Word: nose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THERE are two sides to the work of Nikolai Gogol, one lighthearted and delightfully absurd, the other darker, crueler and obsessive to the point of madness. Director Christopher Duff manages to display through two short pieces, The Nose and From a Madman's Diary, both sides of Gogol's talent with out losing the peculiar, manic sensibility that unites the whole of his canon...
...Nose and From a Madman's Diary...
...Nose is a humorous stroll through the complexities of czarist Russian society. Kovolyov, one of Gogol's usual St. Petersburg bureaucrat protagonists, wakes up to discover that his nose is missing from his face. As he rushes through the channels of the Russian bureaucracy in vain efforts to reclaim his proboscis, the play treats the audience to delightfully unpredictable morsels of absurdism, such as the scene where the hapless Kovolyov encounters his nose, dressed in the uniform of a state councilor, praying at St. Isaac's Cathedral. "Excuse me, sir," says the nose, "but you are mistaken...
...Nose clearly owes a lot to the Russian folk tale tradition of the nebuival'shchina, or humorous tall tale. Duffy takes advantage of the story's fairy-tale quality and frames his adaptation around the premise of a group of adults (Arthur Fuscaldo, Lee Thomsen and Maria Troy) performing the tale to pacify a difficult little girl (Annie Gustavsen) who has locked herself in a basement room, Happily, this device manages not to cross the boundary from charm to terminal cuteness, and while you may occasionally feel like a little malchik being tucked into bed by your babushka...
Diary introduces the darker side of Gogol's oeuvre. Like Nose, it traces the daily struggles of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat. Diary's audience, however, does not get a humorous look at a silly, petty outsider but dwells within the mind of a man tortured by his own lowly position within the inflexible class lines of Russian society and accompanies him on his gradual descent into a hell of madness and self-torment...