Young Talent?€™s Dream Comes True at Premiere

Yaroslava Pulinovich is hardly old enough to have a history behind her, but she does. Things are happening quickly for this young playwright from Omsk.

Pulinovich won her first literary prize before she was 20. Now at the age of 22, she has been produced in numerous theaters in the Russian provinces, has been translated into English for a festival of Russian drama at the Sputnik Theatre in London, and on Sunday, celebrated her first premiere in Moscow — “Natasha’s Dream” at the Playwright and Director Center.

Georg Genoux’s production is about as bare-bones as they come. And that suits the play to a T.

“Natasha’s Dream” is the monologue of a 16-year-old who has experienced plenty of trouble in her short life. She lives in an orphanage, nearly killed herself by jumping out a window, has occasional run-ins with the police, doesn’t have the best memories of her mother or an aunt who put her up for awhile and rarely lets her thoughts drift far from her one big dream — finding a man worth giving her heart and soul to.

When we first encounter Natasha, she is in a rather grumpy mood. “You want to hear my story?” she grumbles as we stand waiting in the theater’s foyer. “Then follow me.”

She leads us down a corridor and up some stairs into a tiny room with little more than the top of the stairwell, a window and a door to look at. As designed by Sofya Yegorova, this utterly blank space comes to life in other ways with the help of mirrors and lighting, but essentially Genoux puts his young actress face to face, one on one with the 25 spectators squeezed into their seats.

In the role of Natasha, Anastasia Pronina is as tender and vulnerable as she is tough. She inhabits a character who has been slapped down often enough to expect nothing good from any corner. At the same time she is young and innocent enough still to be filled with an instinctive sense of hope and a natural feel for the good that life can bring.

It is a precarious walk on a tightrope for an actress, and Pronina does it well.

There is nothing formally complex or challenging in Pulinovich’s text. But it provides a sensitive and insightful look at the workings of the mind of a young, defenseless person running up against major obstacles for the first time in her life. Pulinovich reveals the details of Natasha’s life in small, seemingly insignificant increments.

A journalist named Valery comes to interview Natasha in the hospital after she survives her jump from the window, having no idea that he will trigger romantic thoughts in her mind. But he does, and she begins almost to stalk him, visiting him at the offices of the newspaper where he works, and letting her fantasies about future marriage run wild.

“He is mine now, and nobody is going to take him away,” she declares.

But he isn’t hers, and the shock of seeing him kissing another woman is more than Natasha can bear. She rounds up several friends to teach the woman a lesson — and then she really lands in trouble.

In order to find out the exact predicament that this violent encounter puts Natasha in, you will have to attend the performance. Suffice it to say Pulinovich pulls off a clever and unexpected dramatic trick that suddenly draws the audience into the heart of the problem.

By the time you leave the theater, you have not only witnessed a character facing a dilemma, you have felt the discomfort of making a moral choice yourself.

Genoux enlivened the monologue by adding a peripatetic guitarist, who constantly serenades Natasha, and a series of episodic characters who pass through Natasha’s life almost — but not quite — without leaving a trace. These include her drunken mother, the journalist Valery, several policemen on the beat, an affectionate stray dog, classmates and friends, a pair of doctors and even a fireman who stops to listen to Natasha briefly before he presumably moves on to fight his fire.

“Natasha’s Dream” is as fresh and gentle as the bright, flowered dress that costume designer Anna Selyanina created for the title character. Or, at least, it seems that way until each time you remember you are dealing with a young female crazy enough to throw herself out a window or angry enough to have another brutally beaten.

“Natasha’s Dream” (Natashina Mechta) plays Dec. 6 and 13 at 8 p.m. at the Playwright and Director Center, located at 5 Begovaya Ulitsa. Metro Begovaya. www.cdr.theatre.ru. Tel. 945-3245. Running time: 1 hour.