Notes from the premiere of the Brusnikin Studio's "T-35," directed by Sergei Shchedrin.
I was at the premiere last night, seated in an enviable spot: sixth row, right against the wall — close enough to prop a shoulder on the plaster and half-disappear into it, legs crossed or folded up beneath me like someone settling in for a nap rather than a night at the theater. But for most of the two hours, I sat upright, in the posture of a man who does not want to miss anything.
I loved it. And afterward something in my head seemed to come loose, because all I could manage were monosyllables — "thank you," "congratulations" — nothing that resembled an actual thought. For the first time, I wanted to stay for the post-show talkback on a piece where I'd only ever been in the audience. So I overrode my usual instinct to avoid feeling out of place, slipped into the back row, and waited to see the new toy taken apart: what's inside it that lets it cry like an abandoned teenager, terrify you without ever dropping its clown's grin, and, of course, sing straight through the heart like a blade.
No dissection happened. There was a brief discussion that knocked me down a notch or two from wherever my seat in the audience had lifted me, and left my face pressed against the rough, unplaned table of my own thin expertise in theater criticism. And in that brief window when I might have said something, I again managed only a general compliment — when what I owed the show was praise for every single scene, ideally delivered in rhyme, half-sung. I'm trying to correct that now, at this hour, because it's not for nothing that I woke up in the middle of the night to write it.
The scene called "Steps."
This one is personal. A little over a month ago my own father became a bedridden patient. That alone made me feel singled out as a spectator from the very start, because in this scene one of the actresses is suspended in a harness, and from the house you end up looking down at her "bedridden" body from above — with the sick recognition of how irresponsibly I'm living through my own version of this situation, given that unusual vantage point, and how powerless I am to change anything, watching it all from up there. One of two things is true: I am God, or I am dead. Maybe both. But no — the second performer keeps tending to her, cycling through the same small, graceful, and quietly exhausting movements, in something close to the vocabulary of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. That's my mother.
"Karol" is, for me, the most personally invested scene in the show. Shchedrin and I had talked about its soundtrack a week earlier, in Sochi — he told me that a well-known Paul Mauriat instrumental, the one everyone associates with "Deep Blue Sea," would show up in one of the études. That sent me straight to a Soviet animated short from 1977 — Anatoly Petrov's "The Firing Range" — which is also, as it happens, about a tank, and shares the exact same central theme. What a coincidence: an old cartoon about a tank and a new play about a tank, the T-35, arriving independently at the same piece of music. If it weren't for my childhood trips to a certain Moscow cinema, I'd never have caught the overlap and pointed it out to Sergei. Here, too, I felt singled out as a viewer.
The "Midpoint Celebration" is a nice bit of stagecraft comedy: the actors announce that the audience is now exactly halfway through the show, and — since an hour has already passed and everyone's feelings about that are mixed — Sasha invites the house to applaud its way into choosing the next scene, handing the audience the illusion of a choice. But I know better: whatever we clap for, the next scene will be whatever's written in the program. The program — funny word, that. And once again I felt singled out, applauding, hyper-interactively, for all three options at once.
Masha appears holding a portrait of the actor Alexander Petrov, whispering something faintly German, a little mustache penciled in to match. Alexander Petrov — it's genuinely funny. Not because he isn't talented; he clearly is, and in demand. But to me he's less a Thai — sorry, a Russian DiCaprio — than a generational echo of Vsevolod Shilovsky, an actor who is wonderful in villain roles but should, God forbid, never be cast as the lead tank driver. Quite right to knife him, Manya. The house laughs, and I feel very much like a member of the audience.
Then comes the scene that hits closest to home: "Ah, Joe." Taso, in a tone of deliberate, cold calm, carries on a one-sided conversation with Sasha, who realizes, with a chill, the full bleakness of his situation. When you know that you are the reason for your own loneliness, your inner voice takes on a woman's register — and the calmer and more cloying that voice becomes, the more frightening it is.
When the people close to you stop scolding you, it means there's no longer enough life left to fix anything. When they stop scolding you, it means hope has died. For anyone who happened to live right and never had reason to feel this, a bright, major-key jingle straight out of a children's holiday concert kicks in — and it's chilling precisely because of how wrong it feels. And the more beautiful the woman who, inexplicably, still wants you, the deeper you sink into the mess of your own helplessness. And when the people around you suddenly start shouting — that's me. Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
Then Masha climbs out of a trash bag. An operatic backing track starts, and she sings — and for the first time in forty years I understood a form of pleasure that had simply never been available to me, though like every guy from my old neighborhood, myself included, I'd always assumed listening to opera just wasn't for people like us. "Nobody likes opera," as the saying goes. I closed my eyes to work out, honestly, what this new register of feeling actually was. Strip away the fact that it's Masha. Strip away the fact that it's happening inside an experimental show made by people I love. Strip away the contrast with the garbage bags — just this voice, forgiving and enormous: do I actually like it, in itself? Surely not.
And yet there I was, feeling like the ex-con Evgeny Tkachuk plays in "Winter Journey," while Masha kept the note held so high I started doubting it was live. I couldn't see a microphone anywhere near her. My eyes welled up. And I noticed her left eye catching a particular shine along her warm profile, and it became completely clear: yes, of course, that's really her singing. How could I have doubted it?
When the aria ends I start clapping, tentatively, tucked down behind the seat in front of me, but no one joins in. Did I misread something? But I'd simply jumped the gun — the music lands its final chord, and I applaud again, as fast as I can, first once more, breaking through the audience's stunned silence. This time the house catches up and the applause pours out, so thoroughly that I can finally let my hands rest, while it keeps going and going. Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
"Only the fundamental sounds, and no jokes." Sasha grabs that sentence by the hair and drags it across every possible shelf of interpretation, naturally joining the chaos "that's always with you." All it takes is repeating the same phrase enough times, hammering the same single point, and the words start to lose their meaning linguistically — and once that happens, every other point of reference shifts, and the load-bearing walls come down. When the dust settles, all that's left is Iggy Pop. Or do you have other favorite artists? Other favorite artists. Other favorite artists? Other favorite artists! Other favorite artists!! Other favorite artists!!! Other? favorite artists! Other! favorite? artists! Other!!!! favorite!! artists.
... Other favorite artists.....
And here, honestly, a well-timed fart would be enough to wake the room back up. Crude? No matter — this is buffoonery, after all. Though the more grotesque a character's laugh at his own joke, the closer the eyebrows knit together, and you start remembering that what separates a buffoon from a clown is that a buffoon can elbow you in the face, purely for the laugh. That's why buffoons get paid less. Which is why Fedya and Masha sit in a pile of garbage, finishing off their fried chicken, delighted with the church interior that's become their home — spacious, and full of light.
Though it's worth remembering that there can be too much light, which is exactly why buildings get small windows — so faces don't wrinkle prematurely. Then again, laughing constantly at your own jokes will do that too. And then you'll have a face like that: funny, and wrinkled! Yes, the grotesque is a weapon. A prop weapon, but it lands like a real one. And even when a genuinely sharp joke slips through inside all that grotesquerie, you're not obligated to laugh. What did you think this was, stand-up?
Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
Then a dialogue between Sasha and Andrei brings every audience member, in purely theoretical terms, face to face with their own sense of being singled out. God is inside everyone, the same way brilliant schizophrenia lies dormant inside everyone — in case you missed that in the first étude.
And finally, the story of Fedya, the crying Superman — who isn't remotely a Superman, but a weepy, gangly lump of a man who can't even manage to hug a friend in a moment that calls for it, let alone move objects at a distance. But all of it is treatable. Because help is always on its way, in the form of Superman's Tangerine friend. All it takes is remembering the Master's instructions: keep doing something new, together, with the people who love you and understand you without needing the words spelled out. People who can't be fooled. And that's where the hope comes from — that maybe, someday, you'll stop fooling yourself too.
I was at the premiere last night, seated in an enviable spot: sixth row, right against the wall — close enough to prop a shoulder on the plaster and half-disappear into it, legs crossed or folded up beneath me like someone settling in for a nap rather than a night at the theater. But for most of the two hours, I sat upright, in the posture of a man who does not want to miss anything.
I loved it. And afterward something in my head seemed to come loose, because all I could manage were monosyllables — "thank you," "congratulations" — nothing that resembled an actual thought. For the first time, I wanted to stay for the post-show talkback on a piece where I'd only ever been in the audience. So I overrode my usual instinct to avoid feeling out of place, slipped into the back row, and waited to see the new toy taken apart: what's inside it that lets it cry like an abandoned teenager, terrify you without ever dropping its clown's grin, and, of course, sing straight through the heart like a blade.
No dissection happened. There was a brief discussion that knocked me down a notch or two from wherever my seat in the audience had lifted me, and left my face pressed against the rough, unplaned table of my own thin expertise in theater criticism. And in that brief window when I might have said something, I again managed only a general compliment — when what I owed the show was praise for every single scene, ideally delivered in rhyme, half-sung. I'm trying to correct that now, at this hour, because it's not for nothing that I woke up in the middle of the night to write it.
The scene called "Steps."
This one is personal. A little over a month ago my own father became a bedridden patient. That alone made me feel singled out as a spectator from the very start, because in this scene one of the actresses is suspended in a harness, and from the house you end up looking down at her "bedridden" body from above — with the sick recognition of how irresponsibly I'm living through my own version of this situation, given that unusual vantage point, and how powerless I am to change anything, watching it all from up there. One of two things is true: I am God, or I am dead. Maybe both. But no — the second performer keeps tending to her, cycling through the same small, graceful, and quietly exhausting movements, in something close to the vocabulary of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. That's my mother.
"Karol" is, for me, the most personally invested scene in the show. Shchedrin and I had talked about its soundtrack a week earlier, in Sochi — he told me that a well-known Paul Mauriat instrumental, the one everyone associates with "Deep Blue Sea," would show up in one of the études. That sent me straight to a Soviet animated short from 1977 — Anatoly Petrov's "The Firing Range" — which is also, as it happens, about a tank, and shares the exact same central theme. What a coincidence: an old cartoon about a tank and a new play about a tank, the T-35, arriving independently at the same piece of music. If it weren't for my childhood trips to a certain Moscow cinema, I'd never have caught the overlap and pointed it out to Sergei. Here, too, I felt singled out as a viewer.
The "Midpoint Celebration" is a nice bit of stagecraft comedy: the actors announce that the audience is now exactly halfway through the show, and — since an hour has already passed and everyone's feelings about that are mixed — Sasha invites the house to applaud its way into choosing the next scene, handing the audience the illusion of a choice. But I know better: whatever we clap for, the next scene will be whatever's written in the program. The program — funny word, that. And once again I felt singled out, applauding, hyper-interactively, for all three options at once.
Masha appears holding a portrait of the actor Alexander Petrov, whispering something faintly German, a little mustache penciled in to match. Alexander Petrov — it's genuinely funny. Not because he isn't talented; he clearly is, and in demand. But to me he's less a Thai — sorry, a Russian DiCaprio — than a generational echo of Vsevolod Shilovsky, an actor who is wonderful in villain roles but should, God forbid, never be cast as the lead tank driver. Quite right to knife him, Manya. The house laughs, and I feel very much like a member of the audience.
Then comes the scene that hits closest to home: "Ah, Joe." Taso, in a tone of deliberate, cold calm, carries on a one-sided conversation with Sasha, who realizes, with a chill, the full bleakness of his situation. When you know that you are the reason for your own loneliness, your inner voice takes on a woman's register — and the calmer and more cloying that voice becomes, the more frightening it is.
When the people close to you stop scolding you, it means there's no longer enough life left to fix anything. When they stop scolding you, it means hope has died. For anyone who happened to live right and never had reason to feel this, a bright, major-key jingle straight out of a children's holiday concert kicks in — and it's chilling precisely because of how wrong it feels. And the more beautiful the woman who, inexplicably, still wants you, the deeper you sink into the mess of your own helplessness. And when the people around you suddenly start shouting — that's me. Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
Then Masha climbs out of a trash bag. An operatic backing track starts, and she sings — and for the first time in forty years I understood a form of pleasure that had simply never been available to me, though like every guy from my old neighborhood, myself included, I'd always assumed listening to opera just wasn't for people like us. "Nobody likes opera," as the saying goes. I closed my eyes to work out, honestly, what this new register of feeling actually was. Strip away the fact that it's Masha. Strip away the fact that it's happening inside an experimental show made by people I love. Strip away the contrast with the garbage bags — just this voice, forgiving and enormous: do I actually like it, in itself? Surely not.
And yet there I was, feeling like the ex-con Evgeny Tkachuk plays in "Winter Journey," while Masha kept the note held so high I started doubting it was live. I couldn't see a microphone anywhere near her. My eyes welled up. And I noticed her left eye catching a particular shine along her warm profile, and it became completely clear: yes, of course, that's really her singing. How could I have doubted it?
When the aria ends I start clapping, tentatively, tucked down behind the seat in front of me, but no one joins in. Did I misread something? But I'd simply jumped the gun — the music lands its final chord, and I applaud again, as fast as I can, first once more, breaking through the audience's stunned silence. This time the house catches up and the applause pours out, so thoroughly that I can finally let my hands rest, while it keeps going and going. Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
"Only the fundamental sounds, and no jokes." Sasha grabs that sentence by the hair and drags it across every possible shelf of interpretation, naturally joining the chaos "that's always with you." All it takes is repeating the same phrase enough times, hammering the same single point, and the words start to lose their meaning linguistically — and once that happens, every other point of reference shifts, and the load-bearing walls come down. When the dust settles, all that's left is Iggy Pop. Or do you have other favorite artists? Other favorite artists. Other favorite artists? Other favorite artists! Other favorite artists!! Other favorite artists!!! Other? favorite artists! Other! favorite? artists! Other!!!! favorite!! artists.
... Other favorite artists.....
And here, honestly, a well-timed fart would be enough to wake the room back up. Crude? No matter — this is buffoonery, after all. Though the more grotesque a character's laugh at his own joke, the closer the eyebrows knit together, and you start remembering that what separates a buffoon from a clown is that a buffoon can elbow you in the face, purely for the laugh. That's why buffoons get paid less. Which is why Fedya and Masha sit in a pile of garbage, finishing off their fried chicken, delighted with the church interior that's become their home — spacious, and full of light.
Though it's worth remembering that there can be too much light, which is exactly why buildings get small windows — so faces don't wrinkle prematurely. Then again, laughing constantly at your own jokes will do that too. And then you'll have a face like that: funny, and wrinkled! Yes, the grotesque is a weapon. A prop weapon, but it lands like a real one. And even when a genuinely sharp joke slips through inside all that grotesquerie, you're not obligated to laugh. What did you think this was, stand-up?
Once again, I felt singled out as a spectator.
Then a dialogue between Sasha and Andrei brings every audience member, in purely theoretical terms, face to face with their own sense of being singled out. God is inside everyone, the same way brilliant schizophrenia lies dormant inside everyone — in case you missed that in the first étude.
And finally, the story of Fedya, the crying Superman — who isn't remotely a Superman, but a weepy, gangly lump of a man who can't even manage to hug a friend in a moment that calls for it, let alone move objects at a distance. But all of it is treatable. Because help is always on its way, in the form of Superman's Tangerine friend. All it takes is remembering the Master's instructions: keep doing something new, together, with the people who love you and understand you without needing the words spelled out. People who can't be fooled. And that's where the hope comes from — that maybe, someday, you'll stop fooling yourself too.
T-35
Original text translated by Claude