Gentle by Zeljko Djukic (review)

The Utopian Theatre Asylum (TUTA), founded in Washington, D.C., in 1995 and transplanted to Chicago in 1999, has produced one of the most culturally and aesthetically diverse repertories in the United States. The company has offered its audiences innovative revisions of iconic works (Shakespeare, Aristophanes, Chekhov), rarely seen works from Serbia, East Germany, France, Austria, Russia, and the UK, original devised pieces, and original adaptations of literary classics. In the latter category, the world premiere of Gentle was a landmark event, expressly suited to the talents of this inventive theatre organization and its visionary founding artistic director Zeljko Djukic.

Dani Mann Tucker (The Girl) in Gentle. (Photo: Austin D. Oie.)

TUTA’s imaginative staging, overt theatricality, and striking visual and aural images combined to loosen without severing Gentle’s ties to its nineteenth-century Russian roots. Inspired by an actual event—the suicide of a seamstress—and first published in 1876, Dostoyevsky’s story features a pawnbroker whose young wife has just leapt to her death from an upstairs window. The story resonates with late-nineteenth-century concerns of socioeconomic and political upheaval as the world entered the modern age, particularly the human isolation resulting from capitalism’s materialist individualism. Underlying these universal themes, however, hovers the “woman question,” the specter of shifting gender relations, and a critique of the institution of marriage. TUTA’s production brought these latent themes into the foreground, thereby inviting comparisons to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which premiered four years after Dostoyevsky’s “The Meek One,” in 1879. The introduction of the immigrant experience within a temporally and geographically dislocated mise en scène increased the adaptation’s relevance for a contemporary US audience.

Tom Dacey Carr (The Pawnbroker) in Gentle. (Photo: Austin D. Oie.)

In this updating it was The Girl’s immigrant status rather than her birth within a rigid social system that rendered her vulnerable to a proposal of marriage by a much older man with whom she is barely acquainted (citizenship is part of the arrangement). Portraying The Girl, Dani Mann Tucker was revealed to the audience in a stunning coup de théâtre: as The Pawnbroker (Tom Dacey Carr) began to share with the audience the events leading up to his wife’s death, he swooped aside a white curtain, revealing The Girl, seated motionlessly in the window, dressed in black, her arms filled with yellow roses, a startlingly beautiful vision of death that also hinted at the youth and life held by the young woman. As she rose to become a character in the story her husband is telling, the roses fell at her feet.

Rescued from an even more dismal prospect—living in poverty with abusive relatives or an arranged marriage to an even older, twice-widowed man— The Girl enters her marriage to The Pawnbroker with a glimmer of hope for happiness. Although clearly enamored of her, The Pawnbroker insists on controlling every aspect of their relationship. More than her love, he wants power over her. Money and cash transactions (amounts updated to reflect current norms) proliferate and become major sources of contention, as The Girl attempts to participate in the family business, lending money on terms that her husband deems too generous. The Pawnbroker’s coldness and his perverse desire for control push The Girl into acts of rebellion, including a flirtation of sorts with one of her husband’s former associates. Following one such encounter, The Girl returned in a wild mood and danced with fierce abandon to Spanish-inflected music, a moment that vividly recalled Nora’s tarantella and that does not appear in Dostoyevsky’s original. These deviations from Dostoyevsky underscored the critique of marital and gender relations. Her youth, her gender, and her immigrant status doom The Girl to an unthinkable existence within a prison house of a marriage. Escape comes only with...