How Ukrainian Playwrights Are Defending Culture

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, it claimed that Ukraine had no language and no culture. This isn't just a military assault; it is an assault on Ukrainian identity and culture itself. Playwright and screenwriter Laura Cahill was teaching screenwriting to teenagers in Ukraine when the full-scale invasion began in 2022, at which point she founded Young Playwrights Ukraine. She moderates this discussion with Andrii Bondarenko and Iryna Harets. They were joined by John Freedman, the Ukraine program director for the Center for International Theatre Development, and Petro Ninovskyi, a New York-based actor who grew up in Ukraine. Petro translates for Iryna.

Laura Cahill: Welcome. I'm Laura Cahill in New York. When the full-scale invasion took place on 24 February 2022, I was teaching screenwriting to teenagers in Kyiv. They began fleeing and moving all over. So I founded the group Young Playwrights Ukraine. Our work has been done in New York and over Zoom. Altogether, I think, twenty-eight young writers have come through Young Playwrights Ukraine.

Iryna, where are you?

Iryna Harets [via translator Petro Ninovskyi]: My name is Iryna Harets. I live in two places, in Lviv in Western Ukraine and Poltava in Central Eastern Ukraine. I am a playwright, a psychologist, and the head of the Theatre of Contemporary Dialogue in Poltava. I am the founder of Ukradramahub.org, an online drama library, and an organizer of the July Honey drama festival. I am a co-founder of the Theatre of Playwrights in Kyiv, and I work with different social projects, particularly with soldiers.

Andrii Bondarenko: I am Andrii Bondarenko. I'm a playwright living in Lviv. Like Iryna, I am a co-founder of the Theatre of Playwrights. I am lecturer at a local Lviv university, and I teach drama courses. I also participate in different projects connected with social work.

I would like to start with the Theatre of Playwrights. For us, it's a community. Our official opening was planned for March of 2022, but unfortunately, a month before this date, the full-scale war broke out, and the official opening was delayed. In fact, it's still delayed. When the war is over, we will organize our official opening. Still, we did have an unofficial opening, and we began to work almost immediately. Basically, we present new Ukrainian drama on our stage, but we also to promote Ukrainian drama throughout Ukraine and abroad. We organize festivals of drama, readings, and so on.

I also want to highlight is what I call the actualization of classical content in Ukrainian theatre. There has been a Shakespeare boom in Ukraine since 2014. It's an interesting example of how we are trying to make sense of the war using classical content. Shakespeare provides a profound view of war, and he helps us develop our own thoughts on the war.

My first play after the full-scale invasion, Peace and Tranquillity, suggested that, suddenly, all classical literature about war had lost its meaning for me. I felt that all the great, big books had not been able to stop the war, so I couldn't see how they can help us now. But if literature cannot stop war, it can help you make sense of it.

Another example of classical content is a recent production that I was asked to write based on several plays by Bertolt Brecht. What emerged were profound reflections on Brecht and war, on the situations of war, and on living in the time of war.

Brecht's critique of war was a big challenge for us. His work is aimed at a country responsible for generating war. Ukraine did not generate war; we received it from outside. As such, I needed to adapt and change the Brechtian material. The result was called Brecht Cabaret, because cabaret allows you to be more critical and speak more forcefully about what is happening now. This show, staged at the Golden Gates Theatre in Lviv, allowed us to speak more directly about very painful issues that we are experiencing, such as the rift arising between soldiers and the rest of society.

There is a difference between Shakespeare and Brecht. Shakespeare allows us to reflect on the war but from a safe distance. Brecht’s epic theatre, on the contrary, allows us to be more critical, to employ a more direct voice.

Laura: What was in your cabaret?

Andrii: We employed different Brecht plays. We were looking for something relevant to our situation. Brecht has very good texts, but they probably are more relevant to Russia’s situation—a totalitarian society prone to violence.

We found some plays that we connected to: Drums in the Night, this story about this soldier coming from the war; one of my favorites, The Wedding, describes very bourgeois people who are only thinking about themselves, about their business, and not thinking about anything else; and Mother Courage, which is about people getting used to war, adapting to it, and even getting benefits and profits from it. It's very sad story, but we are now experiencing people adapting and making businesses on war. It's a very complicated issue.

We used these plays to speak about this kind of problems that we are seeing nowadays among ourselves, but we didn't insert Brecht into our reality. We created an in-between reality, something that connected Brecht’s Germany and our Ukraine. We were going to and from these two realities, and it created a new perspective. We can think about not only Ukraine, but also about war as a phenomenon and about historical times. Because for us, war is not only happening now. For us, this war has been happening for a long, long time. It returns and keeps returning. Brecht helped us to find this bigger perspective.

Also interesting is a project I worked on with Home of Sound, an institution dedicated to the medium of sound and modern art. We created an art therapy audio tour to help soldiers returning from the front lines. We wanted to help them to adapt again to civilian life because it's very hard for them. In their minds, they are still there in the battlefields.

We created this audio tour based on interviews with soldiers, with veterans. The author of the tour was Pavlo Yurov, who's serving now in the army. So, it’s a case of a soldier writing about soldiers and veterans. But some of the veterans told us that this content needed to be done not for them alone, but also for civilians, because they wanted civilians to hear this, to know what and how they feel. This project was not only a therapeutic tool, but it was also a kind of bridge between soldiers and rest of society.

Laura: I want to be able to picture the audio walk. We'd love to hear just what that is and how it works.

Andrii: It begins as we hear several soldiers communicating among themselves, sharing stories about their experience, and sharing comments about the civilian life they see all around them, remembering what happened to them when they were at the front line.

We wanted to make this audio tour useful to everyone. It is divided into eight episodes. We published these episodes like a music album on Bandcamp, with an instruction manual. Everyone can go to this webpage, read the menu, and see a map with the route. A point one, you play the first episode. At point two, you press play for episode two, and so on.

The idea is to give veterans some kind of ritual, a rite that will allow them to feel they are no longer there but already here—a peaceful exit from the horrible things that they were going through. Soldiers are telling us this a big problem now. Not all that many soldiers are actually returning because the war is still going on. Those who return, for example, may have injuries. We believe that, over time, there will be more and more such people, so we must be ready. We must do something now, not wait.

Laura: Now Iryna will make her presentation.

Iryna: Thank you for inviting me. I want to tell you more about the difficulties we have been experiencing since 2014. Right now, I’m showing a picture of a school in Popasna, in the east of Ukraine. You see how a shell has hit it. This was our first impression when the war began in 2014.

After our Revolution of Dignity in 2014, we mounted The Diaries of Maidan by Natalka Vorozhbyt, which was based on interviews that many of us had done, at the Franko National Theatre in Kyiv. During the Maidan Revolution in 2014, many playwrights came to Maidan Square where they literally recorded or witnessed what was going on. We realized that we could preserve this history.

The first show about displaced people in our own community was Gray Zone, created by my colleagues from Post Play Theatre. I wrote the second, Zlatomisto (or The Golden City), which was a production of our Theatre of Contemporary Dialogue in Poltava. It has been shown throughout Ukraine over forty times. After one performance of this production in 2015 in Dnipro, one teenager said, "I didn't know what war is before your show." Now, of course, Dnipro has largely been evacuated. It is terrible, but it is fact.

In parallel, there have been initiatives for young people like Class Act, run by Vorozhbyt and Nicola McCartney from Scotland. Andrii and I both took part in that project where young people write their own dramatic texts. We realized that these “witnessing,” or documentary shows were therapeutic and gave people an opportunity to heal. That is especially true for the participants whose texts are used in the shows.

We continued our work in Donbas. The first performance of What to Do in Popasna After 6 PM took place in the bomb shelter of a school in Popasna. It was very shocking for many people who had not yet felt what it was like to live in a war.

We also performed this show at a school in Lviv where the principal later went to fight and died. It was terribly painful; he was a tremendous man. We didn't know what to do with that. We still don't.

We also have worked in the city of Lysychans'k. You may have heard the names of these cities on the news. Many of them have now been seized or occupied. Working with a group of very progressive citizens of Lysychans'k, we created at least four shows. They were so powerful and so effective that the citizens could literally just take these shows into City Hall to show the changes that needed to be made in their lives.

All of the projects I have discussed were done in collaboration with the Poltava Branch of Public Service of Ukraine. We bring together knowledge of civil rights and theatre. We mix these spheres to educate people through collaboration on civil rights, general education, and theatre education.

In 2019, I created Ukradramahub.org, an online library of works by contemporary Ukrainian playwrights. These writers were creating plays with themes that were timely, themes capable of influencing society.

Unfortunately, the official state theatre system does not see contemporary plays as viable material for their audiences. Our playwrights are ready to search for new dramatic forms, but most directors are not. Still, the situation is improving, and I hope that Ukradramahub.org will begin to attract contemporary directors

2022—I don't have to explain it—the full-scale invasion began. Even though at that moment it felt like it was impossible, writers started writing, and I began collecting plays written after 24 February. Working with John Freedman’s Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, we created a library of translations of contemporary Ukrainian playwrights. Now our library has Ukrainian works translated into thirteen languages.

In 2022, in Ivano-Frankivsk in the west of Ukraine, I worked with women who were refugees from different cities that had been occupied by Russian forces. This work taught me how to combat trauma. Writing is a therapy in which you describe your trauma. You write it down; you realise what has happened inside you. Then, you show it on a stage, and you receive emotional support from an audience, which helps alienate you from your trauma.

After this project, I began combining psychological exercises with theatre, drama, and acting. It's not for everyone, but it works really well with people who are receptive to it.

We worked a lot with children. This gave us opportunities to discuss what is actually happening with these kids. We organized public readings based on the exercises that the kids were doing and the discussions they were having. In some cases, this prompted parents to actually bring in a therapist or psychologist to treat their children. At these readings, the kids would become more relaxed and more willing to talk on themes that they would never have talked about in front of their parents about.

Andrii mentioned that the Theatre of Playwrights still hasn’t opened officially, yet it is a very sturdy platform that will support our activities. It has already given birth to the Theatre of Veterans, a core home for war veterans seeking to work in theatre. Maksym Kurochkin invited me to be a coach at the Theatre of Veterans. As I said, I had learned how well it works to write down your trauma on a piece of paper. We have had excellent results helping to reintegrate veterans back into society.

But the main thing I want to say is that we are involved in constant search. We never really know whether it's going to work or not. It may change next year. Time forces us to make these decisions very quickly and in a creative way.

Laura: Brilliant, Iryna. I was told in a panel at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center that most writers wait seven years before writing about war they have experienced. I was asked how the very young writers of our Young Playwrights Ukraine could capture their experiences at the very moment that their lives were changing. You have done this with your communities and with the Theatre of Playwrights when you wrote in real time.

Andrii: There is something to this rule, and that is how I felt after Maidan. I didn't want to write about Maidan. I wanted to wait. I wanted time to pass to give me understanding and perspective. I waited and waited, and then I understood that this war was not ending. I needed to write without waiting. This war gives us no time to consider, to reconsider, or to think.

We were frozen when the full-scale invasion began. We didn't know what to do. We stopped everything: living, eating, reading, breathing, and writing. I begin to write again because I needed the process. I needed writing to pick up my shattered pieces.

How can you wait seven years when something horrible is going on? You need to react. You need to shout something into this black hole right now.

Iryna: The first motivation for me was the knowledge that if we don’t tell about this war, somebody else will. Most likely that would be Russians who would basically insert their narratives into our history.