Ilya Epelbaum died yesterday of complications caused by the evil, unforgiving coronavirus. I posted the text that follows on Facebook.
By John Freedman
A Facebook post from October 19, 2020
It was roughly 10 years ago that Moscow began a fight for the life of Ilya Epelbaum. His kidney was fading fast. He had weeks, then days to live. People from all over the world responded – people who knew his brilliant, utterly unique art at the Ten’ (Shadow) Theater which he created and ran with his brilliant wife Maya Krasnopolskaya. He had a last minute kidney replacement that saved his life and brought the world joy for at least another decade. He lived most of that decade virtually in quarantine. He rarely went out of the house and theater that was his home, his workshop and his life. Maya was very careful to keep him from encountering anyone sick enough to be dangerous to Ilya.
And then the goddamned coronavirus came and he could not be saved. This is my third close friend lost to coronavirus in Moscow. If you are one of those downplaying it, blustering about your goddamn freedom, or making politics out of it – get thee out of my sight. You are killers and you are stupid.
Sorry, Ilya. I had to say that.
Ilya Epelbaum was one of the purest, most unaffected, most talented and most down-to-earth individuals that I encountered in 30 years in Moscow. He was a brilliant, innovative artist. He had an instinctive genius for theater – as did his wife Maya, who walked the walk with Ilya step for step. The theater that the two created, the Ten’ (Shadow) Theater, was not what you’re already thinking. It was not a children’s theater, although it was a theater for the child in everyone who attended it. It was not a shadow theater – alone. It was not a puppet theater – alone. It was small in stature, almost minute in conception, and enormous in its innovative powers.
Ilya Epelbaum and Maya Krasnopolskaya created a theater for all ages and a theater for the ages – a theater that played Shakespeare in a few minutes. It played grand, imaginary folk epics in 15. Ilya had a brilliant, unfettered mind that saw through crap and cut to the meat of every theatrical task he ever took on. He really didn’t believe in theater lasting more than 15 minutes or so and he created masterpieces within those time frames. Occasionally he would go epic and run a show out there for 45 minutes.
Ilya had a wicked sense of humor that he whetted on every second of stage time passing. In 15 minutes he might conjoin opera singers with ballet dancers, light shows with water and mirrors, professional and amateur dramatic actors who always interacted with puppets – those brilliant, naive puppets. And I mean the old-fashioned puppets. Puppets on sticks that backstage hands moved as if they were 3 year-old children.
A battle between Ilya’s puppets was two wooden pegs on sticks being banged against each other until one fell. A war was 20 wooded pegs on sticks being banged against each other until all but one fell…
His great Liliputan Grand Royal Theater was an unbelievably lifelike, plush, posh, velvet strung theater house seating 2,000 miniscule Liliputan puppet spectators who reacted to drama or tragedy on stage by shivering and shuddering. Only five people could watch most of the shows mounted on this incredible stage – we would sit on chairs peering in through the elaborately latticed windows as thunder roared, dying heroes screeched, battle calls were trumpeted, and plaintive arias were sung over the fallen. We howled with laughter, we were deeply touched by the humanity of it all, and yes, Ilya could move you to tears with one of his eternally unexpected twists and turns on the theatrical art.
There was nothing like Ilya Epelbaum and Maya Krasnopolskaya’s Ten’ Theater in Moscow, Russia or the world. It was a perennial Golden Mask award winner, which under the usual circumstances would mean very little. But here it was earned and deserved – there was nothing and no one who could compete with the imagination, the detail, the wit, the intelligence, and the craft that went into a Ten’ Theater show. They won awards wherever they went in the world, because no one had ever seen anything like this – such powerful, legitimate, nuanced theater packed into tiny, brief sprints of artistic genius.
The ideas the duo came up with were precisely that – ingenius.
The Grand Royal Liliputan Theater, the “world premiere of the lost ‘Swan Lake’ opera,” the five-minute Shakespeare plays played out in the perfect setting – an old kitchen cupboard with the back taken out of it. Who else would make you exchange worthless rubles for miniature Liliputan money so that you could purchase fingernail-size sandwiches? Who else would begin and end shows with “scholarly” lectures by Maya Krasnopolskaya explaining the history and origins of everything the 15 minute show had to offer? With tongue stuck so deeply in cheek that you could feel your own cheeks bulging as you sat or stood and listened to the Epelbaum/Krasnopolskaya machine work you for everything you were worth.
They were the kinds of artists who could take your pants off without you ever realizing it, showing that off to a mirthful crowd and then putting them back on you so that you never knew what had happened – except you knew it was funny, deep, thrilling and fun.
That “deep” there is my word. Ilya would have scoffed at it. But his theater was as “serious,” as innovative, as deep, as any of the masters among whom he toiled. You see, he just had that genius – of lightly transforming humor, satire, comedy, into something that could take your breath away. I don’t know how it was for others, but I don’t think my wife Oksana and I ever attended a show at the Ten’ that didn’t end with a few guests sitting at a table laden with tea, cognac, cookies, cake, and sweets.
Ilya and Maya called their theater a family theater. Perhaps at the beginning that was because all their family lived and breathed it with them. But in time I came to see that term as something much broader, something much – sorry, Ilya – deeper. For they turned every spectator that joined them into a family member. When you set out to attend a new show at the Ten’ Theater, you knew you would encounter a piece of entirely unexpected theatrical art. But you also knew that prior to that you would be greeted by Maya, who helped you off with your coat, and your hand would be shaken by Ilya, who would come running out from some back room, and then, after the show, you would sit with them and laugh and chat, and join in the warmth and love that life is so capable of bringing us, but does so much, much too rarely.
But love and warmth were no rare guest in the company of Ilya Epelabaum. Oh, my, what a loss. Maya, my beautiful Maya! Oksana and I are devastated by Ilya’s death. He was way, way, way, way, way too young to die, at 59. But what he did with his years is not matched by a single soul I know. He was utterly unique. With you alongside him, he created the world he wanted to live in, he made it out of nothing, turned it into great art, and that art rewrote the history of Russian theater.
Ilya, you left us much too soon, but you left us with so many unparalleled riches. What a beautiful way to use a life. Thank you, good man, for everything.
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