Moscow Rehearsals

One of the serendipitous rewards of time spent in New York City is the rediscovery of long lost and forgotten connections. One of these happened to me a few weeks ago when I was recovering from the city by reading in the quiet and comfortable Harvard Club Library.

James, the personable librarian, mentioned that he has a friend who knows a long-ago friend of my father’s, Norris Houghton, an esteemed man of the theatre—my father’s passion—in New York in the 1970’s and 80’s. I was intrigued; I remember Norris as one of the butterfly young men who hovered around my father when we visited New York, recommending plays, and visited us in Kentucky, bringing a whiff of that far-off exotic world.

A week later, back at home, I was sorting my big collection of plays, most assembled when I was working as a playwright in New York in the 1980’s; this was when Julia Miles, Joan Vail Thorne and I founded The Women’s Project which continues to this day to produce plays written and directed by women.

In the midst of my collection, I discovered a bound volume called Moscow Rehearsals by Norris Houghton, published in 1979. On the flyleaf Norris had written a note to father: ”Here is the beginning (43 years ago)…From your devoted and admiring servant, Norris.” It was dated Louisville, 1979—on one of those visits I remember.

A few pages further, a blue note printed “Memo from BARRY BINGHAM, SR” is addressed to me, asking me to return the book “sometime in the future.”

Obviously, I never did, and so this thread leads back to Norris and that lost time. I intend to send the book to him via James, the librarian.

As I glanced through it, I recognized a time, as the Cold War was ending, when the U.S. was entering a period of Détente—a reuniting with the culture of Russia, so rich in playwrights, writers, music, ballet and theatre. We have forgotten all this now as the drums beat louder and louder for war. And yet Norris’ notes on his evenings in the Moscow theatres remind me of that rich culture and its interesting lessons for the U.S. commercial theatre, now bogged down in overpriced tickets and generally worthless re-runs geared to the supposed interests of tourists.

In his chapter, “Playwrights at Work,” Norris notes a dramatic difference in the way Russian theatres treat their playwrights—they have much less authority once their scripts are accepted to attend rehearsals, request changes, rewrite constantly—all I found so debilitating when I sat through endless rehearsals of my plays. I found this baffling and confusing because I am far from being an expert on production; I am a literary writer, who must hope that my words find inspired interpreters in the designers, producers, directors and actors. Rewriting lines on the spot, sometimes creating whole scenes, seldom increases the literary value of a play and should probably have been done lone before the first rehearsal. I remember my dear colleague, Julia Miles, asking me crisply when I was complaining about an actor who ad-libbed rather than learning her lines, “You mean there is nothing wrong with the script?”

Of course there was a good deal wrong that I should have noticed and rewritten or cut before that first baffling rehearsal.

Norris then notes that “The Marxist theatre demands that art and the currents of life should never flow in separate channels, that the class struggle must have constant representation in the theatre”—poison to our American individualism. After all we don’t even admit that there is an ongoing class struggle, obvious to everyone on a daily basis, although in the 1930’s playwrights like Clifford Odets did recognize this struggle as central to plays that would have a direct impact on an audience and perhaps even staying power.

He traces the history of Soviet theatre AS THOUGH IT IS ALWAYS CONNECTED TO SOVIET POLITICS AND ECONOMIC CHANGES—something unrecognized in the U.S. today where theatre often seems to be a frivolous nonentity. After the horrors of the first eighteen years of the Revolution, the Second Year Plan in 1933 emphasized “Cultural development and the achievement of certain refinements… the socialist state seemed assured and people looked to the future with renewed hope.”

The theatre fell under the influence of the People’s Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharski, “a wise and discerning leader. While upholding the principles of Marxism, he yet felt the importance of maintaining cultural unity with the past” and the Russian playwrights we admire today. With the assistance of Vsevolod Meierhold, he envisioned Revolutionaries working in the theatre as well as the more traditional playwrights. They were called upon to create “an agitational drama which would enthuse the people to the cause of the Party and keep the enthusiasm at war-time pitch.”

Your reaction to this statement and others like it depends on your commitment to individualism in the theatre as elsewhere; but it is possible to view theatre here today as just as much propaganda as the Soviet theater of the Second Year Plan, promoting as it does the worship of romantic and largely heterosexual love and a degree of comfort with commercialism and superficiality.

Which of the two forms of propaganda, I wonder, is more hurtful to the theatre?

And, even more crucial, how will we ever reach the Détente that allowed for the writing of a book like Norris Houghton’s Moscow Rehearsals?

In Theater Julia Miles The Women's Project The Women's Project Theater