The Crossroads
- Genre
- Duration
- 1 hour 40 minutes without intermission
- Content warning
- Theatrical fog is used during the production
- Date of premiere
- Nov. 29, 2018
“This is Franko at the rawest of nerves. We have become accustomed to seeing Ukrainian classics through the veil of sentimental tears. But when we look at what’s truly beyond the sentiment, what we find is a terrifying chasm. This is the first stage work known to me where a cross emerges as if a central character—and not as the customary figure of redemption or suffering. No, the cross in The Crossroads is the fateful place where very differing paths intersect. As an author Franko is not one to mince bland words; he is heatedly precise, which yields an honest point of view. I think that this is a very successful way to read the classics, because if there is no power in expression, then there will be no power of impression, ”-
Bohdan Tykholoz, Franko House Director
“The Crossroads” as presented in Lviv is not at all about a love story, but rather about the loss of integrity that each character faces his own way, and it is about the play’s director. Here the characters are left as empty spaces that we are meant to fill out with our own inclinations. This type of production, with open structures that lack “catharsis,” is far from works the public has come to expect. Instead its function is to observe-remove, reflect-encode, speculate-realize. As such this crossword-production has its own systems of symbols and need of an audience as agents from Franko’s world to fill it in, which in our 21st century is what distinguishes Franko’s text as a novel from its stage text in the theatre.
Oleh Vergelis
Director - Ivan Uryvskyi
Choreographer - Pavlo Ivliushkin
Costume designer - Olha Hnatiuk
Lighting designer - Olesia Pravdyvets
Sound engineer - Volodymyr Fanta
Cast:
Yevheniy Rafalovych - Mykola Bereza, Andriy Petruk
Valerian Stalskyi - Oleh Stefan
Regina - Oksana Kozakevych
Baran - Yaroslav Fedorchuk
The project was implemented in cooperation with the Franko House with the assistance of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine