RUSSIAN RUSH.(Theater Review)

"Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient," a new play by Rezo Gabriadze, has a simple, even naive, story, set in the Stalinist Georgia of Gabriadze's childhood. A man named Chito (Mikhail Baryshnikov) is abandoned by his fiancee in favor of a dashing fellow with a fancy car. Chito thereupon decides that he is a car. Seven years later, on Christmas Eve of 1952, he pulls up at the house of the town doctor (Jon DeVries), another maniac. A little girl is dying, Chito says; the doctor must come. The rest of the play concerns the two men's misadventures as they stagger through a blizzard to the girl's house. There is a surprise ending and a lesson in faith--a resource hard to come by in the U.S.S.R. in 1952. It's all presided over by an angel in red spats (the former Joffrey Ballet dancer Luis Perez). Think Capra.

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