"White White Black Stork" by The Ilkholm Theatre on April 5th in Seattle, WA

The Ilkholm Theatre was founded in the mid 1970's in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. It was a non-state sponsored theater (and a political one) ten or a dozen years before Gorbachev. In his notes, the founder explains that in Uzbekistan's history the arts, especially theater, were highly prized as a tool for examining political situations. Under Soviet rule, this freedom disappeared. With this history and under these conditions he founded The Ilkholm Theatre.

"White White Black Crane" is set in the late 1900's. A boy in his late teen falls for a poor boy who is in school. The poor boy seems largely to spend time with the protagonist out of economic self interest. Forgetting his economic reason for his participation for a moment, he gets caught up by the exuberance of the other boy's attraction and they frolic and are caught by the father. The father and townspeople interpret the frolicking as sexual play. The poor boy is kicked out of school and the protagonist is forced to marry. The girl he marries has fallen in love with her own pauper, a boy who seels cloth for a living and wanders into her family's garden. With her headdress off, she tries to flirt with the boy but he's afraid and dashes off. he returns for meals but never tells her his name. Her father marries her off to the other boy for and insists on a larger than normal dowry.

The boy is heartbroken and can't bring himself to have sex with his new wife. She knows that he's reputed to be gay and shuns him. Over time, however, they come to understand each other's pain and they forge an emotional bond. Knowing that they still haven't consecrated the marriage, her father sues the boy's family and wins. The play culminates in murder and everyone's miserable.

The themes are clear. The boy and girl do not follow social conventions and are cast out as result. The only relationship allowed any power is the economic relationship between the fathers. Their children are things they trade with no consideration of their uniqueness. While arranged marriages might be typical, the impetus for the marriage were homophobia and greed. One father forces his son to be with a woman and the other didn't care that he was marrying his daughter off to a gay man -- he just wanted the money. The treatment of the theme is more nuanced than my statement of it, however. We're not really certain if the boy is gay or if, as he insists, he's just deeply connected to the other boy in neither a sexual or romantic way. There's also a play on "Romeo and Juliet," with some homoeroticism brought to the surface, an investigation of how families harm their children, and, most interestingly, how young people come to love each other in ways that adults can't seem to recognize.

The play is lyrical, with much of it reading like poetry (well, it's in Russian and I read supertitles but the supertitles were lyrical so I think the original script must also be). Even the set and the blocking were sparse and lovely.

I very much enjoyed the play, partly because it was a pleasure to watch but mostly because I was interested to be seeing a play by an Uzbeki theater company. The supertitles weren't always synched up correctly with the dialogue on stage, which pulled one out of the play.