Sasha’s 82-year-old mother has lived in Kyiv her whole life. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, Sasha copes with her fears by imagining her mother in increasingly fantastical situations: strategizing with President Zelenskyy, striking Russian drones with jars of pickles, and even debating with God. Playwright Sasha Denisova was inspired by her online chats with her mother to write this darkly funny and deeply heartfelt new play.
"My mother was born on the very day when the Germans were bombing so, when I told her to go to the bomb shelter, the first thing she said was: ‘I’m not going there. I was born there.’ That gave the start to our ongoing fight because she didn’t let me come and take her out and, as you will see in the play, this is a woman of a strong character, as all Ukrainian women are." -- Sasha Denisova, The Guardian
Sasha Denisova is a playwright, a director, a writer, and a Ukrainian. Born in Kiev, she graduated from the Philology Department of Kiev Taras Shevchenko University and subsequently studied theatre and worked at various theatre companies in Russia. Her play Light My Fire was awarded Russia’s highest theatre prize, The Golden Mask, in 2012. As a playwright and director Sasha has produced more than 25 performances at Moscow stages. She makes sharply social, political theater in which documentary material merges with magical and fantastical. Sasha fled Moscow for Poland immediately after the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine. At the same time, all of Sasha’s productions in Russia were shut down. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion she has written and staged 4 plays, all of them about the war: Six Ribs of Anger, about the fate of Ukrainian refugees in Europe; My Mom and the Full-Scale Invasion; The Hague, an account of a tribunal against Putin and his gang that takes place in the imagination of a Ukrainian girl from Mariupol; and Bakhmut, a story of two women who mourn the same man, an intellectual whom they had loved and who gave his life for his country.
Born in Moscow, Russia, Yury Urnov graduated from the Russian Academy of Theater Art (GITIS) in 2000 with an MFA and since then has directed over 40 productions in his home country, Europe, and Africa. He currently serves as a Co-Artistic director at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Yury recently directed My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion, Twelfth Night, Minor Character, and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play. His other US directing credits include Hedda Gabler and Ubu Roi at Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco, the award-winning Thr3e Zisters at Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin, The Pillowman at Forum Theater in DC, Putin on Ice and One Hour Eighteen Minutes with ACME Corporation Theater of Baltimore, and also KISS, Marie Antoinette, and You for Me for You at Woolly Mammoth Theater in DC, where Yury has been a proud company member since 2014. In 2009-2011, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Towson University, MD where he still teaches. Yury serves as an Associate Director of the Center for International Theater Development, Baltimore. During his 20-yearlong partnership with the CITD Yury participated in and co-produced multiple US-East European cultural exchange projects. He also translated plays of Martin McDonagh, Sarah Ruhl, and Edward Albee into Russian, and several contemporary Russian plays into English.