IIn the Studio Theater, tucked away in a courtyard behind Kiev’s main Khreshchatyk Street, six playwrights and six directors developed the difficult question of how to write a play about war during wartime. was.
One of the unexpected outcomes of their workshop was through jokes.
“In Ukraine, it is very important for people to laugh about the war. That’s how we survive,” said playwright Oksana Gritsenko after the final session of her week-long lab. “You can’t live if you cry every day about the lives lost.”
Three of the six drafts the writers brought to the group were comedies, Gristenko said. The plan was to conclude the workshop with readings performed in theaters in different regions of Ukraine, from Sumy in the northeast to Lviv in the west.
In this session, participants discussed Katerina Penkova’s comedy-drama set in a Polish hostel hosting Ukrainian refugees when the invasion began in earnest last year.
However, the play also focuses on dark and difficult episodes in the common history of Ukraine and Poland. Volhynia massacrewhen thousands of Poles were killed by Ukrainian rebels in 1943.
When the playwrights and directors gathered in a circle for the session, Lena Ragushonkova, the playwright’s mentor who was overseeing the day, asked Penkova to talk to the group about the challenges she faced when writing the script. asked to provide insight.
“It took me six months to write this draft, which seemed like an eternity,” Penkova said. “I wanted it to be funny and light, but I still wanted it to raise certain issues. I hope so. After taking a year off from writing, I wanted to play with my characters. I wanted that sense of creation.”
After almost two years of war, playwrights felt they were at a turning point in terms of what they could and should write.
At the beginning of 2022, many people stopped writing altogether. My priority was to protect myself and my family. Many people turned to volunteer work and humanitarian work. Writing for theater seemed irrelevant.
And after the initial shock, the script was written. They tended to be improvised documentary pieces that told stories of escape and survival based on personal testimony.
“I think the problem for me was that there were a lot of plays that were about great patriotic Ukrainians coming out at that time,” Gritsenko said after the workshop. “It was a kind of therapy for us to draw strength from the fact that we survived, and that there are so many wonderful people around us. But soon we realized that this was a kind of kitschy thing. It has become.”
At the same time, the theater was keen to produce texts that boosted morale. “In 2022, I received five different requests from directors for something ‘patriotic’,” Penkova said. “War has to come with a certain amount of that, and that’s normal. But it’s not real art.”
“It felt like a new version of old-style Soviet realism,” Ragushonkova added. “We have not yet completed the process of decolonization from the Soviet Union.”
Penkova said now is the perfect time for a deeper, broader and more complex approach.
“I believe we have reached the next level,” she said. “We are not yet far from events, but we can start thinking about the war from a different angle. The new script is not just about survival, it is about who we are, our identity, Europe. We’re preoccupied with who we are in relation to , the world, and the past. And we want to think about certain things that are buried and unreflected.”
Penkova’s own comedy-drama, for example, is closely based on her own experiences running a hostel in Poland in early 2022, but is fictionalized. And it’s not overt “patriotism.”
At the center of it all are Ukrainians who are far from heroes. “She has a negative personality and she wants to live on refugee payments and welfare,” Penkova explained.
And with references to the 1943 genocide in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, the play explores how the often fraught past relationship between Ukrainians and Poles resonates in the present.
The broadening of the approach from verbatim, testimonial works also contributed to the emergence of comedy in the plays that writers brought to the group.
And in Gritsenko’s case, for the introduction of something surreal.
Her draft is a comedy about Ukrainian statues of poet Alexander Pushkin and other Russian historical figures, many of which are being removed from the country’s squares and parks under new colonial liberation laws. .
In her play, statues rise and march towards Crimea to protect the peninsula and “.Rusky Mir”, or the Russian political and cultural space from the Ukrainian counterattack.
Another workshop participant, Olha Matsyupa, is working on a Western-style dystopian comedy set in post-war Ukraine, where the majority of women are women.
Despite this non-documentary approach, the artists say they deeply reflect on their responsibility to the truth.
Penkova said the group cited Yurik, a Ukrainian feature film set in Mariupol that was released earlier this year, as an example of not writing a script. it is, barrage of criticism for giving a false impression of the situation during the siege of the city.
The fiction, which is said to be “based on a true story,” was criticized for depicting residents receiving telephones and lights when in reality neither electricity nor traffic lights existed. It was also accused of falsely suggesting there was a safe humanitarian corridor for evacuation. This inaccuracy was seen as gaslighting those who were actually suffering the trauma of survival under Russian shelling and siege of the city last spring.
Even when creating characters, “the play has to be based on deep research,” Penkova says. That often means collecting stories from people who witnessed horrific events. Over the summer, the playwrights participated in sessions with psychologists about how best to speak to traumatized interview subjects.
“At this stage, journalism and playwriting are closely related,” Ragushonkova said.
Gritsenko himself writes journalism. But her playwriting process is very different from reporting, she says. She said: “When I write about a person in a newspaper, of course I think about that person, but there is a certain line between me and the source.
“On the other hand, when you do theater, you have to get into the person’s skin, to become that person.”
When it comes to the central question of how to write a play during and about war, “there is no exact recipe,” Penkova said. “But it has to be honest, it has to be specific, it has to be true.”
