Acting schools are one of the last places in L.A. where one can see large-scale original productions. Basic economics and recent Actors Equity contract requirements dictate that state of affairs, resulting in a profusion of one- and two-person shows being mounted here (except in those small theaters which have gone non-union). Thus it was good to see thirteen actors listed in the program of Isaac Babel and the Black Sea, which is now in a world-premiere run at Stella Adler Lab Theater. Sometimes one yearns to see full-blown paintings, not just intimate portraits. Babel tells the tragic story of the Soviet-era writer Isaac Babel,who wrote some fifty stories, most of them collected under the title “Red Cavalry.” Babel, a secular Jew from Odessa, was hailed in the 20s and 30s as a master of world literature, but his reputation did not save him from being persecuted by Stalin and his henchmen in 1939, when he was arrested and accused of being an enemy of the state. Tried on trumped-up charges, he was sent to prison two years later, where he died ignominiously. McNeil’s play centers on the interrogation Babel (Bradley Wayne James) endured at the hands of two police officers, Captain Schwarzmann (Owen Conway) and Lieutenant Kuleshov (Teo Celigo).These torturers took turns beating and cajoling Babel in an attempt to get him to sign a confession—and give the names of fellow writers and poets who, like him, were going to be charged with undermining the communist state. McNeil pulls out all the stops in dramatizing the brutality and deceit of Babel’s interrogation, but he errs in the number of times he keeps repeating the same action. Watching an innocent man being beaten again and again turns the audience into masochists. McNeil is more successful when he depicts Babel’s days as a war correspondent with the Red Army as it drove Poles from the Ukraine in the 1920s.As many of the stories in “Red Cavalry” show, Babel was unable to reconcile himself to the cruelty of his Cossack battalion, the war crimes they committed on an almost daily basis. What stung him even more was the knowledge that many of these Cossacks had, just a few years earlier, led the pogroms against his fellow Jews and slaughtered them unmercifully. Yet such was the nature of this complicated, principled writer that he forced himself to ride with the Cossacks and endure their anti-Semitic abuse so that he could tell the truth about them. McNeil also brings in Babel’s early life with family and friends, such as the poet Osip Mandelstam (Andrew Garrett). He doesn’t neglect Babel’s love life either: there are scenes with his second wife Antonina (Alex Aves) and his mistress Margarita (Maia Nikiphoroff).The legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (Marina Zoreva) also makes an appearance or two, reciting lines that tie in with the anti-Stalinist POV of the play. (Stalin himself is seen often in the looming projections by Nihan Yesil). The sprawling, back-and- forth- in- time construction of Isaac Babel and the Black Sea makes it difficult for suspense to keep building. Another problem is the poor diction of many of those in the part-professional, part-student cast. So many speeches were garbled that I found myself wishing that the Stella Adler Academy would emphasize speech over acting lessons in future. What does come through strongly, though, thanks to James’s vibrant performance, is the greatness of the writer Isaac Babel, a brave artist who stood up against the power of a corrupt state as best he could. As Babel tells his tormenters, “You can kill me, but you can never kill my imagination.”
