The numbers, when it comes to the final curtain, will be downright humble. A 20-month run. Fifty-six shows performed in 10 cities for an estimated 70,000 spectators.
For perspective, compare that to the Moscow Art Theater's production of "The Blue Bird" which, in various forms, has been performed more than 4,600 times over a 94-year period. Or the Beatles playing a one-night stand at New York's Shea Stadium before an audience of 100,000.
Still, when Oleg Menshikov's production of Maxim Kurochkin's play "Kitchen" closes on Tuesday, it will be a milestone. This is a show that, arguably, stirred more passions than any other in recent memory in Moscow. When it opened in November 2000, critics frothed at the mouth and tumbled head over heels in search of the snidest epithets and most damning verbs.
It was ridiculed as everything from pop fluff to cryptic intellectual balderdash. It was the first time in recent history that a contemporary play had served as the basis for such a large-scale commercial production and many did not know how to react. Meanwhile, the residents of Moscow were busily being divided into two distinct groups: those who had seen the show and everybody else. That is a state of affairs that has continued to the present day.
There is no question that "Kitchen" became a cult item in large part because it starred and was directed by Menshikov. Kurochkin, who is now 32, admits that being plucked out of obscurity to write the play for the matinee idol was a fateful turn of events.
"I knew basically what would happen when I got the offer," the Kiev native said in his hesitant, self-effacing manner. "I knew Oleg's [Menshikov] ability to change a person's fate, to alter the level of attention that people will pay to anyone working with him."
Menshikov's status is still not enough to explain the sustained and often fanatical responses to this weird and wonderful production, however. His previous and subsequent productions of classic plays, Alexander Griboyedov's "Woe From Wit" (1998) and Nikolai Gogol's "The Gamblers" (2001), were unquestionably and uncommonly popular. But they did not whip up the maelstrom that rose around "Kitchen," a wild and woolly tragic epic with farcical detours in which modern Russian workers in a kitchen are revealed to be Nibelungs locked in an ancient battle to the death among themselves and with invading Huns. This, after all, is a play that many spectators will admit they do not understand except in the simplest of terms. It confuses them no end, and -- surprise! -- they love it all the more for that.
Summarizing "Kitchen" is a thankless and intricate task. It begins with a verse prologue depicting the moment when the Nibelung Queen Kriemhild is tricked into betraying her husband, Siegfried, to the murderer Hagen. The scene then shifts abruptly to the sparkling world of a modern kitchen and a crowd of bustling cooks situated in a medieval castle. These workers are the same people who were once accomplices in Siegfried's murder, although none of them are aware of that. Only Gunther, the castle's owner and the man who ordered Siegrfried's murder, has the power to recollect the past. He hopes to induce his kitchen employees to remember their origins, but his plan goes awry when a lowly cleaning woman recalls that she was 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.
Olga Subbotina, one of Moscow's top young directors, commented on the play shortly after it opened. "Contemporary authors are afraid to speak in elevated language," she said at the time. "Kurochkin is not. He writes monologues that can be compared to 'to be or not to be.' 'Kitchen' may not be a perfect work, but segments of it are on the level of a masterpiece.
"Kitchen" has something of a built-in personality split. On one hand, it is a pop happening and is proud of it. Aside from jokes about Beavis and Butthead, the Internet, inane beer ads and the flip "wisdom" of glossy women's magazines, one popular scene has a character cracking a linguistic pun based on Menshikov's name. The kitsch is out in the open and it's all in fun. On the other hand, the play and its production come together in a tremendously ambitious work of dramatic art. Here is a work that raises the specter of social ills inexorably emerging from historical processes, while posing challenging questions about guilt and responsibility for betrayal, for murder and for the sin of ignoring one's own sins.
The show works as a pop spectacle and it works as poetic, thought-provoking art because its creators made it voluminous enough to hold a multitude of contradictions.
"'Kitchen' is a very baroque work," Kurochkin said. "It is excessive in its devices, its colors and its textures. Its set is excessive. Even I, who wrote a play of excess, was amazed at the excess that Oleg put into his handling of the play."
The significance of Menshikov setting out to stage a box office hit on the basis of a strange play by an unknown writer cannot be overstated. In fact, Menshikov was determined to do something out of the ordinary. When he heard about Kurochkin -- essentially, an unproduced playwright with a reputation for writing unwieldy plays mixing different nations and historical eras -- he invited him in for a chat.
"The ideas of the kitchen, the medieval castle setting and the modern Slavic heroes who are caught in a prank of some kind all belonged to Oleg," Kurochkin said. "He had already decided on the title when I came to meet him."
Work on giving flesh to Menshikov's ideas was long and arduous. Officially commissioned in the summer of 1999, the first draft was delivered late -- and rejected -- only in the winter. Plans to open the show in January 2000 were repeatedly pushed back as Kurochkin produced rewrite after rewrite. Even after the show opened nearly a year later than planned, Menshikov, for months, continued to demand rewrites, fine-tuning and cuts.
'Kitchen' was constructed on the principle of a Roman city, where we built everything on the ruins of previously abandoned ideas," said the author.
This process naturally led to differences in opinion, although Kurochkin ever remained the team player, fighting for his own ideas only until Menshikov convinced him changes were inevitable. However, when the public finally reads the version Kurochkin plans to publish soon, the play will look quite different in parts from the production of it.
"The published text will be something of a polemic with Oleg's staged version," the author admitted. "I would like the tragic theme to be clearer. And I will restore my own finale, which is very important to me."
In this excised scene, the lawyer, a slippery character who plays something of a devil's advocate from beginning to end, has a crowning monologue that ends with the words, "Nothing ever indicated a tragedy was in the making!"
In other words, Kurochkin said, the lawyer lies through his teeth, something no audience could miss.
For Kurochkin, the publication of the play and the show's closing will provide him an opportunity for a new beginning. He recently finished writing a new play with the working title of "Tsurikov," about a man going, literally, to hell and back, and next fall his major adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" -- pushing the story back into the 19th century -- will open in Moscow.
"I know the danger that lies ahead if I continue to live and breathe 'Kitchen,'" he said. "I could easily get stuck talking about how I worked with Oleg Menshikov for the rest of my life. In fact, when I'm writing now, I am extremely careful to cut anything that echoes the intonations of 'Kitchen.'"
One story he could tell was how a drunken binge finally got him over a debilitating case of writer's block.
"I would wake up in the morning and think, 'My God! I'm writing a play for Oleg Menshikov and nothing is working!' I couldn't get that out of my head until I went out and got dead drunk one night and blew the cobwebs out. The next morning I sat down and wrote the prologue."
Make no mistake, however. Despite his almost gallant reverence for Menshikov and his reputation, Kurochkin knows the value of what he has done. "One way or another, I expected some sort of 'Kitchen' to happen in my life," he said. "But what a joy it has been that it happened as it did. I believe Oleg lost nothing by taking the chance he did on 'Kitchen.'"
Is Kurochkin sad to see the play closing?
"Of course. As a person I'd love it to go on forever. But you also have to know when to cut things loose. I'm happy the show is bowing out in good working form. My task now is to go out and show that 'Kitchen' was a promising debut and not a dubious end to a career."

Submitted by Kay