FringeNYC 2013: novaya zemlya or a strange, new land

Review by Lillian Meredith · August 12, 2013

According to its website, novaya  zemlya, or a strange, new land is “part coming of age story, part dark fairy tale.” This makes a lot of sense, and brings clarity to my experience of the play. Unfortunately, as a theater-goer who prefers to attend shows blind in order to figure them out for myself, I did not read this description until five minutes ago. If I had seen it pre-show, I might have been less confused.

I appreciate that playwright Mila Golubov expects her audience to have a working knowledge of Soviet history. It is refreshing and empowering to watch a play that assumes you’ve been paying attention for the last thirty years, or at the very least, that you’ll go look up the USSR on Wikipedia when you get home; it frees the narrative up to focus on the relationships of the characters against the backdrop of reality, rather than serving as a history lesson. The play spans ten years, following a family living in a remote area of post-Chernobyl Ukraine (indicated by giant fruit props, which was an exciting revelation for me when, mid-way through the play, I put two and two together). Although mostly unaware of the changes happening outside their village, the sibling pair at the heart of the story experience individual hope and trauma that parallels the major upheaval of the contemporary political world.

These experiences, however, don’t actually seem to hold a lot of weight for any of the characters. Love, sex, rape, disillusionment with one’s parents, loss of the love of one’s children, recognition of one’s own failure, break-ups, the political reorganization of your homeland; these are disruptive, life-altering, and emotionally jarring events, and yet there is very little actual tension in this play. Part of that is in the writing; the play has a number of false starts and unfinished plot lines – there are hints of lesbianism, mentions of “dangerous people,” and cryptic dreams that don’t seem to portend anything. Most of the problem, however, lies in the direction. Daniella Caggiano has done an admirable job with the physical staging of the piece, creating occasionally lovely stage pictures within the confines of a three-quarter thrust. And while this is impressive and visually interesting, the production is lacking an arc. Because the events in the play – a drunken game of Russian Roulette, or a terrifying walk in the woods – lack any pervasive fear, and seem to have no lasting impact beyond the moment in which they occur, I was frequently lost, trying to figure out what was happening and why.

Moreover, if the play is supposed to feel like a dark fairy tale, I would think the play would be more terrifying, the experiences more disturbing. There was an ominous and increasingly heightened sound design by Ien DeNio that might have worked if the actions of the play matched its intensity, and there were moments when the unreality of the piece was enjoyable and exciting, but for the most part I was left trying to figure out why no one seemed bothered by the appearance of the father’s drunken ex-army pal who immediately takes out his gun and starts threatening the son (for example).

The acting is solid for the most part, if a little anemic. Kevin Russo as Serge the dreamer son stands out in his enthusiasm and charisma, and Stuart Marshall is enjoyable as the pathetic father Boris, lamenting his ordinariness while writing rejected ad copy for Soviet meat products. Liba Vaynberg is sometimes lovely and understated as the frustrated and lonely artist daughter Dascha, but I was repeatedly put off by the fact that the character is referred to as fat (so fat, in fact, that no one wants to marry her), while Vaynberg herself is actually thin.

Ultimately, novaya zemlya is, I think, meant to be a kind of absurdist dark comedy, and parts of it were amusing, certainly. But overall, I’m afraid the show is flat, lacking in the suspense and humor it needs to earn the tagline it would otherwise deserve.