Moscow - the biggest popular hit of Moscow's current theater season is a show the critics trashed with glee. While audiences are packing the 1,200-seat theater where it is performed, reviewers greeted its opening this winter with the verbal equivalent of rotten eggs and tomatoes. This "patently weak show does not deserve the attention it is getting," groaned the critic for Argumenty i Fakty, the large-circulation Russian weekly. The reviewer for Izvestia was equally dismissive: "The author tried to say everything at once without understanding what he had in mind."
But "Kitchen," a sprawling phantasmagoria by a 31-year-old playwright, has been a theatrical demonstration of Newton's law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: the harder the critics protested, the more the public clamored for tickets.
Moreover, this large-scale production, directed by and starring Oleg Menshikov, Russia's top stage and screen actor, may be less a case of a fad run wild than a strong indication that after more than a decade of neglect, the contemporary play is poised again to become a vital part of Russian theater.
Throughout the 1990's, a time when Russian culture, society and politics were in turmoil, Russian directors largely ignored contemporary plays and retreated to the stability and familiarity of the classics. At times, there were as many as 35 Chekhov productions running simultaneously in repertory, while entire seasons passed in which only a dozen new plays were produced. The number had increased threefold by the beginning of the new millennium, although a vast majority of these came and went quietly.
Things have been so bad for contemporary playwrights in Russia that a few years ago a group of them commemorated the centennial of a legendary flop: the first production, in 1896, of "The Seagull" by Chekhov. Their method was to hold a semi serious, semi-mock seminar entitled the Treplev Readings, named after the character in "The Seagull" who commits suicide; their point was that if Chekhov was once such a dismal failure, then they had every reason to be optimistic about the future.
"Everybody knows the playwright is the least important figure in the theater," Yelena Gremina, the primary organizer of the Treplev Readings and a playwright, said wryly. "There is a song with the words, 'I can't get in the door.' Well, it has been like that for us."
But the strange, labyrinthine "Kitchen" may have thrown that door open.
The play was commissioned by Mr. Menshikov and his production company, the 814 Theatrical Association. Since its opening in November, it has played to overflow houses in Moscow and on tours to numerous cities in the former Soviet Union. In Moscow it is performed at the Mossoviet Theater, nestled in a small park off Tverskaya Street, the city's main thoroughfare. Mr. Menshikov thought a play set in a kitchen would offer good opportunities for theatrical business. The author, Maxim Kurochkin, who was then 30, developed the idea into an iconoclastic work that mixes contemporary Russian life with characters from the old German Nibelung saga, poetry with social satire and pathos with scathing irony.
"We set ourselves the task of activating a field that was dormant in contemporary theater -- new ideas, mythologies and problems," Mr. Kurochkin said in Russian as he sipped tea in his Moscow apartment.
That is, he decided to write a nonrealistic play in the hope that it might help break down the limitations imposed on contemporary artists by such untouchable theatrical icons as Stanislavsky and Chekhov.
"I did not want to deny the importance of such figures," the soft-spoken Mr. Kurochkin said. "But I wanted to put them on an equal footing with others. For me, the murder of Siegfried in the 'Nibelungenlied' is more important than the fact that Stanislavsky once staged Chekhov's plays." It is no coincidence that Mr. Kurochkin, whose father was an ethnographer, has a degree in history (from Kiev University) and, for a short time before moving to Moscow, worked at the archaeology institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. All of his plays mix different historical eras, cultures and occasionally even languages.
This was true of "Steel Will," a complex, multilingual play about the creation of a new Slavic mythology, which won a prestigious award in 1998 for innovative writing given annually by the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
Until Mr. Menshikov tackled "Kitchen," however, no director had been able to find the key to the playwright's unorthodox style.
"Kitchen" begins with a brief verse prologue depicting the moment when the Nibelung Queen Kriemhild is tricked into betraying her husband, Siegfried, to the murderer Hagen. But the scene quickly shifts to the sparkling world of a modern kitchen and a crowd of bustling cooks situated in a medieval castle. The multilayered castle interior and the mix of modern dress and detailed historical costumes worn by some of the performers are visually arresting in an old-fashioned, even operatic, way.
As the kitchen scene progresses, it gradually becomes evident to the audience that the workers are the same people who were once accomplices in Siegfried's murder, although none of them apparently know it. Only Gunther, the castle's owner and the former King of Burgundy, has the power to recollect the past. He hopes to induce the others to remember who they really are, but his plan goes awry when a lowly cleaning woman, Nadya, recalls that she was once Queen Kriemhild. She resolves to avenge the death of Siegfried and calls on a horde of 500,000 Huns to lay siege to the castle.
While snippets of Dvorzhak's Ninth Symphony alternate with a perky musical theme composed for "Kitchen" by the Russian rock star Boris Grebenshchikov, a television program broadcasts news reports about the advance of the Huns. When Gunther changes the channel and voices unmistakably resembling those of Beavis and Butthead continue the commentary, the usual standing-room-only crowd erupts into laughter and applause.
With ingredients like these, perhaps it is inevitable that many critics would lodge complaints about the play, among them: the serpentine plot, the time warps and the kitschy, crowd-pleasing references to pop culture (characters quote television advertisements; Attila the Hun swears by the Internet).
Abefuddled critic from The London Guardian wrote that her Russian translator complained about understanding "nothing" and added that no one else did either.
But others acknowledged being spellbound by the play and the production. " 'Kitchen' is a fascinating play that may appear complex at first," said Larisa Isayeva, the founder and general manager of the MAX Actors Agency, which represents performers. "But it has a magic ability to suck us in and not let us go. I dreamed about the show for 10 days after seeing it. It is a mystical work that provides genuine catharsis."
Olga Subbotina, one of Moscow's most prominent young directors, agreed and suggested that the author and director were clearly aiming to provoke attention to the plight of modern Russian drama.
"Kurochkin and Menshikov created this play with the intention of extracting contemporary drama from the underground, of getting it off small stages and putting it on mainstages," Ms. Subbotina said. "I am impressed by the scope and the ambition of what they did. Unfortunately, the critics did not accept it, but that is no indication of failure."
Ms. Subbotina, who is 28, began establishing her reputation by staging contemporary drama. "There is nothing more important right now than discovering new writers," she said. The role of the writer in Russian theater today continues to be hotly debated. Many distinguished directors openly declare their disdain for new plays and refuse to stage them, while writers routinely complain they are excluded from the theatrical process.
This situation drove Ms. Gremina, the playwright, who is 45, to take action. In recent years, she and her husband, Mikhail Ugarov, a playwright also and a novelist, have been helping to set up development programs for playwrights. They were involved in establishing two performance sites for new, noncommercial plays - the Debut Center and the Playwright and Director Center. Both of these small Moscow theaters have given a push to several fledgling writers and directors, including Mr. Kurochkin and Ms. Subbotina.
The Playwright and Director Center, the brainchild of two well-known veteran playwrights, Aleksei Kazantsev and Mikhail Roshchin, has been especially productive since opening in December 1998. Of the 13 shows it has produced, nine have been contemporary works.
In another move, Ms. Gremina sought the help of the Russian Golden Mask theater festival and the British Council in Moscow, which promotes British culture, to help her establish ties with the Royal Court Theater in London. This union has produced several practical seminars in Moscow. The first involved a dozen short sketches written by various authors and called "Moscow -- the Open City"; the sketches were subsequently organized into a single production and entered the repertory of the Playwright and Director Center. The seminar also prompted Mr. Kurochkin to write the sketch that brought him to Mr. Menshikov's attention. Though Ms. Gremina has praised Mr. Kurochkin's play, she said she was not in favor of writers merely "fulfilling the demands of an actor or director."
"There currently is an organic flaw in our system," she said. "For a contemporary play to succeed, it must star a famous actor or win a prestigious prize. But I would like to think that Kurochkin is worthy of being staged on his own merits. I would like to see him produced, like Ibsen, because his body of work is of intrinsic interest, not because he is doing someone else's bidding."
While Mr. Kurochkin noted that the "sweet trap" of popular and financial success can turn writers against their best instincts, he emphasized that it would be a mistake to lose the "frankly impossible" plays that a writer writes "for no reason at all." And he praised the commissioner of his play: "Oleg Menshikov is a living example that you can break the rules. I believe he will accomplish much as a generator of new ideas and help bring about new tendencies in theater." Mr. Menshikov, whose shy manner is at odds with his celebrity status, was nonchalant about the origins of "Kitchen." "This is not the first time I have commissioned a new work from an author," he said. In 1993 he produced and starred in the highly successful "Nizhinsky," Aleksei Burykin's poetical tale in which the dancer interacts with an imaginary double.
"This time, I wanted to do a play in a kitchen and I had heard of Kurochkin," said Mr. Menshikov, who plays the role of Gunther. "So I had someone ask him to bring me a play. He brought me everything he had written."
Mr. Menshikov, who is 40, is one of the few people in Russia capable of giving significant financial backing and major exposure to a writer with virtually no production history. His film credits include starring roles as the young informer in Nikita Mikhalkov's 1995 Oscar-winning "Burnt by the Sun" and the Russian refugee in Regis Wargnier's recent "East-West." His 1992 London stage appearance as the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin opposite Vanessa Redgrave's Isadora Duncan in Martin Sherman's "While She Danced" won him an Olivier Award.
BUT if Ms. Gremina worries about the balance of power between Mr. Menshikov, a sponsor, and Mr. Kurochkin, a playwright, the author was more sanguine. "The situation of the playwright's role in the theater will always be unhealthy," Mr. Kurochkin said. "But the diagnosis is changing. Many good and innovative writers are now in demand."
Among others, Mr. Kurochkin singled out Yevgeny Grishkovets, who is 33, and Olga Mukhina, who is 30, as vastly different authors who have had a positive impact on contemporary Russian theater. Mr. Grishkovets is a one-man theater from Kaliningrad who writes, directs, designs and performs his own lyrical but wickedly barbed comedies. They have acquired a cult following and garnered a pile of awards over the last two seasons in Moscow. An English-language production of "How I Ate a Dog," his breakthrough performance piece about a former sailor recalling his days in the navy, was mounted upstairs at the Royal Court last year.
Ms. Mukhina's play "Tanya-Tanya," which opened at the Piotr Fomenko Studio in Moscow in 1996 and continues its successful run today, was a pioneering effort. At the time of its premiere, this work, about three young couples sharing experiences and a house, was the extremely rare case of a new play enjoying enthusiastic support from audiences, critics and theatrical colleagues as well. Its deeply personal nature, its highly poetic form and its utter lack of emphasis on social forces, marked a major break with several decades of Russian drama when social commentary was almost obligatory.
By comparison, Mr. Kurochkin in "Kitchen" maintained the poetic structures that Ms. Mukhina introduced, but also shone a strong spotlight on social issues.
"I see it as a social play, as a criticism of a form of civilization," Mr. Kurochkin said haltingly of "Kitchen," after insisting several times that he cannot define his own plays. "It is a play that declares a person is lying when he says he knows why he did something, for you can only come close to the truth, you cannot achieve it. I believe we must accept the schismatic nature of contemporary life and learn to live with dichotomies."
Not surprisingly, then, "Kitchen" is a postmodern collage of styles, references, quotes and influences that reflects and responds to the fragmented, contradictory nature of the contemporary world. And beneath its glitter, it is raising a timely moral issue: exhortations to remember the past may seem noble, but they inevitably lead to equally lofty - yet dangerously volatile - impulses to avenge ancient wrongs. This is the crux of the conflict that develops between the central figures of Gunther and Kriemhild.
"The question of choice is stated extremely clearly in the play," said Ms. Isayeva, the founder of the actors' agency. "This is one of its finest points and one that audiences readily respond to." The popular success of "Kitchen" is certainly not great enough by itself to turn around the fortunes of contemporary Russian drama. It is not even clear how much it will affect Mr. Kurochkin's own future. His other plays, which also routinely incorporate temporal, spatial and stylistic zigzags, have drawn praise from directors and dramaturges who nonetheless admit they wouldn't know how to stage them.
Still, the crowds packing the house seem to be sending a message: "Forget the critics, forget Chekhov and bring on the new!"

Submitted by Annie