A Gulag Mouse

Reviewed by Bill Raden
Sacred Fools Theater Company
Through May 15

Arthur M. Jolly’s unrelentingly grim, 2010 drama A Gulag Mouse is hardly the first work to tackle the subject of life in extremis amid the brutal conditions of an internment camp. The global cataclysm known as the 20th century — which included two world wars and the genocidal mass atrocities of Hitler and Stalin (to name but two) — has bequeathed a rich legacy of dramatic and literary eye-witness accounts of the unaccountable inhumanity inflicted upon men and women by their fellows in the service of ideology.

The best of these include the writing of Primo Levi on the Holocaust, and that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the Stalin-era Soviet system of Siberian forced-labor camps, which is likewise the subject of A Gulag Mouse. Movies such as Bryan Forbes’ excellent 1965 World War II POW film King Rat, or Jean Negulesco’s less convincing 1950 drama Three Came Home, both about men and women surviving against the odds of Japanese prisoner-of-war and enemy-alien camps, are likewise notable. The list goes on.

But the genre that director Danielle Ozymandias’ somewhat uneven and naggingly under-imagined production most suggests is the Hollywood Western, in which history, unmoored from fact, becomes an abstract canvass for a more philosophical and sensational kind of musing.

The play opens on a Moscow train platform in 1949 as Anastasia (Emily Goss) greets her husband Evgeny (Brandon Bales), returning belatedly from the wars. As might be expected in a play with “gulag” in its title, the reunion does not go well. Evgeny reveals himself as a physically abusive brute, and the attractive Anastasia, too accustomed to her independence to take his debasement sitting down, promptly dispatches him with a knife.

The crime lands her in an all-women barracks (nicely rendered in Aaron Francis’ ramshackle, barn-siding set) in an unnamed forced labor camp in Siberia’s remote frozen wastes. Jolly quickly introduces the bunkmates, who embody an even more unimaginably savage pecking order than that found in pre-Khrushchev Soviet marriage.

There is Lubov (Heather L. Tyler), whose good looks and willingness to trade sex with a never-seen guard for extra rations has won her the berth closest to the shack’s potbelly stove; Masha (Kimberly Atkinson), the barracks bully, who viciously — and irrationally — torments the women with opportunistic acts of violence; Svetlana (Crystal Keith), the ego to Masha’s id, constantly staying her hand by reminding her of the impracticality of her terror; and Prushka (Dana DeRuyck), both the titular “Mouse” and the group’s reticent conscience, its critical and moralizing superego.

Like Levi, Jolly’s objective seems to be a depiction of humanity stripped of dignity, with prisoners reduced to their most utilitarian, reptilian instinct to survive at any cost — an arena that Levi called the grueling struggle of “beast against other beasts.” Into this, the play introduces Anastasia (along with her willingness to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the group) as a sort of morally redemptive messiah figure who restores the women’s self-respect sufficiently to to have them rebel against what the play has gradually adduced as patriarchal repression. It’s not exactly unfamiliar dramatic terrain.

And while the ensemble is mostly up to the heavy lifting demanded by the characters (Bales, who is sweet and ethereal as a later figment of Anastasia’s grown son, is less convincing as the bestial Red Army veteran Evgeny), the stubbornly naturalistic pitch of Ozymandias’ otherwise earnest staging can’t quite sell the text. The extended and tediously over-familiar street-fighting sequences designed by fight director Mike Mahaffey seem particularly misguided.

What a master stylist like Sergio Leone understood was that the inherently mythic nature of the Italian Western made it unsuitable for the rote realism of a mere U.S. history lesson. Lifting such material onto the allegorical plane that can speak directly to a contemporary audience requires an approach far less literal, and an attack that ultimately answers the question: How is a 1949 Soviet gulag like 2016 Los Angeles? A Gulag Mouse fails on both those critical counts.

Sacred Fools Theatre Company, 1076 Lillian Way, Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. performances May 8 & May 15; through May 15. (310) 281-8337, sacredfools.org. Running time: one hour, 20 minutes.