NIKOLAI AND THE OTHERS - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2013, Issue Number 60 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

Nikolai of Nikolai and the Others is the fascinating Nicolas Nabokov, composer, cousin of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, émigré, cultural impresario, and CIA fixer. The “Others” are the legends of the Russian artist émigré community, among them, Igor and Vera Stravinsky, George Balanchine and Maestro Serge Koussevitzky—who appear in Richard Nelson’s play to celebrate the name day of an old friend, designer Sergey Sudeikin—and a few Americans who pay them a visit. Here, on a mythical summer weekend in 1948 the ballet Orpheus is rehearsed. The New York City Ballet had not yet been established; Orpheus would be featured in its legendary inaugural season. Through seemingly mundane conversation, Richard Nelson masterfully reveals the inner lives of this brilliant circle of men and women. And so it seems appropriate that for this issue of Lincoln Center Theater Review we engaged in conversation with a cast of luminaries. We talked to Nelson about his work, this play, and how he views the role of theater; we spoke with the inimitable actress Blair Brown about the process of becoming Vera Stravinsky; and we interviewed Peter Martins, Ballet Master in Chief of the New York City Ballet, about dancing Orpheus, and Mikhail Baryshnikov about becoming an American artist. The deeper we delved into Nikolai, the more layered, complex, and satisfying the play became. Everything that was happening in the world of these characters—privately and publicly—was connected, so in this issue we explored these connections. The musicologist Charles M. Joseph employs his deep knowledge of Igor Stravinsky to provide a survey of the world in which Orpheus was created. With fresh and razor-sharp wit, the novelist Lara Vapnyar writes about a more recent gathering of Russian émigrés. A poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jorie Graham gorgeously delivers the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The issue closes with an excerpt from a 1987 talk by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Joseph Brodsky, on exile and art. A generation after the end of the Cold War, there is a new wave of art—movies like the film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, television shows like The Americans, even a band called Cold War Kids—that reacts to the iconic and historic clash of two great nations and their ideologies. Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Richard Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others opens a window into the world of Russian émigrés in the early days of the Cold War. A subtle, beautiful work, the play captures the texture of the lives of this remarkable group of people, depicts the creation of a magnificent work of art, and catches the shadows of the newly formed CIA, the growing fear of Communism, and the swelling power of the House Un-American Activities Committee that push against the edges of this play. —The Editors

Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary John B. Beinecke Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz André Bishop Debra Black Allison M. Blinken Mrs. Leonard Block James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Bernard Gersten Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow

Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Elihu Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

For plcement only high resolution to come

Nikolai and theOthers A World Onstage: An Interview with Richard Nelson

Finding Russia Again and Again by Charles M. Joseph

Coming to America: An Interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dancing Orpheus: An Interview with Peter Martins

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Becoming Vera: An Interview with Blair Brown

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

The Cosmopolitan Glories of a Russian Immigrant by Lara Vapnyar

Motherland Otherland by Joseph Brodsky

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review. TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—www.lctreview.org.

Cover photograph: George Balanchine’s Orpheus, with dancers Maria Tallchief and Nicholas Magallanes and the lyre designed by Isamu Noguchi, 1950. Photograph by George Platt Lynes. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

Contents photograph: Dancer Suzanne Farrell rehearses for the New York City Ballet as Nicolas Nabokov and George Balanchine look on, 1965. © Gjon Mili for Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. BALANCHINE is a Trademark of The George Balanchine Trust.

Courtesy of the archives of the New York City Ballet.

Orpheus and Eurydice by Jorie Graham

For plcement only high resolution to come

Nikolai and theOthers A World Onstage: An Interview with Richard Nelson

Finding Russia Again and Again by Charles M. Joseph

Coming to America: An Interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov

Dancing Orpheus: An Interview with Peter Martins

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Becoming Vera: An Interview with Blair Brown

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

The Cosmopolitan Glories of a Russian Immigrant by Lara Vapnyar

Motherland Otherland by Joseph Brodsky

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

Courtesy of the archives of the New York City Ballet.

Orpheus and Eurydice by Jorie Graham

: e g a t s n n O o s l e d l N r d o ar h c i W R h t i A nterview w An I

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This winter our editors spoke with the playwright Richard Nelson about Nikolai and the Others and his other works—from the recent trilogy, Sorry, Sweet and Sad, and That Hopey Changey Thing, which appeared at the Public Theater, to the plays Lincoln Center Theater audiences will remember: his Tony-nominated Two Shakespearean Actors and Some Americans Abroad. Editors: There are many ways to write a play—forward-moving plots, backward-moving plots, Beckettian plots—and you’ve written plays with many of these structures. Structurally, what are you doing with Nikolai and the Others? Richard Nelson: Structurally, it’s a play set in one day, and that’s very important. I’m interested in tying important events— about a society or about a human being—to something very organic, very domestic. The flow of a day is as natural an order of things as exists. Basically, the order of this play is a dinner, followed by an artistic presentation, followed by people going to bed. Ed: This is a different mode of storytelling for you. How did you arrive at this artistic place? RN: I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine who is a very, very good playwright, and he considers himself a political playwright, and he said to me, “And so are you.” And I said, “No, I’m not. I’m absolutely not.” He said, “You won’t use the name ‘political playwright’?” I said, “Absolutely not.” Around the same time, I was doing a panel down at the Public about one of my plays, and the moderator of the panel said to me, “So, Richard, if you were president what would you do about…?” And I said, “One, I wouldn’t want to be president. Two, I would be a very bad president. Three, if I were running for president, I wouldn’t vote

for me.” And they were curious about why. My ambition is to be an artist. And what does an artist try to do? That’s the essence of what Nikolai and the Others attempts to discuss. I believe the goal of an artist is to convey the world to an audience in ways that make them understand it, or feel it, or connect to it, or see it differently. It is basically a descriptive role—describing the complexity of life, the soul of life. And if you’re going to describe, you’re not going to prescribe. And I think if one considers oneself a political writer you have an agenda, you have a view of the world that you would like to expound. You would like to change things, you would like the world to move in a certain direction. As an artist, I don’t feel that. I don’t feel that desire, I don’t feel that need—in fact, the opposite. When I direct, I tell my actors that our job is to put people on the stage who are as complicated, confused, ambiguous, lost as any person in the audience. We will always fail, but that’s our ambition. The theater itself almost demands this approach, because theater is the only artistic form that uses the entire live human being as its expression. That understanding carries with it a humanistic worldview. Theater is a place where human beings can come together in the same room, in the same space, and in the same time to talk to each other, or listen. I think theater fills a profound need. In Nikolai, part of what’s being described is what an artist is, or how an artist tries to be within the world, and that world is complicated, with personal relationships, family relationships, cultural relationships, as well as political pressures. All of these things circle around Nikolai. But I placed

all these stories in the context of a life—the sun rises and the sun sets, people eat and then they’re finished. To organize these larger questions within that context is something that I find very exciting, and it helps me describe the world as I best see it. Ed: Do you have a goal for your audience— to simply acknowledge the richness of life, or of the particular demands or challenges or consolations of the life of an artist? Or are you calling them to action or understanding, in some way? RN: No. I think neither. Your husband is a sculptor, right? Ed: A painter. RN: What’s he trying to do? What is a poet trying to do? I think those are the wrong questions. Each of those questions implies that you need to come out with some sort of answer. Everything is ordered in such a way that it is going to make a point, but what I want to do is put a world on a stage, a whole rich, complex world, and have people experience that for two and a half hours VAPNYAR of their life. If they feel that B there’s Y LARAsome kind of humanity that they’ve shared in a room with three hundred other people—I think that is an extraordinary ambition, and a goal in and of itself. Ed: This play is set in history and is about people one has heard of. Does the audience need to know anything about these characters? RN: We in the American theater, especially, we’ve shied away from historical plays by and large. There are theaters in this city that won’t even touch a historical play. They call it a “period play,” and they don’t do period plays, even if it’s a new play, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. But I think there’s also been a proliferation of plays and films that are biopics, or biographies, which try to show someone’s life in all of

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Photograph © Tamar Cohen.

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Photograph © Tamar Cohen.

its facets. If you come to Nikolai with that expectation—to see what makes Balanchine or Stravinsky tick—that need is not going to be satisfied. Instead, it’s a peek in the window of x number of hours in a day of these people, who combine their personal lives, and their passions, their confusions, their worries, their selfishness, all the various things that we all are. And, at the very center of the play, you have that work being created visibly on the stage, in a way in which I’ve never seen before. We’ve often seen plays about painters or writers,

series in my own head, but I don’t think anybody else needs to think of them that way—that is an exploration of the nature of an artist, and particularly the nature of an artist in America. Each play is simply a moment. If you could just check in and see this day, what would you feel about the complexity of that life, and the pressures on that life, and how the people fit within a society but are trying to maneuver in other directions as well? I’ve done four plays in this series, and Nikolai was the second. The first one is called Frank’s Home, about Frank

The theater itself almost demands this approach because the theater is the only artistic form that uses the entire live human being as its expression. That understanding carries with it a humanistic worldview. Theater is a place where human beings can come together in the same room, in the same space, and in the same time to talk to each other, or listen. I think theater fills a profound need. and you see the typewriter going, or the painter moving things—you can barely see them paint. But here the actual creating of a dance piece on the human being who is necessary to create it is in front of the audience and the other characters in the play. Ed: Some plays are held together by ideas, some by a plot. What holds Nikolai together? RN: Human beings. I’ve said this to David Cromer, who is directing the play: “As a playwright I feel I do not write words; I write people. That’s what’s important to me.” It’s really not what they say. What they say, hopefully, is the best way for me to convey those people. Ed: As a playwright, did you find that there was a particular challenge in writing Nikolai? RN: The exciting challenge is to work with historical people, because it requires a great amount of research so that the audience can feel that maybe this is how Stravinsky, Balanchine, Koussevitzky were on this particular day. Ed: You seem to be drawn to plays about artists in America. RN: Nikolai is in a series of plays—it’s a 6

Lloyd Wright, and takes place over a twentyfour-hour period. Ed: That was done at Playwrights Horizons? RN: It was done at the Goodman Theatre first, and then moved to Playwrights Horizons. I very much wanted it to play in Chicago; Frank Lloyd Wright was such a Chicago presence. That’s another element that I’m interested in—not so much site-specific work, but adding an extra dimension so that when people sit in the theater there’s another kind of presence as well. Ed: Like opening your play Sorry, which is set on Election Day, so that you have the audience sitting in the world on the same day that they’re talking about. RN: It’s the ambition of every writer to have an audience engaged in his or her play. If you set it on the particular day in which the audience is sitting there, watching it, then you’ve already got them interested in that day. It’s an effort to try to make things extremely present, and the relationship between the audience and the stage immediate, and one full of connection. So Frank

Lloyd Wright opened in Chicago. Nikolai will open at Lincoln Center Theater, which is just across the plaza from the New York City Ballet, which is the result of what happens in the play. The City Ballet formed just after my play ends; it started at the City Center, and then moved to Lincoln Center. Their first ballet was Orpheus. The next play I wrote about an artist was The Farewell to the Theatre, about Harley Granville-Barker, an English playwright, director, actor, producer, and visionary, and a period of time, in 1916, that he spent in Williamstown. The fourth of these plays is called The Peculiar Nature of Cities. And that is a play in which Joe Papp, Bernie Gersten, and Merle Debuskey are all characters, young men in 1958. Joe and Bernie were called in to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Funding was pulled from the Shakespeare Festival, and Joe, who was the artistic director of the festival, had pulled out and decided to direct a show that was a big disaster. All things were falling apart, and the play deals with that. And then we have Nikolai, where you have artists—all Russian, all immigrants, all trying to survive in America in 1948, a time when there were two huge push-pulls on Russian immigrants. On the one hand, there was the beginning of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was starting to question anyone who had ties to Russia or the Soviet Union. On the other side, the newly formed CIA had begun what we now know as a cultural Cold War, which was a concerted effort to win the hearts and minds of left-leaning, but non-Communist, Western Europeans, and to do that it was decided, quite brilliantly, that America needed to be presented with a culture that was not just gum-chewing, big cars, and westerns, but actually high art, and avant-garde art, especially. And so the CIA began funding avant-garde art of all sorts, from painting, to dance, to theater, to book and magazine publishing. So you ended up having things like Igor Stravinsky re-orchestrating “The Star-Spangled Banner” and trying to get it to President

Truman to become the new official orchestration. You have Shostakovich agreeing to be in a contest to write the new anthem and coming in second. Ed: I would say it isn’t so much even left-leaning Europe as it is cultural Europe. It was a successful effort to really showcase American art, some composed by Americans and some composed by new Americans, like our characters here. In your play, we meet only Nicolas Nabokov, who was sort of the impresario of this CIA cultural effort, in one way, but he was actually a very important figure for almost a decade and a half. RN: Yes. Absolutely. Keeping to the human story, as opposed to the larger political one, what interests me in terms of Nikolai is that he was a successful composer. He got to know both Stravinsky and Balanchine, worked for Diaghilev, who commissioned work from him. Then he pretty much traded that in for this other kind of work for the CIA, and this weekend Nikolai realizes that he’s no longer that artist creating works of art as if they were worlds; he’s now someone who is pushing and selling things. And he feels that loss. In part because he is seeing work actually being created in front of him. Not the creation but the creating. That, to me, is what Nikolai observes, and what gets under his skin. He realizes what he’s missed, what he’s lost, and what he’s given up. Ed: Chip Bohlen is another character in your play. A player in the newly founded CIA, and an agent for this cultural Cold War. Bohlen, who speaks Russian— RN: Yes, he’s a fluent Russian speaker. He lived in Moscow; he even worked at the embassy. He was a translator for Roosevelt, actually. Ed: Bohlen is the bridge between the two cultures—America and this very insular émigré culture, with its values, its shared past, its reverence for artists set down in a world that doesn’t understand them. RN: But this immigrant culture isn’t just isolated. There’s a huge sense of nostalgia. I mean “nostalgia” in a very deep sense—

there is a painful yearning and loss. These people are getting together in a foreign land, and they have one weekend in which they can pretend that all of this history hasn’t happened. But then Chip Bohlen arrives, someone who is not part of that. Though he speaks fluent Russian, and knows most of the people in the room, he does not have that yearning, that loss, and that deep, painful nostalgia that also binds the others together. He’s the snake in the garden. Ed: Do you see your portrayal of artists, with all the dark times, and the triumphs, as being particularly important now? RN: I think there’s a reason why I’m choosing to write these plays about artists in America. Because I think maybe that’s something I’m exploring in my own life; just trying to reflect the complexities and confusions that I feel. So I think it’s more personal than anything else. Ed: When I went to see Sorry, I noticed that you had included a brief note in the program in which you quote from Harley Granville-Barker: “One is tempted to imagine a play—to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle—from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set before the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.” So my last question is about human intimacy—our audience sitting there in the Mitzi, and your actors right next to them on the stage. In The Poetics, Aristotle says: Character is the habit of action. There is no such thing as character; it is what you are in the habit of doing. You are not an industrious person if you happen to be lazy every day; you are a lazy person. Aristotle would say that you define your character by what he does, and Granville-Barker is saying I’m defining my character, or I’m creating my character, by the way he is. RN: It’s a complicated one. I obviously believe more in Granville-Barker’s ambition than in Aristotle’s notion. In the preface to Miss Julie Strindberg writes that “the multiplicity of motivation for any given action

is indicative of our time.” That’s a quote. And I can say the same thing of ours. Basically what he says, what he means by that, is we do things for many different reasons. So there you go, Mr. Aristotle. That’s a very hard one to deal with if you define people by their actions. And some of the reasons we do things are contradictory. We do the same things for two different reasons that are contradictory. People are complicated, or complex, and that...well, when we simplify people down to a particular action, and then find clear, simple motivation as we often find in playwriting classes, or in acting classes—what is my motivation here? I run screaming into the night because it’s very, very hard. My plays are always built upon a series of motivations at the same time. And the job of the actor and the director of my plays is learning which is a priority to convey at that particular moment, but without losing all of those others. So that’s my ambition. So when I read Harley Granville-Barker’s quote, I read it in a very Chekhovian sense—trying to create a world onstage, and actually present a world with all of its connections, and confusions, and layers, and contradictions. Ed: In an intimate way. RN: I think of the intimacy as allowing the audience to just sit there as a fly on the wall, and be present. The best notes, the best responses to my Apple Family plays, have always been: “I felt like I shouldn’t be there”; “I felt it was too intimate, it was too private”; “I was allowed into something so private.”

Finding Russia

BY CHAR LES M. J OSEPH

Photograph of George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky on the plaza at Lincoln Center. © Martha Swope/The New York Public Library.

Again and Ag ain

Premiered in New York on April 28, 1948, Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine’s lyrical ballet Orpheus stands as a testament to one of the closest artistic collaborations of the twentieth century. The ballet follows the melancholic journey of the demigod Orpheus, whose mystical lyre possessed such enchanted powers of persuasion as to shield the Argonauts from the Sirens’ seductive strains, animate inanimate objects, and charm Pluto’s underworld. Ovid’s tale of Apollo and Calliope’s Thracian son had long intrigued both the composer and the choreographer. Stravinsky was captivated by the Orphic myth’s timeless classicism. Even as a young man, he became thoroughly familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, wherein a disconsolate Orpheus suffers the loss of his wife—a loss that leads to his own demise. Balanchine, as a nine-year-old student, danced in a Meyerhold production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at the Mariinsky. In subsequent years the choreographer would stage several versions of the story throughout Europe and, with the help of the American entrepreneur Lincoln Kirstein, at the Metropolitan Opera. The ballet appeared at a moment when not only Stravinsky and Balanchine but many Russian émigrés were struggling with the tricky process of Americanization. Their enculturation unfolded during a complicated historical period in which their newly adopted country seemed to be conveying an ambivalence that simultaneously questioned and praised the contributions of these transplanted artists. It was a time when enemies and allies could easily be confused. Americans might awake to find a tyrannical Stalin, the perpetrator of the infamous Great Purge, suddenly hailed for standing firm against Hitler’s 1941 invasion of communist Russia. William Donovan, the founding father of the CIA, remembered that alternating labels of “Good” and “Evil” were pasted on and off nations in an eye’s blink. Orpheus, the subtlest of the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaborations, sprang from a cauldron of political uncertainty stoked by heated rhetoric and escalating threats. The ballet invoked several ageless themes: despair, judgment, transition, conflict, perdition, the afterlife, and, quite literally, the perils of looking back over one’s shoulder. It is not that Orpheus’s understated message had anything directly to do with what some perceived as an imminent Soviet aggression; rather, its mythology raised universal questions that transcended the Cold War politics of the day—sobering questions that were very much on the minds of Russian artists trying to carve out an American identity during a very perplexing era. The ballet first took the stage at New York’s City Center of Music and Drama in the wake of a still anxious postwar period. America was only beginning to wash away the horror into which it was plunged seven years earlier at Pearl Harbor. Just as the world was regaining its fragile balance, international stability once again grew tenuous. Fears intensified as suspicions spiraled. Public admiration of Russian-born artists, including Balanchine, Stravinsky, Serge Koussevitzky, Sergey Sudeikin, and Vladimir Sokoloff, could not dispel an undertow of skepticism. Only two years after American and Russian military forces jointly struck the fatal blow to Hitler’s megalomania, a widening trench divided the USA and the USSR. Potentially subversive subgroups of the American population were targeted. Russian immigrants frequently found themselves in the crosshairs. Even though Stravinsky had exiled himself from his homeland years before the October Revolution, he was still sometimes portrayed as a cultural Bolshevik. “I am not a Russian composer,” he persistently objected when cast as such. Asked by the American Communist Party to lend his support to the Soviet regime, a much chagrined Stravinsky scurried from the request. But he, as well as other prominent Russian artists, could not escape an implied linkage that was both embarrassing and disturbing. Espionage, undercover operations, psychological warfare, and propagandizing insinuated themselves into the psyche of Russian artists. All the geopolitical maneuvering that surrounded Orpheus’s 1948 premiere might easily have overshadowed the ballet. Indeed, 1948 proved, historically, to be a pivotal year: Stalin seized control of Czechoslovakia in February as the USSR continued making incursions into Eastern Europe. Then on April 9, only weeks before Orpheus’s curtain, the U.S. Congress signed into law the Marshall Plan. Aiding a decimated Europe‘s recovery, so the Plan projected, would surely help stem the creeping threat of Communism. By early summer the Soviets had blockaded Berlin, thus denying Westerners access to the capital. Unsurprisingly, the provocation only inflamed an already intensifying Cold War standoff. The ballet world’s own landscape changed in 1948 as well. Balanchine and Kirstein had not had an easy time of it in the years preceding Orpheus. The choreographer’s 1933 arrival in America included passage for an entourage of Russian dancers and teachers brought over specifically to instill Balanchine’s methods. Kirstein would furnish both a steadfast advocacy of Balanchine’s ideas and a desperately needed financial underpinning. It was a challenging transition for the “foreign” choreographer, a “defector,” a “Russian despot,” as a blatantly jingoistic press portrayed him. John Martin, the well-respected dance critic of the New York Times, pulled no punches in urging America to send the Russian interloper packing with his “Riviera esthetics.” The city needed to be swept clean of Balanchine and his émigré disciples, Martin asserted. Enough of names that ended in “ov’s, itzky’s and owsky’s”—so the Russian composer Nicolas (Nikolai) Nabokov would later satirize in his chronicle, Old Friends and New Music. The blast of invective blowing through the ballet world in the 1940s reflected a rising chorus of insinuations, innuendo, and outright hostility pitting American dance companies against Russian/European classical ballet. Lucia Chase’s critically acclaimed new company, Ballet Theatre, founded in the early 1940s, immediately collided with Balanchine and Kirstein’s

Finding Russia

BY CHAR LES M. J OSEPH

Photograph of George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky on the plaza at Lincoln Center. © Martha Swope/The New York Public Library.

Again and Ag ain

vision. An internecine battle quickly developed within the New York ballet world. All the while, the U.S. State Department recruited performing-arts organizations for its own purposes. Ballet companies became part of an arsenal of cultural weapons in waging an international war. The State Department’s initiative hoped to blunt Soviet charges that America was no more than a land of philistines. William Donovan, of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (one of many pre-CIA agencies), had his own strategy. In 1941, in sending American dancers to South America with the goal of improving relations with Latin America, Donovan asked Lincoln Kirstein to “spy” on suspected political activists. But Kirstein’s friend Nelson Rockefeller, as the U.S. State Department’s coordinator of inter-American affairs, would have nothing to do with such surreptitious tactics. Lucia Chase served up her own Ballet Theatre as a model of all that was right with America’s arts. An overseas tour of her company, she argued, might help deter the toxic fallout of a ubiquitous Communist propaganda. Meanwhile, the firestorm of criticism enveloping Balanchine continued unabated. Having had enough, Kirstein skirted a relentlessly antagonistic press by creating the membership-supported Ballet Society in 1946. The new venture would boldly champion the avant-garde, the initial brochure promised. Most significant, the always opportunistic Kirstein utilized the fresh start to partner Stravinsky and Balanchine once more. His commissioning of a new ballet for Ballet Society’s 1948 season, to be entitled Orpheus, proved a milestone.

Ballet companies became part of an arsenal of cultural weapons in waging an international war. The State Department’s initiative hoped to blunt Soviet charges that America was no more than a land of philistines. Balanchine spent the summer of 1946 in Hollywood working with Stravinsky. Conversing exclusively in Russian, the composer and the choreographer meticulously plotted the temporal architecture of the ballet’s individual episodes. Before any mention of music and dance arose, the actual timing of each separate segment of each scene was drafted with the precision of an engineer’s blueprint. Later in New York, as the choreography began to come together in the rehearsal studio, the two men sat side by side conferring about possible alterations. As always, they did so in their native tongue, with Lucia Davidova, Balanchine’s devoted friend and assistant, providing translations for the dancers. Stravinsky willingly made several compositional adjustments in accommodating the physical demands put upon Balanchine’s dancers—an uncharacteristic gesture for a composer disinclined to make any concessions easily. Balanchine often prevailed upon Stravinsky to stretch certain passages, including the closing section of the moving “Pas de Deux,” danced by Nicholas Magallanes and Maria Tallchief. The beautiful, tension-filled extension that occurs just at the moment Tallchief’s Eurydice dies, was constructed right on the spot. Shortly before the ballet’s premiere, Morton Baum, the chairman of the City Center of Music and Drama’s executive committee, proposed that Balanchine and his dancers become the Center’s resident ballet company, joining the New York City Opera and City Center Orchestra. In that instant, the New York City Ballet was born. With the invitation came a major metropolitan platform from which Balanchine could advance his convictions about contemporary classical ballet. In October 1948, only six months after Ballet Society’s premiere of Orpheus, the ballet was programmed again. This time it appeared on the inaugural program of the newly formed New York City Ballet—the world-renowned company that became Balanchine’s home for the next thirty-five years. Nika Nabokov (as the composer called him) had become an eyewitness to Stravinsky’s working process in Hollywood shortly before the ballet was completed. He observed how the composer configured separate ideas, juggled them, shortened phrases, interjected and exchanged others, and pasted things back together in just the right order. As a composer himself, Nabokov understood how these seemingly small but in fact crucial modifications enhanced the story’s unfolding drama. And while Nika’s visit had provided a welcome window into the making of Orpheus, it was obvious that Cold War worries were never far from the nervous Stravinsky’s mind. He quizzed Nabokov about daily flare-ups that bespoke the increasingly tense American-Soviet political climate. Where would he go if Los Angeles was attacked? he asked Nika. Who better to answer such questions than Nabokov? Of all the Russians Stravinsky knew, none were more attuned to the layered convolutions of international affairs. More than any other member of the “Russian clique,” as the press had often derisively portrayed émigré artists, Nabokov had lived a life of artistic and political twists and turns. In 1933, he became one of the first White Russians to immigrate to the United States, where he taught music at several colleges. But by 1945 his love for the city of Berlin had led him to join the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany. He quickly immersed himself in the

affairs of government. Winter 1947 found him rummaging through the bunkers and museum rubble of a war-torn Germany, searching for manuscripts that his friend Koussevitzky had deposited in his publishing house in Berlin. Further, he engaged in the Allies’ denazification program, whereby artists sympathetic to Hitler’s ideology were summarily disenfranchised, losing their posts, their bookings, and their credibility. While Nabokov continued flitting in and out of the lives of his Russian friends during the 1940s, he moved deeper and deeper into the world of counterintelligence, even filing a 1948 application to join the CIA. Appointed in 1951 as the secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (yet another bureau covertly supported by the CIA), he organized international arts conferences in Paris and Berlin, often inviting friends such as Stravinsky to participate. The agenda was simple: promote high-profile events to quash Soviet claims of artistic superiority. Nabokov also arranged commissions for American and European artists, funding composers and performers to tour the West. He befriended anyone who could help him, including Charles “Chip” Bohlen, an American diplomat and CIA agent who had become an authority on affairs of the Kremlin while living in Russia. Nabokov helped Bohlen understand the Russian mind-set, and in turn Bohlen shared with Nabokov information gleaned from the State Department. They worked closely together in planning cultural events intended to highlight Western artists. Bohlen would become Nabokov’s confidant, remaining so after Bohlen was appointed the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s. To say the least, Nabokov was politically well positioned to exercise influence. Given his insider connections, it is little wonder that the close-knit Russian enclave of his friends sometimes beseeched him to disentangle this or that problem. After all, as a fellow composer he was deemed trustworthy. He continued to compose, although only sporadically. Nabokov’s real success, his real identity, was as a skillful enabler who could get things done. His compatriots relied upon him as both an adviser and an advocate, especially in the years immediately after Orpheus, as the scourge of McCarthyism grew more insidious by the day. They watched the hysteria of government inquisitions and indictments swirling around them. They feared the scrutiny of fanatical bureaucrats eager to turn the spotlight in their direction, especially given the questionable contacts some of them had made before leaving Europe. As early as the 1930s, for example, Stravinsky knew and admired Mussolini, presenting him with gifts and invoking his friendship whenever he required an Italian visa or help in securing a favor. The pragmatic composer had also exchanged correspondence with leaders of the Third Reich, hoping to expunge his “degenerate composer” blacklisting by the Nazis in an effort to secure concerts in Germany. Moreover, only a year after Orpheus was premiered, Stravinsky was asked to welcome Shostakovich to the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace held at the Waldorf Astoria. But when the House Un-American Activities Committee denounced the assembly as a Communist front, Stravinsky declined the invitation—perhaps at Nika’s urging, inasmuch as Nabokov intended to lambaste the cadre of submissive Soviet composers, especially Shostakovich, who had been dispatched to New York by Stalin’s direct order. However, by the time Stravinsky visited Russia in 1962 (for the first time in nearly half a century), his political discretion had given way, perhaps inadvertently. The composer’s return overwhelmed him emotionally. He attended a performance of the Leningrad Ballet. The company offered a telling juxtaposition of some of the early Russian ballets from the Diaghilev days right alongside Orpheus, first conceived a world away in America. Stravinsky’s odyssey from St. Petersburg to the glamorous Hollywood Hills could not have been more evident. During this nostalgia-laden homecoming and, ironically, only a few days before the Cuban missile crisis erupted, the composer vehemently decried any political criticism of the Soviet Union by non-Russians. Even more astonishing, he very publicly repatriated himself, reclaiming his ethnic heritage and passionately professing an enduring love for his birthplace. Whatever repression had accrued in the past fifty years melted away in the moment’s glow. The eighty-year-old composer had found Russia once again, and there was no doubt that he was home. How many other Russian artists who lived through the Cold War might quietly have harbored similarly bottled-up feelings? Just as the sweetly serene music of Orpheus’s lyre rises above loss in affirming music’s eternal power, so, too, Stravinsky, Balanchine, Nabokov and the others found both purpose and solace in saying things that could be said only through the ineffable power of the arts. In their quest for assimilation within the American culture, often compounded by the zealotry of the times, they managed to transform themselves into imaginative artists with individually expressive voices. They embraced the legacies of their heritage while always moving forward. As American artists, they welcomed the future with neither the temptation nor the risk of looking back, and without allowing the grief of a lost motherland to impede their ongoing creative work. Perhaps there was no need to look back, since in their souls they had never left Russia in the first place. Charles M. Joseph is a professor emeritus of music at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Professor Joseph is the author of four books on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. In 2000, Mr. Joseph was the Howard D. Rothschild Visiting Fellow in Dance at Harvard University. His Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention, was the winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 2003. Joseph’s most recent book is Stravinsky’s Ballets.

IE BY JOR

urydice s and E Orpheu

What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness, but without their steps on it, their prints, without song— What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you understand this?) —what she dreamed was of disappearing into the seen not of disappearing, lord, into the real— And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-andcast-the-outline-over-her by his glance, sealing the edges down, saying I know you from somewhere darling, don’t I, saying You’re the kind of woman who etcetera— (Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance) (Now the view-from-above, the aerial attack of do you remember?) — now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled, now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

M GRAHA

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance, the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

(somewhere the castle above the river) (somewhere you holding this piece of paper)

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain completely unharmed?—

(what will you do next?) (—feel it beginning?)

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

now she’s raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,

now she’s looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

that perfect shot, give me that place where I’m erased....

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes,

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the glance, could it lie back down into the dustiness, giving its outline up?

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

When we turn to them—limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and avenue— will they be freed then to slip back in?

a doorway open nothing on either side (a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

looking into that which sets the_________in motion and seeing in there

through which morning creeps and the first true notes—

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it called woman, its presence in him the thing called

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

future—could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it, tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

Jorie Graham is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University. THE DREAM OF THE UNIFIED FIELD: POEMS 1974-1994 by JORIE GRAHAM. © 1995 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Orpheus and Eurydice sculpture by Johann Leonhard Baur, 1716. Courtesy of V&A Images, London/Art Resource, NY.

IE BY JOR

urydice s and E Orpheu

M GRAHA

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance, the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

(somewhere the castle above the river) (somewhere you holding this piece of paper)

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain completely unharmed?—

(what will you do next?) (—feel it beginning?)

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

now she’s raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,

now she’s looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

that perfect shot, give me that place where I’m erased....

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes,

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the glance, could it lie back down into the dustiness, giving its outline up?

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

When we turn to them—limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and avenue— will they be freed then to slip back in?

a doorway open nothing on either side (a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

looking into that which sets the_________in motion and seeing in there

through which morning creeps and the first true notes—

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it called woman, its presence in him the thing called

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

future—could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it, tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

Orpheus and Eurydice sculpture by Johann Leonhard Baur, 1716. Courtesy of V&A Images, London/Art Resource, NY.

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The legendary Mikhail Baryshnikov—who left the Soviet Union and the Kirov Ballet to perform with ballet companies around the world, including the New York City Ballet, where he worked with George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins—shares his thoughts about coming to America.

Editor: How did you imagine America to be when you were a child? Mikhail Baryshnikov: My first ideas of America were from propaganda—newspaper cartoons of fat white people in top hats, white ties, and tails sitting smoking cigars, with black people shining their shoes. There

were bags behind them with big dollar signs: “Capitalist Pigs!” Ed: What did you do on your first full day in America? MB: I remember the drive from LaGuardia to an acquaintance’s house in the West Seventies. City of contrasts! Later, I walked to Lincoln Center and back to the State Theatre, where I was scheduled to perform with Natalia Makarova in Giselle, with American Ballet Theatre. I remember the butterflies inside as I stood in the plaza. Ed: When did you first feel American? MB: When I got my passport and I returned from abroad and the customs officer said, “Welcome home, sir.” But of course my wife

says I’m still not truly American, because I don’t eat my fries with ketchup.... Ed: Do you dream in English? MB: I have no idea, but, as Maria Callas once said, I definitely count in English. Ed: How different would your artistic life be if you had stayed in the USSR? MB: My few close friends say I would be BY RA know what would dead, but I don’tLAreally VAPNYAR have happened to me. Things could have gone in many directions, because I was restless, but one thing’s for sure—it wouldn’t have been a pretty picture.

Photography © Steven Caras, All Rights Reserved. Photo on left: Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing George Balanchine’s Orpheus with New York City Ballet. Photo on right: Peter Martins dancing George Balanchine’s Orpheus with New York City Ballet.

he Cosmo politan G lories of a Russian Immigr ant

Ed: Why do you think Balanchine took such care with Orpheus? PM: Obviously it was an important work for Balanchine, and for New York City Ballet, as he had programmed Orpheus on the company’s very first performance in 1948. But RI A VAPNYA LA BYwork think he also knew that it was a difficult that needed a lot of attention. During the rehearsals, he really brought Orpheus to life. Rarely had I seen him so engaged. I can vividly remember him dancing all of the parts— Orpheus, the Dark Angel, Eurydice, the Furies, the Bacchantes, everything. It was very exciting, and it was also clear to me that he felt that this revival of Orpheus needed special care. Orpheus isn’t like other works with conventional ballet steps, which can simply be taught and then executed by the dancers. Making the subtleties of Orpheus work is difficult; I think Balanchine knew that he had to sculpt the ballet back to life. Ed: Orpheus was revived recently. Has your perception of the ballet changed? Do you think audiences react to it differently today? PM: I think Orpheus is one of those works— from the Noguchi sets and costumes to the staging itself—that really speak to the era in which it was created, in this case the late 1940s, so it can be difficult for today’s audiences to appreciate. I remember that when it was danced in the seventies, even with Baryshnikov, Orpheus was not a huge success with the general public; it was more of a connoisseur’s ballet. It’s very different from Apollo, another Stravinsky-Balanchine work that was created much earlier, in the 1920s, and is a totally timeless work. That Y Orpheus is one of said, I thinkPthe ODSKfor SE H BRscore Y JObeautiful theBmost and sophisticated pieces of music in our repertory.

This winter our editors asked the renowned Peter Martins—who left the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen in 1970 to join the New York City Ballet, where he is currently the Ballet Master in Chief—about dancing Orpheus and working with George Balanchine. Editor: When did you first learn of the ballet Orpheus? Peter Martins: Orpheus was not a ballet that I was familiar with until I was called to my first rehearsal. Ed: What was the rehearsal process like? PM: The first few rehearsals were with New York City Ballet’s ballet master John Taras, who taught me the basic steps of the bal-

let, and what I remember most is thinking, There are no steps here, which is very unlike other Balanchine ballets. But, early on in the rehearsal process, Mr. B. became very involved in coaching us in the ballet, and, once he showed me the steps himself, they took on a whole new meaning. It was very rare for Balanchine to rehearse dancers when an existing work was being revived. Usually, once he had created a work he left it to others to stage, so I typically worked with Balanchine in the studio only on the creation of new ballets. But with the Orpheus revival he was very involved; it clearly mattered to him a great deal.

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At the beginning of the year, with Orpheus playing in the background, our editors sat down at Blair Brown’s dining room table, piled high with books about Igor and Vera Stravinsky, to talk about the process of preparing to play Vera in Nikolai and the Others. Brown debuted at Lincoln Center in 1976, in The Threepenny Opera, and Lincoln Center Theater audiences will remember her remarkable, highly lauded performances in Arcadia and The Clean House.

A Wor l d O n An In terview w stage: ith Ric Blair Brown: It’s interesting playing a person who has lived but whom people are completely unfamiliar with. Vera Stravinsky is the person who was attached to a very famous person. Most people don’t know about Stravinsky, who he was as a person, let alone about his wife, but in that world of ex-pat Russians she was a major figure. It was a small, concentrated group of people in the teens and twenties, all leaving Russia and trying to make a home in Paris. The first thing I did was a Google search. I looked at Wikipedia real quick to get a sense of her time line, and then I looked at all these fantastic pictures. When you play any kind of person, real or pretend, the best thing is your first impressions, whether or not they are grounded in fact. It’s that way with Shakespeare, too. The first two weeks, I don’t do all the work on the language. I just go, “I want to stand next to you when I say this. I want to go far away.” And then I go back to it after I’ve done my homework on the text, and I find that, actually, a lot of that instinct was true. So I got all these picture books of Vera and Igor, and one of the first things I started to notice was that she’s always laughing and smiling, and not the smile for the camera but genuine amusement at what’s happening. She always looks delighted. She’s often on an angle. Her legs are off to the side. She’s so physically comfortable in the world. And then when I read Stephen

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put on a show.” Only the kids were Picasso, Cocteau, and Matisse. She had maybe three husbands before Stravinsky. She met him and within two weeks they were having an affair; they were both married. And she befriended his wife, Katerina! When he was traveling, Katerina would meet Vera and give her her allowance from him. She had a complicated life. At one point, she lives in a ménage à quatre with her husband, his next lover, and her lover. Ed: How long were Igor and Vera married? BB: They got together in ‘21. They didn’t get married until 1940, in Bedford, Massachusetts, the year after Katerina died—and they remained married until Igor died, in New York in 1971. Ed: How do you begin to translate all this information into the role? BB: Well, it’s lucky I have time. Every day I find something, and I just start playing with images. Like if, I know it sounds absurd, but if she were a food what would she be? And I thought, Oh, she would be one of those Wayne Thiebaud cakes. Those little stacked cakes, like a charlotte russe—you know, with candied cherries and things, and it would be very luxurious and lovely. She seemed to be a real sensualist. This play is so interesting. It’s a lot about people being in a room—you know, in a space together. So you have a lot of private time, like in Chekhov, to just do things while somebody else is acting. Ed: Being onstage is not just about the lines that you have; it’s also what else you’re doing while supporting other people, especially with Richard, who is now working in a mode where it’s about real time, real behavior. BB: That’s exactly it. It’s a bunch of people intimately connected. Ed: Didn’t you work in that way when you worked with Richard on the musical of the James Joyce short story, “The Dead”? BB: Yes. He was finding stories like “The Dead”

hail Ba ryshniko v

VERA IN WIESBADEN, 1930. PHOTO BY IGOR.

Photograph from Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky, edited by Robert Craft, Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Walsh’s two-volume opus on Stravinsky’s life I found that Vera was completely beloved. She was the fixer in terms of people’s lives— marital problems, what to do about the baby with colic. She was the aunt in that world. And then, what always happens when you’re working on something, for the next while every person you meet is connected to it in some way. So I meet Rosamond Bernier, and she has this little line drawing of Stravinsky by Giacometti. The story is: Sometime after Stravinsky died, Vera was living in the Essex House and was having money problems. Rosamond wanted to give the portrait of Igor to her husband, John Russell (the art critic for the New York Times), so she went to Louis Vuitton, bought a little suitcase, filled it with one-dollar bills, and took it to Vera, who dumped the cash out on the bed to count. I met a young man who works for Bloomberg News, who is going to tell me a story about Stravinsky and Vera from an interview he did with Elliott Carter; Mimi Kilgore told me that her mother had an art gallery in Texas, where the Ballets Russes spent a lot of time, and he did a show of Vera’s paintings. Then I met a woman who is on the board of the Boston Philharmonic, who said, “Oh, you need to come to Boston and talk to our historian.” So I’m doing that in February. Editor: Are you focusing on Vera at the age that you’re playing her? BB: I’m going from the beginning up. And, of course, what’s most documented is from the time she met Stravinsky. Although there is enough about Sudeikin, who is her first husband, because he was a well-known artist. She came from a good family. She studied engineering and dance. At one point, she did dance with the Ballets Russes as a kind of actor. She had done a bit of costume designing for the Ballets Russes. It was that sense of everybody kind of did everything. It was, like, “Come on, kids, Let’s

Brown

or creating the Apple Family plays—taking a group of people who are intimately connected over a long period of time—lovers, rivals, co-workers, friends (I love that there’s so much about friendship always in his plays, which is so rare)—and depicting them in a concentrated period of time. In this play, we don’t have the sound of a cherry tree being chopped down or the anticipation of waiting for a gun to go off. We’re waiting for someone from the House Un-American Activities Committee to show up. But it’s that same thing, that pressure cooker. It’s precisely because these plays are never really on any one person’s shoulders that you do have time to make a life, which is the most fun for actors anyway. Ed: Everybody I know who prepares is always thinking ahead of time about their first conversations with the costume designer. Would you tell us a little bit about that process? BB: Well, the beauty of this play is we’re working with Jane Greenwood. When I heard that, I said, “Ah, we’re going to get the underwear right.” (Laughter) Because Jane starts from the inside out. You have the right underwear, let alone the right shoes,

the right hat, the right gloves. That’s your posture. And she always gets the right fabrics. I remember the fabrics she had for Chris Walken’s coat in The Dead. The wool was so thick it was a pelt. I could feel it when we danced. It is those little sensory things that nobody in the audience really knows. But you know. And everything moves a little bit differently. Ed: Do you bring anything to your first meeting with Jane? BB: I’ll bring pictures. I believe clothes were very important to Vera. You can see that from the twenties on—beautiful hats and things, a lot of jewelry, a lot of that Russian stuff. There is a voluptuous quality to her. Jane will have a million pictures, too, and we’ll start to look and think and ask questions: Do you change for dinner? Because they’re bohemians, did they do that? Who thought this was a very important day? And then there’s a great detail: she couldn’t find her favorite belt, so she’s got a belt that she doesn’t really like. (Laughter) You know? That’s always fun, to have a piece of clothing you hate. You know, Mary Beth Hurt did the most wicked thing when

we were doing Humble Boy at the Manhattan Theatre Club. It was amazing. Mary Beth was playing this character and she put these horrible bobby pins in her hair. (Laughter) There’s a big party outside, and I look over and see that she has put her brand-new shoes on the wrong feet. I nearly fell off my chair. I was playing this very cold, horrible woman. It was literally the only time that we all completely lost it. (Laughter) It was so funny, because her character would have put these very beautiful new shoes on the wrong feet. I’m also hoping that Paul Huntley does my wigs. When you get your wig, you get the color, you get the shape, blah-blahblah, and then when Mr. Huntley shows up and plops this wig on your head he tells you something about the character that you didn’t know before. He has done wigs for Vivien Leigh, for heaven’s sake, and Vanessa Redgrave’s first play. He knows the lives of women over time in this past century. The homework is long done. In Copenhagen there was just something about the shape of my wig, and the tidiness of it, and the way it was and the way it wasn’t. It was, like, Oh, right, okay. What’s nice is to 17

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VERA IN WIESBADEN, 1930. PHOTO BY IGOR.

Photograph from Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky, edited by Robert Craft, Thames and Hudson, 1985.

Brown

One of the first things I started to notice was that she’s always laughing and smiling, and not the smile for the camera but genuine amusement at what’s happening. She always looks delighted.

VERA AND IGOR, LOS ANGELES, 1947. PHOTO BY LOOMIS DEAN/GETTY IMAGES.

diplomats. We’ve been all kinds of things together. I totally trust him. The stuff that will happen between us will be easy. Ed: When you prepare historical material, which you must do, it might have almost nothing to do with what happens in rehearsal. Once you get going, you’re figuring out what’s happening in the moment—you need all that research to inform your choices, but it doesn’t appear in the work explicitly. BB: Exactly. At one point, Sudeikin (you know, he had lovers, too) was so angry with her about this affair with Stravinsky—I think probably in part because Sudeikin’s stock was falling—and he kind of ordered her back. And I found letters that show she’s actually quite frightened. So I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. Because that appears nowhere in our play, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t a moment, or memory, of fear or anger. Maybe I’ll notice it and Stravinsky might notice it. I don’t even know that other people knew it. You know, that kind of thing. That’s where a little bit of research might pay off or it might not get used at all. Ed: How do you think Vera felt about home, about being an exile?

BLAIR BROWN IN “ARCADIA” AT LINCOLN CENTER THEATER, 1995. PHOTO BY JOAN MARCUS.

BB: I think for all of them there is this question of home and homelessness. There is nowhere for them to go. There is nowhere left. They can’t go back to Russia. They can’t go to Europe, period. They’ve tried California. They love the climate, but that’s it. They have nowhere to go to do what they do. And they’re terrified. And that was every day. They’ve been dealing with governments now since the twenties. Oh, you don’t have the right visa and you don’t have the right this. It was hard to get out of Russia. If you left France, could you get back into France? All that stuff just weighs on you. I’ve just always thought I can go anywhere at any time. And I can come back. Ed: And what about the other women in the play? BB: What’s curious is I don’t know the relationship between Vera and all of those other women. That’s the place I don’t know. I know her relationship with the men, because it’s documented. I know her relationship with Nikolai Nabokov. He came and stayed with them and slept on their sofa. I think she liked women a lot. It doesn’t seem she had that “I have to protect him and keep him away from women.” But who they are to her, particularly the Balanchine women,

I don’t have any idea yet. I’m hoping they’ll bring that information into rehearsal. The women in the play are so interesting. I was telling my agent, “See, the trick is one of those quiet women could walk off with the whole play.” We could end up seeing the play through her eyes. That’s true of Chekhov. It’s not the number of lines you have. But that’s a huge divide between actors. I remember one time, when we were doing Copenhagen, there was a talk-back with Phil Bosco and Michael Cumpsty. One of the audience members asked, “How do you choose a part?” And both Michael and Phil said, “I choose the part.” And I said, “I choose the play. If I chose the part, I wouldn’t be in this play.” (Laughter) “Because I don’t actually have a character. I am a device.” But I wanted to be in that play and tell that story. Ed: What were your impressions when you first read this play? BB: I just fell in love with it. I read it because a friend had been interested, and once I finished I thought, How can I be a part of this? I didn’t even know if I was right for any of the women. But I just read it

Photograph of Igor at the Hotel Bristol and Vera in her studio from Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky, edited by Robert Craft, Thames and Hudson, 1985.

have people like Jane and Paul, who are so good that they sort of knock you off your preconceived notion. I think that’s a real problem for actors. So these designers can throw you off your little plot in a way that’s completely interesting. That kind of collaboration is fantastic. Ed: How do you mine the script? BB: I don’t like to do too much on a script before we start, because I do think it’s what happens in the room. When I was younger, I did vast amounts, and then I would get dismayed or disappointed or angry. And I thought, Well, why? It’s all made up anyway. I’m just attached to my idea that I had in my living room. (Laughter) Why don’t I just wait and see. Ed: John Glover is playing Igor? BB: Yes, he’s doing the Edward Albee play A Delicate Balance at the McCarter right now. So I’ve already shown all this stuff to John. I’ve worked more with him than with anybody in my life. We’ve been married at least three times. (Laughter) He’s been my best gay friend, my best straight friend. We were married in Plenty. We did that. We once owned a hardware store, and Lenny Van Dohlen was molesting our daughter. We’ve been British

IGOR AT THE HOTEL BRISTOL, VIENNA, 1930. PHOTO BY VERA.

VERA, IN HER STUDIO, 1959.

again and thought, Oh, I want to play Vera. Then, two weeks later, I was with Rosamond and I saw that picture and I thought, I really have to play her. So I started begging to do it. (Laughter) Ed: How do you beg? BB: I called my agent and said, “Put me in the mix. Just put me in the mix,” and asked him to call Lincoln Center Theater. Because I didn’t know what they were thinking. You never know. And you don’t know how close they’re going to stay to physical types or who they have in mind. But again, I think what is nice about what Richard is doing, and what’s nice for me in working with Glover, particularly on this kind of material, it’s a bit like seeing Tracy Letts and Amy Morton in Virginia Woolf. That friendship, that knowledge of each other artistically and personally, pays off in spades. I’ve never seen a better production—it’s not about a star turn, it’s a story of a couple. I didn’t know the play works like that. So I’m hoping we have that connective tissue. And I think that’s certainly what Richard is striving for by working with actors repeatedly. And David Cromer obviously comes from that tradition in Chicago. They have a shared sensibility.

Ed: You’re sitting here at a table surrounded by these enormous books about these people. Among all the books in front of you are art books and biographies. But here’s a book by Turgenev, who is long dead by the time this play is set. Why are you reading this? BB: Well, because I want to read and listen to what they read and listened to. It is part of their mythology. Ed: You do all this work to prepare yourself for a play. What happens when a show closes and you have to say goodbye to the character? BB: It’s sometimes really sad. Leaving The Dead was just one of the saddest things ever, ever, ever. I cried the whole last matinée. (Laughter) Yes, it’s hard to leave certain ones. It’s just never the same. I felt that way about Cabaret, and then I went back to it several years later. It really just wasn’t the same. I was glad to do it. To sing those songs and stand up there, but, you know, you can’t go home again.

One of the first things I started to notice was that she’s always laughing and smiling, and not the smile for the camera but genuine amusement at what’s happening. She always looks delighted.

VERA AND IGOR, LOS ANGELES, 1947. PHOTO BY LOOMIS DEAN/GETTY IMAGES.

BLAIR BROWN IN “ARCADIA” AT LINCOLN CENTER THEATER, 1995. PHOTO BY JOAN MARCUS.

Photograph of Igor at the Hotel Bristol and Vera in her studio from Dearest Bubushkin: Selected Letters and Diaries of Vera and Igor Stravinsky, edited by Robert Craft, Thames and Hudson, 1985.

IGOR AT THE HOTEL BRISTOL, VIENNA, 1930. PHOTO BY VERA.

VERA, IN HER STUDIO, 1959.

The Co smopolita n Glorie s of a Ru ssian Im migrant

BY LARA VAPNYAR

“Please, bring the scores for all of Handel’s operas and ask George to fetch two bottles of eau de genièvre—it’s better than vodka,” Igor Stravinsky wrote to Nikolai Nabokov, inviting him to spend Christmas,1949, with his family in Los Angeles. The George he was referring to was George Balanchine. In his Memoirs of a Cosmopolitan Russian, Nikolai Nabokov describes that trip in painstaking detail. He complains about poor conditions on the train (it was stuffy, and the kitchen had run out of roast beef). Then he writes about the warm welcome given him by the Stravinskys—the snack of crackers and Camembert, their ultramodern shower, and their countless pets introduced by Vera Stravinsky: “These two are called Beauty and Pretty,” she said pointing at two light-blue birds, sitting next to each other on the upper ring of the cage. “And this one here, with sexy eyes, is Lana Turner, next to her is Wit-Wit, her younger brother. Or perhaps her lover. They all married each other, and now we have one happy incestuous family.” Nabokov doesn’t comment on this, but humans in the Russian immigrant community were notorious for being even more incestuous than their pets. In the next paragraph of the Memoirs, Nabokov describes how he and Stravinsky went over the score for Orpheus: “Jerky movements of his neck, head, his entire body emphasized the simple rhythmic structure of the music.” Even though I don’t know much about music, I find these descriptions achingly irresistible. And I’m pretty sure that a lot of present-day “cosmopolitan” Russians like myself would feel the same. We hate to see ourselves as ordinary immigrants scrapping to make it to the middle class. We’d rather imagine ourselves as sophisticated travelers ready to launch into an inspired discussion of art, music, or literature as soon as we’re fortified with some exquisite cheese and that mysterious eau de genièvre. The emigration from Russia to the U.S. came in several distinct waves. The one that happened right after the October Revolution brought the last vestiges of Old Russia—aristocrats and the cultural élite trying to escape from the new regime. Among them were some of the most prominent artists of that time: writers, musicians, choreographers. Stravinsky. Balanchine. The seventies wave brought the Soviet dissidents who were either forced to emigrate or chose to do so for the sake of freedom. This group couldn’t boast of having as much blue blood as the first, but it did give the world some exceptional artists as well, to name just two: Brodsky and Baryshnikov. The wave from the late eighties to the early nineties brought thousands and thousands of Soviet Jews, fed up with state-sponsored anti-Semitism and a general lack of prospects. The Russians coined a derisive term for them—“sausage immigration,” implying that people who came with this wave weren’t seeking freedom or culture but striving for material comforts epitomized by unlimited quantities of sausage. I don’t know if that’s true. I came to the U.S. with that wave, and I still don’t fully understand the reason I decided to emigrate. I was only twenty-two, and neither food nor civil freedoms were high on my priorities list. I think I mostly came for adventure, for that rare opportunity to leave my old life behind and try living a completely new one. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people who came to the U.S. at the same time shared that sentiment. I had no idea what that new life would have in store for me, but I hoped it would be something more exciting. Something closer to the life described in Nabokov’s Memoirs. What is eau de genièvre? I would wonder while standing in line at Costco with my cart brimming with processed food and toilet paper. Will this two-pound wedge of Brie pass for Camembert? Why aren’t my pet rats Orange and Azure having an incestuous relationship? Why do they hate each other so much that they can’t spend a second in the same cage without trying to kill each other? Why are there no Stravinskys and Balanchines among my friends? Where is the cosmopolitan glory in my Russian immigrant existence? And then, as if by miracle, I got to experience some of that glory. I was invited to become a member of an exclusive club targeting cosmopolitan Russians all over the world, or, as the club’s founders called us, Global Russians. The club was part of a multimillion-dollar media project called Snob. The name, the founders claimed, was ironic. The idea was to create a social medium for successful educated Russians living in various countries and speaking various languages “but united by a common desire to make this world a better place.”

The Co smopolita n Glorie s of a Ru ssian Im migrant

BY LARA VAPNYAR

d n a l r e h t O d n a l r e h t o M

BRODSKY BY JOSEPH

Needless to say, I was enormously attracted by the opportunity to make this world a better place. But what attracted me even more was the promise of fabulous parties, where you could strike up a conversation with a famous artist from Moscow only to abandon him at the sight of an even more famous one from London. “You stay put,” I would say to a two-pound wedge of Brie in my fridge. “I’m going to a fabulous party tonight.” I remember one of the parties especially well, probably because it was the closest to my idea of that Christmas at the Stravinskys. The occasion was the anniversary of Pushkin’s famous alma mater, the Lyceum of Tsarskoye Selo. Our host, a well-known Pushkin scholar and translator (of American descent but speaking flawless Russian), invited everybody to his beautiful Upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park. On the program there was a staged reading of Pushkin’s poetry, a performance of Tchaikovsky’s romances based on Pushkin’s verse, and, afterward, limitless food and drink, all paid for by Snob. Every object in the apartment was saturated with a true Russian spirit. There was a grand piano in the study, Russian paintings on the walls, old editions of Russian classics on the bookshelves. The guests were a beautiful mix of writers, actors, musicians, and businessmen, all speaking Russian and able to recite a Pushkin poem or two. Even the necessary incest was in full bloom. I can’t say anything about the host’s pets—a cat and a dog, both named Stepan, but there were at least three romances going on among the guests, with at least two marriages about to fall apart and at least one affair ripe for consummation.

Humans in the Russian immigrant community were notorious for being even more incestuous than their pets. The food was Russian as well, provided by the legendary Russian Samovar, a restaurant that used to be patronized and sponsored by Brodsky and Baryshnikov. And what food that was! Camembert? Really? We had several kinds of smoked fish, Salad Olivier, and exquisite meat pies. The only problem with the food was that it came too early. I tried to enjoy the reading, but it was a little hard to concentrate with all those taunting smells coming from the adjacent room.

The host recited, and I marveled at his impeccable sense of rhythm, while trying to determine what kind of smoked fish had the strongest aroma. Other guests kept shifting in their seats and throwing sneaky glances in the direction of the food as well, which made me feel a bit better. In a little while, right after the singer started her first romance, we heard the desperate meowing of Stepan the cat, who was locked in one of the bedrooms, because the singer was allergic to cats. I wondered if the meowing was meant to express Stepan’s yearning for freedom, poetry, or food. “Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnoven’e,” the singer sang. My stomach rumbled. I started to look for a possible way to escape. I guess I could fake a bout of coughing and sneak out of the study and into the living room. Or I could just make an effort and suffer through another hour of poetry and music. I had to make a choice. I wondered what Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Nabokov would do. Would they forgo culture for food? Suppose they are all sitting there at the grand piano in Stravinsky’s study, and Stravinsky is talking about the Orpheus score, and then there is a knock on the door and Vera Stravinsky lets in the caterer, and the aroma of the food gradually reaches the study. Suppose it’s a truly irresistible aroma? Would they ignore the smell and continue talking about music? Or would they quit and rush to the dining room? I was still pondering that as I rose and tiptoed out of the study with Pushkin’s verse pounding in my ears: And often on the sly I used to slip Through a forbidden garden’s splendid murk There were two or three other Global Russians picking at the food in the living room. “I came here straight from work,” one of them explained with his mouth full. I nodded and reached for a meat pie. Our choice was made. Lara Vapnyar emigrated from Russia in 1994 and has published three books, including There are Jews in My House, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She has also won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Open City. She lives on Staten Island. 22

“The Condition We Call Exile” from On Grief and Grieving by Joseph Brodsky. © Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

No, I won’t fully die. My soul in sacred lyre Will yet survive my dust, and, despite with’ring, thrive. I’ll glorious be, as long’s in moonlit world entire, A single poet’s still alive.

We are here evidently to talk about the reality of exile, not about its potential. And the reality of it consists of an exiled writer constantly fighting and conspiring to restore his significance, his leading role, his authority. His main consideration, of course, is the folks back home; but he also wants to rule the roost in the malicious village of his fellow émigrés…. It is saddening because if there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. One can even take it a step further and suggest that the exile’s is the ultimate lesson in that virtue. And that it is especially priceless for a writer because it gives him the longest possible perspective. “And thou art far in humanity,” as Keats said. To be lost in mankind, in the crowd—crowd?—among billions; to become a needle in that proverbial haystack—but a needle someone is searching for—that’s what exile is all about. Put down your vanity, it says, you are but a grain of sand in the desert. Measure yourself not against your pen pals but against human infinity: it is about as bad as the inhuman one. Out of that you should speak, not out of your envy or ambition. One ends up in exile for a variety of reasons and under a number of circumstances. Some of them sound better, some worse, but the difference has already ceased to matter by the time one reads an obituary. On the bookshelf your place will be occupied, not by you, but by your book. And as long as they insist on making a distinction between art and life, it is better if they find your book good and your life foul than the other way around. Chances are, of course, that they won’t care for either. Life in exile, abroad, in a foreign element, is essentially a premonition of your own book-form fate, of being lost on the shelf among those with whom all you have in common is the first letter of your surname. Here you are, in some gigantic library’s reading room, still open….Your reader won’t give a damn about how you got here. To keep yourself from getting closed and shelved you’ve got to tell your reader, who thinks he knows it all, about something qualitatively novel—about his world and himself…. In a manner of speaking, we all work for a dictionary. Because literature is a dictionary, a compendium of meanings for this or that human lot, for this or that experience. It is a dictionary of the language in which life speaks to man. Its function is to save the next man, a new arrival, from falling into an old trap, or to help him realize, should he fall into that trap anyway, that he has been hit by a tautology. This way he will be less impressed—and, in a way, more free. For to know the meaning of life’s terms, of what is happening to you, is liberating.

It would seem to me that the condition we call exile is up for a fuller explication; that, famous for its pain, it should also be known for its pain-dulling infinity, for its forgetfulness, detachment, indifference, for its terrifying human and inhuman vistas for which we’ve got no yardstick except ourselves. We must make it easier for the next man, if we can’t make it safer. And the only way to make it easier for him, to make him less frightened of it, is to give him the whole measure of it—that is, as much as we ourselves can manage to cover. We may argue about our responsibilities and loyalties (toward our respective contemporaries, motherlands, otherlands, cultures, traditions, etc.) ad infinitum, but this responsibility or, rather, opportunity to set the next man—however theoretical he and his needs may be—a bit more free shouldn’t become a subject for hesitation. If all this sounds a bit too lofty and humanistic, then I apologize. These distinctions are actually not so much humanistic as deterministic, although one shouldn’t bother with such subtleties. All I am trying to say is that, given an opportunity, in the great causal chain of things, we may as well stop being just its rattling effects and try to play causes. The condition we call exile is exactly that kind of opportunity. Yet if we don’t use it, if we decide to remain effects and play exile in an old-fashioned way, that shouldn’t be explained away as nostalgia. Of course, it has to do with the necessity of telling about oppression, and of course, our condition should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. That’s our value for the free world: that’s our function. But perhaps our greater value and greater function are to be unwitting embodiments of the disheartening idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom and is not synonymous with it. This highlights the extent of the damage that can be done to the species, and we can feel proud of playing this role. However, if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting—or at least imitating— the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody. Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in 1972 as an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and served as the poet laureate of the United States.

d n a l r e h t O d n a l r e h t o M

BRODSKY BY JOSEPH

“The Condition We Call Exile” from On Grief and Grieving by Joseph Brodsky. © Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

No, I won’t fully die. My soul in sacred lyre Will yet survive my dust, and, despite with’ring, thrive. I’ll glorious be, as long’s in moonlit world entire, A single poet’s still alive.