Plays Articles Essays 3

Plays Articles Essays 3 - Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky 14 April 1930 was a Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor. Vladimir Mayakovsky stretched the limits of theater. He was a witty satirist and a clever creator of performance art. Today, Western audiences might find his plays dated and preachy. Many of them are filled with topical allusions and puns that are not easily translatable. Also, his dramas depend heavily on complicated theatrical devices and performance routines that work better on the stage than on the page. Yet there is an element in his work that transcends topicality and ideological biases. Anyone who has dealt with the shabby art of social climbing or felt stranded in the myriad complexities of massive modern bureaucracies can appreciate the pointed satire of Mayakovsky’s plays. Early in his career, Mayakovsky wrote three articles calling for the rejection of realistic theater in favor of a theater that would combine the elements of dance and rhythmic speech to “give expression to powerful emotions.” Such an expression is found in Mayakovsky’s first drama, Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the summer of 1913, on cigarette boxes and scraps of paper, Mayakovsky feverishly scribbled verses, which later developed into a drama with the working title “The Railroad,” perhaps inspired by the suicide of one of Mayakovsky’s fellow boarders who threw himself under a train. Though this suicide motif is introduced into the drama, the play focuses on many personal reflections of the author. In fact, Vladimir Mayakovsky is a monodrama in which there is only one character—Mayakovsky, the suffering poet. The other “characters” are all dreamlike reflections of various elements of his ego. The play, which has no clear plot, is a series of long interior monologues written in fractured verse. With a painted city in the background, Mayakovsky takes center stage, while various cardboard, masklike characters surround him with pleas, observations, and exhortations.