Читать книгу Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama - John Freedman - Страница 15

In Brief:

•Born December 1, 1970, in Moscow.

•Grew up in Ukhta in the Russian North, lives in Moscow.

•Began writing plays around 1989.

•First significant success in 1996 with the production of Tanya-Tanya at the Fomenko Studio in Moscow.

•Flying first produced independently by the author in 2005.

•Wrote approximately 7 plays through 2013.

•Flying was adapted for the feature film Icon of the Season (2013).

Olga Mukhina is unlike anyone in Russian drama. She is acknowledged as a founder of the new drama movement, her play Tanya-Tanya essentially kicking it off in 1996. She is respected as a playwright of unique personal vision and looked up to by younger writers as a model for the artist who follows her own muse. She has been translated and produced throughout Europe and the United States. And yet, by choice or chance, she generally remains on the periphery of the dramatic process. Since the groundbreaking production of Tanya-Tanya at the Fomenko Studio in Moscow in 1996, she has written only three more plays – YoU in 1997 (staged at the Moscow Art Theater in 2001), Flying in 2004 (staged by the playwright independently in 2005), and Olympia in 2013.

“Don’t write plays like I do,” Mukhina once told a group of American students. “You can’t write like that. Every play I’ve written has been an experiment in writing the impossible.” I never believed her for a minute although she swears I am wrong. Then one day I caught her in a trap. At a Moscow performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull, I spied her across the aisle hanging on every word. Afterwards I asked why, and her answer was priceless. “Chekhov,” she told me, “wrote in an impossible style. You can’t write that way. But by doing so, he gave us the right to write in impossible ways, too.” That’s not “impossible,” that’s a conscious method.

Mukhina has always been a deliciously sly writer but never more so than in Flying. In it she revels in razzle-dazzle, bling and attitude, the very concepts that fueled Russian society at the time this play was written. The play’s characters have too much money, too much free time, too much power, too much (or not enough) sex, too many drugs, and all of it comes to them way too easily. These are representatives of what is called Russia’s “golden youth,” the lucky ones who came out on top. Moreover – and this is what is really important – they got there by doing nothing and by being no one. It’s the way the Russian system was working when these characters made their entrance into it. For anyone fortunate enough to possess chiseled cheekbones, or to have the chutzpah to put on an effective pose, it was the only resumé you needed. Most of Mukhina’s airborne young professionals work at, or at least hang out around, a hip, youth-oriented TV station where they are in a position to set trends for the segment of society that greedily consumes the fruits of their labor. What a life! Who cares if disaster looms just up ahead?

As a playwright, Mukhina adores everything about image, appearances and the trappings of high society. I have heard her amuse and surprise Americans by suggesting that the most important quality of her characters is that they are beautiful. I myself can be skeptical about her claims, but consider her description of the four women in Flying: one is a “vamp,” another is “cute,” and two are “beauties,” one glamorous, the other virginal. The men, one is tempted to say, are all dashing, including a hot DJ, a hot-blooded VJ and a fearless BASE jumper. You can almost see the men’s rippling abs in the descriptions alone. The characters’ names, from Snowstorm, Blizzard and Maniac to Snowflake, Orangina and Bushy-Tail, reveal the author’s fascination with, and affection for, swank and style.

Mukhina’s plays make a virtue of ambiguity. Her characters’ phrases are like the tips of icebergs in the sea, brief references to or, perhaps, attempts to obscure, what really matters. What really motivates a character may rarely, if ever, be articulated. There are often two or three dialogues unfolding at any single time. Phrases are broken off, sentences are interrupted, thoughts are abandoned in mid-flight. Mukhina’s is not linear dramatic prose, but rather a swirling constellation of dialogues, monologues, half-thoughts and dropped thoughts overlapping and interrupting one another. As they conjure the force of poetry, they illuminate each other in unexpected ways. This, incidentally, is the reason for Mukhina’s unorthodox punctuation, whereby she often skips periods or other framing grammatical conventions.

I am particularly fond of a claim Mukhina makes in the introduction to Flying. Even more than the claim, I am enamored of the way she makes it. After insisting she wrote the play according to the tenets of verbatim drama, basing her text on a long series of interviews (which, indeed, she did conduct), she adds that the play “contains not a single phrase of my own unless it is the odd stage direction or a simple explanatory phrase. Even the incident with the window and the dog is the whole truth and nothing but. Believe me. All of this is life, like rain in July; this wintery snow is for you.”

This is pure Mukhina as she sprinkles magic dust in your face. Trust the author at your peril. Trust the tale implicitly. If you get this, you begin to get the charm, the cunning, the playfulness, the beauty and the unblinking honesty of this writer’s vision.