A bride with a trailer and a blind groom: Rozovsky staged “The Wedding” by Zoshchenko

A quote from Mikhail Mikhailovich, uttered by a tipsy father-in-law, complaining about the reality of the USSR, where in hospitals patients see the announcement “Release of corpses from three to four,” one can safely carve on the gravestone of the “great and mighty”, which, in fact, is what Rozovsky does , leaving no chance for the past in our present and future.

Literary basis: not a story, but a play

It’s worth mentioning right away that Zoshchenko has two works with a similar plot: the groom meets his chosen one on a tram, decides to get married a few days later (signs at the registry office) – and in the end he does not recognize his beloved among the girls who came to the wedding. In the 1935 story “The Wedding Incident” this leads to scandal, elopement and dissolution of the marriage, and in the mini-play “The Wedding”, dated 1935-1935, to forced marriage and the surrender of the groom.

Groom. Okay, I’ll leave. Just let me at least eat something – without eating in the morning for such a hassle. …

The guests carry the Groom to the exit.

Groom. Okay… Okay… I agree…

Buddy. He agrees. Don’t break his hands…

These details are important because in everyone’s favorite film by Leonid Gaidai “It Can’t Be!” the third film novella is called “The Wedding Incident” – the same as the story, but it is still based on a play. It was directed by Rozovsky, who, as a playwright, is more interested in the writer’s dramatic heritage than his prose one.

However, as inclusions in Mark Grigorievich’s performance there are at least two more exemplary Zoshchenko texts.

In one of the scenes, the Father of the Bride (the role is played by Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Yuri Golubtsov and Vladimir Davidenko) complains that he went to the hospital “with typhoid fever” and read on the wall an announcement “Issuing corpses from 3 to 4.” This tragicomic trash fragment is taken from the story “Case History”.

And again, the Father, who in his youth could easily “eat a quarter”, and now mourns the disappearance of “romanticism” in life, complained, meeting the Groom and his Friend, that after visiting the doctors he decided to give up alcohol.

Reply: “I don’t drink and I don’t drink. I don’t drink for an hour, I don’t drink for two…”, which the audience greeted with approving laughter, refers us to the miniature “Lemonade,” which condemns drunkenness.

It is important to understand that Mikhail Mikhailovich, who almost contracted a fatal disease during the years of the revolution, suffered all his life from a clinical form of depression and verminophobia (uncontrollable fear of germs and viruses), so the medical theme in his work was dominant. And ridiculing the frivolity of young people and the frivolous attitude towards marriage was topic number two.

How unlucky are you, my bride?

The role of the “blind” Groom (not recognizing the chosen one, whom he saw only on the street and on the tram in outerwear, the Groom says that in childhood he suffered from “night blindness”) in Rozovsky’s production went to Vasily Rakhmanin, a graduate of “Pike” who had recently come to the theater. By the way, he coped with his task brilliantly) and the more “seasoned” actor Vyacheslav Pronin.

And the “bride with a trailer” was played by Anastasia Dobrynina, who studied in the workshop of Igor Yasulovich (the audience knows her well from her role as Kashtanka in the play “Kashtanka.sobaka.ru”), and Tatyana Kuznetsova. Why “with a trailer”? In the scene where the Groom confuses the Mother (Irina Morozova/Margarita Rasskazova) with her daughter, who has thrown her mother’s scarf over her shoulders, it turns out that the Bride has a daughter in the village (even several in the original source), plus a son, which is what the story is about. The girl kept silent about getting married (“She/he won’t cost you anything,” she repeats as a refrain).

Oh, this wedding, this wedding, sang and danced…

Honestly, Dobrynina, even in the image of Chekhov’s dog, even in the image of the “red beast” of the Bride, wears a red wig very well. She plays powerfully, colorfully and fits perfectly into the architecture of the performance, conveying the entire bourgeois way of life with rattling bowls, pies, bottles of liquor and dancing to the gramophone.

When all the characters are “in the trash.” When the main conflict between the elderly parents of the Bride is like Staritsky’s in “Chasing Two Hares”: a person is not allowed to drink in peace.

It is important to note that Rozovsky’s “Wedding” also turned out to be musically sung. In addition to material taken from the classic of Soviet satire, the director used songs from the Soviet era and anti-Soviet folklore. Some of them balance on the brink of decency, like the song sung to the tune of “Farewell of the Slavic Woman” (!):

Through the expanses of the capital’s park

A widow was walking with the pioneer.

The widow felt sorry for the pioneer,

And she gave it to the pioneer.

Why is the widow

Gave to the pioneer

On this dark night under the moon?

Because we have

Everyone is young now

In our young Soviet country!

No less colorful is the play “The Story of the Kakhovsky Rabbi” by Arkady Severny, where the rabbi, coming from the synagogue, finds a note on the table from his frivolous daughter:

And on the table lies a letter in four words:

“Goodbye, I left. Citizen Ivanova…”

It’s difficult to say whether Zoshchenko implied the Jewish roots of his characters (but hid this fact for political reasons, since the Stalin era was on the clock), but Rozovsky spiced up his version of “The Wedding” with Jewish culture.

And at the level of details, which are almost never written down by the authors of the original plays, but which are born in the process of scenography, he was able to give the action additional connotations. For example, Mother is looking for a place to hang deer antlers (maybe elk antlers – it doesn’t matter), and accidentally puts them on Father’s head (a hint of adultery), and then “sniffs” an overturned glass with them (pure absurdity). In the song about a widow, the heroine gets an oar in her hands, and for a second she freezes in the pose of “Girl with an Oar” by Ivan Shadr (but only the sculptor’s girl is slender, and the Mother is the opposite).

The father shouts: “Squadron, on horseback,” and caricaturesly waves his saber, like a child sitting on a rocking horse.

Objects and attributes are detailed and brought to symbolic value: camels of different sizes (in houses these were kept “for good luck”) in the play stand at the front edge of the stage, the Groom’s Friend steals them one by one, as if little by little taking away someone else’s happiness.

Flowers grow in colorful pots nearby, and Father waters them with vodka from a teapot – a kind of anti-tea drinking, destructive and terrible.

Finally, closer to the finale, the bed “floating” above the stage lowers, the Bride’s veil merges with the bedspread, and then “grows”, rises and covers the background of the stage, which marks the triumph of philistinism, hated by Zoshchenko and almost all great Russian literature.