‘Idiots Karamazov’ / Zany Musical

 

Play: ‘Idiots Karamazov,’ Zany Musical

By Mel Gussow
Nov. 11, 1974

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“The Idiots Karamazov,” which opened last night at the Yale Repertory Theater, is, more or legs, a musical comedy based on “The Brothers Karamazov,” which is enough to make Dostoyevsky turn over in his grave. Actually there is nothing grave about this antic undertaking. A travesty by Christopher Durang and Albert F. Innaurato, two recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama, it is as precocious as it sounds — but it also has moments of comic inspiration.

The authors, are Yale's response to Tom Stoppard and Vladimir Nabokov. The script is riddled with literary allusions and intellectual jokes. This is a lampoon not only of Doystoyevsky, but also of all Western literature.

The star role is the trarialator, Constance Garnett. As portrayed by Meryl Streep, she is a daft old witch (the play is daft, too) in a wheelchair, attended by a butler named Ernest, who eventually blows his brains out. Absent mindedly, Miss Garnett leads us through the Karamazov saga, offering absurd footnotes and marginalia (such as the conjugation of the verb Karamazov).

The brothers’ mother is named Mary Tyrone Karamazov. She wanders in from another play, shooting dope and confusing the saintly Alyosha with the sickly Edmund Tyrone. Linda Atkinson's performance is delirious, briefly and maniacally lapsing into an exact imitation of Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone.

The brothers are more Marx than Karamazov, four pratfalling mad Russians (Charles Levin, R. Nersesian, Stephen Rowe and Christopher Durang as Alyosha). There appear to be more students in this cast than in other Yale productions—with the noticeable exception of Jeremy Geidt, who doubles as a pederastic priest and a samovar. (He is a very effective samovar.)

Dostoyevsky's Karamazov brothers enter like Chekhov's sisters, singing, “We gotta get to Moscow,” and Grushenka (a rousing performance by Franchelle Stewart Dorn) musically describes her romantic, predicament, “Fathers and sons. I'm in love with fathers and sons.” Eventually Alyosha is transformed into a pop star and plays the Pal ace, accompanied by a chorus of crazy ladies, Constance Garnett, Grushenka, Anais Pnin and Djuna Burnes. Later there is a send‐up of L. Frank Baum, “Totem and Taboo and Toto Too,” and Miss Garnett gets to yodel, solo.

Everything is twitted, even the Yale Theater itself, with scenery removed by a blackshrouded stagehand, a creepy leftover from the company's last production, Andrzej Wajda's version of “The Possessed.” One might, say that “The Idiots Karamazov” is the flip side of Dostoyevsky.

I liked the all‐nonsense attitude, but some of the humor seemed too facile. The evening needs refining and William Peter's direction needs tightening. For one thing, instead of building to a zany climax, the show dribbles off into a recitation by Miss Garnett of famous first lines (from Joyce to Melville) as if the playwrights felt a need to impress us. I was already impressed—with their wit as well as with their scholarship.

THE NEW YORK TIMES