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Vladimir Lupovskoy / For MT
"Phaedra: Golden Braid" suggested that new drama encompasses reworkings of the classics as well as gritty modern works.
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Rebels in the Limelight
As it approaches its fifth birthday, the "new drama" tribe has now become an establishment of its own.
By John Freedman
Published: July 28, 2006
Editor's note: This is the first in a four-part series that will explore the people and issues standing behind current developments in contemporary Russian drama.
It still seems a new phenomenon, although it has been with us now for half a decade. "It" is the new writing for theater, the new playwrights, the new fashions in drama. In short, "it" is what is generally called the new drama.
The phrase "new drama" may sound innocent, but for many in Russian theater today they are fighting words. They have become -- depending on one's point of view -- a description of a trendsetting movement, a commercial trademark attached to a popular festival, a diagnosis, a bludgeon or an irrelevant annoyance.
When asked about the "new drama" earlier this season, Yekterinburg playwright Nikolai Kolyada grinned and said, "I've never said this in an interview before, but I think 'new drama' is a soap bubble. There are a few good plays and playwrights involved with it, but as a movement it is pointless."
Vladimir Ageyev, a Moscow director who has been instrumental in establishing the reputations of several new writers, including the hot properties Yury Klavdiyev and the Presnyakov brothers, takes a different and less categorical approach. "We now have such a concept as a new language," he explained. "I think this is what characterizes the new drama. When playwrights create a new language, then that truly can be attributed to the new drama."
In fact, it is almost impossible to pin down what new drama means. For all the hype and arguments, nobody really knows what it is. In some corners, it has become a pejorative phrase; in others, it describes a force that freed Russian drama of the strict literary traditions of the past. The term's lack of clarity has probably contributed to its relative longevity -- over the years, numerous different kinds of plays have been touted as the movement's calling cards.
At various times such writers as Mikhail Ugarov ("Oblom Off"), Ivan Vyrypayev ("Oxygen"), Vasily Sigarev ("Plasticine"), the Presnyakov brothers ("Terrorism" and "Captive Spirits"), Danila Privalov ("5-25") and the Durnenkov brothers ("The Cultural Layer") have been held up as the movement's poster boys. Curiously, there have been far fewer poster girls. The playwright Yelena Gremina, an important figure in the development of new drama, has never written an original play that the movement has incorporated. The Lithuanian Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite's "Sliding Luche" gained some celebrity among devotees, as did Natalya Vorozhbit's "Galka Motalko," although neither of these works became a first-rank new drama event.
Vladimir Lupovskoy / For MT "Dreams of Rodion Romanovich," a reworking of "Crime and Punishment" that probed Raskolnikov's subconscious | | |
In the vernacular, new drama has come to mean any play that deals with topics of concern to the younger generation, people who are perceived -- and often perceive themselves -- to be bereft of principles, faith, taste, hope, conscience or ambition. A new drama hero or heroine is thought to be a cynic, someone who lacks a past and a future and, at least superficially, couldn't care less about that. The notions of morality, scruples and responsibility have no meaning for them, detractors suggest. New drama heroes are apt to have a proclivity for obscenities, drugs and death.
This certainly is no objective description, but it reflects the general perceptions that have arisen in the new drama territory. Another defining factor is the minimalist nature of the way plays are usually staged. Directors often give preference to amateur actors -- or, at least, those whose goal is to appear amateurish. Psychological nuances and the invisible fourth wall are out; sarcasm and direct appeals to the audience are in.
People tend to love new drama or hate it. Those who loathe it are inclined to reject offhand anything or anyone who has anything to do with it. Those who advocate it have often been so exclusive and zealous in their support as to alienate everyone but the most committed believers. It is no coincidence that as the new drama movement gained in importance -- especially because of the influential New Drama Festival, which debuted in the summer of 2002 -- it increasingly became an institution that offered or denied access to money and power. If you were part of the new drama community, shared its goals, subscribed to its ideology and worshipped the icons it blessed, you were included in the club. If not, you were most likely branded an enemy or, worse, irrelevant.
Vladimir Lupovskoy / For MT "The Newspaper 'Russian Invalid,' Dated July 18" by Mikhail Ugarov | | |
The 2005-06 season may have been a watershed for new drama. The festival that lent it status as a brand name reached an uneasy maturity in September with its fourth running. In the past, it was typically lively, provocative and contentious. This season, there was a heavily scripted feel to the controversies it raised. Ugarov and Eduard Boyakov, two of the masterminds of the new drama, seemed to dredge up the same old dirt in shiny new shovels as they strained to present their festival as something of a source for eternal revolution. More to the point was the festival's program.
Vyrypayev's "Genesis No. 2," the Presnyakovs' "Playing the Victim" and Sigarev's "Phantom Pains" were top-notch productions, but things thinned quickly after that. Ugarov's and Gremina's "September.doc," an attempt to take on the aftermath of the Beslan school tragedy through the format of a verbatim play, was frustrating, if not infuriating, for the way it trivialized a terrible theme. A lethargic Lithuanian production of Yevgeny Grishkovets' old play "The City" left spectators yawning. "Mutter" by Vyacheslav Durnenkov, a short piece about people in an old folks' home who are visited by aliens, won the festival's award for best new play but bewildered most observers for its lack of focus.
What direction the New Drama Festival may take in the future is uncertain. It has broken from the Golden Mask Festival, which originally gave birth to it, and has followed Boyakov to the new Praktika Theater, which Boyakov founded this season after resigning as the Golden Mask's general director. At Praktika, Boyakov vigorously pushed his vision of new drama, putting on simple productions of plays with largely topical interest. His revamped New Drama Festival is scheduled to open in the second half of September.
But what about new drama as a generic phenomenon? New plays this season offered a wide range of styles and themes. Yury Klavdiyev's "Let's Go, a Car is Waiting" at the Playwright and Director Center and "The Bullet Collector" at Praktika were harsh plays about young people that easily fit the new drama template. At the same venues, respectively, Anna Bogachyova's "Learn, Learn, Learn" and Viktoria Nikiforova's "A Play About Money" also tapped variously into the young-people-in-an-alien world thematic.
On the other hand, Ugarov himself pulled one of his old, neglected plays out of mothballs and gave it a heartfelt production at the Et Cetera Theater. This work, "The Newspaper 'Russian Invalid,' Dated July 18," is steeped in nostalgia and intellectual subtlety, two things that are distinctly alien to the new drama ambiance. Oleg Bogayev's "Marya's Field" at the Pushkin Theater was unabashedly traditional, a fairy tale with deep roots in history and the national conscience. Yelena Isayeva's "Doc-tor" at Teatr.doc incorporated a preferred new drama method -- the verbatim play based on real-life material -- and gave it a completely new twist.
Vladimir Lupovskoy / For MT "Let's Go, a Car Is Waiting" from Yury Klavidyev, a trendsetting playwright known for exploring the harsh world of Russian youth. | | |
Meanwhile, two of the season's most interesting productions were contemporary reinterpretations of classic works. Andrii Zholdak and Sergei Korobkov fashioned a compelling modern version of the Phaedra myth in "Phaedra: Golden Braid" at the Theater of Nations, and Mikhail Palatnik penned an imaginative dramatization of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" in "Dreams of Rodion Romanovich," a production of the 814 Theatrical Association.
The importance of the revised classic is not generally considered a common element of the new drama. However, Ugarov's influential "Oblom Off" was a dramatization of Ivan Goncharov's 19th-century novel "Oblomov." And at the end of this season, another new drama star became involved in a modern adaptation. Kirill Serebrennikov, whose productions of the Presnyakov brothers and Sigarev made these writers famous, enlisted Bogayev to reinvent Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" for the Sovremennik Theater. There was a single closed dress rehearsal of the show in May and the official premiere will take place in the fall, so it is too early to draw conclusions. But one thing is already clear: Contemporary Russian drama is much more diverse than any one label someone might attach to it.
Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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July 25 - 31, 2008 
