Nights at the Stray Dog Cafe

During the German bombardment of Leningrad, earlier and now St. Petersburg, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, struck on the head by a falling brick, stumbles into a basement for shelter and finds herself unexpectedly back at the long abandoned site of the Stray Dog Café, where in the second decade of the twentieth century the most famous Russian poets, artists, actors and dancers gathered to drink, sing, argue and make love, and gradually the Stray Dog comes to life again, with Mayakovsky, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Mandelstam, the ballerina Karsavina, the puppet loving and famously promiscuous Olga Sudeikina, the poet Blok and his beautiful actress wife Lyubov, the critic Brik, who became an informer for the secret police, and many others appear. In this funny, vibrant, epic tapestry, the world of pre-Revolutionary Russia comes alive again, with all its hope, and then the nightmare that followed, in which most of these amazingly talented and compelling people were one by one devoured by Stalin's Skeleton Clowns. Eerie, surreal, moving, funny, erotic, with occasional song and dance, a tribute to these remarkable ghosts. Part of Nigro's ongoing cycle of plays tracing the history of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries that includes Pushkin, Gogol, An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness, Emotion Memory, Rasputin, A Russian Play, Marina, Mandelstam and others.