Word: zoditch
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JOURNEY of the Fifth Horse demands consideration on two levels. On the first, it cleverly interweaves the tales of two social misfits in the late-nineteenth century St. Petersburg. Zoditch (Richard Gruish), first reader in the ramshackle Grubove publishing Company, has turned sour and misanthropic in response to his social unacceptability. But Chulkaturin (Paul Benedict), an idle landowner of independent means, has adopted a gentle, wistfully philosophic air. His memoirs, submitted posthumously to the publishing company and read by Zoditch, constitute one of the play's two plots. The other revolves around Zoditch's impoverished life in a miserable boarding...
...Zoditch shares this trait with Chulkaturin and the fifth horse, but he does so unconsciously--as his overinflated sense of self-importance suggests. Journey of the Fifth Horse thus seems a treatment of modern man's alienation from his work. But because the landowing Chulkaturin also suffers from alienation, the play is more than a fable about the unsatisfied white-collar worker. Zoditch and Chulkaturin and the fifth horse represent Everyman, harnessed without reason to a life which he does not understand and cannot hope to change...
...OUTCASTS, who have adopted diameterically opposed attitudes, represent typical human reactions to the state of superfluity. Zoditch refuses to recognize his insignificance; he believes all women love him and despises their feminine weakness, which runs counter to his own assumed logic and coolheadedness. This supposed predilection merely masks his unbearable sense of irreparable inferiority...
...Zoditch reads, he tries in vain to keep from realizing that he, too, is taking the journey of the fifth horse. He constantly criticizes Chulkaturin's characters, his words, his sentimentality, his quiet compassion, and, of course, he criticizes Chulkaturin's love for Lisa. But there is no escaping the obvious, and he is drawn deeper into Chulkaturin's tale; he even begins to substitute the names of figures in his own life for those of Chulkaturin's characters. And as he is drawn deeper, as his critique becomes more impassioned and more futile, it becomes obvious that Zoditch lacks...
This is the piece of human garbage that Peter Lempert is given to play, and, with the exception of a number of scenes where he is just a bit too hysterical, he plays them well. Despite the fact that Dustin Hoffman popularized the role, Lempert's Zoditch is so real, with his thin face, his pointed nose, his beady little eyes, and a body and limbs that curl and twist like those of a man old before his time, that it is virtually impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. What Lempert does best is comedy, and, though Zoditch...