We sat down with Scenic & Costume Designer Misha Kachman, who was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, to explore how his designs for Mother Russia draw on his personal experience.

^{Scenic & Costume Designer Misha Kachman}

Seattle Rep: What was it like living in St. Petersburg during the transition from Communism to capitalism?

Misha Kachman: I was in my late teens and early twenties. It was very interesting, but also at times scary, disorienting, amusing, baffling, exciting, and terrifying. It was never boring. Money was always scarce, and I would have said that we lived paycheck to paycheck except for the fact that we didn’t have bank accounts. Russia was basically a cash economy until around 1999–2000, by which time my family and I had already left. The thing is, we really didn’t know how truly poor we were until the economic reforms began.

I grew up in the 1970s in a single room in a communal flat, a room I shared with my parents, my twin brother, and a baby grand piano, but I didn’t feel particularly poor when I was a child. The sudden abundance of largely unaffordable consumer choices was disorienting and, for many, quite baffling. For instance, at some point in the early nineties, the TV would run a relentless stream of commercials for Head & Shoulders shampoo. Who, before the fall of Communism, knew that dandruff was such a massive problem?

There was very little predictability and security of any sort, but there was freedom, and there was hope.

^{Misha Kachman's scenic model for Mother Russia (2025). Photo by Sayed Alamy.}

SR: How did that experience influence your designs for this show?

MK: I certainly had very little need for what designers call “research” because I have a very vivid memory of what everything used to look and feel like—streets, facades, trash, people’s faces, hair, clothes, etc. Strange juxtapositions of old Soviet apartment blocks and sleek advertisements for Western brands most people couldn’t afford yet; swarms of street vendors and kiosks next to subway stations; luxury German cars driven by men wearing burgundy dress coats and black turtlenecks who had brick Motorola cellphones demonstrably glued their ears while navigating gargantuan potholes and deteriorating tram tracks in the middle of St. Petersburg streets.

SR: Is there anything you want the audience to know? Anything you hope they take away?

MK: First, I hope they laugh a lot. I think Lauren’s play is very funny. Second, I can’t think about this production outside the context of what has transpired in and with Russia over the decades that followed. Particularly in the light of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which will have lasted a full three years by the time Mother Russia begins performances. But then again, as Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev put it back in 1831 in his “Philosophical Letters,” Russia "represents nothing more than a gap in the rational existence of humanity.”

See Mother Russia on stage at Seattle Rep from March 6 – April 13, 2025. 

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