Review: Belarusian Basketballer Katsiaryna Snytsina Scores in Bio-Drama KS6 at La MaMa

Katsiaryna Snytsina cuts an imposing figure on the basketball court. At six-two, she glides down the parquet floor with the agility of a lion, easily landing layup after layup. She’s played on some of the biggest stages in the world — but she nearly lost it all in 2020 after being labeled as a political dissident in her native Belarus.

Snytsina recounts her life in KS6: Small Forward, a not-quite solo play from the invaluable company Belarus Free Theatre at La MaMa through October 13. When Belarus Free Theatre is in town — they, like their subject, are living in exile in London — it’s imperative to go see their work, and KS6 offers a perspective that we don’t often see onstage in New York City. It’s worth it for that alone.

But it’s also worth it because it’s really fascinating. Framed as a post-retirement interview, Snytsina begins by describing her unyielding affection for the man who could never let her down: Mr. Spalding, the orange basketball who’s been her friend since childhood. The daughter of two players, she almost inevitably went into that profession, but she never expected that it would take her around the world and make her one of the more notable pop cultural figures in her country.

Snytsina’s globetrotting is part of the reason why she’d been able to turn a blind eye to the repressive political regime led by President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since she was 9 years old. When protests gripped the country after the 2020 election — in which Lukashenko declared preemptive victory for his sixth term over opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who is really believed to have won — Snytsina reevaluated her public persona. What was she posting on her social media platforms instead of speaking out? Pictures of her dog.

After declaratively becoming an activist by simply posting “Stop the Violence,” Snytsina becomes a public enemy, fleeing to the United Kingdom for safety. The fact that she’s a lesbian — an “extremist lesbian,” she notes — makes matters that much worse in a dictatorship that doesn’t recognize homosexuality (her mother and father, whom she was most trepidatious to come out to, were cool with it, and she says she personally faced no outside homophobia in Belarus).

It takes Snytsina a couple of scenes to shake some visible stiffness, but that’s easy to forgive; by trade, she’s a basketball player, not an actor. But she brings something to the court that a hired performer could not: authenticity. When she eases into the play (which is adapted from her own words by directors and BFT founders Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin), she reveals a warm and kind presence, drawing the audience onto her side with laid-back charm. And when she encourages participation — in the forms of a kiss cam and free-throw contest — people enthusiastically line up on the faux court (Khalezin designed the set, which is augmented by videos from Dmytro Guk and pulsating lights by Peter Small).

There are striking stage pictures throughout; most notably, Snytskaya is encased in a glass tomb and pummelled with basketballs to symbolize the terrible conditions in Belarusian women’s prisons. But the production itself is a little shaggy; bells and whistles, like a live DJ, don’t really add much, though Blanka Barbara is an enthusiastic presence. Two actors in mascot costumes could have been left out to focus the story more squarely without distractions.

Those distractions end up taking away from the show’s great head and big heart. And that’s a shame, because Snytsina’s perspective is one that can get lost in a world filled with a plethora of other human rights violations, but it’s just as important. And in the case of the play, it occasionally gets a little lost, too.