The play “Natasha” was written by Moscow playwright Marina Krapivina in 2020 at the Discipline narrative theater factory, which intention is to prove that plot-based realistic theater is still interesting to the public. According to this concept, Krapivina composed a story about how Natasha, a vital young provincial woman with a difficult past, bursts into the life of the intelligent metropolitan Kirillov family - arrogant, passive and impractical.

For the Theater of Nations, Krapivina created a new edition of the play, giving it the author’s name “Abulia”. This medical term means a syndrome of lack of will and accurately describes everything that happens to the Kirillov family under the onslaught of Natasha, about whom we do not fully understand whether she composed her entire biography or is she really like that.

«I really like that in the end Natasha does not feel like a winner. She, like Lady Macbeth, is filled with colossal anxiety - she is expecting a child! Therefore, the fire that once happened in Natasha’s life overtakes her in the finale. Several times she utters the phrase: “Cigarette butts, it smells like smoke.” This is an anticipation of trouble, which is still lurking somewhere,” says the director of the play Svetlana Zemlyakova.

In addition to obvious intersections with Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” “Natasha” has a lot of humor and elements of the absurd, which dictated the farcical aesthetics of the production.

«In this play, like in Ionesco’s dramas, there are often moments when the characters intend to talk to each other, but having caught on some word, they go so far away that they forget the initial cause of the conversation and start a quarrel though it was not at all intended,” says Svetlana Zemlyakova.