Dramaturge: Irina Kóstina
Colombian adaptation: Students of the Performance Workshop II
Musical Direction: Claudia Vélez
With a special appearance by Libardo Carvajal
Production Design: Jorge Reyes
A production of the Universidad del Valle's Theatre Department and Four Worlds Theatre Research Group.
Premiere: September 2008
Doña Cecilia with two guests (Isabella Moloney with Oriana Gironza, Diana Tapasco) in Poverty is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)
Ostrovsky is the most important Russian playwright, and were it not for the fame of the Moscow Art Theatre, and the subsequent rise of Anton Chekhov, who knows if we would not rather be staging Ostrovsky in all the theatres of the world, and not Chekhov?
As with Chekhov, Ostrovsky is dismaying at first because his plays don't seem to have any conflict. It is difficult to understand them at first, because no one is who they seem - the characters are neither good nor bad, and they never finally reveal themselves. In this aspect, Ostrovsky is more authentic than Chekhov himself, whose almost seasick vision of people's banality lead him, out of extreme sensitivity, to make quite cruel moral judgments of them.
Ostrovsky is more generous than sensitive, and he always seems to be waiting himself to see who his characters really are. As the Ostrovsky scholar Lakshin writes: "The very hero throws the author off a little. [...] Perceptive as an artist, Ostrovsky analyses life and brings to light new types of characters, without out making definitive judgments on them." Ostrovsky suspends moral judgment, - in a way this is the essence of his style. You Never Can Tell (title of a play by George Bernard Shaw) could be the title of any of Ostrovsky's plays, and it would be well worth taking the time to compare these two prolific playwrights (Ostrovsky wrote 47 plays with 728 characters, Shaw wrote 57 plays with fewer characters, as Russian plays are always more crowded). The fact that Ostrovsky pegs popular sayings to his plays does not reflect the simplicity of his vision, but rather the complexity of popular wisdom, which is older than all of us, and also knows that things are never what they seem.
In contrast to his contemporaries, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Ostrovsky has a more modest background; he was born in Zamoskvarechie ("The Other Shore"), the huge merchant class neighbourhood on the south side of the Moscow River. His plays, like many from the sixties in the XIX century, mark a fascinating transition in theatre history: the plays are still within the great tradition of melodrama, and are full of brilliant effects, tableturnings, unexpected endings, etc., but at the same time the context is no longer the nobility but rather the aggressive world of the merchant class, depicted with great fidelity. The term realism was coined in Russia by the critic Dobroliubov, speaking of the new plays by Ostrovsky. There are few writers in the history of literature - except perhaps Ostrovsky's contemporary Anthony Trollope - who better describes corrupt lawyers, poet-merchants and scheming accountants, and yet Ostrovsky was also a poet, whose dreamlike parentheses in the action, incomprehensible for the more conventional realistic writer, gave his plays all of their vitality. (At the very climax of Wolves and Sheep, two characters in conflict suddenly begin to speak about tobacco.)
With the rise of neoliberalism all over the world, Ostrovsky's plays, at one time thought to be the parochial works of a provincial Russian writer, have experienced a re-evaluation in the world, and his themes are more pertinent than ever. Ostrovksy is also modern in his treament of women: the great majority of his plays, including the two mentioned, have as their principal character strong-minded and independent women.
His great masterpieces are The Forest (staged by Meyerhold, one of hos three or four most important productions, in 1923); Wolves and Sheep, one of the first important artistic successes of the Fomenko Theatre under the direction of Peter Fomenko and Ma Zheng Hong; and The Storm the most famous play by Ostrovsky outside of Russia. This production's director began his directing carreer with a production of Truth is Good , but Luck is Better in Ottawa in February 1996.
The Musicians (Lina María García, Estefanía Díaz, Cindy Muñoz and maestro Libardo Carvajal) in Povertu is no Crime by Alexander Ostrovsky. (Photos: Juan Diego Muñoz, Jorge Suzarte)
This play unites three types of characters: a group of young people who are just beginning to live, and want to live life to its fullest (Mitya, Liubov; characters who have lived too long and who want to recover a happiness that seems to be slipping from their fingers (Korshunov, Tortsov); and characters who are simply happy despite their condition (Pelageya, Liubim, Arina). As in another play which confronts the heady aspirations of youth with the nervous nostalgia of age, Romeo and Juliet, this play is about a group of people who are ever after a happiness that only falls into their lap, miraculously, at the end of the play. Shakespeare's play is a failed comedy; this play by Ostrovsky is a failed tragedy, and both playwrights mixed comedy and tragedy in unexpected ways in all of their plays.
As far as the action of the play is concerned, this play celebrates national prowess, and for this reason it would make no sense to preserve the original Russian songs and traditions, but instead it is better to look for their equivalents here in Colombia. Our version is full of traditional colombian music, the "llanera" style which so much resembles, in atmosphere, content and complexity, Russian music, and the action of the play takes place in a different generation, the age of our grandparents, in the forties, when traditions still hadn't broken down before aggressive modernity.
In short, this play is a party that some of the characters want, and fail, to spoil. We are delighted to present this author unknown in the Spanish world, and we are proud to present this Latinamerican premiere of Poverty is no Crime.
