Kyiv, Ukraine – Villagers whisper that Maryna, a refugee from Russia-annexed Crimea, kept a black hen’s egg under her armpit to hatch an evil critter that makes wishes come true.
Maryna, the heroine of Twenty One, staged in a tiny basement Veterans’ Theatre in central Kyiv, has one wish: that her soldier husband Petro comes back alive. She is obsessed with incubating the egg her hen laid before dying. Living modestly in a rural house, Maryna frantically raises tens of thousands of dollars online to buy drones, weapons and power generators for the front line. She believes this ransom keeps Petro alive, paid to an obnoxious woman in a black leather coat who personifies death and whose visits Maryna imagines.
Despite its injection of magic realism, the play is “our reality,” actress Kateryna Svyrydenko, who plays Maryna, told Al Jazeera. “There is enough of everything, one can cry, laugh, think,” she said between rehearsal and performance in the jam-packed theatre.
Founded in 2024, the Veterans’ Theatre runs a four-month school for servicemen, their wives and widows who want to become playwrights. Discussed and dissected by fellow veteran students and professional instructors, their plays are staged at graduation and then travel to other Ukrainian theatres, serving as thespian therapy for authors, actors and audiences. Soldiers-turned-playwrights tell about wounds, amputations, contusions or captivity; their wives and widows act out pain and fears often overshadowed by men’s hardships.
Svyrydenko’s husband went missing on the front in 2022, six months after Russia’s full-scale invasion began. “I can’t express in words how difficult, how heavy it is. The waiting and the incognisance,” she said, still clad in her character’s dress. More crushing is the emotional withdrawal and sad silence of her seven-year-old son, Semen. “He very rarely allows himself to cry at night. Very rarely,” she added with restraint.
Twenty One is autobiographical, written by publicist and campaigner Olha Murashko, who raises money for arms and gear that end up at the front, where her husband still serves. The plot resonates: some audience members, director Kateryna Vyshneva said, admit that “if there is no happy end in my life, for a split second I believed that a happy end is possible.”
The Veterans’ Theatre aims to seize the zeitgeist so future generations can have firsthand knowledge of the war. “We have to talk about the war using the words of its participants, through the eyes of those who survived it,” Vyshneva said. “It’s important to document the here and now while it hurts, while it’s hot, it’s burning, while it means something.”
Last year, veteran and documentary filmmaker Oleksandr Tkachuk staged his first play, A Military Mom, written by medic Alyna Sarnatska. It retells her ordeal of being torn between the front and her child. Tkachuk called the act of reliving pain on stage therapeutic “as a side effect of art.” “They realise [their trauma], they break it down, they relive it, let it pass through them, not just in flashbacks, but as a clear, calm memory.”
Twenty-one days is what it takes an egg to hatch and a fetus to develop a heartbeat. Maryna knows this after lost hope and miscarriages before giving birth to her daughter, Alyna. Alyna has never lived in peace: Maryna joined crowds at Kyiv’s Independence Square during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity while pregnant. The current war exacerbates Alyna’s teenage confusion—arguing with her mother, bickering with a neighbour, drawing Ukrainian flags on asphalt—and she silently waits for her father’s calls or messages. His silence lasts more than two weeks.
On stage, as Maryna frets at home, two soldiers from Petro’s unit try to evacuate a dying brother-in-arms and are killed by a Russian strike. Maryna’s anguish—twisted with pain and tears—spreads through the audience. That shared release is what Vyshneva calls collective catharsis: “They reached a unison, a resonance,” she said, “breathed with her, and waited for her husband with her.”
Maryna’s agony breaks when Alyna cries out: “Daddy called! Looks like the egg hatched!” The theatre exhales—tears still rolling, but a sigh of relief unites everyone in the small basement hall.