The Latvian director Alvis Hermanis has not given up his penchant for telling stories on the theater stage. For his first Moscow production – Hermanis makes his debut at the State Theater of Nations – he foregoes his system, well-tested on Latvian and German stage, which involves actors studying their contemporaries encountered in the street and in the public space, and building stage characters from the human experience and thoughts of these people; this time Hermanis goes back to time-tested values – the 20th-century classics that are the Russian filmmaker and writer Vasily Shukshin's stories – and uses them as raw material for his 21st-century "group portrait in an interior setting". The "interior setting" will take the shape of photographs taken in Shukshin's native village of Srostki in the Altai region by the artist Monika Pormale, a co-author of many of Hermanis' productions: the radiant aura of these giant portraits will take part in the production, helping populate the stage space in contemporary Moscow. Ten stories by Vasily Shukshin will be brought to the spectator by a fabulous ensemble, including Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova, stars of the stage and screen, and a number of very young Russian actors. All of them joined the director and set designer on a field trip to the village of Srostki last summer, where the team explored the setting and started to rehearse with an objective of getting as close as possible to the core of the personalities – not attempting to recreate any physical likeness. That seems to be the underlying principle of the new production, in which actors will transform into different people without any external means – becoming other people through the inner world of the characters.