Periodical: The Shore Date: 01.04.2008 Author(s): Anastasiya Kirillovykh

Childhood is the happiest period of our life. Is it really so? One can see an image of the yard, molten by the summer heat, tabernacles, “hide-and-seek” and “cops and robbers”. Or wintery dark blue twilight and ones’ desperate stepback towards the walls of a ruined snow fortress, counterattacks and heeling ones’ damaged nose with a snowball. Our memory is a patchwork quilt that we create ourselves, throwing away the pieces that do not match the color we choose. We forget grievances, unjust punishments, loneliness in the crowd of classmates, ones’ name written next to a word “fool” on a blackboard.

Childhood is a controversial period of life. This is a statement more true to life. It is a time when a little human, abstracted from the rest of the world with his or her skin only, assumes all outdoors as it is and trains to build up ones’ armour. The empire of fantasies and reveries.

“Natasha, what is your dream?” – this is the question the heroine of the play “Natasha’s Dream” by young playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich asks herself. Her monologue on the whole is a vivid demonstration of a child’s speech transformation into an obsession. A transformation provoked by a torturous loneliness. An orphanage in our country (with some minor exceptions) is a place where it is very hard to seclude oneself, yet at the same time one is always alone. Natasha narrates the story of her life and of her first love that did not become a beautiful tale worthy of the patchwork quilt, but turned into a tragedy with a monstrous ending. And in that tragedy Natasha is de jure a criminal who has beaten dead her successful competitors. And as for de-facto… The performer of the main and only part in this show Olga Lysenko made the whole audience feel like criminals, avoiding orphans as if they were leprous.

In its original variant the play ends at this deeply moving moment of spectator’s or reader’s personal guilt sense. Bur especially for Saratov Kiselev Youth theatre Yaroslava Pulinovich has written a second part of the play. That part also starts with the words: “Natasha, what is your dream?” For a homegrown girl with a proper behavior Natasha this problem is not less acute than for a hard to get along with orphan. Her life is ruled by her mother, who is brining to life her own dreams and plans by means of her daughter. Indeed, which parent wouldn’t be flattered if his or her child is a perfect pupil, sportsperson, and passed the casting to a teenage TV-show? And do many parents admit that an “exemplary” childhood excludes dreams? Because children who think of grown-up matters, such as success, career, decent life – make a spine-chilling impression as if they became old rather than grown-up. Just like punctual and pedantic Natasha is a kind of 14-year old lady, who dreams of her mother’s dreams and thinks her mother’s thoughts… This is what the audience think until the girl jumps up from her seat and hysterically begins to knock at the wall and call the doctor. The audience was faked out. They watched a different mind’s dream – a dream of a girl Natasha who is taking her medical treatment at a hospital, where she has no dream.

It looks like they’ve shown us all possible deviations from a wholesome dream, and the lights go down. But it’s not the end. The spotlight shows us a one more Natasha: a dim-witted country girl constantly writing letters to her icon – a pop star with a name that has much in common with a popular mobile phone operator.
And only after you’ve watched the performance that ends with a loud recitative: “There is no death. There is only wind…” you understand why the audience does not let Olga Lysenko go off the stage for a long time making tremendous applause. For almost two hours the girl from the stage talks to you about the most important and the most fragile thing in the world – the dream. And it is not about Natasha’s dream at all – it is all about yours.

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