According to a fictional depiction of the actual Soviet secret police head Nikolai Yezhov, ‘true is what happens and false is what doesn’t happen.’ Most of what happens in theater is false: the blood on beaten faces is makeup, the furnace that burns crucial documents is a flameless set piece and the eagerly consumed bowls of leech soup are empty. And yet, a good play can have you believing what you know you’re not seeing. The power and danger of storytelling is at the heart of “Describe the Night” by Ravij Joseph, playing at MuCCC through May 17.
Out of Pocket, Inc. specializes in staging contemporary plays by some of theater’s most thought-provoking current playwrights. The Obie Award winning “Describe the Night,” directed by Rachel Solomon, wraps up their 17th season, which is dedicated to the memory of local actor and theater artist Tricia Alan. A portion of the show’s earnings will be donated to the National Kidney Foundation, as part of the group’s mission to support non-profit organizations.
The play opens with a stern KGB Directorate S official who goes by Vova (Matthew Walls) wearing a gray suit, red tie and slicked back black hair. Surrounding him are dozens of stacked cardboard boxes with the text on their sides redacted by strips of black tape, in a simple but effective set (designed by Solomon and Stephanie Roosa). He sits at a table dispatching reports of seemingly unrelated incidents.
One tale is how, in 1920, Isaac Babel (Edward Byrne), a soft-spoken yet quick-witted writer, befriended Nikolai Yezhov (Jeffrey Siuda), a rambunctious and prone-to-yelling soldier. Babel quickly charms Yezhov with his ability to say entirely untrue statements as though they are fact, including “I love goat ass.” When they meet again 17 years later in Yezhov’s home, Babel auditions Yezhov’s wife Yevgenia (Tracey Ulterino) for a film by acting out a scene with her about a woman being wooed by a former flame – a situation too specific to be made up, though Yezhov remains oblivious.
In 2010, a journalist Mariya (Alexus Maxam) in Smolensk questions a nervous car rental salesman Feliks (Declan McHale) on the tragic and possibly mysterious plane crash that resulted in the death of the Polish president. Decades earlier, Vova gets tasked with surveilling an aspiring singer Ursula (Brook Mordenga) who lives with her grandmother and is plotting to escape Moscow.
The scenes at first appear connected only through details echoed across time: questions about people’s accents, police pounding on doors, offers to tell fortunes and descriptions of smells. Most tangible is the reappearance and exchange of Babel’s journal, which contains his stories and descriptions of the world as he encountered it—including the night.
By the end, the connections between characters become revealed and loose ends are tied, though the play never loses a sense of mystery. Fact and fiction swirl together like a kaleidoscope. A character presented as fictional takes on the identity of an infamous political figure, while characters based on historical figures take on fantastical alternative lives — for example, Yezhov escapes his execution and now lives underground in a “repository of truth.”
The script is complex and layered, but under Solomon’s insightful and economical direction, the many strands of the story are clear throughout the play’s over two-and-a-half hour run time. With each scene, black tape on a box in the set gets removed to reveal the name of the scene and the year — a clever device that helps orient audiences as the play jumps through time across 90 years. The costume design (also by Roosa) helps differentiate the time periods as well, with suits and vests appropriate for the mid-20th century and Converse for 2010.
The cast is deeply engaging, bringing out both the strange humor and the emotional stakes of Joseph’s script. Siuda and Ulterino have the added challenge of portraying Yezhov and Yevgenia across the span of their lives, and convincingly alter their physicality to convey the aging characters.
It’s part of the authoritarian playbook to silence the arts. Artists get defunded, books get censored. Putin would undoubtedly hate this play; it’s a clear demonstration of why the arts are vital in the face of fascism. One wishes “Describe the Night” weren’t so relevant, but now is the perfect time to stage a play about the beauty in lies that tell stories and the cruelty in lies that rewrite history. A play that calls a man a coward when he silences journalists. A play that knows when the boxes in an authoritarian regime’s repository of truth come tumbling down, they’re empty.
“Describe the Night” runs through May 17 at MuCCC. More info and tickets here.
Katherine Varga is a contributor at CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
