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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Playwright had help finding humour in horror
Vern Thiessen's latest play is deeply rooted in his family's history. (MIKE.DEAL@FREEPRESS.MB.CA )
When playwright Vern Thiessen's parents escaped Joseph Stalin's reign of terror in Russia by emigrating to Canada after the Second World War, they hoped to never set eyes on the despised despot again.
But there they were last Thursday, seated in the second row of the Berney Theatre watching the murderous Stalin onstage in their son's fantastical historical comedy Lenin's Embalmers, which opened WJT's season. Each of the octogenarians grew up under Stalin's iron rule and lost their fathers in the purges of the SSRq30s. Thiessen's maternal grandfather was never seen again after police took him away to the gulag.
The central figures of Lenin's Embalmers are two minor Jewish biochemists ordered by Stalin to forever preserve the corpse of the Soviet prime minister following his death in 1924. Through embalming, Stalin hopes to keep the revolution alive by making gods of leaders like Lenin and himself.
The memory of Stalin is also well preserved in the Thiessen family.
"I've had fantasies about meeting Stalin in hell, because I'm sure he's there and I'm going there," says the Winnipeg-born Thiessen, 46, over coffee recently. "And I would kill him.
"As far as I'm concerned, he's, if not the greatest monster of the 20th century, the second to Hitler. He killed 50 million people and two happened to be close relations of mine. I'd like to have a word with him."
The sight of Stalin on stage did not generate much of an emotional reaction for Susan Thiessen, who, like her husband Gerhard, is a Mennonite from southern Ukraine.
"My mother says she is over that," her son says. "She said, 'I was eight years old when my father was taken. I had to push that out of the way or I couldn't live.'"
Instead of fleeing Stalin again, this time Thiessen's parents, North Kildonan residents, supplied the humour that Russians crave to survive under such a repressive regime.
"They helped me with a lot of the jokes, as did some of my Russian relatives, who translated Russian joke books for me," says Thiessen, who won a 2003 Governor General's award for his first historical drama, Einstein's Gift. "The whole story of Lenin's Embalmers is deeply rooted in my upbringing in a Mennonite home. I'm honouring my family's past, not making fun of it."
It was Toronto designer Guido Tondino who first clued Thiessen into Stalin's god-building by giving him a book called Lenin's Embalmers by Samuel Hutchinson and Ilya Zbarsky, whose father Vladimir was one of the scientists Stalin strong-armed into perserving the body of Lenin for all time, a scientific feat that had never been achieved before.
The University of Winnipeg graduate moved to New York City three years ago and in 2008, when he learned the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was looking to fund plays that explore science or scientists, he finally read Tondino's literary present.
"I thought, 'What those embalmers went through is exactly what my parents and grandparents went through,'" says Thiessen.
Lenin's Embalmers debuted at New York City's Ensemble Studio Theatre in March and following the WJT run, the Canadian cast heads for Toronto's Harold Green Jewish Theatre. Another production is planned in Phoenix next season and with translations into Hebrew and Polish in the works, hopes for international revivals have been raised.
Meanwhile, Thiessen remains a writer in demand, with commissions from the Manitoba Theatre for Young People (an ecological musical he is penning with local composer Olaf Pyttlik), Shaw Festival (stage adaptation of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage) and one for Leonard Nimoy, the one-time Spock from TV's Star Trek.
He was in Los Angeles recently for a reading of his commissioned play Saving Grace, which Nimoy's wife Susan is directing. She also helmed his play Shakespeare's Will in L.A. three years ago and Thiessen formed a friendship with the couple.
"They are generous and talented people," he says. "Leonard is just a good Jewish boy from Boston. He's filled with emotion, not like Spock at all.
"I did hear him say 'fascinating' once and that made my ears perk up."
Lenin's Embalmers runs until Oct. 24 at WJT.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 21, 2010 D3
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