From Russia (to the ART), with love

By Catherine Foster, Globe Staff, 9/7/2003

CAMBRIDGE -- For director Kama Ginkas, life in the theater -- and life itself -- has always been about obstacles.

In "Lady With a Lapdog," a story by Anton Chekhov that he's adapted and is directing for the American Repertory Theatre, a middle-age philanderer falls hard for a young married woman in the resort of Yalta. For the first time in his life he feels truly alive. But since neither can leave his or her spouse, he's miserable.

"This is about two people who want to live," says Ginkas, 62, a balding, white-bearded, vigorous-looking man, during a lunch break. "When he fell in love he was born. He was born and he was killed by love. To live means to overcome obstacles. In our lives we do everything possible to overcome obstacles or not have them at all."

As a Jewish director in the repressive Soviet Union, Ginkas faced obstacles that were mostly external. Through persistence he's basically kicked them all down -- or waited them out. Now he's considered one of Russia's most innovative stage artists and is directing an American cast in the United States for the first time. But getting to that point took more than 30 years.

Born in the Jewish ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania, in May 1941, six weeks before the Nazi invasion of the Baltic states, Ginkas was one of only a handful of the city's children to survive. As a toddler, he was smuggled out and then sheltered in a variety of places, including the home of a dying poet and a Catholic orphanage for retarded children.

A few years after graduating from an arts institute in Leningrad in 1967, he was named artistic director of a regional theater in Krasnovarsk, Russia, where he rankled city bureaucrats with his now-legendary productions of "Hamlet" and "Fahrenheit 451." He and his wife, director Genrietta Yanovskaya, returned to Leningrad, where several of his productions were cut or closed because of pressure from authorities.

His fortunes improved when they moved to Moscow, and Yanovskaya began running the city's New Generation Theater in 1987. His 1988 dramatization of Feodor Dostoevski's "Notes From Underground" stirred controversy with its full-frontal nudity. Still, his star was rising. While doing more work in Moscow, he was invited to stage productions in Helsinki.

But it wasn't until the mid-'90s, 30 years after he began in the theater, that he really hit his stride. In 18 months, between 1994 and 1996, he directed five shows -- in Russia, Finland, and Germany.

Then, in 1997, Ginkas had a massive heart attack after doing "Macbeth" in Helsinki. Did he take a hiatus, mull the meaning of life, reassess his priorities?

"No!" he says. "The following year I staged five shows in one year, four for the stage and one for TV."

Now he's a cultural icon, a media darling, a highly sought-after teacher of master classes, a director whose productions tour European festivals.

In a 36-year career, he's returned again and again to the works of Dostoevski and Chekhov. "Because they're geniuses," he says. "Because they tell us more about life than anyone else. When I read Dostoyevski, he's writing about me. Chekhov, he knows me, he's writing everything about me. . . . That's why I am trying to say what I know about me. In the audience they will recognize themselves in what I say about me." He often chooses poetry or prose works -- even historical documents -- to adapt to the stage. "Adapt" is used loosely: In his "K.I. From `Crime,' " adapted by his son, Daniil Gink, from "Crime and Punishment," he tossed most of the plot, leaving one incidental character, Katerina Ivanovna.

"Most of [Ginkas's] adult life has been devoted to making theater in defiance of various forces, from a hostile political climate to the occasional complacency of popular taste," writes John Freedman, theater critic for the Moscow Times and author of several books on Russian theater.

Ginkas's characters are likely to be provocative and raw -- to stand up buck naked or break the fourth wall to harangue audience members.

He calls his theater "physiological" -- meaning he wants to provoke reactions in people that bypass the intellect and shoot straight for the jugular of feeling. He wants you to be moved, squirm, blurt out laughing in the middle of horror.

"I don't trust intellect much," he says. "Often intellect is just a defense from spontaneous interaction with life."

Ginkas, who teaches at the Moscow Art Theatre School, is not one for dazzling technical effects: no video, no lasers, no dry smoke. He does use simple devices to provoke reactions, however, such as the snapping of wooden hangers to suggest necks cracking. And he chooses odd spaces for his performances. One was done in a theater's stairwell, with the audience seated in the second-floor lobby.

"There's an opinion that Kama can only do his work in the space of an elevator or a bathroom, because a lot of my productions over the past 15 years have been done in very small spaces," Ginkas says. "People who say that want to ignore the fact that I staged `Macbeth' on a big stage."

The ART's production, scheduled to open Sept. 13, is the fourth Ginkas has done of "Lady With a Lapdog" -- all with a seaside setting. One, done in Turkey, was performed in a room painted Turkish blue. Another was performed on the balcony of a theater. "Imagine the edge of the balcony is where the sea starts," he says. "All the actors jump from the balcony into the sea."

He's brought that sense of structural daring to the ART as well. The production's set, designed by Ginkas's longtime collaborator Sergey Barkhin, is unlike anything the ART has ever done before. The stage is a thin ribbon of "beach" that takes up the full width of the house. The first section of seats has been ripped out to accommodate the set. What's behind it is another oddity: a large blue box containing a white boat suspended in space. The audience sits smack up against the edge of the stage.

"The people in the first rows are basically onstage," says Ginkas. "I like to confuse or mix what's going on onstage with what's going on in the house. It's very important with me that things go on with the audience. So Barkhin and I, we pushed our action very much forward."

In person, Ginkas is good-spirited, engaging, and quick to laugh. In print, however, he has described himself as "harsh, insistent and impatient" as a director. When his two leads in the ART production, Stephen Pelinski and Elisabeth Waterston, who have sat in on the interview, are asked if they would describe him that way, they laugh and look at each other.

Ginkas laughs, too. "See, I'm a pussycat," he says.

Waterston, dark-haired and grave, says, "Sometimes it could be a terrifying problem, except that I would always say he was right in demanding of us. There's so much meaning that needs to be carried by each movement and each second of the show. That makes for a greater demand to be precise and to fill every moment."

Pelinski, a veteran actor who has played the leads in four Chekhov plays, was working at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis when the auditions took place. He flew east on his day off to audition.

"I left an hour after we met, and it changed me," he says. "I went back to the Guthrie facing eight more shows, knowing that I had barely scratched the surface. It was the most painful experience of my life."

"I've worked 23 years with many different directors, directors equally brilliant but demeaning," he adds. "This work feeds the mind, body, spirit in a way seldom experienced in the professional theater. It's one of those epiphany experiences one can only achieve a handful of times."

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.