Red Star, Block 28

This is Maria Kassimova-Moisset’s second storytelling performance (or storytelling show), following the success of “Free-Falling Stories.”

It tells the story of a special time in the past—the era of “developed” socialism. These are personal stories, viewed through the eyes, biography, and experiences of a girl—now a grown woman—during her early childhood and teenage years.

The show is neither nostalgia for the past nor social criticism of the years from 1969 to 1989. It is a portrayal of what that time was: a first-person account of comic absurdities created and experienced by extraordinary characters who really existed in a period that was utterly insane in its very essence.

In “Red Star, Block 28,” older audiences will reminisce, while younger ones will learn about many things, including:

• Young Pioneer camps;
• party-member neighbors;
• the female teachers at school;
• Chinese condoms;
• military service and the barracks;
• brigade work songs;
• friendship books;
• “sexual intercourse” and “comradely love”;
• “The Night Horizon” and “Musical Stairway”;
• the queues for bananas every December;
• Zhigulis, Trabants, and waiting lists for new cars;
• lignin paper and “The Age of Puberty”;
• the ideological subversion of bourgeois “decaying capitalism”;
• and how to cook a dish called “Good Wife.”

Everything will unfold without a script, alongside objects that have become classics of everyday socialist life for several generations.

The storytelling show aims not only to entertain, but also to give us an opportunity to recall in detail a real historical period during which our childhood and youth took place. They were wonderful—not despite it, not because of it, but independently of it. Because childhood and youth, except when they have been spent in wartime, are the most wonderful time in a person’s life.

Let us remember it, even with laughter, so that we do not allow those who come after us to spend their childhood and youth in such a way that one day they will not want to remember them!