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The Great Read
The students in a summer acting course performed a play set in America, called, “It’s okay!” And it gave them hope that their lives would be OK, too.
By Kim Barker and Dzvinka Pinchuk
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
The teacher needed teenagers for her summer acting class in Kyiv, which would end with the performance of an original play.
Listen to this article with reporter commentary
“This is a course for happy children, free in their thoughts and dreams,” the instructor, Olesia Korzhenevska, wrote on Facebook last spring.
It was hard to find happy teenagers in Ukraine. The pandemic and the war with Russia had trapped some young people in their homes, solitary and fearful, for more than four years. Many did not know how to socialize and could not imagine a future without war.
But two days after her Facebook post, Ms. Korzhenevska heard from the mother of a 16-year-old boy, asking her to accept him in the class.
Sasha Suchyk was an unlikely candidate. A year earlier, he had dropped out of the same class and landed in a mental hospital, suffering from clinical depression, even hurting himself. Buffeted by the war and dark thoughts, he was still in the hospital, where he had spent most of the previous year.
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