'Boris Godunov' makes world premiere

One of the University's most ambitious theatrical collaborations came to fruition last night with the world premiere of Alexander Pushkin's 1825 play "Boris Godunov" at McCarter Theatre.

The play was brought to life in 1927 by acclaimed Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold and lost to the censorship of the Soviet era when Meyerhold was executed by Stalin in 1940. Though Meyerhold had started rehearsals for his vision of the production, it was never performed in its entirety and had seemingly vanished in the tumult of post-Communist Russia.

Vanished, that is, until music professor Simon Morrison found Meyerhold's long-lost notes in a sealed section of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. While researching acclaimed Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev in 2005, Morrison said he stumbled across Meyerhold's "instructions for how this could be put together and made into a performance, and the function of the music in the performance."

Morrison and Slavic languages and literatures professor Caryl Emerson set to work as project managers, fusing Meyerhold's theatrical vision with a score composed for the play by Prokofiev.

After more than two years of intense research and creative planning, more than 500 members of the University community have come together to stage the play for the first time. Drawing from the Program in Theater and Dance, the music department, the University Orchestra and the Glee Club, the cast includes 15 actors, 34 singers and dancers, and 35 musicians. [Read our review of the performance.]

"This has been such a great showcase for the talent in the undergraduate population," said director Tim Vasen, a theater and dance professor.

Many of the students who worked on the play are enrolled in courses about Godunov. Vasen and English professor Michael Cadden taught THR 329: The Boris Godunov Project. Emerson taught COM 335: Pushkin, Prokoviev, Meyerhold: Boris Godunov on the 20th-Century Stage and SLA 537: Boris Godunov.

The play tells the story of Czar Boris Godunov's autocratic rule of Russia from 1598 to 1605, until his nefarious rise to power is unmasked when Dmitry the Pretender claims his right to the throne as the son of former czar Ivan the Terrible.

The production was staged with an emphasis on the innovative frame of mind in which it was originally conceived, Emerson said. "[We've] tried to be modernists, in the spirit of Meyerhold, who was a modernist," she said. "We're trying to do what he would have done with all these resources he didn't have."

The set, which was created by graduate students in the architecture school, centered around a system of bungee-cord cables that were rearranged to create each of the different settings in the play's 25 scenes. The production has cost an estimated $140,000.

"The ideas for how to do the play were influenced by Meyerhold's sense of physicality and daring," said Cadden, who is the dramaturg for the play.

The expansive nature of the production provided an opportunity for performers to experiment outside their areas of expertise, Vasen said. Glee Club members appearing onstage near the end of the first act had to sing through thick fake beards, something to which they were not accustomed.

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Several portions of Prokofiev's vocal arrangements do not include words, leading Glee Club director Richard Tang Yuk to "become part of the orchestral fabric ... to come up with certain vowel sounds to match the orchestra, there was some level of experimentation involved with that," he said.

Prokofiev's unfinished score was completed by emeritus music professor Peter Westergaard, whose additions created greater challenges for Tang Yuk.

"The project required people to do things that they've never done before," Vasen said. "Stirring things up and getting people off balance often allows things to come forward that have never been tried before."

To enrich the performance with the play's strong academic element, Emerson and Morrison have educated the performers with a specialized course combining theatrical, literary and historical components.

"I don't think it could have been done in the United States without such scholarly expertise," said Max Staller '08, who played Father Superior and Semyon Godunov in the performance. "[Emerson and Morrison] gave us all these little nuggets and from that we could create a piece of art that had never been done before."

Emerson and Morrison said the project aligns closely with the effort to enhance the University's creative and performing arts programs following the $101 million gift Peter Lewis '55 gave the University in January 2006. "It goes with Princeton's performing arts initiative, a sort of flagship project," Emerson said.