A Russian Theatre Director in Exile

In Krymov’s first season of expatriation, he went to Latvia, France, Israel. State-run theatres, with their year-round companies of actors, predictable funding, and, in some cases, Russian-speaking audiences, still want Krymov’s heady mixture of literary elaboration and toybox visual invention. But he chose to be based in New York. He speaks English; he has friends here; he has taught and worked on the East Coast. Still, it’s been a bit of an adjustment. When he asks for a few chandeliers in a state-funded theatre in Riga, they materialize. In the U.S., he wakes up thinking about how to raise cash for his tiny production, one twenty-dollar bill at a time. (The group has raised many of those twenty-dollar bills, actually. Thanks to small donations, two large gifts, and foundation grants, the budget is now four hundred thousand dollars, and well on its way to being covered. The entire run of “Big Trip” is sold out.)

In many of his works, Krymov adopts the standpoint of a young boy: “Seryozha,” his 2018 adaptation of “Anna Karenina,” was named for Anna’s son, Sergei; his pointedly political rewriting of Chekhov’s “Seagull,” from 2021, is titled “Kostik,” a diminutive of Konstantin, the play’s callow hero. It’s possible that Krymov identifies as a perpetual child because so many in Russia think of him as the child of his famous parents, the director Anatoly Efros (born in what is now Ukraine, in 1925) and the critic Natalya Krymova. Efros, in particular, was an era-defining figure in nineteen-sixties Moscow, during the Khrushchev thaw, and in the return to rigidity that followed. He was a subtle modernist interested in characters’ psychology (an emphasis on the individual psyche had been ideologically repressed under strict Communist dicta), and he helped to popularize the rehearsal use of “études,” or independent improvisational studies, a technique devised by Konstantin Stanislavski in the nineteen-thirties.

In an étude, actors are asked to devise actions or sketches of behavior supertextually: how Hamlet might behave at his uncle’s wedding buffet, for instance. Elaborate game-structures also underpin Krymov’s process, and there’s a sense that the script may never be fixed: “The entire company is an endless improv,” Eliot says. “We’re all following the lead conductor of the improvisation.” In the La Mama rehearsal studio, I watched his company spend five minutes blowing on a feather, trying to keep it in the air, to represent the communal effort and delicate silliness of theatre. There are other, sadder parallels between father and son. In the eighties, Efros led the Taganka Theatre, after its founder, the theatre titan and defector Yuri Lyubimov, had his Soviet citizenship stripped from him. The authorities erased Lyubimov’s name from his productions, as they would do sixty years later, with Krymov’s. Efros’s ensuing conflict with the Taganka company —according to one of his biographers, James Thomas, there were antisemitic aggressions against him—may have led to his final heart attack and death.

Krymov’s grandfather, his father’s father, insisted he be given his mother’s last name rather than his father’s because he “was afraid of recurring waves of antisemitism,” Krymov says. Krymov did not immediately follow his father into directing, choosing instead to become a set designer; Krymov got a degree in scenography from the Moscow Art Theatre School in 1976, and designed more than a hundred productions—including many for his father—in his first career. Then, when Efros died in 1987, when he was sixty-one, Krymov abandoned the theatre for more than ten years to paint.

In 2002, Krymov, almost fifty, joined the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts as a professor of scenography, and directed his first play. (It was “Hamlet,” professionally cast and coolly received.) While at the school, he pivoted, forming his signature Krymov Lab; his design students acted as performers and puppeteers. For the nearly two decades since, his theatrical works have often included a graveside moment or a cortège: there’s the ashes ceremony in “Everyone Is Here”; “Tararaboombia” features an infinite funeral parade for Chekhov, staged on a conveyor belt; “Opus No. 7” contains a surreal wake for the composer Shostakovich; and “Death of a Giraffe” creates a knock-kneed animal onstage out of pipes and cardboard, asks the audience to love it, and then buries it.

I asked Krymov why so many of his works revolve around funerals. “I remember when I started to paint—because I was a painter for many years—it was after my father’s death,” he said. “I started to paint funerals in different compositions, different fantasies. It was probably because of the very strong shock that I experienced during that time, and, somehow, it jumped over into my subconscious.”

In the winter of 2022, Krymov and his wife woke up in New York to smoke in their apartment, which had caught on fire from a suspected electrical fault. After trying to fight the flames, Krymov spent several days in a medical coma, as doctors treated him for smoke inhalation and burns. His wife and friends didn’t know if he would survive. He shrugs when he talks about it. He dealt with it the way he always deals with trauma: this summer, he went to Klaipėda, Lithuania, and devised a production borrowing from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” based on the act in which the sisters take in their neighbors after a fire.

Even in translation, his work is referential and allegorical, but the world he left behind in 2022 understood his references. “Tararaboombia” paraded characters from Chekhov’s plays past the audience, but it also included sly jokes, such as a train car marked “oysters.” How many people here would know, as a Russian theatregoer once would have, that Chekhov’s body was shipped to Moscow in a refrigerated railway carriage? An important part of Russian theatre is its stratigraphic effect. From their school days, audiences are steeped in the meanings and changing interpretations of theatrical texts, which allows them to read a production as a series of layered transparencies. At New York’s City Center, I once saw a Russian production of “Eugene Onegin,” by Alexander Pushkin, directed by the Lithuanian Rimas Tuminas, that baffled me—one actor was playing a rabbit, and I finally had to ask a Russian seatmate about it. Legend has it that Pushkin saw a rabbit in the road as he was on his way to participate in the doomed Decembrist Revolt; he thought that it was a bad omen, so he turned back, saving his life. So a show’s jokes and talmudic references might well stay opaque, if you don’t know both the text and the commentary around the text.

Because Krymov’s work primarily operates through image—the critic Viktor Beryozkin grouped him with other highly visual directors like Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor in “the theatre of the artist”—it has been received well in New York despite the audience’s lack of shared literary context. “Opus No. 7” came to St. Ann’s Warehouse, in 2013, where it was rapturously received. There was a time when you could see quite a bit of work by Russian directors in New York: Piotr Fomenko’s “War and Peace” came to Lincoln Center in 2004; the Foundry helped Kama Ginkas restage “K.I. from Crime,” an elaboration on a moment from “Crime and Punishment” put on in a midtown freight entrance, in 2005; Lev Dodin brought several of his epic, elegiac productions to Lincoln Center and Brooklyn Academy of Music, most recently in 2018. But it didn’t take a war or a pandemic for that contact to lessen—such cultural exchange was already dwindling in the wake of increasingly stringent visa requirements and fading institutional support for overseas work.

“Pushkin ‘Eugene Onegin’ in our own words,” the first part of the La Mama diptych, begins with a band of travelling Russian players, grumbling and frustrated with their performing conditions. When Krymov spoke to his cast in April, before they spent the summer apart, he tried to explain to them how to play these Russian immigrants. “I know what it means to be an émigré,” he told them. “I know but I won’t share. It’s scary. It’s like you’re standing like this and behind”—he mimed a cliff at his heels—“everything has dropped away.”

The audience receives puppets that look like children, which sit on their laps. The troupe talks directly to these loaned-out, artificial boys and girls, explaining everything from what a ballerina does to who Pushkin was, which turns the event into a kind of children’s educational theatre. “Eugene Onegin,” of course, isn’t really for kids. It’s a sorrowful nineteenth-century epic about the impossibility of recovering the past. The jaded aristocrat Onegin spurns the affection of a country girl, Tatyana, and then, years later, reëncounters her, now the wife of a general, in the soulless glitter of high society. She rejects him, though she loves him, mourning her lost innocence. The puppet-children allow the audience to watch the show as if through children’s eyes, vicariously experiencing, at least dimly, the sensation that Tatyana says has been lost forever. In the nineteenth century, the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky called the novel in verse an “encyclopedia of Russian life,” and the view hasn’t changed much since—Tatyana’s despair and nostalgia are still central to how Russians see themselves.

There’s a hint of defensiveness in staging this now, of course. Russian culture is being reëvaluated and challenged as part of global anger about the invasion. When I asked a friend and theatre critic, who has been a passionate advocate for Krymov’s work in the past, to speak with me about his career, he refused even to discuss him, pointing me instead to Ukrainian theatremakers. (Even fictional Russians are too radioactive for some creators: the author Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her period novel “The Snow Forest,” citing Ukrainian sensitivities.) Is there a place for Russian theatre? “The desire to destroy everything Russian on a national basis is also nationalism,” Krymov wrote, when I asked him about whether he was sensitive to these protests. He sees the work that the Lab is doing as hybrid—Russian theatre mixed with all the other influences that have immigrated into the room. Yury Urnov, one of the artistic directors of the Wilma Theatre and also a Russian-born theatre director, has struggled with just this: “It’s a very painful moment to associate yourself with Russia, but then dissociating is dishonest,” he says. In Krymov’s work, one encounters a “matryoshka of contexts,” Urnov says, which can be understood “in the context of this company, in the context of the war, in the context of his immigration, or—whatever it is, I don’t know how to formally name it—immigration. Exile.”

Elizabeth Stahlmann, an actor who followed Krymov from the Yale Drama School, plays Tatyana, and she says that when Krymov first showed “Onegin” to the new Lab, he acted out the entire play, reading the script and demonstrating the blocking, playing all the parts. Toward the end, Tatyana delivers a monologue. “It’s one of the only times in the play that we actually use Pushkin’s words,” Stahlmann says. “So he sat down, and he gives this monologue in Russian, with Tatyana [Khaikin] translating—and he transforms. He’s an incredible actor, and he starts crying. It’s about leaving. For him, it was about not being able to go back, not being able to go back to Russia.” Then Stahlmann quoted Krymov reciting Tatyana’s speech: “That’s where my parents are buried. I will never see their graves again.” She, like many actors before her, was discovering that she would be playing a version of her director onstage.

“And then he goes—‘O.K., you do it now.’ ” ♦