Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama. John Freedman
underlies every one of his works. His Martial Arts puts a pair of preteens into a pitched battle with drug dealers and corrupt narcotics agents. The results are as hilarious as they are harrowing. It is a combination of which Klavdiev is a master.
Writing alone, each of the Durnenkovs turned out plays of significance. In Exhibits Vyacheslav set himself the task of writing a purposefully “old-fashioned” family drama with strong social undertones. He declared that new drama had spent time enough in basements and on small stages, and he wanted to write a big play for a big stage. (For the record, its premiere in Moscow was performed on the tiny Teatr.doc basement stage.) Based in part on a real event that occurred in a small town south of Moscow, it pits two clans against each other, somewhat, though only loosely, in the fashion of Romeo and Juliet. But the real conflict arises as the result of two Moscow city slickers proposing to turn the small town into a living museum. If town residents agree to play the parts of their ancestors for tourists a few hours each week, the city will thrive financially. But what effect will this have on their dignity?
Mikhail Durnenkov’s Trash, in its way, is another exploration of the contemporary Russian’s struggle for a dignified existence. “I’m not trash,” one young character declares in response to a humiliating verbal attack. “How you gonna prove it?” his nemesis shoots back. The characters here are buffeted by poverty, aimlessness, a sense of not belonging, addiction to drugs and to taking risks. But perhaps the central figures are two forlorn mothers, whose sons are lost to them, even if their love is not. This is a world where love exists but no one seems to realize it. Looming over the story is the very structure of the play. In actual fact, Trash depicts a doleful screenwriter trying in vain to satisfy the demands of a boorish film producer. This kind of cold-nosed irony is typical not only of Durnenkov but of many of new drama writers.
One of the most wickedly ironic playwrights of them all is Pavel Pryazhko. He appeared with a trio of plays, The Third Shift, Panties, and Life is Grand, that took Moscow’s progressive basement theaters by storm. The first aimed an acidic gaze at the cruelties and corruptions of a children’s camp, while the last was a rather astonishing accomplishment: It told a four-way love story employing an unprecedented quantity of obscenities. Several plays in this era – including Maksym Kurochkin’s Vodka, Fucking, Television – made efforts to topple the taboo against obscenities on stage, but it was Life is Grand, following the lead of Panties, that can be said to have done it. As funny and touching as it was bracing, it became Pryazhko’s biggest hit.
Panties, which won grand prize in the 2007 play competition organized by the Free Theater of Minsk, is many things in one. It is a satire of a society that has lost its taste and capability for grand ideas and deeds. It joyously mocks literary traditions while renewing them in a contemporary setting. As if springing like a crassly colored plastic toy from the hoary depths of a Greek tragedy, a young woman undertakes a heroine’s journey when she discovers that someone stole her underwear from her clothing line. So intent is she upon establishing the truth of the crime that she apparently is willing, like Joan of Arc, to be burned at the stake. Pryazhko’s inventiveness, his humor, and his ability to engage serious themes in a purposefully frivolous setting, were signs that still another writer of importance had emerged.
The pioneering playwrights of the 1990s, those who fought indifference and hostility to bring their work to the public even in small ways, were predominantly women. Yelena Gremina, Olga Mukhina, Nadezhda Ptushkina, Olga Mikhailova and Yelena Isaeva were just a few of them. For whatever historical, cultural and random reasons, the new plays making impact in the first decade of the 21st century were usually written by men. Mukhina’s Flying was an exception, as were Natalya Vorozhbyt’s Galka Motalko, Nina Belenitskaya’s My God – Pavlik and Natalia Moshina’s Pulya and Techniques of Breathing in an Air-Locked Space. Still, the discovery of the young Yaroslava Pulinovich and the return of Gremina were important events as the turn of the century’s second decade approached.
Pulinovich, still another former student of Nikolai Kolyada in Yekaterinburg, burst on the scene with a short monologue, Natasha’s Dream. It was published in a journal in 2008 and within two years had been staged throughout the country and the world. The tale of a teenage girl living a difficult and dangerous life in an orphanage struck a chord with many. Both victim and victimizer, the poor, sensitive and angry Natasha is battered by the insurmountable weight of her troubled background and her idealistic, woefully simplistic strivings for romantic love. Her vulnerability and the injustice that society and the construct of God’s world impose upon her are overwhelming and dramatically convincing.
Pulinovich wrote an equally powerful companion piece to Natasha’s Dream called I Won. It considers a similar problem – a young woman making her way in the world around her – only this time from the opposite side of the spectrum. I Won considers the plight of a privileged teenager who is always successful at everything she does. These plays in English have come to be known collectively as The Natasha Plays.
Yelena Gremina, a prolific playwright in the 1990s, spent most of the 2000s writing teleplays, and running the Lyubimovka play festival and Teatr.doc. In 2005 she crafted a text called September.doc that sought to raise questions about Russia’s reaction to the horrific 2004 terrorist attack on a school in Beslan in the Russian Caucasus. It was comprised of textual fragments drawn from commentaries, blogs, interviews and journalistic reports on the topic. Although the production was short-lived, September.doc was noteworthy for being one of the first overtly political dramatic statements to come out of the new drama movement. Despite new drama’s fascination with social problems, it virtually never took on politics directly. That changed in a significant way with Gremina’s One Hour, Eighteen Minutes in 2010.
One Hour, Eighteen Minutes was a direct response to the death in November 2009 of Sergei Magnitsky in prison. Magnitsky was an attorney investigating corruption charges against high-placed Russian officials. Before his work could bring anyone to justice, he was arrested on corruption charges himself and then, as is now assumed, murdered in an isolation cell eight days before the government was compelled by law either to charge him officially or let him go. The year of incarceration leading to Magnitsky’s death included a series of bone-chilling actions – or refusals to act – on the part of Russian law enforcement agencies and the legal system. Gremina, employing the verbatim or documentary method of drama, took texts available in the public domain – interviews, official statements and reports, investigative journalistic articles – and turned them into a play that held Magnitisky’s jailers and killers to account. It was another watershed moment in the recent chronicle of Russian drama, in part because of the power of the play itself, and in part because it coincided with a growing protest movement in Russian society at large.
One of the most interesting developments of the new drama movement was the transformation that occurred in the work of Pavel Pryazhko. His early obscenity-filled tales about outcasts and losers gradually gave way to experimental, minimalist texts, the sophistication of which was probably matched among his peers only by Maksym Kurochkin. But where Kurochkin’s was a complicated, baroque manner of writing, Pryazhko began seeking to strip his texts of everything but essentials. One of his most radical efforts, I am Free, consisted of 535 photographs to be shown as a computerized slide show accompanied by a dozen laconical spoken phrases.
Closer to traditional drama in form, but still playing fast and loose with many of its basic rules, was Pryazhko’s Angry Girl. First produced in 2012, it dares to tread territory on the banal surfaces of the lives of a group of young twenty- to thirty-somethings. It eschews plot complication almost entirely. The worlds of dream and imagination flow freely into the characters’ waking lives. Some of the most prominent, repeated events, if they can be so called, are people turning lamps on and off, sitting on sofas or waiting for others. Most of the dialogue, of which there is relatively little, centers on mundane exchanges. Author’s directions are so extensive as to make the text look in places like a short story. The substance of the tale that is told so unusually emerges in carefully placed details that attract our attention briefly, but significantly. Consider the way that the image of a character dropping money into beggars’ hands changes our understanding of the story as a whole. Angry Girl has a sense of magic to it. While seeming to do little, it paints a powerful, nuanced picture of the world young Russians inhabit in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
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