Ilia Volok’s definitive performance in Diary of a Madman returns to New York in Support of Ukraine

Touching and funny, unnerving and terrifying, exhilarating and chilling—Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 short story is all these things, and Ilia Volok embodies them all at once in a tour-de-force as Gogol’s doomed protagonist, Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin.

Stage-and-screen star Volok has been around the globe and back again in what has become a world-renowned signature role—from Kiev to London to Los Angeles (where he won the LA Weekly Theatre Award for Best Solo Performance). Looking impoverished in a white tunic and torn white pants, his Poprishchin is revealed to us slumped on the floor in a bare room, before rising to prepare his journal entry of October 3^rd. Thus begins a tale of isolation and desperation; of one man’s desire to be somebody and to be loved by someone, and his plummet into insanity as he fights, through flights of fancy, the terrible truth that neither can ever be attained. The strains of “Una Furtiva Lagrima” (or “One Furtive Tear”), beautifully rendered by Izzy Cooper, are heard as an elegy mourning Poprishchin’s hopes, dreams, freedom, and sanity. Volok leaps around the stage hurling pieces of paper, laughing, screaming, and crying as his character unravels. It is a harrowing portrayal of madness that will haunt even the most detached of theatergoers.

Poprishchin is a low-level civil servant in 19^th century Russia who spends his day sharpening the pencils and pining for Sophie, the director’s beautiful daughter. He desperately tries to see himself as an individual to be adored and revered, while the dreariness of his life and surroundings constantly proves otherwise. As he approaches madness, he begins to suspect Sophie’s dog Medgi is having an affair with another local dog, and believes he has found letters of correspondence between them. He learns (or hallucinates) through the letters that his beloved Sophie not only finds him repugnant and is laughing at him behind his back, but is also engaged to someone else whom her father approves of. “It’s always like this,” he laments heartbroken into the middle distance. “You find a little treasure for yourself, you’re just trying to reach your hand to it, and the gentleman of the chamber…snaps it away from you.”

His delusions of grandeur and encroaching emotional destruction are ironically his only way out of the despair of his reality. As Gogol observed, “Only in his madness does the lowly anti-hero attain greatness.”

He decides his meaningless job is no longer worth his time and hides himself away. In a December diary entry, he notes that he has read of “strange happenings in Spain.” Learning that the Spanish throne is unoccupied, he concludes that he must certainly be the country’s true heir, and fashions a robe out of a ratty blanket. Volok is mesmerizing and devastating as the delusional Poprishchin makes his final descent into delirium, wondering why his coronation has gone wrong as he is beaten and locked away. It’s not only a tragic tale of the unraveling of a human being, but as Gogol likely intended, a brutal indictment of society as a whole, as it systematically chews up and spits out the soul of the individual.

Volok’s Madman is an astonishingly perfect marriage of actor and role, and it’s a great privilege to witness its New York encore.

Diary of a Madman is directed by Eugene Lazerev, with Lighting by Michelle Stann and Sound Design by David Marling. It runs on Mondays at The American Theater of Actors at 7 pm through February 5, 2024.

To help support Ukrainian volunteers, visit http://www.multihuman.life