. Linda Buchanan’s menacing, two-tiered set provides the perfect neutral ground for the ingenious rolling props, Martin Pakledinaz’s color-coordinated costumes, Rob Milburn’s clanging prisonlike sound design, and James F. Ingalls’s scalpel-sharp lighting. Little seems unfinished about this Bulgakov.
