5 Things: Great Lines from Teatro en Blanco’s Neva

Photo: Teatro en Blanco

There’s a lot of great language in Teatro en Blanco’s Neva, which plays this week at Radar LA (see Kerry Lengel’s rave here). Here are five of my favorite passages from Guillermo Calderón’s script, in my own, likely inaccurate translation.

Olga: What do you see? You see Olga Knipper, a cracked woman, an ex-everything, a reptile skin.

…

Aleko: I imagine a revolution. One day after the strikes, the Czar goes to live in the countryside and we find ourselves orphans, and there is a war, we’re so hungry that the simple folk like me have to eat human flesh. Until one day we go to the station in Finland and await a new leader, a bald man, electric, full of sawdust, and with him we enter the French museum by the Neva river.

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Aleko: Thus are we poor folk, we have fewer bones and those few we have are bigger, we are uneven. I have mouse bites on my buttocks. I smell like a woman, where I should smell like a man and I don’t know how to love without wanting to hit, kill, vomit, pray, drink and return to loving. The most important organ in my body is my appendix, and I want to put it in your kidney and watch you sweat.

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Aleko: I imagine all those soldiers, workers and peasants, die and float in the river, they were killed by the new Czar, the new Caesar. I only wanted vodka, Champagne, rifles, onions, liberty without got and the woods. I imagine I will go on loving Russia. I imagine winning a patriotic war and making a bitch fly through the cosmos will be worth the effort/trouble. I am in love with Russia.

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Olga: I like servile sex, I like to speak obscenities in German and make gutteral sounds. After sex I fall asleep, but I wake up feeling like cooking and cleaning the house. I like you onion smell, I like to see you defecate, I will treat you like a child, I will make you cry, I will give ou my placenta to eat, I will love you.