Blue marmalade

You know, gays get lonely. They lie, embracing and yearning, dreaming of love, not receiving it. They go to nightclubs incessantly and pour alcohol into grief. So Kolya fell in love with Yura - and what? The insidious Yura only wants money, treacherously kissing Kolya on the lips. Nikolai suffers, struck by love, and spends dollars on a young handsome man. Here is the old homosexual Renard: in his eyes - longing, in his hands - condoms. A student-musician - an innocent Ilyusha from a distant province - was plotted to destroy a vile libertine. He puts him in the car, treats him with champagne and ... Oh, horror!

This is how you can describe the premiere at the Praktika Theater - a production with the sweet name "Marmalade" and the subtitle "Performance about gays." Gays are played by women, and this play was written by a woman: Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina suddenly felt like a playwright and wrote the play Marmalade in two weeks. The recipe for preparing such plays is simple: we take a choice of gays, prostitutes, lesbians, or, at worst, a serial killer, add a pinch of longing, fill it all with youth slang - and the product is ready. An acutely social play about the inhabitants of a modern metropolis is ready to be staged. It doesn't matter that her style is absolutely similar to chattering on the phone or in chats, and there is no more sense than in the phrase "the sun rises and sets." The main thing is the theme. Although such topics are now few people can be surprised.

The period of shock, when same-sex love was shown on stage, is long gone. After Roman Viktyuk, who declared that only love is important, and between whom and whom is the tenth question, no one in our theater, in fact, added anything to the “blue” theme. It became more and more banal, and the play "Marmalade" only summed up the triviality of this whole theatrical gay parade. No matter how much you say “halvah”, it will not become sweeter in your mouth, no matter how much you talk about gay culture, and a performance is a performance, whether it is about gays or about birds, it first of all requires meaning and artistry, and only then social pathos, documentary overtones, vivid manifestations of tolerance and other wonderful things like that.

Our theater is stuck somewhere between what Oscar Wilde called "slavish worship of facts" and the embodiment of aesthetic heights and beauties that have nothing to do with what we live today. You come to the theatre, and either unprocessed pieces of the so-called “real life” are dumped on you, or you are invited to such a beautiful fairy tale that it becomes dreary from the very first minutes. Artistic reworking of reality, a powerful author's view of what is happening to us, is an increasingly rare case.

Of course, experiments are needed and the mistakes and defeats associated with them - in this sense, there can be no complaints about the Praktika Theater. The question is different: when marginal characters have become cult, and all topics that were once taboo are capitalized by the bourgeois theater, what should those who claim to be a non-trivial statement do? It is no longer possible to return to that type of theater, which, as Gogol said, is “a department with which one can say a lot of good things.” It is hardly promising to continue to create acutely social documentary works, thinking about art as a last resort.

Texts like "Marmalade" will soon become as banal as plays about shock work and the struggle for world peace used to be. Homosexuals will soon be equated with steelworkers, prostitutes with quivering girls, faithful to the ideals of socialism, serial killers with district committee chairmen, and the slogan “Gay, Slavs!” will sound as trite as the call "Guys, let's live together!"