One of the great things about working for The Moscow Times was collaborating with great photographers. We had a corner on the market, the best in the business. I still remember seeing this image come out of the darkroom (yes!) in the hands of Mikhail Metzel after he shot it for the piece that follows below. What a beautiful portrait of Olga Mukhina! After leaving TMT, Misha worked for several news agencies. It appears he now works for TASS. Check out the book Reflections: Russian Photographs 1992-2002, published by The Moscow Times. It includes great work by Metzel and his and my fabulous colleagues Igor Tabakov and Vladimir Filonov.
As for the interview article below, it was Olga Mukhina right at the beginning. Her groundbreaking Tanya-Tanya had premiered about six months earlier. Her next major work, YoU (which I called Yu in the article), was still in the making and after a bit of a tortuous road, finally premiered at the Moscow Art Theater a couple of years later. Other new plays would come even more slowly – Flying came out around 2005, followed by Olympia – a huge hit at the Fomenko Workshop Theater – in 2014. I seem to have seen a comment by Olga on social media that another should be coming soon. I hope so. Hers has been one of the clearest, most talented, most interesting voices of all those that emerged over the last 25 years. The uniqueness of her voice – aside from stamping her as a true original – has caused a problem or two over the years. I was with her in New York in 2001 when the prominent American playwright Arthur Kopit became exasperated during a table reading and discussion of YoU and exclaimed, “You can’t write plays like that!” He wanted more clarity and sharp turns in plot. Kopit was not – and has not been – alone. Not that I have ever bought into that approach. Every once in awhile Olga, who is a true seeker in this life, will begin to doubt her instincts and she will begin quoting from the latest hot-pancake Hollywood theory about how to write and construct stories. It makes me burn inside. Hundreds, thousands, of people can read a how-to and write like “that.” Only one writer on the planet can write like Olga Mukhina.
Fighting for Letters and Commas, and Winning
By John Freedman
The Moscow Times
July 26, 1996
People keep telling Olga Mukhina that her plays can’t be staged. Some say she doesn’t even write plays at all, although they don’t seem to be able to define with accuracy what it is that she writes.
Who would have guessed it judging by her play “Tanya-Tanya”? It created a minor sensation when it opened in February at the Fomenko Studio, signaling the appearance of a major new playwriting talent.
Since then there have been productions in St. Petersburg and Chelyabinsk, and there is talk of a possible Paris production. “Tanya-Tanya” has already been translated into French, and the Fomenko Studio version has toured to festivals in Poland and Germany.
Not bad for a playwright so many can’t seem to figure out.
But over the last few years, Mukhina, 26, has worked out her own response to the skeptics.
“My second play, ‘Alexander August,’ is my favorite,” she says. “It’s a very pretty play about the country which I can’t seem to get around to finishing. When I showed it around, nobody liked it. But finally I found one person who did and I decided to believe that opinion. Now, if somebody likes what I write, I listen to them. If they don’t, I don’t pay any attention.”
Mukhina originally wanted to write for the movies. But her experiences with the film industry anticipated the reactions she soon would be receiving as a playwright. Four years in a row, she took the entrance exams to be admitted to the cinema institute, and four years in a row she failed with flying colors.
“They didn’t understand what I was up to,” she says about the test compositions she wrote in hopes of being admitted to the institute’s screenwriting division.
While attempting to gain admission to the cinema institute, Mukhina wiled away her time working as a courier, then as a secretary for various scientific journals.
Finally, she changed gears, thanks in part perhaps, to the influence of her mother, Tanya, a geologist, who has been an avid theater fan all her life and who lent her name to her daughter’s most successful play.
“Suddenly, I just wrote a dialogue between a ‘he’ and a ‘she,’ and it was very easy,” Mukhina says of her first dramatic work which she titled “The Sorrowful Dances of Ksaveria Kolussky.” She submitted it to Yuliu Edlis, a well-known playwright of the Soviet period who teaches at the Gorky Literary Institute. He was impressed and admitted Mukhina to his course.
But if Edlis liked that first play, his reactions to his student’s subsequent works have been more equivocal. “He thinks my other plays aren’t plays,” says Mukhina with a shrug of her shoulders and a little laugh.
“Tanya-Tanya,” Mukhina’s fourth play, the second one to be published and the first to be staged, is a strangely wonderful, densely atmospheric piece that observes the emotional entanglements of three men and three women in the course of one soft summer. A highly poetic work in spirit, in structure it betrays the author’s early attraction to film.
The action jumps around freely from episode to episode, and there is no linear plot development from any traditional beginning to any conventional end. As in a Chekhov play, everyone is hopelessly in love with someone else, while as in a Fellini movie, the very air seems to be under the power of a magic spell. Champagne flows, kisses are stolen left and right, hopes and desires are excited, and at least a couple of characters are said to “fly away.”
That is just one of the stage directions which appears to have earned Mukhina her dubious reputation as an unstageable playwright.
Elsewhere in “Tanya-Tanya” she writes: “Maybe they kiss. Maybe something else seems to happen. Maybe everything comes out just the opposite maybe.”
As if that wasn’t enough to drive traditionalists mad, Mukhina possesses another unorthodox “habit.” She sprinkles her texts with pictures and considers them as important as the words.
“I see the pictures as I write,” she says. “Maybe I’ll run across something at someone’s house, or maybe I’ll see something in a magazine. I’m always so happy when I find something, because they have a big effect on me.”
They also caused her a good deal of grief when the journal Contemporary Dramaturgy prepared her third play, “Karlovna’s Love,” for publication in 1994. The editors cut out all her pictures and “cleaned up” her peculiar use of punctuation and capital letters.
“They fought me over every letter and comma,” she says. “I corrected the proofs, but when it came out they had ignored all my corrections. I was very upset and they told me I have a terrible character.”
Nowadays when she hears that someone has been reading that published version, she winces and hurriedly offers to supply a “good copy, with pictures.”
She was luckier with “Tanya-Tanya,” which attracted a huge amount of attention when it was first read publicly in the summer of 1995 at the annual playwriting seminar in the Moscow suburb of Lyubimovka. The play was quickly picked up by the more progressive journal, Playwright, where the editors were so attentive to Mukhina’s style that they even inadvertently introduced some confusion about her name.
A close friend had prepared the typescript on his computer — with pictures, missing periods and occasional sentences in all caps — for submission to the journal. Without thinking, he wrote the name “Olya Mukhina” on the title page, using the diminutive form of “Olga.” The editors conscientiously printed exactly what the author submitted, thus making for the childlike form of her name that is published over the play.
Mukhina says she hasn’t been overwhelmed with attention since the premiere of “Tanya-Tanya,” but she still is having trouble getting to work on her newest idea, which has a tentative title of “Yu.” As an editor and scriptwriter for the popular television musical program, “U Ksyushi,” almost all her time is spent on the set or in the studio, editing footage, writing texts or coordinating shoots.
“I need a month to write a play,” she says. “It’s a kind of meditation process.” So she is taking August off and is heading for the peace and quiet of the country. If all goes well, she should have a new play written especially for the Fomenko Studio when the new season opens in the fall.
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