THE THEATER OF QUESTIONS:

A MANIFESTO FOR THE RESTLESS​

By Igor Golyak

I. THE HIGHEST JOY

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There's a recording I return to — Georgy Tovstonogov, the great Soviet director, his voice crackling through decades of tape. He divides all theater into two categories: spectacles that give answers and spectacles that ask questions.

"I am for spectacle-questions," he declares.
 

This is my north star. This is the invitation I extend to every collaborator, every audience member who enters our space.

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The highest joy for a theater maker, Tovstonogov said, is when someone tells you they couldn't go straight home after the show. They had to walk the streets. Something got under their skin and they can't even name it yet. Not because they're troubled—though sometimes they are—but because they're alive to possibility, awake to connection, suddenly aware that strangers in the dark have become something like a community.
 

That restlessness, that beautiful discomfort, that unexpected sense of kinship — that's theater doing what it's supposed to do.

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When theater tries to give you answers, it becomes a sermon. Didactic. Moralizing. But a question? A question opens doors. It creates space for discovery. It says: what do you think? What do you see? What do we believe together?

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This is what I create: theater that asks questions we discover we've been hungry to ask—together.

II. THE OBSTACLE AS INVITATION

In rehearsals, I create problems for my actors.
 

If they need to cross from here to there, I tell them — imagine there are puddles. You can't walk straight. You have to navigate around them, jump over them.

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The obstacles don't block the path—they reveal the path. The questions create oxygen. The difficulty becomes discovery.

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I've directed luminous artists in exile—Chulpan Khamatova and Andrey Burkovskiy—working with three pages of Ionesco, two and a half days, and whatever objects we could find in a rehearsal room. A dog barked. Chulpan grabbed a leash and used it as a generator crank. Andrey transformed his lines into the rumble of those machines that keep Ukrainian cities alive when the power grid fails.

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This is the alchemy: every sound carries ghosts of meaning. A Mardi Gras necklace becomes internal organs. White powder transforms from construction dust to the ash of bombed buildings, depending on who's watching, what they've lived, what they bring into the room.

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I've made theater with window blinds and courage. I've also filled major stages. The rigor is identical. The invitation is the same: bring yourself. All of yourself. We need what you know.

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What remains essential is always the actor's body, the director's vision, the eternal human need to connect—and the stories we carry, whether we've trained at conservatories or carry our theater in our bones from lived experience.

III. THEATER BELONGS TO EVERYONE WHO SHOWS UP

When you leave your country at eleven, you learn to read rooms differently. You notice what belongs and what doesn't. You feel the weight of doors — which ones open easily and which ones require codes you don't have.

I could have let this make me bitter. Instead, I've tried to let it teach me about opening doors.

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At -Arlekin! we've built something that started as survival and became mission: a company of immigrants, refugees, survivors of circumstance. Artists who left everything behind and found each other in rehearsal rooms. Professional actors, yes—but also the Russian grandmother who never performed before she joined us, the recent arrival working three jobs who shows up because theater is the one place that feels like home.

We are living proof that theater doesn't belong only to those who went to the right schools, grew up in the right places, speak without accents. It belongs to anyone brave enough to walk through the door and say: I have something to offer. I have questions too.

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Every production I make is shaped by the question: what happens to people like us — educated, civilized, certain of our goodness — when the world cracks open? Our Class asks it through Polish schoolchildren who become murderers. The Dybbuk asks it through a bride possessed by her dead beloved. Witness asked it through passengers on a ship turned away from every port.

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I return to this question not because I have special sight, but because I've learned that sometimes distance gives perspective. Sometimes margins illuminate centers. Sometimes the most important questions come from unexpected places—from the person who just arrived in this country, from the elder who's never been to theater before, from the kid who thought theater wasn't for people like them.

Those are often the questions that matter most.

IV. THE PRACTICAL MAGIC

Theater, at its most essential, is an act of faith — the belief that gathering strangers in a room to witness stories can somehow heal the fractures that threaten to destroy our capacity for empathy.

That faith is not naive. It is the most practical magic we possess.

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I don't believe in the lessons of the past. If they worked, would we be here? When we staged Our Class, the question wasn't "how could those people do such terrible things in 1941?"

The question was "when will we?" And then, more urgently: "how do we not?"

Sometimes people ask me what message I want to send with my work.

Message? Western Union sends messages.

I'm trying to create conditions for transformation. A space where strangers become something more than strangers. Where the familiar becomes luminous with new meaning. Where we discover we have more in common than we thought possible, even—especially—with people whose experiences are nothing like our own.

V. THE INVITATION TO COLLABORATORS

I'm looking for partners who understand that art is made from constraints, not despite them.

Actors—professional or not—who can say "I don't know how to do this" and hear it as the beginning of discovery. Designers who see every limitation as a doorway. Producers who believe audiences are hungry—starving, actually—for theater that treats them as full partners in making meaning. Community members who have stories the rest of us need to hear.

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I've been privileged to work with extraordinary actors on major stages. I'm equally excited about work that brings together professional artists with people who've never set foot in a theater before—anyone who has a story to tell, anyone brave enough to ask the questions with us.

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Because here's what I know: the audience brings half the art into the room. They bring their histories, their fears, their hopes, their questions. They bring the stories we haven't imagined. They bring each other.

My job isn't to give them answers. My job is to create the conditions where something can happen between us that couldn't happen anywhere else. Where a banker sits next to a teacher sits next to a student sits next to a grandmother, and for two hours they breathe together in the dark, and something shifts.

Not just in each person—between them.

VI. WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

When you work with me, you're joining a theater that believes:

Questions are more generous than answers.

Obstacles reveal pathways.

Beauty and rigor can coexist.

Theater can be joyful AND challenging, empathetic AND transformative.

The margins illuminate the center—and the center has much to learn from the margins.

Communities are built in rooms where strangers encounter their common humanity.

Theater belongs to everyone who shows up.

This is work made with window blinds and courage, yes—but also with joy. With wonder. Sometimes the question leads to laughter. Sometimes to tears. Sometimes to that particular kind of wonder when strangers discover they're not so strange after all.

With the stubborn, ridiculous, essential belief that gathering together to tell stories might actually change something.

Not might. Does.

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I'm committed to making work that doesn't just welcome everyone theoretically, but practically—through accessible ticket pricing, community partnerships, work in multiple languages, and the belief that the person who's never been to theater before might be the most important person in the room.

VII. THE PROMISE

I won't promise easy answers. But I will promise beauty, rigor, and the deep comfort of discovering you're not alone in your questions.

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I promise theater that makes room for your questions, your experiences, your full human complexity. Theater that says you belong here, exactly as you are. Theater that believes the person sitting next to you—the stranger you'll never see again—is essential to what's happening in this room, right now.

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Theater that trusts something beautiful and true can emerge when we stop pretending we have all the answers and start living in the questions—together.

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Join me in creating theater that asks what we're hungry to ask, that brings together people who thought they had nothing in common, that makes impossible communities possible.

Because the moment you think you have the answer, you've lost the theater.

But the moment you realize we're all asking the questions together—that's when the magic happens.

That's what I bring into the room: not certainty, but attention. Not answers, but the quality of looking that comes from having lived between worlds. The knowledge that the familiar can become foreign overnight. The understanding that "people like us" is both the most dangerous phrase in any language—and the most necessary, if "us" means everyone in this room, everyone who showed up to breathe together in the dark.

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