She sits in her dorm room, a mirror propped up on the desk against a stack of textbooks. There is nothing interesting about her face that she can see: big gray eyes her acting teacher calls photogenic, a pudgy nose that her roommate Sveta says will always typecast her into character roles, bangs that fall down to her curved eyebrows Sasha has recently plucked with tweezers. This is what art demands, said Sveta, who has already starred in a movie, so Sasha believes her. She sits before a mirror, ruthlessly yanking little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each tug.
During the month of September, like college students all over the country from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, they pay for their free education by working on a collective farm, where there is a perpetual shortage of hands to harvest the vegetables planted in May. Every morning, they climb into a creaky bus and for eight hours bend over rows of potatoes, onions, and turnips, raking through the dirt soaked from recent rains in search of produce that hasn’t yet rotted in the ground. Sasha doesn’t know where all the collective farmers are, the workers who have tended to these crops they are now told to harvest, but as she lifts her head, all she sees are drama students up to their ankles in mud. Every day, practical as ever, Sveta stuffs the best-looking vegetables into a bag to take back and store in the bottom of the armoire in their dorm room. At the end of the month, they have a pile of food that will last them until New Year’s.
Sveta is inventive in other ways, too. She is a year older than Sasha and, in her own words, she has already seen life. She sends Lara, their third roommate, to buy a few meters of cheap upholstery fabric and instructs Sasha to sew them skirts with big pockets. “For crib sheets,” Sveta says. “For history and philosophy, when we have our first final exams in January.” With a blonde braid down to her waist, Sveta has the slight build and pure blue-eyed stare of an ingenue. Sasha had to look up the word ingenue in a French-Russian dictionary—“an innocent, unworldly young woman”—and she thought it was ironic that the real Sveta was the complete opposite of the Sveta she would portray onstage.
The only classes they would never dream of approaching in their devious skirts with crib-sheet pockets are the classes they came here for, the reason they left their homes and endured three brutal rounds of auditions. These are the classes of stage movement, dance, voice, and, the most frightening, the most important class of all—acting. Acting is sacred, and they all know that the first two years are when some of them will be expelled for what their dean calls “professional inadequacy,” or simply a lack of the acting gift.
During the first year, no one is allowed to speak in acting class. For two semesters, they drink from imaginary glasses and eat with nonexistent forks and knives, diligently screw in light bulbs, feel the wind standing on the bow of a ship, thread needles and sew up holes. For her first final exam in acting, Sasha picks up imaginary clamps and scalpels and hands them to the surgeon played by Lara. She has learned to do this by observing a nurse during surgeries at Central Clinical Hospital, four operations a week, for two months. The rest in their class silently slice apples, bang make-believe keys of typewriters, sway in crowded buses, knit scarves, chew on lemon wedges, embrace illusory lovers, wait in lines, walk pretend dogs, uncork wine bottles, wash underwear in the sink, stand on the observation deck of the highest building in Moscow and look down at the sprawling city laid out below—all on the small stage of their freshman studio.
By the end of the first semester, three students are dismissed for professional inadequacy, and Sasha feels a rush of overpowering relief that she is not among them. Their dean calls it “the first wave of attrition,” and the word first sends a cold shiver down her spine.
There are twenty-two of them left, ten girls and twelve boys. “My girls and boys” is what their artistic director Vera Konstantinovna calls them, and a smile spreads wrinkles across her face as she surveys her students before their History of Theater class. Vera, as they call her when she is not within earshot, is short and small-boned, and Sasha wonders if she, too, was an ingenue when she was young. When she speaks, she waves her ringed fingers as if conducting an orchestra, and her sharp nose and a green shawl around her shoulders make her look like an exotic bird.
Vera tells them that they are now actors and will always live on this side of the curtain, the stage side. From the time they walked through these doors, she says, the world has split in two: one half is Theater, where everyone is one of them, svoi; the other half is the audience, chuzhoi. Among the audience is a world they are told to observe, full of situations they will use onstage and characters they will inhabit when they are finally allowed to speak. They are different, those people; they lead normal, ordinary lives; they are civilians, as Sasha’s teacher calls them. By the end of the first year, they must learn to become them.