The teacher needed teenagers for her summer acting class in Kyiv, which would end with the performance of an original play.

“This is a course for happy children, free in their thoughts and dreams,” the instructor, Olesia Korzhenevska, wrote on Facebook last spring.

It was hard to find happy teenagers in Ukraine. The pandemic and the war with Russia had trapped some young people in their homes, solitary and fearful, for more than four years. Many did not know how to socialize and could not imagine a future without war.

But two days after her Facebook post, Ms. Korzhenevska heard from the mother of a 16-year-old boy, asking her to accept him in the class.

Sasha Suchyk was an unlikely candidate. A year earlier, he had dropped out of the same class and landed in a mental hospital, suffering from clinical depression, even hurting himself. Buffeted by the war and dark thoughts, he was still in the hospital, where he had spent most of the previous year.

“Your lessons for him would be about the opportunity to open himself up and find new friends,” his mother, Olena Suchyk, told the teacher.

Ms. Korzhenevska, 40, remembered Sasha. Skinny, with long brown hair and a somewhat vacant look. He had disappeared after only a few classes. But now he sent her a video of himself, and she saw he had gained weight. His hair was short. He smiled.

“I’ve been playing guitar for four years and played violin for five years,” Sasha said. “I want to join the course to develop my creative potential and make new friends.”

Ms. Korzhenevska was not trained to work with troubled teenagers. But she was a patient teacher, and she had learned a lot raising her own teenage son, who was autistic.

“This is quite a challenge,” she remembered thinking about Sasha. “But I accept it.”

Sasha got out of the hospital in June. For the next three months, he and three other young actors tried to put aside their worries and work on the play Ms. Korzhenevska wrote for them. Its theme was that life could work out even if everything seemed to be falling apart.

The title of the play was “It’s okay!” But could it be, really?

The Teacher

Ms. Korzhenevska had worked as an event planner, teacher and film producer before she started teaching acting classes to teenagers during the pandemic.

A building in Kyiv’s hipster neighborhood of Podil was her creative laboratory. With its brick walls painted white, hardwood floors and high ceilings, the ground floor vaguely resembled a tech entrepreneur’s Manhattan loft. Ms. Korzhenevska named it the 9¾ School, after the magical train platform in the Harry Potter books, and offered classes mainly on the weekends.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Korzhenevska used the space to also teach military recruits to operate drones and run drills. Upstairs, teachers worked with her son and another autistic teenager.

Ms. Korzhenevska wrote a new play for every acting class. After the invasion, she focused on war stories because many students had loved ones fighting near the front lines. In 2023, the students got “Turtle in the Pot,” so named because one teenager’s family had fled their home carrying their pet turtle in a pot.

Ms. Korzhenevska noticed right away that the vibe in 2024 was different. Everyone needed a break from the war. She wanted to help the students imagine themselves in a more predictable, more routine environment. Someplace like America, Ms. Korzhenevska thought, where none of them had ever been.

She needed a break, too. Her fiancé, Dani, whom she had met at a music festival in 2017, had joined the army the day after the Russians invaded, and he was still on the eastern front, flying drones.

The Play

When creating her plays, Ms. Korzhenevska looked to the students for inspiration.

The 2024 class had four students. Solomia Cherepushko-Zagrebelna, a 13-year-old who goes by Solya, spent hours a day on her beauty ritual — maintaining stiletto nails and eyelashes that looked like awnings. But in class, she was serious, the student most interested in the craft of acting.

Anna Yuzhda, 14, wore glasses and seemed nerdy, but she played the guitar and exuded cool. Ms. Korzhenevska decided they could be sisters, one beautiful and one brainy.

A third student, Alisa Pazushko, was an old soul at age 12. Two years earlier, as the Russians besieged her home of Mariupol, her mother woke her one morning and told her to pack. She grabbed two books — “How to Train Your Dragon” and a Harry Potter — but left behind her favorite stuffed animal, a gray-and-black cat, and with her family, fled to a new life in Kyiv.

Alisa attended online classes from Kyiv, and so had not made friends in her new city. Tall for her age, she seemed as if she could use something to care for, Ms. Korzhenevska thought. Alisa could play the mother in the story that was beginning to take shape in Ms. Korzhenevska’s head.

The rough outline: A teenage boy from an affluent New York City family was orphaned in a car accident and sent to live in rural Mississippi with his mother’s best friend, who was so poor she could not even afford pancake syrup. The woman had two daughters: a smart bookworm and a beautiful cheerleader. The boy, Simon, fell in love with both.

Sasha would play Simon.

Ms. Korzhenevska picked her setting after meeting an American in a Kyiv bar who extolled the virtues of his hometown: West Point, Miss., a city of 10,000 with a website boasting that it “embodies what was best about America a generation ago.”

She included two American songs. One was “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail),” by Hillsong United, a reminder to keep faith in God, even when things seemed difficult. The other was performed by Jane Marczewski, known as Nightbirde, who became an international sensation after singing it on “America’s Got Talent” when she had terminal cancer.

That song, “It’s OK,” gave the play its title. Ms. Korzhenevska would say later that she wrote it with Sasha in mind.

The Star

On a Sunday in July, a generator sat near the front door of the theater in case the electricity went out, as it often did when Russia attacked Ukraine’s power supply. Air-raid sirens punctuated the hum of traffic. It was about 90 degrees.

But on the makeshift stage, it was Mississippi. Sasha, playing Simon, slumped into the room and flopped glumly onto a chair. Too sad, Ms. Korzhenevska thought. By this point in the script, Simon had been living with his new family for a few months.

“You’re still sad, but a little more fun,” Ms. Korzhenevska explained. “You’ve been here for a while, and so you’re a little more cheerful. You were terrible once, but not so much anymore. You can smile now.”

Sasha tried it again, with a hint of a smile. Angst with possibility, a singular teenage emotion.

The pandemic had been hard for Sasha, who had gone to school online and spent a lot of time alone. Once the war began, his mother and stepfather sent him to Poland, where he would be safer, to live with his father.

For almost a year, Sasha bounced between his parents, depending on whether his school in Kyiv was open. In the chaos, the sadness that put him in the hospital took over.

The cast did not talk about such things. They focused on the project.

Just as Sasha had the central role in the play, he became the center of the class, with the three younger girls seeming to fawn over him. With Anna, he practiced Nirvana songs from the play on the guitar. Alisa preferred talking to Sasha over anyone else.

“We have more interests in common than with the other girls,” Alisa said.

The students learned as they went. Ms. Korzhenevska taught Sasha how to hold his skateboard in the middle, so it did not hang awkwardly. She told Anna, who played the brainy sister, that she needed to hand an apple to Sasha in a way that conveyed flirtation. The young actors worked hard, memorizing their lines. Sasha learned a poem about loss and hope.

“And even if your soul is the most desolate of deserts, then something will grow from it,” he repeated.

Still, the war intruded. Ms. Korzhenevska saw a psychiatrist to cope with her worry about her fiancé and her country, but the medication made her want to sleep all the time. On some days, she couldn’t get out of bed.

“The only thing managing to get me out of my house is this play,” she said. “For the rehearsal, I am fine.”

Dani — whose full name is not being published because of military rules — was in charge of a group of drone operators near the eastern town of Pokrovsk. On Sept. 6, a car carrying two of his soldiers hit a land mine. The soldier driving lost the lower part of her left leg. Dani sent a video to Ms. Korzhenevska of the panicked trip to evacuate her, and they cried together while watching it.

Nine days later, the play would premiere.

No Regrets

Outside the theater, more than 40 people, including Sasha’s mother, waited, dressed in Sunday outfits and holding bouquets. Some had not been to the theater in years.

Inside, Sasha sat on the dressing room floor in shorts and his favorite shirt, which had English words like “rebel” printed on it. He chewed the inside of his lip. His face, always expressive, settled somewhere between startled and amused.

Alisa paced. Sasha and the two other girls tried relaxation techniques: shaking out their hands, playing meditation music. Would they be able to avoid laughing when they sang American songs?

Ms. Korzhenevska introduced the production, wearing a blue and white polka-dot dress and with her blond hair pulled back.

“We are in the middle of a war,” she told them. “We have been talking about war for a long time. But this performance is different. We wanted to show something easy, romantic and not about war.”

Alisa came out first. Soon, Sasha appeared as Simon. Ms. Suchyk, overwhelmed to see him in such a prominent role, began to cry.

Sasha forgot a line, as did one of the girls. In the audience, no one knew. As the story unfolded, Simon fell for both sisters and began to accept his parents’ death. In the end, he moved on but left gifts: pancake syrup, a sparkling dress designed by his mother, who had been a fashion designer, and $2,000 so the brainy girl could get Lasik eye surgery.

The audience responded as if the play had released something in them that they had been holding back. “Nobody died in the end and everything was OK,” Ms. Korzhenevska said. “But people were crying.”

Alisa’s mother said no one should judge the performance by her family’s reaction, as they all had post-traumatic stress disorder. Tears streamed down the face of Alisa’s aunt, whose former husband disappeared and was presumed dead after Russian troops took over Mariupol.

Sasha said the class had helped him make friends and return to school. He now wants to become a psychologist, he said, to help military veterans and teenagers.

He talked about his character, Simon, as if he were real.

“I know Simon is pretty sad but with that family that loves him, the character, he got loved by someone,” Sasha said. “It was very good for him.”

After the performance, Ms. Korzhenevska joined the actors onstage and praised each one. Sasha, she said, had developed a kind of peace and inner calm.

“I’m just on tranquilizers,” Sasha said. The audience laughed.

“Me too,” Ms. Korzhenevska admitted.

“I’m just joking,” he replied.

Ms. Korzhenevska hugged him. “I’m not,” she said.

Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.

The teacher needed teenagers for her summer acting class in Kyiv, which would end with the performance of an original play.

“This is a course for happy children, free in their thoughts and dreams,” the instructor, Olesia Korzhenevska, wrote on Facebook last spring.

It was hard to find happy teenagers in Ukraine. The pandemic and the war with Russia had trapped some young people in their homes, solitary and fearful, for more than four years. Many did not know how to socialize and could not imagine a future without war.

But two days after her Facebook post, Ms. Korzhenevska heard from the mother of a 16-year-old boy, asking her to accept him in the class.

Sasha Suchyk was an unlikely candidate. A year earlier, he had dropped out of the same class and landed in a mental hospital, suffering from clinical depression, even hurting himself. Buffeted by the war and dark thoughts, he was still in the hospital, where he had spent most of the previous year.

“Your lessons for him would be about the opportunity to open himself up and find new friends,” his mother, Olena Suchyk, told the teacher.

Ms. Korzhenevska, 40, remembered Sasha. Skinny, with long brown hair and a somewhat vacant look. He had disappeared after only a few classes. But now he sent her a video of himself, and she saw he had gained weight. His hair was short. He smiled.

“I’ve been playing guitar for four years and played violin for five years,” Sasha said. “I want to join the course to develop my creative potential and make new friends.”

Ms. Korzhenevska was not trained to work with troubled teenagers. But she was a patient teacher, and she had learned a lot raising her own teenage son, who was autistic.

“This is quite a challenge,” she remembered thinking about Sasha. “But I accept it.”

Sasha got out of the hospital in June. For the next three months, he and three other young actors tried to put aside their worries and work on the play Ms. Korzhenevska wrote for them. Its theme was that life could work out even if everything seemed to be falling apart.

The title of the play was “It’s okay!” But could it be, really?

The Teacher

Ms. Korzhenevska had worked as an event planner, teacher and film producer before she started teaching acting classes to teenagers during the pandemic.

A building in Kyiv’s hipster neighborhood of Podil was her creative laboratory. With its brick walls painted white, hardwood floors and high ceilings, the ground floor vaguely resembled a tech entrepreneur’s Manhattan loft. Ms. Korzhenevska named it the 9¾ School, after the magical train platform in the Harry Potter books, and offered classes mainly on the weekends.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Korzhenevska used the space to also teach military recruits to operate drones and run drills. Upstairs, teachers worked with her son and another autistic teenager.

Ms. Korzhenevska wrote a new play for every acting class. After the invasion, she focused on war stories because many students had loved ones fighting near the front lines. In 2023, the students got “Turtle in the Pot,” so named because one teenager’s family had fled their home carrying their pet turtle in a pot.

Ms. Korzhenevska noticed right away that the vibe in 2024 was different. Everyone needed a break from the war. She wanted to help the students imagine themselves in a more predictable, more routine environment. Someplace like America, Ms. Korzhenevska thought, where none of them had ever been.

She needed a break, too. Her fiancé, Dani, whom she had met at a music festival in 2017, had joined the army the day after the Russians invaded, and he was still on the eastern front, flying drones.

The Play

When creating her plays, Ms. Korzhenevska looked to the students for inspiration.

The 2024 class had four students. Solomia Cherepushko-Zagrebelna, a 13-year-old who goes by Solya, spent hours a day on her beauty ritual — maintaining stiletto nails and eyelashes that looked like awnings. But in class, she was serious, the student most interested in the craft of acting.

Anna Yuzhda, 14, wore glasses and seemed nerdy, but she played the guitar and exuded cool. Ms. Korzhenevska decided they could be sisters, one beautiful and one brainy.

A third student, Alisa Pazushko, was an old soul at age 12. Two years earlier, as the Russians besieged her home of Mariupol, her mother woke her one morning and told her to pack. She grabbed two books — “How to Train Your Dragon” and a Harry Potter — but left behind her favorite stuffed animal, a gray-and-black cat, and with her family, fled to a new life in Kyiv.

Alisa attended online classes from Kyiv, and so had not made friends in her new city. Tall for her age, she seemed as if she could use something to care for, Ms. Korzhenevska thought. Alisa could play the mother in the story that was beginning to take shape in Ms. Korzhenevska’s head.

The rough outline: A teenage boy from an affluent New York City family was orphaned in a car accident and sent to live in rural Mississippi with his mother’s best friend, who was so poor she could not even afford pancake syrup. The woman had two daughters: a smart bookworm and a beautiful cheerleader. The boy, Simon, fell in love with both.

Sasha would play Simon.

Ms. Korzhenevska picked her setting after meeting an American in a Kyiv bar who extolled the virtues of his hometown: West Point, Miss., a city of 10,000 with a website boasting that it “embodies what was best about America a generation ago.”

She included two American songs. One was “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail),” by Hillsong United, a reminder to keep faith in God, even when things seemed difficult. The other was performed by Jane Marczewski, known as Nightbirde, who became an international sensation after singing it on “America’s Got Talent” when she had terminal cancer.

That song, “It’s OK,” gave the play its title. Ms. Korzhenevska would say later that she wrote it with Sasha in mind.

The Star

On a Sunday in July, a generator sat near the front door of the theater in case the electricity went out, as it often did when Russia attacked Ukraine’s power supply. Air-raid sirens punctuated the hum of traffic. It was about 90 degrees.

But on the makeshift stage, it was Mississippi. Sasha, playing Simon, slumped into the room and flopped glumly onto a chair. Too sad, Ms. Korzhenevska thought. By this point in the script, Simon had been living with his new family for a few months.

“You’re still sad, but a little more fun,” Ms. Korzhenevska explained. “You’ve been here for a while, and so you’re a little more cheerful. You were terrible once, but not so much anymore. You can smile now.”

Sasha tried it again, with a hint of a smile. Angst with possibility, a singular teenage emotion.

The pandemic had been hard for Sasha, who had gone to school online and spent a lot of time alone. Once the war began, his mother and stepfather sent him to Poland, where he would be safer, to live with his father.

For almost a year, Sasha bounced between his parents, depending on whether his school in Kyiv was open. In the chaos, the sadness that put him in the hospital took over.

The cast did not talk about such things. They focused on the project.

Just as Sasha had the central role in the play, he became the center of the class, with the three younger girls seeming to fawn over him. With Anna, he practiced Nirvana songs from the play on the guitar. Alisa preferred talking to Sasha over anyone else.

“We have more interests in common than with the other girls,” Alisa said.

The students learned as they went. Ms. Korzhenevska taught Sasha how to hold his skateboard in the middle, so it did not hang awkwardly. She told Anna, who played the brainy sister, that she needed to hand an apple to Sasha in a way that conveyed flirtation. The young actors worked hard, memorizing their lines. Sasha learned a poem about loss and hope.

“And even if your soul is the most desolate of deserts, then something will grow from it,” he repeated.

Still, the war intruded. Ms. Korzhenevska saw a psychiatrist to cope with her worry about her fiancé and her country, but the medication made her want to sleep all the time. On some days, she couldn’t get out of bed.

“The only thing managing to get me out of my house is this play,” she said. “For the rehearsal, I am fine.”

Dani — whose full name is not being published because of military rules — was in charge of a group of drone operators near the eastern town of Pokrovsk. On Sept. 6, a car carrying two of his soldiers hit a land mine. The soldier driving lost the lower part of her left leg. Dani sent a video to Ms. Korzhenevska of the panicked trip to evacuate her, and they cried together while watching it.

Nine days later, the play would premiere.

No Regrets

Outside the theater, more than 40 people, including Sasha’s mother, waited, dressed in Sunday outfits and holding bouquets. Some had not been to the theater in years.

Inside, Sasha sat on the dressing room floor in shorts and his favorite shirt, which had English words like “rebel” printed on it. He chewed the inside of his lip. His face, always expressive, settled somewhere between startled and amused.

Alisa paced. Sasha and the two other girls tried relaxation techniques: shaking out their hands, playing meditation music. Would they be able to avoid laughing when they sang American songs?

Ms. Korzhenevska introduced the production, wearing a blue and white polka-dot dress and with her blond hair pulled back.

“We are in the middle of a war,” she told them. “We have been talking about war for a long time. But this performance is different. We wanted to show something easy, romantic and not about war.”

Alisa came out first. Soon, Sasha appeared as Simon. Ms. Suchyk, overwhelmed to see him in such a prominent role, began to cry.

Sasha forgot a line, as did one of the girls. In the audience, no one knew. As the story unfolded, Simon fell for both sisters and began to accept his parents’ death. In the end, he moved on but left gifts: pancake syrup, a sparkling dress designed by his mother, who had been a fashion designer, and $2,000 so the brainy girl could get Lasik eye surgery.

The audience responded as if the play had released something in them that they had been holding back. “Nobody died in the end and everything was OK,” Ms. Korzhenevska said. “But people were crying.”

Alisa’s mother said no one should judge the performance by her family’s reaction, as they all had post-traumatic stress disorder. Tears streamed down the face of Alisa’s aunt, whose former husband disappeared and was presumed dead after Russian troops took over Mariupol.

Sasha said the class had helped him make friends and return to school. He now wants to become a psychologist, he said, to help military veterans and teenagers.

He talked about his character, Simon, as if he were real.

“I know Simon is pretty sad but with that family that loves him, the character, he got loved by someone,” Sasha said. “It was very good for him.”

After the performance, Ms. Korzhenevska joined the actors onstage and praised each one. Sasha, she said, had developed a kind of peace and inner calm.

“I’m just on tranquilizers,” Sasha said. The audience laughed.

“Me too,” Ms. Korzhenevska admitted.

“I’m just joking,” he replied.

Ms. Korzhenevska hugged him. “I’m not,” she said.

Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.