BREAKING THE SILENCE
The title refers, in part, to the invention of the talking film, the goal that obsesses Poliakoff’s proud and stubborn protagonist. A man crammed with unrealized ideas, Nicolai Pesiakoff is on the verge of creating sound on film when he and his family are torn from their Moscow mansion, much like the Romanovs from the Winter Palace, and consigned by Nicolai’s new job to a former Imperial Railway carriage whose battered state resembles their own.
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Nicolai’s ally, Alexei Verkoff, a commissar of labor, has appointed him a “telephone examiner of the Northern District railway” (though no telephone lines have been strung). Alexei, it seems, wants to protect Nicolai’s genius from–well, Nicolai. Alexei knows that Nicolai’s monomania and arrogance, his Anglophile snobbishness and contemptuous air of superiority–always a hazardous trait for a Jew in Russia–would get him in trouble if he weren’t forced to be always on the move.
Breaking the Silence is strongest when it shows how, despite the isolation of these exiles in their own land, the outside revolution trickles into Poliakoff’s limited world. The setting works equally well as a backdrop and as a microcosm of isolation.
As plucky Polya, Johanna McKay shows a more conventional bravery as she alternately attacks and defends Nicolai; she also conveys well the sexual fascination that Polya increasingly exercises over Sasha. Murphy Monroe plays the confused boy with the right teenage tentativeness. Wayne Brown gives Alexei–the play’s sole male hero by default–an earthy common sense, but needs to sharpen his character’s fear late in the play. Finally, Steve Juergens and Kevin Theis, playing two bored and lonely railway guards, provide a raw contrast to these elegant exiles.
