Victoria Tolstoganova played a bad mother and a good girl in the play “That’s All She”

Danil Chashchin did everything in his own way: the producer dreamed of silence, but got something completely different

In the independent project “That’s All She,” Victoria Tolstoganova played the “bad mother” of a 16-year-old teenager, ready to do anything to get closer to her son. She will create a fake account on the social network and finally lose control of the situation.

The play is based on Andrey Ivanov’s play, written ten years ago, about the difficult relationship between mother and son, who live together after the early death of their husband and father. The heroine of Tolstoganova – Tatyana – like Yulia Vysotskaya during a culinary show, conducts an invisible dialogue with a virtual interlocutor. And if Julia tells the “heavens” about the recipes for gourmet dishes, then Tatyana spreads everything about her son without hiding. In social networks, he is Raven, and she is the mysterious girl Toffee, who walks exclusively at night. And her dad is allegedly a taxidermist who makes stuffed goats and other God’s creatures. This happens in a completely different space, unreal-cosmic.

As the director of the play, Danil Chashchin, explains, there is a verbal space where the actors read monologues to the audience, and a plastic one, where they, portraying their avatars, become the heroes of a computer game. In order to create its appearance, the actors had trainings, classes with choreographer Igor Sharoiko. Artist Dmitry Razumov created a virtual reality at the back of the stage behind a transparent curtain film. A crazy swing with turrets rotates there, on which the actors fly into the abyss.

Producer Leonid Roberman dreamed of a performance without videos and microphones from the artists, without everything that had nothing to do with the theater that he loves. He wanted peace and quiet and thoughtfulness so that viewers could remember their moms. There really are no screens, but the microphones remain. Everything is very loud, but at the same time old-fashioned. Because you can’t catch up with “them” – young people with their slang and lifestyle. Whatever efforts the director and actors make, even if they have relatively recently moved away from the teenage subculture, their cause is still hopeless. More and more new words appear, and some “cool” goes out of use. Do you know what “LD” is? It turns out they are best friends. Welcome to old age. We are hopelessly behind.

Victoria Tolstoganova is trying to talk about parental blindness. It’s amazing how her heroine, leaving the virtual space, throwing off her black cloak and colored wig, turns into a screaming aunt. Yes, it’s hard for her, she’s all alone. The son is insensitive, you will not hear a good word from him. And she tries her best – she bought him a green parrot in a cage, and her son called him … “sparrow.” The mother threw the bird out of the window and put a candle in the cage. How can I communicate with her after that? Better imagine dead.

“The playwright Andrey Ivanov brought the situation to a peak,” says Victoria Tolstoganova. – He brought the relationship between mother and son to such a level that I want to say: “Stop!” On the one hand, a catastrophic story of misunderstanding, and on the other, a love story in which not everything is always good.

The son is played by a capable young actor Denis Vlasenko, who graduated from the workshop of Sergei Solovyov at VGIK, and is remembered after the film “Tossing” by Ivan Tverdovsky. He acts a lot and would have been famous under other circumstances. Before each rehearsal, Victoria and Denis talked for thirty minutes, shared what had happened to them the day before, creating a special mood, but such magic does not arise in the performance. Victoria Tolstoganova has two sons, aged 11 and 14, and they participated in the creation of the play as experts of sorts. The elder Fedor selected music so that it was non-random, the one that people listen to at his age.

Danil Chashchin believes: “The problem of our heroes is that they do not talk in real life, but communicate in social networks, where they are doing well. And it is important to talk before the problem becomes fatal. I had a workshop with teenagers, and the first thing they asked me was if I had real sneakers, what kind of iPhone and how much money I make. I replied that the sneakers are not real, the iPhone is old, I get little money, and now welcome to the magical world of the theater. For them, theater is their father’s and mother’s art. Often the problem is, “why are you not like me, you be like me.” This is the conflict. Teenagers communicate in their own language, like scouts. It’s a code that only they can understand. It is important for them that adults do not understand them. This is not only about the relationship between mother and son, but globally about the separation of people. Being together is difficult and necessary.”

What happened in the end? Representation of an adult about how the world unknown to them works. But he is completely different.