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The Brazilian playWhat If They Went to Moscow?is actually also a movie.
Fascinated by the relationship between theater and cinema, Jatahy has made a show thats both.
But Jatahy has managed a strange and difficult trick.
The audience, too, is split in half.
One portion goes to the BAM Fisher Theater, where it watches a loose 90-minute adaptation of Chekhovs classic.
Jatahy introduces another character, though: the camera.
(At Brooklyn Academy of Music, the BAM Rose Cinema backs up handily onto the BAM Fisher.)
Halfway through the evening, the audiences trade places, and it starts all over again.
We see the same 90-minute piece, but in the other medium.
In either room, the adaptation is elegant, then frightening.
Most of the show is in Portuguese, but sometimes the women break into English.
asks Olga, as she pushes snacks on the theatergoers, who have been invited to the festivities.
And Maria, poor creature, is pure, naked need.
This pressure builds into explosions of music and dance, which oscillate between real action and metaphorical gestures.
The sisters fling themselves into a tank of water or strip naked or grab an electric guitar.
Irina screams a punk song, and poor Olga seems to pass into nightmare.
At one point, she appears with mud up to her elbows.
What has she been digging up?
As a demonstration of technique,Moscowis superb.
Given the same piece in both, which medium wins?
For me, it was the theatrical iteration by a mile.
Onscreen,Moscowis claustrophobic and dark-spirited, shot mostly in oppressive closeups.
Onstage, we see everything against the sets backdrop of lovely honey-colored light and green hills.
In the cinema section, I actually caught myself remembering the magnificent in-the-flesh half with something like nostalgia.
Sometimes, says one of the sisters, the past is more real than the present.
Thats true, and Jatahy is clever to point out that we can sometimes sour our experience retroactively.
Certainly, I remember how I felt at intermission: I was staggered and delighted and in love.
Somehow cleverly and painstakingly the cinema section steadily leached some of those feelings away.
Was it the repetition?
Or was it the screen?
I watched myself grow resentful at a show I wasalsowholeheartedly admiring.
Its hard, it turns out, to be left wanting.
