By MICHAEL MARKHAM

It's 1996, and Mikhail Lincoln Lenin Smith—arriving at Kennedy Airport from Russia—has a bit of explaining to do. "Mikhail was my grandfather's name. Lincoln is your Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States." ("Yes, I have heard of him," interrupts the American customs officer.) "Of course. Lenin—well, that's obvious, yes? And Smith—my father's name. So Mikhail Lincoln Lenin Smith, requesting admission to America!"

Director Marion McClinton (right) in rehearsal with the fourth-year actors, including (left to right) Will Pailen, Erin Krakow, and Rachel Nicks, whom he directs in Thomas Gibbons's Black Russian. (Photo by Jane Rubinsky)

An interesting name, indeed—and so is the title of the play that launches the Drama Division's offerings of Juilliard's centennial season: Black Russian, by Thomas Gibbons, which will be performed by the fourth-year actors (Group 35) at the end of this month in the newly renovated Drama Theater. The production will be directed by Marion McClinton, who has directed Drowning Crow, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and King Hedley II on Broadway. Black Russian was first produced by InterAct Theater Company in 1996, where Gibbons is the playwright-in-residence, and later produced Off-Off-Broadway by Blue Heron Theater Company. InterAct has produced six of Gibbons's plays during his tenure there. His plays have also been produced around the country at theaters such as Center Stage, Arizona Theater Co., Northlight, Florida Stage, New Repertory Theater, and others.

Gibbons first came up with the idea for Black Russian from reading a newspaper article about the descendants of African-Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union during the '20s and '30s. He says he found the topic "fascinating," but it wasn't until several years later that he was able to explore it within a play. "While I was working on the play," he said in a recent interview by e-mail, "a remarkable book called Soul to Soul, by Yelena Khanga, was published. Yelena is herself a black Russian, the granddaughter of a man named Oliver Golden, an agronomist who went to Russia in the '20s to develop a new strain of cotton (a historical irony that I couldn't resist using)."

The play follows the parallel stories of Eugene Smith, an American agriculturalist who moves to the Soviet Union in 1936 to join what had been portrayed as the social utopia there, and his son Misha, who—disillusioned with his father's choices and the country crumbling around him—travels back to New York and the Deep South to discover his roots. Gene left to start a new way of life, in a place where he could work and be judged by his work, not the color of his skin—to "breathe in the pure oxygen of a new age," as he says in the play. Through persistence and hard work, he succeeds in making cotton grow in the shortened Soviet summer season. And while planting in Yangiyul, Uzbekistan, he meets a young teacher, Galina Vertov. Soon they are married and have a son, Mikhail Lincoln Lenin Smith, who is called Misha.

Having grown up in the Soviet Union, Misha is something of a novelty. He is a lone black man in the sea of white Russian faces. In a society based on equality and the collective, he sticks out like a sore thumb. A historian by training, he is dying to know his own history. Why is he different? What does it mean to be black? Eventually he travels to the America his father left behind. In New York, he joins old friends Yelena and Alex Markov, Russian émigrés who are living the life of successful artists. They travel with Misha to Bogalusa, La., and the cotton fields in which his father grew up.

The play skips back and forth in time—sometimes with alternating lines—dovetailing the two stories across the stage. This enables the audience to see it as one story, experiencing the parallels between father and son—history repeating itself with subtle and not so subtle tangents. While Gene and Misha travel the same road and face similar obstacles, they climb through them in their own way. In early rehearsals for Juilliard's production, McClinton expressed his desire to explore how the parallel stories work out in Gibbons's writing. Do they simply juxtapose similar events, or are they entwined more directly, underneath the surface of their presentation? Do the stories actually need each other in order to be told fully?

Gibbons says the play is about "the necessity of acknowledging our past, and the equally strong necessity of transcending it." It also seems to be about home—our search for a home; about finding or making a home, no matter what the distance we must travel in the process; about making our home better.

Black Russian by Thomas Gibbons Drama Theater Thursday, Sept. 29- Monday, Oct. 3 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

With time rising and falling, rather than following a literal narrative stream, we are allowed to examine the sociopolitical temperatures of the Soviet Union and the United States from the inside and outside, and consider these "homeward" questions for each character individually. What is it about the society they were born into that makes them want to leave? Do they find what they are looking for? And ultimately, is the society they enter really any different? Are father and son really so far apart that they cannot bridge the gulf? "From the juxtaposition of this father's and son's stories, despite their feeling that they are so different from each other, we see how their lives really are a bit similar," says Group 35 actor Daniel Shelley. "Despite the differences of time and location, these two men, bonded by blood, do have a universal connection."

The play is also about race, and the effects our history has on our perception of race. This is not a new topic for Gibbons. He has written several plays that deal with race on many levels, from social to governmental, from economic to familial. And it is not something many people might expect from a white man living in Devon, Pa. "The fact that I'm a white man who chooses to write about this subject has led some people to question my right to do so," Gibbons says. But he explains, "Race is the central dilemma in American history, which we still have not succeeded in untangling. A nation founded in liberty practiced slavery; a constitution that declared the equality of all men also declared that slaves counted as three-fifths of a human being. This is a murderous paradox, and we're living with its ramifications to this day." Gibbons was also compelled to explore this paradox, along with the objections to his writing about race, in a play called Bee-Luther-Hatchee, first produced by InterAct in 1999.

Wherever you are on your own journey, and whatever place you call home, it will be well worth your while to stop in on Black Russian this fall, and see what questions it raises for you.

Michael Markham is a fourth-year drama student.