Philipp Gurevich is a director with a recognizable creative style. He loves stories with a mystical, fairy-tale twist. Most of his works are stories about those who are "lost in a dark forest", filtered through an ironic attitude to life and humanity. So for his debut production at the Theater of Nations, Gurevich chose the novel Sato by writer and screenwriter Ragim Dzhafarov, winner of the literary awards "NOS" (2020), "New Horizons" (2021) and "Yasnaya Polyana" (2023).

Sato is the name of a captured rear admiral from an extraterrestrial civilization, who is forced to temporarily live in the body of an ordinary boy. At least, that's what five-year-old Kostya claims. For his age, he is surprisingly cruel, and his vocabulary and sense of humor are far from childish... Kostya's parents decided to seek help from a child psychologist, but not all of the child's odd behavior can be attributed to mental peculiarities.

"I read Sato and immediately got hooked on this novel, although it is very complex, not quite suitable for the stage, but, as it seems to me, it contains an important and rather cruel diagnosis of modern society with its norms and generally accepted rules," says Philipp Gurevich. "This story is about how difficult it can be to accept a child's peculiarity and avoid the temptation to change him – into someone who is generic, digestible for the family, school, society. About the need to make this choice every day, about parental responsibility, about the unwillingness to grow up. The center of our attention is the fact of suppression of personality. In the play, we will explore the boundaries of what a person is allowed and not allowed to do."

Despite the fact that Ragim Dzhafarov's novel is called Sato, Philipp Gurevich brings to the forefront the psychologist Dasha, who must figure out what she is dealing with - a dissociative identity disorder caused by family trauma, schizophrenia, or perhaps an alien from another galaxy.