About the Play:

Master and Margarita or, The Devil Comes to Moscow is a full-length drama adapted for the stage by Jean-Claude van Itallie, from a translation by Sergei Kobiakoff of the famous Russian literature classic by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is springtime in Moscow and the Devil has come to stage his annual ball and wreak havoc on a city that believes in neither Heaven nor Hell. Jean Claude Van Itallie's adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's cult masterpiece combines elements of Faust, the Bible and Soviet Russia with the surreal romance of a writer driven mad by his own work and his lover's desperate attempt to save him.

The Master and Margarita is part love story, part phantasmagoria, and part biting satire. On a hot spring day, the Devil pays a visit to Stalin's Moscow. His retinue includes a naked witch, a fanged assassin, a vodka swigging black cat, and a slew of other dazzling cronies who soon wreak havoc among the writers, critics, and other cultural elite 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 past 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. Dear to the hearts of Eastern Europeans and Russians, The Master and Margarita was a suppressed cult novel during Stalinist days, expressing forbidden truths with wild spirit, humanity and humour.

Master and Margarita premiered in 1993 at the Theater for the New City off-off-Broadway in New York City. Since then the play has been successfully staged at several professional theatres and colleges.

Cast: 2 female, 11 male (flexible casting: 13 total playing 39 roles)

What people say:

"As one might expect, Jean-Claude van Itallie's stage adaptation of The Master and Margarita can keep an audience startled and amused for a couple of hours." — The New York Times

"Master and Margarita… captures all the wildness, wit, and sadness of Bulgakov's work… There isn't a dull moment." — TheaterWeek

About the Playwright:

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was a doctor, journalist, novelist and short-story writer as well as a playwright, but his works were heavily censored and rarely published or performed in the Soviet Union during his lifetime. He wrote Master and Margarita as a novel between 1928 and 1940 and was still revising it in the last days before his death. It wasn't published until 1967, when it was instantly acclaimed as a triumph of individual art over collectivist oppression.

Jean-Claude van Itallie (1936-2021) was one of the most distinguished playwrights of the American avant-garde. Born in Brussels, Belgium, he was three when his family fled the Holocaust to America as refugees in 1940. He grew up on suburban Long Island, graduated Harvard in 1958, and in the 1960s was a seminal force in the explosive New York Off-Broadway theatre. He may be best-known for America Hurrah (his landmark counter-culture trilogy comprised of Interview, TV and Motel), The Serpent, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his classic translations of Chekhov's major plays, which are prized by directors and actors for their clarity and actability, are possibly the most performed Chekhov versions on the American stage.