The Resurrection of Meyerhold

Mark Jackson has written and directed a sprawling, unlikely play that is a triumph of dramatic intelligence. The Death of Meyerhold will be at the Julia Morgan Center in Berkeley, California, through January 25, presented by the Shotgun Players. It's one of a kind. Don't miss it.

Meyerhold was a Russian theatre director and acting theorist of the early 20th century, alternately colleague and rival of the more famous Stanislavsky. His productions were always experimental and controversial, emphasizing the heightened artificiality of theatre as a means of achieving experiential truth—in contrast to Stanislavsky's psychological realism. It's the gesture that matters for Meyerhold more than the underlying motivation—that's what the audience sees and responds to. As the recent book Pure Play expresses it, "Meyerhold’s creative work has…been directed towards one unique goal: not to let theater be the same as life."

In other words, Meyerhold was a precursor to Brecht: theatricality is the path to truth, and truth (above all, political truth) is the goal of theatre. That may not be everyone's glass of vodka, and in the hands of amateurs it leads only to stolid speechifying. But Jackson and the Shotgun Players bring the theory—and the turbulent history, and the revolutionary politics—to life, with an energetic verve that would make even the severe Meyerhold smile.

And the production is wildly popular in Berkeley. Robert Goldsby, cofounder of the experimental Berkeley Stage Company in the seventies, once explained why BSC produced at least one Brecht play a year: "It will always be a hit. Brecht is the Neil Simon of Berkeley." And now Meyerhold, resurrected by Mark Jackson and the Shotgun Players, can join the local pantheon.

There's a lot of good theatre in the Bay Area these days. Triptych, by Irish novelist Edna O'Brien, also runs through January 25, at the Magic Theatre in Fort Mason, San Francisco. It's a powerful triangulation of a man who never appears on stage, outlined by three vivid women, his wife, his mistress, and his daughter. The approach is more Stanislavsky than Meyerhold, though no less theatrical, and what emerges are some painful truths about human relationships and the politics of gender.

In both plays, it's the theatrical experience that makes it all worthwhile. Truth is conveyed, yes, but it's fun! People moving about in the same space as you, at the same time as you, collaborating with your own imagination and experience to create an alternate, evanescent reality. Here's to the stage! Here's to Meyerhold!