Born in the Soviet Union and raised in America, 20-year-old Annie travels to mother Russia to immerse herself in a culture that is her birthright. Somehow, she gets sucked into a magical vortex, where the bears and witches of Russian folklore stalk the same ground as the slinky streetwalkers and corrupt politicos of Moscow, circa 2005.
Such is the premise of Meg Miroshnik’s “The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls,” the 2012 winner of the Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition that is now receiving its world premiere on the theater’s Hertz Stage. This ambitious dark comedy showcases the fecund imagination and robust theatricality of Miroshnik, a talented young writer who holds an MFA from Yale School Drama and is a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for women playwrights.
A withering critique on failed economies, sexual enslavement and poverty, the play mourns the cultural splendor of the old order while satirizing the tackiness of the new. Yet is so cluttered with symbols, ideas and strange Russian utterances — not to mention magical potatoes, a boyfriend who turns into a bear and a witch posing as a sweet babushka — that it ultimately becomes a hairy, unwieldy beast.
By turns dazzling and maddening, perhaps too clever for its own good, “Fairytale Lives” is a fast-paced, 90-minute head scratcher that's somewhat indebted to Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods.” The latter opened the Alliance's 2011-2012 season last fall, and also featured bakers, witches, ravenous animals and lost babes in the woods — including Diany Rodriguez, who played Little Red Riding Hood in the Sondheim and here plays Masha, a kind of contemporary Goldilocks.
All this said, director Eric Rosen and his company of six women have a delicious time chewing the scenery, lugging around bear costumes, vamping it up in stilettos and playing everything from club kids and hookers to doting old aunties and uptight passport officers.
Longtime Atlanta actress Judy Leavell is Auntie Yaroslava, who lives in a tiny apartment and seduces Annie (Sarah Elizabeth Wallis) with her baked goodies. Annie’s mother (the wonderful Kate Goehring, in a variety of character roles, including the delightful passport agent and a romantic college professor) warned her daughter about the “aunt.” Yet such is the loopy logic of the play that it ignores the fact that most mothers would not ship their daughters off to board with witches.
As the young woman terrified by her bear-boyfriend, Rodriguez is good, but she doesn’t sparkle the way she did in “Woods.” Alexandra Henrikson and Bree Dawn Shannon play the two Katyas — a plot device that is too convoluted to explain and ends up muddling the material. Both give nice performances, and Shannon really shines as the bitter prostitute Nastya (note the name choice).
The true star of this production is the design, some of the season’s best. Collette Pollard creates a multilevel set that can double as a slummy apartment and fashionable hideaway. Auntie’s enormous blazing oven dominates one side of the stage and, thanks to Howell Binkley's lovely lighting, flickers magically. Ivan Ingermann’s clothes — rags for the old crone, sexy lingerie and tight-fitting tubes for the younger women — are fabulous and fun.
No doubt about it, Miroshnik is a ferocious talent with a promising career in store. But in utilizing a literary legacy that most Americans know only intuitively, "Fairytale Lives" is something of a lost opportunity, fascinating but problematic. But wow, those shoes are amazing.
Theater review
“The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls”
Grade: C+
7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through Feb. 26. $25-$35. Alliance Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E, Atlanta. 404-733-5000, alliancetheatre.org
Bottom line: Flawed but fascinating.
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