This is one of three recent AT pieces about theatre related to the current war in Ukraine. The other two are here and here.
ProEnglish Theatre, an adventurous theatre company in Kyiv that performs all its works in English, this year decided to mount the first Ukraine Fringe, despite the war still raging in their country. Performers came from France, Switzerland, England, Hong Kong, and the U.S. for a four-day program of extraordinary diversity which ran Aug. 31-Sept. 3. I myself brought a solo show, Dr. Glas, which closed the festival with performances Sept. 2-3.
A few years ago, I acquired the English-language rights to Doctor Glas, a 1905 novel by the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg about a Stockholm doctor grappling with romantic and moral issues, and handed it to playwright Jeffrey Hatcher to craft a solo piece. Handing a project to a playwright in such great demand, as Jeff is, can be risky, because you never know if they are going to find the time to commit. Either Jeff is a darned good friend or the project especially excited him, but I had an actable version within a year. We workshopped Dr. Glas at Solo Flights in Aspen in 2019, then produced it with San Diego’s North Coast Rep on Vimeo during the COVID lockdown. Last year we took it to the Edinburgh Fringe. Earlier this year, Jeff expanded the piece from 60 to 75 minutes, and that’s the one I took the Kyiv Fringe.
My best decision was to hire Solomia (Mia) Pankiv, a young Ukrainian journalist, to help with all my travel arrangements and to be my assistant for the entire enterprise. I booked a hotel and plane tickets, with financial help from a number of sources including WASL, a soccer team I play on in Connecticut, and various members of the theatre community, as well as large contributions from a pro-Ukrainian Russian lawyer. Mia did the hardest task of arranging train tickets, which could only be done 20 days before the date of the outbound journey and again 20 days before the return date. If not booked with alacrity, I would either never make it there or, even worse, never make it back.
On Aug. 26 I flew to London and connected to a flight to Warsaw, where I booked a very cheap hotel so I could dump my bags while I explored the city during the seven hours before catching a train to Chelm on the Poland/Ukraine border.
First glitch: I went to the wrong train station and had to pay a taxi driver to make the three-hour drive to the border. Once there I waited in the unlit streets for another four hours. I ate a ghastly sandwich from the corner supermarket and sat outside the airless station in clothes clinging with 90 degree-induced stickiness.
The train from Chelm to Kyiv takes 12 hours. It was a grueling ride. The temperature dropped to 80 degrees after midnight but the A/C worked only when the train picked up speed, which it seemed torturously reluctant to do. The Ukrainian military, comprising strapping ladies formidably armed and outfitted, made sleep even less possible with their frequent border and customs checks. Morning came, finally, and Ukraine appeared in luscious green glory. I had discarded most of my clothing during the trip and I hadn’t showered in God knows how long, but I didn’t want to waste fresh clothes, so I felt almost amphibian getting back into the shirt and pants, which now stuck to me.
The taxi ride to the hotel was an unpleasant welcome to the city. The driver insisted I get cash from an ATM and concealed the meter, managing to easily charge me double. The Intercontinental Hotel, which a couple of friends who had connections with CNN insisted I stay at (they even contributed to the cost, as it was well outside my budget), housed the bureaus of various press organizations and had the best bomb shelter. At breakfast the following morning I was a couple tables away from Christiane Amanpour, Bill Whitaker (of 60 minutes) and various rugged war correspondents.
There was a “meet and greet” and the home of ProEnglish Theatre, where I met my fellow performers as well as the robustly enthusiastic young Ukrainian theatre artists who were devoted to making the event as glorious as it deserved to be. We were all rather energized and exuberant at being there.
From Washington, D.C., came Robert McNamara, a veteran stage actor, bringing a Kafkaesque solo piece about which he said very little—a refreshing contrast to some of the others, whose introductions gave away their entire performance. From Hong Kong, Thomas Tse and his director William Wong Ka-kui were to perform a dance piece in a tradition of which Tom was the prime exponent. From London, Kristin Milward brought two pieces, one of which was crafted from personal stories in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Julie Zeno from Paris was to perform an interesting exploration of an French actress being approached to audition for a Hollywood project, and Michelle Chung had the most unusual project, in which she made one-on-one “dates” in a public place to exchange personal stories.
One performance I was particularly looking forward to was from Madeleine Bongard, a Swiss performer, who created a magical experience in which movement, words, music, and visual art intertwined to form a helix that broke its shape and wrapped itself back up in itself. After seeing it, I have no better way of describing it. Extraordinary work.
Oh, the war…yes, that was going on too. One wouldn’t know it from the daytime bustle of the city but at night…yikes.
Just when I thought I’d come to the wrong country, at around 3:30 in the morning my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch all started screaming at me that there was an air alert. There followed a voice of doom insisting I take cover. I hesitated, having heard everyone telling me that the Patriot missile defense system was so efficient that no one was bothering with shelters.
Then the actual sirens followed, along with more and more online alerts. I got dressed and undressed with each alert, as though I were making costume changes in a French farce. Only after the fifth did I make my way down the nine flights of stairs, judiciously avoiding the elevators, to the vast garage. There I found long tables with white linens and red velvet-backed chairs and lots of bottles of water—but not a soul in sight!
Feeling a little sheepish I shrugged off the panic, clambering back up the stairs to my room and back to bed. Unable to sleep, I played online bridge and chatted on WhatsApp with my WASL soccer buddies for whom it was mid-morning. They entertained me with their customary ribaldry and lighthearted concern for my welfare.
And then……KA-BOOM.
It must have been close because I could feel the blast, or at least some vibrations. I went to the window and there, maybe three blocks from the hotel, was a thick cloud of black smoke rising over the buildings. I grabbed my iPhone and captured it on video before the evidence dissipated. I got dressed, again, and went downstairs to the lobby to find the cleaning staff quietly vacuuming, cleaning the windows, and, well, bored. The doorman even offered to let me out the front door, which seemed strange given that there was still a curfew.
Back in my room I made some dreadful instant coffee. I had given up on sleep (MacPutin hath murdered sleep), and opened The Guardian on my iPad. The mayor of Kyiv was commenting on the attack. It was the biggest attack on the city in months. Of over 20 missiles only one had got through—the one I’d just seen.
At 7 a.m. breakfast was served. I was there as the doors opened. It was packed with journalists. I made some small talk with an Australian war reporter and asked why they hadn’t all been in the bomb shelter. From him I learned that after I had gone down and back up at 4 a.m., they had all gone down at 4:30 and stayed there for two hours. I was the only person back in my room to witness the explosion. I mentioned casually that I had captured the aftermath on video. His eyes bulged. “Well done,” said the grizzled Aussie.
As part of my involvement with the festival I had agreed to conduct a
workshop/master class. At 3 p.m. I arrived at the ProEnglish Theatre school and found a gathering of the most disparate group of individuals. After two hours with them, I came away with a reawakened love of the craft of teaching.
There was a tall, dark-haired guy with a huge smile who introduced himself as Nassim from Azerbaijan. I asked him what monologue he was to present and who wrote it. “Cham Kateepi,” it sounded like. He borrowed a water bottle and sat on the floor. After a few lines, I told him to get rid of the props and do it on his feet. Vast improvement. This guy has real talent. I asked again, “Who wrote this?” He said the name again, and I made him repeat it slowly until it was revealed to be Chat GPT! It was a very affecting tribute to a dead father by a son who was struggling to make something of his life. Perhaps the software had an early IBM progenitor.
The most unexpected attendee was 11-year-old Alex. Sweet face, masses of curly dark hair, and the look of a frightened puppy. I am not sure he understood English, because anything I said was met with a blank stare. His choice of monologue: Robert Mitchum from The Night of the Hunter. I managed to hide my shock, horror, and fear for his likely embarrassment. He sat in a chair and give us a quiet and rather affecting journey through the words with very well-rehearsed hand and arm motions (love and hate fighting for ascendancy), though he no more chilling than a geisha doing a tea ceremony. He is a child actor with some experience, and I suspect his mother had coached him, or perhaps some acting coach who does it purely for the money and should consequently be sent straight to a gulag.
My favorite was the silver-haired giant of a man who spoke with the tiniest voice imaginable. He started a monologue about losing his keys, of which I heard absolutely nothing. I told him he had to get our attention before starting and to maintain it by being audible. He got up and swept his gaze slowly across the whole room and back again. It was mesmerizing. And the words started coming out…kind of. Not about keys this time, which confused me. I insisted that he try again and speak up. Oh boy, did he! Out came a rich, poetic tirade about something, I am not sure what. When it was over he looked at me expectantly.
“What happened to the keys?”
“There are no keys.”
“But the first monologue had keys. Did you just give us three different monologues?”
“Yes.”
“Who wrote them?”
He pointed to himself.
“Are they from a play?”
“No. I made them up.”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
It turns out that this guy, for the first time in his life, was about to start work as a lecturer in AI at the Polytechnic, and used this moment to experiment with addressing an audience, which he was suffering severe apprehension about. The session apparently galvanized him, because his gratitude was tangible—literally, he could barely let go of my hand.
The rest was a mixed bag: The best needed constructive advice and the less gifted needed a hug. I avoided the latter.
Earlier in the morning I blocked Dr. Glas on the outdoor stage at the Bar Moralist (love the name—it was a secret artists’ hangout throughout the Soviet era, apparently since 1918). As I rehearsed, young women in uniform with machine guns slung over their shoulder would come out for a smoke. Mia wanted to know if she should shoo them away. “Probably not,” was my response.
The extreme air conditioning in the hotel was hurting my voice/throat. I had a streaming cold, so I decided to take the day off and hang in a warm environment. I felt bad that I couldn’t attend the other shows yet, but I’d be coughing up a lung.
4.33 a.m. the next morning I woke up in a complete mess of headache, sweats, and sore throat. Got dressed, made some green tea, and settled back on the bed to play bridge. Then the “cat in heat” air raid siren edged its way into action and my iPad started guilting me into going down to the shelter—a recorded voice insisted I not be stupid and do as ordered. I wonder if I will be able to hear the bombs down here. I sat down there and wrote a bit of this article.
What had been developing as a cold was turning into full-blown physical degradation. Worst of all, I was losing my voice. After thousands of miles and thousands of dollars, I was on the eve of my performance with failing equipment. The only cures were complete rest—and, to my delight, I read online a confirmation that the old actors’ remedy for restoring the lost
voice was cognac! (I remember playing the Cork Opera House in my 20s, where there was a hatch between the front of house bar and backstage through which one could request a “port and brandy,” for medicinal purposes, throughout the performance.)
After a couple of throat-searing brandies, I took to bed around 9, and after a series of one- and two-hour naps, I awoke feeling somewhat better…but not with a voice that would get me through a performance. Not yet anyway.
I went down for breakfast. I guess the press corps takes Saturdays off, because I was all alone. I drank pot after pot of tea and force-fed myself from the copious buffet. I returned to my room to lie down quietly and heal.
Then the alarm. This one was louder than the missile alerts—this was about a fire in the hotel. Oh God, nine flights of stairs again. I grabbed my essentials from the safe and made it to the shelter just in time for the “all clear.” It was now 11:30 a.m. I had an hour and a half to rest before a gentle warm-up. I had no idea what the day would bring.
Sunday morning, I arrived at the Bar Moralist to find a crew preparing the space for my 3 p.m. performance. They put the seating as close to the stage as possible, leaving me a small area so that I could step down from the stage for the final scene. I had insisted on not performing inside in the ridiculously inadequate space they had suggested, and opted rather for the outdoor courtyard that had a small stage already in place.
As so often happens in theatre, less so in film and hardly ever in TV, the challenging circumstances provided some unexpected delights. The play ends with the shattered doctor wandering the street outside his house, taking in the world he has seen every day, but now filtered through the prism of his heartbreak. “Old stones, ancient trees, limbs, branches…two leaves had separated from the branch that held them together, and into the darkness they danced until they came to earth.” I would step down off the stage at the end of the play and would indeed be surrounded by old stones, trees, branches, leaves.
Helping me set up the space was Tetiana Slelepko, a young theatre director with a passion for Pinter. After a long talk with her about his work, I wished I could bring her to the U.S., where her insights would leave other practitioners of the craft with something to learn.
It began. I opened my mouth to enunciate the first words with no real confidence in how I’d sound or how long I’d last. I went from hungover toad to rasping baritone to a place of mellifluousness I didn’t think possible. It all came together perfectly, including, especially, the new scene Jeff Hatcher had contributed after playing at Edinburgh.
I collapsed, exhausted, the moment I got back to my room. I had a full day to rest—Sunday, appropriately—and then a final performance at 6 p.m.
On the way to the theatre I walked past the memorial to the fallen. As much as I wanted to avoid it, I had to accept the discomfort, along with the stomach-tightening sadness of something that bore witness to so many men and women cut down in their prime.
I thought as I passed the photos:
She looks like my sister…He could be the son of the guy who sold me my car…That must be the girl who babysat our youngest…There is the guy who threw a beer at me in the bar last year…Is that my cousin’s girlfriend’s father?…Now surely he isn’t my driver from Toronto…?
No. They are not. But they are.
This article is not just about the qualities, aspirations, and accomplishments of the individual pieces—all were pulled off beyond the performers’ hopes and dreams. What this is about is the impact such a venture had on the people who took part, and on the country where it happened.
It is common to share one’s gripes about lack of sleep, poor health, and anxieties when putting on a show. But in this case these were redundant. We were all awoken by the air raid alerts and besieged by temperatures that veered from 100 Fahrenheit to a chilly mid 50s in the course of 24 hours.
The common and gracefully ignored fact of it all was that we were doing all this not only in a country that was at war but in a city that had been, not so long ago, on the edge of physical and cultural obliteration. Alex Borovenskiy, the festival’s founder, made a wonderful opening exhortation when we all first go together. He spoke to the resilience of the arts and artists, and about how important that resilience is. We can’t all be uniformed warriors; some of us, out of uniform, must use our art to fight oppression. The Ukraine Fringe’s motto: Festival for the brave.
The artists who stood for freedom behind the Iron Curtain knew this and, more relevantly to me, the actors who kept the theatres open and active during the London Blitz—they knew it too. It reflected the memory of my parents’ generation, who recalled their conviction that Hitler and his bombs were not going to interrupt the daily function of their lives.
That is why I came: solidarity with the current heroes, solidarity with those who came before them, solidarity with those who will come after. Solidarity with all artists who won’t let authoritarianism dictate how, what, why, when, and where they create.
I am now at a modest hotel in Warsaw. I am trying to assess the past week with some objective, dispassionate grasp of what the Kyiv Fringe Festival has meant to all who took part and all who attended. Of course, most of those who attended my final performance were my fellow participants: the other actors and producers, the organizers, the volunteers, students from the ProEnglish Theatre school. But, as validation that we weren’t just a self-serving, self-devouring clique, there were also members of the theatregoing public present. Every seat was taken and many were standing.
My piece had no help from lighting cues or a curtain or sound effects, and hence nothing to indicate that it had reached the end, except for the text, which obviously, I thought, left nothing else to be said. At the first performance, I ignored the lack of applause and strolled to the back of the “auditorium” (an unkempt garden, really), doing so slowly enough to let them know, surely, that it was over. As I reached the back—nothing! I turned and saw that the entire audience had swiveled in their seats and were expecting some further storytelling from their distant rear. I raised
my hands in exasperation and cried out, “That’s it!”
For the final performance, I instructed Tetiana, the very erudite and sharp-thinking theatre director, who knew the piece by now, to initiate the applause. I got to the end. Nothing. I bowed my head and just stood there. Nothing. One…two…three…four…five…six…then she remembered.
Applause. I bowed and left the stage. They rose to their feet. I turned, and as I made my way back awkwardly to take further bows, it struck me: This is for them. They had made it. The festival. It happened. I was applauding with them.
It is over this year, but it will be back next year and, fate willing, the year after that and the year after that.
Slava Ukraini.
Glory to Ukraine.
Daniel Gerroll (he/him) began his career in the U.K. and moved to New York in 1981, where we has received a Theatre World Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and an Obie for sustained excellence. He has appeared on Broadway and the West End, and in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire.
