Drama & Theater with John Freedman
Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings
The Worldwide Readings Project was founded in September 2020, when Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik asked me if he would translate his play Insulted. Belarus, about the revolution in Minsk and "perhaps arrange a few readings." Two years later, the project had supported approximately close to 250 readings in 110 theaters in 32 countries and 22 languages. Within hours of Russia invading Ukraine on 24 February 2022, theaters who had hosted readings of Insulted. Belarus began asking me what they could do to support Ukraine. Thus, the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Reading Project took off virtually overnight. Over the first 17 months of the war, we have helped organize over 400 readings, productions, films, videos, and installations in 30 countries. All of the events have held fundraising events for artists, theaters and other Ukrainians in need.
The Story
The Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project started up just days after Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
The chief impetus for it was a message I received from William Wong, a director, actor, and teacher in Hong Kong. William had taken part frequently in the Insulted. Belarus Worldwide Reading Project, a long-running program I was curating to publicize the horrible reality of the courageous, but ultimately unsuccessful, revolution in Minsk, Belarus, in the fall of 2020. No sooner had the Russian invasion of Ukraine begun than William sent me the following query: “Can we do a worldwide reading of a Ukrainian play to support them?”
My first reaction was, “Indeed, can we?!” and I immediately reached out to colleagues who I thought might help. They included Molly Flynn, an American scholar based in London, the English writer and translator John Farndon, and two of the best Ukrainian playwrights alive — Natalka Vorozhbyt and Maksym Kurochkin. Molly sent play translations, emails, and advice; John responded he would help me take on translations immediately; Natalka sent English translations of two of her plays and encouraged me to contact Maksym, because he was the artistic director of a new playwrights’ theater in Kyiv, and he should have access to a large number of brand new texts.
The information about Maksym’s new Theater of Playwrights was, indeed, news to me. I immediately reached out to him and explained I was mounting a project that even I, at that moment, did not yet know would end up being called the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings.
Over the first 400 days of the war, we organized 364performances of 150 texts by 50 writers in 30 countries and 19 languages. I stress the fact that “we” have conducted this project, for it truly has been a global effort, involving, primarily, William Wong in Hong Kong; Elli Salo in Finland; Andreas Merz-Raykov and P.J. Escobio in Germany; Dominique Dolmieu and Ian Stephens in France; Raluca Radulescu in Romania; Romana Storkova-Maliti in Slovakia and the Czech Republic; Yevgenia Shermeneva in Latvia; Bryan Brown, Neil McPherson, and Steve Hennessey in the United Kingdom; Alex Borovenskiy in Ukraine; Leslie Baker in Canada; and Robert Matney, Carey Perloff, Mark Seldis, Anya Zicer, Vladimir Rovinsky, Lisa Channer, Igor Golyak, Kate Bredeson, Amy Pinto, and Philip Arnoult in the United States. And that is only a list of individuals who participated multiple times, sometimes in multiple countries.
Translations for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings were done by over 40 individuals. The vast majority of English-language translations were done by John Farndon of London, and by me, often with the aid of Natalia Bratus.
I collected twenty texts written by the writers of the Theater of Playwrights into a book titled A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Texts by Ukrainian Playwrights that was published by Laertes Press in January 2023. - excerpted and adapted from "The Texts of Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights: Literary-based Acts of War," John Freedman's introduction to A Dictionary of Emotions...
