By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Bomb, starring Mariya Khomutova. Pyretic Productions. Poster by Amelia Scott.
Can you name a single Ukrainian playwright? Me neither. Fringe Full of Stars is about to change that.
When director Lianna Makuch got her hands on Bomb, a dark, absurdist comedy by the contemporary Ukrainian playwright Natalia Blok, she knew she’d found a perfect home for it at the Fringe. And she set about gathering an all-star cast, including Mariya Khomutova, James MacDonald, Geoffrey Simon Brown, and Anna Kuman for the Pyretic production that opens at the Fringe Thursday.
“A strange little show … it encompasses everything the Fringe is all about: it’s subversive, it’s weird, it’s edgy. It leaves people with questions; you’re invited to think! It’s going to make you laugh — and not in the way you think.”
Bomb, our introduction to a brave new world of contemporary Ukrainian theatre, came to Makuch, an award-winning Ukrainian-Canadian director/ actor/ playwright (and the artistic director of Pyretic Productions), from Khomutova. The award-winning Ukrainian actor who now lives in Canada with her husband playwright Matthew MacKenzie (First Métis Man of Odesa) and young son Ivan, is a peer of playwright Blok.
Set in 2017, “after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine and before the full-scale invasion,” as Makuch explains, Bomb speaks to our age of chronic anxiety, resonating in the collective ribcage — literally. The protagonist Dasha, plagued by anxiety and PTSD, the journalist and activist played by Khomutova, has a bomb in her stomach.
“She is the Chosen One. That bomb, if she chooses to set it off, can change the fate of Ukraine forever…. Back to before the revolution, before the Russian invasions, before the Budapest Memorandum signed by major world powers who convinced Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for protecting its territorial integrity. Back to when Ukraine was just starting out as a country.”
“But Dasha would rather just get a moment of peace and quiet.…So she has to make a decision,” says Makuch. “Save the world. Or go about living a ‘normal life’.…”
On the recommendation of her husband (Brown), Dasha consults a new-age doctor (MacDonald). As Makuch explains, that character is inspired “by the pseudo-scientific doctors of the post-Soviet world, and modelled particularly on a tele-hypnotist said to have hypnotized 300 million people via Soviet state television.”
It’s the kind of surreal absurdist comedy that really only an Eastern European can write,” says Makuch, fresh from assistant-directing Daryl Cloran’s production of Sense and Sensibility at the Stratford Festival. Where does that distinctive sense of humour and appreciation for absurdism, “so much part of the post-Soviet mentality,” come from? “It’s a sensibility shaped by a society with government structures that made no sense at all. A topsy-turvy world. A government that makes choices that are illogical, steeped in corruption and confusion at all times.”
“It feels like a Vaclav Havel kind of show,” she says of the playwright/ essayist/ poet/ public intellectual (who became the first president of the Czech Republic). Makuch remembers being in the cast of Havel’s The Memorandum in her last year of U of A theatre school. Trevor Schmidt’s production “really leaned into that world, and the absurdity of bureaucracy. A lot of fun to do, and a lot of fun to perform…. I’ve thought about that a lot getting ready to direct this show.”
Bomb, she says, “is really a story about the cost of caring, the internal battles activists face when the world asks too much of you…. the toll it takes on our bodies, and our souls.”
Bloodshed and war have been terrible constants in Ukrainian history. By 2017, the first time Makuch was in Ukraine, researching on location for her own plays (Barvinok and Alina among them), she noted that “a prevailing sentiment, outside the veterans groups I was connected with, was the question of whether all the chaos, all the upheaval was worth it.… People have gone to war and risked everything. But there’s exhaustion; there’s the wanting to live a normal life.”
“Ukraine has constantly been thrust into asking those questions, and taking responsibility for defending the entire free world. Would it be better to just start again?”
After the full-scale invasion, the story has a new relevance,” says Makuch. The world, and our sense that “everything is spinning out of control,” have seen to that. “With everything that’s happening down south, the rise of populist governments, increased authoritarian rhetoric around us … we are slowly eroding democratic norms, and the basic rules of world order.”
“The fun challenge for me as a director,” says Makuch, “is how to create a container for this show that is going to invite people into that world. How do we make this show, so steeped in the Ukrainian mindset, relevant to a North American audience? To not be didactic — this isn’t a history lesson by any means! — and honour the dark comedy of the show?.”
The design, by Stephanie Bahniuk, “leans into the retro-futurist aesthetic,” says Makuch. “Big old-school tech, overhead projectors, analogue lighting.” The look is “old Soviet state-run hospital…. Very moody, very dark, a little bit scary but still fun!.”
“So often we impose a perspective on what’s happening,” she says.“We need to be listening to Ukrainian voices abut Ukrainian things.”
Bomb runs Thursday through Aug. 24 at MacEwan Fine Arts Walterdale Theatre, Fringe Stage 4. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.
