Russia's Pop-Up Theatre Performs US Premiere Of FUEL

San Francisco International is proud to welcome Pop-Up Theatre from St. Petersburg, Russia making their North American debut with the U.S. premiere of FUEL.

FUEL is a monologue based on interviews with David Yang the Russian technology businessman and founder of ABBYY Software Company, one of the largest tech companies in Russia. FUEL provides an outstanding glimpse into Russian society that uses abstract drama to highlight the thoughts, aspirations and dreams of its citizens and to depict societal change.

The play covers the period of Yang's earlier life through the last years of the USSR, Glasnost and Perestroika into the first several years of the 21st Century. It begins with his childhood (he wondered about the fleeting nature of existence even at a young age), and his initial career path: that of a physicist. He describes struggling through schooling at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology, the most important physics program in Russia. Along the way, he is met with racism (as a Chinese Russian), a grueling workload and thoughts of suicide. His career intersects with the phenomenon of flash mobs in Russia and the existential ramifications of them for a once totalitarian system coming to terms with individual expression and the ability of non-state actors to instigate the movements and actions of masses of people without the prior knowledge of the authorities.

Festival director Andrew Wood said of the production, "Being--as we are--on the edge of Silicon Valley, we are accustomed to thinking that the entire computer industry was launched from a series of garages in Menlo Park. But here is a profound story from the other side of the world that sheds light on what one man had to go through to build his own tech start-up--operating in a political system where the notion of Bill Gates stealing his ideas would have been the least of his worries."

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