What to do if mom is a blogger: a premiere about teenagers and parents at TsIM

What to do if you are still a schoolgirl, but already pregnant, and your mother, mother, does not get out of the Web? For classmates, you are an abuser, and your mother does not worry about your problems? These and other issues of puberty for adults and adolescents were proposed to be considered at the Center. Meyerhold (CIM), recently merged with the School of Dramatic Art (SDI). In the play “Mom. I’m a blogger! According to the play by Alexandra Strizhevskaya, answers can be found to the most complex questions, which, upon closer examination, turned out to be very simple.

It was like this: a small child crap one’s pants. Happenes. And instead of washing him and changing his diaper, a young mother named Sophia grabbed her phone and made a video of her little Zoya smearing poop on the wall and joyfully announced that it was her mother. Thus began the career of blogger Sofia Polyanskaya (Sofia Igrushkina), who managed to monetize the children’s theme from infancy. Every day, a photo, a video about your little Bunny for the joy and science of other mothers. But the cool blogger didn’t take into account how things would end when Zoya grew up, became pregnant … No, everything is better here in order.

In the new hall for no more than a hundred seats, the second floor of the TsIM has an absolutely empty space in front of the audience – either a television studio, or an operating room. It turns out that the whole city is conditionally divided into locations, as indicated by seven luminous inscriptions – a school, a hospital, a TV studio, a park, etc. The production is not confused by the scenery – four doors, a couple of chairs, and several studio tripods. In the center of the space is a very modern story – essentially a drama, on the verge of a tragedy, but director Asya Knyazeva presented it as a tragicomedy.

Four doors open and close, famously beating off the mise-en-scène. A mom-blogger in the studio gives an interview about her successes: how best to post videos, photos in order to get advertising for baby food or clothes. Behind her on the screen is a close-up of a smiley of a successful lady in a pink jacket. But in fact (this is already off the screen) – views are falling, earnings are below the baseboard, and all because Zoya (Anya Karabaeva), having become an angular teenager, refuses to record her life on video.

She has communication problems, first love, plus the aggressiveness of the teenage environment, which hides behind slang. “Over to a fig”, “krinzh”, “holivar” … Did you understand anything? And they understand, in any case, those teenagers who are sitting in the hall and who do not need a separate vocabulary: cringe is strange, over to a fig is a lot, to scan a mammoth is to deceive. Holivar is hell. Father, mother – this is fucking, even an angel (Anton Vlasov), who from time to time appears between teenagers, this language is incomprehensible.

– Something I began to understand human speech poorly … – says the guy in white – a knitted shirt, the same trousers and a cap with strings. Of course wings behind. Funny and touching, as he sees lovers, right there in outstretched palms, folded in a handful, he carries future lives. It seems that this white-winged one in the company of adults and teenagers is devoid of aggression, soft as his shirt, and pities everyone. Even the sleazy blogger mom who almost lost her daughter behind the posts. Zoya is expecting a child from a handsome classmate Misha (Ruslan Pogodin), who turned out to be a weakling…

But the blogger mom immediately came up with a plan on how to use the situation to raise the popularity of her blog. But there it was: the most dramatic moment between mother and daughter will turn into an unexpected ending. Everything can be assumed, but not how the daughter will bypass the mother in the blog race.

I must say that this is not the first performance by Asya Knyazeva, made under the roof of the new association “Vakhtangov Practicum”, which became a resident of the CIM. The director works well with the space, with the actors, understands convention, and CIM can be congratulated on a good acquisition in the repertoire of a modern performance, where there is a lot of unimagined truth that can make you go crazy. But the view on the topic proposed by the young team is rather an optimistic and, most importantly, useful instruction than another theatrical scarecrow.