| The destinies of Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin and Prince Felix
Yusupov were fused long before either knew of the other’s existence.
Each believed that in his youth the Virgin had appeared to him and charged
him with a special mission in life. Rasputin, from the moment of his vision,
never doubted the path that lay before him. For Yusupov the vision was the
start of a long descent into the darkest part of his soul. What he found
there he could neither acknowledge or accept—and it was Rasputin’s
misfortune that in him Yusupov saw the image of everything he despised in
himself. |
| The play opens in darkness. Rasputin’s disembodied voice
prophesies his own death as the lights slowly rise to reveal his body. There’s
a gun shot. The scene shifts abruptly. Yusupov enters having just shot a
dog to cover the traces of Rasputin’s blood in the snow outside. The
sight of the blood on his hands transports Yusupov to the moment when the
Virgin appeared to him. |
| 1909. Rasputin is hailed as a miracle worker. Yusupov has
wandered far from the path of the Virgin’s call. He’s set his
heart on winning Dmitri, a young cousin of the tsar. He’s haunted
by Rasputin’s growing acclaim and by his own sense of failure. He
erupts in a fit of self-recrimination; he admits he doesn’t know what
his mission is. Yusupov goes to Rasputin for guidance. Rasputin’s
assessment is acute and unvarnished: “You are a frightened little
boy,” he tells him. “You have a beautiful quality in your soul,
but your weakness and self- indulgence are twisting it.” Yusupov carryings
on with Dmitri become so blatant that—after a titanic row with his
domineering mother—he’s packed off to school at Oxford. |
| 1911. On his return, he discovers that Dmitri has become engaged
to Irina Alexandrovna, one of the tsar’s nieces. He seduces Dmitri.
Rasputin seduces a woman who comes to him for comfort. |
| 1913. Rasputin cures the tsarevich when the doctors have given
him up as lost. On another part of the stage, Yusupov visits a male prostitute.
Dmitri, with whom Yusupov is now living, is chronically drunk and suicidally
depressed over their relationship. Dmitri attempts suicide. Yusupov, faced
with the consequences of his willfulness, is shattered. He sees himself
pursued by the Hound of Heaven, a God who relentlessly pursues those he
has chosen. As he flees his own remorse and the echo of Rasputin’s
judgment, he finds himself providentially in Irina Alexandrovna’s
maternal embrace. Their marriage is announced. |
| 1916. After two years of marriage, Yusupov finds himself the
addictive customer of the male prostitute. Still haunted by Rasputin’s
judgment, he begs Christ to put an end to his suffering. Yusupov’s
mother confronts him with the fact that he is being followed by the Secret
Police. The thought of scandal is intolerable to her, and she warns him
she’ll take matters into her own hands if necessary. Yusupov turns
again to Rasputin for help. Yusupov returns to the prostitute distraught.
As Rasputin prayed over him, he reveals, he was obsessed with a fantasy
of having sex with Rasputin and became so aroused he ejaculated. Yusupov’s
mother, to prevent any further scandal, has the prostitute killed. Yusupov
learns the prostitute has been murdered. The torrent of guilt that assaults
him—for the prostitute’s death, his unfulfilled mission, Dmitri’s
attempted suicide, his many sins—drives him to the gravest of his
self-deceptions: that he is not the cause of anything that has happened,
but the victim. He convinces himself that his fantasy of having sex with
Rasputin was actually hypnotically induced. His reborn innocence re-ignites
his messianic delusion; he discovers the mission that has eluded him for
so long: to destroy Rasputin and save Russia. |
| The assassination is a living nightmare for Yusupov, and Rasputin’s
horrific end shatters him. He recognizes that the evil he has projected
onto Rasputin lies in fact in his own soul. Completely broken, he confesses,
“I’ll never be holy or cure a child. I’m nothing.”
Rasputin’s body is pulled from the river where Dmitri has dumped it.
Yusupov takes the body in his arms and says, “You had a beautiful
quality in your soul, Grigorii Efimovich. If only your weakness and self-indulgence
hadn’t twisted it.” |
| Ourselves, Our Foes was winner of the American Theatre
Ventures National Playwrights Contest and the Sonoma County Playwrights
Festival. |
