Sex—and Politics—in the Soviet City: Review of
Bridget Bailey’s Child of Hungry Times
By
Julia Voss
Posted August 16, 2006
Following an introduction by a scarf-swathed babushka,
the first act of Bridget Bailey’s one-woman show, Child of
Hungry Times, could easily be a page from one of the
better-written episodes of Sex in the City. The first
character to appear is a young career woman, tossing back shots
of vodka while describing to a cluster of girlfriends a male
coworker’s feeble attempts to seduce her. The young woman’s
story blends into monologues by the other characters—two
struggling single mothers, an abused disabled woman, a feisty
tomboy, and a lonely housewife—to depict one neighborhood’s
female circle of friends.
This premise, based on the writings of Soviet-censored author
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (1938– ), lightheartedly sets the stage
for the increasingly grim world the characters narrate. Bailey
wrote the one-woman show using the Petruvshevskaya’s novels,
plays, and collections of short stories—in the original Russian,
since some of her works remain untranslated or poorly
translated—as source material. Yet, amazingly, each character
rings incredibly true and familiar to the audience. Bailey
achieves this effect by having the six characters within the
show speak unaccented English—but with various regional and
social dialects—so that the audience identifies directly with
them as distinct personalities from within their own culture.
The six female characters descriptions of everyday life in the
USSR demonstrate the huge gap between the socialist utopia the
Russian government promised and the hardscrabble society it
created. Based on her experience as a woman living in the USSR,
Petruvshevskaya focuses on issues which affect women
particularly: relationships and families.
As
the single mother's and the disabled woman’s stories
particularly highlight, the gender equality and new morality
which the Soviet government promised often extended no further
the legislatures which enacted them. The women complain of men
who refuse to provide for their own children because the state
has dissolved the sanctity of marriage, of the need to protect
their children from neglect and indoctrination in state-run
orphanages, and of the inaccessibility of purportedly
state-sponsored abortions.
However, the show’s greatest success comes from Bailey’s ability
to create characters that American audiences can identify
immediately while firmly situating them in a Russian context.
She achieves this by focusing on the particulars of the show’s
USSR setting, using allusions to highly recognizable Soviet
topics like the KGB and the state monopoly on consumer goods.
Bailey also creates an immediately recognizable Russian
character not found in Petrushevskaya’s work: a babushka
narrator with a thick accent. Unlike the six women within the
show, who are sarcastically critical of the government right
from the start, the babushka begins as a state sycophant who
finally becomes radicalized by great disparity between official
polity and reality.
These details about life in Russia, Bailey says, are what
veterans of the USSR appreciate most about Child of Hungry
Times. The difficulties of life in Russia which belied the
government’s lofty promises—and the characters’ critical but
deadpan description of them—remind many Russian viewers of
conversations they used to have “back home in the old days.” The
babushka demonstrates that there were limits to how long even
staunch supporters of the regime could ignore reality and buy
into delusional government propaganda.
The final scene of the play connects Bailey’s interpretation of
Petrushevskaya’s Soviet critique to contemporary politics. The
last lines of the play, spoken by the babushka, criticize some
specific USSR practices, such as imprisoning people without
trial, tapping citizens’ phones without warrants, and invading
the Middle East under the guise of promoting of “democracy” to
serve its own national interests. However, the obvious parallels
between Soviet policy and current US anti-terrorist policy
demonstrate that the US, despite its overwhelming rhetoric of
“freedom,” is in some ways just as totalitarian and abusive of
its power as the USSR was.
Bailey’s Child of Hungry Times offers a critical, but
thoroughly realistic, view of life in the USSR which audiences
from both the US and Russia can immediately identify with.
Moreover, the familiar characters and government practices point
out to American viewers the striking similarities between the
Russia under Soviet rule, a country generally recognized as
corrupt and abusive, and the US under the Bush administration.
Following Child of Hungry Times' run at the Washington
Ensemble Theater in July, Bridget Bailey has been invited to
perform her show at Moscow's prestigious Fomenko Studio this
fall.
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2006 All content property of European Weekly unless where otherwise
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