Will Keen and Michael Stuhlbarg in “Patriots” on Broadway. (Photo by Matthew Murphy)
The scene: Intermission at Patriots, the Peter Morgan play that played on Broadway from April to June, about the devil’s bargain between then-future Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Boris Berezovsky, the flamboyant Russian oligarch who helped to engineer Putin’s rise to power—and soon regretted it.
During the lull, I notice a small cluster of theatre patrons gathered outside the Barrymore Theatre. They are speaking animatedly in Ukrainian. I cannot resist asking them, in English, “What do you think of this play?” After confirming that the historical events in Morgan’s script are basically accurate, one man tells me, “I did not expect to see a lot of Americans in the audience. I’m surprised so many are interested in this.”
The irony is not lost on me that one reason so many of us are intrigued by the play is, of course, Russia’s 2022 invasion and relentless territorial war against Ukraine—and the political divide over America’s support for it.
“Russia is, unfortunately, in the news—because of its invasion of Ukraine, because of its political brutality, because of its interference in U.S. elections,” said University of Washington professor Barbara Henry, who specializes in Russian and Eastern European literature in UW’s Slavic Languages and Literature Department. I was sounding her out on why there seems to be a mini-trend of plays about or from Russia lately. “Russia and Russian culture are topical, and controversial, and thus considered relevant,” she reasoned.
But timeliness alone doesn’t explain why these works seem to be cropping up more often lately in our theatres. In addition to the blatantly topical Patriots, which crossed the Atlantic following a hit run in London, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya received a starry revival at Lincoln Center Theater in a new adaptation by American playwright Heidi Schreck. (Another New York rendering of Vanya, mounted in a private loft in spring of 2023, won praise for its “hyper-intimacy.”) Earlier this year Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm, about employees at a Russia-funded political disinformation outpost, was staged at New York’s Vineyard Theatre. (The play was presented previously at Geva Theatre in Rochester, N.Y., and before that, during Covid lockdown, as a virtual play co-presented by TheatreWorks Hartford and Arkansas’s TheatreSquared.) In Seattle in the spring, a potent modernized version of The Lower Depths, mounted by the Seagull Project and Intiman Theatre, offered a rare chance to see Maxim Gorky’s sprawling classic. Around the same time, D.W. Gregory’s chilling Memoirs of a Forgotten Man, set in Cold War-era Russia during the interrogation of a college professor by a political apparatchik, was a success for the Seattle troupe Thalia’s Umbrella.
And there are more on the way, including Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir at Manhattan Theatre Club this fall, about a female Russian journalist who investigates corruption in the Putin regime and pays the ultimate price. And Lauren Yee’s new dark comedy Mother Russia, about the promise and pitfalls of post-perestroika capitalism, is coming up at Seattle Rep in 2025.
Certainly it is no surprise to see a smattering of Chekhov works in American playhouses every season. His classics have been a staple of the regional repertoire for the past century. And certainly the acting and directing techniques codified by Konstantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre, where Chekhov’s best-known plays premiered, have had an immeasurable impact on American theatre and film performers and directors over the last century.
But current revivals of Chekhov have a renewed relevance, even an urgency, Schreck told me. Though best known for the award-winning What the Constitution Means to Me, her autobiographical exegesis of a seminal American document, Schreck has a deep, longstanding interest in Russian culture. She spent several years in her 20s working as a teacher and journalist in Siberia and St. Petersburg, an experience that has influenced her writing and acting career. (Her play There Are No More Big Secrets, loosely inspired by the story of reporter and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006, was produced by Rattlestick Theatre in 2010.)
When invited to adapt Chekhov, decades after she collaborated on an offbeat version of his The Seagull in Seattle, Schreck considered it a propitious time for a new take on Vanya.
“Reading Vanya while emerging from the pandemic—from years of isolation, exhaustion, despair, and simmering and overt violence—made it feel terrifyingly immediate,” said Schreck, who forged her new adaptation in concert with the show’s director, Lila Neugebauer. “So did the fact that the characters in Vanya feel rather similar to the audience that would be seeing this show at Lincoln Center. I include myself in this: progressive people who know they are standing on a faultline of history that’s just outside of their line of vision, or it’s outside of where they’re willing to focus their attention—a political upheaval brewing that is so extreme it will change the trajectory of the world for the next 130 years.”
In fact, Vanya is having something of a mini-boom beyond Manhattan also, including recent stagings in Portland, Ore., Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Catskills. A spring 2025 production based on Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of the play is slated for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, with Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville in the title role. Also this year, there were public screenings around the U.S. of the National Theatre Live’s filmed one-man Vanya performed in London by Andrew Scott.
For Seagull Project artistic head Gavin Reub, the notion of diving into The Lower Depths also felt timely. And necessary: Outside of academia, few American theatres tackle Gorky’s sprawling, impassioned, and, in its finale, somewhat didactic classic.
This Seattle-based ensemble led by Reub has been studying and staging fresh versions of Chekhov and plays by other Russians since 2013. After more than a year-long period of discussion and rehearsal, Reub (with co-adaptors Mark Jenkins and David Quicksall) directed a cast of leading local actors, who transformed Gorky’s panorama of dread, anguish, and flashes of hope among Russian flophouse residents into a vital theatre verité portrait of desperate modern Americana.
In a highly gentrified Seattle where homeless encampments and street begging are rampant, The Lower Depths characters were not difficult to transport to the present day. The play’s habitues are akin to “people I encounter on my walk home,” Reub said. “In different yet similar ways, it seemed like Gorky and I were in the same conversation. He wanted change, to move a monarchical society into a socialist society. And we are dealing with our own oligarchical, capitalistic society that’s created structures of inequality. Gorky and Chekhov were thinking about what change could be, and we are asking too. Though I don’t feel we’re at the precipice of that change yet.”
Reub saw another correspondences between our era and Gorky’s Russian generation (and characters like the young writer Treplev in The Seagull), with artists in both periods struggling to redefine theatre and create new forms.
“So much about American theatre and society is in an identity crisis right now,” Reub said. “I’m not sure it’s ever been so up in the air. So you see great writers like Heidi Schreck, Annie Baker, Richard Nelson, and others reaching back to adapt Chekhov plays.”
Contemporary playwrights are also turning their eyes to modern-day Russia. Peter Morgan’s Patriots, for instance, is both a product of recent history and an elastic fable about dangerous alliances with devastating political consequences. Morgan, a prolific dramatist best known recently for scripting The Crown, the hit TV series about Great Britain’s royal family, proposed to Almeida Theatre artistic leader Rupert Goold a play about Putin’s rise and the oligarch Berezovsky’s steep fall.
Goold remembers being immediately intrigued by the premise. “I still think Russian literature and playwriting cast a huge influence over Western drama, particularly in London and New York,” Goold said. “Most of our acting infrastructure and education has its roots in Russian practice. But I also think that for a once mighty imperial power like Great Britain, and a now fading imperial power in the U.S., the rise and fall of another great empire exerts a particular fascination.”
Clearly the military might and adventurism of Putin’s Russia is a nearer threat to Europe’s stability than to our own. But in a transactional global economy, the immense power wielded by billionaire oil magnate Berezovsky (played on Broadway by American actor Michael Stuhlbarg) to elevate Putin (Will Keen, reprising his 2020 London turn in the role) from a minor government official to the Russian presidency, felt not so distant. And Putin’s reprisals against his mentor, who is forced into a restive exile in England, served as reminders of just how pitiless a dictator can be against those who cross him. (Berezosky’s death in London, in 2013, was ruled a suicide, but suspicions linger that he was murdered.)
Said Goold, “The oligarchs have permeated London society more publicly than in New York, so there was maybe a greater vicarious thrill here to see how they emerged. But I think Americans have found more interest in Boris, the typical outsider, the brilliant Jewish businessman, the rule breaker, and maybe he resonates more in the U.S., along with other rule-breaking businessmen you may have!”
Still, the biggest shift in the play’s perspective, Goold noted, has less to do with geography “and more with time. We opened the play only weeks after the Ukraine war had begun. Now, two years on, Putin seems a more remorseless and tyrannical figure, so his presence on the stage, even more bizarrely on Broadway, feels darker and even more urgent.”
Serious stuff, to be sure, but there are also playwrights finding comedy in our entwined global politics. Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm takes place in a fictionalized version of an actual “fake news” factory, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, and it quotes some of the real disinformation that flooded the internet during the 2016 presidential election year. With its laughable take on the interactions between misfit coders and internet trolls, Gancher’s play has most often been compared to the Anglo-American TV sitcom The Office. And though it ran last winter, we were already in the midst of an American election year with the major parties sharply polarized on geopolitical matters, so it struck an immediate chord.
For her upcoming Mother Russia, Lauren Yee is taking a different tack. Unfolding in the 1990s, her play has a bicultural focus.Darlege basketball players and their Chinese counterparts during a Beijing tournament. Her new play, Yee explained, extends her “exploration of the intersection of Communism and American culture in the 20th century. I’m fascinated by big pillars of what we view as American culture—rock music, basketball, etc.—and I wanted to see what it was like for people to encounter American culture head on for the first time.”
Like Morgan, as she was writing Yee could not imagine that her play would collide with Russian’s invasion and ongoing war with Ukraine. Nor did the La Jolla Playhouse, when it announced its planned staging of Mother Russia back in 2020—a move scrapped due to the pandemic.
Seattle Rep was only too happy for the chance to premiere Mother Russia now. “Russia holds an enormous space in the public consciousness,” said Seattle Rep artistic head Dámaso Rodriguez. “On the political stage, they’ve been our lead antagonist. I think the theatre should be a place where we can see and consider the world as it is now, even if the subject matter is controversial or makes us uncomfortable.”
Director and Brandeis University theatre professor Dmitry Troyanovsky heartily agrees, while also urging more attention to works centered on and coming from writers in Russia’s neighboring countries. A Russian-speaking native of Kyiv, the well-traveled Troyanovsky worked in Russia before its invasion of Ukraine, both at the Moscow Art Theatre School and the University of St. Petersburg.
“I think American theatre is too parochial,” he declared. “What do we know of the riches of Ukrainian, Georgian, Baltic theatre? I feel we’ve lost these riches.”
While agreeing that plays by English and American playwrights are viable and valuable, Troyanovsky added, “Maybe we need to pay attention to other places, too, particularly to Ukraine. I’ve yet to see a large, prominent regional theatre in the U.S. tackle a play about the war or any Ukrainian play. It’s been up to small theatres and universities to explore that work.”
But some attention is being paid. The Baltimore-based Center for International Theatre Development, long led by the late Philip Arnoult, sponsors a number of global Eastern European theatre projects, and has compiled a database of Ukrainian playscripts. And two recent plays by refugee Ukrainian dramatist Sasha Denisova drew strong responses and prestigious 2024 drama prizes. My Mother and the Full-Scale Invasion, a co-production last fall and winter of D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth and Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre, earned Helen Hayes Awards, while her The Hague at the Boston-area Arlekin Players Theatre, received an Elliot Norton Award.
Perhaps more companies will follow suit. But Russia, as a modern superpower and a fount of theatrical culture, is likely to remain on America’s dramatic radar for reasons that go well beyond today’s headlines.
“My guess is that the Russian productions happening in America and Britain today are more about America and Britain than they are about Russia,” Schreck said. “I feel like these plays are being done in an effort to help us see something about our own countries, our own political systems, using Russia as a lens or maybe a kind of reflective surface.”
Misha Berson is the former theatre critic of The Seattle Times and the author of several books on theatre, including Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination. She is currently a freelance writer and teacher, and a frequent contributor to American Theatre.
