In his novels, stories and plays, Nikolai Gogol turned a sardonic eye on mid-19th-century Russia -- a place of corrupt bureaucrats, sly tricksters and downtrodden government clerks whose poverty and subservience placed them near the bottom of the social hierarchy. Gogol's classic 1842 short story "The Overcoat" encapsulates one of those clerks' "lives of quiet desperation." It has been adapted several times for stage and screen, even as a ballet by Rudolf Nureyev. In its latest incarnation, "The Overcoat" is a movement-theater piece with no dialogue and music by the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
The show has elements of physical theater, modern dance, mime and vaudeville slapstick, but it doesn't fully belong in any of those categories. The 22 performers are primarily actors by training, not dancers, but their bodies are supple and wonderfully expressive. This unique hybrid was developed by the Canadian theater director Morris Panych and choreographer Wendy Gorling as a training exercise for actors, but it has developed into a unique style of movement theater.
Their version of "The Overcoat," first produced in Vancouver and now touring under the auspices of Toronto's CanStage, is receiving its American premiere at the Bushnell Center's three-year-old Belding Theater in Hartford.
This is a fairly loose adaptation of the story, overlaid with a couple of borrowings from another Gogol tale, "Diary of a Madman". Both narratives center on the obsessions of a middle-aged office functionary, a cog in an intimidating bureaucracy of rigid hierarchies and slavishly repetitive work. Here the character is a draftsman, laboring at his drawing board while his oafish young colleagues tease and bully him.
In Peter Anderson's wonderfully mercurial performance, the man (in this wordless staging, he has no name) is a lanky, loose-limbed fellow with a long face, a tangle of thinning hair and a generally disheveled appearance that wars with his fastidious nature. In the boarding house he calls home, he dodges the drunken advances of his tawdry landlady. At work, he yearns after the boss's secretary -- and mistress -- a haughty marcelled blonde, but he's oblivious to the shy, plain secretary who yearns for him.
The symbol of his pathetic existence is his overcoat, so tattered and threadbare it looks like a collection of rags. When the shame and the St. Petersburg winter get too much for him, he gathers up his savings and commissions the tailor to make him a new one -- no ordinary coat, but the best overcoat a civil servant's wages can buy.
This production shifts the story from the 1840s into the 1920s -- the silent movie era. The piece is almost an homage to Chaplin and Keaton, those hapless heroes buffeted by fortune but buoyed by a dogged optimism. The choreography mimics the exaggerated postures and expressions in those flickering two-reelers. There's even a big industrial wheel in the tailor's shop that recalls the factory machine in Chaplin's film "Modern Times".
Ken MacDonald's expressionistic set is backed by a two-story wall of dirty windows, evoking the grubby regimented conformity of our hero's life. Tables and chairs, the draftsmen's drawing boards and the tailor's ranks of sewing machines are rolled on and offstage by pale men with shaved heads. These ghostly stagehands foreshadow this adaptation's twist at the end, when we realize they are inmates from a pre-Freudian insane asylum.
The music, a medley from ten different works by Shostakovich, flows together seamlessly, matching movements from his ballet and jazz suites, two of the symphonies and the two piano concertos to the moods and rhythms of the story. Quite a few of the pieces are in waltz time -- too many, really, but they capture the swirl of activity in the drafting office as well as the man's elation when he receives his magnificent fur-collared, royal-purple overcoat -- and dances with it.
This is a case of clothes making the man -- and unmaking him, too. The new coat makes him the toast of the office. The young bullies lionize him and the boss invites him out to a party that evening. He drinks too much champagne and, staggering homeward though the city's red-light district, he's robbed of his coat by a crafty whore.
In Gogol's story, the loss of the coat drives the poor man into a fever of despair, which he dies from. Here, his delirium turns him into one of the lunatics who have been shadowing him from the beginning, and he ends up in an asylum where the lost overcoat is replaced by a strait jacket.
"The Overcoat" is a genuinely unique theatrical experience. A feast for eye and ear, often funny in a heartbreaking sort of way, it makes us reflect on the poignant ironies of longing and loss, while it creates an entrancing new vocabulary of physical theater.