‘The Gaaga’ Puts Putin On Trial For The Invasion Of Ukraine
by Tom Smithyman
While the war in Ukraine rages on, a new play imagines Vladimir Putin being put on trial by a young girl who lost her family during the invasion.
The new play, The Gaaga, will have its US premiere in Boston June 2-18 thanks to Arlekin Players Theatre and (zero-G) Virtual Theater Lab. The production will also be streamed to a worldwide audience June 8-18.
Developed through first-person interviews with refugees and officials, The Gaaga deals with the consequences of war. Set in a bomb shelter, a Ukrainian girl dreams Putin and his cronies into a courtroom and tries them for war crimes. Playwright and director, Sasha Denisova, a theater maker from Ukraine, fled Moscow in the first days of war and has been living as a refugee in Poland. While there, she interviewed refugees and officials to create The Gaaga.
“In the first days of the war, I fled from Moscow, where the police came for me,” Denisova said. “Russia bombed Kyiv and my mother, Olga Denisova, who was born under the bombing of Kyiv on July 7, 1941. She refuses to leave and awaits victory in her home. During these months, I thought about what would give hope to me and those who fled the war. A trial of Putin and his government was the biggest expectation. A new `The Hague’ – The Gaaga.”
The play takes place in a bomb shelter, but the show’s creative team chose to set the US show in a shuttered restaurant in Boston’s Harvard Square. Taisiia Fedorenko, a 17-year-old Ukrainian refugee who has been in the US without her family since the beginning of the war, is playing the girl. Curiously, Putin is played by a woman, Polina Dubovikova.
“I have long been influenced by Sasha’s brilliant productions, her explosion of ideas, their scope and spectacle, and the way her plays turn tragedy into comedy, exposing our humanity,” said co-director Igor Golyak. “When we talked about her idea for The Gaaga, we immediately commissioned her to write it and invited her to come to Boston to create it with the Arlekin company.”
Tickets are available here.
