By George Basler

J. Vaclav Michalec was looking to present plays that deal with hard issues in the realm of social justice when he formed Face It! Theatre nine years ago. He wants to get people talking about these topics, conversations he believes are desperately needed at the present time.

“I want the public to see how the community can benefit from these kinds of productions,” said Michalec, a playwright, director and actor with a master’s degree in theater from Binghamton University.

Since its founding, Face It! has staged plays on the Afghanistan War, a eugenics program that targeted Blacks in North Carolina, and racial tensions in an upstate New York community. The company is now focusing its attention on the issue of political propaganda by presenting In the Garden of Z. The play will open Friday (Nov. 1) for a two-weekend run in the First Congregational Church Theatre in Binghamton. Admission is free.

“The play is so appropriate for now when the political atmosphere in America is so toxic, allowing propaganda to replace our ability to think,” Michalec said. “It’s an uninvited guest wherever we go.”

In the Garden of Z is the work of Jelizaveta Robinson, a Russian woman who grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Latvia. She immigrated to the United States in 2019 to live out her dream to be an actress. The genesis of the play, which she wrote along with her husband, Sean, was her revulsion with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“She thought her friends and family would agree, but she was wrong. They supported it (the invasion). It led to tensions in her family,” Michalec said.

To find out why, Robinson and her husband did research into how Russian state media and propaganda worked to build support for Putin’s invasion, and how these methods are used in other parts of the world.

This means In the Garden of Z’s message is a universal one. “It’s dealing with the same fundamental forces that push people apart into different ideological camps where open truth and facts no longer seem relevant,” Michalec said.

The play debuted earlier this year at the New Hampshire Theatre Project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Michalec’s sister contacted him after seeing the production and told him, “It’s right up your alley,” he said.

Michalec, is directing the Face It! production with an all-female cast playing the seven characters. He described the play as a “docudrama” with an interesting story-telling structure.

The central characters are a Russian girl and her mother, who are pulled apart by their divergent feelings about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The mother buys into Russian propaganda from state media while the young girl, with access to other media, is horrified. To find some comfort, the girl is reading two books: the day-to-day journal of a Russian teenager living through the bloody war between the Russian Federation and Chechnya, and the recollections of a prominent Russian woman who was sent to the Soviet Gulag during the Stalin era of the 1930s and 1940s.

“As she reads about the two women (who were real people), she crosses time and has conversations with the two women,” Michalec said. The three stories are woven together as the play moves from the present moment to the Chechen War to the Soviet Gulag and back again.

Three Binghamton University students — Alexandra Blum, an undergraduate theater student; Anastasiya Psyhk, a Ukrainian native, and Dana Buralkiyeva, from Kazakhstan — are in the Face It! production. Also in the cast are local actors Dori May Ganisin, Nina Varano and Kirsten Whistle, who have appeared in numerous regional productions. Alex Neal-Hansen, a Binghamton High School ninth grader, rounds out the cast.
 
Michalec hopes In the Garden of Z will “get the concepts (of propaganda) out in the open so people can understand how they work across communities.” First Congregational Church deserves credit for allowing its space to be used for a production that deals with difficult issues, he said.

IF YOU GO: Face It! Theatre will present the play In the Garden of Z by Sean and Jelizaveta Robinson at the First Congregational Church Theatre, 30 Main St. Binghamton. Performances are at 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 10. Admission is free. Donations will be accepted.