WASHINGTON — Imagine watching a gorgeous and primitive funeral through the wrong end of a telescope — the ache of grief and the precision of ritual perceived remotely but with great emotional clarity — and you will have some idea of the effect of "The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem," a puppet production imported from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The show, on a tiny stage in the Kennedy Center's American Film Institute auditorium, is imagistic, elliptical and mournful, a memorial in miniature to the city that was besieged by the Germans from August 1942 to February 1943, and to its people, a million or more of whom died in the gruesome victory that was a turning point in World War II. The city, now Volgograd, was destroyed, but the Russians, at the fierce behest of the despot defending his name and his nation, rejected the German advance, obliterating the Axis forces on the Eastern front.
But this is less a history lesson than a timeless elegy. Striking and beautiful in its small-scale imagery, elegant and delicate in the marionette work of its five puppeteers, it is, by the acknowledgment of the show's creator, Rezo Gabriadze, a personal response to the Georgian civil war of the early 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire and displaced him from his homeland for four years.
To that end, though the show is nominally set in Berlin, Moscow, Kiev and Stalingrad from 1937 to 1943, it has a spirit of universal lament. Though it is nominally focused on one of history's bloodiest events, it is focused on the stories of individuals unlucky enough to be ensnared in the gathering horror.
These stories, real and surreal, credible and fabulous — that of a young soldier who witnesses the wedding of the girl he loves to another man and goes on a shooting rampage; or a confrontation between a Russian transport worker, portrayed in the form of a horse, and the German commander at Stalingrad; or that of a foppish German painter who preens in a Berlin cafe as the war proceeds — resonate not so much with historical or narrative precision but with a helpless anguish as evocative as music.
The show — in Russian, with English titles displayed across the front of the puppet stage — is loaded with grave sentiment, but it is a gravity that is both earned and leavened by Gabriadze's creations, which are not without humor. As characters either powerful or weak, his puppets, long-faced, with a clattery-boned droopiness, seemingly constructed from bird legs and seashell fragments held together with string, share a frailty that feels human.
This pertains even to the show's anthropomorphic icons, which includes two horses struggling through a war-torn love affair and an ant who is a mother with a dying daughter. Their animal qualities are stunningly, suggestively real (particularly in the ant, whose movements, down to its fibrillating antennae, are precisely denoted by a puppeteer) even as their stories turn them into sympathetic, even charming personalities.
It isn't just puppets. Gabriadze is also a gifted designer of stage pictures, and many of the images he presents are memorable.To represent a battalion of marching soldiers, Gabriadze lines up an array of doll-size army helmets on what appear to be baking pans.
The pans are yanked, with military rhythm, along a platform; the soldiers are heading into the maw of battle, which is suggested by a fiery spray of red-lighted sand from the wings. A midair dogfight is depicted by three puppeteers, each holding a piece of a skeletally rendered plane.