A Free Bird in Captivity

At the premiere of the play "Bird in the Attic" by the Ukrainian theater "Wandering Stars," applause was heard many times.
On stage is a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl. She is having a conversation via mobile connection with her mother.
However, it becomes clear from the conversation that her mother is most likely no longer alive, and the conversation is imaginary.
After all, the girl's entire world is the attic of a house belonging to a family that supposedly "adopted" her. ("'Adopting' me is absolutely impossible," the girl jokes). However, adopting her is also impossible. At least by this family. Because this family is Russian, and the girl ended up with them from Ukraine. From Mariupol. When she and her mother were fleeing the occupied city, they were detained at a Russian checkpoint. 

"There — a terrible, dirty room with a filthy sofa," the girl recounts anxiously. "But they didn't like me. They pushed me outside, I stumbled and fell." In this strange way, she avoided being raped. But it was there that she was separated from her mother. The soldiers at the post either recognized her mother or suddenly, without any reason, accused her of being in the Ukrainian military. The girl does not say (because she most likely cannot, unable to convince herself) that her mother is no longer alive. But it is clear: such an accusation at a checkpoint is highly likely a death sentence.
There was also a soldier named Nikita who picked her up and took her to occupied Donetsk. There, most likely, this Russian family picked her up and took her to Russia.
Through the drama of the 13-year-old Ukrainian girl, it becomes clear: for her, "adoption" in a Russian family is not "salvation from war," but captivity. She is forced to attend a Russian church, school, and for the slightest "offense," that is, manifestations of being Ukrainian, she is locked in the attic. However, isolation in the attic for her is not a punishment at all, because only there, alone with herself, can she be herself. In the attic, she has frank conversations with her mother, tells her about her teenage feelings, about how she maintains her dignity in a family where she is humiliated in every possible way, imposed with a foreign way of perceiving the world, foreign customs. What this family lives by is vividly described by the girl's mention of one of the older ones, either daughters or "adopted" — Sasha. "Her favorite pastime: scattering grains on the windowsill, birds fly there, and she covers them with a cap, and they suffocate," — we, the audience, physically feel the captive's throat tighten when she shares this revelation with her mother, whom she will never see again.

It becomes clear: the 13-year-old Ukrainian girl feels in the foreign family like that bird, attracted by the supposed food and treacherously covered with a cap, deprived of the oxygen necessary for life.
In an imaginary conversation with her mother, she mocks her hosts; boasts about how she hummed the Ukrainian anthem in their presence — for this, of course, she was once again sent to the attic...
...Only after the performance did I find out that the actress who transformed into the 13-year-old girl, Diana Yavorska, is well over 30. Neither from her appearance nor from her performance is this visible.
The actress (one of the few non-professional actors in this theater, the director Olena Bilyak told me) conveys with a wealth of the subtlest shades of intonation, gestures, and movements the depth of the drama experienced by the 13-year-old girl. Diana's heroine, although remaining a teenager, pure, untouched in her feelings, at the same time is an adult person who deeply understands everything happening to her and around her. She, one of tens of thousands of children, had her native family stolen by Russian occupiers, deprived of her world, and they attempt to remake her very essence — just because she is Ukrainian and lived in a country that, according to the criminal plan of the Russian dictator, should not exist.
…Here is her triumph: the captive tells how her "stepmother" Masha read that she, Maria, was accused by the International Criminal Court of kidnapping Ukrainian children and put on international wanted list! Thus, we learn: this girl was kidnapped not by an ordinary Russian family, but by the "Commissioner for Children's Rights of the Russian Federation" Maria Lvova-Belova. (But this, ultimately, does not change the essence, because any Russian family would behave similarly with kidnapped Ukrainian children — the captive children are evidently distributed to pre-prepared families, tested for loyalty to the "general line" aimed at erasing any manifestations of Ukrainian identity).
How did this captive free bird fly across the ocean to our land? Why did the "Wandering Stars" choose this work by Kharkiv writer Oleh Mykhailov?
- I saw this play on the internet, staged in Ukraine, — Olena Bilyak told me. — In Ukraine, it is very popular, staged in many theaters. However, the performance I watched was staged in a completely different way: documentary, with the reading of documents. But I saw in this plot a complex and deep psychological drama of a 13-year-old captive. I have worked and continue to work with teenagers all my life, so I was captivated by the idea of conveying this psychological drama on stage.

Thanks to the skill of the director, the actress, and all the participants, this idea was embodied in a performance that, with minimal but harmoniously selected means — minimal decorations, stage movement (Olena Kolodko), songs behind the scenes (music editor and sound engineer Volodymyr Karpovych), video frames (Yuriy Lozhnevskiy) — conveys the full depth of the psychological drama and trauma of a teenage girl from whom Russian invaders took away the most valuable — her family, her country, her world — and try to forcibly change her identity.
Futile attempts. Deprived of freedom, the 13-year-old heroine of the play remains herself.