The Play "At The Beginning And The End Of Times": Why We Choose Familiar Scenarios - Reviews

A new performance at the Roman Viktyuk Theater - staging a play by contemporary playwright Pavel Arie. Together with the actors, we, the audience, are transported into the scary world of the exclusion zone formed after the Chernobyl disaster.

The main characters are family: Baba Frosya (Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Oleg Isaev), mother (Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Lyudmila Pogorelova) and grandson Vovik with developmental disabilities (Igor Nevedrov). Abandoned by their father (Alexander Semyonov), they live in their dilapidated house in poverty and voluntary isolation, not wanting to move, despite the friendly advice of the district police officer (Alexander Dziuba), or serious threats. As a result, this leads to tragedy. Why do they so stubbornly refuse to change anything in their lives?..

We are afraid of change, even if the change is for the better. The main guarantee of the survival of any system is the maintenance of homeostasis, that is, balance. Change always disrupts homeostasis, which means it endangers the existence of the system. Changes lead to misalignment and force to look for new forms of adaptation. All evolutionary leaps on the planet took place during abrupt climate changes: everyone was very ill, and it was necessary to re-adapt to the environment. In a situation of changes, voluntary or forced, the system develops, moving to a new, more perfect level of functioning. Or it cannot adapt and is destroyed. This fear of destruction makes us desperately cling to the old and avoid the new.

We, people, are conservative in nature and strive for the familiar as safe: we walk around the city by the same routes, make the usual order in a cafe, from year to year we go to a familiar resort … There are much fewer innovators and experimenters in each generation, this is genetically predetermined

The innovators asked themselves questions: "Wow, what is there, in that dark cave?", "I wonder what would happen if you eat this unfamiliar mushroom?.." Of course, not every cave lived in a cave bear and not every mushroom turned out to be poisonous, but this was often the case, which is why in each generation the "innovators" died more often than the cautious "conservatives". Accordingly, it was the “conservatives” who left offspring and passed on the genes more often.

These genes force us to be careful and avoid anything new, but there is a catch. Imagine that the water in the lake stops renewing. It will soon turn into a swamp. If we refuse changes and new unusual experiences, we can turn into a swamp in the same way … Isolation is a suboptimal form of adaptation, it seems safe, but ultimately leads to degradation, loneliness, tragedy, which we see in the example of the characters in the play.

Recently, the expression "Get out of the comfort zone" has become popular in psychological trainings. In my opinion, it is not entirely correct: most people live in the “familiar”, not in the “comfortable” and confuse one with the other. And the "habitual" is rarely optimal and useful. Most often it is a consequence of inertia and passive life position: "It happened so …", and then it's scary to change something … People go to unloved work for years, live with an unsuitable partner, communicate with uninteresting friends … What does such a choice lead to, we will see in the finale of the performance.

To increase the level of adaptability, develop self-regulation skills, for development, we definitely need to let something new and unusual into our life. It is fraught with risks, it takes courage. But otherwise we can "swamp". Of course, this is not about playing Russian roulette or otherwise endangering yourself. But trying the unusual, even in small things, can be useful: new food, trips to new places, communication with new people … Get out of your inner "exclusion zone".