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Kiryl Masheka. left, and Siarhei Kvachonak in the Belarus Free Theater production of the play Burning Doors at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York, Oct. 12, 2017.SARA KRULWICH/New York Times

  • Burning Doors
  • Written by Nicolai Khalezin
  • Directed by Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada
  • Starring Maria Alyokhina and artists of the Belarus Free Theatre
  • Through June 24

Rating:

3 out of 4 stars

Toward the end of Burning Doors, a performance piece by the Belarus Free Theatre now at Luminato, one cast member has a rope attached to each of her limbs. Spread-eagled and raised off the ground, her arching body is then flung out toward the audience in an action that feels both acrobatic and abusive. Determined to confront audiences with human rights violations in Eastern Europe, the underground company now working in Britain restages its own artists’ imprisonment and torture in an aggressive theatrical style that is both highly physical and very wordy. The results are erratic but startling.

Banned by the Belarus government, one of the company’s philosophies is that all of its artists should know of what they speak: the current troupe includes Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot who spent two years in a Russian jail after the punk protest group staged a performance in a Moscow cathedral in 2012. Burning Doors begins as she recounts her jailhouse experiences – the violating strip searches; the lover who is reporting back to the authorities – with the help of female members of the company. Ultimately, they all wind up bellowing at each other in a rotating chorus of media questions, interrogators’ demands and guards’ orders.

The show also includes the cases of Oleg Sentsov, the Ukrainian filmmaker imprisoned by Russian authorities on trumped-up terrorism charges and now on a hunger strike that is reaching the 40-day mark, and that of Petr Pavlensky, the performance artist who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square. In 2015, he also set fire to the doors of the Federal Security Service in Moscow, the act for which Burning Doors is named.

Pavlensky’s Kafkaesque dialogue with an interrogator whom he entangles in a philosophical discussion about his art is one of the more remarkable texts in the piece, as is Sentsov’s moving courtroom statement calling on Russians to overcome their cowardice to confront an anti-democratic regime.

The texts, which also include passages from the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and French theorist Michel Foucault, are animated with a gymnastic theatre that directly confronts the audience with the violence these artists have experienced. In some places, torture is implied with aggressive but choreographed tumbling in which the performers repeatedly knock each other down. In other scenes, it is directly enacted: In the show’s tensest moment, the audience must watch as one actor repeatedly dunks a colleague’s head in a bathtub full of water, holding it down longer each time.

Comic relief, of a very black sort, is provided by scenes between two of Putin’s henchmen, debating how they should rid themselves of the various artists embarrassing the regime. Following these satirical skits through projected titles is easy enough, but elsewhere the need for the viewer to grasp the import of long Russian-language texts often distracts attention from the performers, blunting the symbolic relationships that are being established between words and action. There is a certain patchwork feel to the show, perhaps because new material about Sentsov’s hunger strike has been recently added, and by the time one performer is swinging in a hoop while citing Foucault in Russian as another dances with a judge’s robe, the effect is confusion.

Determined to remind you that these cases are real, the show directed by Nicolai Khalesin and Natalia Kaliada makes various witty references to its own artifice as actors argue over how they will produce a baby required for one scene and point to the need to shorten texts to fit the subtitles in another. Still, that breaking of the fourth wall can only engage an audience so far: at the opening night performance, a mini press conference in which the audience is invited to ask Alyokhina questions produced only vague responses delivered in halting English. The effect felt forced and uninteresting – as did the invitation to join in a curtain call chant for Sentsov’s release. Burning Doors’ most politically effective moments lie in its risk-taking approach to theatre, rather than any overt call to action.

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