The first year of the Theater of Nations' project in support of theaters from Russia's smaller towns (there are over nine hundred smaller towns in Russia, and to date there are no official statistics on their working theaters) is coming to an end. Theaters from Rybinsk, Tuapse, Novoshakhtinsk, Prokopyevsk, Velikiye Luki, Balakovo and Yelets have already taken part in this program.

CONTINUE DO NOT FORGET

The workshop's model is a simple one. A participating theater receives several dozen contemporary plays. Theater management chooses three or four plays and distributes the parts. Theater of Nations and Oleg Loyevsky, the program curator, provide the theater with young directors, voice coaches and movement instructors. Afterwards the rehearsals process begins in a storm-and-onslaught mode. In a span of several days (the entire program is only a week long) directors and actors must not only learn to trust each other but also create a sketch of a production that can be shown in front of an audience. The only allowance: the actors are permitted to peek into the text. Admittedly, though, many of them didn't take advantage of that right. The audience here is given the role of Roman patricians, who decided the fate of a gladiator by casting a simple vote with their thumbs. The audience members are given three pieces of paper: "Needs more work", "Leave everything as it is" and "Forget this nightmare". And they are given the right to express their opinion as soon as the show is over – eye-to-eye. The people having thus spoken, the theater management gets to decide which productions will remain in the repertoire and begins to look for funds in order to invite a director to finalize the production, to pay royalties to the playwright and to cover production costs. Oleg Loyevsky assures, however, that there are plenty of opportunities to receive grants from the Ministry of Culture, which has programs aimed at supporting young playwrights and directors. Just so long as the will is there – the primary driving force and the primary shortage. The efficiency coefficient of these workshops sometimes reaches one hundred percent – every single sketch survives to its premiere.

MOSCOW'S OLDER BROTHER

In the Nikon Chronicle the city of Yelets is mentioned earlier than Moscow (and that means that its construction began before 1146). ... The spirit of Russian provincial past with one- and two-storey houses (local developers build houses that don't stand out from the overall architectural ensemble, – the Muscovites could stand to learn from them), with numerous temples and monasteries (the Soviet power demolished them, but thirteen of the thirty-three managed to escape destruction) persisted in Yelets to such an extent that film crews flock here to film the "Russian spirit." This is where Andrei Smirnov's Once Upon a Time There Lived a Simple Woman was shot. Admittedly, though, the Yelets residents who played extras in the movie don't get to see themselves on the silver screens – movie theaters offer the endless Star Wars, betting on a tried and true success. Theater playbill appears to be equally "safe" – mostly comedies and children's plays. Add to that the forced closure of the local Benefis Theater, which stems from the size of its small cozy auditorium (because of the small number of seats it is not profitable for neighboring cities to perform here – their guest performances do not pay for themselves), and local actors find themselves locked in a vicious cycle. It is no wonder then that they threw themselves headlong into the Theater of Nations' experiment like Ostrovsky's Aksinya into waters of the deep. As that wild week came to a close, having watched each other's productions, they suddenly rediscover their colleagues and themselves. And one would think that nothing could be more terrifying for them than to bury these productions they had already created. ...

PANDAS, DRUG ADDICTS, COMPETITORS AND BRODSKY

Four plays were selected for further work – Yaroslava Pulinovich's Endless April (Pavel Zobnin, director), Danila Privalov's Five Twenty-Five (Radion Bukayev),The Story of the Panda Bears Told by a Saxophonist Who Has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt by the Romanian-born Frenchman Matei Visniec (Valeria Surkova), and The Grönholm Method by Spanish playwright Jordi Galceran (Giorgi Tznobiladze), a play that is already well known in Moscow thanks to the very same Theater of Nations.

All four plays had no problem getting a full house, and the post-presentation discussions turned into shows in their own right. Twentieth century through a prism of the history of an old Saint Petersburg apartment; a love story of two suicidal drug addicts (mothers of growing teenagers were the most ardent proponents of this production); nine days of the body bidding farewell to the soul; and a job interview, harsh like the Judgment Day and twisted like a detective story. These themes quickly inspired the Yelets residents, who have been starving for a "new word". ... And so, four different directors divided between themselves nine evenings in the same theater. And the result was a wonderfully harmonious production that found room in it for Homeric laughter, lyricism, tragedy, and humility. ...

The Theater of Nations' workshop easily brought together audiences for a full house and, in a good way, stirred the hearts of everyone. It let actors of all ages experience once again the feeling of youth of their student days, of maximum creative workload – they were literally in tears when they were bidding goodbye to their guests. It gave the audience (not yet accustomed to a literature-centric theater) new subjects and themes. And it had once again proven that there is insatiable hunger for both.