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Date: 7/18/2023
EASTHAMPTON — The Blue Room in Easthampton’s CitySpace will be the upcoming site for six performances of a brand new one-man-show, “Hope I Die Before I Get Old: The Last Case of Sherlock Holmes.”
Written and performed by John Feffer, the play juxtaposes the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and real-life infamous poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and probes the mysteries of creativity and political collaboration. Chris Rohamann, who has directed shows across the region including for Silverthorne Theater Company, Majestic Theater and the Suffield Players will be directing. The show will open on July 21 at 8 p.m. and run on July 22, 23 — a 3 p.m. matinee — 27, 28 and 29. Tickets are $15.
The play finds Sherlock Holmes in Moscow investigating the puzzling death in April 1930 of the poet Mayakovsky. The bard of the Russian revolution has just shot himself through the heart. It’s not a question of whodunnit, but why?
Although Soviet authorities are counting on Holmes to answer that question, only Mayakovsky himself can really solve the mystery. Resurrected and forced to relive his life backwards, the poet delves into his past — aided by two mysterious women — played by Jarice Hanson, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor, and Hero Marguerite, a Smith College Theater graduate, who appear in video cameos — to figure out why he ultimately pulled the trigger.
Feffer, who plays both Holmes and Mayakovsky, told Reminder Publishing when he started theater 20 years ago, he didn’t know anyone in the theater world so he forged his own way into its world.
“A one-man show was basically the default option,” Feffer said.
From that point on Feffer has done well in theater as a playwright, performer and producer of 11 previous theater works, and has had shows appear at the Edinburgh, New York City and Capital Fringes, as well as the One Man Standing and United Solo festivals. He added while it was his way of starting in the theater world, he still enjoys the limitations imposed through a one-man show.
“The main challenge for a one-man show is to keep the interest of the audience. The audiences are usually excited by conflict and by interaction and by different people on stage doing different things, so just having one person up there is not necessarily very interesting,” Feffer said with a laugh. “I had to come up with some other way of engaging audiences and that’s kind of the challenge is to come up with different storytelling techniques, different dramatic techniques to really propel the story forward to get an audience engaged at every level.”
When writing this new one-man show, he felt there were elements with Mayakovsky’s life that made for an interesting parallel with the current times with the ongoing war in Ukraine. He said Mayakovsky’s life allows for a view into the dilemmas facing Russian artists today, as political pressure and current events are often reflected through art.
“The major theme of the play is how do we deal with the compromises we have to make in our lives in order to do what we want to do,” Feffer said. “It could be creative work, it could be starting a business. I mean basically, as an adult, we have to make compromises. We’re not happy about it often, but that’s just the reality of the world.”
Feffer continued, “In this particular case this was a poet who was famous at the time, and he made compromises for a lot of people. The compromises he made were basically deals with the devil, like if you make me famous, I’ll give you my soul, that kind of deal. And so, the play basically rewinds his life in a way, so that he is not aware of the compromises he has made in his past and as he is kind of going back through his past, he discovers the compromise. I think a lot of people can relate to the challenge in compromises we make.”
Bringing Sherlock Holmes into a fictional story based on the real Mayakovsky connects audiences to the story waiting to be told. Feffer noted they were “born” and “died” around the same times as the author of “Sherlock Holmes,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, died a few months after Mayakovsky.
“There was this space in this kind of imaginary world for Sherlock Holmes to have his final case in Moscow trying to figure out why this poet committed suicide,” Feffer said.
He added with the ongoing war in Ukraine, the new story allows for a connection to a similar time of conflict in the region with the Russian Revolution a century ago.
“Russia is obviously in the news right now and I realized that this was a really good time to do this show because there are a lot of people in Russia today who are struggling with this question of whether to oppose the war in Ukraine or support the government. And so, they’re being forced, especially cultural figures, are being forced to make this decision. This is effectively Mayakovsky’s dilemma as well, although it wasn’t a war that he was supporting, it was the government, the Soviet Union, and so I felt that this is an important kind of time to consider the compromises that soviet intellectuals, in this case a soviet poet, made in exchange for fame, in exchange for money, in exchange for legacy.”
Feffer said the two characters clash as Holmes represents his typical rational detective self while Mayakovsky was a Soviet supporting poet who was filled with emotion.
“He had just this enormous heart and he used to say all the time that he wrote about love, love was the center of his obsession, and he was in love with numerous women, he was just Mr. Emotion,” Feffer said. “So, you have these two very different characters, you have the brain and the heart and they’re basically dueling with one another to a certain extent.”
This will be Feffer’s first show in Easthampton, as he recently relocated to Northampton with his wife and has been excited to become more familiar with the arts space in the region.
“I was charmed by the Blue Room,” Feffer said. “It’s a cozy space that has really everything you need for a theatrical show, but not overwhelmingly large. You have these two columns that are part of the Blue Room and that’s an interesting challenge to incorporate that in one show. It frames the stage and provides a kind of interesting addition that you have to kind of move around.”
Feffer added much of the play is taken directly from historical record, as he attempts to give recapitulations of things that happened during Mayakovsky’s life. He decided having the story go backwards in time provided a unique vehicle of storytelling to tie in with Holmes solving the case.
He explained that going backwards provides the story an important dramatic narrative that he said can be successful as in theory, going backward through your life you are left in the dark about what is next dating back in your life.
“[When going backward] they are discovering things about their lives that they have “forgotten” and that’s a really interesting moral question,” Feffer said.
He added people live their lives “going forward,” learn lessons and grow, but going backwards brings a new perspective. Going backward is often the “Sherlock Holmes” method to solving mysteries.
“So, both Mayakovsky and Sherlock Holmes, two very different people, are actually doing the same process of going backward to understand the motive/motivation behind this act of suicide in April 1930.”