While the Revolution of Dignity was happening in 2014, Lianna Makuch came across her grandmother’s journal, which she had kept while emigrating from Ukraine during World War Two. “The sentiments she was sharing in that journal really struck me because they were reflective of the sentiments that people were sharing from Ukraine during the revolution.”
Fully inspired and having just finished theatre school, Makuch wrote the first draft of Barvinok, which is set 2017, three years after the Russian invasion. She listened to more of her grandmother’s experiences, and explored what that meant for herself as part of the Ukrainian diaspora, but “I knew that if I wanted to develop this story further, I needed to go to Ukraine to understand the contemporary situation more.”
She ended up taking three trips, covering much of the country, including where her grandparents were born, lived and eventually fled. “We started asking around, and then, you know, the village mentality — this one woman went to another woman, they called people, and then this other woman started running down the street, yelling the names of all my family members. She came and threw her arms around me and knew exactly who I was.”
Makuch also met with veterans, survivors, diplomats and displaced people — in places that are now very hot conflict zones — and workshopped her script based on the experiences they shared. “Their perspective is something that we wouldn’t necessarily have been able to gain by workshopping the play in Canada in the same way.”
The perspective of the Ukrainian actors was important as well. “There’s a character in the play who is more pro-Russian than a lot of the other characters,” she says, “and the girl who was playing that character, it really affected her emotionally because she had a falling out with a very close friend who moved to Russia. So it was a really impactful experience for her to have to embody this person whom she had this falling out with.”
The parallels to the current Russian invasion are obvious, largely because today is an extension of 2014 — both in terms of unprovoked Russian aggression and Ukrainian resilience. As the country being invaded, Ukrainians are, technically, victims, but “the feedback that we got was that people just really don’t want to be seen as helpless. And that really rings true with what we’re seeing in Ukraine’s amazing counteroffensive right now. Back in February, people thought that Ukraine would fall within three days or a week. And here we are now, over 200 days later, kicking ass. There’s a huge cost to that — Ukrainians should not have to be as resilient as they are forced to be, but that strength exists. And that’s actually what the play is named after: ‘Barvinok’ is the Ukrainian word for periwinkle, which is a symbol of resilience in Ukrainian culture.”
Unfortunately, Makuch’s grandmother never got to see the finished play live. But she did see a video recording of a performance in Toronto and was especially touched by the music. And while it’s a thoroughly Ukrainian story, the story of escaping war is unfortunately all too well known for people around the world. “Obviously, Ukrainians have a special relationship with the story, but ultimately, this is a human story about the cost and impact of war, which many immigrants, and descendants of immigrants, have. So I hope everyone, Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians, will come out to the show.”
Get tickets to Barvinok, running September 21 to 25, at a pay-what-you-can scale ranging from free to $35. If you require a wheelchair, email [email protected].
