Аbstract. The article examines the unique experience of creating a documentary “peasant theater” in the historical and architectural environment of the ethnographic museum “Semenkovo” of the Vologda region. “The Theater on Poveti” – this is exactly what you can call the space in which the play “Native Mother” was created. Serious research work that preceded the writing of the documentary drama is connected with the intention of the collective to give the Russian peasant of the 19th – early 20th century “the right to fate”, to a personal voice. “The Theater on Poveti”, inscribed in the architectural space of the museum, dramatizes, reconstructs and makes the past alive, represented in faces, paintings, family stories.