During his lifetime, Mikhail Kuzmin produced an extraordinary output, including poetry, novels, critical essays, musical scores, and plays. However, in the mid 1920s, as Stalin tightened his grip on the new Soviet state, Kuzmin became persona non grata in the eyes of the regime and published virtually nothing during the last 10 years of his life, leading up to his death in 1936. Among his unpublished works, was the play, The Death of Nero, which he had completed sometime around 1929 and it was finally published in 1977.
Now, ThreePenny Theatre Company in Salt Lake City is leveraging its artistic license as a wonderful example of how creators are inspired by a usable past to produce a world premiere of this rare Kuzmin play. The production, directed by Syd Peronnet with an adaptation by Keenan Shionalyn which translates the Kuzmin original from Russian into English, will be presented in a six-performance run Sept. 4-13 at the Alliance Theater Main Hall at Trolley Square in downtown Salt Lake City.
The play comprises two narratives woven together. Traveling in Rome, Pavel Lukin. a Russian poet, has written a biographical play about Nero which critics have ridiculed. Meanwhile, Nero’s life is the other narrative, as chronicled by Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars. Peronnet describes their production as “a queer, Russian, anti-realist, anti-authoritarian, play-within-a-play, murder mystery. Actors will be exploring gender expression through Drag topped off with a dash of Epic style theatre.” Incidentally, Kuzmin gained literary notoriety in 1906 with the publication of his novel, Wings, which literary scholar Judith Kalb described as “a joyous affirmation of homosexuality.”
While working from a century-old obscure Russian play by an author who was associated with the avant/garde literary circles in Leningrad and was interested in German expressionism, this Salt Lake City theater company has discovered smart contemporary resonance in the value of a usable past to connect with 21st-century audiences.
We know that many authoritarian leaders rely on the potential of a usable past to legitimize their positions of power (think Trump and Putin here). However, this unique production of The Death of Nero speaks to the joy of creative license in open and free societies. “The project is exciting for me as a nonbinary individual and as someone who sees themselves as a scrappy director,” Peronnet said in an interview with The Utah Review. “It really hits the current tenor of everything that is happening now.”
In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks, an American literary critic and cultural historian, wrote a short essay for The Dial magazine titled, On Creating A Usable Past. He wrote, “The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals; it opens itself at the touch of desire; it yields up, now this treasure, now that, to anyone who comes to it armed with a capacity for personal choices.”
Indeed, the anti-realist creative brief for this ThreePenny Theatre production is delightful to see, with elements of drag, its joyful embrace of fluid gendered spaces and identities and the reminder of Nero’s acutely relevant connections to making sense of the bizarre zeitgeist of politics today. Again, as Brooks wrote more than a century ago, “To approach our literature from the point of view not of the successful fact but of the creative impulse, is to throw it into an entirely new focus. What emerges then is the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavor, and the appalling obstacles our life has placed before them. Which immediately casts over the spiritual history of America a significance that, for us, it has never had before.”
Likewise, Shionalyn’s adaptation-translation lightens the syntax and diction, to ensure the play’s tone is not burdened by an elevated academic sensibility. “He [Kuzmin] was a very talented poet,” Shionalyn said, “but that doesn’t mean that he always chose language that was beautiful. Sometimes he wrote language that was just mundane and boring and that’s fine.”
In a published statement, Viviane Turman, who plays Nero, said, “It is incredibly exciting to be a part of history and honor our queer ancestors by ensuring their art is not lost to the sands of time. Throughout this process there have been moments that felt like, regardless of language or culture or generational differences, we’ve been able to almost time travel. To reach back to a generation of queer elders and say, ‘Your story matters. Your art matters. There is queer joy nearly a hundred years later and you were a part of ensuring that was possible.’”
The show’s principal creatives suggest that audiences should not overthink or stress for finding interpretations. It is a joy to see a production of this nature reclaim the usable past, shine a light and offer joyful warmth to a creative voice who had fallen out of favor but still had much to say. “Look back and you will see, drifting in and out of the books of history, appearing and vanishing in the memoirs of more aggressive and more acceptable minds,” Brooks wrote so many years ago, “all manner of queer geniuses, wraith-like personalities that have left behind them sometimes a fragment or so that has meaning for us now, more often a mere eccentric name.”
For tickets and performance dates and times, see this link.