— Michael, how did you get the idea to stage this novel?
— My acquaintance with this text began with an audiobook. It was probably 2012, I had just graduated from the Studio School and was already working at the Moscow Art Theater. I immediately realized that it was mine. In general, I love stories about space, as a child I read Soviet and foreign fiction with great enthusiasm. I dreamed of becoming an astronaut.
— Really? It is believed that this is a typical dream of a Soviet child, and you have practically not found the USSR.
— Nevertheless, I really wanted to go into space. But then I quickly realized that I was not so brave, so I decided that I would rather become an astronomer, I would study celestial bodies. I loved watching educational programs on the topic of space, I looked at astronomical atlases. In general, I was sick of this topic. I really liked Pelevin's book. When Sergey Vasilyevich Zhenovach, who was then the artistic director of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, asked me what I would like to put on, I named her. During the lockdown, he wrote a dramatization. But the most difficult thing turned out to be something else – to try to find a stage equivalent for this story. After all, the novel balances between a dream and reality, between esotericism and everyday life, between plausibility and complete absurdity.
— What is this story about for you?
— For me, this is an existential story about human delusions, about the inability to break out of one's consciousness. About the impossibility of truly changing life, because we are not so limited by this consciousness of ours. Why won't our life change in any way, why won't we break through anywhere, won't we be reborn? As you remember, in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" Olga says: "Everything is not done our way." Paradoxically, the postmodernist Pelevin also has this Chekhov theme.
— The main character of the novel Omon Krivomazov, dreaming of flying to the moon – what is he like?
— This is such an Ivanushka, as in a fairy tale. A simple guy. After all, why is the riot police chosen for the flight? He is open, smiling, good, understandable and close to most. Alexey Krasnenkov plays in the first part of the Riot Police in our play, and in his acting nature this simplicity and ingenuity of the archetypal fairy Ivanushka is just there.
— Omon has a friend Mitek in the novel, also a very important character. Are they doppelgangers or opponents with the riot police?
— Mitek, in my opinion, is the most mysterious participant in this story. There is an episode with reincarnation in the book: just before the flight to the Moon, applicants must pass a test during which the ideologists of this space program will find out who you were in your past life. And now they find out that Mitek was a traitor, including in his last life he served in the Luftwaffe – he was a German pilot. Pelevin thus speaks about the idiocy of the system, elevated to the absolute: you are already different in this life, maybe you are able to do real things, but you are not given a chance to be reborn. You're doomed.
— Michael, you know how to stage performances of a light genre – your production of "Merry Times" based on the film "Ninochka" with Greta Garbo has been successfully going on at the Moscow Art Theater for several years. You have worked on the performances "Blue-Blue Bird" at the Theater of Nations and "All about Cinderella" at the Musical Theater, I'm not talking about the famous Moscow Art Theater skits, of which you are the constant author. What will be the balance of serious and funny in Omon Ra?
— In this material, I really like his tragicomism. In the presence of incredibly funny, absurd, grotesque episodes, this is a very tragic story. Almost an ancient Greek tragedy, in which there is a hero and a chorus. In general, I always struggle for humor in the theater. To be honest, I can't stand performances that seem to say to the audience: "We're not just going to show you a performance now, we're going to show a performance with meaning. And even with what!.." And they try to get the guts out of me. I, as a spectator, am completely not fooled by this. It seems to me that the path to a serious experience, to meaning, should be paved through humor, through lightness. And the world of the novel "Omon Ra" seems to me to be some kind of infernal circus, and this genre dictates the carnivalization of even the most tragic, death-related moments.
— I know that you are an economist by your first education, and before you entered the Moscow Art Theater Studio School, you graduated from the university in your native Perm. And what was the impetus for such a radical change in life?
— At school I played amateur and at Perm University I was an active member of the student club. At the university, amateur art was put on a grand scale, it was treated extremely seriously there. In the first year I was still studying, and starting from the second I was terribly carried away by the theater, I disappeared around the clock in the student club, and only before the session I closed at home for 25 days and taught everything intensively. But somehow I managed to graduate from the university with a red diploma! Because I spent all my time at the club, I started having wild scandals with my parents. They were very worried that I was doing the wrong thing. At some point I even left home, got a job at a firm and spent the night on the floor in the office of the director of the student club. In the morning he got up, walked past the students to the toilet to the sink with an independent look, quickly washed his face like an army man, put on a jacket and tie and went to work. And in the evening I rehearsed at the student club. Then I went to study in Germany. I entered the University of Potsdam, but I quickly realized: well, no, I don't want to be a financier, and even study German. And I had a classmate in Germany. At my request, we went to the theaters with her. Right in the center of Berlin, a small private theater was discovered, which staged mainly plastic performances. I barely knew German, but I had a good command of English. In this theater, I was told that if I wanted, I could participate in their productions. The troupe was led by a professional mime, he did such plastic things in his 60s that God grant everyone! I traveled all over Germany with this theater, they had a cool production about Johann Sebastian Bach, we played it in Bach's homeland, in Eisenach, right on the square near the house where he was born.
— That's when you decided to enter the theater?
— Yes, at first I thought of studying in Germany, but I found out that it was necessary to analyze Heinrich von Kleist's "Penthesilea" at the entrance exams. And as soon as I opened this play in German, as soon as I saw how complicated this text was, I immediately closed it. I had a strong complex about admission, because my parents, with the best intentions, always inspired me that it was impossible to get into a creative university, that everyone was thugs there. But I still decided to go to Russia to try my hand. As a result, he entered the St. Petersburg Theater Academy to direct a variety show. I called my parents from a Berlin phone so they wouldn't know I was in Russia.
— And when did you open up to them?
— Having already studied for a couple of months in St. Petersburg, I specially went to Perm to tell them everything. A very difficult conversation took place. I remember my mother sat in silence, as if numb, and tears flowed down her cheeks…
— But have they accepted your choice now?
— Yes, everything is fine now. Although they sometimes blame me that I don't have enough time for anything, that I am constantly at work, but if I served in a bank, then I would have a normalized working day… Sometimes, though, I think so myself (laughs). In St. Petersburg, I worked as an animator, and led weddings, and performed in a music hall. But I realized that all this is not mine. Then I decided to go to Moscow.
— And they entered the Moscow Art Theater Studio School, the directing group of the course of Roman Kozak and Dmitry Brusnikin. What do you remember from your studies?
— In the first year I really plowed, my classmate Nina Guseva and I had the most sketches. And in the second year, he began to loaf. The fact is that our course fell into the inter-time, Roman Yefimovich Kozak was already ill, we rarely saw him, and our directing group was partly homeless. But Viktor Anatolyevich Ryzhakov was engaged in us. Boris Leonidovich Dyachenko was also the teacher of the workshop… When we were in the third year, Roman Yefimovich died. Dmitry Vladimirovich Brusnikin, of course, was very worried about it. And in terms of pedagogy, he was so... a little bored. I think he understood that it was no longer possible to teach as before, but he did not yet know how to do it in a new way. Dmitry Vladimirovich tried out his new ideas in pedagogy with the guys who came to the Studio School after us.
— In the Moscow Art Theater, you go on stage as an actor. Do you like acting in plays?
— Depends on the setting. For directing, this is certainly a help, because you begin to understand the actor from the inside, you can show him something. Well, when you're an actor, you have less responsibility for what's happening on stage than the director. And sometimes it's very nice to take this responsibility off yourself.
A source: ok-magazine.ru