Then and Now

Sunday was a marathon theater day: the Russian production of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia at the Russian Academic Youth Theater. That's 9 hours of romanticism, revolution, and intense(ly ridiculous) love triangles, people! And not to brag, but even after a serious week of dacha-ing and watching the entire first season of Workout the night before (what? shut up!), this gote did not once fall asleep.

In point of fact, though, the production was really good - fast paced, spare but expressive set design, scene changes done using a mini-cast of singing, dancing, marching, saluting, silent history-making commoners who transformed themselves and the stage with the turn of historical tides (peasants in the 1830s, workers and seamen in the 1840s, later young revolutionaries in the 1860s). The translation was good, too. Not surprisingly, it all sounds really good (if not better?) in Russian. And it was strangely appropriate that the Russian actors actually had real Russian accents when they spoke English in character, the way the historical figures would have (but as far as I remember, the American actors didn't).

There were two moments of extended applause (aside from the long standing ovation at the end):
1) in response to a line from Hertzen about his jealous lover getting angry at him for being unfaithful in her dream (those crazy women!)
2) and for a line from Turgenev to a young nihilist about the practicality of Pushkin over a manual on treating hemorrhoids (great Pushkin makes you forget your earthly ailments; the manual just reminds you of them. Get it? Life is cold, brutish, and short - read your Pushkin!).

Anyway, on a slightly different note. I was reading a book on the train home when I heard what I thought was gunfire further down the car. People scattered, as one might expect, and three (Turkish? Central Asian?) guys dressed in going-out clothes rushed toward a (white Russian) guy dressed in shorts and a tshirt and holding a beer bottle above his head. Instead of getting into a fight right in the middle of the car, though, and while everyone else was running to the other end of the car, an older couple went toward the guy with the bottle (who looked pretty wild-eyed and about to snap) and proceeded to physically isolate him from the others and talk him down through the next five stops.

From what one of the women who was sitting nearby told me, the three guys had been "acting obnoxiously," laughing at the shorts guy or something, and he just snapped and tried to break the bottle against the metal pole (but couldn't). What do you expect, she wanted to know, if he's got some inner hatred "for them" already? The "so-called national question."

More than the sudden threat of violence, I was really surprised by the old dude's immediate action in handling the situation. The way he didn't just run to the other side of the car, but used his grandfatherly skills in making the angry racist guy calm down by standing in front of him (physically blocking the other three), patting him on the back, putting his arms around him, saying soothing things, and shaking his fist at the three would-be bottle victims. (What was that about fathers and sons, Tom?) Of course, I'm also disturbed by the way the story is being told (how were they "taunting" him, exactly? being dressed a certain way? laughing amonst themselves? being non-white?). And as impressed and relieved as I was to avoid witnessing more violence, such a response does not convey how totally unacceptable the guy's reaction was in the first place. Perhaps that's a bit too much to ask though, given the circumstances.