Maria Mashkova
Maria’s personal story is closely intertwined with the image of the heroine of the story Marusya Tatarovich. Maxim Didenko’s production combines theater, film, and multimedia and promises to be ironic, honest, and therapeutic.
This is Maria’s second theater project created in Chisinau. The first was in 2023, the play “Nadezhdiny”, based on the memoirs from the diary of Mashkova’s great-great-grandmother Melanya Sevruk. Maria’s diary was given to her by her father back in 2014. It is a unique historical source that conveys the life of the Moldovan capital of the late XIX – early XX century. A confession about love and marriage, about the revolutionary Eugene Zelenski, whose name was deliberately forgotten during the Soviet era, and in later years was simply lost under a thick layer of archival dust. He wrote under the pseudonym Nadezhdin and was an opponent of Lenin.
The premiere of the play “Nadezhdins” took place in the Jewish Cultural Center “KEDEM”, the play “flew” three continents and received enthusiastic responses from the audience.
In Chisinau, the publishing house “Stratum” in partnership with the Marc Blok Library of Civilizations published the memoirs of Melania Sevruk and the first serious analysis of the ideological heritage of Eugen Zelenski.
Now Maria Mashkova has returned to Chisinau with a new team that has created the play “Inostranka”. The plot of Dovlatov’s novel tells the story of Marusa Tatarovich, a girl from a privileged Soviet family who, after a failed marriage and a turbulent life, finds herself in New York. There, like many Russian emigrants, she lives in a Russian neighborhood and seeks happiness, falling in love with the Latin American Rafael.
What makes a person leave home? Politics, circumstances, a desire to escape from problems? The play “Inostranka” is looking for answers in today’s reality. After all, this is also the personal story of actress Mashkova, her life in Los Angeles, her attempts to make her way in Hollywood, and her memories of her family.
“Inostranka” is a play-talk without the fourth wall about emigration as an eternal human experience – an attempt to find one’s place in the world and keep a sense of humor when everything around becomes foreign and new.
If in the 80s emigration was a domestic drama, today it is an existential leap into the unknown. But the essence remains the same: each of us once becomes a “foreigner” – in a new country, profession or even our own life.
Before the director Maxim Didenko Maria Mashkova set a task: there should be a stand-up – a genre of comedy performance, in which the actress speaks to the audience with a monologue, tells stories from life, shares thoughts and observations. “I came up with the plot: the director calls Masha and offers to star in a movie on “Inostranka” Dovlatov. And half of the play is an audition for the movie. Other artists who have left Russia are also trying out for this imaginary movie. For example, Maxim Sukhanov as Dovlatov, Nikita Kukushkin as all the male characters, and Varvara Shmykova as all the female characters”.
The director of the movie was played by Maxim Didenko himself. The play was composed online, as all the participants – playwright, composer, production designer, video artist, director, actress – live in different countries. And at first “Inostranka” was as if between heaven and earth, the “landing” took place in the Jewish Cultural Center “KEDEM”.
