MASTER & MARGARITA OR, THE DEVIL COMES TO MOSCOW

by van Itallie, Jean Claude

The devil, his acrobatic cat and other colorful cronies come to Stalin’s Moscow to wreak hilarious surreal havoc on the lives of writers, critics and bureaucratniks who have lost touch with their feelings. Satan sends some to the madhouse, stages a devilish play within a play, and gives the lyrical Margarita a whirlwind witch’s ride climaxing in a satanic masked ball as she searches for her lover, a writer known as “Master.” The novel Master is writing appears simultaneously on stage. His work, politically suppressed, focuses on the moral dilemma of Pontius Pilate in biblical Jerusalem. The characters in his book and the characters on the streets of Moscow, cast similar lights and shadows around them even as they live in separate worlds.