Source: The New York Times
In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.
We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one’s country, one’s city, one’s skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.
And then the show goes on.
This isn’t a theater review, and I’m not here to tell you why you should go see the play, “Seagull: True Story.” I have too many social connections to Alexander Molochnikov, the exiled Russian director, and anyway, the current run is sold out. I’m interested in something else: that moment when the shock fades and the (figurative) show goes on.
