Trees Die Standing

    Trees die standing: Strong people even in their sorrow prefer to stay strong and not to bend from the burden of bad fate, and not to give that burden to their close people, in the first place.

    For twenty years the Granny has been living waiting for a miracle, her only grandson to whom she devoted her whole life. And when he finally comes, she tells him to go away.

    Why did she do that? What made her to do so? Maybe her short meeting with the Director of magic “good actions” agency and his fake wife Marta? Or, maybe she understood both simple and difficult fact: close people are those who make your life full, and not those thought-up persons who are not worth of your love sometimes.

    For the first time, Trees Die Standing Tall by Alejandro Casona was played at Lesya Ukrainka Russian Drama Theatre in 1956 by now legendary stage director Leonid Varpakhovsky.

    Varpakhovsky, them working on the play, devoted it to the memory of his teacher V. Meyerhold. A dry bamboo became the core material in the scenery of Trees Die Standing Tall for a reason. That is both the reference to Meyerhold’s play A Teacher Bubus, and to the description of the lead woman character Eujenia, an old lady. You may not bend a bamboo, you only may break it. Still, it is not so simple to do that.

    In the far 1956 the play was played by great actors E. Opalova, V. Khalatov, I. Pavlova, and N. Rushkovsky.

    However, no play, even the most talented one, may not be everlasting by its nature. Still, the topics it covers may be timeless.

    Maurucio in childhood: Igor Askevych, Artem Petrukhin, Oleksiy Rezunik