A New York Actress in Moscow

Heidi Schreck is an American actress and playwright who is originally from the state of Washington but has been based in New York City since 2003. She won a prestigious OBIE award in 2008 for her performance in "Drum of the Waves of Horikawa," after which one New York blogger called her "God's gift to audience members everywhere." This year she received a Page 73 playwriting grant, in connection with which she spent a week in Moscow doing research at the end of May. Heidi spent a year teaching English in Siberia in the mid-1990s and, before resuming her acting career in the U.S., spent two years working as a journalist in St. Petersburg. It's that experience in Russia that she plans on using as material for a play. For the record, Heidi is also the sister of Carl Schreck, a former editor of The Moscow Times, although we won't hold that against her.

While conducting interviews and doing research around Moscow, Heidi found time to check out a number of shows. I cornered her in a cafe with my trusty digital camera and coerced her into spilling the beans. So, what did she think? Her answers, taped in two video segments, can be watched below.

In the first, Heidi talks about how she ended up at Dmitry Krymov's production of "Auction" at the School of Dramatic Art almost by accident. At the time, the actress didn't even realize that her antenna for talent had led her to a show by one of the most interesting directors to emerge in town over the last decade. Heidi then launches into an impassioned description of Yury Butusov's production of Eugene Ionesco's "Macbett" at Konstantin Raikin's Satirikon Theater &mdash so impassioned, in fact, that she actually runs out of words to describe her impressions. I pushed "stop," Heidi took a breath, and we picked up where we left off in a second take.

Although the elaborate stagecraft of "Macbett" sometimes "got in the way of the narrative" for her, Heidi said this show was "a constant progression of surprises," and she declared one of the scenes of Grigory Siyatvinda playing Macbett "one of the most beautiful things I think I've seen."

Another show that caught Heidi's eye was Valery Fokin's dramatization of Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" for the Sovremennik Theater. She was taken with the work of composer Alexander Bakshi and designer Ilya Epelbaum, who created the impressive shadow scenes. But her highest praise was saved for Marina Neyolova, the actress who plays the nondescript clerk Akaky Akakievich. "You could see her thinking, which is an amazing quality in an actor," Heidi said of Neyolova.

Click the images below to watch the videos.