Meg Cashel, Tyler Bremer, Veronica Tjioe
When Soso is left for dead on the Eastern Front, he’s taken in by the Kremlin due to his shocking resemblance to a certain someone. Koba is tasked with training him to perform the role of a lifetime: Stalin’s body double. While Soso is a performer—trained to dance, juggle, and tour the countryside entertaining peasants, Koba is an Actor’s Actor, a student of Stanislavski himself (maybe you’ve heard of his System?), committed to the pursuit of perezhivanie, or experiencing a character’s reality. Based roughly on the life of Felix Dadaev, one of Stalin’s known doubles, the play draws on the historical events of Stalin’s life, the acting methods of the 1940s, and the demise of Yakov Dhugasvilli (Stalin’s real son, who died in a Nazi prison as his father refused to negotiate for his release), as the doubles prepare for the Conference at Tehran, when three so-called Great Men (or were they merely players?) decided the fate of the 20th century.