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More than just a 19th-century romance, “A Jewel in the Manuscript” offers a story of faith and redemption amid historic Russian pathos.
Director Brian Hansen says the play about a turning point in the life of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Santa Fe writer Rosemary Zibart impressed him on many levels.
Hansen, a University of New Mexico professor emeritus, was ready to send it back with a nice note to Zibart to encourage her writing, but to decline producing it. Reading it changed his mind.
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If you go WHAT: “A Jewel in the Manuscript” WHEN: Oct. 19 through Nov. 11. Performances at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays WHERE: The Adobe Theater, 9813 Fourth NW HOW MUCH: $15 general admission, $13 students and seniors |
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“It’s a May-December romance between two unlikely people who, after travails, fall in love. That formula works very well,” he says.
But beyond the romantic fiction, Zibart, Hansen and cast offer a historical view into the brutalities of Dostoyevsky’s life.
How it was that Dostoyevsky stood before a firing squad and was imprisoned in Siberia for many years because of his philosophical views. How he suffered from epilepsy and had a devastating addiction to gambling.
In the events of his life that have become Zibart’s play, Dostoyevsky’s staggering gambling debts have caused him to agree to a publisher’s ridiculous demands and deadlines, to write a novel in 30 days or forfeit his royalties on his previous writings for a number of years.
His friends persuade a reluctant Dostoyevsky, played by David James, to hire a stenographer and dictate his words.
Although Dostoyevsky expects a man, a young woman, Anna Snitkina, played by Jessica Quindlen, comes to assist him.
“Historically it’s the case. The fact that she became important to his major works,” Hansen says. “In the course of this play, this young and inexperienced woman becomes the thing that gives Dostoyevsky the stability to have confidence in himself and his future.”
Zibart, a journalist for 20 years and a fiction writer, discovered the idea, her manuscript jewel, on a trip to eastern Europe to nose around the roots of her ancestry.
“We were visiting St. Petersburg for four or five days,” she says of the trip with her husband about four years ago. “I was most surprised by the grandeur of it.”
She had long been a fan of 19th-century authors like Dickens and Tolstoy, Austen and Dostoyevsky. “I read his ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ twice. It was so passionate.”
She visited a museum in one of Dostoyevsky’s former homes and bought a small biography in English. All night long on the flight back home from Europe to New Mexico she read and thought about the writer, his flaws and his triumphs. “You know how you feel so all alone, with that tiny spotlight on your book?”
The truth that kept returning to her was this: “Dostoyevsky offered salvation to all the characters he wrote about – prostitutes and murderers many of them – but when it came to his own redemption, he couldn’t find it for himself. Until he met Anna.”
Since then her play, her jewel, she says, that she uncovered and wrote from her experience has won many awards, including at the Icicle Creek Theater Festival in Seattle.
The Adobe Theater production is a world premiere of the play.
She is excited and elated, she says.
“It’s totally amazing. It’s such a different vision that the directors and actors bring to your work,” she says. “They see all kinds of things on so many levels and meanings in your work. The director and the cast are excellent.”
