A Russian Theatre Director in

Exile
Dmitry Krymov starts from scratch in New York.
By Helen Shaw
September 29, 2023
Source:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/a-russian-
theatre-director-in-exile

Photographs by Brian Finke for The New Yorker

In October, 2020, the Russian director Dmitry Krymov staged his
own version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” called “Everyone is
Here” for the Moscow theatre School of the Modern Play. At the
time, Krymov didn’t know that Russia would launch a full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, nor that after he signed a public letter criticizing
the war a temporary work trip to Philadelphia would become
permanent exile. Yet “Everyone Is Here,” a video of which floats
around the Internet, still seems very much like a farewell.

A digressive, at times almost witchy reënvisioning of Wilder’s

plainspoken classic from 1938, it begins with a real black cat slipping
through a door before the play’s familiar characters materialize in
swirls of smoke. After a few dreamlike scenes, a man in a cable-knit
sweater and sneakers interrupts the action, claiming to be the director.
Krymov, or rather his avatar (played by Aleksandr Ovchinnikov), tells
the audience that he has been reconstructing a touring American
production of “Our Town” that he saw in Moscow when he was
eighteen. He reminisces about his past, introduces his long-dead
parents, and reënacts spreading an old friend’s ashes, struggling
comically with the urn. Eventually Anton Chekhov (two actors in a
trench coat) visits the Sakhalin penal colony. Wilder would never
have recognized it.

Or perhaps he would have. The sixty-eight-year-old Krymov, who

often writes his own adaptations, assumes the American playwright’s
cool-eyed stance toward the inevitability of loss, exhuming his own
past in the process. Krymov frequently drills into the work of a great
artist—Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov—only to break into his own
autobiographical substrate. There’s grief down there, but also a great
deal of comedy. His critically acclaimed productions, full of antic
puppets and rousing folk music and the occasional surprise volleyball
game, recall a circus fairground at night, a wild, inviting darkness
where all the buskers are ghosts. “Everyone is Here” was nominated
for five Golden Mask awards, the Russian equivalent of the Tony, but
once Krymov became persona non grata his name disappeared from
the posters. Officially, at least, no one was there.

And now Krymov is here. Close to a million Russians have emigrated

during the war, flooding into surrounding countries, but unlike some
of the other openly anti-Kremlin superstar directors, who fled to
Europe or Israel, Krymov has come to the United States. This month,
he opens a double bill at La Mama, in New York, called “Big Trip,”
which consists of two programs on different nights: “Pushkin ‘Eugene
Onegin’ in our own words,” a reimagining of an old Krymov piece,
and “Three love stories near the railroad,” a new, tragicomical
triptych that adapts three texts by Eugene O’Neill and Ernest
Hemingway. His first production in New York since a tour of his
expressionist “Opus No. 7,” in 2013, “Big Trip” will also serve as
proof of concept for a newly formed theatre company, a body of
mostly young, mostly American artists called Krymov Lab NYC.

La Mama, in the Bowery, isn’t just Off Broadway, it’s Off Off. In
early September, a few weeks before opening night, Krymov met with
his small company in La Mama’s rehearsal complex on Great Jones
Street, in one of a stack of low, tin-ceilinged rooms where avant-
gardists have been rehearsing for half a century. The actors, who had
been on break for the summer, were trying on costumes for the first
time. They had been rehearsing on and off in the course of a year, and
had held a chaotic series of showings in December. (The night I saw
it, an audience member took a prop and refused to give it back.)

Krymov (Dima to his friends and admirers) is a large man—not tall,

exactly, but bear-on-his-hind-legs imposing—with a wispy, silver
Prince Valiant haircut framing a face that’s moon-calm and smooth.
His glasses, which have an aviator-style bar across the top, make his
eyebrows look perpetually raised. His English is solid and idiomatic,
though he sometimes chooses to speak through an interpreter, his lead
producer Tatyana Khaikin. He’s never as puzzled as he seems to be.

It sometimes takes only a glancing contact with Krymov’s work to

make a fan, even an acolyte. The actors and designers in the Lab have
come together by a number of paths—several are from Yale’s drama
school, where Krymov has guest-taught and directed, and some
trained in Russia, encountering his work in its original habitat. One of
the Lab’s producers and performers, Tim Eliot, for instance, was a
student in the American Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced
Theatre Training, which, when it was still running its graduate
program, conducted a semester in Moscow. There he saw “Opus No.
7,” was “thrilled and awestruck,” and, a decade later, fell into Krymov
and Khaikin’s orbit in New York, when Krymov was teaching at the
New School. (I was in an earlier class of that same A.R.T. program,
but I first saw a Krymov piece in Poland, in 2009, at the Dialog
theatre festival in Wrocław. “Opus No. 7” was a hot ticket, and I
watched it sitting on the floor, crammed partly under someone’s
folding chair.)

During that September rehearsal, several Russian friends and

supporters—including Krymov’s wife, producer, and muse, Inna, and
Isaac Koyfman, a lawyer and theatre aficionado turned president of
Krymov Lab NYC’s newly formed board—were crammed into the
back half of the room. The company’s costume designer, Luna
Gomberg, owlish behind huge glasses, was sewing feverishly next to
a costume rack, on which a black-and-white picture of Inna’s
laughing face hung on one side, with the women’s clothes, and a
mask of Dmitry hung on the other. Inna (tanned, tiny, peripatetic,
brilliant) was chortling about Krymov getting stung by a jellyfish in
France. “The last kiss of summer!” she told me.