Wednesday, November 13, 2002

The Fourth Sister

Over the weekend, I went to see a fantastic new play, which is running at the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street: The Fourth Sister, by Janusz Glowacki. Full disclosure: I'm a friend of the translator, Eva Nagorski, and I went to a preview, since the official opening isn't until November 21. So consider this advance buzz, rather than any kind of official review. But I enjoyed the play so much I had to write about it.

The play is set in Moscow, in "the present", by which Glowacki means not some vague idea of post-Communist Russia, but rather a very specific place and time, with references to Chechnya and George W Bush. It opens with an old babushka (is there any other kind?) complaining about the fact that she's being charged $300 for the removal of her late husband's body from her second-floor walk-up. The amount is shocking not only for its size, but also because we're used, in the theatre, to shocked reactions to sums which today would be laughably small. Five pounds! Fifty kopecks! An amount which is actually shocking to us – in today's money, in the US – is a rare thing in theatre, and makes us sit up and take notice. I don't know whether this play is going to become obsolete in the future, or whether it's meant to, but the fact that it's so focused on the actual world as it is today, specifics and all, is refreshing.

The next thing we notice is that there's an equally refreshing headlong exuberance to the writing. Scenes rush straight into other scenes, with hours or even days elided as though they simply didn't exist. Tania (Alicia Goranson), who is the centre of the first half of the play, speaks in a beautifully-captured early-adolescent stream of consciousness, full of strange and wonderful jumps from astonishing solipsism to penetrating psychological insight. She's the youngest of three sisters, all of whom yearn for a romantic ideal we know they will never achieve. But we've come a long way from Chekhov: the buttoned-up manners of Russian country houses have been replaced by a world filled with gun-toting gangsters and Hollywood film directors.

Much of the comedy in this play is broad, in a crazy, exaggerated sort of way. When the gangsters kill the wrong man, they apologise to his mother and make over-the-top amends. A film of a blatant deception wins an Oscar for Best Documentary. A lot of people lose limbs, one of them the manager of a circus, whose leg is eaten by a starved tiger called Pepsi. (Another of the sisters has been taking half of Pepsi's meat home, to feed her family.) These are the sort of things we might be used to finding in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie, but they work just as well on stage.

If one author springs to mind more than anybody else, however, it's probably Zadie Smith, another talent who uses her out-of-control imagination to illuminate lower-middle-class life. And just like White Teeth, The Fourth Sister rocks about so joyfully that it pretty much collapses at the end. On the way there, though, there's a great deal of fun, interwoven with drama and tragedy. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, since the twists are delicious, but suffice to say that it includes defenestration, cross-dressing, drug deals with warlords, and a newborn baby toting a kalashnikov. (And if that sounds like it comes straight from a film script by Quentin Tarantino, don't worry, Glowacki and the director, Lisa Peterson, are one step ahead of you on that front, too.)

The acting is excellent, especially from the supporting cast. Rarely will anybody have relished playing Ganster No. 2 quite as much as in this play, and in return for some great writing, Glowacki gets some great performances. Goranson is particularly good in a very difficult role. (And I don't particularly want to say this, but if I don't, you'll spend half of the beginning of the play wondering why she looks so familiar: she was Becky in Roseanne. Don't let that put you off.)

Ultimately, however, the play is Glowacki's triumph. Peterson keeps it moving at a cracking pace, and Nagorski has done a great job, with Glowacki's help, in preserving the individuality of the voices. But it is Glowacki who has managed to take an important and depressing subject, and turn it into a grand and dark comedy. Go, and enjoy.

Posted by Felix at 20:41 EST