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Russian Marmalade, collected plays by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2005)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HENSCHEL, Russia - EKSMO, AST
Collection of plays for theater ("Russian Marmalade", "My Grandson Benjamin", and "The Seven Saints from Bruho Village").
Russian Marmalade is a play clearly created in dialogue with Anton Chekhov’s «Cherry Orchard». The play’s heroes live in the same kind of old house with the same cherry trees growing all around, only the cherries themselves get made into jam to be sold to provide the owners of the home with their sole means of survival. It is the end of the twentieth century and Russia has changed course yet again as the old system crumbles.
None of the doors close and the electricity does not always work, but mobile phones are busy ringing all the time. The sentimental Chekhovian girl in this play, it turns out, works round the clock for an erotic phone line, unsuspected, it seems, by her respectable parents. This time it is not old monarchist Russia that is crumbling, but the Soviet regime as it gives way to the Yeltsin years. The “new Russians” sell and resell their parents’ dacha, and the parents, pushed onto the sidelines of life, don’t know where to turn anymore. These unhappy tales are infused with philosophical dread and deep psychological analysis. Ulitskaya tells her tales as only she knows how – in a comic, almost grotesque tone, turning a melancholy play with a Chekhovian plot into a bright and buoyant comedy.
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CASE OF ENGINEER TOWN, 2008
Rights sold: Russia – Chronicler
A nomad city of Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire (the map of which is just identical to a map of the Russian Empire), appears suddenly in the beginning of XVIII century in the area of Novocherkassk City in the Province of Don Cossack Voisko. The city does not fit into the picture of the real world; it moves every day a couple kilometers from the point it was seen before; Mongol Emperor Tughe, the ruler of the city, knows nothing about the existence of Russian Emperor Alexander (who in turn has never heard of Tughe).
Otroshenko creates a reality in which the relation between incidents, characters, and setting could not be based upon or justified by laws of nature or their normal acceptance by human mentality.
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