As a night out, Constellation Theatre Company’s production of The Master and Margarita is beyond thrilling, an entertaining genre bender of a show. But as an adaptation of such a complex novel, it proves too ambitious an undertaking.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s seminal novel is many things at once, so Edward Kemp’s stage script has to artfully juggle satire, dark comedy, and romance. The novel contains many moving pieces that interlock just so, but the play, and this production, focus primarily on its titular characters. Set in Soviet Russia, The Master (Alexander Strain) is a playwright struggling with a show he’s written about Pontius Pilate (Jesse Terrill). It’s a difficult production to mount, given the atheistic bent of the literary elite, so the only person who truly supports the work is Margarita (Amanda Forstrom), his married lover who spirits nights away from her affluent husband to spend with The Master of her heart.
The secret romance and the play-within-a-play are easy enough to digest, but once Professor Woland (a truly captivating Scott Ward Abernethy) arrives in the narrative, things take a turn. Woland purports himself to be a magician, but in a Faustian turn, is actually The Devil descending upon Russia to give the elite their comeuppance.
Here, director Allison Arkell Stockman mounts a dazzling production that gives each dueling section of the text its due stage time, contorting the pliable cast and versatile set design to fit each shifting tone of the piece. Tori Tolentino’s choreography lends a musical-like tenor to the show’s more supernatural elements, while A.J. Guban’s lighting design gives the entire affair a sumptuous, cinematic quality.
When Woland’s hellish retinue turns a magic performance into an apocalyptic assault on their audience, the show easily transforms from giallo lit-horror to pitch black comedy. The scenes showcasing the Master’s play work both as an actual exploration of biblical storytelling and an inside baseball send-up of producing a show. Even the soap operatic love story at the play’s center is able to stand out amid its complex machinations, grounded in the leads’ humanistic performances amid broader, showier turns elsewhere in the ensemble.
But when it comes to parsing Bulgakov’s themes, those rich ideas barely show through the surface. It’s hard to draw a line from the distinctly Russian historical elements that inspired the text to the way the novel’s plot and circumstances are arranged in this adaptation. In some ways, the production’s pure entertainment value obfuscates what Bulgakov had to say about the nature of good and evil and the intersection of art and class structure.
Honestly, though, when a show is this fun to watch and this engrossing, it’s hard to fault it for not perfectly encapsulating every little bit of Russian lit nuance.
The Master and Margarita runs through March 3 at Source Theatre. Tickets run $19 to $45.
