Playwright: Vassili Sigarev
At: European Repertory Company at the Athenaeum, 2935 N. Southport Ave.
Phone: (312) 559-1212; $20
Runs through: Dec. 28
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According to European Repertory Company's publicity, Vassili Sigarev, the author of Black Milk, is in his mid-20s now. His play, however, would read like those of a far earlier time—the late 19th century, perhaps—even if its translator (identified in the playbill as one Sasha Dubdale) were not as unfamiliar with English vernacular as the language in this production indicates.
The universe of Black Milk—a title immediately attesting to the text's clumsy transition from Russian to English—is a Brechtian landscape of poverty, squalor and despair, its citizens distinguishable only by the extent to which they exploit one another. But in the remote village (called by our accordion-busking Narrator "the Motherland's ass") in whose all-but-abandoned railroad station we find ourselves, the oppressors are not Landowners and Industry Bosses, but petty entrepreneurs: a stationmaster peddling moonshine vodka, and a pair of urban shysters selling electric toasters to gullible rubes whose reintroduction to capitalism apparently did not include the principle of Caveat Emptor.
And therein lies the sole element distinguishing Sigarev's iconography from that of his socialist predecessors (notably, Maxim Gorky, who founded the genre in 1902 with The Lower Depths). When we are presented with two saintly crones attired like the heroic colossae of Farmworkers Collective posters circa 1931, we are not surprised that one is a midwife or that the other's mission is to bury her dead. And when the traveling salesman's foul-mouthed young consort is discovered to be pregnant, don't we know that she will give birth in the course of the play, and that parturition will, within mere days, transform her into the wholesome embodiment of Mommie Russia?
In interpreting this exercise in retro-agitprop, director Luda Lopatina adopts the declamatory fashion of its source period, with characters giving way to extravagant emotional outbursts in public places, and an old commie's spurious rampage with a blank-loaded rifle contributing the only physical respite from the didactic, if obscenity-laced, dialogue. Heather Prete, Carolyn Ann Hoerdemann, Laurie Larson and Karen Kron endow their allegorical roles with a modicum of intelligence, but cannot supply Sigarev's shrill diatribe the urgency necessary to engage audiences no longer brimming with youthful outrage at economic injustice.