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“Dostoevsky’s Greatest Work put on Stage”

Judging from the joyous festivities on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, crowded with eager shoppers and commuters, one wouldn’t assume that right down the block the culmination of Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life was about to be presented on stage. Having read The Brothers Karamazov, a behemoth of a novel written after the author’s incarceration and death sentencing, I have to admit that I remained rather skeptical that any production could accurately capture 900 pages of profound insight into the nature of doubt and faith, choice and responsibility, good and evil, and human psychology that Dostoyevsky examined in the novel. Right across from Michigan Avenue, the Looking Glass was a modest theater, tucked away inside an old water tower that appeared humble and small from the outside, closer in appearance to an old parish more-so than a contemporary theater. When I entered and saw the stage, I was absolutely exhilarated. The room was no larger than forty feet wide and across, perhaps the size of two high school classrooms. The production was to be performed in the round, with a small audience of about eighty to a hundred people that, even if seated farthest from the stage, would only have been about ten feet from the nearest actor or actress. A minimalist set lay out on the stage, having only a foot-high podium with a sofa in the center, a small hut in the corner, a table with a bottle of cognac adjacent to the house, and then a window across the stage. I sat down in my seat, a majority of my skepticism dispelled by the rather unorthodox and intimate set installation.

It must be said right from the beginning that the audience was almost void of any children. A large majority of the small crowd seemed like they could belong to any number of intellectual circles, and it was a pleasant surprise to see that mostly everybody in the theater had been drawn to the production because they had read the novel. Although a bit older and seeming somewhat intimidating by their mannerisms, the crowd was friendly enough. I engaged in several conversations that resulted in “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve read the book.”

The play began promptly at 2:00 PM. The lights blacked out in the small theater house and the music roared triumphantly from every corner of the room. Sound effects and music were both essential elements to director Heidi Stillman’s artistic vision. In the corner, the small hut began to rotate as mist filled the stage and epic orchestral music thundered . The audience’s first sight was Fyodor Karamazov engaging in drunken debaucheries on a table with harlots as three young boys faced against the audience rebelliously. As the shack made a full rotation, the three young boys had been replaced by three young men, the Brothers Karamazov in the flesh. By the time the entrance was over, all skepticism had been replaced by sheer excitement by the brilliance that was unfolding itself only ten feet away from me.

The first scene was a depiction of the Elder Zossima, played by Maury Cooper, and his initial moderation of the Karamazov family’s dispute over an inheritance. Fyodor Karamazov, played by Craig Spiddle, met with his three sons: the innocent and tender Alyosha (played by Doug Hara), the logical and skeptical Ivan (played by Philip R. Smith), and the sensuous Dmitri (played by Joe Sikora). Such a scene did not take place in Dostoyevsky’s novel until several chapters in. One had to take into account that an adaptation of the novel had to cover action, not back story. The ability of the producer and director to incorporate the background information into the character’s actions was profoundly astute.

Soon, the family began to scream at one another, a common incident for the novel. Such wild confrontations were typical throughout Dostoyevsky’s study into the family dynamics of the Karamazov’s, and to see such tension acted on stage was quite exciting.

The scene changes were well executed and hardly distracting. It was very rare that any person would be mindlessly moving something out of the way to make room for someone else. More than often, the character involved in the set change would only take away a small prop or two, and the transition would be important to the next scene.

The director’s need to cut a 900 page novel into a three and a half hour play was quite evident in the cutting out of excessive dialogue that Dostoyevsky employed for the sake of his paycheck; however, it is important to note that the job was well done. All the character’s intentions were laid on the stage and there were no holes in the dialogue or plot that contradicted the novel’s purpose. The scenes skipped ahead a few hundred pages in the novel to a scene where a set of schoolboys are throwing stones at a lone boy where Alyosha intervenes. There were a few children thespians in the cast that acted nearly as well as the adults, lacking the power and somber understanding of Dostoyevsky that the more experienced thespians possessed. The potential was quite evident.

For the next hour or so, scenes played out in a thoughtful succession as the framework for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov was laid. Dostoyevsky concerned himself with the dichotomy of faith and doubt in the work that manifested itself in several conversations between Ivan and Alyosha. Simply sitting at a table, sipping fish soup and drinking cognac, the two actors were able to embody deep philosophical questions of the suffering of innocent children, the existence of an afterlife and immortality, and the moral responsibility of human beings.

Other scenes sparked great interest for anyone in the theater, even if they were unfamiliar with Dostoyevsky’s novel. The entrances of Katerina and Grushenka were well-produced, and often Ivan or Dmitri would be telling a story at the table while action went on behind them. At a particular scene, five couples began to come out to re-enact a ballroom scene where they danced around the podium while Ivan gave an epic soliloquy on his first encounter with Katerina.

There were a wide variety of scenes that stuck on in my mind, but unlike many contemporary plays where there is at least some ‘filler’, “The Brothers Karamazov” was solid and thoughtful from beginning to end. Anyone having read the novel would be looking forward to a few select scenes, however, and one included Ivan Karamazov’s poem entitled “The Grand Inquisitor”.

Some claim that the Grand Inquisitor is the main character of the entire novel, even though he only exists for a few pages within a span of nearly one thousand. Ivan tells Alyosha the story he thought up to ponder the meaning of life, choice, and faith. His poem told of Jesus Christ, who returned to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition and walked through a local town, healing the sick and raising the dead. He was detained and questioned by a man of great faith, The Grand Inquisitor himself. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that He should have given in to the three temptations that He was faced with in the desert, for if He would have, humanity would be free of the knowledge of good and evil, free from strife, from pain, from despair. He tells Him how human beings are weak, far weaker than Jesus imagined when He died for their sins on the cross. He ends with the bold statement that, if anyone is fit for the fires of hell, it is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus simply rises from the window where he sits and listens and kisses the Grand Inquisitor. Such an incident was well acted out and certainly lived up to my expectations of such a scene.

A few things can be said about the different aspects of the production, and all of them are void of negativity or criticism. The lighting was perfect. There was often a scene with one or two different actions being performed on opposite sides of the room and all that drew the attention to one or another was a lone light. Sometimes, a lamp would descend down to the stage, illuminating a small radius onto where a character was speaking.

The sound effects and music gave the production its power. The music, although possessing a modern instrumentation of an electric guitar and string ensemble, employed harmonic minor keys to create an ethnic, Gypsy-esque tone to the play. Dissonance was used frequently to spark a moment of tension and release in the audience. A few times, such as the bludgeoning of Grigory by Dmitri Karamazov upon the ladder involved a slow-motion acting sequence and an entire room filled with the bass-driven pounding of a failing heartbeat. The sound system in the theater was beyond excellent, and the music itself would be enjoyable to listen to on any day.

The audience loved the play from beginning to end. Dostoyevsky had a way of incorporating humor and irony in his novel that came out through the acting. Laughs were heard throughout the play, and towards the end, when the young child Illyshua is being buried by his bereaved, screaming father, who clings to his small boots and screams “But where are his little feet?!”, I witnessed a few people in the audience shed tears.

In retrospect, there is absolutely nothing negative about the play that I can say. I am the first to admit I am rather critical with many things, and it is very rare that I come across something that I deem a perfect work of art, but this rendition and adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov was absolutely perfect. It would make Fyodor Dostoyevsky smile in his grave.

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