Nine unusual love stories in the Malaya Bronnaya Theater

The Moscow Theater on Malaya Bronnaya on December 13 presents the premiere of the performance “Near-city”, staged by the main director of the theater Sergey Golomazov. This is the first stage reading of a play by a contemporary American actor and playwright John Cariani in Russia. The premiere of this play took place in 2004 in Portland and received well-deserved recognition from the audience and theater critics. Then the performance was played on the stages of Germany, Australia, Canada.

For the Russian audience, the play was translated by Valeria Gumeniuk, who worked as the director of the Malaya Bronnaya Theater. According to Sergei Golomazov, this work is interesting in that this play is not domestic, but fantastic, with an admixture of surrealism. It can be compared with Shakespearean plays singing love - “Winter’s Tale”, “Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

All the heroes of the play, consisting of nine short stories, live in one, invented by the author of Near Novgorod, where ordinary people live, many of whom are familiar with each other. They work, sometimes in the evening they go to the beer bar located nearby. It would seem that these are the most ordinary people, but a miracle happens - to each of the heroes of nine stories at the same time, at the same hour and day, Love comes.

The stories shown in each of the short stories are different - in them side by side funny moments with sad ones, touching ones with funny ones. And the heroes themselves are not quite ordinary - one of the heroines, going to her boyfriend, takes big bags full of love with her, another heart breaks into pieces. The love that the heroes found or lost is about the play and tells the audience about it.

It doesn’t matter in which country this happens, because these feelings are clear to every spectator in the audience. Exactly the same love story could happen to any of them, wherever they live, and whatever their city name is.

Ludmila Trautmane