LAST May in New York, the Lithuanian director Kama Ginkas encouraged a man auditioning for the lead role in an adaptation of a Chekhov short story to be more fearless in trying to seduce the female character in the scene. Minutes later, the actor was making faces at her from a ledge outside the window of the rehearsal room on the 22nd floor of a building on Eighth Avenue. He got the woman's attention but not the part. Stage adaptations of literary prose often bog down in an abundance of detail, as their creators try to squeeze in all the plot lines that are familiar to readers of the original. Mr. Ginkas uses a different strategy. Working at the New Generation Theater in Moscow, he has successfully adapted Russian literary classics to the stage by shifting the focus from plot to relationships. But he does not limit himself to relationships among the characters in a story. The cozy sensation of curling up with a good book is recreated by the theatrical illusion of intimacy that Mr. Ginkas establishes between the audience and the actors on the stage.

In "K. I. From `Crime,' " the first of Mr. Ginkas's productions to be seen in the United States, the director has brashly discarded most of the plot from "Crime and Punishment." Nearly all that is left of Dostoyevsky's sprawling novel of murder and redemption is a minor character, Katerina Ivanovna (the K. I. of the title). The story has essentially been streamlined into a monologue — but one that Mr. Ginkas has transformed into a dialogue with the audience. Oksana Mysina, who plays Ivanovna, speaks to the spectators as if they were guests at her home, where she is holding a funeral dinner for her late husband. The production opens on Wednesday for four performances at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. It is part of the inaugural season of the Bard Summerscape festival.

Performed in Russian (with an English synopsis available), the play was written in 1993 by Mr. Ginkas's son, Daniil Gink, at his father's request. Mr. Ginkas said he wanted to explore aspects of Ivanovna's inner feelings that go beyond Dostoyevsky's treatment of the character. What makes the woman compelling to the audience is the intimacy with which she confides in and jokes with them. She refers to individual audience members by the names of characters in the novel, implicating them in the plot. This confessional approach lures the audience into a personal bond with the character. When she strikes her children in frustration, theatergoers are put in the awkward but fascinating position of being house guests exposed to the private turmoil of a family they have only just met.

"I think of Ginkas as a jazz musician who is my partner in a controlled improvisation," wrote Ms. Mysina from Moscow in an e-mail reply to a question. "There is a moment in the play," she added, "when my character, in a fury, grabs her son by the hair and beats him against the wall. In the nine years that the show has existed, I have played that scene with three different boys, and it has been the favorite of every one of them. This is characteristic of Ginkas: the audience experiences horror, while the actors are having a blast, or the audience is cracking up, while the characters are in despair."

Ms. Mysina was describing another element of stagecraft that distinguishes Mr. Ginkas's adaptations of literature: his reliance on contradiction.

"These kinds of performances cannot be entirely realistic," Mr. Ginkas said in Cambridge, Mass., last month, where he was rehearsing another adaptation, that of Chekhov's short story "The Lady With a Lapdog." The play, about an affair between a woman and a man, Anna and Gurov, who are married to others, opens at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge on Sept. 13.

"It is a game," Mr. Ginkas continued, speaking in Russian through a translator, during a rehearsal break. "New rules have to be developed, and the audience has to be involved so they can play the game with us. Sometimes the audience doesn't know the rules and we use that fact to provoke them. Provocation is my theatrical language."

Mr. Ginkas, 62, displays an impish demeanor. In the A.R.T. basement rehearsal studio in Cambridge, he began by presenting flowers to Elisabeth Waterston, who portrays the naïve Anna. Then he jumped out of his chair to imitate the gestures of Stephen Pelinski, the actor playing the libertine Gurov.

As an assistant translated his words for the American actors, Mr. Ginkas told Mr. Pelinski, "You are an acrobat of love." Then the director began to re-enact the scene himself, playing both roles. He shifted focus repeatedly, keeping the actors off balance, making them laugh, caressing their shoulders, hugging the script and turning to observers in the room with conspiratorial glances. "You want to kiss her," Mr Ginkas said to Mr. Pelinski. "Not you, but your character wants to kiss her character, not her."

He encouraged both performers to play with the boundaries between themselves and their characters, a paradox built into the adaptation's structure because the actors also perform Chekhov's narrative descriptions as if they were part of the dialogue.

Ultimately the love games in "The Lady With a Lapdog" lead Anna and Gurov to a confrontation with their own mortality. "Death and love are equal," Mr. Ginkas told the performers. "To love means to live, but it also means to know that death is right behind you."

Death is a central topic in Mr. Ginkas's theater, said Anatoly Smeliansky, director of the Moscow Art Theater School, where Mr. Ginkas is a professor of directing. "He has the courage to play with death in a way that goes to the roots of Jewish culture as it was expressed in the ghetto and the paintings of Marc Chagall," said Mr. Smeliansky last month during a visit to Cambridge. "Kama proposes death as a game."

Mr. Ginkas recounted a story from his childhood that echoed the experience of the children of Katarina Ivanovna and her drunkard husband without making explicit connections between his life and his art.

"I retell my biography as a series of anecdotes," he said, "which can be very frightening. But the way in which I choose to relate them is comic, even farcical. For example, I, as a Jewish boy who speaks no Lithuanian but only Yiddish with a thick accent, am being hidden from the Nazis by a Lithuanian family. The man who is hiding me is a violinist, an alcoholic who is jealous of his beautiful wife, a 19-year-old actress. Being drunk, he grabs her out of bed half-naked and throws her into the street, yelling that she is a prostitute. Right next to the house are Nazi Gestapo officers. They approach this half-naked woman and ask if they can help. They knock on the door, and who is running to answer the door? Me, with my dark hair and dark eyes. And I say in Yiddish, with my thick Jewish accent: `Who are you? What do you want?'

"I think it is a very funny story. The fact that I was able to live and they didn't shoot the beautiful actress and the alcoholic violinist is a miracle. It is a funny story in a very tragic situation."

The New York Times
Agosto - 2003