HOUDINI UNBOUND: ADVENTURES IN RUSSIA

 

Houdini in the New York Dramatic Mirror

            The Moscow theater scene has seen many sensations this season, in addition to Little Houdini's escape from the prison transport cell....

       -- from "Houdini's Observations" in the NY Dramatic Mirror

“It’s a date,” Gorky said to Harry and Bess. “You're coming to a performance of The Lower Depths at The Moscow Art Theater this Wednesday evening at a quarter to eight. Allow me to insist that we meet on time. Even though it's a dress rehearsal, no latecomers are admitted – not even the playwright!"

Chekhov & Gorky

         At seventeen minutes to eight, halfway down Kamergersky Lane, Harry and Bess alighted from their carriage. Bess was smiling as Harry continued raving ecstatically about the Moscow Art Theater:  "… and they don't paint trees on backdrops, Bess! They use real trees! The rooms have real walls! Real chickens are in real pots in the dinner scenes! Real fires burn in the fireplaces! They make the actors wear their costumes for a long time before the first performance, so they seem like their real clothes!" He felt intoxicated in the presence of living theatrical history.

Moscow Art Theater

Gorky was waiting in the throng outside the lobby, instantly recognizable with his fierce dark moustache and long black hair brushed backward, fitting his head like a war bonnet. Pushing through the crowd of wealthy art lovers and gangly, ultra-serious students, Gorky greeted them warmly and picked up the thread of Harry’s rant as they went inside.

"Yes, quite so, it's the theater of the real. Stanislavsky, our producer, says the public should not even have the impression of being present at a performance, but of looking in on the intimate life of the people,” Gorky said. “As if by a ruse, or by magic. He is just as exacting toward the spectators as toward the production. The theater is a temple of art. It must be entered with reverence."

 At precisely eight o'clock by the Kremlin bells, the doors closed with a hermetic hiss and the theater fell silent as a church. They settled into their seats and immediately the gray curtain, with its subtle seagull pattern, rose.

Stanislavsky in The Lower Depths, 1902

At that moment, the stage becomes a large cavernous shelter for the homeless. Harry is startled to hear the sizzle of a stove and the familiar click of keys being turned in locks. On stage, one of the characters, a thief, sits in front of a block of wood with an anvil and a vise fastened to it. At his feet are two large bundles of keys, wired together. The thief tries one key after another to see which ones work various old locks. "The Baron," chewing a piece of black bread, speaks to a woman busy with a samovar:

"And then?" 

"No, my dear, said I. Keep away from me with such proposals. I've been through it all, you see – and not for a hundred baked lobsters would I marry again!… Not even an American prince!"

For the next two hours, Harry and Bess were completely absorbed. After the final curtain Harry turned to Gorky with a look of awe on his face.

"Sasha Maximovitch, congratulations. That was the greatest thing I've ever seen in the theater. No loud declamations of ‘Treachery!’ or ‘Love!’ Just like real life – in the moment, but more beautiful.”

"Thank you, but you can only say that because you weren't here to see Chekhov's Sea Gull when it premiered. Would you like to meet him?"

Gorky led the way backstage, steering them toward a pale, unprepossessing middle-aged man with a full chestnut beard, who was constantly adjusting his pince-nez. In spite of the evening's warmth, he was wearing a three-piece suit with a bowtie.

"Anton Pavlovich, how are you doing?"

"Ah, Sasha Maximovitch. I haven't seen you for quite a while."
            "I want to introduce you to my great American friends.  Chekhov, meet Houdini. And Mrs. Bess Houdini."

Chekhov bowed shyly and shook hands. "And this is Konstantin Stanislavsky, our producer," Gorky said, introducing them to a tall, handsome man with thick eyebrows and an elegantly-waxed moustache. 

"Delighted,” said Stanislavsky. “How did you happen to meet the bitter Mr. Peshkov, better known as Gorky." Gorky tossed his long hair back, then bowed extravagantly.

"I was just telling him this is the most wonderful evening I've ever spent in the theater." 

         "And I told him he should have been here when your Sea Gull premiered -- when was it, now?  Five years ago already?" Gorky replied modestly, looking from Harry to Chekhov.

"Why thank you, my friend," Chekhov replied, thrusting out his chin and fixing his gaze a handspan above Gorky’s head. "But I must agree with Houdini in praising your play, which is unmistakably fine. Especially the second act. Yours was a hit from the first performance. You took twenty-two curtain calls, if I remember correctly. Mine, unfortunately, had to be rescued from obscurity by Stanislavsky here. In order to thank him properly, I intend to write a new play, which will begin like this: 'How nice it is!  How quiet!  Not a bird to be heard, not a dog, not a cuckoo, not an owl, not a nightingale, not a clock, not a bell, not a single cricket….'"

Everyone including Stanislavsky laughed loudly at this impromptu satire on the "theater of the real."

"Houdini?" Stanislavsky said. "I heard you're killing them at the Yar with your handcuff escapes. It's brilliant. Everyone in this country is in handcuffs!"

"We met when I caught his act on opening night,” Gorky said.  “It was sensational.”  Turning to Harry, he continued. “And you’ve got to tell us all how you escaped from the kareta. I was exiled to central Russia for political activities last year. Around here you never know when you might be headed for Siberia."

Harry laughed, delightedly. He was where he liked it best – in the company of giants. By midnight, when the whole party went out for supper at the Hermitage, Chekhov's joke on Stanislavsky had already made its way all around Moscow. It was published in the next edition of the weekly Art World.

Khitrovka

        The following day, Harry went by himself to meet Gorky again, this time at Khitrovka Square, a vast plaza in the center of the city, near the Iauza River. A curtain of mist hung over the square. Gorky, in a Russian belted shirt, was waiting at the riverbank, along with six actors dressed as laborers:  dirty caps, rough jackets, lime-caked boots and sledgehammers over their shoulders.

"More character-building for The Lower Depths," Gorky said as he introduced them to Harry. He gestured toward the rotting plaster façade of one of the low buildings which bordered the square, then pointed his thumb at his own chest. 

"I myself was once a thief who lived in a homeless shelter like one of those."

"Reminds me of the flophouses we stayed in when we played the freak shows," Harry nodded.

Gorky looked directly into Harry's eyes. "My university was the prison,” he said. “You and I were lucky, my friend. Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul."

Gorky led the entire troupe through a crack between the buildings, squeezing into a tortuous alley full of murky vapors. A stinking drainage furrow ran down the center of the cobblestones.  Pale-faced wraiths wearing patchwork rags swarmed around them in the haze, appearing suddenly like phantoms, then just as suddenly disappearing into narrow passageways. Turning into a gloomy alley, Gorky turned again in front of a row of toothless old matrons hunched like huge bundles of rags along the slimy gutter, their backs to the sinister doorways.

At Khitrovka

          "All right.  This way to the Convict Prison!" The group threaded their way through a spiraling passage so narrow Harry touched both walls simultaneously with his elbows.  Gorky ducked through an archway and led them into a low, shadowed room, foul with the smell of dirty feet and cheap black tobacco. Hideous faces floated in the half-light like jellyfish on the surface of the sea.  Several men were quarreling. A half-dressed woman with a bleeding nose cannoned into Harry and ran for the door. A man stinking of vodka staggered after her with raised fists.

  Gorky nonchalantly climbed a stairway that stank of human waste and emerged in a big room where men were sleeping like corpses on rough maggot-stained planks three feet above the floor. Harry and the others walked through the warren of bunks. Some were askew, and Harry saw a second layer of sleeping men stretched out on the bare flooring.

"Above, they pay six kopecks a night," Gorky explained. "Below, it's only five. Less air." Gorky stopped in the middle of the room and called out in a loud rasp:

"Is 'The Gentleman' here?"

From an adjoining room, a man peered around the corner.  Clad only in torn underwear, he was gaunt, with matted black hair and filthy, but well-trimmed, black whiskers. With a drunken squint he peered at Gorky, then carefully donned a pair of twisted wire spectacles and squinted again.

"Ekh, the writer tramp," the man said. "Sasha Maximovitch, do you have any work for us?"

"Yes, Gentleman. I need six more copies of The Lower Depths."

"At the bottom again, eh?" the thin man said. "All right!  Bring your friends. The landlady will provide the drinks."

Several men in the bunks sat up and cheered.

As Gorky gave the landlady some money, the cheers doubled in volume. Harry was surprised to see her uncork a large bottle of champagne and begin pouring into chipped crockery cups.

"It's corn liquor in champagne bottles," Gorky whispered.  "Harder to break."  The "Gentleman" raised a full cup aloft with a grandiloquent gesture, turning a large semicircle that took in the whole room.

"Friends! You love the gods! We worship the devils! For you and we alike are men of the theater!" He raised his cup higher. "All right!" he said, in English. He clicked his heels with an imaginary jangle of spurs, bowed, and drained his drink in one gulp.

"What is this place?" Harry whispered to Gorky.

"Why this is the intellectual center of Moscow, my good friend! Here you will find the unappreciated actors who are far too brilliant for their audiences, the visionary writers ahead of their time – or, they would be if they had ever published anything. This is the headquarters of the drunken poets, the home of all penniless geniuses. And it includes the copyists."

"Copyists?"

Following "The Gentleman," Gorky gently pushed Harry into the next room. A dozen men in rags sat around a table, heads bent over manuscripts, pens scratching.

"They are copying plays," Gorky said. "I need several more copies of The Lower Depths for our troupe here. It's urgent, of course," he said to "The Gentleman." The thin man nodded, and held out his calloused left hand. Harry noticed he had one beautifully manicured very long nail, on the little finger. Gorky gave him a copy to work from.

"These men will work all night," Gorky told Harry. "When they are ready, they will elect the cleanest one to deliver them.  One man will lend him a pair of boots, another his jacket and another his hat in order to make him presentable enough to show himself at Stanislavsky's front door. He will pay fifty kopeks an act."

"We love Gorky's plays because they always have four acts, instead of three," The Gentleman said. "The critics find the fourth act not very interesting, because all the main characters are already dead. But we like that last act the best!"

After leaving the "Convict Prison," Harry brought up the rear as Gorky's group passed a line of decrepit stalls selling sausages, pickles and fermented kvass. A boy on a bicycle unexpectedly cut in front of him, severing him from his friends. Three of the sausage men jumped up in front of the boy on the bike, blocking Gorky's view. Four strong men tackled Harry from  behind, two hitting him low and two high.  

Taken completely by surprise, Harry fell to the ground.  Eight fists and eight boots pummeled and kicked him, then quickly rolled him up into a heavy, smelly Caucasian rug and threw him onto the back of an ox-cart.

Gorky looked back, but saw only the phantasmic crowd, with an ox-cart pulling away.

        "That Houdini is amazing," he said to one of the actors. "I was planning to ask him to do a trick for us, and he did. Did you see that? He just disappeared like a puff of smoke!"



-- Adapted from our forthcoming historical novel, tentatively titled Houdini Unbound