Steppenwolf Theatre presents DESCRIBE THE NIGHT Review

For Nikolai (Yasen Peyankov), first introduced as a Red Calvary captain in 1920 and now head of Stalin’s secret police in 1940, and Isaac (James Vincent Meredith), first introduced as a state reporter and now a dissident author, truth and not truth have even less traction. When they meet during the Polish-Soviet War, Isaac – fashioned after the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel – challenges Nikolai to describe the cold, dark, silent night surrounding them. Nikolai has the amorality to invent not-truths as needed; but Isaac, clutching a bright red journal full of personal observations, has artistic imagination.

And what an imagination it is. Isaac briefly persuades Nikolai that Poles make a soup with live leeches and that if he smells a goat’s ass, he’ll have the power to read people’s minds. Impressed, even amused, Nikolas does not underestimate the man with the red journal. As Soviet history moves forward, we see how an unbridled imagination continues to threaten to those in power.

Authority with Black Markers at Steppenwolf

Framing the story are reports from Vova (Glenn Davis), a Putin-esque KGB agent who emerges periodically from the stage floor in a wire booth. In this writer’s opinion, we hardly need the ominous smoke and lighting to know Vova’s arrival represents not-good and not-truth. He has files, pulled from a drawer that extends hilariously from off to center stage, that include Nikolai and Isaac’s 1920 nighttime encounter and the 2010 plane crash that killed Poland’s President Lech Kasczinki. Thanks to indelible black markers, an individual’s past can include only what best serves the present.

The 90 years in between Nikolai and Isaac’s meeting and the doomed Polish Air Force flight do not make people any less afraid. The urgency of Mariya (Caroline Neff), a journalist scheduled to interview President Kasczinski, to flee the crash site is matched by car rental agent Feliks (Jack Cain). Like Mariya, he fears that any connection to the disaster will endanger him.

Describe the Night’s Women Exert Influence

Male characters dominate Joseph’s story but journalist Mariya, Nikolai’s unfaithful wife Yevgenia (Sally Murphy) and her granddaughter Urzula (Charence Higgins) – all of them lacking authority – exert immeasurable influence through intimacy. Nikolai explains to an alarmed Isaac that because he has fallen out of political favor, he must protect his wife (and Isaac’s lover) by committing her to an insane asylum. When Isaac finds Yevgenia bound in a straightjacket, she begs him to leave some of his writings to help her survive the hellish asylum. Ironically, this also becomes literary survival for Isaac.