From the other side of the Iron Curtain comes this timebending story, set in multiple places and times in the Soviet Union: in Kruschchev’s era, and before and after the rise of Stalin. Stalin’s purges take on a particular specificity in this work.
In the 1930s, Alexei (David McElwee), synesthete and memory savant, is a newspaper reporter, and apparently a poor one, because he takes no notes. He doesn’t need to, because he can remember speeches word for word. This becomes problematic for him, when certain speakers he has heard (Bukharin, Kirov) are dropped into Russia’s Memory Hole.
He himself disappears from official records, but a 1950s-era bureaucrat (Kreplev, Lee Sellars) takes a special interest in his case and in the psychologist who treated him (Joey Parsons)—a treat for us to see two beloved CATF regulars together on stage.
There are two frames around the story, one of them a rather odd carnival act whose significance will be made clear, and the other a (sometimes distracting) direct address to us by Kreplev. Ultimately, the play is Kreplev’s journey, as he learns the personal cost of “accommodation,” both in the form of forgetting and being forgotten.
Gregory gives Alexei’s synesthesia a poetic turn. The color magenta, for him, has the roar of a train; a politician’s words bounce around meaninglessly like so many rubber balls.
- Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
- Memoirs of Forgotten Man, by D. W. Gregory, directed by Ed Herendeen