Review: "Review: All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station" at HERE NYC
L-R: Rivers Duggan, Elliott Morse, Mia Vallet. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
Max Berry
Contributing New York Critic
All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station is adapted loosely from the poem “Moscow Circles” by Vienya Erofeev and tells the story of a poet and drunk named Vienya (Elliot Morse) as he journeys (or rather attempts to journey) from Moscow to Petushki, were a beautiful woman is waiting for him. However, the journey takes longer than he would like, as he struggles with the search for an “ultimate truth” and grapples with intense and frightening ponderings on religion, politics, and existence itself. He is accompanied by what can only be described as Vienya’s inner demons, played with great enthusiasm and intensity by Rivers Duggan and Mia Vallet.
The poetic origins of the play were greatly felt throughout in both the language and the atmosphere the show created. I found myself locked on to every word that was spoken because I did not want to miss the next existential question thrown at me. Many of these were presented through the character of Vienya as he shared both his thoughts and fears on what was going on in the world around him and what he was experiencing within himself. What made the show so striking for me, was that you often couldn’t tell which one it was. The show lived in a sort of purgatory between a dream and reality. It brought to mind childhood dreams of desperately needing to get to a destination but never actually arriving, that feeling of murky confusion of why you keep getting drawn away from that place as well as the profound need to get there now. Very often in these dreams we wake up having never arrived at our destination. So when we are lured into the dream-like world of ...Kurski Station a part of us knows were are never going to arrive in Petushki, yet we are drawn in by the hypnotic words of a drunk desperate to understand the world because we can all identify with that desperation.
I can not talk about this show without talking about the honest and beautiful performances by the cast. Morse speaks from a place of truth and vulnerability and we really feel his struggles to put the pieces together. He gives us a protagonist that we can ultimately see ourselves in. No need for fanfare, just a guy looking for answers. The fanfare comes from the inner demons or Furies played by Duggan and Vallet.
These characters, donning masks of white face paint and various costumes, give the show it’s dream-like feelings of absurdity while at the same time, speaking just as much truth about the world as Vienya. While Vienya provides a judgemental and exhausted but ultimately hopeful outlook, the Furies mock and laugh at the confusion of the world and of Vienya himself. These two contrasts often overlap each other creating a surreal yet beautiful experience. All Roads Lead to the Kurski Station is absurd and dream-like, but ultimately it is a show that comes out of truth and how we all desire that in the world and in ourselves.