Mobile Waves of Being

"Mobile Waves of Being, or Verbum caro factum est" is the dramatic debut of the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeienko. The author was forced to live under occupation for a month in the spring of 2022 on a country farm between Bucha and Borodianka. This play is his attempt to make sense of his own traumatic experience of the russian-Ukrainian war with the help of literature.

The heroes of the play are a dozen random people who happened to be nearby in the cooperative settlement "The Nearest Gardens" in the first days of the occupation. They share a common need to pick up a stray mobile signal with their phone in a remote forest clearing. But life during the war loses its usual boundaries - and deceased relatives, heroes of Shakespeare and Edgar Poe come in contact with living people, and above the heads of the peasants - the Ukrainian cosmos, dotted with thorny stars, opens up.

Volodymyr Rafeienko's baroquely lush, cruel, and poignant play is about the price a person sometimes pays for the right to touch something over which even death has no power.