From Russia with Love

The cast of The Lower Depths proves that the Harvard stage can put on more Russian shows. There are no fewer than 14 students adept at portraying down on their luck drunks with existential hangups, essential for any future presentation of post-Dostoyevsky Russian drama. Gorky portrays a cross-section of the dregs of late 19th century Russian society with the typically Russian attention to the existence of God, the meaning of suffering and the futility of community. Surprisingly enough, the moral discussions that populate Gorky's low class world in lieu of action resonate well with students' rarefied sensibilities, as they did with the pre-Revolution Russian intelligentsia.

The faded glory of the Adams House Pool's marble and brass primes the stage for a play concerned with decadence and lost time. It takes place entirely in an inn for drifters. The 17 characters range from a baron (M. Daniel Hughes '01) down to a girl of the streets (Jessica B. Kirschner '01). All of them have unique difficulties so that no single one predominates. Peppel (Jared M. Greene '03), the coolly effective driving force of the play, drops out entirely after the third act. None talk about where they come from or where they are going; any attempts to reconstruct a past are shouted down as lies. These people simply exist in the inn, and their incessant friction attempts to find out whether an indolence forced upon them by an unjust society can have any meaning. With nothing better to do, moral posturing is pervasive.

Though some of the actors are sharper than others, the fluidity of the ensemble cast together enlivens the bare text of the play. Gorky allows the director a lot of leeway with respect to who talks to whom when six or seven characters are on stage. This production takes full advantage by creating eddies of conversation that alternately split and combine based on the context, adding texture to what would otherwise be a dry series of declamations.

The characters divide down the middle between men and women. The men, mostly former convicts, expect the women to uphold a higher standard of morality, to "have souls." Too often, however, the women fail in the moment of trial. Vassilissa (Kimberly J. Ravener '03), Peppel's landlady and sometime mistress, is as pure an expression of bitchiness as recent memory offers. The one potential for action in the play comes when she tries to persuade Peppel to kill her husband. Nothing comes of it. That ambition is as abortive as any other. Adding to the cycle of destitution, Vassilissa and Peppel end up in jail for unrelated reasons.

Only one character manages to make sense of the suffering, a pilgrim named Luka, brilliantly played by Kieran Fitzgerald '03, who drifts into the inn in the first act and out before the fourth. Luka preaches a doctrine of benevolent suffering in the face of rampant injustice. Luka guides some of the drifters to dream of a better life in a distant future and of helping people in the present instead of drowning in cold, hard realities. Fitzgerald's Luka is gentle and his good humor is radiant. Even with a shock of blond hair he cuts a better wizened-old man than many wizened old men do.

With Luka and Peppel out of the picture, the fourth act suffers from lack of direction. This was partly Gorky's intention. Satin (Nick Meunier '02) picks up the slack by translating some of Luka's wisdom into a sardonic wit more accessible to many of the drifters. The cast, however, has a bit too much fun joyriding, which takes away from the impact of the pointed suicide at the end.

All in all, The Lower Depths sets an encouraging precedent for bringing more of Gorky's under-appreciated work to Harvard stages, as well as other twentieth century Russian drama. Strangely enough, people like it!

THE LOWER DEPTHS

written by

Maxim Gorky

directed by

Max H. Montel '01

Nov. 2 to Nov. 4

Adams Pool Theater

written by

Maxim Gorky

directed by

Max H. Montel '01

Nov. 2 to Nov. 4

Adams Pool Theater