Maxim Kurochkin hops on stage and grabs an 8-foot spear leaning against an imitation stone castle wall. With only a few bystanders to witness it, the playwright begins plunging it into a block of wood nailed to the floor. Twice the wood crunches as the spearhead comes down, twice the lance wobbles and falls. On the third try, the spear sticks, wiggles tightly and makes a resonant twanging sound. Practice makes perfect.
Oblivious to the writer's nervous energy, Oleg Menshikov good-naturedly calls out to a backstage assistant from his director's seat in the empty auditorium: "Tanya! Where is everybody?!" This playful lull in rehearsals of Kurochkin's "Kitchen" blissfully belies the fact that Menshikov's latest production - in which he stars as well as directs - is just two weeks away from its Nov. 27 premiere. By then, you can bet the tension will be thick enough to stick a spear in it. Menshikov is best known for his movies - he has starred in Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning "Burnt by the Sun" and "The Barber of Siberia," and in Regis Wargnier's "East-West" - but he has been a force in theater, too. His performance in Alexei Burykin's "Nijinsky" in 1993 is legendary while his 1998 production of Griboyedov's "Woe From Wit" was a popular smash despite the grousing of the critics (including yours truly).
If the memory of past successes is pressuring Menshikov now, however, it doesn't show.
"I am satisfied with the process," he said confidently during a break in the action. "We have some good actors and I think they all will recall this chunk of time as a good one." One who might remember a few dark moments is Kurochkin.
At the age of 30, this Kiev native is suffering the pangs of his first major production. He can hardly sit still during rehearsals, constantly leaving the auditorium to scribble last-minute changes in the text or to gulp some fresh air.
Kurochkin won an anti-Booker prize in 1998 for his play "Steel Will" and he regularly tops lists of promising new writers. But, aside from some student shows and a mercifully short-lived show at the Pushkin Theater, Kurochkin's plays have not made the transition from page to stage.
"I had heard of Kurochkin," said Menshikov, "so I had someone ask him to bring me a play. He brought me everything he had written." After a short spell of reading, Menshikov asked Kurochkin if he would consider writing on commission. The playwright heard opportunity knocking. He confesses he had begun to feel as though he were "chewing his cud" as a writer and he jumped at the chance to try something new. The result was "Kitchen." "The idea, the setting and the atmosphere are Oleg's," said Kurochkin, who promptly takes "blame" for the play's form - an epic fantasy that unfolds simultaneously in the present and the mythological age of the Nibelungs.
"The action takes place in a restaurant kitchen located in a medieval castle," he explains. "For some reason, probably because of some error she made, the heroine loses her happiness. But I did not write this for the psychological theater and we are not interested in why she erred. All that concerns us is the fact that she did err and that she and those around her consequently find themselves inhabiting a mythical world of archetypes. No matter what path they take, they still will arrive at the end fate has allotted them." Kurochkin, an uncommonly polite, self-effacing man, readily admits his play is complex and that one of his goals was to "jar spectators out of their sense of comfort." Centering the play are the Nibelungan queen Kriemhild who is reincarnated as a restaurant washerwoman; Siegfried, her husband in both lives, who is murdered in both lives by Hagen, the kitchen manager; and Gunther, the restaurant owner who alone recalls the tragedies of past lives and provokes the others to remember, too.
Aside from Menshikov as Gunther, the cast includes the prominent Moscow actress Oksana Mysina as Kriemhild, the Ukrainian actor and rock musician Alexei Gorbunov as Hagen and Nikita Tatarenkov as Siegfried.
When "Kitchen" opens, it will culminate over 15 months of work. Kurochkin delivered the first version of the play a year ago, but it since has undergone several rewrites.
"We thought we would do this quickly," laughs Menshikov. "But now it seems as if we haven't had enough time. I really don't know what we have." "No one knows what will happen," agrees Kurochkin, "but I'm grateful to Oleg for believing in me."

Submitted by Sanochki