Three Sisters in the Labyrinths of Time

Culture, p. 8
[Excerpts]

[…] “Katerina Ivanovna“
Who knows, maybe on the other side of the doorstep Mary [from Eugene O'Neill's “A Long Day's Journey into Night“] will yet meet her Russian sister, Katya: Katerina Ivanovna. One more case of burning, protesting loneliness that comes ripping at us from the Young Spectator Theater's production of „K. I. From ?Crime?.” Oksana Mysina is Katerina Ivanovna.
Mysina is not a newcomer to the Moscow stage. She has performed at the Spartacus Square Theater and the Novy Drama Theater. But she became a star suddenly, in the course of an hour, in Kama Ginkas's production. Since then, Mysina has been inundated in the unction of praiseful reviews, ecstatic gasps and eulogies. Almost everyone has striven to force her into the general category of the „best actresses of Moscow.” But Mysina has nothing in common with anything general. She is apart. Her world is not of velvet curtains and proper rows of seats. Hers are the boards of a puppet show, a circus ring, a fairground stage.
And for that very reason her eccentric and unusual Katerina Ivanovna, making spectators weep tears of empathy, has not charmed everyone. She can irritate those who don't understand and don't know the rules of Ginkas's game. Those spectators look away uneasily, fearing open contact, refusing to get caught up in the action and shrugging their shoulders in confusion.
But Mysina's job is to win over everyone. Otherwise the performance loses its sense. Because it a priori does away with the limits that separate the actress and her spectators. Here, everyone becomes a player, some as Raskolnikov, some as the landlady. The actress does what she wants with these spectators chosen to become players — she pulls them on stage (although there is no stage to speak of), makes them read letters and give alms, curses them, ridicules them and, during the curtain calls, gives them her flowers for their having improvized with her.
It's not easy to accept theater like that, and it's doubly difficult to connect it with Dostoevsky. What is needed to do it? Virtuoso playfulness multiplied by sincere empathy for the heroine. Mysina shows more playfulness, driving her empathy deep inside. But at times her stormy temperament, striking off brilliant comic sparks one afterthe other, suddenly calms and her words take on a simple, quiet tone without the slightest playfulness. And that's when the heart — of both the actress and her spectators — takes it all in. These moments are worth their weight in gold, and soon it dawns on one that, yes, Mysina is in truth an actress about whom it is worth talking these days.

, 4-03-1995