Sophia Romma's Absolute Clarity

The other night, Tanya and I went to a theater on MacDougal Street in the Village to see an off-Broadway play called Absolute Clarity and had a brief, but rewarding encounter with the playwright, Sophia Romma (ne Murashovsky), a wildly talented exemplar of the new generation of Russian-American Jewish writers alongside Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar. Romma, now in her early 30’s came here from the Soviet Union at the age of six and has somehow found time and energy to get both a BFA and MFA at NYU and a PhD in 19th Century Russian literature at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. She teaches American Literature at Touro College, runs a screenwriting workshop at the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center and sometimes teaches screewritin g at Mc Gill University in Montreal. She is clearly an intensely mezhdunarodnya soul, a creation of a particularist ‘Russian Jewish intelligentsia in America’ sensibility, which is by its very nature extremely cosmopolitan.

A writer of poetry and prose, Romma has written three plays which were produced at the famous La MaMa Theater; Love In the Eyes of Hope Dies Last, a journey through Russian-Jewish immigration in a series of eight playlets; Coyote, Take Me There, a surrealistic work on the ordeals of immigration and the corruption of the American Dream as experienced by Russian Jews and Mexican immigrants; and Defenses of Prague, a story of revenge set among gypsies in 1968 Prague. She is author of the film Poor Liza, a love story set in 19th Century Russia which was directed by Slava Tsukerman, another Russian-Jewish expatriate who made the memorably psychedelic and brainy film Liquid Sky back in the 1980’s.

Romma’s last play before Absolute Clarity was called Shoot Me In the Cornfields, a time travel extravaganza involving characters finding love during the siege of Stalingrad and during the Moscow coup of 1991, which, I myself had the privilege of witnessing. Actually, I had thought that was the play we would be seeing, but instead found that Absolute Clarity was a ‘transplanted to New York’ version of a play by the famous Russian playwright Edvard Radzinski, who collaborated with her on the project. I was a bit disappointed because I had expected to see a play focused on the Russian Jewish experience, but Absolute Clarity turned out to be an enjoyable absurdist romp through the modern downtown New York cultural and artistic scene, involving vivid characters who revolve around Claire, clearly Romma’s alter ego, a prematurely hip teenage gamin who speaks in rhyme. Claire struggles to actualize herself as an artist, is terribly cruel to her mother, a lounge singer who was once a stripper, torments and seduces a middle aged artist, and hangs out with an outlaw jazz/hip-hop group, whose members rap, sing and make music in black, Jewish, Latin and Russian/Georgian rhythms. The play’s director, by the way, is another transplanted Russian Jew, Yuri Joffe.

There are some other memorable characters, including a hilarious black chanteuse, a slimy, joyously corrupt Italian-American judge, with perfect Curtis Sliwa diction, a bitchy, seductive Frenchwoman. It is obvious that Romma has a wonderful ear for language, accent, and expression of cultural distinctiveness. And she wrote all of the jazzy, hip hop music in the play, which is itself a tour de force

Before the play. I spoke briefly to Romma, a slight curly-haired figure with a warmth and easy informality that contrasts with the creative forces—some of them evidently dark—churning inside her. As she talks about her life and her art, it is obvious that she is fully at home and artistically engaged in both New York and Moscow and interacts effortlessly with the finest artistic and literary minds in both capitals. Let me say for the record that I am more than a little jealous that I don’t get to have her life, but, nu, shto deliyat? Anyway, its fun to be in the presence of youthful genius. Romma said that Absolute Clarity which is about “striving for happiness amidst betrayal” is her attempt to write a play along the lines of one of her artistic inspirations--Tennessee Williams—“to have a go at writing something more meaty than I usually do.”

Romma spends a lot of time in Moscow and loves living there, “because it remains a place where you don’t need a calling card like you do here. You can just drop in on people spontaneously, although it’s a good idea to bring a honey cake with you.” But hasn’t Moscow gone all glitzy and wildly materialistic? “Yes, that is happening of course, and I dislike glitziness whether in Moscow or New York. But I still find plenty of people there who believe in love, beauty, poetry and humanism.”

Anyway, rubyjewsday readers, I recommend you go and see Absolute Clarity, which is to run at the Players Theater from January 31 to February 25. Yes, it’s an America-focused play, but it comes with plenty of Russkaya dusha.