REVIEW: Anatole Fourmanchouk stages Albee's "Counting the Ways" in New York (03/23/97)

REVIEW: Anatole Fourmanchouk stages Albee's "Counting the Ways" in New York

by Bohdan Boychuk

NEW YORK - So far the 1996-1997 theater season has not proven to be very interesting, with the exception of two extraordinary theatrical events.

The first was the revival of Romanian director Andrei Serban's production of "Trojan Women" in December 1996 at La Mama on the occasion of the theater's thirty-fifth anniversary.

Twenty-two years ago, the then still young director staged three Greek tragedies - "Medea," "Electra" and "Trojan Women" - in the original classical Greek at La Mama. These three performances elevated Mr. Serban to the level of the finest stage directors of his time.

The staging was so original, so dynamic and powerful, that I count seeing them among the most profound of all of my theater experiences. The three productions have forever inscribed themselves in my memory alongside those of Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brooke.

This time, again, "Trojan Women" had the same powerful effect on me as the original.

The second surprise of the season was brought to New York by the Ukrainian director Anatole Fourmanchouk. He staged two vaudevilles - "The Proposal" by Anton Chekhov and "Counting the Ways" by Edward Albee at Michael Howard Studios/New York Art Theater this January and February. Since Chekhov's world is foreign to me and the issues touched upon in "The Proposal" anachronistic, I will not comment on this play.

Mr. Fourmanchouk is a stage director well known in Ukraine as well as abroad. He staged a very original production Eugene Ionesco's "The Picture" and Samuel Beckett's "All That Fall" at Kyiv's Theater of The Young spectator; an all-male, Russian cast, "Romeo and Juliet," which was highly acclaimed in London; and "La Publica" by Federico Garcia Lorca in Madrid. His other productions include "Antigone," "Hamlet" and "Salome."

The staging of "Counting the Ways" is the most original of all the plays I saw this season. Mr. Fourmanchouk the director (he also was the stage designer), called it a vaudeville and presented it in an appropriate style. In the middle of the stage stood a large painted box made out of carton, with one of its sides open to the public. In the sides of the box were cut out the outlines of doors and windows. Inside the box, as if in a room, stood a miniature silver table and two little golden chairs. This design had a twofold effect: it was the setting for a vaudeville and a box for children's toys.

The stagehand brought out onto the stage two dolls, Him (Stass (Stanyslav) Klassen) and Her (Alexis Brentani), sat them in the chairs, and they came alive. The costumes of the two characters (work of Nadia Fadeeva) were most original and carefully thought out: up front, He and She had painted paper clothes; in the back, they were naked, exactly like a pair of dolls.

He and She sat in their golden chairs and their dolls' life began, which, paradoxically, was very similar to that of people, but in a somewhat distorted, artificial perspective.

She kept asking Him if He still loved her. He avoided a direct answer. They spoke of everyday things, made mundane gestures, and she quite normally revealed to him that they slept in separate beds. This pained him, he got angry, protested, but the normal turn of events in life cannot be undone. Yet, having gone through all the routine complexities of life, they again sat in their little chairs and she again was asking him if he still loved her. "Of course, I love you," he answered. This scene brought an element of tenderness into their relationship and very simply also a deeper meaning into their lives - in other words, even an unstable, temporary life, cut out of carton, has its own beauty and one should rejoice over it.

In the production, Mr. Fourmanchouk represented life in a stylized manner, as a puppet theater, where the serious and the trivial, the real and the artificial, the human and the doll-like are joined into an organic whole. Or, as he said, "We live among stage props and spend our lives trying to fill out the emptiness between them."

Mr. Fourmanchouk's treatment of language was also very interesting, balanced between the normal and the artificial, creating a rhythm and phrasing such that they brought out the humor and the philosophy of the author. In one scene, for instance, the character He stands immobile and most insistently demands a shirt from Her. When she doesn't pay enough attention to His need, He paraphrases W.H. Auden and tries to convince her of the importance of his need: thousands of people live without love but no one lives without a shirt! The audience responded to this with an explosion of laughter, delighting in the sharp humor and thought, not only of Albee but also of the poet Auden.

I would like to single out the exceptional acting of Mr. Klassen as He. He is a very accomplished actor, one with a broad range of talent. He has had parts in such plays as "Henry IV," "Tartuffe," "The Zoo Story," "Dead Souls," "The White Guard," "Anna Karenina," "Romeo and Juliet" and many others. He would not only beautifully transform his acting into the style of "controlled emotions," but set the tone for the whole play. Ms. Brentani, as She, an actress of a more dynamic temperament, was less successful in adhering to the style set by the director; at times she tended to just barely overextend herself. But this in no way diminished the effect of this exceptional production.

Mr. Fourmanchouk, a native of Ukraine, was educated in Kyiv and Moscow. He was the artistic director of Theater of the Young Spectator and Theater in the Trees, in Kyiv. He currently conducts workshops at Michael Howard Studios in New York City.

Mr. Boychuk is a poet, literary and theater critic and editor of Svito-Vyd, a literary and arts quarterly published in Kyiv.

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