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The KGB’s trademark predawn knock at the door provides a kind of pulse for The Akhmatova Project, developed by Keystone in collaboration with her 12-member ensemble (portraying nearly 40 characters) as a choreographed recital tracking the plight of poet Anna Akhmatova (Miranda Viscoli as the girl, Valerie Spencer as the woman) and her circle of mostly outcast artists.

The dance enlarges upon two major motifs. First, there’s the sheer reach of Stalin’s sadism—how for example, he lashed out at Akhmatova by repeatedly sentencing her only son, Lev (Joseph Grimm) to Siberian labor camps. Second is the fact that, in the Soviet Union, poets could be as influential, and disruptive, as today’s rock stars. That Stalin would sentence Osip Mandelstam (John Prosky) to hard labor for one poem is testament not only to Stalin’s paranoia and vindictiveness, but also to the high regard in which he held poetry. One line from the play— “There’s no place where more people are killed for [poetry]” — bespeaks a circumstance of history that many of our more serious artists might well envy.

The rest is largely a who’s who of Soviet lit, a roster of talent that includes Vladimir Mayakovsky (Christopher Kelley), Boris Pasternak (Eric Marx), Aleksander Blok (Russell Edge), Sir Isaiah Berlin (Grimm again) and even the ghost of Aleksandr Pushkin (Joe Palmiotti), with additional poetry and text by Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Keystone.

The Akhmatova Project’s literary ballet plays out on a mostly bare wooden stage, a feast of visual tableaux and symbols. Young Akhmatova slips out of a white dress to don the black dress of her maturity. Meanwhile, in a crescendo of terror and doom, most of her colleagues either are swept away or cut their losses and run to Paris. Mayakovsky, favored by Stalin, commits suicide. A scene depicting the march of citizens to the Soviet anthem, the Red Flag unfurling around them, ignites feelings of both inspiration and alarm. A firing squad guns down an artist th the strains of Mozart’s Requiem.

The plays points are driven home not so much by the abundant poetry in the text as by Keystone’s staging, juxtaposed against Randy Tico’s haunting sound design and original music. The tone is like a sledgehammer pounding an anvil. When sparks fly, they are the words of the poems, often spoken in Russian by Natasha Basley. The Akhmatova Project is a labor of devotion whose integrity resonates from the stage. Keystone has been developing the piece over many years. (It premiered in ASK Theater Projects’ 1998 Common Ground Festival.) Diligently researched, it is nonetheless an emotional cry, a tone poem, an ode to the vigor of the crafted word and to the people who craft it.

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