Word: shea
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SINCE HE IS a radical, Steven Shea has no objections at all to the timing of the premier of his first play, A Hero of Our Time, except to hope that people will not be too busy with politics to come to watch his representation of the politics of another era. When he graduated last year as an English major, he had written prose and poetry, but never before a play. Now, as a playwright and as a person involved in the Harvard community, he is concerned with the relevance of art to politics, and with a synthesis between them...
...Hero of Our Time deals with political decisions, but it is not, Shea points out, political theater, at least not in the Brechtian or propaganda sense. The author prefers to call his work a "play of character," in which the audience is supposed to deal with the problems in the play by identifying with the characters, not by being estranged from them. It is, then, a psychological play...
...overcome the staging problems, Burt and Shea have come up with a number of tricks, some more successful than others. The film clips of the Decembrists being busted and Pushkin being shot, and Bekhmetyev's slide-show for the Czar, ease the action over places where words would have been too bulky. Similarly, the projected title for every scene is of great aid in following a very complicated plot...
...role of Lermontov, as Shea has drawn it, is exceedingly difficult because it bends back upon itself. The actor must be, sometimes almost simultaneously, Lermontov, Lermontov creating Pechorin, Pechorin as a character in his own right, Lermontov manipulating Pechorin--and in the end, perhaps, Pechorin manipulating Lermontov. The perspective is at times a bit like looking into one of two opposed mirrors, as you try to sort out the images and assign them to the figures, and a lesser actor than Bro Uttal would have made himself very dizzy in the attempt. It is no mean dramatic feat to slip...
...when it finally does, the question that has been forming in your mind--why Shea decided to write about Lermontov and not Pushkin--begins to dissipate. Of course Lermontov is a tinhorn, a two-bit mock-up of Pushkin, a caricature of a radical artist who is grotesque rather than tragic (though, by some trick, he becomes almost tragic in the end). That is precisely the point; Pushkin was above revolution, though he was a friend of revolutionaries. He saw through it. Lermontov was beneath revolution; he was merely bored, dissatisfied with things the way they were for some vague...