Documenting the Art of Playwriting in Times of Crisis with LINKAGES: Ukraine

Last week, I offered an overview of LINKAGES: Ukraine, a new program funded and conducted by the Center for International Theatre Development (CITD). Its purpose is to bring Ukrainian and American writers together to discuss their work, methods, worries, and strategies for living and writing in difficult times. What follows is an edited transcript of two LINKAGES-organized Zoom conversations of over three hours’ time held in early 2025 with playwrights Carolyn Dunn, David M. White, and Nina Zakhozhenko. Taya Fedorenko, a student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, joined us as translator.

To grease the wheels of the conversations, the writers shared recent work, which they comment on in the transcript. Carolyn Dunn is an Afro-Indigenous artist of French Creole, Creek, Cherokee, and Tunica/Choctaw-Biloxi descent, and who now teaches at California State University, Los Angeles. Her play Soledad tells the story of Soledad “Sunny” Sixkiller, a teenage woman who attempts to overcome a disconnect with her father by becoming a powwow singer, an activity that her tribe’s traditions do not make available to women. David M. White, born in southwest Missouri, now lives in Baltimore and teaches at Towson University. His play Anti(gone) is a radical reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone that shifts the focus of attention from Antigone and Creon to a highly modern Chorus that chats and texts as it maneuvers its way through an onslaught of information, disinformation and misinformation alike. Nina Zakhozhenko, originally from Kyiv but now living in Lviv, shared her play I’m Fine. It is a brisk, hip exploration of the lives of teenagers who, despite a debilitating war raging around them, find ways to hang out, gossip, fall in love, get hurt, and—against all odds—grow up.

Part One: 31 January 2025

Carolyn Dunn: As an Indigenous person, I'm very much land-based. How does landscape become a character in our particular works?

In my play, Soledad, the landscape is definitely a character, but it's more internal: what happens after a war, after colonization? David’s Anti(gone) and Nina’s I’m Fine are both plays at the beginning of it. The dramaturg in me was saying, “Let's make these connections. Let's put it all together.”

Nina Zakhozhenko via Taya Fedorenko: As I read Soledad, I understood that our contexts were completely different, but we have many similarities. I put that down to the notion of colonization and how it affected our works. I can draw lots of parallels between Indigenous people in America and ethnic Ukrainians. I am very interested in James Mace, a Cherokee American, who was one of the first people to draw attention to what happened during the Holodomor, Russia’s superficially created famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. James wanted to explore that event in America, but instead he came to Ukraine and taught at the university that I attended. He approached Ukrainian history through the stories of his own family, the Cherokee nation. It was all very similar, and I was amazed when I saw this in Soledad.

Carolyn: We never learned about that in the United States.

Nina in English: No one in America was interested, so he came to Ukraine to explore it. He saw this connection between his people and Ukrainians.

David White: I was amazed by the similarities in your two plays, Carolyn and Nina. Not only the presence of youth, of songs, of deeper themes, but also the structural features—how you both live in this world that is grounded not just in speech, but in melody. You both ask similar questions about how we preserve things. How do we keep things alive when everything around us says it is not important anymore?

Then I started thinking about Nina's play and mine, the social media aspects, the way we receive devastating news in 120 characters or less and have to process that. A wonderful dialogue arose as I looked at the scripts. I love the stories in Nina's play and that they are so melodic—similar to the songs in yours, Carolyn, but your play seems to be about someone earning their story, learning their story.

My job is to teach students how to develop their own tools. My tools might not be what they need in their toolbox, but I can show them how I got my tools over years of work.

Carolyn: There's always an autobiographical element in my plays. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, but my tribes are from Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana. My grandparents immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1930s, so I always say that I'm not a California Indian, but I am an Indian from California. All of my ceremonial life has been in California with California Indians. That's why Sunny’s mother in my play is a California Indian, but her father is Cherokee and Creek. Her mother passed away and her father is still grieving, so she has no connection to her father's or mother's families. It's just her and her father. She has to learn everything through songs. That was autobiographical because I became a powwow singer in my twenties. Women aren't powwow singers, and they aren’t grass dancers. Women can't do that. That’s a clash within the Indigenous cultures. There's always been a struggle between traditional cultures in California and powwow cultures because they're very different. The two cultures have never embraced one another. You know you’re an Indian, but how are you connected to your land base if you live somewhere else?

David: Nina, you mentioned you are going to teach and that most of what you do is intuitive. My journey as a teacher was: How do I turn my intuition into craft? One of the first things we teach is how young people can trust their intuition so we can teach them craft. My job is to teach students how to develop their own tools. My tools might not be what they need in their toolbox, but I can show them how I got my tools over years of work.

Nina via Taya: What do you do with students?

David: I teach short plays so I can cover more ground quickly. I take the American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. I did her 365 Plays/365 Days project in 2006, and I found that those scripts tended to look a lot like what my students would write in a one- or two-minute project. How can I get them to make a lot of work quickly? By showing them plays that are a couple of minutes long and by not making them look at full-length plays. I’ve been using things from the Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War anthology of Ukrainian writing. Short pieces that my students can read quickly, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I try to make my students earn their minutes, because I don't want one minute of theatre to be boring.

Carolyn: That's funny. I don't teach ten-minute plays, because I can't write a ten-minute play to save my life. I've always envisioned things on a big scale. When I teach playwriting, we spend a lot of time talking about character development. I teach character worksheets: getting to know your character, how they think, how they feel, not just what they look like, but how they were raised. Then, we talk about Aristotle and Western story structure, and then we get into non-Western story structure. I teach a lot of Black and Indigenous playwrights. Most contemporary Indigenous playwrights mostly use Indigenous structure models. I teach how to read a literary text, how to read text in drama, how to read a play. I just co-edited a book called Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. It’s a series of exercises for playwrights.

David: I teach that book. I can't recommend it enough.

I came into theatre through storytelling, so my basis for playwriting and dramaturgy is oral tradition. How do we write things that are received through the ears, not the eyes? There are things at work in storytelling that we can adapt in our plays, both rhythmically and in ways that prepare people's ears for what they will receive.

And then I stole something from the visual arts. When I took a painting class, we always did studies about what we were getting ready to do. You're just sketching something out. That demystifies it for the students. This isn’t the big thing you’re planning to do. No, you’re learning how to use a paint brush. You're learning how to use action, character, and all of those dramaturgical things. Then, how do you step on from that?

Part Two: 14 February 2025

Nina via Taya: From a Ukrainian point of view, it has always seemed that what matters most in American theatre is to show the stories of marginalized communities, people who didn't have a voice before. Is that changing now with the politics that are happening?

David: Yes, a big letter went out yesterday from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the focus now will not be stories of marginalized voices but stories that will reinforce patriotic ideas of America. At the same time, Donald Trump took over the board presidency of the Kennedy Center, which has been very successful in lifting up marginalized voices and moving away from the mainstream. As an artist, it's terrifying to see.

Carolyn: The shutdown of federal funding affects all our campuses. The Upward Bound Talent Search, the Educational Opportunity Act… These programs were started in the sixties by Lyndon B. Johnson. They were part of what he called the “war on poverty.” They reached out into rural communities, to people of color, and made college more accessible for those communities. Now the funding has been cut way back. It threw everybody into chaos.

Western and southwestern Altadena, where I live, is very much an immigrant population. It burnt down, and there were rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) coming in—rumors that, as people were sifting through their belongings, ICE was coming to make arrests. I don't know if that's true, but what the current president does is throw everybody into chaos so we can't function. Yet we can't afford not to function. That's the danger right now: people being so overwhelmed that they shut down.

Nina via Taya: It's interesting how one person can affect so much. The same is happening in Ukraine. Independent media outlets are being shut down in Ukraine, and that’s because of Trump cutting USAID funding. USAID has helped Ukraine with these things, because Ukraine wants to be a part of the Western world. USAID has been a huge source of our funding. Now we're not going to get that anymore.

I no longer believe the concept of trauma creating great art.

Nina in English: I can understand Americans: About 50 percent of the people might vote for Trump if he appeared in Ukraine. Maybe not right now, but it could have happened some time ago. We have already had corrupt and authoritarian presidents like this—Viktor Yanukovych, for example. Things are not great with women’s rights and human rights in Ukraine. During our Revolution of Dignity in 2014, we consciously chose the path of development and transformation into a democratic European society, but we need time to complete this journey. Our forward-thinking theatremakers were making work on the topic of human rights. But their funding came from America. From Europe too, but a large part of the money was from America. Now these processes are slowed down.

Carolyn: I gave my graduate playwrights an assignment last week. It was a theatre of the oppressed exercise. I said, “I want you to do a social justice scene about something you know is wrong in the world.” Then, I said, “instead of being spect-actors, we become spect-writers.” Look at somebody's scene and see what the issue is as the writer, not the actor. Go in and change it.

How do we continue to be artists when we're so traumatized that we just can't do anything? How do you do that, Nina? Your play was so beautiful because your kids were going through so much, but you were still able to write. How can we be artists in this world today?

Nina via Taya: I no longer believe the concept of trauma creating great art. For the first six months of the war everybody thought we’d have this new experience, physically and emotionally. We would have new feelings and, and we would use them to create something great. We would scream, and our voices would be powerful. We thought the war wouldn't last long.

Ukrainian art is not well known in the world, but in the first six months of the war everybody was very eager to catch up.

Short bursts of trauma may give you the power to create something new, but long-term exhaustion drains you of everything artistic that you have. It's not just emotional exhaustion. People are disappearing, going to war, running away. There are fewer people and fewer resources. Meanwhile you still have to support your way of life as an artist; you have to support your children.

In the past two years, nothing extraordinary has appeared in Ukrainian theatre. We’re going back to classical theatre, to more conservative performances. At the beginning of the war, theatres wanted to reflect on the war and everybody's experience. Now people don't want to see the war on stage. It’s not that they're not thinking about it, but they are weary. They can't handle having it in the arts, too, when it is everywhere. I don’t want to write about the war anymore. I’m interested in other things.

A feeling of helplessness comes with this. We, as a nation, cannot support ourselves, neither artistically, nor internationally, nor politically. On top of that, our allies who are supposed to help us essentially have betrayed us. That's the feeling everybody has. A sense of despair has arisen from the emotional swings that Russia has created.

We need to tap into nostalgia and be subversive about it.

David: I want to riff on the notion of despair. Maryland, where I live, is a bit of a bubble. It's very liberal. My campus is minority majority: 60 percent minority population, 40 percent white. Within this bubble it often feels like we only talk to people who agree with us, like I only present work to people who want to see the same kind of theatre. We just recycle our frustrations. Then I realized that I could really annoy some people that I want to provoke by stepping inside those classics you mentioned. The moment I stage an adaptation of something, I get all these people who disagree with me. I directed Hamlet in 2019, and the department chair got all kinds of hate mail. My favorite was, “This was a vulgar interpretation of a great play.” The students and lots of other people loved it, but the people that came because they wanted Shakespeare to reinforce their cultural status and values were not pleased.

By a similar token, I wrote a play that was a radical, experimental environmental play called Dance on Bones. 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. It was an eye-opener for me. I thought, this might be a way to get my work, even 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 my work evoked in the kids at a Baptist bible college who had never thought about the environment before. That was a little victory for me. Much of my family is very conservative, and I have always wanted to do things to change their minds. I continue to fight that battle.

Carolyn: That is very astute. I, too, want to address complacency, which goes hand in hand with the sense of nostalgia. There is a sense of nostalgia for classical theatre. For Hamlet, for any Shakespeare... for the Greeks, maybe. For special American theatre, maybe musicals. How can we be subversive in our adaptations? That's important. In appealing to people's sense of nostalgia, you’re implying you want to go back to when “things were good”: when people of color knew their place, poor people were poor, rich people were rich, and the middle class was middle. We need to tap into nostalgia and be subversive about it, as you did with your environmental play for kids who had never thought about the environment before. How do you learn that language and sneak it in there? Like Nina said, how do we counteract our trauma? How do we push forward and make sure that people don't forget?

David: Getting these things out of people's faces is part of what won Trump the election, right? “You won't have to think about transgender people. You don't have to think about immigrants anymore. You won't have to think about Ukraine. I’ll take care of it in one day.”

Carolyn: Is that how democracy dies?

Nina via Taya: Do you think this is temporary? Or is the world actually changing, and things will never be as they used to be?

Carolyn: That's a good question. I'm hopeful. I think at some point the rest of us will get our act together and organize as the right has been doing. At some point the left and the center will have to say, “Enough.” We're going to have to figure out how to organize, but we have to do it soon, and we have to organize for the long haul.

David: I'm hopeful that on the small scale, theatre can still effect change, uplift voices, and share stories. I make sure my students feel empowered in their sense of voice. They are my hope. My investment is not short-term. It is a twenty-year investment, so that by the time they’re forty-two they’re still thinking about interesting things and wanting to make the world a better place. That's where I'm putting my energy.

Carolyn: I take inspiration from that.

Nina in English: I do, too. I’ve started to work with students, and I think that, maybe not in my life, but in theirs, it will be a better world.

David: That's what we're all doing. It’s why we do this. It’s why we teach. It’s why we write plays. To see a different world and a better world than the one that has been offered to us.