"Pushkin at Boldino' at Fringe Festival

Three characters in search of Alexander Pushkin

JIM RUTTER

“You know you’ve hit a new literary low when the fictional characters you’ve created no longer need you,” declares Alexander Pushkin in Armina LaManna’s Pushkin at Boldino. Maybe so, but this work by a young playwright (and MFA candidate at Temple) is the first new play I’ve seen at this year’s Fringe Festival that I’d love to see cleaned up and made into a full production elsewhere.

LaManna’s play, set in 1830s Russia, shows the Russian Romantic author and poet (played by Greg Bell) in the service of the Tsar— living in penury, away from his wife and family— while attempting to write his great short story The Queen of Spades. In an age of censorship, he muses, “Writing is a bet, wagered in time.” Even Pushkin’s clothes constrict him as he struggles to create a tale that not only needs to excite readers but to survive the government “editing” so common in his times.

Frustrated by writer’s block, Pushkin turns to drink and begins narrating aloud the early events of his story as the characters from Queen of Spades appear and begin acting out the scenes he’s struggling to create— that is, until they start to take the story in a different direction.

“I thought I was the hero of this play,” complains Hermann (Matthew Lorenz), “not Tomsky” (Steve Kuhel). Liza (Nicole Erb) doesn’t like how Pushkin is writing her character, either. And the Countess (Tanya Lazar) tries to insert herself in the story before her first entrance.

Sure, it’s all derivative of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. But like rap music that merely samples from other songs, LaManna creates something original and exciting from techniques and story lines borrowed from others.

For the most part, LaManna’s play operates elegantly across three levels: Pushkin in his own life, writing frantic letters to a wife who may be cheating on him; Pushkin interacting with the characters in his short story (even attempting to seduce the fictional Liza); and the plot of intrigue, seduction and greed that plays out in Queen of Spades.

Ultimately, Pushkin at Boldino is a play about the tyrannical relationship between a writer and his creations. “Your existence depends on my thinking about you,” Pushkin asserts, but his characters create tangent plots and even start feeding Pushkin the lines of his narrative. Slowly, they realize, “We don’t need him.”

Strong performances from Erb, Kuhel and (once he finally comes on stage) Lorenz animate St. Petersburg of the 1830s while fleshing out characters into recognizable people, struggling equally with their not-real lives and a capricious external force trying to control them.

At times brilliant, and altogether funny and engaging, Pushkin at Boldino held my rapt attention throughout. Even if you’ve seen Tchaikovsky’s opera of Pushkin’s tale, or Hollywood’s many film versions, LaManna’s play creates an inventive new dimension for the story’s conflict. I hope that after the Fringe, I’ll get a chance to see it again elsewhere.