‘Archipelago’ explores effects of Stalin’s regime

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    By Elizabeth Lewis

    A play exploring Stalin”s concentration camps, the Gulag, premieres this week in the Pardoe Theatre.

    “Archipelago” plays at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through April 5. A matinee will play at 2 p.m. on March 29.

    Pricing ranges from $9 for BYU faculty and students to $12 for the public. Tickets are available at the Fine Arts Ticket Office at (801) 378-4322 or online at www.byu.edu/hfac.

    The purpose in producing “Archipelago” is to help the audience believe that in the face of suffering, hardship and agony, one can endure and triumph, according to the Department of Theatre and Media Arts.

    The premiere production of “Archipelago” began rehearsals with a visit from the play”s creator, LeeAnne Hill Adams, a graduate of a master”s program at BYU, who now lives in California.

    Adams, from Salt Lake City, wrote “Archipelago” as part of her master”s thesis. She completed her undergraduate work in playwriting at the University of Utah.

    “It”s a difficult text,” Adams said. “I have done a lot of research on the general subject, so it”s helpful to put things in both contexts that might be difficult for the actors to understand.”

    After attending rehearsals for two nights, Adams said she is confident of the direction taken by director Rodger Sorenson, an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Media Arts.

    “Archipelago” refers to the concentration camps that dotted northern Russia like islands.

    People became prisoners of these camps because of “counterrevolutionary” accusations of Stalin and his government. The play will weave 40 scenes telling multiple stories of people sent to the Kolyma prison camp in Siberia.

    An important element in “Archipelago” is the incorporation of the use of multimedia. Adams said cameras will operate onstage as part of the storytelling, film what is happening and also turn to film the audience. Short films being taped will also play during the production.

    “You”ll see the cameras and the camera operators,” Adams said. “The audience will be surprised at how different the show is going to look and feel than what you are used to when you go to a night of theater. If you are expecting a realistic set and being drawn into a realistic story, you”ll be surprised.”

    Shelley Graham, from Aiken, S.C., said the use of multimedia in the play is ideal. Graham is a theater history and criticism graduate student and the dramaturge, or researcher, for the play.

    “There are several messages that couldn”t be sustained by the audience without the added intertextuality of the media,” she said. “From the beginning of the process it was part of the conceptual foundation.”

    Adams said the deliberate use of media elements is a way of commenting on how media functions in creating ideologies and the way that people feel and think. She said the Soviets used media to allow the Gulag to exist by creating paranoia among the Soviet people.

    “It seemed like it would be interesting to comment on that by using multimedia elements in the production itself,” Adams said.

    Joni Clausen, a senior acting major from Gilbert, Ariz., performs in “Archipelago” and also choreographs the play.

    Clausen said the theater experience people expect to see is too complacent and conforming compared to what the audience of “Archipelago” will witness. She described the production as “innovative theater pushing the limits of what a theatric experience should be.”

    “Archipelago” is set in 1938, which Adams said was one of the harshest years in the Gulag. Adams said about 15 million people died in these concentration camps.

    “They were brutal work camps where people were worked to death in mines,” she said. “It tells a lot of true stories of victims that were there, and it also looks at performances going on in the camps. There may be places where it would be understandably difficult for an American actor to understand what was going on. That”s what I really hoped to add by coming out from California.”

    Adams said everyone involved with “Archipelago” heavily researched the roles, sets and costumes and the Gulag itself.

    “It really shows in the work they are doing,” Adams said. “A lot has been done to try and help the actors put on the bodies of these Gulag victims, which you can understand would be really difficult to do as well-fed Americans, to be playing starving Russians.”

    Clausen said this is a theater experience, and the actors in the play are only storytellers. She stressed that she and the other actors do not presume to tell the stories exactly how they happened because they have never experienced anything akin to the prisoners in the Gulag.

    “They are not our stories,” Clausen said. “They are the stories of the dead. We will try to portray them so you can experience them.”

    Clausen also expressed strong emotion for the production.

    “I”ve never worked on a project so infused with and hinged upon the spirit,” she said. “I feel this is something Heavenly Father really wants performed.”

    Graham said she has never felt as strongly about any production she has worked on as she does toward “Archipelago.”

    She said she considers her work on the play “a calling” and that it has been a life-changing experience. She said she wants people to become aware of the atrocities that occurred in the Gulag.

    She said records of the Gulag were lost because of the closed economic and political policies of the Soviet Union until the 1980s, when Gorbachev incorporated glasnost and perestroika.

    “There was an opening of the secret government files and people started to realize how extensive the labor camp systems had been and how long they had been in place as a punishing and political element,” Graham said. “But this script doesn”t bash the Soviet Union. It talks about the survivors of the camp and how they used art to sustain themselves.”

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