Big City Dreams, Small Town Scandals
Crossposted from Haaretz
The recent Europe Theater Prize ceremony in St. Petersburg gave me a chance to meet with Lev Dodin, the director of St. Petersburg’s Maly Theater, who won the prize back in 2000.
Israel’s Gesher Theater hosted the Maly recently for their adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate.”
Dodin’s perception of time on stage is unique; his productions do not have video clips and visual pyrotechnic marvels. It is all based on the actor’s art and the director’s wisdom in interpreting the text.
His new production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” was a great experience for me. The story of the three Prozorov sisters is already known: their struggles to leave their boring lives in the town they moved to because of their father, the general, and their longing to return to Moscow since his death (about a year before the start of the plot). So what new meaning can one gain there?
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
