12.05
Public reading of the play "Taras and Me"
by Dr. Doug Larche

Dr. Douglas Larche is a Senior American Fullbright Scholar to Ukraine (from Marinette, Wisconsin), and a visiting Distinguished Professor and Playwright-in-Residence at Kirovohrad State Pedagogical University.

In his play the author represents his vision of Taras Shevchenko's spiritual heritage. Events presented in the play are based on historical research of the epoch, manuscripts and traditions of that period of time.

The plot of the story is that a young Ukrainian woman after hard ordeals of the fate found herself at the feet of the statue of the great Ukrainian Cobzar and is desperately trying to awaken the spirit of Shevchenko, the National Poet and Patrtiot of Ukraine, in hopes that he can help her restore her own lost sense of personal dignity and believe in love and her country's happy future.

Her plea stirred Taras to life and they began to argue about their understand of spiritual values of life, about relations between man and woman, which are based on the opposite outlooks of different epochs.