Parallels of Putin and Trump coming to the Alley Theatre?
The Alley Theatre is expected to announce its 2017-18 season later this month. Whether that lineup will include Rajiv Joseph’s painterly, mythical yet explosively pertinent historical drama, “Describe the Night,” is to be seen.
But the fact remains that the Alley Theatre is committed to producing a play that could become the most striking commentary on fascism, truth and Russia to come from the theater world in some time.
In other words: We should all be very, very excited.
“Describe the Night” is based on three historical focal points: The life and work of Soviet-era writer Isaac Babel, the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk that killed most of Poland’s political leadership and the rise of Vladimir Putin. The way the three chapters in Russian history are interwoven in Joseph’s tale is too complicated to boil down, since Joseph uses the intricacies of plot, inheritance and mythology to make some striking suggestions about authoritarianism and where it’s born.
Joseph, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” was in Houston earlier this year to oversee a staged reading of “Describe the Night.” The play is an Alley Theatre commission, which means that, though the Alley hasn’t officially committed to producing it next season, it’s well on track to have a Houston premiere in the future.
“Describe the Night” hits close to home for the modern American, featuring an abrasive regime that discredits journalists and creates, using both force and propaganda, its own form of truth. A central character rises in the ranks of the Russian military and becomes one loosely based off of Putin, but his personality might remind the audience of another, more American political figure. “You act like a little boy, surrounding yourself with your house of lies,” someone accuses this leader.
Because the play is in development, it’s too early to properly review “Describe the Night.” Still, it says a lot that a post-show audience in February during the Alley All New Festival — which featured staged readings of Joseph’s play, along with several other plays likely slated for an Alley production — bristled with excitement after hearing “Describe the Night.”
During a festival in which plays explored gay marriage legislation (“The Cake” by Bekah Brunstetter), Edward Snowden (“Roan @ The Gates” by Christina Gorman) and race in America (“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Kenneth Lin), how strange that the most relevant story was in fact about a relatively-obscure Russian writer who died in 1940.
“That’s why I don’t write about current issues,” Joseph said during the post-show talk. The issues themselves change so much that any play might become outdated in 4-5 years. Instead, he prefers to delve into history, which he finds circular. There, in the past, is a treasure trove of lessons that remain pertinent as regimes rise and fall and the political pendulum swings left and right. Look back, he said, we see those same mistakes.