Hyperboloid by director Garia

Honestly, I don't know why Slava Kaganovich, who founded the Atrium Theatre in his time, was forced to leave it (I don't like battle stories and don't ask anyone unnecessary questions), but it is absolutely clear that it happened for the best: talented, smart, devilishly energetic, fanatically loving theatre Slava, to put it mildly, did not lose from this. Well, okay - of course he won. And I am very happy for him.

Kaganovich is not an artist by profession. This is his diagnosis, thank God. In general, I think Sasha Guitry was right when he said something like: "All people are actors, with the exception, perhaps, of some actors." There are no such exceptions in the By The Way theater company, which Slava organized.

Last Saturday, the premiere of the play "Two-Step Against the Background of Suitcases" took place on the long-suffering stage of the "Academy of Christian Roots", as Sergei Trofimov laughingly called the Christian Heritage Academy . I called this stage long-suffering because it had withstood a huge number of entreprises, performed by visiting stars "with their left foot". The sensitive Chicago audience stopped filling the hall, fearing to be deceived once again (and sometimes - in vain), but on January 25 there was a near-full house. Because the audience guessed that Kaganovich and Marina Karmanova would not act, but live the lives of their characters. And so it happened.

She is in her seventh decade. He has already spent half of it. She has lost her beloved husband and best friend. He has lost his only friend and devoted wife. They are connected by the memory of their common dead and thirty years of family friendship. She gives up on herself and wants to run away from the memories to another city. And he is trying to prove that a common future is still possible for them, in which there may be room for love and even sex. The play pays special attention to the latter point.

In fact, as Mark Zakharov said, after watching the performance of his Lenkom prima Inna Churikova paired with Gennady Khazanov in the private production of this play by Leonid Trushkin (in that version it was called as the author wanted - "Mixed Feelings"), "Richard Baer's thing is the height of vulgarity even for the seasoned Russian stage."

And here a bow is necessary to the director of the Chicago play Gary Chernyakhovsky, who with masterful strokes "painted over" the excess, leaving the actors who were imbued with his ideas alone with each other and the material. And the former successfully coped with the latter. They built, as the director wanted, a hyperboloid of mixed, but warm feelings (hyperboloid consists of two ancient Greek words that are translated as hyperbole and appearance or type).

Marina Karmanova plays sometimes playfully and slyly, sometimes thoughtfully and seriously, sometimes she is embarrassed like a girl, but she never allows herself those vulgar grimaces with which some great actresses sometimes read the most innocent text. Behind all this nonsense, Karmanova plays a woman with a capital letter, capable of remaining faithful to her husband for thirty years, and falling in love again at sixty, strict with herself, but forgiving towards others, not trying to look younger, but also not losing her taste for life - beautiful clothes, dancing and raspberries in February.

At the beginning of the play - a simple calculation. At the end - a vital necessity. Comedy turns into melodrama, not the most suitable genre for a story about old people. This eternal theme of age, loneliness and the need for love - in the dramatic aspect - remembers much stronger solutions: it is enough to recall the legendary Moscow Art Theatre production of Osvald Zahradnik's play "Solo for a Chiming Clock" or the Mossovet Theatre's play "Further - Silence", in which Faina Ranevskaya shone.

But that is a play.

And it was made and played perfectly.

For which we would like to thank the By The Way team very much.

We live! While we live...