CITD’s LINKAGES Projects Help Artists Stand Strong in Difficult Times

The LINKAGES projects of the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD) have entered their sixth year of fostering grassroots connections among theatre makers in Poland, Hungary, and, now, Ukraine. Among all of CITD’s activities over the years, LINKAGES may be the one that most perfectly expresses the organization’s core values, objectives, and methods. CITD was founded by Philip Arnoult in 1991 and run by him until his death in June 2024. Philip was famous for bringing the world’s theatre artists together, beginning when he gave Jerzy Grotowski his first significant airing in the United States in 1975 and continuing over the next fifty years. His efforts brought hundreds of major East European artists to the United States and sent hundreds of American artists on working trips to Eastern Europe. One of Arnoult’s favorite phrases was “I put people in airplane seats and watch what happens,” and when all cylinders are firing the LINKAGES projects do precisely that. They connect artists from different countries, traditions, backgrounds, and methodologies to share their experiences and learn from each other—and, in the process, to learn more about themselves—in intimate, face-to-face meetings. The ultimate goal is to foster long-term personal connections among artists.

The LINKAGES programs began at a time of sea change in Eastern Europe. CITD’s lengthy partnership with Russian theatre organizations and artists had essentially ended, falling victim to Russia’s hostile activities in Ukraine following the illegal annexation of Crimea and other lands in the east of Ukraine in 2014. This provided an opportunity for Arnoult to redouble his efforts in other countries that he had collaborated with for decades. The specific impulse for establishing LINKAGES: Hungary in 2019 was Arnoult’s desire to support disenfranchised MFA students at Hungary’s University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE). Major demonstrations and sit-ins broke out among the students and faculty when prime minister Viktor Orbán installed one of his right-wing cronies as the school’s top board member, and began curtailing artistic and educational freedoms there. The protest movement, which became known as Free SZFE in 2020, gained international attention when it was backed by such Western celebrities as Salman Rushdie, Colm Toibín, Cate Blanchett, and Helen Mirren. Arnoult’s respect for the bravery and creativity of the students prompted him to set up a yearlong program that paired MFA students in Hungary with counterparts in the United States. Various factors—the COVID pandemic not being the least of them—derailed the Hungary project for a while, so it happened that the whole LINKAGES idea actually had its first full implementation a bit further north. 

As student protests were taking place in Hungary, change of a very different but equally powerful nature was building momentum in Poland. The old guard in Polish theatre had begun giving way to a new generation, bringing about a period of accelerated growth and engendering artistic, social, and political challenges that echoed changes familiar to artists in the United States—a movement toward diversity and modernization. Working closely with renowned Polish theatre critic and translator Małgorzata Semil, CITD established the LINKAGES: Poland project in 2020.

COVID also affected plans for Poland, of course, making travel, to say nothing of in-person work, impossible. But Arnoult, ever at the forefront of all things technological, immediately redirected his initial plan of personal exchanges into the realm of Zoom meetings. As a result, the first hands-on meeting in Poland took place in June 2022 when project director Howard Shalwitz and project manager Brandice Thompson took the program’s initial participant, Julieanne Ehre of PivotArts in Chicago, to the Divine Comedy Festival in Kraków. Since then, more than thirty Americans have entered into long-term artistic relationships with at least twenty Polish theatremakers thanks to the LINKAGES initiative. Six more Americans are set to travel to Warsaw, Toruń, and other cities in May and June of 2025. Shalwitz has published reports about trips to Poland in the HowlRound Journal in September 2022 and March 2023. More coverage of LINKAGES: Poland has appeared in American Theatre and the Washington Post.

 From our vantage point we can only imagine the importance of the readings in Kharkiv, a city that has been under heavy attack for over three years.

LINKAGES: Ukraine is a new venture that builds relationships specifically among playwrights from Ukraine and the United States. Even as this article has been in the making, the project has expanded into other spheres (more about these later). It is worth noting that this is the first major initiative established by CITD since Arnoult’s death. Losing Philip meant that CITD had no choice but to reinvent itself, and it is now a nonprofit organization with Howard Shalwitz and Yury Urnov sharing duties as associate directors, Brandice Thompson as managing director, and Susan Stroupe as legacy and communications manager. I ride a sidecar as the Ukraine program director. One of the first steps that Brandice and I took after Philip’s death was to create LINKAGES: Ukraine, leaning on CITD’s expertise in Poland and Hungary. There was immediately one major difference, however: with Ukraine embroiled in a full-scale war, travel between the United States and Ukraine was not viable. Not only was there a safety risk to consider, but Ukrainian writers were scattered throughout various countries, making the logistics of travel complex beyond reason.

The inaugural participants in LINKAGES: Ukraine were Anna Halas, Dmytro Ternovyi, and Olha Ternova, who worked through the Teatr na Zhukakh in Kharkiv, and Mark Cornell, Judy Klass, and Garry Lee Posey in collaboration with Posey’s Ensemble Theatre of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The husband-and-wife team of Ternoviy and Ternova mounted an evening of live readings of short plays by the three American writers on 29 July 2024, while Ensemble Theatre reciprocated by recording audio readings of Chronicles of a Lost Soul by Anna Halas and On the Eve by Dmytro Ternovyi that were streamed in February and March 2025 along with interviews on the Ensemble Theatre’s Lights Up! podcast. From our vantage point we can only imagine the importance of the readings in Kharkiv, a city that has been under heavy attack for over three years. The situation is so dire that all cultural events in the city are bound by law to take place in underground spaces. The day after the event, Ternovyi wrote in an email: “The evening turned out to be very atmospheric, sincere, and warm. The house was packed. Spectators said it was as if they were able to catch a different wave, as if they had briefly entered life in peacetime.”

We next assembled two pods of writers who would participate in the classic form of meetings and discussions, albeit by Zoom. Meeting virtually on 26 November 2024 and 29 January 2025, the first group, which we refer to as Pod One, brought together Ali Viterbi, a playwright, television writer, and educator based in Atlanta; Nilan, a performer, writer, and associate artistic director of the Drama League in New York; and Olena Astasieva, a playwright from Kherson, Ukraine, who fled to Ireland when the full-scale invasion began, but who now lives in Türkiye. Translating for them was Karina Syrota, a member of Laura Cahill’s Young Playwrights Ukraine project who studies computer sciences at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Brandice and I were present as observer-moderators.

Pod Two, who met on 31 January and 15 February 2025, consisted of Carolyn Dunn, a writer, actor, director, and associate professor of playwriting and dramaturgy at California State University, Los Angeles; David M. White, a playwright, director, and head of the Theatre Lab at Towson University near Baltimore; and Nina Zakhozhenko, a playwright, screenwriter, director, and educator from Kyiv who is now located in Lviv. As did the first group, the writers shared writing samples to kickstart their conversations. Translating for this pod was Taya Fedorenko, another member of Laura Cahill’s Young Playwrights Ukraine project, and a student at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

It is a sign of our times that every Zoom took place as one or more major upheavals affected all or some of the participants. Pod One's first meeting was held the day after the 2024 American presidential election. The second meeting came days after the inauguration of the new United States president. Pod Two's first meeting was delayed because Carolyn Dunn was caught in the aftermath of catastrophic fires that swept through her home city of Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. This group’s second meeting came three days after the new American president declared himself chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and ten days after he ordered the shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which, according to Zakhozhenko, had an immediate adverse impact on grant recipients in Ukraine.

Given the upheavals that the United States and Ukraine are currently experiencing, it is not surprising that much of the conversation involving Viterbi, Nilan, and Astasieva revolved around two specific themes: the role of place in their work and the question of theatre and drama’s potential to affect the course of events in the contemporary world.

“I usually hyper-fixate on communities,” Nilan told the group during their first Zoom meeting. “I try to look at why people have chosen to live in their place and what conversations they need to have with each other to be a stronger community. Usually that comes out with me talking a lot about race and sexuality, especially class. I speak about a lot of class issues.”

Viterbi agreed that her own work is similar in some ways. “I write a lot about communities,” she said. “I love deep diving into hyper-specific communities with their own social norms and roles, whether that's a nursing home or, you know, a sorority, or Jewish refugees.”

I think it's very ambitious to think that we can change something if we write about it.

Astasieva, who has been living in exile for three years, admitted that the topics of place or society are currently a conundrum for her. “My recent work is more about myself,” she explained through Syrota’s translation. “Here in Türkiye, I am more in social isolation.”

Astasieva referenced her latest play, The Egotist, which, echoing her personal experience, explores the rocky relationship between a grown woman and her mother after world events force the two to share living quarters again for the first time in decades. Said Astasieva, “I wanted to explore the fact that during the war many grown-up children and their parents have had to experience reunions, even sometimes as adult children have moved back in with their parents. This topic relates to so many people in Ukraine.”

Nilan parried that admission by saying, “I call that very courageous. I do not put my life in my work. I put my opinions and thoughts in the play, but Nilan is zipped.”

Responding to Nilan’s question about whether Astasieva felt that her art had the power to change the culture in Ukraine, Olena said, “I think Ukrainian playwrights now are trying more just to capture what is going on around them, to write about what is happening rather than to change it. I think it's very ambitious to think that we can change something if we write about it.”

“I used to live in the South,” Nilan opined, “but for my own sanity and safety I moved out of the South. But I knew the South needed me more as an artist.”

Viterbi expanded on the topic, declaring,

I really relate to what you just said, Nilan. I only moved to Atlanta a year ago. Before, I was in Southern California and New York, and I hear what you're saying about bubbles and the way we make art inside them. Who are we making art for? Who is our audience? Why does it matter? And what if you're making it for people but you don't feel safe in those spaces? Those are really resonant and powerful questions right now.

The topic of bubbles, and the faults inherent in them, also arose during the discussions of the second pod when David White described in detail an experience he had crossing the “red lines” that can separate audiences from artists.

“I wrote a radical, experimental environmental play called Dance on Bones,” White said:

You can throw it in the air and do it in any order that it lands in. It was produced at Southwest Baptist University because it lacked obscenities, and they were looking to do something clean but wacky. I thought this might be a way to get my experimental work in front of audiences that, if they were to meet me, would not like me. So I'm figuring out these tricky ways to get my work across red lines. It was amazing to see the reactions among the kids at a Baptist bible college who had never thought about the environment before. I'm thinking, you're twenty years old and your parents are here too. None of you has ever thought of the environment until you saw this play. That was a little victory for me. So the way I operate now has changed from “how can I get on stage in big theatres or medium or even small theatres?” to “how can I do things in which people who disagree with me will see a superficial value?” Then when it gets staged, it operates according to a different set of rules.”

A fuller account of the discussion among Pod Two will be published alongside this essay.

In the short time since the second group met for the final time in February, CITD has pushed the LINKAGES further into new territory. Play exchanges and meetings among US and Ukrainian writers will commence on 8 May in New York when Wayne Maugans’ Voyage Theater Company hosts readings of short plays by five Ukrainians at the New York Public Library on 53^rd St., and Dmytro Ternoviy’s Teatr na Zhukakh in Kharkiv will present Ukrainian translations of plays by three to five Americans this summer. This specific LINKAGES group will be expanded when Voyage Theater Company presents a full-length Ukrainian play at the Ukrainian Institute of American on E. 79^th St. and Fifth Avenue in New York City.

In April, Brandice Thompson completed plans for the first proper travel event for a Ukrainian writer. Fittingly, it will be a joint effort of two LINKAGES projects—Ukraine and Poland. Nina Zakhozhenko will travel to the Kontakt Festival in Toruń for a Polish-language reading of her play I’m Fine and an opportunity to meet with, among other CITD LINKAGES alumni, Carolyn Dunn and Polish director Radek Stępień.

In March, CITD announced the commencement of the Nézz Körül (Look Around) Philip Arnoult Mobility Grant. Administered by CITD with Summa Artium in Budapest, and supported by longtime partners Roland Kelemen, Noémi Herczog, Andrea Tompa, and Bence Bíró, this is not formally a LINKAGES project, but it is the next step in CITD’s activities inspired by the LINKAGES experience. Nézz Körül will provide travel grants to emerging Hungarian directors—there are fifteen in the first cohort—giving them the opportunity to escape their own personal confines to "look around" at what others are doing, then bring back the seeds of creative transformation to their home base. In this case it is more a matter of putting people in train seats, rather than airplane seats, but the basic principle is entirely true to Philip Arnoult’s vision: put people on the road, bring them together, and encourage them to make art.