Yoked Animals

By T.E.Kalem

BARBARIANS by Maxim Gorky

While time and subject overlap in the plays of Chekhov and Gorky, the two men differ in their angles of vision. Chekhov was a cardiologist of the wounded heart; Gorky was a cartographer of a scarred social landscape. Chekhov's characters transcend their enervating environment; Gorky's characters drown in the swamp of their surroundings.

The landscape in this play is a tiny Russian village in the year 1905, where civilization is, at best, a rumor. Gorky populates the canvas of his drama with wife beaters, sodden vodkaholics, corrupt bureaucrats, venal merchants, sanctimonious hypocrites, neurotically damaged children and disaffected wives who have been churlishly and brutally scorned.

Like animals long used to a chafing yoke, the townsfolk can take known evils in stride. Ill winds from the outside world bring them something worse. Two engineers arrive to oversee the laying of railroad lines that will forever end the isolation of the town. The local timber merchant, Pritykin (Gary Bayer), hopes to grasp the railroad-ties concession in his sweaty palms. But mostly the villagers treat the coming of the engineers as if it were a visit from royalty, bringing a scent of urbanity to their drab dismal lives.

The elder of the engineers, Tsyganov (John Seitz), does have a drawing-room air about him. The younger engineer, Cherkoon (Jon Polito), is an ex-peasant who came from the town and seems to be using the rail line as a steam-lined revenge on his humdrum origins.

Despite Barbarians' three-hour evocation of a technologically doomed milieu, the most vivid image in the play is that of a woman burning with fitful passions. As a teasing agent provocateur of sex, Nadezhda, played with sensual animal magnetism by Sheila Allen, is a queen bee killer. Her husband, Monakhov (Brian Murray), whom she loathes, pleads for her love, holding his spectacles in his hand like a beggar with a tin cup. The seemingly amour-proof Tsyganov offers to sweep her off to Paris and is crushed by her cruel rebuke that at 49, he is disgustingly old. Under Cherkoon's touch, however, Nadezhda becomes an emotional tinderbox. Cherkoon has already enjoyed the favors of Lydia (Roxanne Hart), an achingly bored, terribly wealthy beauty who has been visiting her aunt, the town's only bona fide aristocrat. In one electrifying embrace, Nadezhda seems to claim Cherkoon for keeps. Abruptly, he rejects her, and she goes offstage to punctuate her life with a revolver shot. Her desolated husband turns to Cherkoon and asks, "What have you done? What have you done?" The unspoken answer is that the engineers have done what barbarians always do -- destroy people, destroy their habitat, destroy their way of life.

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the staff and acting troupe are doing what civilized men and women always try to do. In his first season as BAM's artistic director, David Jones is laying the foundations for a U.S. repertory theater of daring and imaginative scope.

--T.E. Kalem

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