Stalin on Broadway

The Passion of Josef D. Paddy Chayefsky has changed butchers; his Josef Stalin is a Marty with fangs. It is Chayefsky's notion in this play that Stalin can best be understood as a brute with an unquenchable thirst for the Absolute. Beginning as a divinity student in a Tiflis Orthodox seminary, Stalin lost his belief in God. According to Chayefsky, Stalin was further desolated and left with a desperate sense of meaninglessness when his first wife died agonizingly. As a Bolshevik revolutionary, he found new meaning in life; in Lenin he found a new god.

To support this idea, by now stale, of Communism as a surrogate religion, Chayefsky feels free to rewrite the early history of the Russian Revolution in the best tradition of Soviet historiographers. He makes Stalin out to be Lenin's right-hand strongman, which he was not, while also creating the illusion that Stalin was capable of nimble ideological disputes with Lenin. Trotsky (Alvin Epstein) is portrayed as a kind of effete dancing master and relegated to a stage-struck walk-on part in the Revolution, so that no playgoer would ever guess that he was looking at the man who forged the Red army.

This tampering with history might be dramatically justified if it were amusing or ironic or revelatory, but Josef D. incessantly lectures and never electrifies. Chayefsky misdirects his own work, injecting group chorales and Brechtian-inspired political satire in which inane bourgeois messily cut their own throats onstage. Peter Falk's Stalin is a menacing thug with a will of granite, but Luther Adler's Lenin is too mellow and self-questioning for the single-minded intellectual doctrinaire who could be just as implacable as Stalin. To recreate the rationale of tyranny should not be to forget that for men like Lenin and Stalin, power is its own reward.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.