#7
New York Times
March 31, 2002
Total Theater, Starring Puppets
By JOHN FREEDMAN

MOSCOW -- CHILDREN in Moscow call the Shadow Theater their favorite.

Critics, enthusiastic about its productions of "Hamlet" and "Swan Lake," call the theater one of Russia's most innovative.

World-class artists, like the Russian theater director Anatoly Vasiliev, the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra and the Russian composer Aleksandr Bakshi, call it home for their latest projects — brief, intense segments in a program titled "The Lilikan Museum of Theatrical Ideas," which will be unveiled at a national theater festival here. (It began last Thursday and runs to April 15.)

Maia Krasnopolskaia, the founder of the Shadow Theater in 1988 with her husband, Ilia Epelbaum, put it this way 20 minutes before a late-January matinee — a puppet performance of Tchaikovsky's mystical fairy-tale opera "Iolanta":

"This is not a puppet theater, an opera theater or a drama theater. It is theater as a way of life, a way of existence, a way of feeling."

An hour after the performance, Mr. Epelbaum was in his office, jokingly describing his efforts to raise the status of puppet theater. Speaking in Russian, like his wife, he said: "Getting Vasiliev to do Molière's `Misanthrope' as a puppet show was a big victory. It ought to raise the prestige of the genre, although I must admit I don't even like puppet theater."

Mr. Epelbaum, a native of Chelyabinsk, a city in south Russia near the Ural Mountains, has lived in Moscow since his student days at the Stroganov art institute. He likes to make quips and to speak plainly on complex subjects.

"I think we should quit breaking art into genres," he said. "Why judge music, painting, dance, theater, puppetry and film by different standards? That's narrow-minded. What's good is good and what is good is what should guide us."

The Shadow Theater, on a nondescript side street about three miles northeast of the Kremlin, is something of a misnomer. Most of its shows, which include shadows of people and inanimate objects, dip into numerous art forms, incorporating painting, live acting and music with stick, string and hand-held puppets. Several recent works have made use of video — recorded tapes as well as video transmissions of events in progress.

"Ilia was a successful commercial artist when he decided to quit and create a theater," said Ms. Krasnopolskaia, 39, who is a trained puppeteer. "His parents were shocked. He was 25 then and earning good money. We made an agreement that if, by the time he turned 30, the theater wasn't a success, we would abandon the idea."

Mr. Epelbaum, who is now 40, took up the tale: "A shadow theater seemed closest to what an artist does on paper. But I have no education in theater and we couldn't hold to the genre for long. I think what best describes us is `visual theater.' Mine is the theater of an artist who begins with visual images and then adds literature, music and other things."

The theater's first productions were straightforward puppet shows, which attracted the attention of international puppet festivals. Soon, the husband and wife team, often with their two children in tow, was touring the world, including appearances in Vancouver, Chicago and Pittsburgh in 1990 and 1991. Eventually, as the theater's reputation grew, it made the transition from a private organization to one that is municipally financed.

These days, it is often easier to see the Shadow Theater's shows outside of Moscow than in it. Immediately upon returning from a festival in the Siberian city of Tomsk in late January, the troupe left for a tour of Spain in February. One period they always spend in Moscow, however, is March and April, during Russia's annual Golden Mask national theater festival. Since 1996, when the festival jury named Mr. Epelbaum best director in the category of puppetry for his show "The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater of Drama, Opera and Ballet in Russia," the Shadow Theater has been a perennial nominee and frequent award winner.

AT this year's Golden Mask, one segment of "The Lilikan Museum of Theatrical Ideas" — the Vasiliev-Epelbaum rendition of "The Misanthrope" — has been nominated in the innovation category rather than the puppetry division, endorsing Mr. Epelbaum's view that his work has taken him into new territory.

"The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater of Drama, Opera and Ballet in Russia" was breathtaking in its conception, scope and detail. Its play-within-a-play — "Two Trees," a raucous mock-Wagnerian opera enacted by two-inch puppets on sticks — was almost an afterthought in what amounted to an elaborate theatrical event, beginning with the arrival of the spectators.

The theater's entrance and foyer were remade into a fantasy land that ostensibly had been transported from the legendary kingdom of Lilikania. For the foyer, Mr. Epelbaum created a chamber imitating a grand opera house lobby with four working puppet video screens (images painted on scrolls were rolled to give the illusion of movement), self-service snack bars, souvenir stands, paintings and sculptures.

After listening to Ms. Krasnopolskaia recite a comical lecture on the history of the Lilikan people and their theater, spectators moved from the lobby into another small room containing a remarkable miniature-scale opera house. With its faux marble columns, the exterior of this building was as elaborate as its interior, which held a mechanical working orchestra and 2,000 minuscule, fashionably dressed spectators. Live spectators were given glimpses of "Two Trees" through latticed windows.

Like everything Mr. Epelbaum and Ms. Krasnopolskaia do, the show undercut pathos, shattered preconceptions and injected a healthy dose of whimsy and novelty into ossified theatrical forms.

Each subsequent production at the Shadow Theater has pushed the envelope further. "Hamlet" mixed scenes from "Don Giovanni," "Eugene Onegin" and "The Seagull" with audience-participation can-cans and just about everything else but Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Another show, whose full title was "P.I. Tchaikovsky. `Swan Lake.' The Opera," was presented as a great historical discovery: the creators informed audiences that they had unearthed the lost opera score for a work that Tchaikovsky subsequently turned into a ballet.

"Swan Lake," like "The Tour of the Lilikan Grand Royal Theater," began in the foyer, this time with a Gypsy musician, a fire, and the death and burial of the traditional Russian puppet Petrushka. After that delightfully chaotic introduction, the audience was treated to a performance in which an actress, Natalia Barannikova, sometimes worked puppets and sometimes stepped onto the forestage to take over the action herself. A crazed pianist, Andrei Semionov, frequently interrupted the goings-on, which concluded with a film clip of the entire cast — puppets and actors — taking curtain calls.

"The creative ideas for shows belong to Ilia," said Ms. Krasnopolskaia. "He sees the artistic image, and every time the form is new. He creates the visual properties and organizes them in space."

Mr. Epelbaum's latest idea is his most ambitious yet. When complete, it will consist of a half-dozen or more 15-minute productions conceived by various famous artists and realized in practical terms by Mr. Epelbaum. As a nod to the Shadow Theater's most famous show, the project bears the overall title of "The Lilikan Museum of Theatrical Ideas."

The museum's first installment is the Vasiliev-Epelbaum interpretation of Molière's "Misanthrope." Mr. Vasiliev, known for his reclusive ways and eminently serious productions at his School of Dramatic Art in Moscow, took the opportunity in this mini-production to laugh not only at audiences and theatrical conventions but at himself. His show ends with the death of a heckling spectator and the total destruction of the theater in a fire.

Soon to come are "Rain After the Deluge," a tale about the destruction of civilization by Mr. Guerra, who wrote some of the best scripts filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and "On `The Seagull,' " a musical mystery by Mr. Bakshi, an innovative composer.

In "Rain After the Deluge," Rome, Paris, New York and Moscow will be depicted "as cities made of matches," Mr. Epelbaum said. "Each, in turn, will be wiped out by a huge swell of water. Bakshi's show will be based on the experimental play by the character Treplev within `The Seagull.' It is an extension of Bakshi's use of sound to describe the unity of the world."

Foremost for Mr. Epelbaum is the notion of breaking down barriers and avoiding ruts. "I am not trained in theater," he said. "And that helps me. I never think, `Can I do this or not?' I just do what needs to be done."