Review: Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina Joins Belarus Free Theatre in Protest Drama BURNING DOORS

When their current engagement at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club concludes this weekend, members of the Belarus Free Theatre will return to their homeland, where they and their audience members can be arrested by the Belarussian K.G.B. for creating and attending a play.

Founded in 2005 by spouses Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, the troupe was formed to create works protesting their government's censorship of free speech. By 2011, the company's impact had been recognized enough so that Khalezin and Kaliada needed to be smuggled out of the country. As political refugees, they continue to direct their secret, illegal productions, communicating with their actors in Minsk via Skype.

In January of this year they visited New York with TIME OF WOMEN, based on the experiences of journalist Iryna Khalip, pro-human rights news editor Natalya Radina and political activist Nasta Palazhanka; each imprisoned for their protests against their country's fraudulent presidential election in 2010.

Their new work, BURNING DOORS, not only returns to the theme of political imprisonment, but features Maria Alyokhina of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot, who was incarcerated for 21 months on charges of hooliganism, after she and her bandmates gave an unauthorized performance at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, criticizing the church's support of Vladimir Putin.

Not only does she give testimony of her brutal treatment in prison, but a sudden break in the proceedings has her taking questions from the audience.

Also represented are performance artist Petr Pavlensky, best known for sewing his mouth shut in support of Pussy Riot, who was arrested for setting fire to the doors of Russia's secret service headquarters, and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is now three years into his 20-year sentence for unclear acts of terrorism.

Company members Pavel Haradnitski, Kiryl Masheka, Siarhei Kvachonak, Maryia Sazonava, Stanislava Shablinskaya, Andrei Urazau and Marnya Yurevich play multiple roles in an abstract collage of words and movement. They perform in Russian and Belarusian with English titles flashed on the upstage wall, so keeping track of who is playing who and what each highly stylized moment is supposed to represent can be a bit confusing.

Rope and pulley rigging is used to show prisoners being hanged by the neck and hurled through the air. One actor, while suspended above, urinates through his briefs down to the stage. There is a great deal of male nudity depicting acts of humiliation, climaxing in a full-company brawl of simulated fighting that goes on for so long, and so repetitively, that the point appears to be to show how normal and continual such treatment is.

Dark comedy scenes have Haradnitski and Urazau as government officials, at one point seated on twin toilets, discussing the imprisonment of Sentsov as a symbolic gesture to keep Crimeans in line. Neither are familiar with his films, but they conclude he was arrested because there's nobody else well-known in Crimea.

If the people and issues referenced in BURNING DOORS are not exactly familiar to Americans watching, there is still a great emotional impact to be felt just from the realization that, upon returning home, the brave artists participating in this piece can, at any time, be in the position of the tortured prisoners they play.

Upon exiting, viewers are handed post cards and encouraged to write uplifting messages to Sentsov, which the company will make sure will be delivered to him. Not only will he appreciate that his story is being told, we're advised, but the time prison workers spend translating the English messages means less time they have available to menace political activists and artists.

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