Word: shatrov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mikhail Shatrov...
...Litovsk was suppressed for more than two decades. When it finally debuted in 1987, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing times...
...Shatrov's play works as more than a political curiosity. Staged by Robert Sturua of Soviet Georgia's Rustaveli Theater, which this month presented a striking King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the show marks the U.S. debut of Moscow's venerable Vakhtangov Theater and of Ulyanov, its artistic director as well as its star. Although the bulky, brooding Ulyanov in no way resembles the vulpine Lenin, he and his troupe seem wholly at ease. Amid the symbolic flutters of cloth, abrupt bursts of music, caricatures of the old bourgeoisie and odd lighting shifts...