Garvin Wolfe Van Dernoot as Kazimir Malevich, left, and John Drea as Marc Chagall in Grippo Stage Firm’s “Chagall In Faculty,” Sept. 6-Oct. 8, 2022 at Theatre Wit. (Credit score: Anthony Robert LaPenna)
The time is January 1919 to Might 1920 — a quick second of risk within the wake of the Russian Revolution.
The place is Vitebsk, a metropolis in what’s now the Republic of Belarus, however at that second in historical past was dubbed the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia. Dwelling to a big inhabitants of Jews, it was the birthplace of Marc Chagall (1887-1985), the world-renowned artist who would spend most of his life in France, however whose magical work remained deeply rooted within the tradition and folklore of his homeland.
It was in 1919 that Chagall assumed the place of commissar of arts for Vitebsk and based the Vitebsk Artwork Faculty, which opened its doorways to all who needed to pursue their inventive goals. It additionally marked a quick openness to Jews.
Chagall assembled a notable college of conventional and radically modernist artists (the latter together with El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich), and it was right here that the difficulty started. It’s this conflict of inventive egos and political outlooks that drives James Sherman’s immensely entertaining play, “Chagall In Faculty,” a Grippo Stage Firm manufacturing now receiving its world premiere at Theater Wit.
Sherman refers to his 90-minute play as a comedy. However it’s greater than that because it deftly suggests what occurs when a society that’s unable to come back to phrases with dramatically totally different concepts and temperaments.
Chagall (winningly performed by John Drea, whose boyish seems and open spirit seize the artist) is the humanist right here, however as he confesses, he’s positively not possessed of an administrative character. (His adored and adoring spouse, Berta, performed by the feisty Yourtana Sulaiman, positively possessed that present.) His imaginative and prescient of the varsity is to be open to all potentialities of expression, however that seems to not be the mood of the occasions.
An artist with a uniquely magical, otherworldly contact, whose work have been stuffed with characters who usually seemed to be floating above the cities through which they lived, Chagall additionally infused his work with components of the Cubist fashion he had picked up earlier whereas residing in Paris. However hardcore abstraction was not his fashion.
In forming the varsity, Chagall tapped a employees comprised of his first artwork trainer, Yuri Pen (ideally performed by Fred A. Wellisch), an older man and extremely gifted realist painter; Alexander Romm (the aristocratic Peter Ferneding), a soft-spoken artwork historian and curator; and Vera Ermolaeva (Daniella Rukin), an illustrator, injured from a childhood accident, who’s quietly drawn to the Suprematist motion and in addition works as an administrator. Enrolled within the faculty as a painfully shy however attentive scholar is David Yackerson (performed by David Lipschutz).
After which there are the 2 fiery, disruptive and intensely brainy forces of “the brand new” — Lissitzky (Myles Schwarz) and Malevich (Garvin Wolfe Van Dernoot). They loudly and argumentatively proclaim the obsolescence of realism in artwork, and their perception that the one type of true inventive freedom is abstraction, which they herald as “an affirmation of the brand new man.” And in a way they’ve turn out to be each bit as dictatorial and doctrinaire because the regime that’s taking maintain in Moscow, with each actors capturing the hearth, vanity and rigidity of their characters. They’re unbending absolutists.
Georgette Verdin (a Cuban-American director who’s at the moment a Goodman Theatre Michael Maggio Directing Fellow), has clearly seen to it that her actors seize their characters’ distinctive personalities as cleverly (and sometimes as comically) as Sherman has outlined them. To make sure, it is a gathering of massive personalities venting their opinions at a second of super political, social and inventive change. And Chagall clearly got here to see that his utopian imaginative and prescient for the varsity (and for the nation) was to not be.
Abbie Reed’s easy however efficient set design is enhanced by Erin Pleake’s projections of the work of Chagall, Levitsky and Malevich.
Sherman, whose many earlier performs have ranged from modern-day, Jewish-inflected comedies of manners to a one-man present (through which he starred) about Ben Hecht, the playwright, screenwriter and Zionist, has a present for being without delay good and accessible.
The concept for this play got here from his go to to an exhibit he noticed on the Jewish Museum in New York in 2018. He ends it by cleverly revealing the fates of every of its characters. I can’t do the identical right here aside from to say that Chagall outlived all of them, and died on the age of 97, and naturally his work is sure to reside on eternally.
“Chagall in Faculty” runs by means of Oct. 6 at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont. For tickets name 773-975-8150 or go to theaterwit.org.
Observe Hedy Weiss on Twitter: @HedyWeissCritic
