Back from the Nikitsky Gates Theater: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Concerns in the Staging of Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother in Moscow M. Joshua Karter As the cast, our translator, and I sat around a small table in the mirrored reception hall of Moscow's Nikitsky Gates Theater, I smiled to myself, knowing that I'd now have to try to explain the cultural significance of Howard Johnson's restaurants. We were in the second day of the initial desk work on our production of Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother, and we had come upon one of those small but telling moments in the play. Thelma, while struggling to find reasons for Jessie to want to stay alive, proposes that they go to Ho Jo's: "I know you love that clam roll" (67). Jessie remains unmoved by the suggestion. It was late November, 1991; and outside the theater, Moscovites were bracing for a winter which promised, but fortunately didn't deliver, mass starvation. Shelves in the state stores were already empty. My Russian friends had adopted a determined, philosophical attitude—along with a dark sense of humor—as they spent much of their waking hours in the quest for affordable food and other daily necessities. How, then, was I to describe what Howard Johnson's represented to Jessie and many audience members in America: a ubiquitous, homogenized cultural presence which promises that each visit will be identical to the last? This late November, in this city, fried clams sounded pretty good. Going out to eat in a restaurant, any restaurant, sounded even better. I knew that I'd have an even harder job explaining the concept of "junk food" when we needed to find adequate translations for the "snowballs" (5) and the myriad of other sugary, processed goodies which stuff Thelma's cupboards. I was proceeding in large measure on the faith that intelligent Russian audiences would simply allow for cultural variables. Yet I was also aware of skewed views of American life, as variously expressed by my Russian friends. These views stemmed less from years of propaganda than from the Russians' recent exposure to American television, both prime time fare and MTV (one of the five channels available in Moscow almost exclusively runs music video), and from encounters with the new wave of American tourists. As my choices through the rehearsal process were repeatedly influenced by cross-cultural concerns, I became more aware of the delicate nature of staging even a seemingly straightforward, classically-structured American play in Moscow. 75 76 M. Joshua Karter Here, then, is an account of a modest experiment in cross-cultural communication, involving questions from play selection to translation, production design, and rehearsal procedure. During rehearsals, these issues were continually clarified for Linda M. Glass—the American scenic designer—and for me by Galina Borisova and Vera Ulick, the two fine Russian actresses who comprised the cast. Once the play was open, I asked the Theater to survey the first few audiences to test their perceptions of the piece. When Mark Rozovsky, the artistic director of the Nikitsky Gates, asked me to choose a contemporary American play to stage at his theater,1 accessibility to Russian audiences had been among the principal criteria for my selection. Most works I considered seemed too deeply rooted in either language or topical references. I considered some plays which addressed shared concerns, such as homophobia or environmental devastation, but while these problems are significantly worse in Russia than in America, they seemed to pale in the face of political upheaval and the imperatives of survival. I was told that Russians, who above all seemed to want to import musical theater from America, had little taste to confront these issues in the theater at the present time. I reasoned that 'night, Mother would be a good choice. Certainly, the essence of the piece, the relationship between a mother and her daughter, is universal. In the past few years suicide has become a very significant problem in Russia. I hoped that the play's small cast and unit set would alleviate the logistical nightmare of trying to do just about anything in Moscow these days. While I was tempted...