WISE CHOICE: FORTUNE’S FOOL
By Jan Aaron

Ivan Turgenev’s little-known comedy Fortune’s Fool, comes vividly to life at The Music Box Theatre. With Alan Bates and Frank Langella playing the leads in this effective adaptation by Mike Poulton, the production, cleverly directed by Arthur Penn, brings mid-century Russia to the Great White Way in an always entertaining and, at times, touching way. For educators, the play might inspire new ways to bring Russian literature into the classroom.

Bates is Kuzovkin, a down-at-heels nobleman, who has been a houseguest for many years at a huge country estate recently inherited by the radiant Olga (Enid Graham) and her new husband, Paul (Benedick Bates, Alan’s son). Olga was a young girl when she left the estate for St. Petersburg and is eager to showoff her property, her new husband and resume her old life. Kuzovkin’s own estate has been mired for many years in a tangled legal suit that keeps him from claiming possession of it. He now worries about staying on here.

Paul, who hopes to restore order to the seriously mismanaged property, might not let Kuzovkin stay and the neighbor, Tropatchov (Langella), a spectacularly arrogant dandy snooping from a neighboring estate, drops in unexpectedly and stirs up trouble for him too. But when Kuzovkin gets drunk at a gala evening, he blurts out something so shocking it changes everything.

In the centerpiece of the first act, when Kuzovkin makes this admission, Bates is both hilarious and pitiful. Langella’s mischiefmaking Tropatchov is entertaining, too, as he goads the drunken Kuzovkin into recalling the snarled details of his fruitless efforts to reclaim his estate.

The Russian estate seen here seems too sleek for Czarist days and the costumes for Olga look more Gone With The Wind than 19th century Russia. But these are minor quibbles in an otherwise engrossing two-act comic melodrama — a must see for serious New York theatergoers. (Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th, $55-$75. #

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