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...