Love and Intrigue at Brooklyn Academy of Music

Two young lovers meet their fate in German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy of class warfare and courtly intrigue, which remains as prescient today as when it was first performed in 1787. Ferdinand, played by Danila Kozlovsky (Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, 2016 Winter/Spring), is the son of a high-ranking courtier, forced to marry Lady Milford (Ksenia Rappoport) in order to cement his family’s position at court. Instead, he falls for Louise (Elizaveta Boyarskaya), the daughter of a middle-class musician, and the resulting stream of insidious plots, legal injustices, and deadly misunderstandings exposes all the horrors wrought by politics in the name of idealism. Russia’s Maly Drama Theatre, led by the incomparable Lev Dodin (The Cherry Orchard, 2016 Winter/Spring; Three Sisters, 2012 Winter/Spring), stages this biting indictment of despotism and immorality among the ruling classes with signature immediacy, breathing vital new life into a lesser-known classic.