THE MASTER AND MARGARITA
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Adapted, staged, and designed by artistic director Rick Helweg, the Chicago Actors Ensemble’s The Master and Margarita faithfully captures the depth if not the verve of Bulgakov’s corrosive satire, charting a clean course through a novel filled with digressions and diversions. This production may fail to move us, but it can’t help but impress, with its intelligent homage and occasional visual richness.
By 1939, when the play is set, Bulgakov had fallen afoul of the censors, though he’d once been one of Stalin’s pet writers. He knew The Master and Margarita would never see print while he lived (it was finally “rehabilitated” in 1962). Like his lesser known Heart of a Dog and Black Snow (both of them also adapted by Chicago theaters, as this novel will be by Lookingglass in the spring), The Master and Margarita hid little: Bulgakov’s characters are charged with the author’s sense of intelligent paranoia about the state.
The Master and Margarita inaugurates the CAE’s new 60-seat theater, a renovated fourth-floor 1921 meeting room once used by Masons. The renovation took six months and cost $70,000, but oddly it preserves the room’s previous look of stylized decay (and poor acoustics); white blotches intentionally “distress” the walls. The decay may be deliberate, but most theatergoers will probably assume that the room, like Bulgakov’s novel, was unfortunately left unfinished.
