Life on the run

Tracking Russian exiles in Flight

by Johnette Rodriguez

In order to convey the personal upheaval and psychological suffering of civil war, many artists have embellished a naturalistic style with flashes of surrealism and free-association, stream-of-consciousness images. Ukrainian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov used these techniques to great effect in his 1926 play Flight, which was rehearsed but never staged during his lifetime (under the Stalinist regime) because of its sympathetic look at the White Army.

Finally published, with a translation by Mirra Ginsburg, in 1985 in New York, Flight has been infrequently performed in the States, perhaps due to the challenges of its lengthy script and large cast of characters. Under the inspired direction of Spencer Golub, however, with haunting sets and lighting by John R. Lucas, crisp technical direction by William C. Roche and bone-chilling portrayals by the principal actors, the current production at Brown University Theatre is a stunning representation of displacement and exile.

The cumulative impact of the seven "dreams" (instead of scenes) of Flight is strong. The play chronicles the 1920-21 "flight" of a young woman from St. Petersburg (Serafima) searching for her husband, a former a vice minister of trade, and the young man (Golubkov) who befriends her on the train (portrayed with gut-wrenching credibility by Miriam Silverman and Todd Sullivan, respectively).

It also takes us into the manic "flight" of the White Army as they hide from the light of day, scurry into any available corner and fight for every last crumb of power, like so many pesky cockroaches. The metaphor is made manifest by asides to the audience from the "cockroach king" (Bill D'Agostino); by actors frequently lying prone in the background, like Kafkaesque Gregors; and by a leitmotif of skittering, whooshing sounds from the actors. Such repeated utterings and movements are woven through the interchanges between the refugees and the White Army chiefs and wrapped around the speeches delivered by the military leaders.

Michael Crane as General Khludov and Max Finneran as the Commander in Chief of the White Armies turn in urgent, hammering performances. Burnett Voss as a White Army Major General and Jordan Roter as his wife Lyuska are especially effective in the fifth dream, in Constantinople, as they bicker over money for food and go into periodic paroxysms of fever and hunger pains.

The staging of Flight itself underscores the nightmare quality of being on the run, of being constantly paranoid, of barely surviving. The set, a dimly-lit rectangle of wide gray floorboards, long gray curtains and multi-paned windows, with only one or two plain wooden chairs, is a stark existential hell.

Two rectangular trap doors swing up one way to reveal a staircase from which characters emerge or into which they disappear. They swing back in the opposite direction to provide a source of eery light on the faces of whomever stands nearby. Though these doors are raised and lowered scores of times throughout the piece, a half-dozen times they are allowed to slam shut, sounding like the crack of gunfire moments before and underscoring the terror that stalks Serafima and Golubkov.

Spooky, disembodied voices around and behind the audience, including strangled sobbing, enhance this dark mood. And so, in a different way, do the startling outbursts of sustained screaming that happen in the middle of conversations between characters. It's not a stretch to see Munch's famous figure, as Golubkov holds his face in his hands and cries out in helpless fright.

And those are director Golub's (and his team's) finest touches on this play -- creating the aura of a vast brooding Russian soul, along with a black hole of angst and abandonment. Leaving one's home, life and personhood and searching across time and space to get back to all three are themes threaded through these dreams of Serafima's and Golubkov's: exiles wandering through the labyrinths of their memories, trying to piece together a present and a future from a past they'd like to forget but never can.