Strange Russian teen is worth deciphering
The Russian accents were thick, all the more difficult to make out in allegrissimo delivery and with a bass line drifting in from another event at Fort Mason. Performers Aleksandra Kuzenkina and Anastasia Pronina stumbled periodically on the avalanche of lines, and some lighting cues cut in and out at seemingly random moments.
But Meyerhold Theatre Center’s American debut, on Thursday, June 1, was more than worth deciphering. That’s not just because its “One Day We Will All Be Happy” is the only theater production from abroad in the San Francisco International Arts Festival, after France’s Stereoptik canceled
because of concerns about technical needs, says festival Executive Director Andrew Wood.
This 50-minute two-hander, divided into parts for two actors, is a monologue about a teenage outcast that accomplishes exactly what a visiting international show should. In addition to succeeding on its own terms, it offers a rare chance to see work you might never encounter if circumstance keeps your theatergoing provincial. Indeed, by its very strangeness — it’s unsentimental, highly stylized, fanciful and literary, so savage in its humor as to transcend genre — it helps you get a glimpse of what’s American about American theater.
Yekaterina Vasilieva’s script, translated from the Russian by Stephen Ochsner, allows narrator Masha, and the neighborhood, mother and school that created her, to be so weird as to be dangerous. Each day she throws an egg out the window simply because “it calmed my soul.” For a similar reason, she enjoys repeatedly rewinding and fast-forwarding VHS tapes, finding music in the mechanical whir.
She knows all this makes her deeply uncool, but she regards her lack of taste, her nonexistent sense of style as a congenital disease, inherited from a cruel and capricious mother just like the acne that has “pockmarked” both their faces. Another playwright might make heavy-handed tragedy out of the failure by Masha herself, her mother and the “little bitches” at her school to recognize Masha’s quirks for what they are: poetic, wondrous testaments to individualism. But Vasilieva lets audiences draw that conclusion completely on their own, instead allowing Masha’s righteous anger to fester into something sinister, until she becomes equal parts victim and victimizer.
Delivering the overlapping, whirlwind text, Kuzenkina and Pronina choose each syllable’s pitch so carefully — chirpy, then husky deadpan, then nasal as a Muppet — that speech often sounds like song, an effect heightened by the static staging. For almost the whole show they stay rooted in place, like woodwind players performing a duet; it’s a huge, surprising event when in unison they simply pop a hip. Breaking the monologue into two parts makes the already complicated Masha all the more so, and the device also makes Masha less tragic. Even though she constantly laments her lack of friends, in the reality of the stage, she has a co-conspirator in her second half, one who’s infinitely more interesting than any of the monsters at her school.
The script’s main weakness is how long it dwells on those monsters’ obsession with makeup and models and boyfriends without adding much you haven’t already heard ad nauseam in stereotypes of teenage girls. Yet even this filler has important work to do: The banality of evil has to come from banality.