WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOMEWARD FLY
But not of all the members. The two youngest Romanovs–Alexei and Anastasia–were not identified. Anastasia was long rumored to have escaped, her “second life” the subject of romantic speculation. In a 1956 film Ingrid Bergman played her as an amnesiac young woman recruited in 1928 by exiled Russians to impersonate herself.
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In Silent Treatment, the first of two one-acts by One Day Short Theatre that make up the 90-minute “When the Swallows Homeward Fly,” director-playwright Cynthia Wasseen supplies another sequel. Set 18 months after the assassinations, the play imagines Anastasia as a woman who jumped from a Berlin bridge into a canal. Committed to an asylum, she claimed to be Anastasia, then said she was Anna Anderson. (Twice she went to the World Court, which said it was unable to uphold or dismiss her claim. “Anna” died in Virginia in 1984.)
In this farcical depiction of an unwitting wooing, Elena and Grigory, at loggerheads over her phony grief and his unpaid debts, resolve their squabbles through romance. Inevitably the comedy borrows a heavy load of dark irony from the Romanovs’ captivity. However histrionic, Elena’s feelings of isolation and imprisonment are echoed in the Romanovs’ situation, while the class distinctions that yawn between Elena and Grigory mirror those of the prisoners and their guards.
