The best thing about “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk,” Daniel Jamieson’s 2016 play with music by Ian Ross, is the attention it gives Bella Rosenfeld, Marc Chagall’s wife from 1915 until her death in 1944.
A poet as well as her famous husband’s muse for his colorful paintings, mosaics and more, she even wrote a charming memoir about her girlhood in Vitebsk, the Belarusian town where both she and Marc were born, met and married. It wasn’t discovered until after her death.
Jamieson’s unconventional 80-minute piece, loosely framed as a flashback from an interview with Chagall, who lived to be 97, traces the relationship of the couple using narration, dialogue, some of Bella’s writing, movement, dance, music and songs in Russian, Yiddish, English and more. Repeatedly moving from place to place, they survived separations, the Russian Revolution, two world wars, pogroms, antisemitism and the destruction of their beloved hometown.
“The Flying Lovers” is meant to be a joyous celebration of one of the great love stories in art history, but the Northlight production doesn’t quite work that way. The stage and movement direction by Elizabeth Margolius is wonderfully sensual at times, and Jack Cahill-Lemme and especially Emma Rosenthal are engaging actors, singers and dancers, but a certain spark is missing except in the musical direction by Michael Mahler and performances by him and Elisa Carlson on piano and strings.
One problem is the design. Scott Penner’s set features the profile of a long staircase with an equally long ramp jutting off it, and both are charcoal gray, as is the background. Rachel Lambert’s costumes for Marc and Bella are in neutral beige tones, too, and no attempt has been made to make the actors look like the people they’re playing. Nor is there any effort to recreate Chagall’s paintings. The only suggestions are in Charlie Cooper’s at times boldly colorful lighting and in a puppet that’s meant to represent Bella’s daughter and looks like a fish.
I had hoped for more visually and also wished that the songs had been translated. “The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk” left me with an uncomfortable feeling, too. Given the amount that Marc and Bella argue, and his penchant for doing what’s important for his career regardless of her needs or desires, it came across as yet another story about a woman who sublimates herself for the sake of a talented man.
