A Russian Theatre Director in Exile

By Helen Shaw
September 29, 2023

In October, 2020, the Russian director Dmitry Krymov staged his own version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” called “Everyone is Here” for the Moscow theatre School of the Modern Play. At the time, Krymov didn’t know that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nor that after he signed a public letter criticizing the war a temporary work trip to Philadelphia would become permanent exile. Yet “Everyone Is Here,” a video of which floats around the Internet, still seems very much like a farewell.

A digressive, at times almost witchy reënvisioning of Wilder’s plainspoken classic from 1938, it begins with a real black cat slipping through a door before the play’s familiar characters materialize in swirls of smoke. After a few dreamlike scenes, a man in a cable-knit sweater and sneakers interrupts the action, claiming to be the director. Krymov, or rather his avatar (played by Aleksandr Ovchinnikov), tells the audience that he has been reconstructing a touring American production of “Our Town” that he saw in Moscow when he was eighteen. He reminisces about his past, introduces his long-dead parents, and reënacts spreading an old friend’s ashes, struggling comically with the urn. Eventually Anton Chekhov (two actors in a trench coat) visits the Sakhalin penal colony. Wilder would never have recognized it.