November 11-17, 2004

theater

In the Driver's Seat

by Toby Zinman

Dance legend—and, recently, Sex and the City hottie—Mikhail Baryshnikov brought his newest work to Philadelphia for four performances last week. Forbidden Christmas—conceived, directed and designed by Russian artist Rezo Gabriadze and currently touring the country—is a theater piece (albeit an unconventional one) rather than ballet.

Highly visual, often wordless, this sweet fable about Stalinist Georgia begins with Baryshnikov as Chito, a sailor, joyously corresponding with his beloved (Pilar Witherspoon) via semaphore flags. But she is wooed away by another man and marries him, leaving Chito heart- and mind-broken. His defense against his pain is to imagine he is a car, and attaching a window crank to his pocket as an ignition key, he revs himself up and zooms around, happy in his delusion. He is a very Chaplinesque car, and although you can see Baryshnikov's immense grace and control in even his tiniest gesture, there really isn't much more to it than his zooming around.

The dialogue is limited and stilted; the plot focuses on a snowy Christmas Eve when, after years of being a car, Chito calls the exhausted doctor out for yet another house call, and pushed beyond even his saintly limits, the doctor finally disabuses Chito, convincing him the car does not exist. Jon DeVries plays the doctor as a cartoon—mouth agape, hair awry, voice booming.

Whether Chito's madness is the artist's retreat from Soviet repression or the lover's comfort from the intolerable pain of his loss (a tempting idea defeated by later revelations of the peculiar and not-always-followable plot) hardly matters. And what Jesus and Christmas have to do with the car completely mystified me. There are many beautiful images and much childlike charm, although if it weren't for Baryshnikov, one might be tempted to call this show tedious and pretentious. But since it is Baryshnikov …

Forbidden Christmas or the Doctor and the Patient Nov. 4, Prince Music Theater