Krymov, Dmitry

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    In ‘Big Trip,’ an Exiled Russian Director Asks: What Makes Us Human?

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    Dmitry Krymov’s two shows at La MaMa thrillingly stress the porosity of the line between life and storytelling.The Russian theatermaker Dmitry Krymov’s “Big Trip,” two shows in repertory through mid-October at La MaMa, in Manhattan, is in love with the very essence of theater: how we tell stories, how we make art, how we live.The productions have no sets to speak of. The costumes and props look as if they have been sourced from thrift shops and Home Depot — one piece makes extensive use of cardboard. Yet we are far from the usual Off Off Broadway seen at incubators like the Brick. The framework here — Pushkin, Hemingway and O’Neill — is drawn from high art, or at least classics some might deem musty. Flares of whimsy, as when the actors don red clown noses, might feel rather European to locals more accustomed to irony. It is safe to say there is nothing else like this on New York stages right now.This is all very much of a piece for Krymov, but also new territory for him.Back in Moscow, this acclaimed writer, director and visual artist had access to fairly generous budgets, presented work at fancy institutions and taught his craft to avid students. He earned accolades and traveled the world, including to our shores to present “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (2013), “The Square Root of Three Sisters” at Yale University (2016) and “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. After that last production’s run ended in spring 2022, Krymov refused to return home because Russia had attacked Ukraine.Now living in New York, he runs Krymov Lab NYC, an iteration of his Moscow workshop, and collaborates with an English-speaking ensemble. “Big Trip,” their first official outing, consists of the distinct pieces “Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in Our Own Words,” a retooling of one of his Moscow productions; and “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” based on two of Hemingway’s short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Canary for One,” and scenes from Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Krymov does not so much stage classic works as filter them through prisms like memory, notions of cultural heritage and identity, and the very process of theatermaking. (It’s mind-boggling that, according to Tatyana Khaikin, a lead producer of Krymov Lab NYC, none of the city’s established companies have invited him to do a show.)In “Onegin,” the stronger of the two works, Russian immigrants (Jeremy Radin, Jackson Scott, Elizabeth Stahlmann and Anya Zicer) guide the audience through a retelling of Pushkin’s 19th-century masterpiece about high-society youths facing the demands of love.Kwesiu Jones, left, and Tim Eliot in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad,” in a segment that adapts Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.”Steven PisanoThey begin by explaining the basics of theater then re-enact scenes from “Eugene Onegin” while essentially annotating the text (throughout both shows, Krymov repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to stress the porosity of the line between life and theater). The central character is a dandy afflicted with spleen, which “is like having American blues,” we are told. “But even worse — it’s having the Russian blues.” (Reflecting on such differences is a Krymov forte: His astonishing memory play “Everyone Is Here,” which is on the streaming platform Stage Russia, intersperses scenes from “Our Town” with the impact a touring American production had on him in the 1970s.)The issue of watching an exiled Russian director’s work while his country is waging war against Ukraine is actually raised in “Onegin,” which is interrupted by a harangue directed at the cast: “You can’t hide behind your beautiful Russian ‘culture’ anymore. Your culture means destruction and death, and all of your Pushkins, your Dostoevskys and Chekhovs cannot save you.” The show resumes, but the trouble among theatergoers feels real, and so are the questions that have been raised. Should Thomas Mann not have been able to publish in America after he fled Nazi Germany, for example?The outburst is also representative of the constant interrogation of the source material, all the while reaching deep into its core and extracting the marrow — what makes us human.The trickiest of the three segments in “Three Love Stories Near the Railroad” is O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” which will be cryptic for those unfamiliar with the play’s premise and characters. Yet the action is magnetic because of the director’s ability to create absorbing theater in an elemental way, often through deceivingly simple devices. The father and son Ephraim and Eben (Kwesiu Jones and Tim Eliot), using stilts, tower over Abbie (Shelby Flannery), the woman who has upended their lives. It’s a stark representation of power and its often illusory appearance that peaks in a stunning visualization (that I won’t spoil) of Abbie and Eben’s tortured relationship.In the same show’s “A Canary for One,” the unrolling of a painted sheet suggests passing scenery seen from a train. It’s easy to get lost in the action, despite the fourth-wall breaking. Introducing “Desire,” Radin wondered where the train was. A whistle blew. “It’s very far away, and behind you,” he told us. I knew the train could not possibly be there, and yet I turned around and looked. I’d bought it all. More

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      Dmitry Krymov, Exiled Russian Director, Starts Over in New York

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      Dmitry Krymov, one of Russia’s most eminent directors, is among the dozens of artists who have left their homeland since Russia invaded Ukraine.If Dmitry Krymov, the celebrated Russian director and playwright, were directing a play about his life, the third act would begin, he mused, in a cramped, art-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It is winter, nearly a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, turning his brief visit to the United States into an open-ended exile after he spoke out against the war. And his living room has suddenly burst into flames.So much brownish-black smoke is filling the apartment that he can’t see his arms, and he’s gasping for air. The computer containing drafts of his plays is burning. He is struggling to stamp out the flames with a blanket. Then darkness. His lungs are so badly damaged by the fire, which was apparently caused by a wire that short-circuited, that his doctors keep him in an induced coma for nine days.But this third act, Krymov stressed later, is not meant to be the final one.Surviving a fire, he added wryly, had been a baptism of sorts for his new life in the United States. “A fire brings you closer to a country, when you burn,” Krymov, 68, said recently as he recovered at a friend’s apartment and reflected on his self-imposed displacement, which he sees as a banishment of sorts, but also as a rebirth. “My life as a play needs to end with something, and I hope that we’re not at the end,” he added.Krymov, who scaled the heights of Russian theater during a storied career, left Moscow last year, the day after the invasion of Ukraine, for what he thought would be a six-week trip to the United States to direct a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. He packed only one small suitcase.Before getting on one of the last Aeroflot flights to New York, he became one of the first prominent Russian cultural luminaries to sign a public letter criticizing the war. “We don’t want a new war, we don’t want people to die,” the letter said.The reaction was harsh. In the months that followed, he said, the authorities closed seven of his nine plays, which were playing at some of Moscow’s most vaunted theaters, and his name was erased from the posters and the programs of the two that continued. The cancellations were crushing, he said, but he had no regrets about signing the letter.“Sometimes,” he said, “you are facing something that is so obvious there is no other way.”During President Vladimir V. Putin’s first two decades in power, Russians in many walks of life — including the arts — were sometimes forced into compromises as the space for free speech narrowed. But with the war, that space has slammed shut almost entirely. As Putin has introduced some of the most draconian measures against freedom of expression since the end of the Cold War, Krymov has become part of a growing exodus of Russian artists, writers and intellectuals who have left the country, dealing a heavy blow to Russian culture.Krymov and the actor Annie Hägg rehearsed “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a mash-up of works by Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill.Marina LevitskayaChulpan Khamatova, one of Russia’s most prominent stage and screen actresses, left the country; so did Alla Pugacheva, one of its defining 20th-century pop stars. Young, ascendant filmmakers fled. Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, denounced the war, left the Bolshoi and joined the Dutch National Ballet. The list goes on.For Krymov, the 14 months since he left Moscow have had all the audacious drama, tragedy and dark comedy of one of his plays.In Russia, Krymov was revered by critics and audiences alike for his brazenly original and visually driven re-imaginings of classics from Pushkin, Chekhov and Shakespeare, among others. Now his antiwar stance has pushed him into a period of reinvention: as a little-known director in the United States, a country whose language he speaks only haltingly. He has gone from rehearsing plays at the famed Moscow Art Theater, where Stanislavski once presided, to rehearsing at a vacant barbershop in Midtown Manhattan that his new Krymov Lab NYC rents for $10 an hour from a friend.Last fall, his group was given a residency at La MaMa, the venerable East Village theater. He and a company of New York actors held workshops there of his adaptation of Pushkin, “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words),” and his own work “AMERICANS: 2 Hems and ⅛ O’Neill,” a play mashing up works by Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill. He hopes to stage them at La MaMa next fall.“I want to work and have my work shown in the United States, to make them angry back home that I am gone,” he said. He brandished a handwritten manuscript of a play he is working on, its words blurred after being drenched by a fire hose.“Manuscripts don’t burn,” he said with a hint of mischief, quoting the devil Woland from “The Master and Margarita” by the Soviet-era writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The quote, with its suggestion that true art cannot be destroyed, has taken on new meaning for him.Liz Diamond, chair of directing at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, has known Krymov for nearly two decades and teaches his work in her courses.“He has lost everything,” she said. “He was at the absolute heights of Russian theater.”She credited him with pioneering a visceral and strikingly visual form of theater, known as “theater of the artist,” where classic texts are mined for contemporary themes and fused with deeply personal meditations.Anya Zicer and Jackson Scott in Krymov’s “Eugene Onegin (In Our Own Words).” Steven PisanoHe often uses a single line, scene or gesture as a jumping off point in works like “The Square Root of Three Sisters,” an encounter with Chekhov that he staged in 2016 with students at Yale. In his play, an actress reinterprets a line about a fork left outside by repeatedly stabbing herself with a fork.Diamond recalled she was “thunderstruck” years ago upon seeing Krymov’s wordless take on “Don Quixote,” with the whimsically phonetic title “Sir Vantes. Donkey Hot.”“Dima creates a poetry of space that I’ve never seen anyone else achieve,” Diamond said.Born in 1954 in Moscow, Krymov was the only child of two titans of Russian theater: His father, Anatoly Efros, who was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, was one of the leading Soviet theater directors of his generation, while his mother, Natalya Krymova, was an influential critic.Krymov said his father was Jewish, and that his parents, who were concerned about antisemitism, gave him his mother’s more Russian-sounding surname. Before he could walk, he said, he crawled around the backstages of leading Moscow theaters.“I never felt I was living in my father’s shadow,” he said. “My parents didn’t pressure me.”After graduating from the Moscow Art Theater School in 1976, he initially started out as a set designer, which has deeply informed his approach. He eventually became a successful painter, and returned to the theater in 2002 almost by accident, he said, and only reluctantly. He had mentioned to an actor friend an idea for a plot twist in “Hamlet” in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father doesn’t want his death avenged. At his friend’s urging, he directed the play, which bombed with critics but proved a hit with theatergoers.Soon he began teaching at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts, the oldest theatrical school in Russia, and he went on to direct and design dozens of productions.He and his wife, Inna, a frequent collaborator, who often finishes his sentences and lives with him in New York, have one son, age 40, who lives in Miami.This year Krymov’s work has taken on a sharper satirical edge as it grapples with the fate of Russian culture, which is under pressure, for very different reasons, at home and abroad.In the first scene of his new adaptation of “Eugene Onegin,” a group of elderly Russians are telling the story of Pushkin’s poem, as if to children. Then, suddenly, an actor planted in the audience violently throws a tomato at them, accusing them of ignoring the brutality of Putin’s war.“How can you talk about the beauty of Russian culture?” the actor screams. “It’s disgusting!”Krymov has many friends in Ukraine, and he said that he had broken down in tears several times during rehearsals of “The Cherry Orchard” in Philadelphia, thinking of them sheltering underground while bombs rained down.Still armed with his dark and fatalistic Russian sense of humor, he appears resigned to his new life. Alluding to Dostoevsky’s satirical novel “Demons,” he said he wouldn’t return home until “the latest demons had left Russia.”“It’s very safe to be a demon now in Russia,” he said. “Even if you are not a demon, you are going to put the tail and the horns on just in case they are looking for one.” More

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      Dark. Messy. Assaultive. Inscrutable. Even From Your Couch.

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      Without international tours, streaming high-concept, director-driven European theater is the next best thing to being there.In October 1973, Arena Stage in Washington took its productions of “Inherit the Wind” and “Our Town” to Moscow and Leningrad for “the first American theatrical performances on the Soviet stage in memory,” according to The New York Times.A teenager named Dmitry Krymov was so bowled over by “Our Town” that he returned the next day. He grew up to become one of the world’s finest theatermakers, and “Our Town” plays a pivotal role in his wonderfully evocative recent memory play, “We Are All Here,” which tracks Krymov’s relationship with Grover’s Corners over the course of his life, and peaks in an emotional gut punch doubling as a visual masterstroke, with the cast lined up on a slowly rising bridge.The good news is that I was able to take in Krymov’s show earlier this month. The less-good news is that I saw it online.And that, in a nutshell, is what the past year has been for fans of border- and boundary-crossing theater: increased access, curtailed experience.Audiences in New York (and other cities that regularly host international companies) have long been able to discover theatrical ideas, techniques and aesthetics that can be radically different from the ones we encounter in the United States.Indeed, American theatergoers can be taken aback by another culture’s conception of the art form. Very roughly, if the playwright, dead or alive, rules in the United States, in Europe it’s the director who is the focus.But as Krymov learned in 1973, opening one’s mind to different possibilities is also incredibly exciting.The main problem is that travel was even harder this past year than it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. And sharing a physical space has always been a key to the more adventurous experiences, the ones that make us question our artistic assumptions: The impact of a show by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine or Poland’s Krystian Lupa can only be fully felt in real life.When you are in the room, you can see how Mnouchkine reconfigures the very idea of the theatrical space by placing movable sets on casters or having the actors get ready for a performance in full view of the audience.In the room, Scott Gibbons’s tectonic soundscapes, which are an integral part of Castellucci productions, feel as if they are pressing on your chest. Audiences entering “The Four Seasons Restaurant” at Philadelphia’s FringeArts festival, in 2014, were handed earplugs, and no, raising the volume on headphones at home just isn’t the same (you can try with another Castellucci show, “Inferno,” available in full on Vimeo).In the room, you can be awed by the supersize scope and the way live and videotaped perspectives intermingle in Ivo van Hove’s “The Damned.”The impact of oversized video imagery, as in this 2018 production of “The Damned,” can’t easily be replicated in a production watched at home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd in the room, you can thrill to an audience’s response to the moment. It’s possibly even more exciting when you’re in the enthusiastic minority in a sea of haters, “Rite of Spring”-style: I can still hear the slaps of seats springing back up as enraged patrons left in the middle of Jan Lauwers’s berserk “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was 20 years ago.But just like that, the pandemic closed borders: we will have to do without outré tableaus from visiting companies for the foreseeable future. The sudden disappearance of international theatrical touring did not make headlines in America last year: Our shellshocked stages went into survival mode, and a much needed discussion of racism in theater took precedence.Obviously I am not begrudging any of that — the reckoning was overdue — but I couldn’t deny the dull ache I felt for what was missing.It was somewhat alleviated, at least, when we switched from glaring at supertitles to glaring at subtitles, as the digital floodgates opened and theaters all over the world began streaming both shows in their repertoires and new projects.Krymov’s “We Are All Here,” for example, was just one of 15 subtitled captures I binged over five days of watching this year’s Golden Mask Festival. These were part of the Moscow-based festival’s showcase section, called Russian Case, which offers works available for tour bookings.Some of them were entrancing even on a screen, like Mihhail Plutahhin’s hypnotic “The Observers,” which consisted of handlers wordlessly moving objects rescued from forced-labor camps this way and that on a table.Yury Butusov’s staging of the Florian Zeller drama “The Son” was so bizarre that it was compelling on its own terms — the actors’ histrionic line readings were refreshingly free of any attempt at psychologizing. The popular writer Vladimir Sorokin’s “Spin” was staged by Yury Kvyatkovsky in a glass house, where we spied a rich family reveling in a decadent boozy brunch via surveillance cameras.Not everything worked, especially the shows that illustrated Regietheater (or director’s theater) run amok, like the incomprehensible commedia dell’arte-influenced production “Pinocchio. Theater.”“Investigation of Horror,” which recreated a soiree of 1930s avant-garde philosophers, complete with real-time potato-peeling and intense debates, looked at times like a “Saturday Night Live” parody. After I admitted, in a postfestival debrief on Zoom, to having been bewildered by a modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” another viewer reassured me by saying, “I’m Russian, I read the book, and I had no idea what was going on.”None of the Russian Case shows I watched were of the naturalistic bent most common in the United States. I never caught a glimpse of characters desultorily chit-chatting on a couch plopped center stage.Come to think of it, there was not much desultory chitchat at all.Yevgeny Mironov, left, as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, in “Gorbachev.” Ira Polyarnaya, via Theatre of Nations, MoscowIn her introductory note to “Investigation of Horror,” the Russian Case curator Marina Davydova wrote: “Watching relationships between characters is getting boring — it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out.”This applied even to the most traditional productions, which always had a twist, like “The Son” and its outré Expressionism, or the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s brilliant bioplay “Gorbachev” having the virtuosic Yevgeny Mironov in the title role as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, change costumes and wigs in full view as their characters age over the course of the show.And Russian Case was just the apex of a year in which I gorged on non-English-speaking theater.It all started last spring, when major companies scrambled to put catalog productions online as soon as their venues shut down — many of them stuck to traditional curtain times and eschewed on-demand, which meant appointment matinees for American viewers.Suddenly, it became easier to see work by directors we have come to know over the years. Berlin’s Schaubühne dug into its archive for full-length shows, including a healthy selection from the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier — a treat for those of us who have loyally trekked to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for his live productions. As of this writing, the prestigious Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris was still streaming a subtitled capture of a contemporary take on Molière’s “The School for Wives.”The most ambitious institution may well have been the Comédie-Française, also in Paris, which started by offering a slew of weekly archival captures (without subtitles) in the spring of 2020. I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”The Comédie-Française’s virtual programming has evolved over the past year as regulations changed, and this 341-year-old grande dame has exhibited enviable verve. When in-person rehearsals were authorized again, the company put its troupe to great use with new initiatives like the table read series “Théâtre à la Table,” which has become increasingly sophisticated (and will remain on YouTube, unlike the full captures).The Comédie-Française’s reading of “The Seagull,” part of a series that is available on YouTube.via Théâtre à la tableThose familiar with “The Seagull” could be tempted by the Comédie-Française’s dynamic reading, led by Guillaume Gallienne as Trigorin and Elsa Lepoivre as Arkadina (they also played the terrible lovers Friedrich and Sophie in “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory).Choices of source material show inventiveness, too, as with a fantastic re-enactment of Delphine Seyrig’s “Sois Belle et Tais Toi” (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a prescient feminist documentary from 1981 in which actresses including Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda talked about sexism in the film industry.Other companies have taken to appointment, blink-and-you-miss-it livestreaming, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam — the company led by van Hove, whose staging of “The Things That Pass” you can catch on April 25.Not long before my Russian immersion, I was on the edge of my, er, couch during the British director Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” for the Amsterdam theater. Even though there was no doubt as to the outcome, the modern-dress production had the intensity of a thriller and I caught myself yelping “no no no no no” out loud as the characters headed toward their fate like asteroids pulled into a black hole by an irresistible gravitational force.Hans Kesting as the title character in Robert Icke’s production of “Oedipus.”Jan VersweyveldThere have even been actual online festivals such as “Stories From Europe,” which presented subtitled captures from members of the theater network mitos21. For a few days in January, we could pretend we were at the Berliner Ensemble, Moscow’s Theater of Nations or the Teatro Stabile Torino. In dark wintertime, that escape felt precious, a window onto a world of possibilities rather than restrictions.In an article for The Times recounting that trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, the Arena Stage associate director Alan Schneider quoted an account in the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper. “Truly,” it said, “the exchange of theater experience, of theater groups, is one of the finest proofs of the willingness of peoples to live in peace, to seek mutual understanding.”If that understanding must happen online for now, so be it. The glass, at least, is half full. More