Dmitry Lipkin on Cranes

When and how did your family leave Russia?
I was born in Moscow, and we left when I was eleven. We stayed in Italy for three months, near Rome, in a place called Ostia. In the Seventies, about a third of Ostia was Russian. It was fun. It was my first glimpse of the West. Then we went to Baton Rouge.

Did you have an immediate reaction to the West?
It was a big adventure. I got to buy clothes, food... Everything was colorful. Only when we got the the United States did it begin to seem depressing. You find that you have to live by the rules of this new place.

How did you get out of Russia?
In applying we took a risk. Had we been refused, my dad would have lost his job - our lives could have been ruined. We could have been ostracized simply for applying. My father was demoted, but he maintained good relations. No one at my school knew that we were trying to leave. Once you were allowed to leave, you went in two weeks, because you had your citizenship revoked right away. Permission to leave was granted under the guise of family reunification. You'd get someone who was leaving to get their relations in Israel to say they were your uncle, or whatever. Everyone went to Austria first. From there, if you wanted to go on to Israel, you could leave that day.

Why didn't everyone go to Israel then?
Jobs. Once you said you didn't want to go to Israel, they tried to hook you up to a Jewish community. In Baton Rouge, there were two temples. One was old-time Southern Jews, the other was Jews from New Jersey. They knew my father was an engineer, and could be useful. The whole congregation was at the airport flashing pictures of us.

To what extent is CRANES based on your own experiences?
Once you write the name on paper, it's a character. Nominally, [the character of] Alex is me, but I also identify with the Lily character. I know it is a cliché, but they are all me. I start out with elements from life, but they only stay if they serve the play. Also, I never played the piano, and neither did my mom.

Why is the play set during Mardi Gras?
I liked the costumes, the visual and thematic/emotional/intellectual breadth it provided. It allowed me to get away with things that I wouldn't have [in a naturalistic play], in terms of how characters act, or move in space. I generally fall in on the excess in theater: the more ideas, the more things to look at, the better.

Why did you choose the year 1986 for the action?
This is where I start sounding really pretentious. I felt that this moment in time was an end of an age, a certain era, for these people. Gorbachev is mentioned in the play, and it was just before the Berlin Wall fell - the last point before everything changes.

When and how did you start writing plays?
Grad school at NYU. I was originally going to go for film, and I wrote a screenplay, which was terrible. Then I got interesting in theater in the Dramatic Writing program, which is both theater and film. I just wanted to be a writer. And I found out that theater was much more open to creative freedom.

Copyright © 1999 Dmitry Lipkin and thenewgroup Theatre Company