New Russian Drama: An Anthology ed. by Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt (review)

Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt, editors of New Russian Drama: An Anthology, acknowledge that "no single anthology can do justice to an artistic movement that is still evolving and that has produced many dozens of texts that deserve serious attention" (xxxi). This anthology offers a collection of ten texts, written between 2000 and 2014, that are fundamentally antithetical to the Russian drama traditionally familiar to most anglophone readers. The anthology introduces, contextualizes, and provides works from several nonconformist Russian theatre artists and organizations, highlighting the inconstancy and ephemerality of contrarian theatres in Putin's Russia. New Drama, or Novaya Drama, was a post-Soviet, turn of the twenty-first-century experimental theatre movement characterized by unapologetic depictions of violence, obscenity, skepticism and self-indulgent despair. Sharing and expanding elements of this aesthetic, each play in the anthology offers a set of challenges waiting to be turned into opportunities for powerful, profound, and creative learning. The book will be a helpful resource to theatre educators, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights, actors, and anyone interested in post-Soviet Russian culture and identity. Professors could easily design a decent Russian theatre history using New Russian Drama: An Anthology in alliance with its predecessor from 2014, John Freedman's Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama, as well as any theatre history books by Anatoly Smeliansky and Laurence Senelick.

The book contains a foreword by Richard Schechner, an introduction and chronology by editors Hanukai and Weygandt, and the plays, which are followed by endnotes, and concise biographies of the playwrights. One of the strongest contextual statements that the authors offer is the observation that New Drama is "one of the most important documents" of Putin's Russia (xxix). The introduction includes a clearly articulated critical overview of post-Soviet theatre history, and advocates for theatre becoming a site of memory, as well as "a public laboratory of the future—a place of collective dreams, discussions, and actions that help build a new social and political consensus" (xxx). What is not mentioned in the introduction, however, is how post-Soviet theatre, including New Drama, developed during the unprecedented time of intercultural collaborations. After the fall of the Soviet Union, cultural exchanges with countries previously considered alien or hostile became vital in the Russian theatre ecosystem. The book does not address the immense role globalization and Americanization played in shaping the path of post-Soviet theatre, as well as the New Drama aesthetic. "Chronology" (xxxiii) includes a Moscow/St. Petersburg–centric timeline of events pertinent to the development of New Drama, while the list of provincial Russian cities in it is far from exhaustive: Tolyatti, Ekaterinburg, and Rostov-on-Don.

The authors acknowledge a wide variety of themes and forms among the plays and suggest three potential unifying trends. The first trend is represented by the networks and institutional/organizational affiliation of individuals, groups, and companies that contributed to advancement and production of New Drama works. The second unifying quality among multiple New Drama texts is exemplified in its aesthetic elements which the authors also articulate. Some of the shared elements are hypernaturalistic portrayals of sex and violence, profane language, recognizable character types, and themes of anxiety, alienation, disappointment, and disassociation (xxvii). While the content is exquisitely efficient, the organization of this part of the introduction lacks clarity, and some readers might stumble in the process of deciphering this crucial but dense portion of the introduction. When assigning this essay to students, it would be helpful, if not necessary, to unpack page xxvii into an accessible list of bullet points and clarifications. Including content or trigger warnings is advisable, especially when the anthology is considered for educational use. The third unity is described as "pursuit of the real" (xxviii), which can be understood as an attempt to control the unreachable narrative of reality by at least capturing it. After all, as Mikhail Bulgakov brilliantly noticed, manuscripts don't burn.

While every play in the anthology explores...