The Moscow Art Theater is concerned about people: the premiere based on Gorky will scientifically explain the nature of a kiss

The new production turned out to be unexpected, especially against the backdrop of the last premiere of 2023 – “Three Sisters”, from which the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, as it seemed to many, turned towards a purely traditional theater. But no, “Above Not” is a modern story, the approach to the classics is scientific. This is what the viewer sees immediately while sitting down in comfortable and comfortable chairs, not suspecting that the spectacle will be far from inner comfort.

And he sees an inscription above the stage in Latin – DNO, followed by a decoding of this abbreviation. By the way, “The Bottom” was one of the working titles of the play by Maxim Gorky, who in 1902 described the life of the inhabitants of a shelter for the poor. 122 years later, director Galina Polishchuk and playwright Elena Isaeva turned his shelter into a functioning neuropsychological monastery, decorated in the style of cinema with scientific content. In any case, the artist Nikolai Slobodyanik turned the huge Moscow Art Theater stage into a sterile two-level space with silently floating walls made of white plastic and above – showers behind transparent glass and metal cabinets. Moreover, all surfaces above the proscenium, in the background and the walls will continue to work as screens. Let’s see how.

The current life of the cool (and not for the marginalized, which is important!) DNO clinic is inscribed in such a cold space: it houses people with vices who have lost the ability to live in society, where, according to the off-screen male voice, they are given back the ability to feel and are helped to socialize.

“We remind you that loving, making friends, creating positivity around yourself is the goal of your day,” the cheerful voice of a young nurse reports over the broadcast. Nicknames guarantee patients complete confidentiality – their list is immediately displayed on both portals, as in the contact list of any gadget: Bubn*off (Bubnov is a businessman), Anna (diagnosed with BSA), Aktor (Actor), B@rron (Baron is a slacker , gigolo, is kept in the clinic with the money of a rich lady), Sat-in:truth (Satin is a millionaire rentier), Nastja@5element (Nastya, with red hair) and a couple of other strange people from politics and business. Their behavior is assessed with points. The owner and head physician of the clinic, Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev, is not some kind of myrrh-eater, but a respected professor, psychiatrist, who advocates evidence-based drug therapy, without denying other methods, even in the form of tango. Because (a short rationale follows) “life is a tango: if you stop, life will stop.”

And what does Gorky have to do with it? At first, the viewer really asks this question, frantically trying to link this clinical story with Gorky’s plot, to correlate all the nicknames of the current characters with their literary prototypes. And at the same time, expand your own knowledge about the human brain, which by the end of life is capable, according to the voice-over, of remembering an average of 150 trillion bits of information. There will also be information about a kiss – ordinary and passionate, so that you can feel the difference. But the further the story develops, the more obvious it becomes that between the original and what it inspired modern authors, there is essentially no global contradiction and this story is moving purposefully towards the people of today. With his fall due to his own fault, pain, problems.

At a fairly fast pace, taken from the second crowd scene, the director shows everyone, giving them a close-up directly on stage and on screen. In this case, the screen image, which is pretty boring to everyone, is an important emotional addition to the images – whether by angle, or by close attention to them. It is not a deeply social, but rather a deeply human history that is being produced at the Moscow Art Theater on Tverskoy. Even with all the questions that arise to the author and director. First: if Satin is a millionaire rentier, then why did he live on the money of his sister’s husband, whom he killed as a scoundrel, and which of them, it turns out, is a scoundrel? Why did the scene of Anna’s resuscitation take so long? To show how the actors mastered medical skills, or so that the plastic sketch of the departed soul would not be lost?

Nevertheless, everyone here is looking for their own happiness: professional – Actor, female – Vasilisa, Kostylev’s wife, wonderfully and subtly played by Ekaterina Strizhenova. And the husband she cheats on with Dr. Ash is a sweet man, whose monstrousness is only revealed in a clash with his main opponent in human and soul science – Dr. Luke (emphasis on the first syllable, because he worked in Italy).

By the way, for Alexander Strizhenov, the son of actors Lyubov and Oleg Strizhenov (for many years his father was one of the generally recognized first beauties of Soviet cinema), the Moscow Art Theater scene is not just a beautiful phrase. His parents served in the Moscow Art Theater for many years, and he himself rehearsed with Efros as a boy. For decades, the prolonged break did not affect his work at all – Strizhenov’s Kostylev is incredibly charming, soft in words and movements, convincing both in business and in personal terms. And a couple of dialogues between Alexander Strizhenov and Andrey Veshkurtsev (Dr. Luka) are more reminiscent of a fight between rattlesnakes and are conducted in very low tones so that an electric discharge beats between them.

Galina Polishchuk took several very young actors and yesterday’s graduates into a large production. Among them, Ekaterina Livanova especially stands out in the role of the quietly dying Anna, Kristina Shmyrina in the role of Nastya with the nickname “5th element”, who invented a beautiful love for herself in the absence of a real one. It is she with red hair in a bob touchingly soloing in group classes with the 1972 song “The Little Prince” by Mikael Tariverdiev (“Who invented you, star country …”). She is in eternal conflict with the Baron (a very noticeable role of Georgiy Iobadze). And Grigory Morozenko as an Actor becomes good in the second act, when the internal breakdown of his hero manifests itself.

There is no doubt that this production will infuriate some and the new leadership of the Moscow Art Theater and Polishchuk as the main director will present a classic set: this is not Gorky and this is not a play in the best Moscow Art Theater traditions. Others will buy (and quite understandably) the stylish visuals and the fact that they walk around in it with cool music (Sophie Zelmani (I’m The Rain, Going Home) or Rene Dupere (Querer)) recognizable types from life: disliked girls with multi-colored hair, coaches , posing as experts on everything, hard-working businessmen who were deceived by their own people, serial artists who have gone crazy from the captured “star”.

But, perhaps, it is worth noting the main thing: among the numerous modern versions of the classics, the Moscow Art Theater “Above Ne”, with the help of a textbook text, does not cultivate the theme of Russian chthony, from which there is no way to save it – neither in “Boris Godunov” (Theater of Nations), nor in “Masquerade” (Chekhov Moscow Art Theater), nor in other metropolitan productions. On the contrary, here we can clearly see an attempt to finally break out of the framework of this very root chthonic confusion and identify other coordinates of the search for modern theater in working with classical and non-classical material.

Maybe that’s why, without thinking about any chthon (even if it’s wrong), but empathizing with the inhabitants of DNO, the audience listens attentively to the new monologue of the nickname Cat-in: “Luke lied to us, but taught us to love, and you all live here in dreams, but about real you forgot your feelings. And how to rise above this Above Not – I don’t love, I don’t regret, I don’t feel. Whoever rises will have happiness and a new life.” And then they sing along with the artists on stage: “Who invented you, star country…”. The Soviet song, which today for directors is often like a lifesaver in terms of emotion, here in reality – like hope. Maybe it’s the latter, and they are diligently trying to take it away from the viewer, suggesting: life is terrible, and it will be even worse. It won’t be, even if the star country is fictional.