In November of 2019 the Theatre on Vasilievsky held a director's laboratory "New Directing and Modern Drama for Youth #PROTEXT" led by the Merited Worker of Arts of Russia Viktor Ryzhakov. Seven students of the Moscow’s Meyerhold Centre and Moscow Art Theatre School presented on the Theatre’s stage their sketches based on modern drama works engaging Theatre on Vasilevsky's actors. The artistic director Vladimir Slovokhotov promised that the best works would be included in the Theatre’s repertory. As an outcome of the discussions, one sketch by director Galina Saltzman based on the play by Daria Slyusarenko "Seven Times Eight" was warmly accepted. Now this sketch is being staged as a full-length repertory performance on the Chamber stage of the Theater.

Viktor Ryzhakov is a director, teacher and professor at the Moscow Art Theater School. He is also a winner of the Stanislavsky Award and Merited Worker of Arts of Russia. He worked as artistic director of the Meyerhold Theatre Centre and now he is the artistic director of the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre.

Galina Saltzman is a director, actress and teacher. She collaborates with the Russian Academic Youth Theatre, Mayakovsky Theatre, Theatre of Russian Army and many others. She is a senior lecturer at the Acting Department of GITIS. 

Daria Slyusarenko is a playwright, script writer and documentary films director. She is a winner of various modern drama awards. 

At the Remarque contest the play by Daria Slyusarenko was appreciated by the famous theater critic Pavel Rudnev. The author considers her drama "Seven Times Eight" as biographical. The heroine of the play recalls her childhood with a purely female family. Her mother was eternally busy and an awfully demanding grandmother was a domestic tyrant. The atmosphere of the family reveals in all its exposure the world of a person in the absence of love - with the remembrance of childhood traumas, "disunity of close souls" and a guilt complex, alienation and loneliness, timid attempts to find the ways of mutual understanding. Three actresses play three different ages of the heroine, and each of them has her own “skeleton in the closet” and her own things to confess. And Tatyana Bashlakova got a complex and charmless role of a grandmother, a domestic abuser who “hits because she loves”.

The performance continues the theme of psychological violence in the family - after "Bury Me Behind The Baseboard" by P. Sanaev and "How Zoya Fed The Geese" by S. Bazhenova.