MARRIAGE: Gogol Dancing

by Nikolai Gogol

Adapted by Barbara Field

Nikolai Gogol had a mind like a trap door. Anyone venturing on the deceptive surfaces of his works must be prepared to lose his footing at unexpected moments and be sent plummeting into radical alterations of consciousness. Realism shifts to fantasy; the prosaic turns mystical; solid citizens stumble unwittingly into topsy-turvy land.

Onstage, Gogol's characters look naturalistic enough, even transparently accessible, but it is the unseen company they keep—God, the devil and Russia—that lends them the strange dimensions of figures in fables. At one point in Marriage, a key character breaks into a paroxysm of laughter about the absurdity of just about everything. Then his face takes on an ashen look of desolation, and he says, "God have mercy on our sinning souls." Gogol uses such juxtapositions to go beyond tragedy or comedy into a realm that might be called cosmic farce.

That specific tone is admirably captured in a luminous and hilarious revival of the seldom done Marriage at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. For the occasion the Guthrie imported Russian Director Anatoli Efros to stage the play, and his work is a marvel. Communicating through interpreters, he seems to have established an intuitive rapport with the cast. The actors get under the skin of an alien culture and, with seamless ensemble work, translate Russian characters and responses in supple body English.

Gogol produced the play in 1842, and the plot has been a staple in many lands: the comic trials and tribulations of marriage brokers and their clients. Fiokla (Barbara Bryne) is an accomplished matchmaker, but she has something of a problem bride-to-be in Agafya (Cara Duff-MacCormick). Agafya is a mer chant's daughter and a bit of a ninny. The three suitors Fiokla lines up are chauvinist piglets. Ivan Pavlovich Poach'tegg (Jon Cranney) is a blustery, pompous bureaucrat. Poach'tegg (sometimes translated Omelet) is only after Agafya's property, a two-story brick house, the walls of which he thumps to test their soundness. Zhevakin (Randall Duk Kim) is a diminutive ex-naval officer who dreams of duplicating the girls of Sicily with their "rosebud mouths" and cushiony flesh. Then there is a snob of an ex-infantry officer, Anuchkin (Jake Dengel), who, though devoid of social graces himself, insists that any bride of his must speak French.

The yeasty comic genius of the play rests with a totally reluctant fourth suitor, a court councilor named Podkoliosin (Peter Michael Goetz). Russian inertia runs like psychic sludge through Podkoliosin's veins. He is a precursor of Goncharov's famed character Oblomov, who could barely make the effort to get out of bed. When it comes to marriage, Podkoliosin can scarcely contemplate getting into bed. But he is sponsored and goaded by his friend Kochkariev (Alvin Epstein), a born busybody. Epstein, in his first season as artistic director of the Guthrie, animatedly embodies the temperament of a man who can always double his energies as long as he is managing someone else's affairs. Finally, Goetz's Podkoliosin, the soul of skittishness, i brought to bay, but in a bachelor's desperate bid for freedom, he jumps perilously out of the second-story window of the marriage site.