“It is easy to love all of humanity, but it is hard to love the ugly face of one’s neighbor.” – F. M. Dostoevsky
The commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” is the most beautiful answer possible. And the most unattainable. It is no accident that it stands outside the Ten Commandments — love cannot be commanded. It is Christ’s cry for salvation, suffered in his own flesh; the insight that love is the only counterforce against evil and ruin. The spirit must rise against the devil — the only conspiracy in the name of good. Seven years after our first stage version of The Idiot, beloved by the audience of SFUMATO, comes The Face of the Neighbor — a sequel. A more concentrated, more ascetic gaze into the bitter truths about man, and, through Dostoevsky’s characters, into ourselves.