One Thursday night six months ago, a 52-year-old theater director
named Mark Weil was murdered in the entrance of his apartment building
in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Neighbors say they saw two men with baseball
caps waiting for the director, who was to premiere a high-tech version
of The Oresteia the following night. The two men hit Weil over
the head with a bottle, stabbed him several times in the stomach, and
ran. They didn’t take his money; they just wanted him dead.
Weil was the founder and dynamo of Ilkhom Theatre, which has
produced controversial and contrarian work since 1976, when it became
one of the first companies in the Soviet Union to refuse state funding.
Since then, Ilkhom has outraged Communist apparatchiks, Muslim
fundamentalists, and members of the current Uzbek dictatorship. But
detectives concentrated their murder investigation on the artists of
Ilkhom, interrogating them for hours at a stretch, asking about their
personal lives and favorite positions in bed. Four months later, police
announced they had no leads.
“The people who did it thought they’d end the theater, but they were
wrong,” said assistant director Maxim Tumenev, sitting in the
production offices of ACT Theatre. “Spiritually, it has made us
stronger. We cannot quit.”
And so they’ve come to Seattle, as they’d been planning since before
Weil’s murder, bringing two works: White White Black Stork and
Ecstasy with the Pomegranate.
Their hometown is Tashkent, a way station on the Silk Road. A
cosmopolitan merchant city since the seventh century, it became a
destination for intellectual exiles from Moscow and Leningrad under
Stalin’s regime. The theater was born in this climate of underground
dissent, in the basement of an abandoned building where Weil and his
ensemble staged forbidden plays.
For its first years, Ilkhom thrived at the fringes of Soviet
culture, unnoticed by censors. But, in the early 1980s, the company
leapt into the bear’s mouth and toured to Moscow. Alarmed Muscovite
bureaucrats threatened to smash the company, but were thwarted by one
powerful apparatchik.
“He was one of the old Communists who was not afraid of anything,”
Tumenev said. “He said to young functionaries who wanted to close the
theater: ‘You will not close it, and you will obey me because I saw
Lenin when he was alive!'”
When Uzbekistan declared independence from the crumbling USSR in
1991, theaters in Tashkent went on a political bender, preaching from
every stage. Weil, always the contrarian, responded by producing five
years of silent clown and mime work.
But the era of Uzbek freedom didn’t last long. Tashkent, its
capital, is sliding into anxious mediocrity, with artists and
intellectuals fleeing the country’s dictator—and former Soviet
leader—Islom Karimov. When someone at a bar table begins
criticizing the government, others hush him up, Tumenev said: “The city
has been castrated.”
But, even in this climate, even with the murder of their director,
Ilkhom will not be deterred. “We do what we want,” Tumenev said.
Tumenev suspects Muslim fundamentalists killed Weil—over a
recent play about a heretical Sufi philosopher—but it’s not as if
the Uzbek dictatorship was sorry to see him go. Ilkhom has produced
several shows that have needled zealots in the government and the
mosques with gay characters, criticisms of Islam, and romance.
“No kissing allowed on stage,” Tumenev said. “Like in the Soviet
Union, there is no sex in Uzbekistan.” One of his colleagues directed
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in one of Tashkent’s national
theaters and, per “representatives from the Ministry of Culture,” had
to stage the romantic comedy with lovers who never touched.
If Tashkent is such a bleak place to make art, why don’t they
leave?
“We cannot,” Tumenev said. “Tashkent is part of Ilkhom. If you move
the company out of the city, it will die.” And Ilkhom is part of
Tashkent. Beneath Tumenev’s lament for his graying city, one detects
his feeling that to leave it would betray it: Ilkhom has a dedicated
local following and a small academy. Weil stayed in Tashkent, even
after moving his wife and daughter to Seattle, where he had connections
at the University of Washington. Perhaps leaving would be a betrayal of
him, too.
“These artists are sharp, defined, and committed,” said Kurt
Beattie, ACT Theatre artistic director. “They have to be committed, in
a way I don’t think any theater in Seattle could be.”
Ilkhom has 20 core members, 20 satellite members, and 12 shows in
its repertoire, from The Oresteia to Brecht to ensemble work
made from scratch. Twenty-nine of them have come to Seattle to perform
two plays, in Uzbek and Russian, with English supertitles. White
White Black Stork is one of Ilkhom’s more realistic and austere
original works, a tragedy about two young Sufis forced into an arranged
marriage. He’s gay, she’s in love with a traveling salesman, and both
are doomed.
The play—by Weil and Elkin Tuichiev—has been in Ilkhom’s
repertoire for 10 years, and beats relentlessly forward, like Romeo
and Juliet without any comic relief. A newer work that uses dance
and video, Ecstasy with the Pomegranate concerns a Stalin-era
painter who travels to Uzbekistan and is bewitched by the “bacha boys,”
young Sufi men who perform women’s parts in traditional dances.
The company spends months, sometimes a year, creating a production,
and prioritizes acting over sets or spectacle. The results are
palpable: Performances in White White Black Stork, which I saw
in previews, are hermetic and confident, both physically and vocally.
The actors perform with an authority one doesn’t see in American
theater, where directors and actors have mere weeks to bang a show
together.
Weil directed by improvisation. He had actors improvise for months,
feeling out the borders of their characters while he watched, noted the
best moments, and molded them into the production. “The actors never
waited around while he staged them, telling where to walk or stand,”
Tumenev said. “He invited them to sink into the material.”
How will the company persist, now that its center of gravity is
gone?
“There is a phrase I like very much,” Tumenev said. “‘Genius is
opening the door and letting talented people walk through.’ Mark was a
true genius—he invested a lot in all of us. He opened many doors,
but he left the keys when he died.” 
