"Orpheus Descending" PREMIERE on May, 22 and 23

Dear friends!

Our Theatre is preparing a very interesting premiere for you - "Orpheus Descending" by Tennessee Williams directed by Aleksandr Bargman!

The rehearsal process is going on right now.

This play is not frequently staged, but it was the first piece by Tennessee Williams that Russian audience saw on theatre stage. In 1961 the play "Orpheus Descending" was translated by the prominent theatre expert, critic and translator Yuri Alexandrovich Osnos for the benefit performance of the actress Vera Maretskaya. It was premiered at the Mossovet State Academic Theater on May 25, 1961 and directed by Irina Sergeevna Anisimova-Wolf. Unfortunately, despite the participation of outstanding actors (People's Artist of the USSR Vera Maretskaya, People's Artist of the USSR Rostislav Plyatt and People's Artist of the RSFSR Serafima Birman) the performance was not a success and, as written by the notable Soviet theatre critic B.N. Lyubimov , "it didn’t leave a trace either in the repertoire or in memory...". That production was mistaken to extremely simplify the philosophical problems of the Williams’s work and turned into a primitive, vulgar sociological criticism of "bourgeois" America.

Today there is no longer any need to solve ideological problems on the stage. The playwright links his works with mythological plots and images and reveals the problems and conflicts that are always actual for everyone, some basic plots of human existence. And our performance is going to be exactly about that!