HISTORY AS A METAPHOR
The Retreat from Moscow

This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

                    T.S. Elliot

When the Emperor Napoleon marched through Russia in 1812, he lost nine out of ten of his almost half a million men. When Hitler launched his ill-fated Operation Barbarossa in 1941, his road back from Moscow was equally paved with the bones of his troops. Virtually all of them were common foot soldiers whose names are now lost to history. Napoleon and Hitler will be remembered as long as there is history; but the men who died in the retreats from Moscow will not, proving once again that tragedy strikes the most ordinary, even if history only remembers the marvelous and the infamous.

While bad and failed marriages have been grist for the dramatic mills of playwrights from Sophocles to Albee, not all have had the fireworks of Oedipus and Jocosta, let alone those of George and Martha. Most have been more tedious, which is the case with Edward and Alice in William Nicholson's Tony-nominated The Retreat From Moscow, now playing at the Heartland Theatre Company in Normal, Illinois. Based on the 30-year disintegration of his parents' marriage, it is virtually impossible to say how much of the script is autobiographical and how much is true fiction. That matters little, as the play, originally produced at England's Chichester Festival in 2000 and opened in New York on October 23rd, 2003, tells us in bold terms that the shattering of lives, be they great or small, can be the stuff of compelling drama.

The story offers little that is new in the telling of a marriage that has collapsed from sheer inertia, but, again, that matters little, thanks to Nicholson's beautifully succinct writing. The result is a powerful dramatic experience in which there is not a single moment that does not ring true, from Edward's explanation of how he and Alice met when he accidentally got on an express train that did not stop at his station ("I got on the wrong train," he says) to when he decides to get off some thirty-three years later, announcing that he has fallen in love with someone else and intends to leave.

The Heartland production, marvelously directed by Sandra Zielinski and featuring excellent performances by Kim Periera as Edward, Sandra Lindberg as Alice and Eddie Staver III as their son, Jamie which meld well together as a family finally teetering on predestined destruction, as Edward and Alice, despite his love of books and her devotion to poetry, cannot communicate with each other and any hope if reconciliation seems doomed from the opening curtain. I could not help but remember Cool Hand Luke's famous curtain line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Eugene Ionesco felt the inability to communicate made life absurd. Perhaps he was right. Edward, a history teacher, seems to be absent rather than absent minded. To a great degree, he seems to be more like John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Nowhere Man" ("He's blind as he can be,/ Just sees what he wants to see"). He remains intent on little more than peace at any price, relaxing with a cross-word puzzle at the end of his day ("Nowhere Man, don't worry/ take your time, don't hurry"), while Alice, in an attempt to goad him into some sort of reaction to her, permits her frustration to result in denial and despair which lie just below the surface of her seemingly caustic and castrating personality. Their son, caught in the middle, easily becomes the character for which the audience has the greatest empathy. However, the jury remains out on both the father and mother. In the end, there are no heros or villains, just victims.

Zielinski's direction proved to be brilliant. Her use of cinematic devices such as fades and dissolves to control the audience's point of view was very effective and permitted the use of a single unit set to suggest several locations, as well as having particular actors removed without being actually physically removed from the center of attention. Scenic Designer Chad Lowell's set was inspired, utilizing pieces of shattered mirror as a backdrop. While the symbolism was fairly obvious, it was also extremely effective.

But make no mistake, this play is an actors showcase, and Lindberg, Pereira and Staver used it effectively. As the action is set in England, a believable English accent was required by all three, and all three delivered well. On only a few occasions did I detect the word "been" being pronounced as "ben" instead of "bean." Save for these instances, the accents were very believable throughout. The script has some built-in difficulties with characterization, and it takes a talented cast to keep Edward and Alice from becoming a somewhat civilized version of Albee's George and Martha. Lindberg and Pereira meet this challenge head on, and succeed without question. Perhaps the most difficult character to play is the son, Jamie. Without careful and sensitive handling by both the actor and the director, this character can easily become merely a figure to receive information. Staver, however, manages to breath life into Jamie's somewhat undefined personality, as he attempts to understand and relate to both of his troubled parents, while, fearing all the while, as we all do, that he will eventually become them.

The play's obvious theme, the analogy with Napoleon's abortive retreat from Moscow and the soul-killing thirty-three year war between Alice and Edward, summed up when Jamie refers to his mother as a "casualty" and his father as "a traitor, the friend who turned out to be an enemy," works well. The play begins with Edward reading an eye-witness account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, "As men dropped in this intense cold, their bodies were stripped of clothing by their own comrades and left naked in the snow, still alive. Others, having lost or burned their shoes, were marching with bare feet and legs. The frozen skin and muscles were exfoliating themselves, like successive layers of wax statues. The bones were exposed, but, being frozen, were completely insensitive to pain. Some officers, suffering from diarrhea, found themselves unable to do their trousers up. I myself helped one of these unfortunates to put his asterisk-asterisk-asterisk back and button himself up. He was crying like a child." The metaphor is clear. Perhaps the play should have ended with Aldous Huxley's line, "Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."

Reprinted from The Pamphlet