‘Gogol Project’
mixes three Gogol short stories – review at NeonTommy.com
There aren’t a whole lot of ways to make abstruse Russian literature palatable to a room full of young Echo Park hipsters, but a giant walking nose is one way to go about it.
If Nikolai Gogol had written three of his most famous short stories while on acid, the result would have been the Gogol Project, the Rogue Artists Ensemble’s dance-puppetry-play amalgam that opened at the Bootleg Theater over the weekend.
“Trippy” might not be an adjective commonly used to describe 19th-century social commentary about life in Czarist Russia, but the Ensemble managed to make it so. The result was extremely flamboyant, a little overwhelming but an altogether a pretty fun ride.
The production combined three of Gogol’s most famous short stories – Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat – into a two-act play, weaving the plots together and embellishing them with dancing puppets, metaphorical props and dance numbers set to an original score by Ego Plum.
With the tagline “I choose crazy,” the production went for just that. The story is set in early 1800’s St. Petersburg, largely near Nevsky Prospekt, and the same handful of townspeople-characters play all the parts in all three stories.
Half of the characters wear cartoonish plaster noses intended to represent their higher social standing. The other half don’t speak. Because they’re poor. And their voices aren’t heard by the powerful. Get it?!
From there, the production (like the original) relies almost entirely on allusions to larger social issues to make any sense. The town’s resident pushy spinster caries around a purse labeled “daughter,” in which she keeps a girl-shaped piece of paper that she repeatedly tries to marry off.
When the town clock breaks, the town’s “Very Important Person” orders it to be fixed by a worker and then remarks “how hard it is to be a Very Important Person in this town.” Don’t worry about missing any of the symbolism, you’ll be hit over the head with it repeatedly.
But despite the overacting and tedious amount of magical realism, Project becomes an increasingly exciting spectacle as it goes. The pace is fast and the jokes, though occasionally cheesy, are plentiful.
In The Nose segment, the simpleton barber Ivan Yakovlevich finds the detached nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov in a loaf of bread. Horrified, he throws it into the Neva River, but a passerby rescues the Nose and dresses it in a coat and hat.
From there, the Nose grows until it becomes a freakish Halloween costume on legs, performing feats of strength, gaining notoriety among the townspeople and talking like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Eventually, the Nose is revealed for what it really is (a nose), and the local gendarme utters the best line of the play: “Well, this is most irregular.”
One of the most compelling plot lines is the story of The Overcoat, in which the impoverished mail clerk Akaky Akakievich (whose name means Poop Son-of-poop… nothing like 19th-century toilet humor) rises to social acceptance by getting a new overcoat. When the coat is stolen, Akakievich dies a frustrated, miserable death after the “Very Important Person” refuses to search for the culprit.
Along the way, Akakievich (played by Kristopher Lee Bicknell) is jeered by two postal-worker puppets made of envelopes and letters, and he is helped by a tailor puppet with a scissor mustache and a pincushion hat. Though the puppeteers are incredible, Bicknell is even better, playing a spot-on downtrodden commoner without ever uttering a word. Apparently cowering despondency is all in the eyebrows.
The production could have been improved with the omission of a few scenes – most notably a cloyingly sweet love song between two dog puppets. Gogol may have been gay, sure, but that level of camp is a little distracting.
But sometimes it works. At the end of the Diary of a Madman plot line, the clerk Aksenty (played by Ben Messmer), having been slowly driven insane by his own hollow existence, imagines himself as the Queen of Spain and leads the cast in an impressive gender-bending dance number. It may not have been in-keeping with Gogol’s original depressing message, but it was a good celebration of the author’s farcical tendencies.
I’m willing to give Project the benefit of the doubt that their hyperbolic absurdity was just political satire with jazz hands. Or, as Gogol wrote at the end of the Nose, “there may, after all, have been something to all this.”
Gogol Project runs through Nov. 1 at the Bootleg Theater
Gogol: un-mellow
by olgakhazan on Sep 30, 2009 • 4:54 am No Comments‘Gogol Project’
mixes three Gogol short stories – review at NeonTommy.com
There aren’t a whole lot of ways to make abstruse Russian literature palatable to a room full of young Echo Park hipsters, but a giant walking nose is one way to go about it.
If Nikolai Gogol had written three of his most famous short stories while on acid, the result would have been the Gogol Project, the Rogue Artists Ensemble’s dance-puppetry-play amalgam that opened at the Bootleg Theater over the weekend.
“Trippy” might not be an adjective commonly used to describe 19th-century social commentary about life in Czarist Russia, but the Ensemble managed to make it so. The result was extremely flamboyant, a little overwhelming but an altogether a pretty fun ride.
The production combined three of Gogol’s most famous short stories – Diary of a Madman, The Nose and The Overcoat – into a two-act play, weaving the plots together and embellishing them with dancing puppets, metaphorical props and dance numbers set to an original score by Ego Plum.
With the tagline “I choose crazy,” the production went for just that. The story is set in early 1800’s St. Petersburg, largely near Nevsky Prospekt, and the same handful of townspeople-characters play all the parts in all three stories.
Half of the characters wear cartoonish plaster noses intended to represent their higher social standing. The other half don’t speak. Because they’re poor. And their voices aren’t heard by the powerful. Get it?!
From there, the production (like the original) relies almost entirely on allusions to larger social issues to make any sense. The town’s resident pushy spinster caries around a purse labeled “daughter,” in which she keeps a girl-shaped piece of paper that she repeatedly tries to marry off.
When the town clock breaks, the town’s “Very Important Person” orders it to be fixed by a worker and then remarks “how hard it is to be a Very Important Person in this town.” Don’t worry about missing any of the symbolism, you’ll be hit over the head with it repeatedly.
But despite the overacting and tedious amount of magical realism, Project becomes an increasingly exciting spectacle as it goes. The pace is fast and the jokes, though occasionally cheesy, are plentiful.
In The Nose segment, the simpleton barber Ivan Yakovlevich finds the detached nose of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov in a loaf of bread. Horrified, he throws it into the Neva River, but a passerby rescues the Nose and dresses it in a coat and hat.
From there, the Nose grows until it becomes a freakish Halloween costume on legs, performing feats of strength, gaining notoriety among the townspeople and talking like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Eventually, the Nose is revealed for what it really is (a nose), and the local gendarme utters the best line of the play: “Well, this is most irregular.”
One of the most compelling plot lines is the story of The Overcoat, in which the impoverished mail clerk Akaky Akakievich (whose name means Poop Son-of-poop… nothing like 19th-century toilet humor) rises to social acceptance by getting a new overcoat. When the coat is stolen, Akakievich dies a frustrated, miserable death after the “Very Important Person” refuses to search for the culprit.
Along the way, Akakievich (played by Kristopher Lee Bicknell) is jeered by two postal-worker puppets made of envelopes and letters, and he is helped by a tailor puppet with a scissor mustache and a pincushion hat. Though the puppeteers are incredible, Bicknell is even better, playing a spot-on downtrodden commoner without ever uttering a word. Apparently cowering despondency is all in the eyebrows.
The production could have been improved with the omission of a few scenes – most notably a cloyingly sweet love song between two dog puppets. Gogol may have been gay, sure, but that level of camp is a little distracting.
But sometimes it works. At the end of the Diary of a Madman plot line, the clerk Aksenty (played by Ben Messmer), having been slowly driven insane by his own hollow existence, imagines himself as the Queen of Spain and leads the cast in an impressive gender-bending dance number. It may not have been in-keeping with Gogol’s original depressing message, but it was a good celebration of the author’s farcical tendencies.
I’m willing to give Project the benefit of the doubt that their hyperbolic absurdity was just political satire with jazz hands. Or, as Gogol wrote at the end of the Nose, “there may, after all, have been something to all this.”
Gogol Project runs through Nov. 1 at the Bootleg Theater