(2013)

 

On days like these I look at my mother and father, at the emptiness and disappointment that has filled their marriage for more than thirty years and all of a sudden everything becomes very grotesque.

 

My mother  is in the kitchen. My father on his way downstairs to the garage.”You are offended by everything I say these days.” my father yells a my mother “I cannot even talk to you anymore!” And with that he slams the door and heads downstairs. 

 

I am in the courtyard outside writing notes on Russian theatre director Yevgeny Vakhtangov for an exam I have tomorrow. My father passes from in front of me on his way downstairs to the garage which is attached to our house.

 

I do not lift up my head because i cannot meet his eyes. I don’t know with which look I should meet him. Working on the play Turandot Yevgeny Vakhtangov defined his concept of Fantastic Realism as follows. My father feels humiliated and sad that my mother doesn’t love him how we like her to and that she is always angry at him. As I keep writing notes I hear him. He’s on the computer now clicking away on the keyboard. He laughs wholeheartedly.  Naturalism and Realism have no place in the theatre. They should be substituted with Fantastic Realism. Since my father discovered youtube all he does is watch videos all the time. He watches comedians mostly. My mother hates comedians. She feels anxious watching Charlie Chaplin or Mr. Bean and cannot stand the tense situation they always find themselves in.   Mother thinks that my father doesn’t lover her. Late at night on February 23, 1922 Vakhtangov held his last rehearsal. My mother and my father. The two characters who have left me the most perplexed in my life. When I think of them, I think of beautiful moments, I think of long silences, I think of the villages where they come from. When the rehearsal began, Vakhtangov already felt sick. I think of my father crying on one particular night. Then lifting his head, smiling and winking at me. He says: “I’ll explain everything when you grow up..” 

 

“WHAT IS THERE TO EXPLAIN?!” says my mother.

 

“I WILL EXPLAIN!” he retaliates.

 

I am now twenty years old and my father has not explained a thing. Yevgeny Vakhtangov was running a temperature, was wearing a fur coat and had a wet towel pressed to his forehead. I often think what would have happened if my parents broke up. When Yevgeny returned home after the rehearsal was over, he lied down and never got up again.