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“Mariupol,”  which was designed and presented by the New York-based Yara Arts Group, epitomizedthe mission of the project.  JCTC founder Olga Levina — herself born in Ukraine and raised in Belarus— views theater as the voice of the people, particularly those who cannot otherwise speak.Devastation has thrown a shroud of silence over Mariupol. These are the stories that got out.  They’vebeen adapted for the stage by Yara director Virlana Tkacz, a specialist in Eastern European drama.Shows she’s created for New York’s long running La Mama Experimental Theater have oftenincorporated Ukrainian poetry into the scripts, and “Mariupol: Diaries of War and the Tree of Life”contains a gripping mid-show reading of an elegy for refugees by the celebrated Serhiy Zhadan, aliterary award winner now voluntarily fighting the Russians in the National Guard.  But mostly, she letsthe words of the diarists do the work. These are delivered with minimal visual adornment by a quartetof actors who do their best to channel the monumental terror, grief, and confusion of people who’vewitnessed their hometown getting dismembered by an ancestral enemy. All four acquit themselveswell, but particularly affecting is Susan Hwang as Yevhenia Ivanchenko, a Mariupol policewomantrying to maintain her professional composure and usefulness as the town burns around her.Yara has also employed the services of a ringer: musician Julian Kytasty, master of the bandura, anunusual stringed instrument that resembles a cross between a zither and a tennis racket. Tkacz giftedthe first ten minutes of the show to Kytasty, who sat at stage center and set the mood for the eveningwith a mournful, probing and emphatic original piece. Even after the actors had taken over the stage,the composer didn’t go far. He sat in the shadows, underscoring and augmenting the scenes fromMariupol with harp-like sweeps, grunting low-string riffs, and delicate high runs like the patter of rain ona shingle. Even as “Mariupol” spoke to the universal experience of armed conflict, the presencebandura kept the storytelling firmly tethered to Ukrainian culture.Kytasty’s playing and the moments of sturdy group vocal harmony from the nine-person castprovided necessary sweetening to a show that was unflinchingly frank about the cost of armedconfrontation. The diarists described the carnage in the streets, the fear of hiding from tanks infreezing basements for weeks at a time, the impossibility of finding food and water, the casual crueltyof the invading army, and the unbearable pain of watching a beloved city — a kind of communal artproject — reduced to rubble. The actors, many of whom were Eastern European, carried that dread intheir postures, which, even as they sat in folding chairs, were wary, suspicious, and pinched.Ukrainian-born Petro Ninovskyi took on the role of Yaroslav Semenenko, a paralympic swimmer bornwithout arms. Tkacz and Yara took no steps to hide the actor’s limbs. They didn’t have to: everythingabout Ninovskyi’s performance suggests a man stripped of agency by cruel fate.|“Mariupol” argues that there can be no justification for the destruction of a city and theindiscriminate killing of its inhabitants, and the terrible condition of Eastern Ukraine makes that positionhard for anybody to refute. Chief among the diarists’ reasons for their pre-war disinclination to abandontheir hometown was their appreciation of its beauty. That’s long gone, and there’s nobody to blame forthat desecration but Moscow and its bombs. As the focus of anti-war attention shifts to Gaza, Russianaggression has been pushed off the front pages. But the stories of atrocities in Ukraine keepcoming. They’re not always easy to hear. We ought to listen anyway.

Tris McCall, Jersey City Times, June 21, 2024