Staging Mitya’s Love: A Russian theater performance as reviewed by someone with no background in either Russian or theater

Hello from somewhere between Moscow and St. Petersburg. It is obscenely cold outside and my phone won’t connect to the free wiki on the train so I figured I’d write instead of watching Brooklyn 99 (which is on Russian Netflix by the way). In two short weeks, this trip has repeatedly and severely changed the way I see live theatrical production. One theater that has challenged my expectations and delivered the best productions I’ve ever seen performance after performance is the famed Gogol Center. The politics of the theater and its troupe’s history are intriguing enough to warrant researching (which I would strongly recommend) but in this post, I’m going to strictly focus on the staging of the second show we saw at the Gogol: Mitya’s Love.

            Mitya’s Love was staged on a wall with sporadic protruding pegs. The two actors that made up the cast sat, laid, and walked across the pegs for the majority of the 90-minute performance. Yet this peculiar staging was not simply an amusing gimmick that shocks audiences briefly then hinder the performance in totality but rather a medium that allowed the director and actors alike to explore a new plane of acting. First, the staging allowed small actions that are usually less noticeable to be easily visible. When Mitya would sit, he would either draw his knees to his chin in a fetal position with a peg underneath or sit as if at an uncomfortable wooden desk. Both of these positions were incredibly expressive and a visual representation of the character’s yielding and childish nature. Every fidget and shutter was clearly seen by the audience due to the elevated positioning of the actors on the wall and the lack of obstructing props. One would think that hanging off a wall would stop an actor from performing normal actions such as sitting and standing but I felt that the bare peg allowed for more expressive characterization through positioning. In the same way that Mitya’s awkwardness was more vivid because of the staging so to was Katya’s youthful whimsy. She lounged carelessly, as if on a swing, on the very same pegs that seemed so restrictive when Mitya mounted them. In addition to expressing character traits, the vertical space was also used for comedic effect. At one point in the play Mitya gives a bottle of vodka to a villager. In this production, instead of simply passing him a bottle, the villager motions for Mitya to pour the liquor down into his mouth from two meters up. Alternatively, they also at times used the pegs like a jungle gym as one character would chase another around the set.

From my reading of the script, Mitya’s unhealthy infatuation with Katya is a major theme. The staging of this production vividly showed this obsession. For example, the vertical staging gave the actors an opportunity to visually express the power dynamic between characters. When Mitya and Katya interacted, Mitya was positioned on a slightly lower peg then Katya, forcing him to look up at her. This visual reinforces Mitya’s idealization of Katya. This is not the only nod towards Mitya’s obsession. The actor for Katya also plays every other role in this performance. Throughout the script Mitya talks about how he sees Katya in all the women in the village and so it seemed to me that they very intentionally cast her as all the other roles as to further show Mitya’s infatuation with Katya. Lastly, the only voice amplification that was used was the amplification of Katya’s voice over the phone. This was the most obvious production expression of Mitya’s obsession because while the phone call was a two-way call with both actors talking, only Katya’s voice was amplified. All in all, the staging did a phenomenal job showing and not simply telling this major plot point. They truly explored the possibilities of the vertical stage in innovative and awe-inspiring ways that effectively conveyed everything from character traits to power dynamics to some of the best comedy I’ve seen.