Theatre in Review: Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist (The Tank)

	Jeff Gonzalez. Photo: Nick Dove

Three Rounds in the Life of a Trotskyist would be a more apt title: Andy Boyd's verbally two-fisted drama cannily traces the career arc of a prominent neoconservative like Irving Kristol, explaining how a fiery young Marxist of yesteryear could end up to the right of, say, Jeane Kirkpatrick. It's a trajectory that many true believers followed in the years between World War II and the 1980s, trading in one ideology for another while blaming their apostasy on a changing world. Boyd, recognizing dramatic gold when he sees it, delivers one of the most fiercely argued plays to come our way in years. Get ready to put up your dukes.

Lev Trachtenberg, Boyd's protagonist, is devoted to his socialist principles; he's even more devoted to fighting about them. In 1939, he convenes a meeting of the City College Cafeteria Pugilists (check the acronym), a group devoted to hashing out the details, large and small, of Moscow's policies. Lev, a rebel who reveres the exiled Leon Trotsky, and Ben, a strict apologist for the Party line, duel for the allegiance of Daniel, a fellow student who is itching to commit to one side or another. The debate is not theoretical; the young men, all Jews, have relatives in Eastern Europe, their lives hanging by a thread.

Ben argues that, with Hitler on the march and the rest of the continent weak and divided, only the Soviet Union can stop the spread of fascism. Lev has a few objections about Josef Stalin, involving purges, show trials, and the funny way his enemies "all seem to jump off buildings right after they're denounced in Pravda." Nonsense, Ben insists; the legal system still works, and, anyway, Nikolai Bukharin and his cronies, all of them now dead, were traitors to the cause. The battle is bitterly joined but with a difference: Ben has the furious insistence of a true believer but, for Lev, the rat-a-tat fusillade of ideas is intoxicating. The dispute is abruptly broken off when news arrives of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, a twist that makes both Ben and Daniel physically ill. Lev's reaction: "This is terrible news. This is... unbelievable. But also. We win, you fuckers!"

Lest you think the passage of times moderates Lev's tone, the action jumps ahead to 1967, when he is a professor at Columbia, teaching modern literature. (This is an entirely consistent position; back in 1939, he says, "Even a reactionary like Eliot or Yeats or fucking Pound can be a revolutionary as a writer because his work changes how you see the world. It rearranges the furniture inside your head. That's the first step to changing society.") In middle age, he relishes T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and their cohort because their work is so difficult; nothing useful is gained without struggle, in his view.

It's an attitude that baffles Curtis, one of the few Black students on campus, who rejects any notions of bootstrapping himself into a white-defined culture, calling instead for a restructuring of the literary canon to include more Black authors. Lev -- who, embarrassingly, is a little too insistent about displaying his civil rights credentials, which include marching on Washington with Martin Luther King -- is suddenly on the defensive, accused of reactionary thinking. When Curtis reveals that he and other students are compiling a list of white supremacists on the faculty, Lev roars, "Buddy, I've been on lists before, and I cleaned their clocks every time. I didn't live through Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy to have my reputation dragged through the mud by undergraduates." But, given his resistance to such new intersections of culture and politics, his days at the university are numbered.

Not that he faces any danger of erasure: In 1980, Lev runs a conservative think tank, publishing a journal described as "the flagship publication of the contemporary Right," avidly read by the likes of Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail. A bona-fide boldface name, familiar to the viewers of Meet the Press, who parties with Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Hardwick, he seems to have it all. Then why does he summon Daniel, his long-estranged friend, to propose a most unlikely literary project? Daniel, a retired schoolteacher, has hit the best-seller list with his memoir of Brooklyn in the 1930s and Lev is looking to similarly burnish his legacy. By now, however, his views, especially his ardent anti-communism, have calcified, leaving him to forever fight old battles: "Why did some of the best minds of the twentieth century fail to understand what we understood in 1939?" he wonders. "The will to power! You want to understand the appeal of Communism, don't read Marx, read Nietzsche!" But, as Lev points out, a life spent detecting fascism in the EPA and the folk songs of Pete Seeger is, to most eyes, less than rewarding. As it happens, Lev has an urgent reason for wanting to shape his reputation.

Productions at The Tank tend to be scrappy at best and bare bones at worst but, if one can imagine a more fully realized staging, the director Jake Beckhard makes sure that every ideological jab draws blood. Jeff Gonzalez is galvanizing as Lev, who is never happier than when demolishing the positions of friends and enemies alike. ("Goddam, this is good," he says, pausing in mid-tirade to appreciate his on-the-spot rhetoric.) The actor fully captures Lev's complex, prickly nature, in which the desire to do good, serve the truth, and emerge triumphant are eternally at odds. Charlie Hurtt underplays craftily as Curtis, who approaches Lev in good faith, revising his opinion in real time. Michael Jay Henry takes a similar approach as the elder Daniel, deftly deflecting Lev at first, then fighting back with surprising vigor. (The younger Daniel is played by Evan Maltby, an interesting casting idea: Daniel matures into an entirely different person, while Gonzalez's Lev remains the same down through the decades.) Also, Leanna Keyes' lighting is solid, and her projection design is filled with images that allude to the time frame of each scene.

As Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist draws to a close, reports are arriving from Poland about Solidarity, presenting Lev with the new twist of an anti-communist trade union movement. I'd love to know what this tremendously confounding, endlessly interesting character would make of it. It's fascinating to see Boyd's play only a few days after attending a performance of Itamar Moses' The Ally, which parses similar, and yet different, issues of culture and politics with equal vigor. This is also another vital entry in a season that has been a months-long colloquium on American Jews. It's an exhilarating experience and Andy Boyd is a name we should all know about. --David Barbour