in search of happiness with “Hare Moan”

Theater “Lenkom Mark Zakharov” presented the premiere of the comedy “The route is built.” The performance is performed in the genre of musical stand-up, which is not typical for Lenkom Mark Zakharov, and is perceived by theater fans as an experiment.

The young director Daria Borisova, who previously staged at the A. Raikin Variety Theater and the M.O.S.T Youth Musical Theater, built the action based not on classical scenery, but on technological innovations.

The authors of the play and its performers were the quartet of Lenkom artists “Hare Moan” consisting of Maxim Amelchenko, Vitaly Borovik, Alexei Polyakov and Kirill Petrov. These artists insist in their interviews that they are “inspired by the impressionists in their work, who got tired of academicism in stuffy workshops and went out into the street to sketch a sunset in some Parisian park in two hours.”

The Hare Moan Quartet reflects on what happiness is in a new comedy. The heroes have entered an age when men no longer respond to the appeal “forgive me, young man”, and do not respond to the appeal “hey man”, believing that it was not said to them.

In the musical and theatrical stand-up, four friends – the Groom, who ran away from his own wedding, the Friend of the Groom, the Waiter of the “first bar that came across”, and the Brother-in-law – embark on a journey that is long, as it turns out in the finale, in life.

The search for happiness is serious business. On this path, you will definitely meet a fork with a traditional stone that says “you will go right / you will go left”, and understanding who set the rules for such a game. There will be a desire to jump out of the knurled rut on the road. There will also be a desire to cross the red line and see if there really is a real danger behind it, or is it a means of suppressing individuality. There will be a comprehension of a happy childhood, which took place under the watchful mother’s eye. There will be a look at happiness, as at a bandit destroying the empire of the unfortunate.

The route to the goal, determined for the characters by the Voice of the Navigator (voice of Yasmina Mamaeva), juggling with genres – from stand-up to the musical, a set of more or less successful jokes, wonderful plastic solutions – all this is present in the production of Daria Borisova.

The Araks musicians, Nikolai Parfenyuk, Oleg Zaripov, Anatoly Abramov, and Vladimir Pravdin, are masterful performers on the stage.

Well, now about what is not in the performance, and about some associations that have arisen along the way.

In general, “The Route is Built” looks a lot like the famous productions of “The Quartet I” from the “What Men Talk About” series with reflections on life: four friends are also going somewhere, they also chat about everything that comes to mind, sometimes asking rhetorical questions.

The performance evokes associations with the film “The Sacred Mountain” by Alejandro Jodorowsky. There the hero goes to meet himself, without even trying to imagine the image of his “beautiful far away”. (And how do you know that you have already arrived if you have no idea where you are going?) So the heroes of the “Route …” move forward in fits and starts, like an akyn (“I sing about what I see”). The performance itself is both a travel diary and at the same time a guide that drags the audience along with it.

The trouble is that this movement, at first curious, becomes more and more monotonous towards the end. Like running in circles. Because it goes exclusively horizontally, there is no “vertical” component in it, there is no search for the spirit. In this case, it really doesn’t matter whether you go right or left, or even “go diagonally” as the heroes try to do – losses are inevitable along the way.

Maybe it was necessary, like Mayakovsky, to ask oneself: “Who mends the clouds, who adds heat to the sun in the furnace?” After all, one cannot do without an essential conversation in a production that touched upon the philosophical theme of happiness. Otherwise, the audience gets tired of being overloaded with special effects and a feeling of light moralizing on the part of the authors by the end: for a stand-up – it’s too long, for a philosophical parable – a bit weak. The deaf sad fog that enveloped the characters at the end of the path is not the worst finale of this “built” route.

Elena Bulova.

Photos courtesy of the theater