It was remarkable. When Tusya was present, the mundane chatter around a dinner table quickly turned into an intellectual conversation of the highest order. When she led a seminar on set design, the primary topic of discussion had become literature, dramaturgy. A decade later, when she began to lecture on the history of theater, she led her students beyond the boundaries of theater into the realm of psychology and philosophy. Every subject she broached immediately became too narrow, too confining, and she spoke of the adjoining areas, what lay beyond, about things that at first glance did not seem directly relevant—but it later turned out that what was most interesting lay precisely in these marginal spaces. Nora had long known this about Tusya, and now, listening to her spontaneous lecture on the fate of the Jews, she thought about how far Tusya had come from Tevye the Dairyman, with his mundane, and at the same time ponderous, questions.
“I’ll try to explain to you why that play so irked me, but it’s not easy. It’s saccharine and mendacious. There’s no more ‘Tumbalalaika’ anywhere in the world. That is a cheap, cookie-cutter stereotype, a cartoon. There is a Jewish people scattered around the world that introduced contemporary morality harking back to the Ten Commandments. There is an image, very fraught intellectually, of the two-thousand-year existence of the Jews, banished from one country after another, a small people who miraculously survived, and who want to retain their Jewish identity and live on their own land—and have a right to do so, as do all other peoples. Alongside this is the image of a mighty power that to this day wants to destroy them. I have nothing against Sholem Aleichem, but we need to retire Anatevka to the museum; things have moved far beyond that. Not to mention that it no longer exists, and never will again. I wanted to be able to say all these things before you begin your production. And I would never dare say any of this to you if I didn’t believe that the theater today is still capable of saying things that are impossible to articulate, to express, any other way.”
“But this musical doesn’t allude to any of the things you are telling me—nothing I could discern, anyway,” Nora objected.
“Nora, you have to know how to unearth meanings. It’s very often up to you to extract them not from the work at hand but from yourself.”
This turned out to be the most difficult of all Nora’s projects. She wrestled with the text. What helped her most was the splendid premiere with the bells tolling in the finale—she didn’t have the right to trespass on that territory in any way. Efim Berg came to Moscow on business. They met and spent a wonderful evening with Tusya. Efim, usually garrulous and disinclined to listen in a conversation, was reticent and attentive this time. They spoke about the merits and shortcomings of musical theater, about the gradual transformation of the genre of high opera into the democratic genre of the musical, about the two revolutionary American musicals, Bernstein’s West Side Story and Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Tusya again surprised Nora with her thoughts about possible trajectories of development in the theater: about the broadening of the space of theater thanks to cinematographic devices; the use of street scenes, drawing the viewer into the action onstage; about the carnivalization of life; and about the return of theater itself to its ancient mystical roots.
“All of that was tried in Russia just after the Revolution, but it was squelched. And very quickly it returned to its conservative forms, and the Russian avant-garde, which promised so much, was silenced,” said Tusya, folding her arms over her chest in a cross, like a corpse.
Then, when it was already night, Efim took Nora to visit a theater friend of his at his house. There, on a new VCR brought back from America, Nora watched the film version of Fiddler on the Roof for the first time. Though it had long since become a relic, it had never lost its riveting appeal. Now Nora knew that, from this generally accessible spectacle, so sweet and appealingly humane, without changing a single line, she would have to extract something much more essential than the playwright had communicated. Efim couldn’t sit still—he sprang up to his feet and galloped around, tapping and stamping his feet, clapping his hands—but he had already fallen under Tusya’s influence, and the play appealed to him more and more.
Nora was already coming up with ideas and drawing them on big sheets of Whatman paper. She drew the small box of a stage hung on the inside with long strips of colored fabric, alternating red, brown, and dark blue. Small human figures rushed around inside this compressed space, chaotically, hither and thither. A horse and a cow seemed to appear, then disappear again, filling the box with living creatures of the land. She drew a rope with rags hanging from it, and then took a fresh piece of paper and peopled it with other figures, old women and children, and again changed everything in this constricted world. Then she drew a leaning table platform and placed on it a pot, with bowls, and again drew an empty box. She couldn’t figure out whether all these outward signs of an impoverished, benighted rural existence were necessary, or whether they were superfluous details that would distract the eye. Finally, she scrapped it all except the platform leaning downstage.
This wrapped up the preliminary work; now it was time to consider the actual staging. Nora was not sure whether Berg, a talented but capricious and ambitious man, would accept her fully formed vision. In addition to everything else, she proposed that the stage dimensions be diminished, creating a compressed space that would open up only in the finale.
She made three mock-ups, and laid them one inside another. They differed only in the color of the curtains that constituted the “body” of the set. On fourteen poles hung three layers of fabric. In the center of each section of cloth was a small vertical slit, invisible when the fabric was hanging.
The first layer was thick red, ceremonial and disquieting. At the end of the “Sabbath Prayer” scene, Tevye would pull a curtain from the pole and put it over himself like a mantle, placing his head through the slit in the fabric. All the other actors would also put on these improvised red mantles, and sing a Sabbath song, which Nora already knew was not a real Sabbath song, but commonplace, ordinary music, an ingeniously interwoven medley of religious and local folkloric melodies.
Now Nora removed the outermost mock-up and revealed the next layer of curtains, the brownish-ocher ones. When the next scene was performed—with the matchmaking and the wedding, which seamlessly blended into the pogrom—these curtains would be pulled down in turn, and transformed into overcoats, traveling garments. And again, on the proscenium, the crowd of shocked and agitated Jewish villagers would sing the prescribed mournful melody, and under the layer of brownish ocher would be revealed the last layer, the dark blue.
Nora removed the second mock-up, leaving only the last. This was where the finale would play out. The Cossack sergeant informed the Jews that all of them would be expelled from Anatevka, and from the rigging a ladder descended. One could interpret this as one willed, in accordance with one’s awareness of Biblical texts. It could be viewed as Jacob’s Ladder—the villagers would yank the final layers of fabric from the poles and throw over themselves these garments the color of the nighttime heavens, then ascend the stairway and disappear there, in the gridiron. On the darkened stage, in a black room, only the poles would remain—not a single human being. An empty world, from which all people were gone.
And while they ascended the stairs into the heavens, they would sing their little ditties and songs, and snatches of conversation would be heard: “Did you forget the frying pan? And the rug? Where’s the pot, the bridle, the candlestick holder?” And this would be even better! Because the contrast between the trivial details of the daily round of life, with its matchmaking and its marriages—its Friday hustle and bustle, and a sick cow, two-cent cheating and two-bit guile—and the great drama of life of the human being, the end of human existence on earth and the complete collapse of the failed plan of the Lord God, would be all the starker.