MASTER CLASS
Set in a Kremlin anteroom in January of 1948, Master Class hypothesizes a confrontation between the mass murderer Stalin and the Soviet Union’s most illustrious composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In Patrick O’Gara’s absorbing staging, a Chicago premiere by Wild Life Theatre Company, Master Class offers a nightmare look at a megalomaniac and the geniuses he endangers.
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The occasion is the notorious 1948 conference of the Soviet Musicians’ Union (a guild made up of court composers fearful for their lives and freedom). Stage-managed by Stalin with sadistic zeal, the conference was marked by organized vilification and disorganized fear, evolving into a sort of musical purge, its target 20th-century composition. (Only a decade before, Hitler had reviled 20th-century art, declaring it entartet: degenerate.)
Living arguments against state interference with artistic freedom, these great composers resemble elderly children about to be birched. The frail Prokofiev, recovering from a stroke, endures the sight of Stalin and Zhdanov smashing recordings of his works. Shostakovich, who’s younger, suffers the more intense vilification, presumably because he’ll influence the future. Ironically Stalin reviles them both as “dictators” of music; at one point the artists are even threatened with instant execution in the Lubyanka prison.
In one of the most relentless performances I’ve seen, Tim Kough as the bully Zhdanov explodes with a psychopathic abandon, effectively conveying the brutality of the world Stalin has created.
