Day 14...what a jam packed two weeks it's been...

I went for numerous multi-mile hikes in preparation for my time here in Moscow and I never once got a blister.  But now that I’m here, I seem to be in a constant battle with the little devils.  Just when one heals up, I get another…I just feel like I can’t win.  They’re not horribly painful or anything like that, they’re just a minor nuisance that I’d rather live without.

I slept in today, kind of anyway.  I was up really late last night working on my blog so it was nice that I didn’t have to be up until ‘noon’ish.  The bad part was that I kept waking up at random intervals all morning.

We went to the Stanislavsky House Museum today and it was really educational.  I could write for a while about things we learn but I try to hit just a few highlights.  This house is actually only where we spent the last 17 years of his life.  He came from a wealthy merchant family and lived next to the family factory near Moscow, but after the October Revolution things changed dramatically.  Eventually, under Communist rule, his family’s factory was taken over by the government and he lost all his wealth.  This is significant because he had used his money to help support the still relatively young Moscow Art Theatre.  To help the MXAT survive, he took in on tour for several years in Europe and the US.  When they eventually came back to Moscow, the government gave him this house to live in so they could prop him up as the supreme example of a theater director.  He only had the entirety of the top floor while the first floor was jam packed with ‘normal’ Muscovites living under the Soviet regime.  Today, the first floor is part of the museum and acts kind of like a gallery to him and the MXAT.  Right now there is an exhibit of the previous head of the design program at the MXAT School, A. D. Ponsov.  Here’s a few of his costume renderings from the exhibit.

We saw Gogol’s play Marriage at the MXAT tonight.  It was a pretty entertaining comedy. It was easier to follow the play having read through a synopsis beforehand.  The set was kind of interesting; at least it looked like a more traditional approach to a stage set anyway.  It was two platform sets connected together by a wall in the back that pivoted to one side or the other depending on which set was down stage.  Then they were also connected together on the down stage side by a couple of walls that kind of functioned like an accordion that created a third room for the show.  It was quite clever and I might have to steal that idea sometime…  Here’s a couple pictures I got off the theater’s website.