Artistic Director Beata Pilch directs a set of two staged readings of plays by Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova. Based on her true life experiences. Tthese plays are deeply personal and political — a tribute to Ukrainian resilience, to motherhood, to ordinary people surviving war.

Golem

Written by Sasha Denisova
Translated by Maria Saltykova
Directed by Beata Pilch
Tuesday Oct. 28th

Featuring Ariana Silvan-Grau and Monika Valkunaite and Jakob Ulburghs as the narrator.

My Mama and the Full Scale Invasion

Written by Sasha Denisova
Translated by Micha Kachman
Adapted by Kellie Mecleary
Directed by Beata Pilch

Featuring: Anna Diogene, Angelina Usenia and Michael Garvey.

Tuesday Nov. 11th

Graphic Design: Michal Janicki

GOLEM

and

MY MAMA AND THE FULL SCALE INVASION

Barcelona, Spain

Tuesday Oct. 28th and Nov. 11th, 2025 at The BCN Studio C/ D’Elkano 26

Based on the playwright’s true life experiences, these plays are both deeply personal and political —
These stories weave together the everyday: domestic life in wartime, mother-daughter intimacy, memories of the past, come to terms with the loss of loved ones, humor, pain, and fantasy.

Playwright: Sasha Denisova is a Ukrainian playwright, director, and novelist whose work merges documentary realism with poetic imagination. Born in Kyiv, she studied philology at Taras Shevchenko University before pursuing theater in Moscow, London, and beyond —including training at the Royal Court and graduating from the School for Theater Leaders at the Moscow Art Theatre School. In her plays, Denisova weaves together documentary storytelling, live speech, phantasmagoria, and grotesque— a signature style evident from her first major production Light My Fire, which received the Golden Mask Award in 2012, to her final Russian work Batman vs. Brezhnev. During her years in Russia, she wrote and staged over 25 productions. In Russia, she served as deputy artistic director of the Mayakovsky Theater and as chief dramaturg at the Meyerhold Center, while also teaching documentary theater and screenwriting at the Moscow School of New Cin- ema. She became a leading figure in the Russian language documentary stage—until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when she fled Moscow for Warsaw. Most of her productions were
canceled or continue to run without her name. Since the war began, Denisova has written and staged a series of urgent, lyrical plays about war, exile, and resistance: My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion, created and performed at CCCB–Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, with the support of Artists at Risk. The play has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, and Catalan. The Hague, a surreal tribunal staged by Ukrainian children against putin, told through the eyes of a girl from Mariupol. The piece has been performed in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, France, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and the U.S. (Arlekin Players Theatre, Boston). She’s also written Six Ribs of Anger, about Ukrainian refugees across Europe (Kommuna Warszawa); Decameron: Love Stories During the War (Warsaw); and Golem, a new play about two women grieving the same man—an intellectual who gave his life for his country. Premieres in Amsterdam in fall 2025. Denisova now lives and works in Barcelona, where she is completing two novels: The Hague and Sasha and Her Brain Run to Barcelona and Win—a sharp, auto-fictional tale about a woman, a war, and a city that changes her language and her life. American awards include the 2024 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Direction (The Hague [Gaaga]) and the 2024 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Production of a Play (MyMama and the Full-Scale Invasion).