The teacher needed teenagers for a summer acting class that would end with a performance of an original play in Kiev.
“This is a course for happy kids who are free in their thoughts and dreams,” instructor Olesia Korzhenevska wrote on Facebook last spring.
It was hard to find a happy teenager in Ukraine. For more than four years, the pandemic and the war with Russia have trapped some young people in their homes, lonely and fearful. Many did not know how to socialize and could not imagine a future without war.
But two days after her Facebook post, Ms Korjenievska heard a 16-year-old boy asking his mother to take him into the class.
Sasha Suchik was a difficult candidate. A year earlier, he had flunked the same class and ended up in a mental hospital, suffering from clinical depression and even self-harming. He was still in the hospital where he had spent most of the previous year, haunted by war and dark thoughts.
“For him, your lessons will be an opportunity to open up and make new friends,” his mother, Olena Suchyk, told the teacher.
40-year-old Korzhenevska remembered Ms. Sasha. Thin, with long brown hair and a slightly blank look. After only a few lessons, he disappeared. But now he sent her a video of himself and she saw that he had gained weight. Her hair was short. He smiled.
“I’ve been playing the guitar for four years and the violin for five years,” said Sasha. “I want to join the course to develop my creative potential and make new friends.”
Ms. Korjeniewska has not been trained to work with troubled adolescents. But she was a patient teacher and learned a lot from raising her teenage son with autism.
“It’s a pretty tough job,” Sasha remembered thinking. “But I accept it.”
Sasha was discharged from the hospital in June. For the next three months, he and three other young actors put their worries aside and worked on a play Ms. Korjeniewska had written for them. His theme was that even when everything seems to be falling apart, life can still work.
The name of the play is “Good!” was But can it really be?
Teacher
Ms. Korjeniewska worked as an event planner, teacher and film producer before teaching acting classes to teenagers during the pandemic.
The building in Podil, a hipster neighborhood of Kyiv, was his creative laboratory. With brick walls painted white, hardwood floors and high ceilings, the first floor looked vaguely like a tech entrepreneur’s Manhattan loft. Ms Korzhenevska named it the 9¾ School after the magical train platform in the Harry Potter books and offered classes mainly on weekends.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Korzhenevska also used space to teach conscripts how to fly drones and conduct training. Upstairs, teachers were working with her son and another autistic teenager.
Mrs. Korjeniewska wrote a new play for each acting class. After the occupation, he focused on war stories because many students had loved ones fighting on the front lines. In 2023, students received “Turtle in a Pot”, so named because a teenager’s family left home carrying their pet turtle in a pot.
Ms. Korjeniewska immediately felt that the vibe in 2024 was different. Everyone needed a break from war. He wanted to help students imagine themselves in a more predictable, more routine environment. In a place like America, Ms. Korjeniewska thought, there had been none of them.
He also needed a break. In 2017, his fiance Dani, whom he met at a music festival, had joined the army the day after the Russian invasion, and he was still on the eastern front in drones.
The game
When Ms. Korjeniewska created her plays, she looked to the students for inspiration.
There were four students in the class of 2024. 13-year-old Solomia Čerepushko-Zagrebelna, who was next to Solya, spent hours every day on her beauty ritual – taking care of nails and eyelashes that looked like shadows. But in class, he was serious, the student most interested in acting.
Anna Yujda, 14, wore glasses and looked annoying, but she played guitar and was cool. Mrs. Korjeniewska decided that they could be sisters, one beautiful and the other clever.
The third student, Alisa Pazushko, was 12 years old. When the Russians besieged his home in Mariupol two years ago, his mother woke him up one morning and told him to pack. He took two books – How to Train Your Dragon and Harry Potter – but left behind his beloved stuffed animal, a gray and black cat, and fled with his family to a new life in Kiev.
Alisa was attending online classes from Kiev, so she didn’t make any friends in her new city. Tall for her age, she looked like she could use something to look after, thought Mrs Korjeniewska. Alice could play the role of mother in the story that began to take shape in Mrs. Korzhenevska’s head.
Rough outline: A teenage boy from a wealthy New York City family is orphaned in a car accident and sent to live with his mother’s best friend in rural Mississippi, so poor he can’t even afford pancake syrup. The woman had two daughters: a smart bookworm and a beautiful cheerful girl. The boy Simon fell in love with both of them.
Sasha would play the role of Simon.
Ms. Korzhenevska chose her location after meeting an American at a Kiev bar who extolled the virtues of her hometown: West Point, Miss., a town of 10,000. website boasting that it “represented the best of America a generation ago.”
He included two American songs. It was one “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)” A reminder to keep your faith in God, even when things seem difficult, by Hillsong United. The other was performed by Jane Marczewski, also known as Nightbirde an international sensation after singing on “America’s Got Talent” when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
That song, “It’s All Right,” gave the show its name. Mrs. Korzhenevska would later say that she wrote it with Sasha in mind.
Star
On Sunday in July, as Russia often does when attacking Ukraine’s power supply, a generator sat near the theater’s front door in case the power went out. Air raid sirens cut through the hum of traffic. It was about 90 degrees.
But it was Mississippi on the temporary stage. Sasha, who played Simon, fell into the room and sat down in a chair. Too bad, Mrs. Korzhenevska thought. At this point in the script, Simon had been living with his new family for several months.
Ms. Korjeniewska explained: “You’re still sad, but a little more fun. “You’ve been here a while, so you’re a little more cheerful. You were terrible once, but not so much now. Now you can smile.”
Sasha tried again with a hint of a smile. Probably excitement, a single teenage emotion.
The pandemic was difficult for Sasha, who went to school online and spent a lot of time alone. As soon as the war broke out, his mother and stepfather sent him to Poland, where it would be safer to live with his father.
For almost a year, Sasha bounced between her parents depending on whether her school in Kiev was open. In the chaos, the grief that had put him in the hospital took over.
Actors did not talk about such things. They focused on the project.
As Sasha played the main role in the play, he became the center of the class, and three young girls looked like him. He practiced Nirvana songs from the show with Anna on the guitar. Alisa preferred to talk to Sasha more than anyone else.
“We have more interests in common than the other girls,” said Alice.
Students learned as they went. Ms. Korzhenevska taught Sasha how to hold the skateboard in the middle, so it didn’t hang awkwardly. She told Anna, playing the smart sister, that she should have given Sasha an apple in a flirtatious way. The young actors worked hard, memorizing their lines. Sasha studied a poem about loss and hope.
“And even if your soul is the most desolate of deserts, something will grow out of it,” he said.
Nevertheless, the war intervened. Ms. Korjeniewska saw a psychiatrist to deal with her anxiety about her fiance and her country, but the medication made her want to sleep constantly. Some days he could not get out of bed.
“The only thing that can get me out of my house is this show,” he said. “I’m good for training.”
Dani, whose full name has not been released due to military regulations, led a group of drone operators near the eastern city of Pokrovsk. On September 6, a car carrying two of his soldiers was hit by a mine. The soldier driving the car lost the lower part of his left leg. Dani sent Ms. Korjenevskaya a video of the panicked trip to evacuate him, and they cried together as they watched it.
Nine days later, the premiere of the play would take place.
No regrets
Outside the theater, more than 40 people, including Sasha’s mother, were waiting in Sunday clothes and holding bouquets. Some of them did not go to the theater for years.
Inside, Sasha was sitting on the dressing room floor in shorts and a cute t-shirt with English words like “rebel” written on it. He chewed the inside of his lip. His ever-expressive face is somewhere between bemused and amused.
Alice stepped. Sasha and two other girls tried relaxation techniques: shaking their hands, playing meditation music. Will they be able to avoid laughing when they sing American songs?
Ms. Korjeniewska presented the production dressed in a blue and white gown and with her blonde hair tied back.
“We are in the middle of a war,” he said. “We have been talking about war for a long time. But this performance is different. We wanted to show something easy, romantic, not about war.”
Alice came out first. Soon Sasha appeared as Simon. Seeing her in such a prominent role, Mrs. Suchyk began to cry.
Sasha forgot a line as one of the girls. No one in the audience knew. As the story unfolds, Simon falls in love with both sisters and begins to accept the death of his parents. In the end, she moved on, but left gifts: pancake syrup, a sparkly dress made by her mother, a fashion designer, and $2,000 for the brainy daughter to have Lasik eye surgery.
The audience responded that it was as if the play had released something they had been holding onto. “In the end, nobody died and everything was fine,” Ms Korjeniewska said. “But people were crying.”
Alice’s mother said no one should judge the play by her family’s reaction, as they all have post-traumatic stress disorder. Tears streamed down the face of Alisa’s aunt, whose ex-husband disappeared and was presumed dead after Russian troops captured Mariupol.
Sasha said the class helped her make friends and return to school. Now she wants to become a psychologist to help military veterans and teenagers.
He talked about the character of Simon as if it were real.
“I know Simon is very sad, but with his family who loved him, with his character, he was loved by someone,” Sasha said. “It was very good of him.”
After the performance, Mrs. Korjenievska joined the actors on stage and praised each of them. Sasha, he said, developed a kind of peace and inner calm.
“I’m just on tranquilizers,” said Sasha. The audience laughed.
“Me too,” admitted Ms. Korjenievska.
“I’m just kidding,” he replied.
Mrs. Korjeniewska hugged him. “I’m not,” he said.
Evelina Riabenko contributed to the report.
Produced by Audio Sarah Diamond.
