emails from russia

hello from russia!

not much time online, so i will paste recent emails for your voyeuristic enjoyment.

happy International Women's Day and i heard that you run went really welltoday. have a great first performance weekend!

Julia SmelianskyAdministrative DirectorAmerican Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre SchoolInstitute for Advanced Theatre Trainingat Harvard University

Julia!

opening night was great! Oleg Tabokov and your proud papa came to watch. we had vodka and pickles afterwards on the stage. We just came home from our celebration at Il Patio. The internet has been down in the dorm for the past few days, but i've discovered that if i put my laptop on the windowsill, i can mooch a signal.

women's day was fun! i gave a flower to our sound lady and another to our waitress at the restaurant.

everybody says hi. adel wants to tell you that he has not been stopped by the militia or the police so far! yay! sarah says to report that we all love the unpasteurized dairy products. this is true. tim says that he's waiting to go to mamushka's. i don;t know what this means.

tell everyone hello!

~neil

Well, I am very proud of you for giving flowers to the ladies. I am alsoextremely relieved to know that Adel has not been stopped by milizia yet(but that doesn't mea that he will not be soon!). Did you visit the marketby the Belorusskaia train station? Check it out - especially cheese andcottage cheese if you are into unpasteurized dairy.

E-mail when you have a minute we all want to know all the juice details ofyour life in Moscow. It is sunny and 45 here today. Romeo is in thehospital, Mara almost lost an eye, Scott is on for Tibalt...there you go.

-Julia

THE COCK'S GAZETTE 2-9-05

the show went much better tonight- there was a lot more confidence onstage. and the audience was a lot more vocal, i think because oleg tabokov wasn't there to scare everyone. roman was supposed to come, but he phoned and said he'd come in two weeks. i saw him on tv last night!

your pop came afterwards and we had a little party with champagne upstairs. there were many toasts, and we said goodbye to sasha. he's incredible, bring him back many times!

brian fell backwards off the lip of the stage tonight, it was funny! he got a very nasty cut on his knee. but he is an eagle scout and he just got finished dressing it and is now rapidly consuming chicken from POCTIK'C. jorge hurt his knee as well, so we are a limping cast. but spirits are very high.

the girls all have crushes on sasha the stage manager and pyotr the angel. the guys all have crushes on dasha the angel to the dramaturgs.

everyone is sorry to hear about the apparent mishaps on the mainstage over there, but at the same time excited that institute students have an opportunity to step up to the plate.

i'll send you reports like this regularly as long as i have internet. the cock's gazette is a good name and feel free to forward them to any interested parties.

hope all is well!

~neil

(Julia's father, Anatoly Smeliansky, is the head of the Moscow Art Theatre School, and a very famous scholar on Russian theatre and literature. 'Cock's Gazette' is a homonym for a phrase in Russian that means 'How do you say...?' I.e., 'Cock's Gazette toilet paper?')

hey mom,

things are going well here- tonight is opening night for our show. we've had no internet in our dorm for the past three days, but i just discovered that if i set my cpu in the windowsill of the common area, i can just barely mooch a signal. hopefully i will stay on long enough to send this.

i don't have any way to download pictures, but i am shooting video while i'm here. at some point i'll be able to show you highlights, or make you a dvd.

it's been fun getting used to things here. we haven't had classes yet, just many rehearsals and tech for our show. it's a 30 minute walk to the theatre, down tverskaya boulevard, which is a huge street full of traffic, populated with stores and restaurants the whole way. a lot like broadway in new york, without the times square. they don't do a lot of shoveling or salting here- it's so icy and snowy that all of us have fallen at least once on the walk. today the sun is shining though.

i need to go shave and shower and leave for our call tonight. opening night is a big deal here!

hopefully i can continue to find this windowsill connection. more soon!

~n

i miss everyone! i will continue to post relevant emails and notes from russia as long as i can squeeze a signal from this windowsill!