Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman
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GIRL: And what is she?
BLACK GUY: Hey, little fucker, you bring anyone in here and I’ll fucking pull your fucking guts out.
BOY: Shut the fuck up.
GIRL: If you don’t stop swearing, I’m going to go away... forever.
BOY: Don’t go. I have to get the dirt from the grave.
(BOY goes to the kitchen. GIRL follows.
BLACK GUY tries to pull himself out of the hole. Boards crack. BLACK GUY screams and hangs motionless. Boards crack.
BOY and GIRL return from kitchen.
BOY wears yellow rubber gloves and carries a bundle.)
BOY: Don’t ever touch it with your bare hands. If you do, you die.
GIRL: Then how did you get it? With a shovel?
BOY: What shovel? Mishka scooped it up. I watched.
GIRL: And what happened?
BOY: Well, that’s it. He’s all laid up. Broke a leg on the way back from the cemetery.
GIRL: You didn’t know about touching it?
BOY: Of course not. That how I found out. Now, we pour it in a circle...
GIRL: Should I sweep up? Mom yells at me when I track in dirt...
BOY: No, um, it’s ok when you’ve got gloves on, so I’ll do it. See, you pour a circle.
(BOY pours a circle.
BLACK GUY’s knees bend involuntarily. He screams.)
BLACK GUY (Prays in Arabic and Swahili): Allahumma In-nee-a toobu ilaylca minha la ar-ji-u ilayhaa abada. Mungu atanilinda ubaya wenu hautanifika.
(Boards crack under BLACK GUY’s struggling weight.)
BOY: Get the deck of cards from the nightstand, there, to the right of the chessboard!
GIRL: Where?!
BOY: To the right!
(Boards break. BLACK GUY screams.)
GIRL: Here!
BOY: That’s the card! Put it here!
(Drops of BLACK GUY’s blood fall on the card. BOY pours dirt over them.)
BOY: That’s it! Get into the closet!
(BOY and GIRL hide in the closet. Boards break. BLACK GUY falls to the floor, followed by a pile of rubbish and canned pickles from the storage area.
BOY cracks the closet door.
BOY shouts.)
QUEENOFSPADESCOME QUEENOFSPADESCOME QUEENOFSPADESCOME!!
(BOY closes the closet door.
From the mirror in the corner of the room the QUEEN OF SPADES appears. She passes the closet.
She passes the blanket-draped corpse of the POLICEMAN. It disappears and the blanket falls to the floor.
QUEEN OF SPADES stops in front of BLACK GUY.
BLACK GUY is injured and cannot stand.
QUEEN OF SPADES moves her hand and raises the heroin up from the floor into the air. The powder covers BLACK GUY from view. When the cloud of powder fades, BLACK GUY is gone.
QUEEN OF SPADES crouches on all fours and licks all of the heroin off the floor.
QUEEN OF SPADES leaves through the mirror.
BOY and GIRL emerge from the closet.)
That was so fucking cool!
GIRL: She only kills evil, right?
BOY: She is from Evil. So what’s Evil here, she takes back over to her side.
GIRL: Why did she take the powder?
BOY: It’s from that side too.
GIRL: So, we did the right thing?
BOY: We did what we should’ve I guess.
GIRL: Then – let’s go. I wanna show you what I drew on the back wall of our building.
BOY: Which wall is that?
(BOY and GIRL exit.)
The End
Olga Mukhina
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