Oksana Mysina

Oksana Anatolyevna Mysina (russian: Окса́на Анато́льевна Мы́сина) (born 15 March 1961, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, USSR) is an actor, director and musician. She has been described by ''The New York Times'' theatre critic Margo Jefferson as one of Russia's greatest actors. She is the founder, lead singer, violinist, and lyricist for the rock band Oxy Rocks.

Personal life

Oksana Mysina was born and lived in the Donbas region of Ukraine for the first eight years of her life. Her father Anatoly Vladimirovich Mysin, later to be a mining engineer, and her mother Lidia Grigoryevna Mysina (Bratus), subsequently a seismologist, grew up and were married in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro). Oksana credits both parents with giving her the necessary actor's sensibilities: "My irrepressible temperament is from my mother. My father... was a very emotional person." Oksana's sister Marina Yakut (Mysina), three years her elder, was a young talent on the violin and a teacher told the girls' parents that Marina needed to study in Moscow. As Mysina told the audience during a performance in Yekaterinburg in April 2019, the teacher "told my parents: 'Immediately! Immediately to Moscow! I've never had such a talent.' And they took me along too." The family moved to Moscow in 1969 where Oksana and Marina both studied violin and viola at the Gnesin School of Music. "I was admitted to Gnesinka in the hopes that I would be Marina No. 2," Oksana said in 2004. But Oksana had dreamed of acting since childhood, and, while still studying at the Gnesin School, she joined a well-known youth theater: "While still studying iolin I worked with Vyacheslav Spesivtsev at the then-super popular Krasnaya Presnya Youth Theater." She subsequently studied professionally at the Shchepkin Institute of the Maly Theater under the famed Mikhail Tsaryov, who had acted for Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1930s. She joined her first professional company, the Spartacus Square Theater-studio in 1986.

Oksana married American writer and translator John Freedman in 1989. They lived in Moscow until November 2018 when they relocated to Greece.

Stage

Mysina was a member of the Spartacus Square Theater-studio (known as Theater Moderne since 1995) from 1986 to 1994. During this tenure she achieved her first international exposure, performing the title role in Lyudmila Razumovskaya's play ''Dear Yelena Sergeevna'' on tours to the BITEF festival in Serbia in 1989, and Chicago and Los Angeles in 1990. She began working independently at various Moscow theaters, starting at the Novy Drama Theater, where she performed from 1993 to 2000, and the Theater of Young Spectators (MTYuZ), where she performed from 1994 to 2020.

Mysina's starring role at MTYuZ as Katerina Ivanovna in Kama Ginkas's 1994 Moscow production of his son Daniil Gink's play ''K. I. from Crime'', a 90-minute monologue adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's '' Crime and Punishment'' was acclaimed as the best production of the Moscow season. "Critics widely agreed hat sherose to the creative heights demanded by Dostoevsky." In tours around the world, she took the role to the Grotowski Center in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1995, the Avignon Festival, France, in 1997, the Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF) in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 2000, the Midwinter Night's Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, 2000, the Mikhail Tumanishvili International Arts Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2002, Bard SummerScape in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 2003 the Foundry Theater on Off-Broadway in New York City in 2005, on a three-city tour of Brazil in 2006, and elsewhere.

Aside from her work with Ginkas, Mysina acted for many top theater directors, including Boris Lvov-Anokhin (Novy Drama Theater, 1993–2001), Vladimir Mirzoyev (Stanislavsky Drama Theater, 1997), Roman Kozak (Moscow Art Theater and Pushkin Drama Theater, 1997–2000), Oleg Menshikov (814 Theater Association, 2000–01), Dmitry Krymov (School of Dramatic Art, 2010–2018), as well as in the professional debut of Eugenia Berkovich
( Kirill Serebrennikov's Seventh Studio at Winzavod, 2011). She was the first Russian-language performer of the Narrator in the Russian premiere of Valère Novarina's contemporary avant-garde classic ''The Imaginary Operetta'' at the School of Dramatic Art (2010). She founded her own theater, the Oksana Mysina Theatrical Brotherhood (2001-2010), directing and acting in two plays by Viktor Korkiya, ''Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the Island of Taganrog'', and ''Ariston'', based on the myth of Oedipus. She was the first performer in roles of plays by numerous contemporary playwrights, including Lyudmila Razumovskaya, Yevgeny Kozlovsky, Alexei Kazantsev, Maksym Kurochkin, Korkiya, Alexander Chugunov, Vadim Levanov, Klim (pseudonym of Vladimir Klimenko), and Kira Malinina.

Television

For her performance in Yelena Tsyplakova's 23-part miniseries ''Family Secrets'' (2001), Mysina received a Spolokhi award for best actress. Her performance in "The Other Mask" episode of the original ''Kamenskaya'' TV mini-series is recognized as a small masterpiece. In Oleg Babitsky and Yury Goldin's television movie of Mikhail Bulgakov's ''Theatrical Novel'' (2003), she offered an eccentric interpretation of Polixena. Her performance as Elzbieta in Alexei Zernov's ironic TV mini-series ''All or Nothing'', based on Joanna Chmielewska's ''Wszystko czerwona'' (All Red), was first aired in 2004. Mysina performed the lead in Arkady Sirenko's made-for TV movie ''Wilting-Failing'', based on stories by Vasily Shukshin (2004). She performed in Andrei Eshpai, Jr.'s TV mini-series of Anatoly Rybakov's novel ''The Children of the Arbat'' (2004) and in Yury Kara's ''Star of the Age'' (2005) in which she played the legendary Russian actress Serafima Birman

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases