Translated material
The meteorite has already arrived
Ivan Vyrypaev* presented his new text in Tel Aviv - The Desire, or “Desire”
18+. THIS MATERIAL (INFORMATION) IS PRODUCED, DISTRIBUTED AND (OR) SENT BY FOREIGN AGENT VYRYPAEV IVAN ALEXANDROVICH OR CONCERNES THE ACTIVITIES OF FOREIGN AGENT VYRYPAEV IVAN ALEXANDROVICH
Two people wake up in an Amsterdam hotel room with a great recovery - the day before, everything that usually happens to them in this free city happened to them. And it seems that great love has happened, but they themselves do not understand it yet. Over the course of ten short stories, which the author calls “essays,” we will see the life of each of them from different, sometimes unexpected sides. Moreover, in a non-linear presentation: around the seventh short story, the narrative will again steer towards that very night, but the story will not have a looping ending, it will develop further.
The story is called The Desire, and the day before, its first public performance took place in the Babel store in Tel Aviv (with this event, the bookstore, which has turned into a center of Russian-language culture, began a small festival in honor of its tenth anniversary). As the author said before the start of the evening, the text was originally written for a one-man show by Mikhail Baryshnikov, which “did not happen” for various reasons. But everything is a plus for the author: the brilliant dancer eventually became the hero of one of the short stories.
The author of this story, Ivan Vyrypaev, is also an international figure. A number of sources call him “a Polish theater figure of Russian origin” - he has actually been living in Poland since 2014, and his plays are widely performed in theaters in this country.
And in the early 2000s, he became the most “staged” Russian playwright in the world since the time of Chekhov - thanks to his, also prose and also consisting of ten parts, text “Oxygen,” which was staged in more than 100 countries.
This text at one time became one of the symbols of the new Russian stage and instantly glorified Teatr.doc, on the stage of which Vyrypaev himself performed it together with actress Arina Marakulina. In the time that has passed since then, Ivan managed to turn “Oxygen” from a play into a film, be an art director of the Praktika theater, and write several more plays that became hits in Russia and Poland.
The Russian public and critics were familiar with “Dance of Delhi” (Meyerhold Center), “Drunk” (Moscow Art Theater and the Bolshoi Drama Theater in St. Petersburg), and “Iranian Conference” (Theater of Nations). More recent achievements include the founding of the Teal House foundation and platform in Warsaw, dedicated to the integration of refugee artists into the European theater and film environment. And also the status of a “foreign agent” and a prison sentence for “discrediting the Russian army” - one must be somehow connected with the other.
However, in the current story, parallels arise precisely with “Oxygen,” the heroes of which were nominally the young man Alexander and the girl Sasha, but in fact - a certain substance, the prana of life and freedom, without which human existence becomes similar to “Russian cinema about birches and fields” and the struggle to inhale which forces the heroes to commit a variety of actions.
In the introduction to the text, the author himself called the 10 texts of the play “commandments” - and with all the metamodernist irony inherent in this definition and generously scattered throughout the work, he laid claim to no less than a modern decalogue (at least with stylizations of sublime Old Testament texts in a number of passages, or even direct quotes). The text itself, in addition to stories about the adventures of Sasha and Sasha, was replete with lengthy discussions in which entertaining metaphysics was tightly mixed with apt observations of modernity and the intrusions of the spirit of the then modernity. “Oxygen”, not without reason, was called by critics a manifesto of the generation of the 70s, “on whose head a large meteorite flies from space at great speed,” as stated in the finale of the play.
In the new text, a catastrophe - like the one that was always nearby in the supposedly free 2000s - is removed, overcome, subtracted from the universe, left outside the brackets of the Universe, from which a celestial body rushed onto the heads of the generation born in the 70s.
In “Oxygen,” Sasha “vomited after vodka with dumplings,” and Alexander simply “took an oxygen shovel and killed his oxygen-free wife,” “an unknown force forced him to tuck a sweater into his pants,” and on the window of his high-rise building you could safely stick a transparent sticker with the title “Director: Alexey Balabanov.”
The heroes of The Desire are already different - they move around the world, getting used to the loss of citizenship and connection with a specific country of birches and fields that has gone its own way, but in birth pangs they become citizens of the world. By the way, it seems that this is precisely why the nationality of the main characters has been erased (this has been a generally characteristic feature of Ivan’s works for some time now). About the name of the main female character, it turns out that she is not Nadezhda, but Nadiya - this was the name chosen for her by her Russian mother and Lebanese father; It is known about her that she was born in Beirut and lived in Moscow - of course, until a certain time. Little is known about the origin of the male character - it seems that his name is Evgeniy Shmidt, but by the will of the author he can be called Vadim, Tolik, or anything else, which Vyrypaev immediately reports in the text.
In general, the text is another, if not the main character of Vyrypaev’s new work. Not the author (who, before starting reading, asked not to identify himself with the lyrical hero, but towards the end suddenly begins to call himself “I”, as if merging with Zhenya-Vadim), but rather the text itself. In some places he is funny reflecting on himself, like a dog playing with his own tail, in others he indulges in funny reasoning (imagine as if Milan Kundera from the time of the novel “Immortality” suddenly inhaled laughing gas) and seems to forget about the heroes.
The text of The Desire contains a lot of swearing - but in Vyrypaev’s performance it sounds not just appropriate, but somehow funny and even tender - especially in discussions about what people who call themselves “spiritual” actually do. And yes, the most common swear word is the same one from the bearded joke about the crossword puzzle: “the collapse of all hopes, six letters, the second “i.”
Despite all this, The Desire also claims to be a new manifesto - but not only for the slightly graying generation of the 70s, but at the same time for everyone else - not only for Xers, but also for boomers and zoomers.
Vyrypaev’s new text says that the meteorite has already arrived (and, let’s be honest, when looking from our time to the early 2000s, it becomes clear that this is true), but in some paradoxical way, life in the fourth year of hostilities is still possible. Not one in which residents of one country, without raising their heads from telegram channels, live from work to home in a khaki-colored reality, while residents of another still divide their day between work, fits of sleep and runs to bomb shelters. Another life - in which, with the loss of ties to a specific country, there is immersion in oneself and the realization of what is actually really important.
For the heroes of “Oxygen,” by the way, it was “conscience,” which the heroes of Vyrypaev and Marakulina announced in a very funny and touching chorus from the stage three or four times. For the characters of The Desire and its author, hiding under the guise of a lyrical hero, the key concept is “contact”, in all the variety of its possible meanings.
“Oxygen” was foreshadowed by the author’s remark “This is an ACT that needs to be done here and now.” The Desire will also not exist for long in the form of text only. Director Daria Shamina received the rights to the first production, and the main characters will be played by musician and actor, leader of the Oqjav group Vadim Korolev, as well as Teal House artist and journalist Wanda Konisevich. Rehearsals for the project have already begun.
Alexander Roitman