Sasha Denisova’s 82-year-old mother is living in Kyiv, Ukraine, when the Russians invade in 2022. She has lived her whole life there, and when her daughter, a successful playwright living in Russia flees that country and tries to get her mother out of the vulnerable Ukraine, her mother refuses to leave her home, even to go to a shelter. Born in an underground shelter when the Nazis were bombing the country, she tells Sasha, “I’m not going there. I was born there.”
In fact, the entire real conversations between mother and daughter take place via texts as Sasha has fled to Poland. And from these snippets of talk, Denisova has created a play about the invasion as told through what she imagines her mother is going through in Ukraine. It is accompanied by visual projections throughout the play giving us the people, the places, and the events which support her story.
We join Mama in her home and learn of the life she led up to and during the invasion, and they are fascinating stories. Narrated by Sasha, she is part of many of the stories and is even told that Mama thinks that at birth, babies were exchanged, and she is not Mama’s daughter. She does have trouble living up to her engineer mother’s expectations as she is more an artist.
But Mama is the eternal optimist. That optimism is turned into stories of shooting down Russian drones with pickle jars. Sasha envisions her mother having talks with the President of France, Macron and with U.S. President, Joe Biden. And Holly Twyford does an outstanding job in giving us the full range of the situation. There is lots of comedy injected into very serious situations. But therein also lies the problem for me.
There is a third character in the play. Lindsay Smiling portrays the Man, who takes on several roles, from Mama’s husband to Biden himself. And he plays them in an over-the-top fashion which is unnecessary in this finely tuned script. Director Yury Urnov has Suli Holum, who plays the daughter, also overacting, when the words are powerful enough without so much embellishment. Though not quite the Theater of the Absurd style of the 1950’s, there is an absurdity that often feels forced and diminishes the tragedy of the play for me.
The friend I saw the play with loved it. So did other members of the audience who I overheard as I left. At home, after I wrote my review, I checked on the reviews of the play, from when it appeared on the Woolly Mammoth stage in Washington, D.C., with the same cast and director (it was a co-production with Woolly Mammoth). The critics loved it. It is important to remember that a review reflects the opinion of the writer. This is mine.
“My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion at Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19107, 215-546-7824 wilmatheater.org Thru February 18, 2024
Philadelphia Theater Reviews by Frank Burd 