Exploring the unresolvable

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The synopsis of Anton Piatigorsky’s multiple-award-winning Eternal Hydra – which will be presented by Touchstone Theatre here next month – offers insight into the complexity of the mind that created it:

“When a young scholar finds Eternal Hydra, a long-lost, legendary and encyclopedic novel by an obscure Irish writer, she brings the manuscript to an esteemed publisher, hoping to secure an international audience for the book. But Vivian’s obsession with the dead author, who has materialized in her life, is challenged by the work of a contemporary historical novelist, and she’s forced to face confounding questions about authorship, racism and ethical behavior.”

The play takes audiences between modern-day New York, 1930s Paris and New Orleans in the years following the Civil War, and is but one example of the depth and inventiveness of Piatigorsky’s work. Among his plays are The Kabbalistic Psychoanalysis of Adam R. Tzaddik, in which “[p]sychic conflicts take on a mythical significance in a play about a young man’s obsession with a sacred Jewish text”; The Offering, which draws “on the classic tales of biblical patriarchs”; and Easy Lenny Lazmon and the Great Western Ascension, a “unique combination of cowboys and kabbalism” that explores “the mythology of western expansion, Jewish history and ancient religious traditions.” His most recent play, Breath in Between, which was presented in Toronto this past summer, “explores mysterious attraction and the wide abysses between the closest people.”

No topic seems off limits to Piatigorsky, perhaps most evidenced by his first book, which was published just last month by Goose Lane Editions: The Iron Bridge, a collection of short stories about six 20th-century dictators as teenagers, beginning with Idi Amin and ending with Adolf Hitler. And Piatigorsky’s talent isn’t limited to plays and fiction – his bio notes that his “libretti for Airline Icarus and Inventory, two chamber operas with music by composer Brian Current, were featured at the VOX festival of the New York City Opera, in 2007 and 2010” and that Airline Icarus was the winner of the 2011 Italian Primo Fedora Award.

Born and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Piatigorsky now lives in Toronto. He came to be a Canuck after having married a Canadian. He moved north of the 49th Parallel in the late 1990s, becoming a dual citizen a few years later, he told the Independent in an e-mail interview.

“I’ve been writing in some form since my university days. I began studying acting in high school, and then began playwrighting in university,” he continued about his background, adding, “I’ve always been interested in ritual – the ways in which rituals, either secular or religious, help structure our lives, provide meaning, and give us identity. I had experienced this both through Jewish ritual, as a young person and an adult, and through theatre. Theatre always seemed like the perfect medium to explore those questions, because it is so grounded in all the elements of ritual – live time, bodies, collective experience. I am also very historically minded – something that’s not unrelated to my Jewish background. An interest in the complex forces of history playing out in the present has influenced all of my writing, in every medium.”

About being “a Jewish writer,” Piatigorsky said, “Being Jewish is a big part of my identity, but I wouldn’t say it’s my only one. I think there’s a high degree of flexibility in any person’s multiple identities in the contemporary world. I am a Jewish writer, an American writer, a Canadian writer, urban, of a certain class and background, etc., etc., ... that’s all true, and none of those labels are the full story. My Judaic background has certainly influenced the themes, structure and content of my work, but usually in more subtle than explicit ways. Jewish philosophers and Judaic ideas frequently guide my writing process, but it’s difficult to see that working overtly. It’s all in there, you just have to know to look for it.”

The intellectual rigor of Piatigorsky’s work – the fact that it so thought-provokingly tackles such a broad range of difficult subject matter – makes it clear that he is not producing art simply for art’s sake.

“I think there are many ways to be an artist and, as long as a person is pursuing a project with honest curiosity, there’s value to it,” he said. “Personally, I love art that points to unresolvable conundrums of human existence – problems that are historical, philosophical, psychological and metaphysical all at once. I like when a piece of art opens up inside those problems, making them ever more complex and nuanced, funny and sad, simple and profound, and always unresolvable. I don’t think there are clean answers to most of the interesting questions and problems of human life.”

The Iron Bridge certainly falls into the category of opening up interesting, unresolvable questions.

“The dictators in The Iron Bridge were all of the 20th century – totalitarian, modern,” said Piatigorsky about his choice to write about Amin, Hitler, Saloth Sâr (Pol Pot), Mao Tse-tung, Soso (Josef Stalin) and Rafel Trujillo. “They all dehumanized and murdered some other group of people, either on racial, ethnic, religious or class lines. Practically, there is a wealth of information available about each of them, which allowed me to explore their psychologies and contexts more thoroughly. They were from a wide range of cultures and geographical locations, and they were all very different personalities. The number of deaths they inflicted didn’t influence the order of stories or the choice to include them.”

About why he wrote The Iron Bridge – whether it was to humanize, understand or make fun of these dictators, thereby taking away further the power they once had – Piatigorsky explained, “In the spectrum between humanizing and mocking these dictators, I sided fully with humanizing. As teenagers, none of them were explicitly evil yet – they were young people, as we all are at one time, confused, with opportunities to make good or bad decisions, to become any number of possible adults. As dictators, these men dehumanized their victims and deified themselves – there was no room in any of their visions for plain and simple humans, for humanism. You were either seen as a nothing or as a god. I did not want to apply that same vision or rule to my portraits, even by replacing them as devils instead of gods. I wanted to emphasize that everyone is equally human, even those who deny humanity to others and themselves. I don’t think that’s really a message behind the stories, it’s rather an assumption underneath them.”

He added, “I don’t think there is one definitive moment where a person switches to evil, and certainly not into a dictator. It requires a lifelong process that involved psychology, history, social and political context, chance and free will. Certainly, I didn’t want to write stories that suggested any definitive moments. I wanted to give portraits of those young men at particular times, in the midst of adolescent trials that indicated both their future choices and the other ways they might’ve approached those problems generally.”

Unfortunately, Piatigorsky won’t be able to come to Vancouver for the Touchstone production of Eternal Hydra, though he said he is “in regular communication with the director, Katrina Dunn, however.”

The play not only received multiple awards, but rave reviews as well, when it was staged in Toronto, so local audiences can rest assured that it will be entertaining. But, as with all his other work, it will also ask some unresolvable questions.

“My primary inspiration for Eternal Hydra was the zeitgeist, or desire, in mid-century Europe for writers or political leaders to create an all-encompassing vision of the world,” he explained. “There’s an eerie (but not morally similar!) parallel between the desire to write a book like Finnegan’s Wake and the desire to submit the world to Nazi or communist order. I wanted to investigate those desires, that kind of obsession, and also the personal and political costs that those pursuits inflict. What kind of person wants to do something that grand and violent? What do they have to do to achieve their results? How can they reconcile their own moral and ethical values with such ambition? How might they compensate for their violence to others? From that starting point, I branched out to many other questions and concerns, and those questions all required a combination of extensive research and imagination.”

Eternal Hydra will be at Studio 16 (1555 West 7th Ave.) from Nov. 1-11. For tickets and information about performance times, contact the Firehall Arts Centre box office at firehallartscentre.ca or 604-689-0926.

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