DRAMATIS PERSONAE | Arianda's parents, Lesia and Peter Matijcio,
photographed at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York.
Photography by Kyoko Hamada  BROADWAY SENSATION NINA ARIANDA'S
taste for the spotlight was born when she was a preschooler
living in Clifton, New Jersey, reading aloud a medley of verses
to a doting Ukrainian-American audience. Her parents, Lesia and
Peter Matijcio, had steeped their daughter in the customs and
language of their homeland, and as she recited (in Ukrainian) an
ode to Ukraine's folkloric kalyna plant—a slender-branched shrub
with lustrous red berries— by the poet Taras Shevchenko, the
crowd roared, and the little girl took bow after bow.  Twenty-
two years later, fresh out of drama school, Arianda strode onto
the New York stage in January of 2010 and took theater-going
Manhattan by storm. She was 25, tall and blonde, with a
distinctive Slavic self-possession, an all-American sense of
purpose and a rare knack for commanding respect while clad in a
garter belt and thigh-h