Stage Review - Yaga (Dacha Theatre)

Stage Review - Yaga
Presented By: Dacha Theatre - Seattle, WA
Show Run: September 11 - September 27, 2025
Date Reviewed: Saturday, September 20, 2025
Run Time: 3 Hours (inclusive of a 15-minute intermission)
Reviewed By: Anna Tatelman

Most folklore tells us that Baba Yaga is a fearsome old woman who eats children, but Dacha Theatre’s current production twists all those fables up into a whirl of truths, lies, and the many shades in-between. Part mystery, part fairy tale turned on its head, Yaga is a production that shows us we should never know or believe anything with full conviction, even if we can experience it with our own senses. Featuring an astonishing set, impressive stage magic, and a cast of three versatile performers playing more characters than I can count, this is not a smaller production to be overlooked.

Kat Sandler’s play Yaga centers around a private investigator named Rapp who decides to look into the recent disappearance of a college student in a rural town. He ropes in the local police department, specifically a detective named Carson, to help him. When the evidence they uncover increasingly doesn’t make much sense, these investigators begin to throw around the idea (casually at first, then with greater intensity and fear) that Baba Yaga had something to do with the disappearance of the student: that this real-life, modern Yaga is not an evil crone who preys upon helpless children, but rather a woman who is both hero and villain, stuck in a patriarchal world in which the only power she has is to hurt men who might otherwise threaten her existence.

In a time when mystery plays are increasingly popular, Yaga does an excellent job capitalizing on this trend while emphasizing theatre’s greatest strengths in this genre: the building of suspense and a pervasive feeling of unease as we work to unravel in real time, alongside the sleuths, what happened to the missing person and – as we circle closer to the truth - whether we’re about to witness another murder in front of our eyes. The script alternates primarily between investigative scenes and monologues from a woman who embodies Baba Yaga. This Yaga confronts our misconceptions about her throughout the show, dropping clues to the mystery that we often don’t understand the meaning of until much later, such as that the most hurtful rumor is that no one can love or desire her. 

Director Mike Lion smartly tackles these at first disparate narrative threads by highlighting their differences. The scenes related to the investigation move rapidly, with characters firing questions and answers at one another. The stakes are high – not just in solving the possible murder, but in preventing any future ones. By contrast, Yaga’s monologues are slow and purposeful, luring us in with the haunting tidbits she shares about her life, or the men she has hurt. While the pacing did lag at times, I think primarily this was due to the script moving more like a TV show and containing lots of short scenes in different locations, which presents production teams a challenge in frequently rearranging set pieces without too much downtime.

The two threads also take place mostly in different locales in the theatre, until the point where the stories start eerily bleeding together. Audience members enter the theatre through a tangle of spindly trees into the seating area, which faces a platform stage made to look constructed from aged wood. Banners depicting cave paintings partially conceal the stage, which features even more spookily bare trees, from view (scenic design by Max Sarkowsky). Yaga delivers her monologues from the ground level, pacing in front of the audience, with these banners lowered; when the cave paintings rise, we see the full platform stage, which is where the investigative scenes occur. I’ve seen a handful of shows at 12th Avenue Arts, and I’m not entirely sure why Dacha chose this configuration of having the set partially immersive and the stage elevated higher than the entire audience. The tangled trees in the back of the house are only utilized for about 5 minutes later in the show, and the lack of risers in the crowded audience seating area makes it difficult for some shorter people (like yours truly) to see everything on the platform stage. Overall, though, I was too awed by the beauty and intricacy of the scenic design to dwell on the spatial usage.

Monica Bowker’s lighting design and Dave Baldwin’s technical direction enhanced that sublime visual quality even further. For most of the play, smoke wafts through a trapdoor in the platform stage, as if the characters are perpetually trapped in some fantastical moors even when they’re in a modern police station or diner. The smoke turns up in intensity at various points, such as when it strengthens enough to blow feathers about. The lighting frequently used multiple colors at the same time in different areas; the most impressive use of this was when the smoke itself appeared to have a different color than the trees.

I was also wowed by the audio experience of Yaga. From the ambient cricket noises that could creep louder to the realistic sizzle of a frying pan, sound designer Alex Parr made the world of Yaga feel delightfully four-dimensional. And music composer/arranger Nathan Brockett created works that meshed seamlessly with the sound design, like when the cricket chirps meld into choral voices that sound both like eerie drones and strange rejoices.

Although the show features more characters than I can count, they’re all masterfully depicted by just three performers. I’d imagine that switching constantly between that many personas is exhausting, but these three actors switch seemingly effortlessly throughout the whole show. Julie Olsen primarily plays Yaga and one of the lead suspects, a Professor Yazov who may have had an inappropriate relationship with the missing college student. Olsen by far has the most awe-inspiring switches between her array of roles. As Yaga, she stoops over, shuffles, and speaks slowly in an eastern European accent; as Professor Yazov, she is straight-backed, brusque, and prone to bantering with a hard edge to her words. Depicting Detective Carson (among others) is Tatyana Emery, who does great work stringing along not just the characters around her, but the audience, and making us believe in their layer upon layer of fables and half-truths. Last but not least is Jerik Fernandez as primarily PI Rapp and the missing student. Although not always playing likeable characters, Jerik’s affability and sincerity help us emphasize with (in the case of the missing student) his thirst for knowledge or (in the case of the PI) his desire to pursue justice even when it leads to morally questionable choices.

If you’re looking to see a murder mystery that differs from the usual stage offerings, Yaga is the show for you. Far more than another whodunnit, Dacha Theatre’s current production serves up a murder mystery rolled up in psychological horror and twisted folklore with a sprinkling of delicious, vicious feminism. Featuring three talented performers tackling numerous roles, stunning visuals, and a thrilling audio landscape, Yaga promises to be a show talked about long after it closes.

Yaga, presented by Dacha Theatre, runs on stage at 12 Avenue Arts through September 27. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.dachatheatre.com/.

Photo credit: Brett Love