Dina Goder. There is nothing to focus on

It seems that by the end of January theatrical life is beginning to improve. Otherwise, the “best ten performances of the season” sign remains almost empty. There’s nothing to put in there: most of the premieres are simply melancholy. There are such lean years. Now Faulkner’s performance from The Snuff Box can be included there.

In fact, they don’t perform Faulkner at all in the theater. And rightly so - he is anti-theatrical. It’s not that nothing happened in his novels, but it all seems to be littered with stones - only an indistinct, dreary noise can be heard. Dreams, fears, passions, thoughts about God - everything turns into suppressed fragments of speech, muttering, born under stones and unable to get out. It is impossible to set this. I have only seen one performance based on Faulkner in my life - a long time ago, Sergei Zhenovach staged his diploma “The Sound and the Fury” at that first, famous Fomenkov course. All the current stars of the “Workshop” played there, and they also invited several younger ones from the Shchukin School. I must say, it was an excellent performance, but, among other things, there was an amazing thing in it, almost a trick: in the first act the actors - without any short pants, bows and stupid lisps - played small children. Something suddenly happened with their plasticity, manner of speaking, reactions - and they became children: they argued, sulked at each other, conducted their funny intrigues, and then just as suddenly - they turned out to be adults again.

There is nothing like that in the story “When I Die” . There is nothing to make a focus out of. This is the story of how the mother of a large Bundren family from Faulkner's famous Yoknapatawpha died, before her death she made her husband promise to bury her not nearby, but in the city, near her relatives. And about how a father with four sons and a daughter spent more than a week traveling in a cart with a coffin to the cemetery. How they got into a river flood and fished out a drowned coffin with a body from the water, and then rescued it from a burning barn, how they drove away vultures that flocked to the smell of rotting meat. How the eldest son, a carpenter, broke his leg and was carried to the cemetery on the lid of a coffin, the middle son, whom everyone considered abnormal, became an arsonist, the youngest drilled the entire lid of the coffin so that his mother could breathe, and accidentally drilled into her face. The seventeen-year-old daughter was looking in pharmacies for a medicine to get rid of pregnancy, and another middle one, adopted from the priest, a lazy person and a scolder, pulled her mother’s body out of the water and fire, just as she had imagined before her death.

The 1930 story was written by Faulkner as an alternation of monologues interrupting each other, merging into an alarming hum, and Mindaugas Karbauskis , who staged the play, preserved these confused, torn and endlessly repeated words almost completely. It is amazing that the Bundren family - tongue-tied, gray, as if covered with earth - their poverty-stricken neighbors, for whom two dollars is a lot of money, and other wretched inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha, are the actors of the Snuff Box. The very ones who in other performances seemed almost to death to be loved by the audience and could not utter a word without showing off, suddenly became quiet and concentrated. It’s not that they showed miracles of self-denial, but they did enough for some spectators, not seeing the familiar “fun,” to leave during intermission, while others froze, on alert.

We saw that the very young Karbauskis, a student of Fomenko, who graduated from GITIS two and a half years ago, was fascinated by death. Under his gaze, all classical literature turns out to be an existential drama. Death was the main event and essence of his first performance at the Moscow Art Theater - Gogol's "Old World Landowners". In essence, the universally adored pictures of gluttony had no meaning for him. The main thing began at the moment when the thin Pulcheria Ivanovna quietly left the stage on tiptoe, and the huge fat man Afanasy Ivanovich, simple-minded and crafty as a child, froze, as if all the life had flowed out of him. So in Karbauskis’s new play, the doctor who came to the dying Addie Bundren said: “I remember when I was young I thought that death was a bodily phenomenon; now I know that it is just a function of consciousness - the consciousness of those who experience loss. Nihilists say, that it is the end; the zealous Protestants are the beginning; in fact, it is no more than the departure of one tenant or family from a city or home." Karbauskis also staged Wilder's "The Long Christmas Lunch" about death - the most ascetic performance of the Snuff Box, where the life of several generations was represented as an endless family dinner in the presence of a silent woman, who, one by one, led the characters through an open door, from where no one returned.

In the play based on Faulkner, Karbauskis understood something new about death. She turned out to be ordinary and not scary. Something that constantly lives nearby, like the death of animals and plants next to a villager. “My mother became a fish,” says the youngest, “and swam away.” It seems that the life of the tormented Addie continues when her husband tells the children: “If she leaves before you return, she will be offended” - or: “She will want to go (to the cemetery) right away.” The Bandrens, with dull peasant tenacity, take their mother to the cemetery, not horrified by the misfortunes, but only feeling the obligation to overcome them: they drag her either burnt or wet tiny body back and forth in their arms. A thin, pale mother - Evdokia Germanova - (they say about her: “small under the blanket, like a bunch of rotten twigs”), dressed in a white nightgown and cap, with a coffin pillow funny tied to her head, quietly walks among the children, looking into their eyes. And this dead pity for those who remained to live - narrow-minded, poor, betraying each other and still inseparable, like shoots of one root - is the most painful and acute feeling that remains after Karbauskis’ performance. Faulkner does not have this pity; it was born in the theater, but its quiet sound flows into the tongue-tied and desperate roar of the story “As I Lay Dying.”