“Inostranka” with Masha Mashkova: a one-woman show that breaks far more than the fourth wall

I’ve always been wary of one-person shows. To me, they were a bit like a strong espresso without sugar or cream: concentrated, yes, but lacking the multi-voiced harmony an ensemble brings. And yet, the other night in Chișinău, on the stage of Teatrul Fără Nume, I realised for the first time that mono-theatre can be something far richer than a connoisseur’s drink.

At the heart of the production is Sergei Dovlatov’s novella Inostranka, adapted by playwright Mikhail Durnenkov. But director Maxim Didenko and Masha Mashkova go far beyond straightforward dramatisation. What they create is not a play as such, but a living fabric in which Dovlatov’s prose and Mashkova’s stand-up-like monologues intertwine like two threads in a woven carpet. From her very first line, Mashkova “breaks” the fourth wall, and the auditorium instantly stops functioning as an auditorium. We find ourselves inside her personal space — a space in which one can laugh, grieve, and ask questions freely.

Two narrative lines run in parallel: Dovlatov’s story of Marusya Tatarovich’s emigration to America in the 1980s, and the actress’s own account of her recent move abroad. They flow side by side like two rivers that eventually merge into one channel. And that channel — sometimes turbulent, sometimes calm, but always honest — rises, quite literally, above the clouds in the finale and turns into a celestial stream driven forward by a brand-new, irresistibly catchy number. (Mark my words: in six months, that song will be coming out of every household appliance.)

I was struck by how seamlessly modern technology is woven into the performance.
The camera onstage works — forgive the cliché — as a kind of “mirror to the soul”. It captures Mashkova’s close-ups and immediately projects them onto the screen. It feels as though you’re sitting with her at a café table, watching every slight movement of her face, every shadow of thought and emotion.

Media projections are used in theatre more and more often, of course. But usually they’re merely illustrative. Here, they are full-fledged characters in their own right. The actors (with a special mention to Maksim Sukhanov as Dovlatov) are pre-recorded, placed into AI-generated composite interiors and different locations, and they appear on screen as Mashkova’s living interlocutors. They converse with her — in taxis, in airports, on the streets of New York, and occasionally even in bed. These technological devices are astonishing: once you accept their theatricality, you still believe in them one hundred percent. The screen stops feeling like a flat projection and becomes an additional stage where a parallel strand of the heroine’s life unfolds.

Artificial intelligence generates digital “echo-images” of the characters — their voices and movements reflected in a virtual mirror. It feels as though their identities break into fragments and reassemble themselves anew, reminding us yet again that emigration is always a process of reconstructing the self.

All of this is done without flashiness or decorative “glaze”. The technology never distracts; it is integrated into the performance as naturally as the actress’s own breathing.

I left the theatre with the sensation that I’d just witnessed the future of theatre — in the same way that seeing Avatar for the first time made me realise a new era of cinema had begun. Inostranka is not a chamber confession but a large-scale artistic statement. Mashkova, Didenko and the whole team prove that the word, the body and the digital realm can form a single organism — and that this organism feels completely at home under stage lights. They show that mono-theatre need not be a niche genre for aficionados, but a powerful emotional instrument for speaking to contemporary audiences. And it feels very much like therapy.

Eldar Tagiev.