English version

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The plays you can download in English
(there will be more soon):


The Drosselmeyer’s Nutcracker
Jester’s Chess
The Four on the Very Top of the Tower of Babel
Tea Ceremony
Ornithology
Scent of Chestnut
Customs of Flowers

Stroganov Alexander / English version

Stroganov Alexander


About the author (Stroganov)

Stroganov Alexander Evgenievitch. Born on 19.11.1961 in Barnaul (Russia).

Dramatist (playwright), member of the Writer’s Union, member of literary workers of Russia.
Psychiatrist, associate professor of the psychiatry department of the Altay state medical university. A. Stroganov is the author of the original method of Epic therapy based on the theatrical concept by Bertold Brecht. It is used in treatment of neurotic diseases. Defended his Ph.D. thesis “Epic therapy and its use in treatment of neurotic disorders” at Novosibirsk state medical academy. Laureate of poetic festivals “Workshops of Modern” (1997) and Demidov’s prize(2000). The author of 40 plays.

Stroganov’s works were published in journals and almanacs: “Arion”, “Strannik” (“Wanderer”), “Syuzhety” (Plots) - Moscow and different local publications (Barnaul, Biysk).

A.Stroganov is the author of collections of poetry “Melos” (Barnaul, 1980), the book “Excentrique” (Barnaul, 1993), “A Book of poems and plays” (Moscow, 2002), “Cadences” (Barnaul, 2004).

The plays by A.Stroganov “A Door”, “ The four on the top of Babel tower”, “Make up a Pub” were staged at the youth theatres “Plot” and “Wolshop21” in the eighties.

In 2003 his play “Ornithology” in the translation of E.Cech was published in a literary journal “Dialog”, Poland. In 1998 the play “Ornthology” was produced at the national conference of the dramatists in the theatrical centre of Eu. O’Neil in the USA (director K.Nersesyan). In 1998 the play “Intimate observation” based on “Ornithology” was staged in Moscow Art Theatre named after Chekhov (director A. Dzekun). Ornithology was also staged in St. Peterburg in 1999 in Alexandrinsky Theatre (director R.Smirnov).

In 2000 the play “Foxes in the ruins” was performed in Altay Regional Drama theatre named after V. Shukshin (director K.Nersesyan). The plays “Ornithology”, “Foxes in the ruins”, “Jester’s Chess”, “Tea Ceremony”. “Divertisment”, “Two Kandinskys”, “Act” were staged in 2002-2005 at Moscow and Omsk (Russia), Riga Russian Drama Theatre (Latvia), at Malem Nosticovom Theatre (Prague, Chech Republic), Keistuoliu Teatras (Lithuania)…

In 2004 at the Altay Regional Drama Theatre there was arranged “Creative Workshop of A. Stroganov where the author performs as a director of his plays. Within the frames of the workshop in 2004 there was staged the performance based on the play “Yakutia”, in 2005 “Long Life of the Rain”. Music is composed by A. Korchagin.

Reveiws on A.Stroganov’s plays and performances are published in different theatre editions of Moscow and St. Peterburg and also in Russkaya Mysl (Paris).


Reviews


1. The Scent of Chestnut (for download) (1 female, 2 male) (A love story in three acts)


2. Act (1 female, 2 male) (Comedy in two acts)

The characters are an old husband, a young woman and a third person - a young man. At first sight the situation is trivial and absolutely anecdotal. But the play offers many examples of significant situations which arise from apparently insignificant events. Constructed according to the laws of para-realism, the play can be understood at many levels. It is classical for dramatic art; ‘theatre in theatre’ makes it sound polyphonic. When staged, the play will give the actors a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the thespian skills.


3. Praslov’s Illness (4 female, 13 male) (Drama in two acts)

What happens when music disappears from our lives? What fills this emptiness? This is a story about a brilliant pianist who lost the ability to play, but has not lost his talent. It is a modern play based on dramatic material and is, at the same time, a detailed psychological sketch filled with the music of Sergey Rakhmaninov.


4. Vacuum (3 female, 5 male) (Play in ten scenes)

The play covers one day in the life of a pub - one of those pubs which are distinguished by their crowded state, dim lighting, slippery floor and loud-mouthed barmaids. Here very different people can meet and like balls in a bagatelle their dreams, hopes and fates collide.


5. Valentin Valentinov (2 female, 8 male, crowd scenes) (Comedy in two acts)

In the life of every person a moment of truth may occur which is a rehearsal for the Last Judgement when forgotten sins, old dreams and lost illusions appear from nowhere and assume quite tangible forms. This play about middle-aged crisis is written in the author’s typical of style of para-realism.


6. The Greatness of See-saw (4 female, 6 male) (Drama in two acts)

The artist’s passion, his love, his life and his death - all these are unpredictable and sharp. The fates of people dear to him and his characters are blended together like the colours on his pallette, and who knows what might result from this combination?


7. Vertigo (1 female. 2 male) (Play in 2 acts)

The play is a fantasy about Sergey Esenin and Isidora Duncan. Vertigo - is the feeling felt by a patient that either he or the objects around him are constantly revolving. Most often this state is accompanied by a perception of the objects rotating around him, however sometimes a person feels as if the ground under his feet is moving.


8. Victor Kandinsky (1 female.7 male) (Mistification in 2 acts)

A play in which the author makes an attempt to analyse those complex processes which take place in the consciousness of a person who suffers from schizophrenia. Specifically, it addresses the story of the life and death of a great Russian psychiatrist, V. Kh. Kandinsky.


9. It's time to light the skies (2 female, 4 male) (Comedy in 2 acts)

A once very popular actor who is now abandoned by everyone, finds himself in a company of people who seem to know how to change their lives for the better. The situation taking place as a result of this meeting verges on the edge of reality and absurdity, and forms the main characteristic of the play. Together with the actor, we are invited to reconsider our attitude to many things which seem certain and simple. The broad sweep of the plot, the paradoxical solutions and the decisions taken by the characters of the play are all based on intuition rather than any logic. This sharp, modern comedy contains several enigmas. In the search for the answers to these riddles, the author anticipates the spectators’ interest.


10. Everything but kissing (2 female, 5 male, crowd scenes) (Play in 2 acts)

The writing of this play was triggered to some extent by the news of the tragic death of a famous Czech theatre director, P. Leble, whose creative motto could be an apt phrase of Vyspyansky, ‘Everything but kissing’. The author tries to find out what the stage means. Together with his characters, he makes a trip behind the looking glass, into the very depths of the theatre. The deep psychology of the play is combined with the grotesque which is quite appropriate when mentioning the name of Leble, who liked this genre very much.


11. Handel (3 female, 6 male) (Play in 2 acts)

Is music always love? What if the music substitutes for or replaces love? What if music is an indication, a prediction of trouble, if the music is tragedy itself? Music is harmony; music is symmetry - the same as destiny. Is it possible for a man to withstand it? The choice of the names of the first and second acts is not by chance. They coincide with the titles of the works by G.F. Handel, “Water Music” and “Music for the Royal Fireworks”. The play is modern and, in many respects, it is innovative. It is addressed to the directors and actors of the psychological theatre.


12. The Two Kandinskys (1 female, 3 male) (Etude in four scenes)

This an etude about an imaginary meeting between a great psychiatrist, Victor Kandinsky, and his distant relative but not less great painter, Vassily Kandinsky. The creative work of the two Kandinskys in this play is mixed with the love story of the painter and his disciple, Gabriel Munter. The protagonist, Mr S, was the composer Arnold Schonberg.


13. Divertissement (2 female) (In 2 acts)

What happens when two absolutely different women live together? In this case, anything might happen. The music of their lives intertwines like a Baroque counterpoint, ranging from total obscurity to a vibrant mixture of colours. They engage in constant fights, as if performing the intricate steps of a choreographed dance, delighting in the aftertaste of pain, longing for the fulfilment of their happy fantasies. Flowers, flowers, flowers. The women’s enigma will never be solved. The author doesn’t even aim to do that. He only lifts a veil a bit, just enough for the spectators to feel the physical magic of love for themselves.


14. A Long Life of the Rain (2 female, 4 male, crowd scenes) (Comedy in 2 acts.)

The play, though constructed according to the laws of comedy and is full of witty dialogues and funny situations, also bears a theme of female loneliness. The comedy is multi-layered, polyphonic. It is rich material for the actress in the leading role.


15. Jericho (3 female, 3 male) (Comedy in 2 acts)

Quite recently, a famous scientist, Sergey Petrovitch Tomilin, and his two daughters who have not accepted the changes in the life of the country, decide to dwell in an isolated place far from other people. However, the serene life of these hermits is disrupted by the arrival of the third, eldest sister and her boyfriend. These are people of a new age, with new values. Together with the unexpected and uninvited guests to the Tomilin’s house, there come anxiety, doubts - and love.


16. Interiors Twinkling of silence (1 female, 2 male, crowd scenes) (Scenes from family life in 2 acts)

Everything in this play is about family life with its tragedies and mysteries, laughter and magic, transformations and death behind the door, the birds and the children. It’s a new, unconventional outlook. It is as if some photographer, veering between the extremes of geniality and insanity, to the amazement, surprise and delight of the household, took some pictures and changed their fate at a most unexpected moment.


17. Jonah (4 male, crowd scenes) (Play in 2 acts)

This play is a theatrical interpretation, made in the author’s typical manner, of the Biblical tale of Jonah, the prophet. Jonah was sent by Jehovah to warn the sinful citizens of Nineveh of their impending destruction, but fearing their scorn, disobeyed and found himself in the belly of a sea monster.


18. Temptation by the Snow (3 female, 5 male)

(A last-night rehearsal of ‘Kashtanka’ by Chekhov at the theatre-home of E.O. Zelinsky in 2 acts)


19. A Pocket Chaos (3 female, 7 male ) (Play in 2 acts inspired by the novel ‘Hopscotch’ by J. Cortazar)


20. Koda (3 female, 4 male ) (Play with the light in two acts)

Retired actors, who left the theatre long ago, are gathering in a country house to give a benefit performance for their ‘prima donna’, the gravely ill actress, Trukhanova, who once was brilliant in the part of Arkadina. An old house, a landscape with a bewitching lake, even the coincidence of the name of the actor for the role of Treplev with the name of the character, all make it seem as if this play and the action taking place intertwine with the plot of Chekhov’s ‘Seagull’. There is a cross between the metaphysical laws of the theatre and allowing the events to flow in their own way. The play is intended mostly for the performers of the older generation of actors. A peculiar role in the performance, according to the author’s own idea, is played by the scenic lighting.


21. Costumes in the Life of Petr Andreevitch Uchagin (5 female, 4 male, crowd scenes) (Play in 2 acts)

A very rich man facing an incurable disease tries to look inside himself, to think over his life, to improve something, to repent of something. As if in a cracked mirror, his mundane, serene reality suddenly transforms, funny situations become tragic, sad ones acquire shades of laughter - miracles and chimeras appear from the sub-consciousness of the main character. There are a lot of unexpected, unpredictable, paradoxes.


22. Levin and His Lions (3 female, 4 male) (Play in 4 acts)

This play represents a detailed analysis of the motives for going to war. A famous writer, Samson Levin, the setting of whose play takes place in Gomel in 1942, together with his characters, tries to reconstruct the psychology of a man living under foreign occupation.


23. Lenin (1 female, 3 male) (Etude in 1 act)

A theatre fable about the immortality of a Great Utopia, its leaders and victims.


24. Foxes in Ruins (2 female, 5 male) (Drama in 2 acts)

Pondering on what we are, what is the purpose of our empty lives, what will be the end of the world in the perception of the Russian people. As it is today so it will be for ever.


25. Modest (1 female, 3 male) (Play in 4 acts)

A famous theatre director, Korsak, who is thinking of producing a play about Musorgsky, comes from the capital to a provincial town. He is going to give a leading role to his old friend Dronov, who was once at the height of fame but has now became a drunkard. The fates of the characters are closely bound up with the fates of Musorgsky and his contemporaries. The events of the play, at times funny, at times full of drama, get an existential development.


26. Moira or New Don Quixote (1 female, 5 male) (Drama in 2 acts)

Moira is destiny. Moira is a metaphysical space where a writer, Agrov, realises that he is becoming an old, drunken ‘favourite of fortune’, and where all threads of his life are brought together. How to restore faith to people, how to do it in such a way that their lives which quite evidently resemble buffoonery, would not be spent uselessly. How can the epoch of forgetfulness and unconsciousness be rendered so that it does not become habitual and comfortable for people? He tries to answer those questions in rather a queer way, which cause misunderstanding, perplexity and laughter in the people around him.


27. Customs of Flowers (for download)(1 female, 3 male) (Comedy in 2 acts in the classical Korean style of poetry and prose)

A charming, magical - yet ironic - action, with the combination of fragments of classical prose and poetry from Korea, inspired by the exquisite fragrance of flowers.


28. Ornithology (for download) (1 female, 2 male) (A drama about haggling in 2 acts)

A dynamic comedy about women, men, birds, people-birds, clouds, clap-nets, ornithology and taxidermy.


29. Realism Something belonging to us (1 female, 7 male) (A criminal chronicle in 2 acts)

A detective in love, Aristarkh Petrovitch Kreschenov, is investigating the most famous crime in the history of mankind. The play, billed as a criminal chronicle, is in fact a comedy written according to all the canons of para-realism, where subtle irony can transform a sharp dialogue into a musical phrase. It features a graphic and intense plot making the spectator a participant in the events taking place on the stage.


30. Sado (Donatien –Alphonce ie Francois de Sade) (Tragedy with disguising in 2 acts)

A theatrical story about an actor who obtains the soul of the character he is playing, and how his fate is changed as a result. At times the play becomes much more real to him than life itself.


31. Satire (2 male) (In 2 acts)

The author unites the plays ‘Satire’, ‘Tea Ceremony’ and ‘Divertissement’ into one dramatic cycle, ‘Dances’. In fact, as each of these plays is a dialogue, they are unusually pliable. Their main objective is to speak the unspoken tensions of the sexes. ‘Satire’ is a play for two men. The leitmotif is the relationship between fathers and sons. Is it possible to cross the abyss between the generations? What is the essence of being a male? Is it only destruction and death? What is the loneliness of a man? What is there before us? The author and his characters try to answer these questions.


32. Seven Words of an Eavesdropper. (6 female, 10 male) (Drama in 2 acts based on the novel by V.V. Nabokov ‘Eavesdropper’)


33. Twilight of a Postman (2 female, 5 male) (Elegy for Andrey Tarkovsky in 2 acts)

Death makes the final montage of our life. After the flowing stream of life comes death; and only then does the meaning of this flow appears.(Pierr Paolo Pazolini).


34. Anglers by God’s Grace (2 female, 3 male) (Comedy in 2 acts with variations)

A physician, Vassily Ilyich Kovrogov, is not prepared for change of the epochs which made the country and society so different, which upturned the habitual conception of values and meaning of life and turned the life of his family upside-down. This painful analysis of the events taking place is more than a ‘middle age crisis’ for the main character. It is the resection of his soul. His salvation is in irony, elixir from death and insanity at all times.


35. Tea Ceremony (for download) (1 female, 1 male) (A Dream in 2 acts)

How many strange things and mysteries, rustles and melodies; how much warmth and despair are hidden in shadowy illusion of love! At times there may be an impression that the characters in the play have been in that place for a century, and sometimes they behave as if they are seeing each other for the first time. The world created by them is capable of reflecting the light, but it is dangerous and unpredictable when the light goes down. What is the link between a man and a woman? A festival? An execution? A game? Hard to say. One way or another, everything resembles a lifelong oriental ceremony.


36. Black, White, Accents of Red, Orange (10 female, 5 male, crowd scenes) (Control prints in 2 acts).

A conflict of times. A tragedy of an elderly photographer set against the background of a newly born millennium. The play is written in a non-habitual manner of ‘control prints’ - giving the events taking place an original, analytical flavour, a specific rhythm and additional volume.


37. The Four on the Very Top of the Tower of Babel (for download) (4 male) (Etude in the genre of a dramatic buffoonery)

An etude written in a grotesque manner, a fable about the blind search for truth in a space of lost harmony.


38. Jester’s Chess (for download) (3 male, 3 female) (Metamorphosis of the new time in 2 acts)

The play is a construction of a world where we live in the perception of a man who thinks about eternity in terms of chess, a man who is balancing on the verge of life and death, normal and pathological, who is in that state where youth and old age reverberate off each other to produce the sounds of chaos called music.


39. The Drosselmeyer’s Nutcracker (for download) (2 female, 6 male)

(A fantasy in two acts based on the fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann, involving intricate mechanisms and wonderful transformations, including music by Chevalier de Gluck and an angel)

A new version of the famous fairy tale by E.T.A. Hoffman suggested by the author, fills the play with a specific atmosphere. Exact psychological portraits of the characters give the plot the features of reality. Virtuoso metamorphoses of the magic action are connected with concentrated analysis. Philosophical sounding is harmoniously combined with subtle irony and naughtiness. The play is of interest both to grown ups and children.


40. The Hermitage (2 female, 16 male, crowd scenes) (Play in 2 acts)

A hermitage is defined as the cell of a hermit, a place of solitude. The hero of the play, a not very young, lonely man whose name is Absent, finds solitude in a quite unusual place, a cafe. Watching the events taking place around him, he remains quite indifferent for a long time. However, destiny makes vigorous corrections to his tranquil existence. Love, confusion, conflict of generations, and anxiety for the future, change his life drastically and fill it with the new meaning. Sharp and modern, permeated by irony and full of melody as is typical of this author, the play is a kaleidoscope of bright characters and philosophical fable at the same time.


41. Eros (3 female, 6 male, crowd scenes) (Comedy in 2 acts)

The action of the comedy takes place in a hotel cafe. The visitors, men and women of different ages with different fates are combined in the eternal theme of unrequited love. Loneliness is caused by the illusion of the absence of freedom. A freakish waiter with a strange name, Eros, who is quite sincerely trying to help the characters solve the interactions of their lives, instead finds himself as a hostage of their passions.


42. Poison of Touching (1 female, 2 male) (Drama in 2 acts)

A play-fantasy about a great French sculptor Rodin and his disciple Camilla Klodel.


43. Yakutia (1 female, 2 male) (Idyl in 2 acts)

Two elderly people, a man and his wife, Yakut and Mura, who survived a great tragedy, decide to change their life together dramatically. They leave their homeland in search of an idyll. The place which accepts them is Yakutia, a paradise as it seems to them at the beginning. But changes start to occur in their tranquil existence …


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© Stroganow Alexandr, Barnaul 2007-2011

e-mail: jazz200261@mail.ru
Tel:+7 (3852) 34-36-19; 24-58-11; 8-913-215-22-18
Adress: Russia, Altay region, 656038, Barnaul, pr. Komsomolskiy, 102À-21
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