Report from Moscow

To U. S. theatre folk who go to Russia to profit artistically rather than financially, the U. S. S. R. seems to be indeed the millennium of the show business. Audiences seem to like everything they get. The spirit of experimentation is vigorous and widespread. And what puts the golden cap of perfection on the whole situation is that the State pays all the bills.

Of the countless U. S. theatricians who have reported on the dramatic wonders in the Soviet Union, none has brought back a more thoroughgoing account of what goes on behind the footlights of Russia's dramatic capital than Morris Houghton, who last week published his findings in Moscow Rehearsals* Mr. Houghton was one of that group of stage-struck youngsters, whom in the early 1930's Princeton sent into show business by way of the Triangle Club and Theatre Intime. He set Carrie Nation, stage-managed the Guild's Both Your Houses and in 1934 landed a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the Russian theatre. To prepare himself for his observations he learned Russian before he crossed the Red border.

Of the 40 Moscow theatres, each of which has its own technical establishments and all of which perform a repertory of from four to 15 plays, Observer Houghton determined to study four thoroughly: the Vakhtangov Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre, the Krasnaya Presnaya or Realistic Theatre, the Meier-hold Theatre. At each of these institutions he spent conscientious days backstage at schools and rehearsals. But Mr. Houghton's impressions, like a cat's eyes, become most vivid at night when he is sitting out front.

Intervention was the first play he saw at "the Vakhtangov Theatre. It was a spy story laid at Odessa in 1920, when the Reds were fighting the Whites and practically everybody else in Europe. Every Moscow theatre group has its own hallmark. At the Vakhtangov the hall-mark is a slight caricature of impersonation. "Men with long noses have very long noses, women with large hats have very large hats, thin men are very thin, fat ladies are very fat. They are a little like characters of a Peter Arno album come to life."

Though the great Stanislavski now nurses ill health behind the calcimined walls of a bourgeois mansion, his Moscow Art Theatre, with the famed sea gull from Chekhov's play on its curtain, remains "a spot sacred and awesome to the man of the theatre. . . . The audience seems to talk in lower tones here; their hair is combed more carefully. Their shirts are cleaner than in other theatres." The Days of the Tnrbins provided Observer Houghton's first impression. The play was an extremely sympathetic treatment of a White family during the horrors of the 1917-22 civil war. First presented eight years ago, it was promptly banned by Soviet censors. Moscow now regards it as one of its most popular plays. Mood and rhythm are the big contributions of the Art Theatre. Observer Houghton properly registered on both.

At the Realistic Theatre, Observer Houghton got into the swing of Russian experimentation. Play was called The Iron Flood. Spectators were kept waiting in the theatre's foyer until suddenly two actors dressed like soldiers went tearing through the crowd carrying water buckets. There upon doors opened into an auditorium domed with sky blue cloth. At one end was a large earthen mound. On it was camped a detachment of Russian soldiers, their women and children. On two sides were seats. "We spent four hours with the Red Army in the field-- that was all," recalls Observer Houghton. "The wounded dragged themselves across your feet, the people were cheering each other on beside you, the relieving troops you could hear coming behind you and sweeping over you, above your head the night sky hung. A racking experience, that. . . ."

The Meierhold Theatre held in store an experience even more extraordinary. Vsevolod Meierhold was in the original cast of The Sea Gull at the Moscow Art in 1898. He soon found that organization too "bourgeois," moved on to St. Petersburg among the intellectuals. After the 1917 Revolution his anarchistic technique, based on the premise that any means is justifiable in bringing audience and actor closer together, made him for five years the master of theatrical revels in shell-shocked Russia.

In a comedy called The Magnificent Cuckold, Meierhold's radical method gets full play. The stage is completely bare except for some intricate scaffolding and necessary lighting effects. The actors all wear denim overalls. "The plot," says Observer Houghton. "is the old triangle situation, a man. his wife and her lover, given by Meierhold what they call in Russia social meaning.' This is apparently accomplished by the introduction of acrobatics . . . and all for a purpose. I can suggest this purpose by describing the entrance of the lover. . . . Meierhold places the lady at the foot of a tin slide, the lover climbs up a ladder to the top of the slide, zooms down it, feet first, knocks the lady off onto the floor and shouts something that sounds like Russian for 'Whee! "

Except for its playwrights, whom Observer Houghton dismisses as disoriented, neglected and incompetent, the Russian theatre seems to him to be by far the world's most stimulating. "In Moscow people . . . know what they are trying to do.'' As to his own country's stage however, he concludes: "The future of the American theatre rests with America, and Moscow-bred missionaries who have envisioned the Soviet theatrical apocalypse can do little. . . . The Soviet theatre has risen to a peak because the people . . . pushed it there."

*Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

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