Farewell Moskva!

I'm finally comfortable enough with Moscow to go it alone for a few hours, which feels really liberating...even though I basically mean that I'll be walking home from the internet cafe alone. I now know my way around pretty well and don't feel like every Russian out there is ready to steal from me or whatever. Jenia is the only one who has run into trouble (I mean Chechans) here. I just have to make sure never to smile at foreign men or talk to strangers without others with me. Haha. Yikes. ************

I have been pretty impressed with a lot of the plays we have seen. Cosmetics of the Enemy was so good, I want to put on a production of it in English someday. Apparently it was translated from French into Russian. Lisa translated the Russian into English, and Sonia and Scott read aloud the play prior to seeing it. I am going to do my video review on Cosmetics of the Enemy, so I won't say anything more about it here. ************ It's far better to read a whole play from start to finish than to read a synopsis or a blog entry about the play, before seeing it in Russian. If you know what is said where, you at least have some hope of following the play, even if, like me, you don't speak any Russian. I can now say "I want little Christmas tree dog!" in addition to my wonderful "What a beautiful potato cat!" in a grammatically incorrect manner. I'm sure you're all quite impressed with mad Russian skills. I have to say, this language is hard to hear. I can always sound things out by reading them in a sort of correct way, which is nice. ************ Last night we saw a great play called KI from Crime. Though there were two girls and a boy in it in addition to the main actress, the kids didn't say or do much. Basically, it was a one woman show, in which Oxana (her real name, I believe) delivered a thoroughly animated and upsetting performance. The woman claimed that her husband had been run over by horses and had died that day, that he was an excellent husband, and that she was very sad to see her and her children left on the street with nothing and no husband or father. She kept on saying how they had been rich but now they look like paupers. However, there is no way that she had been married to a well-to-do man because she and the children looked entirely too poor and acted destitute. Oxana said how she had tuberculosis and that was supposed to create lumps on the brain, and that she was no longer mentally with-it. Well, duh. The woman was crazy, as was shown by the text, which had been written in a spastic/fast-speaking/overly emotional manner. The woman performed the text well, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, often opening, walking through, and slamming a door. She never seemed to know where she was, what she was doing, why she had been left without a husband, or who the other characters in the play were (with the exception of her children). By other characters in the play, I mean the audience. We were a part of her charade; we were her listeners and her guests at her reception after the memorial service (scene two). Some people in our group were fortunate enough to sit at her table, and were directly addressed by the woman. Jenia was addressed several times, as was Marcus. She made Marcus stand up and demanded some sort of an answer from him....which was funny, because Marcus knows as little Russian as I do. Thankfully she also spoke sometimes in English. She is one of the only Russians I have met who is fluent in English. Last night was her 299th performance, and so she knew the text very, very well. She had performed parts of it in English before, and all of it in Spanish/Portuguese. She's toured many parts of the world (Europe, New York, South America) with this play. It was nice that she spoke key lines of the play in English, so that we knew what parts of the play were which. We had read the play previously. Something interesting she told us during a short talk-back after the play is that she always plays the character true to how she is feeling that night. If she is tired, then so is the character. If she's feeling great, the so does the character. She doesn't try to play the character the same nightly. This makes sense, yet it's a new idea for me. I found that greatly interesting. Also of course her performance must change depending on the audience's reaction to her. This makes sense. Audiences can make or break any performance and they always, always change peformances. Even when you're not on stage, this is the case. If you find yourself telling one story to two different groups of people, your narrative may not change, but your delivery always will. ********** Everyone on this trip seems to be stoked for the night train to Novgorod tonight. It will be an eight hour train ride...we leave Moskva around 8 PM and travel north and slightly west until the early morning. It's a sleeper train, and we'll be in rooms of four. I have never been on such a train ride and I am also excited. Sure, being on land is tenchinally nicer I'm sure, but there's something appealling about trains...... ********** Kaitlin