Chicago Sun-Times Review of
"Zoyka's Apartment"

`Zoyka's Apartment'

October 19, 1999

By Hedy Weiss, theater critic
`Zoyka's Apartment'
Through Nov. 13
American Theater Company, 3855 N. Lincoln
Tickets: $15-20; (773) 248-0577.

Highly recommended

It's total madness and marvelous mayhem from the word go in "Zoyka's Apartment," the rollicking Russian play by Mikhail Bulgakov that opened Monday night in what is the latest triumph of the European Repertory Company.
 

And what else but desperation and insanity could you possibly expect? After all, we are in post-Revolutionary Moscow, where aristocrats have been stripped of their titles, where chickens are mysteriously turning into roosters, where identity papers are up for grabs, and where what seems like a
posh little tailoring shop by day is bound to become a brothel by night. Here is the topsy-turvy world of 1920s Russia as it existed during one brief, rarely recalled moment--when Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy allowing a limited form of capitalism in order to inject some fizz into the fledgling
Soviet economy.

Bulgakov (best know for his allegorical novel, The Master and Margarita), was a master satirist who understood the folly and futility of trying to engineer human behavior. In this new translation of the play by Yasen Peyankov and Peter Christensen (the team behind last season's superb "Ivanov"), all the
anarchic zest of his vision comes into play. That vision is further aided and abetted by the exhilarating, brilliantly comic direction of Luda Lopatina, who the larger theaters in this city should seriously begin to court.

Lopatina, trained in Leningrad, not only has a superb knack for casting, but has a crazy energy and musicality that enables her to keep the action of a play spinning like the eye of a tornado.

And a 90-minute tornado is just about what blows through the apartment of Zoyka Denisovna Peltz, a savvy survivor with a flair for running one of the oldest businesses known to man.

Through charm, graft and dissembling, Zoyka (the excellent Carolyn Hoerdemann in a gutsy, seductive, wonderfully sympathetic performance), gets a permit to open a home-tailoring workshop. There, along with her "models" (formerly wealthy women desperate to earn money and flee to Paris), and their clients, she also tends to Pavel, her pathetic, chronically depressed husband and a former Count (played with panache by Misha Kuznetsov); her shrewd, chameleon-like "cousin" Alexander (a virtuosic performance by Kurt Brocker); her pretty, put-upon maid (the adorable Kipleigh Brown); the corrupt and weasely little bureaucrat, Anisim (a Danny Kaye-like turn by Kirk Anderson); two fierce Chinese bandits (played with wild and unapologetic political incorrectness by Michael Park Ingram and John Digles); and a prime customer, Boris Goos (Wesley Walker). The hilarious, lascivious "ladies" are Elaine Roth, Callie Beaulieu, Whitney Powell, Nina Sallinen and Dana Green. Michael Burke and Tim Donovan are a hoot as the inspectors in brown shoes.

Rick Frederick's inspired set--an apartment almost as off-kilter as the people in it--bursts with visual jokes. Also winning are Ann Kessler's costumes, Jaymi Lee Smith's lighting, Moses Moe's score, the makeup by Sandy Morris and the zany choreography of Katrina Levental.

As soon as "Zoyka's Apartment" closes up shop at ERC's temporary home, the American Theatre Company, it should head for Moscow. The ticket line would wind around Red Square.