Word: maksudov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...difficulties of the fictionalized writer Sergei Leontevich Maksudov, played by Derek Smith, only hint at the real story behind Black Snow. Robert Scanlan, the ART's literary director, has explicated the fascinating history of this play. Black Snow began as White Guard, a war novel Bulgakov wrote after serving for the defeated White Guard during the Russian Civil War. Censors stopped the serialized publication of the novel in 1925, but the Moscow Art Theatre defiantly decided to stage the novel as a play titled The Day of the Turbins. Bulgakov was consequently subjected to a decade of persecution under Stalinist...
...much of the history is presented flatly; neither the faceoff between the Red Guard and the White Guard nor the constraint by censors of the protagonist writer Sergei Leontevich Maksudov feel effectively threatening or looming or tragic. The play, in fact, ultimately derives its strength not from the drama of its history but in spite of it. What is most engaging about the play is not the main plot but the subplot, not the tragic sequences tracing Stalinist repression but the comic theatrical sequences woven into the interstices. The comic representation of life at the Moscow Art Theatre...
...their names does not prevent certain actors from achieving distinction: particularly wonderful were Candy Buckley as the secretary Polixena Vasilievna Toropetskaya, Margaret Gibson as the cat-hurling actress Lyudmila Silvestrovna Priakina and Jeremy Geidt as Romanus, the conductor at the Independent Theatre. Derek Smith is not a very dynamic Maksudov; although he expresses his suicidal desperation nicely, his creative anxieties and joys are only sketchily delineated. Alvin Epstein as Ivan Vasilyevich, the director of the Independent Theatre conspicuously modeled on Stanislavsky, is eminently believable in the imperiousness of his manner, the dignity of his posture and the passion...
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