About people on stage

Theatre, as an art, aims to achieve the maximum degree of empathy with the characters by the audience. If the audience does not feel themselves in the same situation as the hero, then the performance is a failure. No matter how many flowers relatives and friends bring to the stage. Of course, this is a very strict criterion. According to it, the absolute majority of theatrical performances fail. But this is exactly what we should strive for, the ideal that should be before the eyes of all those creating the performance.

In April, the Chicago theater studio “By The Way” brought the play “Aydont Understend” based on the play by Viktor Shenderovich, directed by Sergei Kokovkin, to the Russian theater festival in Toronto.

In the play "Aydont understen" based on the play by Viktor Shenderovich there is a heart-wrenching contrast in the transition from light jokes to the theme of death, and bright, developing and revealing characters before the eyes of the audience, and a beautiful plot twist, when instead of the obvious, expected "answer" the viewer receives a different version, but one that fully corresponds to the internal logic of the development of characters.

Two characters – an old man from the former Soviet Union living on welfare in Brighton Beach and a middle-aged woman brought to America as a child. These are not just two generations, they are also two different types – an emigrant and an immigrant. For the first, it was more important to leave somewhere, for the second – to arrive in a certain place. The emigrant continues to hold on to the long-gone Soviet Union, the immigrant tries to understand America, to put down roots in it. The heroine married an American, she has an Anglo-Saxon surname, she has almost forgotten the Russian language, but she is in this country, here and today. The hero does not live, he REMEMBERS THE LIFE he had, he is “there and yesterday”. She can be happy today, he is not. He compensates for the lack of joy with fading memories of how happy he once was.

Eternally dissatisfied, 100% sure of his own rightness, living in the last century, almost an anecdotal character is masterfully played by Vyacheslav Kaganovich. The type is instantly recognizable, from the first seconds, but at the same time it is not schematic, not two-dimensional, but alive, i.e. changing, developing with each mise-en-scène. And we, the viewers, observe this gradual metamorphosis - from a gray and vulgar "chrysalis" a "butterfly" with bright wings gradually begins to appear, it moves differently, reacts differently, it evokes different reactions in us. And we, the viewers, experience this transformation together with the hero.

Vyacheslav Kaganovich's partner on stage, Marina Karmanova, shows us an equally stunning transformation: from an American ashamed of her own immigrant origins, who despised those from the USSR stuck in the ghetto, she comes to understand that although life "there" was fundamentally different from American life, there was something important in that life for today. She begins to see not only an interesting personality in the inhabitant of Brighton Beach, but also reveals the previously incomprehensible motives of her parents' behavior. A person who grew up in America cannot fully comprehend the absurdity of many aspects of Soviet life (just as today's youth cannot understand it). But the more details a person learns, the more complete and accurate the resulting picture becomes. And this gradual enlightenment in the subtlest nuances is demonstrated on stage by Marina Karmanova.

A posteriori, it became clear that there were great talents on stage who completely dissolved into their characters, while the performance was going on the audience lived complex relationships – sometimes friendly, sometimes conflictual, sometimes playful, sometimes familial – of people who had become truly alive. There was no Marina Karmanova and Vyacheslav Kaganovich, there were Wulf Goldiner and Mrs. Watson, née Zhenya Ravinskaya, who once lived in the same city in the former Soviet Union, and now live in the same “Big Apple” with completely different lives.

And this result is practically the maximum possible for an actor. At least from the point of view of those sitting in the audience.

Toronto featured works by Canadian and American companies, from the hopelessly amateur to the truly professional. Some of the performances made your jaw ache, while others brought tears of joy. Of course, acting and directing skills played a significant role in how you perceived what was happening, but the choice of play was not the least important.

The audience wants to learn something new, they are not interested in the old, so it is better to show them new plays. Is it logical? Probably yes. At least to the extent that new plays are not worse than old ones. But geniuses are born rarely, many orders of magnitude less often than ambitious graphomaniacs. Therefore, with a very high degree of probability, the name of the playwright unknown to you, dear potential viewer, means a terrible play that even a good director would not save.

Why do amateur theatres all over the world stage God knows what kind of plays? Because they hope to hide their mediocrity by putting on a play where the helplessness of the troupe – or so they would like to believe – will be less noticeable. If only because there is no need to compare the performance of a bad actor with the performance of a good one, since a good actor has no need to participate in a bad, weak play.

The play, shown by the Vyacheslav Kaganovich Studio Theatre at the Toronto festival and periodically returning to the stage in Chicago, is one of the closest to the theatrical ideal, when the trinity of the playwright’s concept, the director’s interpretation and the actor’s embodiment arises (and only in this case is the “unity of place, time and action”, usually mentioned by theatre teachers and critics, of value).

Not everything shown at the two April Russian theatre festivals in Toronto was good; there was plenty of outright amateurism. In general, sincere, heartfelt performances are rare, but when you get to one after many disappointments, you literally physically begin to feel emotional and spiritual changes in yourself. For this alone, such festivals are worth appreciating.

Ivan Yushin

https://thereklama.com/o-lyudyakh-na-stsene/