In ‘The Gaaga,’ Sasha Denisova tells a comedic and ‘grotesque’ wartime story

To create art out of something as bleak as war takes immense talent, and the widely celebrated playwright and director Sasha Denisova did just that with her production “The Gaaga.” Through a collection of first-person interviews with Ukrainian refugees and officials, Denisova shows the audience the reality of wartime through the eyes of the protagonist, known simply as “The Girl.” This phantasmagoria, as it’s called, is dark, funny and beautiful.

The U.S. premiere of “The Gaaga” — which translates to “The Hague” — is on June 2, but audiences worldwide can view the performance virtually with the help of the Arlekin Players Theater and the zero-G Virtual Theater Lab. Sasha Denisova, playwright and co-director, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss how the production came to be. Sasha was joined by cast member Darya Denisova (no relation) to help translate.

Arun Rath: How long did it take to conduct the immense amount of research that went into writing this play?

Sasha Denisova, as translated by Darya Denisova: It took [Sasha] about two months, but she kept editing and writing the play in Poland, where she went to when the war started. So — somewhat — two months. She had talked to British lawyers and people in Europe.

Rath: How much comes from your own experience?

Denisova: The central character, “The Girl” in the play, is very personal to Sasha. There was a prototype — the real girl who was writing those diaries — but they never met in person. Sasha feels very, very personally connected with that central character. She’s been talking to people and connected to two people in Mariupol when all the horrors happened there last spring.

This character, this girl’s character, has a lot of Sasha’s character traits and portrays something very personal for Sasha. To some extent, this girl is Alice from Alice in Wonderland, where she finds herself in this horror kingdom as if she draws them. Sometimes they’re even funny, sometimes they may seem funny. They are her puppets in the world that she created.

Rath: I understand that there’s a kind of absurdism, a dark humor to this.

Denisova: It has a lot of dark humor and dark comedy is mixed in with documentary here, because a lot of the text is real quotes of these people: Putin, of course, and [Army General Sergei] Shoigu, who is the defense minister. Sasha uses a lot of the original texts and original interviews from what these people do on screens every single day in Russia.

Rath: I’m curious about the use of the term phantasmagoria. How does phantasmagoria apply?

Denisova: The phantasmagoria part here is that The Girl takes each character to the tribunal and creates a separate horror story for each of them. So, for instance, the phantasmagoria piece that — we’ll reveal a little bit of the show, so, spoiler alert — there is a character that is the head of the Chechen Republic in Russia. He will be tortured and interrogated by his own troops, and the comedic part of it is that they simply did not recognize him.

Rath: It sounds like you’ve taken your audience through a lot of very different and distinct but really extreme emotional states through the course of this.

Denisova: Sasha is combining and mixing different genres, and everything is kind of in a grotesque manner.

The production will be available virtually beginning June 8.