Ukrainian children bring a play from a bomb shelter in Brooklyn

The band recently arrived in New York to perform "Mom on Skype", which premiered in April in Lviv, at the Irondale Center this weekend. end.

In a former Sunday school space in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood on Monday, eight children, newly arrived from Ukraine, gathered on a pair of risers and began to sing.

Hanna Oneshchak, 12, on accordion, accompanied the other seven as they sang a Ukrainian folk song, "Ta nema toho Mykyty", about a man who decides to leave the country to look for a better job, but then looks at the mountains and, struck by their beauty, changes his mind. "I will not go to American land."

Children, students of the Open-Minded Kids Studio theater school in Lviv, rehearsed the song before two weeks d performances of the play “Mama Po Skaipu” (“Mom on Skype”) at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. This will be the US premiere of the 80-minute show, which premieres Saturday and Sunday nights.

Image "We share our emotions with Americans," 14-year-old Anastasiia Mysiuha said of the group's piece. “We share our emotions with Americans,” 14-year-old Anastasiia Mysiuha said in English. And, she says, she hopes viewers "will get a better understanding of what's going on in Ukraine."

The show, which will be presented in Ukrainian with subtitles in English, is a series of seven monologues about family separation told from the perspective of children. Written by contemporary writers from Lviv, the true stories were inspired by the mass exodus from Ukraine in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, many men and women went to other countries to work so that they could support their families back home.

“Skype Mom was first staged in a warehouse-turned-bomb shelter in Lviv, western Ukraine, in April, just two months after the Russian invasion began. There it was led by an art teacher turned Ukrainian active-duty soldier, Oleg Oneshchak, who is the father of two of the children in the play: Hanna and 7-year-old Oleksii. It was one of the few cultural events to take place in Ukraine. at that time.

"A lot of people were crying when we did it in Ukraine," said Khrystyna Hniedko, 14, one of the performers.

Now the kids, ages 7-14, are performing for audiences in Brooklyn this weekend.

The idea for the tour was born when Jim Niesen, artistic director of the Irondale Center, home of the non-profit theater company Irondale Ensemble Project, saw a photo report in the New York Times in late April about the performance in Ukraine. .

"I was so inspired by them," Niesen said in an interview at the theater this week. "There was this horrible war going on, and there they were, having a play."

He and the theater's executive director, Terry Greiss, have caught up with Oneshchak on Facebook Messenger and came up with an idea: Would he and the kids consider bringing the show to Brooklyn?

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