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Abstract:

The study focuses on the premiere production of the Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play “The Bed Bug” in the USA, which was carried out almost immediately after its writing — in 1931. Documents are provided confirming the intention of Moscow “The Bed Bug”’s director Vsevolod Meyerhold to show the performance based on Mayakovsky’s play during the theater’s tour in the USA. The history of unsuccessful attempts to stage “The Bed Bug” abroad is traced, before the USA — in Czechoslovakia and Germany in 1929. A brief description is given of the American venue where “The Bed Bug” was staged — the Provincetown Playhouse. The discrepancy between the politically engaged dramaturgical work from Stalinist Russia and the specific requirements of the American theater, which is fundamentally different from the repertory theater of post-revolutionary Russia — the primacy of commerce over artistry, the lack of state support and censorship, a respectable audience that does not share radical political ideas — is analyzed. The person who initiated the production under study is characterized — the young Marxist Leon Dennen, who was also the author of the translation and adaptation of Mayakovsky’s play. The stage embodiment of Mayakovsky’s comedy is examined in the wide political and cultural US macro-context of the “Red Decade” — the 1930s. This study allows for deeper understanding the existence and reception of Soviet drama in the United States in general, and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s plays in particular, and also clarifies the picture of cultural relations between the two countries in the twentieth century. The analysis of the New York “Bed Bug” is based on materials from the collections of Houghton Library (Harvard University), the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Museum “Longfellow House — Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site” (Cambridge), and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI, Moscow).