Playwright: Mikhail Bulgakov
At: Blindfaith Theatre at the Athenaeum
Phone: ( 773 ) 935-6860; $15
Runs through: March 6
Brilliant Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov ( 1891-1940 ) spent most of his productive career fighting the great theater director Stanislavsky or Soviet censorship or both. Almost nothing Bulgakov wrote from 1928 onwards was published or produced in his lifetime. With nothing to lose, he let rip a series of deep, biting, often fantastical satirical plays and novels.
Bulgakov's first mistake was to portray the anti-Soviet White Russians ( the forces defeated by the Communists ) with sympathy. His second mistake was to satirize Soviet bureaucracy. Actually, he portrayed everyone the same way: as well-intended human beings whose weaknesses and fears surface under any political regime. If Bulgakov favored White Russians, it was only because they were dashing and romantic compared to the dour Soviets.
Flight, seen in Chicago for the first time as adapted by Ron Hutchinson, is vintage, sprawling Bulgakov. No good deed goes unpunished, he mocks as he skewers most types of human idiocy. It follows a group of White Russians through defeat in civil war, flight and bitter exile in Constantinople ( Istanbul ) and Paris. A handful escaped with great wealth, but most had only the clothes on their backs. Generals became balloon sellers and their women prostitutes as Bulgakov paints it.
Any small theater taking on Flight has to be either stupid or brave. It's tumultuous, undisciplined and long ( 2:45 with intermission ) with a huge cast ( 16 actors playing 34 roles ) . But by golly, Blindfaith gets far more right than wrong in this energetic, never dull and frequently noisy production with a mishmash of uniforms and costumes. Directors Nick Minas and Dori Robinson capture the sardonic tone very well indeed, but sometimes enlarge the satire into a blustery cartoon. Anytime characters shout through a scene, they are overstating. Sometimes dead calm and a dry delivery are far more effective.
Oddly, one can see Bulgakov's efforts to appease the censors with an Act II knock at greed and capitalism and a final curtain in which two young idealists return to Soviet Russia and a new beginning. Alas, it didn't play in Petrograd, or Leningrad as it then was called.
The hard-working cast seems to rise or fall on how they were directed. As a trio of generals, J. Preddie Predmore is the loudest and least effective, Brent Frost is the darkest and the most effective while R. Tanner Melvin is the dashing man-of-action around whom the play centers. In smaller roles, David Schultz and Thurston Cobb are among several who demonstrate that exaggeration has its place if there's some subtlety attached to it. John Luzar as a young scholar and Jennifer Santanello are appealing as the young couple doomed to love each other, the stand-ins for the long-suffering Russian People.