“I am Here”
This play is about today.
This play is about every one of us in this terrible time.
This play is about loss.
It’s a sincere conversation with the audience about our innermost feelings.
Our play is as funny and sad, as tragic and comical as the times we live in.
I’m Here is the story of a Human.
At a first glance, it is hard to tell whether the protagonist of the play is a “small” and “unnecessary” person depicted in the Russian literature, or a
representative of the lost generation sung by the 20 th century world classics. In any case, he is any one of us; he is a person who just happened to drop into the theater to tell his life story, stammering, mumbling, talking too fast for fear of being interrupted and not allowed to finish his tale – and he must unburden himself, because if he keeps it all bottled inside, he will break down and die.
A genre-blending collaboration by the director Yegor Trukhin and the actor Anatolii Bely combines a stellar performance of poetry masterfully woven into the monologue, gripping dramaturgy, audience participation, and physical comedy reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s legendary Tramp.
At a pivotal moment in the play, we see the actor become an open nerve, giving the audience all he’s got. As boundaries begin to blur, we are unsure whether we hear the character speaking, or the actor, or whether it is our own thoughts that have somehow entered the shared acoustic space. The protagonist seems to build a new self from shards and debris, playing with words and intonations, switching between narratives, gaining a voice and thus making a choice.
When life is a collage of multicolored fragments, to choose life is to to re-assemble oneself from the shards. The selection of poems featured in the play merits a special mention. All the poems were written after February 24, 2022, in different parts of the world, but with the same enduring
pain. Through an interplay of meanings, intonations and images, all poems are imbued with different moods and show different facets of the Human soul: some are the whispering of angels healing all wounds, and others are inhuman screams in the pitch-black darkness of human grief. Still, the play is about love, strength of spirit, longing for light and the great force of life which in the end triumphs over all evil.
I’m here, we say to you; we are alive no matter what.
Besides Toronto, the “I am Here” play will be introduced in the following US cities:
- Philadelphia
- Boston
- Chicago
- New York
- Washington, D.C.
- Seattle
- San Francisco
- Los Angeles
⇒ Tickets for TORONTO play are available at buytix.ca. Phone: (416) 726-6992
