1We’re all hunkered down, waiting out Covid-19.
2Okay, we’re mostly hunkered down. It’s been 15 weeks now; our initial, zealous, puritanism about minimizing contact with any other humans, or anything they might have touched, has evolved into a more measured kind of caution. We’ve let up worrying about spraying bleach on the canned goods we bring in, but we do quarantine them the cupboard for a couple days; we’re allowing ourselves limited, mask-less, social gatherings, but only with people we trust, and never indoors. We’re settling in.
3My friend Scott Hobart leads a country band, “Rex Hobart and the Honky Tonk Standards.” Since everything locked down, their standing weekly engagement at The Ship has been on hiatus. The Ship is this bar that was a local legend: a serious dive for a diverse clientele that included the sorts of customers who routinely carried on conversations with people in other time zones, before the advent of Bluetooth headsets diluted the stigma of doing that in public. Its original location fell to the wrecking ball in the mid-nineties, but somebody salvaged all the décor. Two decades later, The Ship was resurrected as a more fashionable dive for the underground music crowd.
4Scott’s day job is doing scenic design and construction for a children’s theatre. As a side project, he’s done some work to floss up The Ship’s nautically themed appointments, so there are some flats with portholes in them, and other miscellaneous bits and pieces, lying around in his basement. A couple weeks after the lockdown, he mocked up a passable imitation of The Ship’s stage and started using his cell phone to live-stream Rex Hobart concerts from his garage.
5Given the quarantine, the Standards can’t join Rex on stage, but that doesn’t stop him from introducing them. He’s got a stomp box with samples of crowd noise that can deliver the requisite applause, which rises and falls from an ongoing hubbub of juke joint conversation and clinking glassware. In the foreground, out of focus, he’s got a statuette of a dancing couple slowly rotating on a turntable, so that we see a pair of blurry dancers spinning in the frame. He reminds us to tip our waiters. He reaches out of the frame, brings his hand back with a beer, and thanks the bartender. He’s been doing this for a while; he knows the drill.
6After seeing his show, I post a memo on our theatre department’s electronic bulletin board saying, “If you were wondering what the future of post-apocalyptic honky-tonk looks like, Rex Hobart has the answer.”
7All that’s missing is some AM radio static, and him breaking down at some point, asking, “Is there anybody out there?”
8Watching Scott perform from the dark of my own isolated attic office, I, for maybe the first time, have a palpable sense that I am, in real time, living out one of the dystopian scenarios that have been a staple of the science fiction I’ve been a fan of for most of my life.
9The device of an alternate reality, often—though not always—placed at a point in the future, against which the author draws comparison to the present, is a central feature of most science fiction. In its context, the present can be examined in the abstract, freed from the fussy details of current events, politics, and norms.
10These futures are rarely neutral; if anything, science fiction authors and artists, too often, paint their pictures too broadly, falling decidedly to one side or the other of the line between utopian and dystopian. The closest they usually come to “neutral” is “ambiguous.”
11In the future of Star Trek, we’re shown an aspirational utopia where technology has eradicated poverty, thus removing the causes of most conflict among humans, paving the way to a world populated with peace-loving philosophers whose day jobs involve exploring the cosmos (like Captain Sisco), or making really great crawfish étouffée (like Captain Sisco’s dad).
12Conversely, in the dystopian “future” of Blade Runner—technically, “Los Angeles, November 2019” is no longer “the future”—humanity has created an environmental hell-scape in which the lines between nature and technology are blurry at best. There, an assassin/cop (Rick Deckard) whose day job is killing android “replicants” who have run amok, finds himself spending his limited down time courting a replicant girlfriend and drinking Johnny Walker Black. This naturally (one might even argue, inevitably) leads him to question whether he himself was ever human to begin with, and then to realize that it doesn’t matter if you can feel love.
13The dystopian future stories are the ones I always go for. The worlds where things are falling apart—where instead of a well built and stable crystal pyramid, we see a tottering Jenga tower in the midst of collapse—make for more interesting storytelling. Don’t get me wrong, given the choice, I’d pick the Star Trek world to live in, but I’d be up late watching Blade Runner on Blu-ray.
14Staying up late watching Rex Hobart streaming live from his basement, though, I have to wonder whether the writing’s on the wall that the future my present is evolving into is tottering on the verge of collapsing onto the dystopian side of the line.
15The Revolution seemed like a really good idea at the time. The Romanov dynasty (okay, yeah, as if Catherine the Great’s son Paul I was actually fathered by Peter III, but they were still calling it that) had been trying to iron out how to cling to power in a world that had had it up to here with hereditary autocracy since well before Nicholas I put down the Decembrists in 1825. Under Alexander II they’d toyed with the idea of being benevolent, but after he got his legs blown off in 1881, in what would turn out to be the first successful attempt to assassinate him, despotism was once again the norm.
16It’s not like you couldn’t have seen it coming. Chekhov did; three of his four major plays end with the people wearing the shiniest shoes walking out the door and leaving the estate to the people who’ve been doing the heavy lifting around the house. It would be interesting to see what Chekhov would have had to say in the 1920s, but unfortunately, on the road from his boyhood home in Taganrog to his own country estate, Melikhovo, he managed to contract tuberculosis. It would fall to a new generation of playwrights and directors, many of whom would be denied the opportunity to die of natural causes, to take up the discussion.
17Ten years after the storming of the Winter Palace, Lenin was dead, Stalin was consolidating power, and the dream of a just society was fading away under the weight of bureaucratic corruption and institutionalized graft. As the period of the New Economic Policy, and the golden age of Soviet theatre that it had spawned (under the relatively tolerant oversight of People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky), wound down, playwrights found a new—much more workmanlike—bootheel of censorship poised to grind their scripts into the collective’s collective dirt. Seeing as how the wearer of said bootheel had often been provided with a loaded pistol, the keys to a dank prison cell, and a very official looking hat, you have to admire them for continuing to try to stage plays that compared what Russia had become, and where it was heading, with the idealistic vision of a worker’s utopia that they still believed in.
18One of the tacks they took in trying to get away with putting what they wanted to say in front of an audience was using the science fiction device of a visit to, or from, the future, to provide some cover for their dissenting assessment of the present. You can almost imagine Mayakovsky and Meyerhold drinking vodka until 3am on the loading dock with the set crew and a couple of interns, convincing each other that placing the ideal communist utopia in the distant future lets you argue that, “you aren’t criticizing the present; you’re just showing everyone the glorious future that Russia is boldly marching toward.”
19The interns might be buying it, but the stagehands just nod and smile, and wait for the playwright and the director to send the bottle back around.
20The centerpiece of the first act of The Seagull is a play being put on by the character Treplev. It’s a case study in the self-indulgent decadence of late-nineteenth-century symbolism. It’s set in the far distant future where a Universal Soul exists in the form of a pretty girl who dresses like an Isadorable. She sits on a rock declaiming mumbo jumbo with intoned, liturgical pomp.
21The fact that Chekhov was poking gentle fun at nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy), which had emerged as a distinctive style in popular culture, points to it having wandered into the theatre enough to be a target for satire there by 1896.
22Five years after The Seagull bombed on opening night, Zinaida Gippius’ symbolist play Sacred Blood was critiquing Christian dogma and questioning institutionalized classism in a story about a creature born without a soul, whose only means of getting one demands the commission of a murder which will damn said soul at the moment of its inception.
23Supernatural creatures and religious rituals are all fine and well for fantasy, but to make the jump to science fiction you need some technophiles. Conveniently, the type already existed and was waiting in the wings. In the 1859 play Thunder, Ostróvsky has a self-trained amateur clock maker, Kulígin, trying to invent a perpetual motion machine. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya has an amateur naturalist, Astrov, who muses on the balance between the needs of the people and the merits of conservation.
24In real life, both of these characters would have been readers of illustrated journals like Nature and People, which began publication around 1889 and was in circulation for decades. On its pages, readers found portraits of explorers, maps of exotic lands, diagrams of technological wonders, schematics of futuristic multi-leveled cities, and so on. It was an invitation to join in a vision of modernity, built upon both real and speculative technological advances that they might participate in bringing to life.
25With the right leaders, anything might be possible.
26Mayakovsky was a true believer.
27A revolutionary from childhood, he joined the Bolshevik party at the age of thirteen, and by the time he was seventeen he’d gotten himself thrown in jail for anti-Tsarist activities three times. He went to art school, where he co-authored the manifesto of Russian Futurism, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Eventually he got himself expelled. Clearly, he wasn’t the kind of guy who kept his head down.
28His first play, written, produced, and acted by himself in 1914, was titled, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. It’s a celebration of Vladimir Mayakovsky. In Act II he’s got himself dressed in a toga with a laurel wreath on his head.
29He worked in a range of media, but he was first and foremost a poet. His best-known poem is A Cloud in Trousers, which, in a nutshell, is 22 pages of him wooing (more like making his case to) a girl (who, given that he’s having to try so hard, has likely already decided in favor of the defense). In A Talk with a Tax Collector he argues, among other things, that as a poet he should be able to write off the cost of his cigarettes.
30Pretty much everything he did was about him, and pretty much everything about him was over the top. But, he did have a way with words.
31Most Russian artists and writers welcomed the Revolution when it came, but Mayakovsky was in a class by himself. The Bolsheviks needed a loud, confident, wind-in-his-hair romantic hero to shout their message, and Mayakovsky made himself their man. He wrote poems, did poster art, wrote slogans, directed and acted in silent films, drew cartoons, wrote plays, and generally served as the Revolution’s most zealous propagandist. Lunacharsky gave him a free hand to do whatever he wanted: he may have been a loudmouthed egotist, but this loudmouthed egotist was waving the Red flag.
32Eleven years in, though, the Revolution was starting to look like a sick joke. Mayakovski, never one to shy away from speaking his mind, wrote The Bedbug in 1928 and The Bathhouse in 1930. Both were stinging, satirical indictments of the petty bureaucracy that Lenin’s dream had evolved into.
33The Bedbug is a “Rip Van Winkle” story: Prisypkin, an ambitious, politically-connected drunkard, is frozen in solid ice and forgotten for fifty years. When the archeologists of a future communist utopia defrost him, an epidemic of bootlicking, drunkenness, and lust sweeps through the lab where he’s housed. Prisypkin is toxic, a bad fit for the utopia. And, he’s miserable: it’s a place where no red-blooded Russian would want to live. He ends up on exhibit in a zoo, labeled as an example of the species “Philistinius vulgaris.”
34In The Bathhouse, the Phosphorescent Woman, an envoy from the future, arrives with a mandate to select the best citizens of the present and transfer them into the future “Age of Communism,” a utopia where the names of exemplary young workers from the 1920s are inscribed on plates of “demonetized gold”. When the time train departs with those deemed worthy, the bureaucrats and sycophants are left behind. As the curtain falls, the local party boss, Pobedonosikov, turns to the audience and asks, “What have you been trying to say here? That people like me aren’t of any use to communism?”
35The Bedbug was indirect enough that the critics let it slide as a meaningless bit of comedic fluff. It played for a successful three month run at Meyerhold’s theatre. The Bathhouse, though, caught their attention: Mayakovsky didn’t hold back in showing his disdain for bureaucratic double-speak, and the critics, egged on by Stalin, were merciless.
36Mayakovsky’s message, like everything he did, had come through loud and clear: the worker’s utopia can only be as idealistic as those who govern it.
37The official response? “Shut up and sit down.”
38Mayakovsky killed himself on April 14, 1930, with a pistol shot through his heart.
39Meyerhold, perhaps the greatest theatrical director of the twentieth century, hung on for another decade. Unable to bring himself to commit artistic and intellectual suicide by caving in to the party line and doing Socialist Realism exclusively, he was increasingly accused of Formalism (a catch-all term for, essentially, making art with any degree of subtext). He was tolerated for a while. But in June of 1939, in spite of having made the requisite humiliating, public renunciations of his past work; and in spite of having spoken the requisite scripted confession, declaring that he’d seen the light, and that it shone forth from the Party’s collective raised fist, he was arrested, and never heard from again.
40A few days later, Meyerhold’s wife was murdered in their apartment. A Bolshevik woman who had coveted it moved in and covered the blood stains on the floor with a rug. They were still there when the Soviet Union fell.
41In hindsight, they’d have probably killed Mayakovsky soon enough.
42Comedies in which Russians kowtow to government officials and hilarity ensues were nothing new; think Gogol’s The Inspector General. But NEPman comedies—lampooning the foibles and failings of the opportunistic, short-sighted, pigheaded, bureaucrats who would soon became the face of the Soviet system—were the gold in the Soviet golden age. Among them, The Bathhouse is as good as they get.
43Mayakovsky, ever the poet, had always had a flair for a little of the sturm und drang you expect from a big, romantic-hero-with-the-weltschmertz kind of guy. But when the time came for him to shout, “What the hell have you done to my Revolution!?” what came out didn’t sound like righteous anger: It was a bit more like the kind of raving rant you’d hear at 2am on the loading dock. He saw the whole world falling down around him because it was being run by morons; and with it turning into a lost cause, everything was fair game, even the stuff he’d believed in. He called out the bureaucrats and sycophants who were ruining it all, but he also lampooned communism writ large: that line about “demonetized gold,” that’s a zinger. And Pobedonosikov’s curtain line? Mayakovsky might as well have stood down center and mooned ‘em.
44So, the Revolution was a bust. In the end, the Bolsheviks traded the Tsars for Stalin, and the grand and glorious experiment crashed and burned. And as he watched it collapse, at his wit’s end, seeing the writing on the wall about what was to come, the guy who’d cheered for it the most loudly answered with what is one of the funniest plays ever written.
45And, it’s science fiction. (Insert rim-shot here).
46The Bedbug and The Bathhouse don’t neatly line up with either the utopian, or dystopian, strains of science fiction. They’re more at home in the company of science fiction comedies like Weird Science, where untested technology, questionable decisions, human nature, and unintended consequences combine to make things go fantastically bonkers.
47I’ve always scoffed at science fiction comedies. They’re fun, but I’ve never seen them as the real thing. My tastes run toward the hard stuff: I want to be pondering whether replicants have souls, not watching adolescent boys hyperventilating over Kelly LeBrock.
48Mayakovski’s won me over, though.
49Scott Hobart’s live-streaming again tonight. Last week, his show had me getting all maudlin, thinking about whether my world’s circling the drain; but after some reflection, tonight I’m taking him at face value. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but down at the Sunken Ship, Rex is singing, “I’m gonna stay right here in hell with this beer in my hand.”
50I’m with him.
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