The unusual layout of the room immediately catches the eye. The theater is a black box, with two adjacent sides of the room filled with seats for the audience. The other two sides of the theater form the “V” shaped stage, although it is not really a stage because it is not raised up; it is a performance area. The show starts, and jokes are told, scenery is moved to frame certain parts of the stage, and accents are expertly employed by the actors. Later, the audience is almost hypnotized for over 10 minutes with pure silence while a corpse is moved all around the stage in what seems like a ritual. In reality, this “ritual” is the embalming of a famous Russian leader.
Lenin’s Embalmers, a new dark comedy at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, is a historical play surrounding the rise and downfall of two men, Boris (Scott Sowers) and Vlad (Zach Grenier), who were chosen to embalm Vladimir Lenin, a Russian communist politician and revolutionary leader, in 1924. [click to continue…]
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