Playwright: Julieanne Ehre after Gogol
At: greasy joan & company at the Athenaeum
Phone: ( 312 ) 902-1500; $20
Runs through: May 29
Most of us endure petty tyrannies on a daily basis: cabbies inflict their music upon us, bureaucrats do their nails while we wait, bosses call last-minute meetings. Most of us impose such tyrannies, too, pulling rank when we possess some minor authority over others. 'It's payback time,' we might say, twisting the Golden Rule into 'Do unto others as they have done unto you.'
Russia in the 19th Century was built on such pettiness, systemically pyramiding down from the Czar's grand tyranny. Officials of government, education, the military, even the court itself were subdivided into scores of categories. Your rank—not merit or intelligence—determined with whom you broke bread, whom you married and how well you were treated. The great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol was both attracted to, and repelled by, this mammoth engine of meaningless privilege. After failing to scale the ranks himself, he used his razor-sharp pen to satirize government. His darkly comedic tales of bureaucratic absurdities expressed his deeply-felt anathema for an inefficient, overblown and utterly corrupt system. The Nose, a short story, dates from 1836.
The greasy joan folks have a perfect understanding of Gogol's literary style and satiric thrust, and of theatrical absurdism as well. Using simple physical means and clown-like exaggeration that smacks of commedia dell'arte, they've created a small gem of a show that tells the tale of a middle-rank bureaucrat, Kovalev, whose nose goes AWOL. In his search to recover his nose, Kovalev loses both his self-esteem and the due regard of others. Worse, his nose tries to pass itself off as an official of higher rank than Kovalev. Everywhere he turns, bureaucrats thumb their noses—pardon the phrase—at his plight. A newspaper clerk rejects Kovalev's advertisement for his nose, saying 'This newspaper might lose its reputation if it advertises too many vagrant noses. There are too many untruths and absurdities that slip into print as it is.'
Wearing partial masks, each with a grotesque proboscis, and costumes ( by Ana Kuzmanic ) that hint at 19th Century design, the actors tear about Matthew York's airy multi-level stage that suggests birch wood ( plywood is the substitute ) painted with Russian floral folk motifs. Andrew Hansen underscores much of the action with extraordinarily effective and fresh original music. He incorporates an unlikely homage to Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, but it works. Guy Massey as Kovalev heads the five-person ensemble. Under the knowledgeable tyranny of director Julieanne Ehre, they perform their physical business with unusual comedic grace and balletic precision. Ehre's adaptation utilizes portions of Gogol's most celebrated story, The Overcoat ( also from 1836 ) . Her treatment doesn't begin to do The Overcoat justice, but it successfully adds a dark edge to the fantasy of The Nose