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Play About Russian-Jewish Writer Isaac Babel Questions The Truth And If It Matters
by Shiryn Ghermezian
Yasen Peyankov (left) as Nikolai Yezhov and James Vincent Meredith as Isaac Babel in “Describe The Night.” Photo: Michael Brosilow
A play that recently ran at the famed Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago intertwines the lives of seven individuals throughout fact and fiction, with a focus on the journals of real-life Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel, while dissecting the question of what is the truth and does it matter.
Describe the Night, by ensemble member and playwright Rajiv Joseph and director Austin Pendleton, combines real and fictional characters and events, and starts during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 with Babel and fellow historical figure Nikolai Yezhov, an official of the Soviet secret police agency NKVD. The two were friends and Babel had an affair with Yezhov’s wife.
Babel kept a journal while serving in the war and in the play Yezhov asks him how his journalistic reports about the war and the entries in his personal journal say two different things because isn’t there just one way to describe the night? Ninety years later, Babel’s journal is found in the wreckage of a plane crash and as events unfold in the play, they are told by different characters who each variously interpret Babel’s diary.
“Truth is lie; lie is truth,” said the Steppenwolf Theater in its description of the play, which finished its run on Sunday. “What did Babel write, and why does it matter?”
Born in Odessa in 1894, Babel is best known as the author of the short story collections Red Cavalry, set in the Polish-Soviet War, and Tales of Odessa. His writings greatly influenced the genres of short story and autobiographical fiction but under Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule of Russia, Babel was arrested in 1939. After several days of interrogation and torture, he was found guilty of espionage and executed in January 1940, according to historians. In 1954, Babel was among the first victims of the Stalinist oppression to be cleared of all charges.
Actor James Vincent Meredith, who plays Babel in the Steppenwolf Theater play, told The Algemeiner he was “fascinated” by the Jewish writer’s life story after reading Red Cavalry and discovering the documentary Finding Babel, which followed Babel’s grandson as he travels through Europe to find out more about his grandfather’s roots.
“The more I learned about Babel’s life — his upbringing, living his life as a Jew while in the bed of Russian life, chronicling the Russo-Polish War from a Russian slant, while witnessing the horrors of war that would go at odds with what he was writing, his unlikely friendship with the head of the NKVD, his affair with his dear friend’s wife — there was so much to Isaac Babel that as an actor appealed to me,” Meredith said.
Meredith, who is not Jewish, also admitted he had “some concerns” about being cast in the role of an iconic Jewish figure but explained that “thankfully, Describe the Night was written by a playwright who was insistent that the casting didn’t need to be culturally specific.”
“Certainly, there has been a sea change in theatre and movies, as far as casting roles as culturally specific as possible. And I was certainly mindful of being a Black man cast as a Ukrainian-born Jewish man,” the actor told The Algemeiner. “But [Rajiv] used history as a starting point, but there is certainly a magical realism to the play, and there are definite points where this work of fiction explores alternate paths to that factual history.”
He further explained that “Rajiv was very much against any specialized dialect work and really wanted the entry point to focus more on the arbiters of truth in any time or place, and how those creators of record(s) are never the people who are most adversely affected by that truth. And yet, sometimes, even those in charge of curating that truth can be hoisted by their own petard.”
Ultimately, Meredith was chosen to play Babel after he impressed the show’s casting director who heard him read a role in a different production that “had some parallels to Isaac’s emotional journey,” the actor said.
“My hope is that people will come away with a renewed desire to question what is true, but also to understand that your truth is not my truth, and mine is not yours,” he added. “My character Isaac says in the first scene, ‘…and if we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?’ Every character in Describe the Night at some point tries to do just that, and no description is the same. We all have different histories, different joys and sorrows, different griefs and emotions that affect how we see the world. And all can be true.”
Pendleton also shared his thoughts on Describe the Night mixing fiction and non-fiction, in both its casting and storyline.
“Great playwrights have been mixing historical facts with dramatic fiction since this whole playwriting thing began: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Shaw, Arthur Miller,” he told The Algemeiner. “I could go on and on. And, at any rate, I’m happy to include Rajiv Joseph in that list.”
