Last winter I arrived in Kyiv to direct a new play, “When the Hurlyburly’s Done,” which I had written specifically for the Theater on Podil. It centers on a significant time in Ukraine’s cultural history: In 1920, Les Kurbas, the father of the modern Ukrainian theater, directed a production of “Macbeth,” the first Shakespeare play ever produced in the Ukrainian language. He presented it in the countryside, amid civil war, far from Kyiv, which was suffering through a famine; his young actors bartered tickets for food.
The inspiration for “When the Hurlyburly’s Done,” which has just begun a weeklong run at the Public Theater in Manhattan, came during my previous time in Ukraine. I was there to direct another play of mine, and I had noticed that women made up a large percentage of the people on the streets and in our audiences. The men were fighting. I had fascinating talks with women while in air-raid shelters, with female university students, and with the actresses involved in my production.
So, when writing my new play, I decided to make it about young women, mostly actresses, working with Kurbas in the midst of the civil war. In my pitch to the artistic director of the Theater on Podil, I wrote: “It’s a play about a group of young women putting on a play in the middle of a war, to be performed by a group of young women putting on this play in the middle of a war.”
Soon I returned to Kyiv for rehearsals, and encouraged the young actresses to share their stories and to relate these to the stories in our play — maybe, I thought, the actress and character might become entwined.
They talked about the first days of the full-scale invasion when, like my characters, they found themselves in a world of profound uncertainty. In one instance, while waiting out an air raid in the theater’s shelter, an actress recounted the birth of her daughter. She was eight months pregnant, and she and her husband had returned to her village in the Poltava region to have the baby, but once there she didn’t trust the doctor.
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The post In War-Torn Ukraine, ‘I Never Doubted the Importance of Theater’ appeared first on New York Times.
