Only now, her director is doing something very different from what they were taught in eighth grade. The merchant’s wife and daughter, in their production, are practically the same age, both abused, both locked up in the courtyard of the merchant’s house, behind three rows of fences, away from life and any chance of personal happiness. Her character Matryona, always played by middle-aged actresses as a petty tyrant, in their production is as much of a victim as her stepdaughter, who, in turn, is as far from being “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” as any of the play’s despotic merchants.

They rehearse every day, and this routine—getting up, making coffee in a small copper pot she brought from Georgia where her theater went on tour last summer, when her mother was still alive, getting dressed and waiting for a bus under her windows—makes life purposeful and gives shape to the quiet, empty mornings. She wakes up to the silence in the kitchen and the silence in the room where her mother slept. Silence, despite the streetcars screeching on the turn under her windows and the neighbor behind the wall adjusting the volume of their radio to listen to the morning news. Silence in her apartment, silence in her soul, silence hand in hand with guilt. She gets up, pulls on a sweater and pants she wore the day before, and walks downstairs to the bus stop, almost sleepwalking, as if she’d been enmeshed in cobwebs, so every step requires effort to push through the sticky binding. Even the smallest task—taking her coat off the hook, for instance, or lifting a scarf out of a drawer—seems like a colossal endeavor that requires might and concentration almost beyond her power.

Vladimir Ivanovich, who is her merchant husband in the play, watches her during rehearsals, senses the cobwebs, and tries to pick them off with remarks that would normally make her laugh. Sasha doesn’t know what he sees when he looks at her. What she saw this morning when she glanced at the mirror was distressing: a pyramid of bones upholstered in sallow skin, exhausted eyes, the face of a stranger. “The problem with young people is that I am no longer among them,” he says, trying to make her smile, and her mouth smiles, but he can see that her eyes don’t. In spite of having a wife and two grown children, he cares about her, Sasha knows; once in a while, he even says he loves her. She calls him by his name and patronymic, the way you would address someone else’s father.