Journalist James Verini’s new book, The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, tells the story of Ukrainians who turned a Mariupol dramatic arts theater into a haven for refugees after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
In this excerpt, Verini tells the story of aspiring actors Liza and Dima, a young couple who coped with the war by turning it into a play — before the theater was ultimately destroyed by Russian bombs.
The siege of Mariupol began as the Ukraine War began, in the predawn of Thursday, February 24 of 2022. Armored columns carrying roughly 190,000 troops began crossing the Ukrainian borders. Russian forces swept in a crescent north of the port city of Mariupol, in the southeastern corner of Ukraine, cutting off land routes into the city and setting up fire bases. With field guns, tanks, mortars, and the multi-barrel mobile rocket launchers commonly known as Grads, they commenced a barrage of Mariupol’s eastern outskirts that would spread west across the city and continue for 81 days.
Elizaveta Fatayeva didn’t learn those details when she awoke that first morning to news of the war. Few Ukrainians did. The news was stinting in specifics. The same footage of Russian tanks rolling over the border was replayed again and again on TV. Addressing the nation, President Volodymyr Zelensky offered, instead of details about the invasion, attempts at fortitude and solace. “We know for sure that we don’t need war. Not a Cold War, not a hot war, not a hybrid one,” he said.
It was not the most stirring call to arms from Zelensky, who had not yet transformed into the inspiring wartime leader the world would soon come to know, but then Liza, as she went by, a willowy 19-year-old amateur actress with long blonde hair and eyes that seemed demure until you realized they were studying your eyes, didn’t require martial stirring, nor solace, not yet. She wasn’t too worried. She thought the impudent bear to the north was merely bearing its teeth and growling, just as it had been doing on Ukraine’s eastern border for half her life.
As Liza walked to the supermarket where she worked, the shelling was still so distant, she could barely hear it. The doors opened and shoppers crowded into the aisles. Liza studied them. Their eyes weren’t desperate or even particularly anxious, she observed, though the arms below them were stuffing more into their baskets than she’d ever seen.
The same morning, Liza’s boyfriend, an acting student named Dima Murantsev, went to an automatic teller machine. Every citizen of Mariupol seemed to have had the same idea at the same moment. Already there were blocks-long lines at the banks. As Dima stood in line, his relatives called and texted him one after the other, like there’d been a death in the family. None of them were in Mariupol, yet they informed him it was only a short matter of time before the city was obliterated. Dima replied with pictures of the Ukrainian flags that had been draped from building facades and of the people calmly waiting beside him. “Nothing is happening,” he wrote. “No one has entered Mariupol yet.” When his grandmother video-called him, she said, “That’s it, Dima, this is the end.”
After waiting for hours in the line, Dima learned the machine was out of cash. So was every other ATM in the city. He went to a grocery near his dormitory and bought one of the last items left in the freezer section, an extra large bag of dumplings. Already shopkeepers were price-gouging, and the dumplings cost most of the remaining 800 hryvnas, or about 24 dollars, he had in his wallet. He dropped the dumplings in his dorm room and then walked to Liza’s supermarket.
Within days, Mariupol was encircled by the Russians and under total siege. The city’s power, gas, and water had been cut off, as had phone and internet service. The windows in Dima’s room had been shattered by explosions and he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a common room. During a lull in the shelling, he went outside for the first time in days. “There was complete extermination — opposite the dorm a building was already burnt out. Behind the dorm as well. Residential buildings were burnt,” he recalled. “A restaurant at the intersection was destroyed. Stores, gone. Buildings, gone.”
The windows in Liza’s apartment were gone, too. She looked from them onto the krushchevki, the drab apartment blocks built during the Krushchev era. The buildings, once so plain to her, now comprised a hellscape. Flames and smoke billowed from blast holes and blown-out windows. Collapsed walls and flooring smeared down the exteriors. After a blast shattered her windows, sending glass shards flying across the apartment, Liza took to huddling day and night in the hallway outside the apartment. Their nerves shattered.
On March 5, the 11th day of the war, police arrived at dorm and told the students that Kyiv and Moscow had negotiated the creation of a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol. The city government had assembled a convoy of busses outside the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater in the city center, or the Drama Theater, as people called it. Dima ran to Liza’s apartment.
“Pack your things, the most essential things only,” he said. “We are getting out of here today.”
They layered themselves in as many pairs of pants and sweaters as they could fit on, then stuffed bags with more clothing, blankets, what little food was left in their cupboards, and their identity documents. Liza had no carrying case for her cat, Zhmenya — Handful — so she squeezed him into a backpack.
Dima and Liza had gone to the Drama Theater many times, but this trip was different. “We moved in short bursts,” Liza recalled. “We were carrying very heavy bags, but we couldn’t stop for long because the shells were falling right behind us.” They cut through yards and alleyways, but “As soon as we left one yard, a shell landed there.” Before the war, the walk would have been a straight go down Myru Prospekt and would have taken perhaps 15 minutes. Today, it took three hours.
At Theater Square, they found a crowd of hundreds, but no busses. The growing crowd waited in the cold until dusk, when the police arrived, and announced there would be no evacuation that day. Without anywhere else to go, Liza and Dima went into the theater. They were astounded. It was already full to bursting with refugees like themselves. The couple had been to many performances here, but they’d never seen it so crowded.
“Instead of columns, people,” Dima said. “Instead of the floor, people.”
There was no water, no food, no blankets, no supplies. Nor was there warmth. The theater was without heating and so large that not even the mass of bodies raised the temperature much. Some of the people stood about, still in a panic. Others sat, looking hopeless.
Liza and Dima searched for a place to bed down for the night, stepping around and over people. There was not a foot of free space it seemed. Eventually, they made their way into the basement. The air was fetid with body odors and the scent of unwashed clothing, but at least it was a bit warmer. Families huddled together, guarding their small plots of floor. New arrivals would negotiate or quarrel or plead with the established refugees to take pity and give over a bit of space. Dima spotted a wall recess stuffed with scrap metal. If it was removed, there would be space just enough for the three of them. They dragged out the metal, then found a wooden palette among the detritus, and pushed into the recess. They covered the palette over with a layer of the old personnel files that were lying about, and put the blankets they’d brought over the paper.
Over the course of the next 10 days, a crew of volunteers led by the theater’s lighting director transformed the theater into the most famous refugee shelter in Mariupol. They built a field kitchen and infirmary. They set up diesel-powered generators. They dismantled the auditorium seats to create beds. Crews of scavengers combed the wreckage of the city, bringing back food and medicine. At its most crowded, the shelter slept 1,500 people a night and few twice as many. Each day refugees gathered on Theater Square with their luggage to await the convoy of busses. It never came.
Liza and Dima did not volunteer, they were always at something: waiting in the line at the field kitchen for hot water or soup; waiting in the line at the generators to charge Dima’s phone, so that they could watch one of the movies he had stored; bucking up the spirits of Liza’s mother, Oksana; or chasing after Handful, Liza’s cat, who went on long solitary ambles through the theater, returning to their wall recess in the basement like some world-wearied explorer.
Liza and Dima were old enough to know that if they didn’t find some way of interpreting the war for themselves, on their own terms, the wrong sort of memories would embed in their minds and drive them to distraction for the rest of their lives. They were actors — so they acted. They performed scenes from plays they’d worked on together before the war or that Dima had studied. If they could charge his phone, they recorded the performances. They found a wooden arm from a dismantled chair that resembled a gun. It reminded them of a conceptual piece they’d once been in about the history weaponry called A Farewell to Arms. They performed it now from memory, using the chair arm as a spear, a musket, a machine gun. They made a play of war.
Then they made the war a play. They began wandering around Mariupol. They told Oksana they were scavenging for food, but really they were taking in the devastation. They had to see it for themselves. They looked at the charred remains of buildings they’d known, the shimmering pools of glass shards, the blackened and frosted carapaces of cars, the trees shorn of their branches from small arms fire, the gaping tank shell holes in walls, and the rubble, always the rubble. Rubble everywhere. Tons, megatons of rubble, whole streets and neighborhoods of rubble. They walked to the College of Culture and Arts. Looking at what remained of the building, Dima recalled to Liza how frightened and annoyed he’d been just a few weeks earlier when he’d been practicing for a piano exam. I’m a real actor, not a musical actor, why do I need to play the piano, he’d wanted to know. A piano exam! What a thing to be frightened of.
On the morning of March 16, Liza and Dima awoke later than usual, in the mid-morning. The night before, Dima had fried a piece of fish on a fire pit. What remained of it was in a plastic bag. It was disgusting, but there was nothing else to eat. They were both growing dangerously thin. So they picked at the carcass. Dima felt like Smigel in The Lord of the Rings, crouching over the fish, his face and fingers oily, trying to get some nutrition into himself without retching.
Suddenly, the entire building shook, as though the earth beneath it was shifting. Then came a thunderous roar. Then the walls of the basement burst. Liza’s and Dima’s eyes squeezed shut instinctively. When Liza opened hers after she doesn’t know how long — in reality seconds, in her mind a near-eternity — it was onto a new, whited-out world. Dust suffused the air. She could see nothing, including Dima, though he was beside her. She sat, stunned into silence, unmoving, looking at where Dima’s face had been. Finally it emerged. His face may have been pale with terror, but she wouldn’t have known, because it was even paler from the dust that covered it. He looked like an actor with too much pancake makeup on. All she could make out were his eyes. In them, she saw terror.
“The eyes of a crazy person,” she recalled.
Dima had trained to convey his emotions through his eyes. Now he didn’t have to try. He recalled what he was thinking when Liza looked into them. Though a stage actor, his first love was film, and he was thinking, “I am sure the credits will roll now.”
They were still staring at one another, silent, in a mutual daze, when Dima’s nostrils cleared enough that the acrid scent of the fire smoke pierced through. His hearing returned, and shouts entered his years. Now he could distinguish bodies darting about, white masses cutting through the white haze. They looked up to see a face emerge from the whiteness above them. The dust on the face was smeared with blood and tears, giving lurid contour to a mouth and brow already contorted in despair. The face was a man’s, Dima determined. It was yelling something. Dima couldn’t make it out until he could.
“The theater is gone!” the face was yelling.
Liza felt as though she was underwater. Everything was “silent and slow,” she recalled. She couldn’t yet understand what that ghoulish face was yelling, not because she was deafened, but because the syllables were in her perception too stretched out to become words. All time was stretched out, like a rubber band, she thought. Dima shouted at her, and the band suddenly contracted and time accelerated back into place. She heard her own name, first distant and elongated, then sharp and clear.
“Liza!” Dima was shouting. “Liza!”
Her eyes focused on his.
“The theater has been bombed,” Dima said. A Russian bomber had dropped two 500-kilogram bombs on the building. “It is on fire. We have to go.”
Dima took hold of his laptop and the folder with his identity documents. Oksana grabbed her handbag and stuffed the still petrified but at least de-floored Handful under her arm. In the stairwell of the service exit they joined a welter of whitened people. Some sat on the stairs, bleeding, and dazed, while the others climbed over and around them. A few were trying to make their way against the human tide, to get down into the basement, either because they were searching for family or because they believed that if more bombs came, the basement was the safest place to be. Cries and shouts reverberated at vertical cross purposes in the stairwell, going up from the basement and coming down from the ground floor. Getting up the stairs and outside took at most a few minutes, but to Liza it felt “like an eternity.”
They emerged from the service exit nearby into what had been the field kitchen. Now it was a field of rubble, corpses, and dismembered limbs. Unable to bear it, she looked down. She kept her eyes on the ground. She knew that if she looked up again, she would faint. When another plane dove over the theater, Liza and Dima dove to the ground.
They got up, and, in a panic, ran among the cars that were bolting from the burning theater. The driver of a minibus stopped for them. It was already packed with passengers but somehow they squeezed in. The minibus took them about fifteen miles west along the coastal road. They got out and walked the remainder of way to a small coastal village, Melekyne. It was occupied by Russian soldiers, but they were uniterested in Liza and Dima. They slept in the spare room of a distant family acquaintance.
Handful the cat was in shock from the day’s events. In a video that Liza later showed me, he sits as I’d imagined Liza and Dima had that morning, stock still, his eyes wide with fright, his attention fixed on something beyond.
Before drifting off to sleep, Liza and Dima talked about the bombing. Liza realized there was a chasm in her memory. She could call to mind the minutes in the basement immediately after the explosion. She more vaguely recalled the journey up the stairwell. But there her recollection cut out. It didn’t resume until they were in the minibus. She asked Dima what she was doing while they were standing in the remains of the field kitchen. Dima considered keeping the truth from her, but he chose full candor instead.
“You were screaming,” he told her. “You kept screaming.”
She’d screamed not in fear, it seemed to Dima, or not only in fear, but in anger. At first, he couldn’t make out what she was screaming because of all of the noise around them. Then it became clear.
“Putin, die! Putin, die! Putin, die!”
She screamed it over and over.
Dima later told me, “The only question is why we stayed alive,” while so many others did not. “There were children. There were newborns. I am sure there were people much better than me there.”
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