I was the advance man for Mabou Mines, stumbling off an Aeroflot red-eye from Seattle, my brain doing somersaults somewhere over Siberia while my body arrived in Moscow like a sack of wet cement. Nineteen ninety-seven. Yeltsin was still clinging to power, the Soviet Union was barely cold in its grave, and Moscow was this intoxicating, terrifying, half-demolished construction site of a city trying to figure out what the hell it wanted to be when it grew up.
We’d been invited, actually invited, to bring Hajj and Gospel at Colonus to Moscow. Which sounds great until you understand what that actually means. We’re not talking about a couple of actors with scripts. We’re talking about 110 cast and crew members. Sets that need to be shipped halfway around the world. Sound equipment that would make a rock band jealous. And because Gospel at Colonus without it would be like serving borscht without beets, a Hammond B3 organ. That glorious, temperamental beast that weighs as much as a small car and produces that church-shaking, soul-lifting gospel sound that the whole production hinges on.
I was completely in over my head. Zero experience with this type of work. No one had really told me anything. I just got sent. Figure it out, Lee Breuer said. So there I was with my Rolleiflex, man what a beautiful camera, and a beat-up Nikon F3 with a mediocre 50mm lens. This was really before digital cameras took off, when you still had to know what you were doing, when every shot mattered because film cost real money..
They stuck me in the Moskva Hotel, and I mean “stuck” in the most literal sense. This spartan concrete monument to Soviet hospitality sat just off Red Square, all narrow beds and suspicious plumbing and that particular eau de Eastern Bloc that’s part boiled cabbage, part industrial cleaner, part existential dread. But the location? Christ, you couldn’t beat it. I’d stumble out each morning, jet-lagged to the point of hallucination, and there it was: Red Square in all its absurd, magnificent glory, like stepping onto a movie set that forgot to tell you you were in the movie.
My job was simple, in theory: negotiate with bureaucrats to get the equipment we needed. Speakers. Lights. The basic tools of our trade. In practice? It meant drinking vodka. Lots of vodka. With men in bad suits who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and regarded the idea of bringing 110 Americans and a B3 organ to Moscow with expressions that suggested I might be clinically insane. We’d meet in offices that looked like they hadn’t been redecorated since 1973, and every conversation was a dance. Part negotiation, part drinking contest, part cultural exchange program, part exercise in convincing Soviet-trained bureaucrats that yes, we really did need to import a 425-pound organ for artistic reasons.
They’d pour. I’d drink. We’d toast to art, to cooperation, to Yeltsin, to the transformative power of gospel music, to fuck-knows-what. And somehow, miraculously, we’d inch closer to getting those extra speakers, the lighting rig, the visas for 110 people, the clearance for the B3.
The jet lag was a living thing, a malevolent presence that turned day into night and night into some fever-dream purgatory where time had no meaning. But Moscow didn’t care about my circadian rhythms. There was the Bolshoi at night, ballet that made you understand why people used to duel over this stuff. There were classes and performances at the Moscow Art Theater, where Stanislavski’s ghost still haunted every corner, and serious Russian actors made our experimental downtown theater look like summer camp.
I was exhausted, exhilarated, slightly drunk most of the time, and more alive than I’d felt in years. This was Moscow in ’97. Raw, unpredictable, teetering on the edge of something. And I was there, negotiating the logistical nightmare of bringing American gospel theater to post-Soviet Russia, one vodka shot at a time, jet-lagged out of my skull, and loving every confusing, disorienting, utterly unforgettable minute of it.