Texas Detente

By T. E. Kalem

ECHELON by Mikhail Roschin

The opening night began with an unusual ceremony. As the audience rose quietly to its feet, a sole trumpeter onstage played first the Soviet national anthem and then that of the U.S. This salute to theatrical detente came about through the zealous effort of Nina Vance, founder and longtime head of Houston's Alley Theater. On a cultural exchange mission to the U.S.S.R. in May 1977, Vance was particularly impressed by Mikhail Roschin's Echelon and the way in which it was directed by Galina Volchek, head of Moscow's Sovremennik Theater and a noted actress as well. Vance prevailed upon Volchek to restage the play in Houston, and this is the first time in U.S. theatrical history that an American audience has had an opportunity to see a Russian play in English as it appears before audiences in the Soviet Union.

Since the action occurs around 1941, the two audiences react in vastly different ways. The U.S. memory bank of World War II does not contain the traumatic wound dealt the Russians who suffered casualties in the millions at German hands. The valor, the burden and exhilaration of common sacrifice experienced in Russia during those years simply did not exist on the American home front. Thus the bruising flood of memory that Russians bring to Echelon can come from U.S. audiences only in spurts.

Roschin can touch the heart, but he also smothers its beat in interminable bouts of rhetoric. If a character says, "We are all in this together," rest assured you have not heard the line for the last time. He can achieve piercing moments of self-revelation, only to resort to vaudevillian bits of bawdry or sink into bathos.

Echelon is dedicated to Roschin's mother. As a boy (he is now 44), he rode with his mother on one of the special trains allocated by the Soviets to evacuate women and children to the east. An ingenious boxlike contraption, open-sided toward the audience, creates the impression of a cattle car in which the animals happen to be human.

With few exceptions, this is a train of women without men. Some are inconsolable, some lapse into abrasively catty humor. The car commander is Galina (Bettye Fitzpatrick), and she has more of the instincts of a den mother than a party official. Her chief worry is Katya (Cristine Rose), who spends most of the play catatonically desolated by the absence of her husband. Galina's chief ally in rallying group morale is Masha (Bella Jarrett), a gutsy fighter who can issue a pep talk that would blister a slacking football team.

For raunchy comic relief there is Lavra (Lillian Evans), the self-styled former "playgirl of Moscow" from whom a few generous swigs of vodka can elicit a tipsy ode to the joys of sex. Her opposite number is prim, spartan Iva (Lenore Har ris), a dance-exercise buff who seems to revel in single blessedness until, in a passionate and poignant outburst, she reveals its lonely curse.

Volchek's stage effects are admirable, and one is memorable. At one point a barbed-wire barrier must be erected to keep desperate would-be riders off the train. The barrier is set up, and then, with a slow, ghastly insistence, the train ad vances on it until all the women in the boxcar seem to be impaled on the wire.

For one blinding instant, it is an image of the slaughter of all the world's innocents in all the world's wars.

--T.E. Kalem

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