Luxurious women in their solitude: a play based on Williams’ plays was staged at Vakhtangovsky

New scene. While the viewer is looking for their seats and sits down, although out of the corner of their eye, they manage to see what is already on the stage and is waiting for everyone to finally sit down in order to shine in all its glory. Well, or appear in an unusual light – the artist is still Maxim Obrezkov, and this is a sign of high quality. In any case, the visible part of its decoration on one side looks like it came out of a child’s drawing or a cartoon: in front of us is the wall of a house made of crumpled brown paper, the roof is black and also fairly wrinkled. There is an opening in the wall, and in it, in contrast to the bruises, a diva appears in a perfect floor-length golden dress. Not a diva, but a chiseled statue: black hair in a bob, black glasses, a paquitos in her hands, not just lit. The diva opens her mouth and, smiling charmingly, carefully articulating, pronounces… in a male voice a text with the usual request to turn off the phones. A sweet joke breaks the tension expected from Williams.

As the basis for his performance, Eldar Tramov took five one-act plays from his collection “Five for Tennis Players”, and even in a good translation by Vasily Aksenov. The plays – “The Long Goodbye”, “Portrait of the Madonna”, “Alienated Property”, “Talk to me like rain and don’t disturb me to listen”, “I can’t imagine what will happen tomorrow” – were written between 1940 and 1973, That’s why their character is different, sometimes polar. Moreover, the author prefaced each of them with a short essay or poem upon publication, which was also reflected in the production on the Vakhtangov stage.

Director Tramov stitched together five plays with one consistent character – a young writer, played by Karen Oveyan. Naturally, restless, unlucky, who are still far from recognition, but which will certainly come. After. In the meantime, his heroes (real or fictional – go figure these hacks) begin to live their own lives on stage. The writer taps out their feelings and actions on a typewriter, with written sheets flying around him. Manuscripts don’t burn, they fly and bring with them strange characters with their strange desires, emotions, complexes and, as usual with Williams, loneliness. Each of them is ready to say, with varying degrees of despair: “Talk to me.” Which does not mean at all that he wants to be heard, understood – he just needs to speak out, and for some, shout out, spitting out resentment, psychosis, pain, despair along with the words…

And go figure – is the pain real, like a wound, or a figment of fantasy? A woman with an obsession: a man comes to her and satisfies his natural needs with her – an expressive monologue by Yana Sobolevskaya. The red-haired beast rushes across the stage like a flash of fire, pouring out her soul to two stunned hotel servants. And those (again, Karen Oveyan and Vitaly Ivanov) in crimson uniforms with a dazed look accompany her, acting out her experiences with plasticity and emotional reaction. They play very accurately.

And the monologue of the mother (Alexander Streltsyn) of two grown children, who is terminally ill – she is already on the edge, but in front of the children and the world she pretends that everything is still OK! The same diva who preceded the performance performed by Marina Esipenko, with memories of her “great” past, which, as time has shown, turned out to be a soap bubble, but the present remained in the small bookstore that her husband kept and from which she ran away with a troupe of artists to Paris for bright and deceptive fame.

An adventure-seeking girl who lives near the railway, and passing trains are her only entertainment and hope for something she herself doesn’t know. Not even the men who “inherited” her from her deceased older sister… They are a routine for her, an everyday occurrence, in contrast to the holiday that passenger trains carry with them on wheels. She, who every time runs up close to the canvas and opens her dress on her chest in despair, has something to show the successful passengers.

In general, the gloomy life of people, composed by a novice author, acquires bright colors here because each of them strives for a fictional world, where he tries to hide, as in a house. The same one from childhood that greeted the audience at the beginning, and then floated up under the grates, revealing one after another a bizarre picture of a fictional but, alas, temporary world.

On Vakhtangovsky’s New Stage he is bright and eccentric. The young director, for whom this is the second production at the theatre, approached Williams’ works with a Vakhtangov-like approach. He sharpened the classic, caricatured it, added the grotesque – everything in the characters of his characters was a little more, in their actions – brighter, more spectacular, more musical, but not too much. At the same time, he introduces the heroines and characters of others into the world of the heroine of one play, imperceptibly and practically without participating. Poems and fragments of essays that Williams preceded the publication of his plays unobtrusively grow between the stretches. Everything in some secret way connects, grows together, forming one group portrait.

The important thing is that this structure of the performance allowed the director to show actresses of different generations – Esipenko, Tumaikina, Sobolevskaya, Streltsina, Antonov, Kramzin, Lyakhova. Popular or working in third roles, or like Lyakhova, who had just been accepted into the troupe – each is shown in close-up. And most importantly, thanks to the artist Obrezkov, everyone has a wonderful costume when they appear. And as the old actresses who knew the secrets of the stage said: “Make me beautiful when I go out, I’ll take care of the rest.” This expression at the premiere according to Williams was fully justified. And the toilets from Obrezkov are luxurious, stylish, and the actresses are beautiful.

Here discoveries await the audience – Alexandra Streltsina, always noticeable even in the third plan, showed dramatic talent, Marina Esipenko, who has not had a solo part for a long time, only confirmed the class of the third princess Turandot. The restrained beauty Sobolevskaya is like a clot of fire here, Anna Antonova, who hides loneliness behind the image of her wild heroine, but it breaks through. And little Lyakhova, reverent and touching. With a deeply dramatic, although not entirely clear in its essence, monologue Olga Tumaikina.

The director loves and admires his heroines so much (and without this nothing would work out otherwise) that he did not allow himself to shorten the text, especially the final one, and this influenced the style of the second act. In all other respects, the premiere was a success – music (Vyacheslav Zhukov), choreography (Igor Pivorovich), lighting (Ruslan Mayorov), video content (Asya Mukhina), makeup (Olga Kalyavina). And it is also important to say that in this group portrait of women, the men are not lost at all; they perform auxiliary functions in the performance, because they work exclusively for their partners. These are Karen Oveyan, Oleg Makarov and Vitaly Ivanov.