The first night of an Andrey Moguchy performance “Gardeners” by Maxim Isayev will take place tomorrow, October 28, 2008 on the Smaller Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater.  This is a joint project of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the Formal Theater and the Russian AXE Engineering Theater.  The play proceeds at a certain Internet-forum where various issues of personal land plots are discussed.   Such notions as "soil acidity,"  "manure," "earthworms," and "cherry orchards" are equal here and are present with just a “comma” between them.  But for the forum participants, the gardening topic is only an excuse to get into this dispute.  The characters come up with their images and life stories astonishingly differing from their actual ones. They run into the virtual world trying to hide away from the life, to forget the pain they had to get through one day, or even to overplay the ruthless fate.  But the truth slips off their tongues in the emerging dramatic dialogues and the characters tell their “hidden” stories.  At a certain point, the characters give in their fiction masks thus getting the right for a lyrical monologue.  Maxim Isayev sponged his play with numerous links to Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard.” The characters call themselves Lopakhin, Varya, Semyon; Anya and Sharlotta Ivanovna are also mentioned, as is the “doctor from Yalta” in whose yard the phthisic patients gather.   Speculations of the characters on the sense of life, faith and sufferings, death and love (sometimes naïve, sometimes tragic) in Andrey Moguchy’s performance sound as a grotesque, sending back not only to the characters of Chekhov’s plays, but to the ones from the theater experiments of the early 20^th century. In the “Gardeners,” alike the Blok and Meyerhold’s “Balaganchik” (“Carousel”) the conditionality of the theater per say is being played with from the very beginning of the performance. Theatrical scenery (stools, “well-respected wardrobe,” piano-washstand, wash-hand/samovar) of the same Maxim Isayev are demonstratively taken out from the stage; boxes where the characters “disappear” are also moved out from there.  There are its own Harlequin (Lopakhin) and Pierro (Grandson), Colombina (Varya) and even a visionary (Semyon) in this portative, as if toy carousel.   As well as in the beginning of the 20^th century, the theater is again engaged in looking for some modern scenic language, which is not possible without new drama and revealing of a new dramatic conflict.   This performance is a bright example of such theater experiments.   Actors of the Formal Theater Olga Muravitskaya, Vadim Volkov, Alexandr Mashanov and coryphaeus of the Alexandrinsky Stage Nikolay Marton are engaged in this performance.  This performance will be also shown on October 29 and 30 at 19:30.  The tickets are available at the theater booth.  Their price is 500 rubles.