The Stage in Review

“Dostigayev.” drama in three acts by Maxim Gorgy; Yiddish translation by L. Feinberg; directed by Benno Schneider; scenery by M. Solotaroff; produced by M. Goldstein and S. Levine with the assistance of D. Windman; at Artef Theatre, 247 West 48th St.

In a setting of decay and corruption, with imperial Russia gone and with the Kerensky Provisional government going fast, “Dostigayev,” second of Maxim Gorky’s trilogy on the destruction of old Russia and the rise of the new, is presented by the Artef Theatre.

Decay, whether personal or national, is scarcely a subject for light treatment and the veteran Soviet writer makes the most of his grim materials.

When the curtain rises, the Kerensky government is still in power, but its power is waning and the rise of the Communist movement is like a growing storm, which becomes ever louder in the ears of that class doomed to die, but fighting desperately for life and power.

Provincial Russia is no more than an echo of the capital, and it is in a provincial setting that Gorky shows what happened in all Russia.

The merchants and manufacturers of the old regime sigh for the days of their former power and plot to regain it. They fail to recognize the approach of the storm and live only in the past when their power was absolute. Only Vasilli Dostigayev, a manufacturer and partner of Yegor Bulitchew, subject of the first of the trilogy, has prescience enough to know what is coming and attempts to adapt himself. He has read Darwin and constantly quotes the English scientist on the survival of the fittest.

In direct contrast we are shown the younger generation, the workers and intellectuals who are to take the fate of Russia into their hands. But all Dostigayev’s efforts to adapt himself are vain. His daughter, caught in the revolutionary storm, but lacking courage to go the full road, shoots herself, his friends are arrested and shot, and as the shots of the firing squad echo off stage, he sits in dread silence in his own drawing room while a revolutionary soldier stands guard, the symbol of the new Russia.

All the craftsmanship of Gorky and the fine ensemble acting of the Artef group were necessary to make this slice of epoch-making history come to life in the theatre, but come to life it does, and a fascinated audience watches the birth pangs of a new social order.

Of the acting there is little to say save that it is more than adequate to the theme and done with sympathy and understanding. There is perhaps no single artist to single out, since the emphasis was obviously excellence. The direction comes from the talented Benno Schneider, who achieved an outstanding success with “Recruits.”

M. I.