In its latest exploration of origin stories, Southbank Theatre Company's 'Describe the Night' spans 20th-century Russia

Taking an esthetic interest in the larger events of one's life probably requires setting off on a journey of disappointment and even danger. The beauty of style can't begin to bridge all barriers. What shaped the author Isaac Babel as a man  -- his sojourn as a supply officer to a Cossack regiment, during  his country's post-revolutoinary struggles with Poland — had to make accommodation with his writerly absorption in French literature, given the purity of craftsmanship he associated with Flaubert and Maupassant.

In "Describe the Night," Rajiv Joseph explores less the anomaly of a Jew in company with his harassers as much as how this Russian writer's outsider status leads him to practice getting to know the world beyond his experience and dealing with it accurately. Interpretation always involves lies, he learns from a gruff soldier-tutor named Nikolai. No narrative adheres to the facts, after all, though it is crafted to be taken for fact. "Describe the night" is thus a proper assignment for an entry in Babel's journal.

The 2014 play has three more performances in a Southbank Theatre Company production at Shelton Auditorium. The way it delves into 20th-century Russian history is both blunt and oblique, rooted in real events and in touch with interpretive fantasy. You don't have to have mastered the details to see in the current regime the points of contact with totalitarianism the world over, including its traces in present-day America. The Russia that the Soviet revolution upended survived the heyday of that revolution. Never acquainted with democracy, old Russia has restored itself, post-Communism, under Vladimir Putin.

Nikolai schools young Isaac in the world. 

With near-imperturbable strictness, Alex Oberheid  plays Vova, a nickname for Vladimir that we are clearly supposed to connect with Putin. Apart from a breakdown symbolically linked to his eating a bowl of leech soup, the role requires projecting a steely loyalty to the official narrative (the name Stalin means "steel") and to the oppressive structure of the KGB. 

Nikolai, after his service on the Polish front, rises into and helps create the police state that Vova later comes to serve, then to lead. Thus, the fatal airplane crash that demolished the Polish government in 2010 had to serve the story that bad weather was to blame. Any other conclusion was banned. Two vividly played secondary characters, the rootless orphan Feliks (Jy'Ierre Jones) and the journalist Mariya (Brittany Magee), are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and must repress their memories. 

Ronn Johnston plays Nikolai as an apparatchik grooming himself for advancement, with every excruciating detail clear from scene to scene. What it takes to adopt and then to promote a state-controlled approach  to whatever happens, its notions of justice and truth and even how people are described in official documents, is imprinted on every situation that concerns this character. Regional accents, often remarked on in the show, are among the few reliable clues to who people are. 

I got used to Kallen Ruston playing Babel. It helps that her thorough investment in the part made it clear there is something eerily non-binary about Babel's identity. In contrast, and thoroughly female in their fraught life paths, are Yevgenia (Miranda Boyle) and Urzula, her granddaughter (Rachel Kelso), both skillfully woven into the nine-decade story. 

Paige Scott's direction obviously helped the cast find the key to each character and its contribution to a complex story. Unraveling the complexity somewhat is the virtuosic set and props design, including screened projections that help set time and place of the action as it unfolds. 

 By virtue of his implacable irony, looking askance at the narrow means by which the Soviet Union interpreted itself, Babel represents humanity in its full victimhood under an oppressive regime. Among those swept up in the show trials of 1937, he met his death in a camp a a few years later, his writings suppressed. 

He had learned that merely by seeing things your own way, you don't have to oppose the state to be considered its enemy. There's nothing neutral about describing the night.

[Photo by Indy Ghost Light]