Rajiv Joseph’s ‘Describe the Night’ @ Outcry Theatre
Show photos by Jenn Garcia Photography; promootion photos by Jason Johnson-Spinos
—Jan Farrington
NIKOLAI: (He waves the magic marker like a wand.) Behold, Young Vladimir: The Black Magic Marker: The most useful tool in all of communism. There is nothing that cannot be eventually crossed out, and changed...This is what we are here to do: The Soviet Union is a blanket of truth. Every corner of the world that exists under our blanket abides by the truth we create….
URZULA: The misery of the world, and here's me, stuck, too frightened to even step outside and possibly do something. I wish I was more like you and him, Babcia. Brave and smart. YEVGENIA: Can't be both! Choose one!
I’ve been caught up before in the unusual visions of playwright Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Guardians at the Taj, etc.), but Outcry Theatre’s flowing, heart-pumping production of his time-spanning play Describe the Night left my brain crammed with compelling images, ideas, and a sense of the overlaps of life and history—though that sense didn’t leave me feeling comfortable, not a bit.
Ninety years of Russian history pass before us, jumping among scenes arranged not by time but by the seven souls involved. A Russian soldier and a journalist/fiction writer meet near a Russian-border combat zone in 1920, later in the soldier’s home in the ‘30s (where the writer meets the man’s fortune-telling wife), and again in a terrifying “confessional booth” of the 1930s/40s in Soviet Moscow.
The writer has a diary; the soldier finds the notion of “making up” stories outrageous. “Truth is what happens,” he says angrily. “False is what does not happen.”
A 2010 air crash in a Russian forest claims the life of Poland’s president and 95 other officials—and another journalist (running from the goons who’ve picked up and silenced her colleagues who saw the incident) meets a skittish car-rental guy who’d rather not get involved.
A diary passes between them.
The writer and the soldier Nikolai Yezhov (who becomes—in real history—head of the pre-KGB Stalinist NKVD) meet in other years, beginning a thread of story that involves the soldier’s wife, her granddaughter who hopes to flee to the West, and a young KGB agent who has his fortune told: could he truly become “the most powerful man” in Russia?
I don’t think it’s telling to much to let you know that by the closing moments, these seven will be powerfully connected in our minds.
Director Becca Johnson-Spinos (who also created the mesmerizing choreography) uses movement and portable ghost-white panels to expand the story into a beyond-reality. We’re called into the action by a circling dance; the cast members dress one another in Kathleen Wright’s excellent period costumes, which allow the performers to slip easily from their younger selves into older versions (some older by many decades!). And the economical props and set pieces—the ever-lasting diary, a long file drawer, a Magic Marker that makes us shiver, pieces of furniture that clarify time and place—go straight to the point they’re making, helped along by Jacob Kaplan’s spot-on lights, and evocative sound by Jason Johnson-Spinos.
Connor McMurray is fascinating to watch as the edgy, explosive Nikolai—a young man whose unlikely friendship with real-life writer Isaac Babel (Dylan Weand is quietly charismatic, and somehow both an old soul and a playah) challenges his set-in-concrete beliefs. Nikolai will come to hold great power, and Isaac none, except in the power of “my work.” And truth itself, says Nikolai, now belongs to the state, not the artist: “When we say that something is true, it becomes true. When we say that something is false, it becomes false.”
Katelyn Yntema plays Nikolai’s intelligent and ungovernable wife Yevgenia, the seer and soup-maker (playwright Joseph likes to shock us now and again) whose powers leave her unhappy, restricted to playing the dutiful Soviet wife. She’s a fascinating character, and even more compelling as an old woman in a babushka, dispensing cryptic predictions and advice to the youngsters around her. Marcy Bogner is her descendant Urzula, a wannabee pop star (it’s the ‘80s) fixated on escape from the boring, restrictive USSR—but crushing a bit on mysterious young KGB agent Vova (Bradford Reilly), a poor boy from Leningrad who’s climbing the power ladder—and revealing an unstable mix of fragility and brutality in his nature.
As the runaway plane-crash journalist Mariya, helped by the nearly hysterical car-rental guy Feliks, Whitney Renee Dodson and Chase Di Julio (also the show’s dramaturg) strike us as outliers in the story…until they’re not. Their performances and their fates, like those of the other cast members, grow stronger by the scene. And that diary? It keeps coming up, gathering impact and meaning—along with echoes in the play that resonate with our current politics and world events.
Describe the Night is some of Outcry’s best work to date—and that’s saying something. Running for barely one week more in Theatre Three’s arena space, it’s something to see, and I count myself grateful to Becca and Jason Johnson-Spinos, founders of the company, for having the “eye” and determination to get it here to North Texas.
WHEN: August 23-31, 2025
WHERE: Theatre Three, 2688 Laclede St., Dallas
WEB: outcrytheatre.com
