After Russia invades her native Ukraine, Olga Ivanovna, 82 years old,  calls Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy  to strategize; admonishes both Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France for not doing enough for Ukraine, even as the Frenchman sends her a congratulatory telegram and some French perfume for her birthday. She’s warmer with U.S. President Joe Biden, offering him stuffed peppers and her home-made liquor, while lobbying him too. But she doesn’t just wait around for any of these men to take action. She brings down a Russian drone with a jar of pickles, and flies a supersonic jet over the Kremlin.

That, anyway, is what Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova imagines her mother doing in “My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion,” which is on stage at Wilma Theater through February 18th, and livestreamed this weekend. If those scenes are not even the most fanciful – the fantasies become more over-the-top as the play progresses — the layered script and a fine cast allow us to see Olga Ivanovna as a real woman, a formidable one, unyieldingly committed to end the invasion that began two years ago this month. Her strength and resilience have been forged from years of trauma and hardship. Her story, we realize, is the story of all Ukrainians, and of Ukraine.

Olga, portrayed with grit and humor by Holly Twyford,  was born in a bomb shelter in 1941, because the Nazis were bombing Kyiv. This helps explain why she refuses to leave her home for a bomb shelter now, much less leave the country. Her daughter (Suli Holom) has escaped to Poland, and urges her mother to follow suit. Olga won’t hear of it. “The putin has not abandoned the idea of attacking Kyiv,” she says, using one of her dismissive nicknames for the instigator. “How could I leave everything?… I have lived my life! I’m not afraid of anything, and I’ll sleep in my own bed, me and my aching bones.”

Denisova’s play, as she has explained in interviews (and her stand-in alludes to during the play),  was sparked by the long WhatsApp messages that her mother began writing her when the invasion began. There is much in the play about their testy relationship — Denisova doesn’t hold back in dramatizing how typically annoying Olga was as a mother (nagging her about her complexion, about her single status, about her choice of career).   But much of the 90 minutes is taken up with Olga’s impressive life story, a woman of beauty and intelligence, a design engineer who traveled the world, and had many lovers – many of them portrayed by the third member of the cast, Lindsay Smiling (when he’s not playing world leaders.) 

One of them her daughter called Uncle Sasha. He was an army doctor whom Olga planned to marry. But on May 1st, 1986, when her daughter was wearing a pretty white dress, Sasha came rushing home with  a dosimeter, and discovered the dress was full of radiation; he buried it. All the children of Kyiv were evacuated to camps. Sahsa later died from radiation poisoning, because of the accident at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl – another reminder of what Ukrainians have lived through.

“My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion” opened at Woolly Mammoth in Washington D.C. last September and at Wilma Theater in Philadelphia last month.  I saw the livestream of it simulcast from the stage of the Wilma via the League of Live Stream Theater, which has been simulcasting live theater productions for the past two years, most prominently on Broadway, starting with  Lynn Nottage’s “Clydes” , then Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy” followed by Jessica Bioh’s  Jaja’s African Hairbraiding last November.

 The inventive design of this particular production gets somewhat lost in translation in the livestream, especially Kelly Colburn’s projections. But my ability to see this intriguing play without traveling out of New York is further proof of the lasting usefulness of this pandemic-era innovation.

My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion
At Wilma Theater through February 18, 2024, live-streamed* through February 11
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $49 livestream
Written by Sasha Denisova
Sets and translation by Misha Kachman
Lighting by Venus Gulbranson, costumes by Ivania Stack, projections by Kelly Colburn; sound and music, by Michael Kiley.
Adapted By Kellie Mecleary
Directed By Yury Urnov
Cast: Holly Twyford as Mama, Suli Holom as daughter, Lindsay Smiling

*A video of the production will be available online on demand from February 19 to March 17 for $29.