Play: Brave Old World

 Mother Russia by Lauren Yee, Directed by Nicholas C. Avila, Seattle Rep through 6 April 13 April

If writer Lauren Yee has a "thing" that describes her plays, it's dark comedies set against authoritarian backgrounds. Her excellent Cambodian Rock Band featured a man literally playing for time against a bouncy, humorous  leader in the Cambodian genocide. The Great Leap Forward sent a US basketball team to China and ended at Tiananmen Square. And now she take on Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of Soviet Russia and the triumph of capitalism. And its a wild ride.

So, we're in St Petersburg in the early 90s, and we have three people for whom the great move to capitalism has not worked out so well. Billy Finn is Evgeny, a unemployed milquetoast who lurks in the shadow of his father, a former KGB bigwig. He's hired by an old school chum Dmitri (Jesse Calixto), who has used the new freedom to open a small, failing business, and has pivoted it into a front for a freelance domestic espionage operation. Their target is Katya M (Andi Alhadeff),a  former rebel rocker who was big in the secret listening parties during the bad old times, and left for America. She couldn't compete with Whitney Houston, and no one wanted songs about the gulags when the gulags were supposedly closed down, so she came back. They are all lost in this brave new world of MacDonald's filet-o-fish sandwiches, adidas swooshes, and Folger's instant coffee. Freedom of choice means little to them when they themselves are not chosen.

And punctuating all of this is the always-appealing Rep semi-regular Julia Briskman, who wanders onto the stage between scenes as the babushka-wearing old woman. She's the embodiment of old Russia herself, though she never comes out an admits it. She plies the audience with donuts to get them on her side, complains about how everything is different now, and describes the former leaders of the USSR as old lovers who come to woo her yet always disappoint her. 

And the set-up feels comfortable and little frothy, and you think you know what's coming, and you're right and you're also wrong. Yee throws in some delightful curveballs in the plot, and all the characters are both smart and incredibly stupid at the same time. Billy Finn is timid,  trying to strike out on his own, and get his father's love and respect while dealing with his own inner cowardice. Jesse Calixto evokes Jackie Gleason with his wide-eyed reactions and own cluelessness of his weakness. Both men were originally planning on moving up to the big leagues of the old regime in the ranks of the KBG, and are now lost in the wake of the Soviet Collapse. Andi Alhadeff carves her own path as Katya, with her own arc and goals which the others both miss.

Now, in Mississippi Moon I loved the music, but recognized its existence as a cover to the motions of a rotating set design. Julia Briskman's Russian Mom does the same thing here with monologues and complaints, but the rotating set design here actually works, going from inside the shop to outside to a bus interior to outside Evgeny's father's door neatly. In this case there is precious little downtime and without breaking the flow. The fact that Briskman is wonderful just adds to it.

And, like Yee's other works, there is a lot of bright spots and human nature against the authoritarian background, and while there are the horrors of the past and perils of an uncertain future, the performance sparkle against it. Some of it feels like a SNL skit from the same period, making fun of Russian interpretations of American styles, yet it peels away easily to reveal the vulnerabilities of three people who have been conditioned to hide their true selves by their government. And it is a bit uncomfortable at a time when our own authoritarians are seeking to remake the world in their image, so some of the laughter feels like whistling past the graveyard.

I'm going to mark this one as a hit, and am delighted that the Rep is pushing its own World Premieres. More of this, please.

More later, 

Book: October Country

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville, Verso, 2017

Provenance: I first found this book in an airport bookstore, mis-shelved. It is a history of the Russian Revolution, but it was in the Science Fiction section. Which makes sense in that China Miéville is a noted SF/Fantasy writer of the "New Weird" school, best known for books like Perdido Street Station, Un Lun Dun, and The City and The City.

But I did not pick it up then. Instead I purchased it at Third Place Books in Ravenna, a tidy little neighborhood bookshop. On the day of purchase, Third Place was donating their profits to organizations working against the brutal immigration policies of the current administration (and ICE in particular). So a political book purchase made perfect sense.

Review: I'll fess up, despite a lot of reading, I have only a passing knowledge of the Russian Revolution. The storming of the Winter Palace, Rasputin. Lenin. The Battleship Potemkin, Reds with Warren Beatty. Yet in my brain the events of the Revolution itself unspooled almost simultaneously. One day there was a monarchy, the next day the Soviet Union.

Actually, it was a continual and chaotic clusterfreak, unrolling over a period of months, with Saint Petersburg (which becomes Petrograd and will eventually become Leningrad before returning to Saint Petersburg in 1991) at its center. Then the heart of the Russian government, it was here that the people's uprising mattered. Out in the hinters of Baku or Finland or Moscow, rebellions of the workers could arise, either to the be crushed or to find some limited amount of autonomy away from the wellspring of then-modern Russia.

There are histories built around Great Men. There are histories built around Great Moments. Miéville's approach is built around Great Meetings. And there are a lot of them in the tempestuous times.The Duma, the provisional government, the nascent Soviet, the various factions within the revolution, the gathering of a dozen Bolsheviks when Lenin was on the lam from accusations he was a German agents. Meeting upon meeting, faction upon faction.

How many factions were there? Take a dinner plate, hold it at an arm's length, and drop it on concrete. That many. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Mezhriontskys, Socialist Revolutionaries, Kadets (Constitutional Democratic Party), the Military Revolutionary Committee, various garrisons, and subfactions of the above that range from moderate to revolutionary. The difference between the two big factions, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, is whether the worker's paradise has to go through an intermediate stage of bourgeoisie, as the masses need to get up to speed with the concept of self-rule (The Mensheviks said yes, the Bolsheviks said no, and Lenin thought that if you topple everything right now, the rest of a war-torn Europe would quickly follow).

Miéville openly skews left/socialist politically, and that shows in where his attention lies. We get a lot of the Bolsheviks and their meetings, while the right shows up in turns as ineffective foil or a threatening counter-revolutionary force. Nicholas abdicates and vanishes from this narrative. The Duma, tethered to the Soviet in a dance of dependency, is rarely effective (and the Soviet itself, like Caesar, rejects opportunities to take command until forced to by Lenin's wing of the Bolsheviks). He demurs on whether things could have gone differently, or if the horrors of Lenin and Stalin were "baked into" the Bolshevik Revolution itself. There were more than enough opportunities for a different faction, or collection of factions, to "win" the prize of a starving Russian state.

Miéville  is also a urbanist, and most of his fiction is city-based or community-based (The Armada from The Scar, the railroad town from The Iron Council). So he is at home in this not-as-ancient city, built like Washington, DC to house a ruling class and a government. He is at his best when he is describing the city itself, and its inhabitants, either scrounging for food, marching in protests, or defending the barricades against the counter-revolution. Miéville captures the flavor and the feeling of those turbulent months of 1917 where Russia hung suspended through a decaying old system and and an unborn, chaotic new one.

We stop in October, with the Czar still alive, the nation still at war, and the Civil War yet to fully kick off. Miéville tells a great story, but it is an incomplete one, with the great tragedies yet to come. The retro-vision of "what would be" colors our judgement of those hides the concept that the future of the Revolution hinged on a single decision, a single political act, or a single meeting.

More later,

From Russia with Booze

OK, this looks like a setup for a crime thriller:

Putin and the Russian government are pursuing an actively homophobic agenda. By identifying gay men and women as the enemy, they are propping up their own regime, a time-honored rallying tactic and right out of the brownshirt playbook.

A large number of gay men and women, with local sex columnist Dan Savage in the lead, are in return loudly boycotting Russian vodka. There are a number of Russian vodkas, but the one that everyone knows about is Stolichnaya, or Stoli. Apparently, the boycott is having an effect, since Stoli now says it is not Russian, but Latvian, despite massive marketing about how it is a Russian vodka. Apparently they ARE Russian, but flying the Latvian flag like those supertankers registered in the Grand Caymans to hide from safety inspectors.

Photo by Marcus Yam/Seattle Times.
It's Green! You know, like money!

Now, into Elliot Bay sails the "Super-Yacht" owned by the distributor of Stoli. This is front page news as far as the Seattle Times is concerned, which delivers a fawning fluffer of an article about how wonderful it is to be fabulously wealthy, plus noting that the 50+ staff will bring millions of dollars into the area, and oh, isn't it a pity we have to scare these fragile, precious butterflies away by charging taxes if they stay more than two months.

So, that's the setup. The floating luxury palace is glowing green in the harbor, owned by someone backing a nation denying human rights. I'm seeing a caper film with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as ex-alcoholic ex-cop with a beef, and Ellen DeGeneres as the former Microsoft hacker who comes out of retirement for just one more job. And Jerry Seinfeld as Dan Savage. Out in time for SIFF next year. Grab the popcorn.

More later,