Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman
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Mendeloff, Frank Hentschker, Theodore Shank, Erik Ramsey and the late Daniel Gerould. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all.
Aside from Towson University and Philip Arnoult’s Center for International Theatre Development, several organizations contributed to the development of one or more of this anthology’s texts: WordBRIDGE Playwright’s Laboratory, Generous Company, the Residential College at the University of Michigan, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theatre Center, the Graduate Center at SUNY, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding which provided significant support for the New Russian Drama program at Towson. I am deeply obligated to Graham Schmidt and Breaking String Theater who have repeatedly given me and others the opportunity to bring contemporary Russian drama to the American public by way of readings and full productions. The following print and net publications published early versions of several plays: TheatreForum (Flying and Angry Girl), The Mercurian (Flying), nthWORD magazine (Flying), Asymptote (three scenes from Kitchen), Theatre Journal (Natasha’s Dream and I Won).
I am deeply grateful to the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature for a generous publication grant.
Finally I wish to thank longtime friend and colleague Anna Lawton for her interest in this project. Without her the collection you hold would not exist.
More than Mere Drama: The Phenomenon of New Russian Drama
An Introduction
1. Setting the Stage
There is a phrase in Russian culture that remains meaningful no matter how you transform it; “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.” Those in the field of theater often use the phrase to declare that “theater in Russia is more than theater.” The point is that Russian artists have an intensity, a merit and therefore a significance that goes beyond face value.
Anna Akhmatova’s great poem Requiem bears witness to the tragedy of the Purges in the late 1930s, a series of events that left no individual untouched. In a brief, but famous, preface added decades later, she wrote:
I was, then, with my people,
There, where, sadly, my people were.
The poet was with her people in their time of tragedy and, for the most part, the people knew that and admired it. Akhmatova, accordingly, still is one of those poets in Russia who is more than a poet.
Russia at the advent of the twenty-first century is less dangerous than the Soviet Union about which Akhmatova wrote. In fact, the first decade of the new millennium officially became known as a period of stability. Succeeding Boris Yeltsin in 2000, Russian president Vladimir Putin often reminded his people – especially after he shut down television stations daring to question his policies – that he had replaced the volatility of Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s with strength and stability. Increasingly, though, the Putin years (including Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential “interregnum” from 2008 to 2012) became synonymous with corruption, institutional arrogance and lies.
Of all the art forms, theater – or to be more specific, drama – responded best and most quickly to these developments in society and politics. Drama, in Russia of the early twenty-first century, became more than mere drama. In fact, it acquired the designation of “new drama,” and emerged as the culture’s leading means of artistic expression. This did not happen all at once; the changes were neither unified, nor universally accepted. But by the beginning of the century’s second decade, writers, actors, directors, critics, journalists, sociologists and spectators, alike, were flocking to playwriting festivals and looking out to discover the best new plays and playwrights.
Russian drama of this time fulfilled the need for intelligent, provocative discussion that other art forms could not or did not provide. Traditional literature, that is prose and poetry, did not command as much popular attention or respect as it had at various times in Russia’s past. Books lost their mystique; and, after a brief flourishing in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, bookstores disappeared as they had elsewhere in the world. Cinema, but for isolated exceptions, wallowed in a thematic and financial crisis that carried over from the Perestroika era in the late 1980s. Television did what it seems to do best – churning out mind-numbing pabulum that encouraged people to settle for bad taste and low expectations. In this confused and sometimes retrograde artistic environment the so-called new drama took on issues that were controversial not only for Russian theater – homelessness, violence, suicide, abuse of sex and alcohol, life in prisons, mental hospitals, mines and factories. Playwrights sought to replace a language of false literary sensibilities with genuine, unadorned Russian as it was spoken in the new century. To a large extent, new dramatists sought to do what Akhmatova had done seven decades earlier: stand with the common people and share their experience.
New drama flourished (almost) exclusively in small spaces, often in dingy basements that employed and accommodated small numbers of people. The big theaters largely turned a blind eye to what was happening on small stages and in backrooms in playhouses, libraries and community centers in a few chosen hot spots around Russia – primarily Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Togliatti. In many cases, they took actively hostile stances toward it. This would change, however. And by the beginning of the century’s second decade, new drama was threatening to become a mainstream phenomenon. Not every theater staged plays associated with new drama, but almost every one began staging plays influenced by the themes, methods and language of the new drama movement.
This was an enormous turnaround from the 1980s and 1990s when there were precious few places a writer could go for information, education or encouragement if he or she wished to write a play. In 1990 a lone festival, housed in, and named after Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Lyubimovka estate outside of Moscow, came into being. In the early 1990s Nikolai Kolyada in Yekaterinburg opened the first school for playwrights. In 1998 playwrights Alexei Kazantsev and Mikhail Roshchin created Moscow’s and Russia’s first theater for playwrights – the Playwright and Director Center. By the early 2000s these relatively isolated developments had become part of a larger movement. In Moscow in 2002 the well-organized New Drama Festival was founded, as was Teatr.doc, a scrappy basement venue created by playwrights Yelena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov in order to explore documentary and reality-based drama exclusively. Kolyada instituted a powerful new play competition named Eurasia in 2003. At around the same time, in Togliatti, playwright Vadim Levanov transformed the annual May Readings poetry contest into a successful festival for the development and staging of new plays.
The words “new drama” in the early to mid-2000s were on everyone’s lips.
The New Drama Debate
What is new drama? Why is it that, even now, more than a decade after the term gained currency, we still struggle to define it?
These two innocuous words are not capable of embracing everything recent cultural history has asked them to stand for. At the same time, they come closest to describing the movement they have come to define – much in the way, perhaps, that, for awhile, the term New Russians came to define successful individuals in the 1990s. It must be remembered that new drama was coined specifically both as the title of a festival and as an ideological slogan providing leverage for those whose purpose it was to take a proactive approach to the still-stagnating status of drama in Russian theater in the early 2000s. In other words, the name came first and a manufactured reality followed it. This irritated many who, in the early years especially, saw the movement as more artificial than organic. It also brought about huge potential for change.
New drama, especially by its enemies in the earlier years, was often considered an offspring of what in Russian in the 1980s and 1990s was called chernukha, or, as I have translated that pithy word elsewhere, gloom, doom, bile and jaundice colored with foul-mouthed insolence. Characters freely used obscenities – something that was still taboo in theaters – and their conduct was anything but model behavior. These plays often looked at the underbelly of society to find meaning.
The goal among writers was to strip the dramatic text of the perfumes and conceits that had crystallized on its surface over the last 250 years. Famously, Mikhail Ugarov – a founder at both the New Drama Festival and Teatr.doc – railed against metaphors in dramatic writing. Poetry,