YANA ROSS
THEATER MAGAZINE 36.1
RUSSIA’S NEW DRAMA: FROM TOGLIATTI TO MOSCOW
No longer constrained by Soviet government censorship or the economic calamities of the early 1990s, contemporary Russian playwriting has finally emerged at the turn of the 21st century, under the ambitious banner of ―New Drama.‖ For better or worse, it reflects the new generation and its language, its aspirations, fears, and despair. It frequently smashes Russian theater’s previous taboos and it makes no shortage of polemical diatribes. In 2000 when I returned to my native Moscow, a city I left in 1992 and once thought hostile and grim, I found many of my peers—directors and playwrights not yet 30 years old—making a visible impact on the Russian theater and claiming new recognition. In less than a decade, Russia had managed to transform itself from a backward, nationalist mafia-ruled, thug-faced bottomless pit into a handsome metropolis. Glitzy store-fronts invited glamorous shoppers; every teenager sported a late-model cell phone; television beamed with reality-shows, and newspapers screamed Western-style tabloid lingo to attract jaded Muscovite readers. Among the superficial flood of Western goods and values was a strong current of genuine cultural resurrection: I saw an arresting Russian documentary on the Chechen war covered with BBC-precision exposing atrocities committed by both parties. (In 2005, however, the same network aired a blatant propaganda piece, presenting ethnic minorities as ruthless zombies and Russian soldiers as the only heroes—a result of the Kremlin’s consolidation of power over the media.)
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And there were other indicators of cultural resurgence: Maxim Kurochkin’s new play, Kitchen, opened to a sold-out house of 1220 seats. Granted, the production had an Oscarwinning star, Oleg Menshikov, drawing a crowd, but soon the Presnyakov brothers, a fraternal playwriting team, followed with Terrorism, now familiar to international audiences. The New Drama Festival, a brainchild of the Golden Mask Festival’s producers, was born. The new generation has something to say with the stage, they are not afraid of speaking up, and they are gaining new platforms.
Until this recent development, Russia’s modern history had stifled the development of its written dramatic forms. When Stalin enthroned socialist realism on the Soviet stage, newborn revolution, collectivization, emancipation and other staples of socialism replaced the now old-fashioned ―reactionary‖ dramaturgy. Government cultural officials did away with Shakespeare and Calderón, condemning surrealism and French renegades, and steering the proletariat to Russian classics like Ostrovsky. Many playwrights who refused to join the ranks of propagandists simply disappeared. Since the victory of communism eliminated class struggle and social reforms demanded total glorification of the current leadership, a new genre emerged: a conflict-less dramaturgy. The Soviet Union was a state of total happiness and the only possible misfortune on stage could occur between something good and something excellent. No real villains, no family issues, no troubled youth existed until perhaps the late 1950s. Following Khruschev’s thaw, the Russian stage flickered with hope and a small number of new dramatists managed to get their work published. Shakespeare returned in glorious translations by the previously banned Boris Pasternak, and in 1963 Yuri
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Lyubimov directed his famous Hamlet at the Taganka Theater. Young writers such as Vampilov, and Petrushevskaya forged relationships with regional theaters. Even though Vampilov was one of the most vivid and original young playwrights of his time, Moscow and Leningrad would not stage his work because of its complicated and ironic portrayal of contemporary Soviet life. His first production took place in Lithuania, and, ultimately, only posthumously (he drowned at the age of 35 on Lake Baikal) did he gain national recognition. A playwright’s survival largely depended—and still does—on dodging government censorship, on connections with state-subsidized theaters, and with individual directors. Before Perestroika, a roadmap to production existed via membership in the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers. Vampilov was only produced after joining the Union. Nor were there formal educational programs for playwrights. In the whole Soviet Union (population 250 million), only one school—the State Literary Institute in Moscow—allowed students to focus on writing for the stage. Young people interested in theater’s other disciplines had to travel to Moscow or St. Petersburg for the best education. GITIS and St. Petersburg’s Theater Academy held monopolies on directing and scenic design programs. They also attracted famous names among their faculty, as did the Moscow Art Theater’s (MAT) acting studio. Like New York and Los Angeles, these two cities held a firm grip on young talent and everyone tried their best to find work there after graduation without returning to the provinces. In the churning waters of Perestroika, Nicolai Kolyada, a prodigious playwright from Siberia, brought change. A provocative director, Roman Viktiuk, had helped launch Kolyada’s successful career in 1986, and in 1989 Viktiuk lobbied the San Diego
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Repertory Theater to undertake the world premiere of Slingshot, Kolyada’s sympathetic play about a gay relationship, suppressed in Russia until 1993. (Until that year, homosexuality remained a state offense punished by imprisonment.) Kolyada returned to his home in Siberia to head a formal playwriting course at the Yekaterinburg Theater Institute, turning the city into an epicenter of newfound creativity. In 1993 his first class arrived and by graduation five years later, it had produced a major writer, Oleg Bogaev. Kolyada claims he could never teach his students how to write plays; his job is to ―infect‖ them with enthusiasm for writing, to open their eyes to the theater world, and to support experimentation. He also doesn’t believe in churning out an army of playwrights, preferring to admit five or six students each year. Despite Kolyada’s success in Yekaterinburg, today none of the elite theater academies or regional theater schools offers any playwriting programs or courses. When it comes to playwriting, many Russians believe it’s an art form (like painting) in which you either have talent or you don’t—forgetting, of course, that even Kandinsky and Picasso studied formal lifedrawing techniques. Though Chekhov and Bulgakov trained as doctors, they became writers by trade and practice, writing for newspapers and reading books instead of watching Survivor. Aside from Yekaterinburg, before the New Drama Festival was established in 2002, the Lyubimovka retreat was the only significant springboard for emerging playwrights. Housed, from the early 1990s until recently, on Stanislavsky’s summer estate in a Moscow suburb, Lyubimovka became an important forum for young as well as established playwrights to develop and support new work.
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Yekaterinburg continues to offer a healthy alternative outside of the ―two capitals,‖ a place where writers can cultivate voices uninflected by these centers. The results can be spectacular. Vasilii Sigarev, one of Kolyada’s star graduates, has inspired playwrights across the country with his haunting snapshots of teenagers, drug-addicts, and marginal characters that live behind the ―barbed wire‖ of socially accepted terms. Sigarev, who launched an international career with his play Plasticine (published in this magazine), mixes colloquial street slang with poetic, often existential, dream-like forms. Following Kirill Serebrennikov’s productions in Russia and Germany, a parade of other directors and stagings followed. The latest production of Sigarev’s work demonstrates the energy New Drama has created. Phantom Pains, staged by Ira Keruchenko, opened in Moscow and toured France and Switzerland. In fewer than twenty pages, Sigarev creates a breathtaking parable in which a grief-stricken woman lives in disturbed denial of her husband’s fatal accident and is taken advantage of by local men. Her character retains biblical proportions while men struggle to regain their humanity. Paradoxically the project was a result of an assignment by one of the best-established directors, Kama Ginkas (who doesn’t stage anything but classics like Chekhov, Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare), to his directing students at MAT to stage a so-called ―new drama.‖ Actor Oleg Tabakov, artistic director of MAT since 2000, has rejuvenated its stagnating academies into something of a playground for young directors and experimental playwrights. Out of [number TK] new shows this year—[number TK] were based on new plays. 70% of the directors at MAT are 35 or younger—and the result is a dynamic and exciting repertory catering to a wide audience.
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MAT has also became a steady supporter of the Presnyakov brothers—a talented duo from Yekaterinburg (but not affiliated with Kolyada’s school). Their plays Terrorism and Playing the Victim currently perform in repertory in MAT’s smaller hall, accommodating about 200 audience members. Playing the Victim, the Presnyakovs’ latest hit, interpreted by the prolific Serebrennikov, has met with great success with audiences. The Presnyakovs bring a bitter colloquial irony through their use of everyday language—something previously lacking in contemporary Russian drama for decades— while creating humorous, entertaining theater. The play consists of a series of clever vignettes based on the unusual day job of a 20-something antihero, who reenacts crimes at the scene while an old-fashioned police officer scratches his head trying to solve the murders. The Presnyakovs bring generations into collisions, but the conflict, although fatal, is often bittersweet. Grabbing clumsily at his chopsticks in a trendy Moscow sushi bar while everyone else maneuvers speedily through their raw fish, the aging policeman is the real victim—he is incapable of adapting to the new rhythm and new language. The otherwise terse authority figure explodes into a passionate monologue voicing the frustrations of his entire disorientated generation. While young directors are turning to living playwrights for new material and themes, there is also a new tendency for writers to stage their own plays. The Presnyakovs have done it in theaters from Yekaterinburg to Hungary, and Kolyada even launched his own theater, called Kolyada-Teatr, to provide a laboratory serving both his students and his own work. He directs regularly and encourages others to test the waters. Such spaces are an important frontier in Russian theater; fostering dialogue between playwrights and directors has never been a priority in formal training programs, whose
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focus on old ―masters‖ such as Shakespeare and Chekhov forms the basis for directing students’ vocabulary. But what happens when a living playwright appears in a theater’s doorway? Unlike America or Europe, where the playwright is invited to participate in the staging process and indeed can sometimes become integral to rehearsals, in Russia the playwright is often lucky if she or he is notified that their play will open the next week. The questions of rights, royalties and retributions are still murky. Many playwrights prefer to negotiate their own contracts, as the very few agencies that do exist don’t follow standardized rules and are likely to charge high commissions. There is virtually no information on protecting material from plagiarism or copyright violation—and directors have been known to take extensive liberties with scripts, and even to change a play’s title. For example, Vyacheslav and Mikhael Durnenkov’s play The Culture Layer is presently playing at MAT under the new title The Last Day of Summer. The Durnenkovs, another pair of playwriting brothers, do not live in Moscow and say they were not invited to attend rehearsals. Often a play’s authors are banned outright from the process of production. Of course, directors everywhere struggle to relate to playwrights. But in the case of Russia, where directors have become auteurs whose authority lies beyond challenge, the situation may be more extreme. Most of the Russian practitioners I have spoken with agree that nurturing collaborations between directors, actors, and playwrights can only help create fresh and necessary language for contemporary drama. Teatr.doc, a studio-style theater located in a small basement-level space in Moscow, was founded to facilitate exactly this kind of interaction. Its founders, Mikhael Ugarov and his wife Elena Gremina, both playwrights, took part in the early Lyubimovka
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movement, which still supports independent dramaturgy and publishes play anthologies. Ugarov and Gremina, along with their colleague Olga Mikhailova, initiated Teatr.doc as a self-consciously visionary, but entirely pragmatic performance space. (See Theater’s interview with Gremina later in this issue.) Even though Ugarov and Gremina do not teach playwriting in any formal sense, their hole-in-the-wall black box quickly became one of Russia’s most vital, fiercely experimental (if not always successful) creative spaces. The pinnacle of the studio’s success to date was Teatr.doc’s 2002 premiere of Oxygen, a fiery new work by Ivan Vyrypaev, another Siberian from Irkutsk. Among twelve shows produced at Teatr.doc in its first seasons, few became hits. But Oxygen was immediately identified as the new century’s most important Russian drama, literally turning Vyrypaev into a star author overnight. Vyrypaev’s writing recalls the lifegiving dimensions of Gertrude Stein, ―mother‖ of an American avant-garde focused on inventing new language, and of her Russian spiritual equivalent in modernism, Velimir Khlebnikov. Vyrypaev’s language has the dreamlike quality of Stein’s ―automatic‖ writing—like a pouring of words into a ballet or music score—filled with similar equilibrium between the literary, aural, and visual. His narrative creates sophisticated dialogues with itself, while also embodying a certain primitivism through clear, repeated statements, naïve observations, and a natural flow of words. Vyrypaev’s landscape is more violent than his predecessors: it is full of psychological eruptions and dormant craters. (Vyrypaev’s use of a live DJ to underscore Oxygen in performance also shows his generational allegiance.)
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In his latest play, Genesis-2, Vyrypaev continues a dialogue with God, questioning the laws of the universe and breaking up a ―schizophrenic‖ rhythm with oldfashioned Russian folk rhymes performed to live accordion accompaniment. There is always an element of child-like curiosity and openness in his work. The City Where I… is a simple story of Vyrypaev’s hometown, Irkutsk, but the author explains matter-offactly that the town is full of magic, and that we will see the magic come to life. Angels come to visit dressed in shabby garb looking for meaning in human existence; an elephant lives inside a sad citizen; and a ―good person‖ of Irkutsk struggles to remain human. (Vyrypaev’s theater also relies upon a rare sustained collaboration between a playwright and director; Viktor Ryzhakov, his longtime friend and colleague, never tries to impose his directorial impulses on the simplicity of Vyrypaev’s texts, and the results have been fruitful indeed.) Teatr.doc offers a haven in Moscow, but it is not the only home for New Drama in Russia. Siberian blood keeps pumping life into the Ural mountain region, where Oleg Loevsky has become another great supporter of contemporary playwriting. Loevsky had a prodigious career, first as literary manager of the Youth Theater, then as director, managing director, and producer, and he continues to change hats at the speed of light. His most important accomplishment, however, has been the creation of a biannual festival for regional theaters in Yekaterinburg, called the Real Theater. He also supports young directors and organizes job fairs for recent graduates to meet with regional theaters. The indefatigable Loevsky travels across Russia speaking about theater and new dramaturgy, and always seems to have a dozen new scripts in his bag. Even when I saw him at 3:30 am at Moscow’s 2005 Golden Mask Festival, he was eager to talk business.
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Despite his advocacy, Loevsky maintains a certain perspective on Russian drama’s evolution, patient to wait and see what the now-notorious movement he helped launch will bring about. Loevsky’s equanimity is not shared by the majority of Moscow and St. Petersburg’s critics, who have quickly attempted to define—some would say box in— New Drama’s thematic and linguistic terms. ―Contemporary drama that breaks normative taboos in language and addresses open sexuality, drug-addiction and social injustice. Among other things violence, scatology and teenage immaturity,‖ one Moscow critic opined [YANA: source?]. Such formulas, labels and definitions may be unwise at this point, for they do not allow for artistic evolution. The ―movement‖ is far too young, unstable but also exciting. On the other hand, after reading nearly forty plays (collected by the New Drama Festival onto a glossy CD-ROM) I can certainly find the common ground many of these playwrights shared in St. Petersburg in 2004. A surprising number are trying to tackle the current war in Chechnya and speak of its aftermath. Plays where soldiers returned home, physically and emotionally depleted, were not just literal tributes to the daily horrors which Russia tends not to address anymore on television or in press (officially the war is over) but thoughtful explorations of the long-term effects the war will have on this generation. The most distinguished work in this vein came out of Kolyada’s ―incubator‖: Alexander Arkhipov’s The Dembel Train. (―Dembelization‖ is a military term for release from service either upon completion of full term or for injuries sustained in battle.) Tikhon, Vanya and Evgenii are at the military hospital, waiting for discharge. Tikhon lost his legs, Evgenii his mind, and Vanya was shot in the gut by his supervising officer for
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stealing food. The play starts in a realistic mode with Tikhon writing a letter home narrating the story. The seven scenes are labeled ―carriages.‖ Each train carriage spins deeper and deeper into a surrealistic combination of today’s war zone, soldiers’ memories, and existential absurdities. Through haunting brief encounters between soldiers and their pasts, presents, and futures, the audience pieces together the devastating effect of war on the human psyche. Halfway through the play one starts to question whether anything we see or hear makes any ―sense.‖ Agile forms of manipulation allows the playwright to keep us guessing between imagination, speculation, and reality. Vanya’s sudden suicide brings visceral reactions from his hospital mates, who face a funeral ceremony for all three souls. Have they all been long dead to start with? The action transgresses from reality into the ghost world—the only plane of existence for those who killed or were killed, with living spirits and dying souls alike caught in a space between past and future. The ―ghosts‖ cross from the pages of letters they write home into the afterworld, and enter the play’s last ―carriage‖ to face the final curtain. Arkhipov’s stage directions read: ―Three soldiers line up and from the darkness behind them; new bodies of young boys emerge. Some dressed in dirty camo, some just in long johns and barefoot. Some have overcoats over their shoulders. The air is filled with a long sound of the passing train. By planes, by trains, and on foot, the boys rush home: dead and alive. The dembel train is flying, rattling with carriages, pressing down on the wheels of life and fate.‖ Eduard Boyakov, who founded the New Drama Festival in 2002, recently described the event as an attempt to confront escapist and cowardly tendencies in modern Russian theater. ―Most directors are too intimidated to stage daring and controversial
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modern plays, preferring to either hide behind the big names of the past or indulge in fantasy, Harry Potter–style. I do not argue that realities should dictate what artists do, but ignoring real life and turning a blind eye to the plight of your own country is dishonest. It has to be acknowledged that we live in a country of ethnic conflicts and rampant violence, where tragedies like Beslan are regular events.‖1 It is indicative that more than thirty productions at the festival address Russia's most painful and sensitive issues: terrorism, corruption, alcohol abuse, drug addiction, migration and social inequality. Although the playwrights are mostly very young, their generation is not idealized; onstage the youngest generation is generally depicted as desensitized, cool and sarcastic observers of the diabolical post-socialist free-market fruition. Aggression meets apathy, nostalgia, and sentiment. Many embark upon religious and philosophical discourse, looking for God and mocking his absence. John Freedman of the Moscow Times commented on the young playwrights’ workshop, Lyubimovka: ―These are people for whom the presence of television is a given: the garish veracity of talk shows and reality shows; the superficiality of complex world crises reduced to sound bites…. Raised on a diet of feel-good TV they are ready to take on the hard questions, but would rather not have to deal with the answers.‖2 A 24-year old Lithuanian, Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė, could prove him wrong. Sliding Luche is simultaneously a tragicomic sentimental love journey and a familial memory-play with haunting cartography of fate and circumstances. Luche slides on the smooth surface of an ice-skating rink (where she stalks her married crush) and down her skewed plane of existence. In a series of bizarre coincidences two couples break up, meet
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Boyakov at the festival’s press conference, St. Petersburg 2004. The Moscow Times, July 9, 2004.
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each other’s partners and search for intangible yet intoxicating rules of attraction. The opening scene in a supermarket establishes the couple’s identity in just a few lines, as Luche and Felix dock their shopping cart at the cash register:
LUCHE FELIX LUCHE
It’s so hot and muggy here, I’m ready to die. Die already, when the cash register opens, I’ll bring you back.
Thanks, Jesus! Shit, I forgot the red sauce, go grab some. Don’t take the hot one. I’m going to cook some fish tonight.
FELIX LUCHE FELIX LUCHE
Not again. What do you mean? You don’t like it? Not the fish again…
You’ll go to bed hungry. I’ll have some myself. The sauce! Get the sauce! […] Felix disappears and returns with a tin of black shoe polish. Puts the tin in the cart.
LUCHE FELIX
What’s that?
I thought why not dress the fish in the sauce of mourning…. Since it will be your last meal.
LUCHE FELIX
You are hopeless. What’s the point of this? What’s the point of eating fish everyday? 3
When Luche takes off, Felix is left with his childhood memories of a dying bedridden father and his mother has stifled by duty. A strange web of love and dispassion, abuse and tenderness fills the world of the playwright’s imagination. The young Lithuanian stays away from the hostile politics between two nations or issues of the EU, which recently admitted the Baltic countries. But Sliding Luche still stirs emotions on both sides of the Baltic Sea.
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All translations from the playtexts are by the author.
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A special debut, nominated by the festival’s jury for the under-25 category, distinguished another Siberian, Anton Valov. His play, Swings Behind the Glass, evokes the language of bipolar absurdism. A middle-aged couple and their handicapped son are crammed into a tiny studio apartment. From sickly-sweet obsessive sexual dialogue and explicit groping, the couple turns to mundane chores of laundry and vacuuming, while the little boy of seven absorbs and reacts to his parents’ polemics. Valov paints a haunting nightmarish circle of domestic abuse. His characters are a byproduct of economic revolution that left millions of ordinary Russians below the poverty line. When Tolya leaves to buy some cigarettes, Ksusha answers her son’s persistent headache: It’s because you father is an alchie and a lazy ass. He couldn’t make a healthy baby. He can’t do anything. Only ―coochie-coochie, oh, my sweetie-pie...‖ but he is zero. Doesn’t work. Sits on his ass for almost a year now. ―I’m sick,‖ he says. ―Someone put a curse on me!‖ Vampires or something! I bet they didn’t curse his drinking though! It’s alright, honey. Daddy will be back soon and we’ll have some soup. its light though, no meat—vegetarian…We’ll be fine. They are fine until Tolya returns in a drunken stupor and beats Ksusha senseless. The scene unfolds like a danse macabre, with Tolya repeating his earlier monologue but now, instead of smooching, giggles and pinching, he shells out blows, blood, and mutilation. Since the apartment is so small and the giant bed that sleeps three dominates the room, the audience doesn’t realize until nearly the end of the play that the boy can walk only with the help of the crutches. A powerful bond between father and son culminates in the boy’s attempt at ―flying.‖ His dad picks him up from the floor: ―Yes, like a big bird, come on Mike, you are flying away. You are flying Mikhail; it’s us who are falling…‖ Given the weight of these social themes, it might not come as a surprise that comedy remains the toughest genre for ―New Drama.‖ Danila Privalov (whose play is
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published in this issue) paints a Tarantino-like shootout between thugs and policemen in People of Ancient Professions; Oleg Bogaev (Kolyada’s graduate and now a faculty member) creates a philosophical tale, Dead Ears, on the loss of literary interest and cultural values, managing to keep the tone light when the hilarious characters of Pushkin, Gogol and Chekhov make a home in a small town where the library is about to close because no one reads their work anymore. Andrei Kureichyk, a young playwright from Belarus who recently won a prize at the Eurasia 2005 Festival for his comedy Theatrical Play, also turns to a classic ghost—Konstantin Stanislavsky—to create a black comedy about bloodthirsty actors trying to recruit a playwright into their eternal vampire ranks. Those in their twenties and early thirties have experience first-hand the relative freedom that came to Russia with the fall of the Berlin wall. The Western economy has quickly infiltrated the market, and the previously insulated country has been flooded by foreign consumer products and investment. Opened borders brought collaborations and cultural exchange; for the Russian theater, this was most significant when the British Council set up a powerful branch in the capital backed up with sterling for translations and publications of contemporary British drama. (Hence the immense popularity of Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, and their subsequent influence on Russian drama.) The Council also arranged a playwriting lab and cultural exchange program at the Royal Court Theatre, allowing writers such as Sigarev, the Presnyakovs, and Vyrypaev to travel to London for residencies, and to publish English-language translations of their work, rendering their plays accessible to the world beyond Russia and extending their reach. From a practical point of view, the Royal Court program was a success. But its effect on Russian drama will require further analysis over time. In a country where
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Western influence was (and still is) at a minimum, information is filtered through—and subject to the biases of those who carry it. Thus when the Royal Court introduced its expertise in contemporary drama in the only program of its kind, that theater’s aesthetic values became closely aligned with Russia’s new dramatist. For instance, for the benefit of these socially-minded authors, the theater initiated a series of seminars on documentary drama, popular in 1960s Britain, under the term verbatim. The seminars emphasized certain traditions over others, dropping Germans such as Piscator, Brecht, and Peter Weiss. There are also Russian precedents: 19th-century revolutionaries such as the Narodovoltsi (the People’s Will faction) considered it their duty to go to the ―people‖ to gather verbatim slogans later published as manifests and leaflets. Similar journalistic style came from writers like Leonid Andreev who worked as a court clerk and took down statements from the same Narodovoltsi terrorists on trial, local petty-thieves and serial killers who would all, at some point, find their way into his early writing and performance. Soviet Social Realism is also a documentary-based genre, however skewed its perspectives became; the government deployed writers to observe the everyday life of workers and peasants ―on their road to communism‖ and to make their way to the stage. So it is no surprise that Russians reacted viscerally to Britain’s ―Angry Young Men‖ of the 1950s and 60s, playwrights such as John Osborne and Edward Bond, whose shock values and overt political stances opposed the more metaphysical European absurdists of the mid-century. Russian playwrights also encountered the legacy of this British Wave in the 1990s, noting how Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, Mark Ravenhill, and others employ similar tools and polemics. Strong language, full nudity, gay sex, stark violence, domestic abuse, and raw frustration with life—all flooded the stage. In Britain,
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these dramas had a precedent; in Russia, it was completely new. The influence of the Royal Court can not be underestimated. Russian characters now swear, screw, murder, and suffer in violent outbursts addressing the ―in-your-face‖ issues of poverty, frustration, alcoholism and social injustice. And so the ―new‖ genre has been enthusiastically passed from the British to the initiators of Teatr.doc—which became an experimental ground for ―documentary‖ drama, its authors collecting hundreds of audio tapes and converting them into various performance texts. As this idea took off, artists set out for some extreme destinations: Galina Sinkina traveled to a maximum security prison to interview female criminals who killed their men in the heat of passion; Yekaterina Narshi went to another prison to investigate relationships between mothers and daughters separated by bars; Olga Lysak interviewed hundreds of beautiful women to produce a show called The Beauties, a verbatim exploration of what it is like to be the most stunning person on Earth. Overall, this ―documentary‖ theater may be closer in spirit to so-called ―Reality TV‖ rather than journalism or playwriting but so far the works have also been great explorations for directors and actors. If anything, the effort will push them to continue to experiment. But it is striking how swiftly the British Council’s influence has sunk in, recalling Allied efforts in post-Word War II Germany. As France, Britain, and America each installed its laws and influence upon the defeated Germany: the British Broadcasting Company set up German television business as a BBC replica with the goal of ―Reeducating the nation,‖ and Hollywood executives were given tax breaks to set up film studios in West Berlin. I am not suggesting that the West is taking over Russia at the
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same pace, but it is notable that culture, as well as Wall Street, is playing a vital role in shaping the future. Ironically the Goethe Institute has a similar influence. No longer limited to Moscow, the global literary and cultural fund has been sponsoring numerous translation projects and commissioning Russian playwrights to write about Germany or research history through its regional branches. Just a few weeks ago I attended a reading of a play, Why I Remember This, in Togliatti. A local playwright told me how the project came together: on a train he met by chance a Goethe Institute representative, who encouraged him to build on his interest in Marlene Dietrich, offering him a trip to Berlin to research her archives and to gather material for a play on the subject. Although the playwright did not speak German, he traveled to Berlin and met Dietrich’s family and did write a play. German theater has been a steady presence in Russia since Peter Stein’s production of The Three Sisters toured in 1990. Germany’s tradition of bold experimentation and director-auteurs found a warm reception in Russia’s historically strong director’s theater. Thomas Ostermeier and Christoph Marthaler are annually hailed for their touring productions and the controversial playwright Marius von Mayenburg has been translated and staged from the Russian capital to the Alaskan border. The annual independent New European Theater festival (NET, a play on ―Nyet‖), founded by leading theater critics Roman Dolzhansky and Marina Davydova, also promotes this segment of experimental theater and helps to export Russian productions. ―New Drama‖ would seem to require new forms of critical response, and the art of criticism in Russia, has indeed undergone a major evolution in the new century. But it is not a positive development: the newspaper reviewers, highly qualified and trained in
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theater criticism unlike many Western counterparts, have subverted the analytical arm of theater journalism. With most Russian academic journals succumbing to Western economic pressures and slashing circulation and output, the daily newspapers and glossies such as Time Out dominate coverage of theater. But the print industry’s commercialization requires fast-paced, vivid, and condensed consumer reports on what to see or not see on any given day. A relatively new phenomenon is a ratings system which forces many critics (if not all) to ―grade‖ productions (as well as directors and entire theaters) according to their taste and preference (A+, B-, etc). Hollywood’s blockbuster model is forcing theater into a competitive race. A new Americanized marketing language has also entered the lexicon of reviewers, with words like ―fall,‖ ―casting,‖ ―PR,‖ and ―shopping‖ seeping into newspaper pages. Although Moscow’s leading newspapers don’t have the same immediate impact on the box office that, say, the New York Times does (shows don’t close after a week following a bad review), Russian readers increasingly seem to trust and value a reviewer with a ―household‖ name. Unlike New York, where Ben Brantley’s review can do more damage then any lack of funding from the NEA, the Russian Ministry of Culture (based in Moscow) is still the heaviest force in providing funding for municipal theaters, national festivals and international promotions of Russian culture. In the last decade this government agency has been instrumental in developing new grant systems (Western European–style financing for the arts) and is currently involved in the allusive enterprise of ―Russian Theater Reform‖—a future venture that no one has a clear grip on. It is clear, however, that major reform is necessary, with huge discrepancies in actors’ salaries and dying
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dinosaurs called ―academic theaters‖ with 3,000 seats rented out for rock concerts and touring shows. The World Wide Web has also introduced new possibilities for criticism and selfexpression in Russian theater. After chat rooms, forums and ordinary web browsing, Russians got hooked on the oldest literary form: journal keeping. The American-based web site Livejournal.com has the largest virtual Russian community, and at times it seems as if everyone over the age of 10 publishes a blog. The most fashionable, of-themoment thing to do for a teenager or his mother is to document the humor, frustrations, and worries of everyday life. On-line communities cater to all tastes: from a shady ―Misogynists unite!‖ to the essential literary forum ―new drama.‖ Many famous personalities, playwrights, directors, and actors keep daily notes and post comments. This virtual underground culture often substitutes for newspapers and television. People respond to everything: from the terror act in Beslan (Ugarov used immediate on-line comments to create a production called September.doc) to heated discussions of rising numbers of teenage suicides. In addition, many theater critics, although employed fulltime by newspapers, theaters, and production companies find time to write extra reviews and give recommendations to work that would not always make it to their printed pages. Playwrights often post short stories, and some links from their web sites lead to new discoveries. Kolyada’s public journal, for instance, connects to a dozen other pages for the playwrights mentioned in this article. It is an opportunity for creative people to connect across the country and address the issues that they have in common, to share information and find collaborators.
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But as ever, the most important communities in Russian theater are living, not virtual. Vadim Levanov, who moved from the legendary Lyubimovka playwriting festival and Moscow’s State Literary Institute, created another major center for New Drama in an unlikely place. Levanov was invited to submit his first play to Ugarov and Gremina in 1993, and they immediately picked up on his fiery personality and literary talent. Levanov’s home, the industrial city of Togliatti on the Volga River in Southwestern Russia, is famous as a center of Russia’s monopolized automobile industry—VAZ. Togliatti has a rich history going back to medieval times, but legend holds that in Soviet era the city was completely flooded because of construction of a river dam, and instead of a medieval city there is now a man-made sea of Zhiguli. Across the river, Soviets invited Italian Fiat to help them establish an automotive plant. In 1950s, a Russian version of Detroit was born, named after an Italian communist leader, Togliatti. To this day, virtually everyone in town is employed by VAZ, and the plant even has its own television studio with morning talk-shows and glossy sets. VAZ sponsors various cultural events and a few years ago the company donated a substantial amount of money to revamp the city’s large state theater, known as The Wheel. But for some reason, VAZ did not support the region’s more vibrant and creative endeavor—an annual festival called ―May Readings.‖ The festival and its initiators, Vladimir Doroganov and Vadim Levanov, have attained a sort of cult status among Russia’s theater cognoscenti. Their efforts are entirely philanthropic and they run a truly non-for-profit organization. Levanov studied playwriting at the State Literary Institute and returned to Togliatti from Moscow after graduating. There he joined a community center, Golosova-20, as head of theater production and began to promote contemporary playwriting.
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Though his shear enthusiasm and drive for life and art, Levanov managed to attract talented young artists to Togliatti. As he told me at the 2005 festival, his goal was to make everyone write plays. The only advice he gave them was ―to the left you put the name and to the right—what they are actually saying—and that’s all there is to writing plays.‖ In sixteen years, the festival grew from a literary podium for poets and writers to a full-fledged theater festival with a dynamic reputation. In May 2005, I joined the crowd to see for myself. The first surprise came from the people. For a major festival, there was little business-like competition. Levanov calls it a ―happening,‖ a gathering of friends and peers. Playwrights ran around trying to cast their readings at the last minute and even this newcomer got recruited. Actors sat in a comfortable greenroom serving as command post, and greeted arriving participants from other states with fresh coffee and spare cigarettes. If the new Moscow reminded me of a combination between frenzied New York and glitzy Los Angeles where ―who you know‖ is often more important than ―what you know‖—Togliatti was unmistakably Russian. After a week of roundtables, readings and performances, it was clear that Togliatti serves as a distinctive school, from which artists such as Yuri Klavdiev, Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov, and Kira Malinina have emerged. With Levanov encouraging his young charges to write and the Durnenkov brothers suddenly surfacing in the grim city’s streets, I watched new plays find their way to Levanov, the center of gravity, around whom a strong core of people has formed, connected in their extraordinary devotion to supporting and developing new writing. The Durnenkovs are representative of Togliatti’s success. Their work often balances parables and ballads with simple, poetic language of the everyday. Philosophical
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depths are neatly packed away, so that the audience continues to discover meaning long after initially encountering it in performance. The Culture Layer, one of their earliest plays, ends in an apocalyptic vision of a young mother describing the city swallowed by smog. The play is a clever webbing of three vignettes: an old man and his grandson (an artist), a pair of thuggish real estate agents and the newlyweds who, by chance, purchase an apartment that belonged to the first two. The audience has to put the puzzle together drawing parallels between the childhood memories of the grandson and the young bride, the old man and the realtor. The finale pays off with a shocking discovery: the newlyweds have the roof over their head only because the agents covered up the arson that killed the grandfather and the young artist. Humanism and destruction coexist comfortably on the same page when the writing comes from a city such as this -- where the leading newspaper’s editor-in-chief was gunned down in 2002 for exposing corruption and a year later his successor was stabbed to death. At the festival, the local theater company Variant also premiered Vyacheslav Durnenkov’s Mutter, directed by Galina Shvetsova-Skripinskaya. The playwright mentioned that the idea for this play came from his stint performing community service at a local nursing home for a minor criminal offense. There he discovered World War II heroes in a drunken stupor, staring blindly into a wall, their chests glistening with two rows of medals for courage. Mutter is a lyrical and harsh view of grandparents discarded and forgotten by society, who create a new universe in order to escape their daily monotony. Mutter uses theatricalist devices: a play within a play which seniors write and perform for a local competition about foggy Brussels. Variant’s production sustained the
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bitter humor of this tragic farce. I was astonished to learn that none of the actors were professionals; some were students and others were even employees of the VAZ. Yuri Klavdiev, another Togliatti native, works in a cinematic mode, fragmenting his text into striking frames. His characters are archetypal, boyish, and aggressive; they are always on the edge or at the end of their rope. Violence comes naturally in his plays and blood often pours as freely as water into the river. But this violence is exaggerated and iconic. Often described as a ―hyperrealist,‖ he is anything but. His work is an adult cartoon, a comic strip with heroes and anti-heroes, conflicts as clear as day and night, where everything is at stake including the triumph of goodness and evil. Murder, suicide and memories of rape are alienated, as if printed on a large poster painted in garish colors and distorted outlines. In general, the writers I encountered in Togliatti share a strong metaphysical drive and a dramaturgy based on fragmentation—a mirror image of the twenty-first century. Levanov’s Goodbye, Piano Tuner!, with a visceral Lolita-esque character at its center, had a strong arch too. Few ―New Drama‖ playwrights (primarily male) dare to approach the subject of love, but this play was striking in its single passionate voice. Levanov has also written a number of plays with exclusively female characters: 1, 2, 3. is a chilling account of teenage abuse and suicide. And 100 Pounds of Love is a touching expose of obsessive love-confessions, told through women’s fan-mail to their favorite musicians and actors. One can only hope that Levanov continues his mentorship and nurturing of Togliatti’s talented youth. If the local government were finally to recognize the long-term benefits of the festival, there could even be a chance for a Levanov-Teatr in the future. Sadly, however, even an established master like Nicolai Kolyada is still fighting for a
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secure place in today’s Russia. His Kolyada-Teatr nearly closed in April 2004 because the government questioned the terms of his shared lease. ―New Drama‖ is a volatile term for a country full of uncertainties. It’s a hazardous zone—a battle ground of sorts between directors and playwrights. It is opening an exciting, uncharted territory where many will fall and even fewer will rise. Kolyada, Loevsky, Levanov and Gremina continue to follow their passions, just as Jarry, Artaud and Vitrac did at the turn of the previous century, when clumsy, uneven, absurd and surreal language was assaulted by critics foaming at the mouths. The next generation in Russia needs its platforms to speak from, just as much as it needs something to trash.
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