“It is like getting out of the matrix: at first scary, and then very comfortable”

Natalia Blok (born in Kherson in 1980) is a playwright, theater director, and civic activist. She graduated from Kherson College of Culture in 2000, specializing in theater company management. Her first play Are There Women? was staged in 2002 at the TERRA FUTURA Contemporary Art Festival in Kherson. Overall, Blok has written plays Happiness in Children (2003), Childfree, Emo True (2009), Meat, The Zone (2013), The Street of the Decembrists, Maggots, Love Is Stronger (2014), The Stigma, Photo-Topless (2015), Ours-Alien (2016), You Wished It Yourself, The Orangerie, Through the Skin, and I Am Worried about All This Sh*t (2017). Blok’s plays are regularly recited and staged at festivals in Kherson, Kyiv, Georgia, and Germany.

Personally, I listened to her plays for the first time at the end of last year during readings held within the framework of the Kyiv Contemporary Play Week. Through the Skin is a monolog of the mother of two children who has been hit by a strange disease which manifests as khaki-colored spots on her very skin – a strange war trauma, acquired far from the front. I Am Worried about All This Sh*t is a two-act play depicting the life of a young woman whose freedom is always constrained with various kinds of traumatic circumstances. Masterly plot-making, a right amount of provocation, and well-outlined characters of these two different but equally interesting texts make it clear that our drama has in the person of Blok a quite worthy, but not yet properly appreciated author. So this interview is intended to correct the situation to an extent, at least.

 How did you start writing? 

“I wrote my first play in 2002, and immediately staged it by myself at a festival hosted by the Puppet Theater in Kherson. The second one was staged by director Andrii Mai about a year later. For a long time, I wrote short texts as a hobby. I worked as a journalist, then switched to civic activity. And when I got married and gave birth to two children, we moved to the countryside, and I was mostly busy there with children, our vegetable garden and goats, baking bread and pies. I submitted my one-act works to the Kyiv Contemporary Play Week in 2013, and they invited me to come and take part in master classes, and after that I wrote the play Maggots based on my Kyiv impressions, which got on the shortlist of the  Lyubimovka Festival in Moscow. Next year, it also appeared at the Contemporary Play Week, so thanks to this festival I started to grow professionally.”

 What topics are important to you?

“You need to write about what you care about, and it will be honest, you should not invent things out of thin air. My first play was already about a girl who wants to live in line with her ideals, it does not work out well, she is ridiculous in this, and she gets condemned for it. Living as you want and striving for freedom is an important topic to me. Freedom and impossibility of freedom. The Street of the Decembrists makes for hard reading, though it has a lot of humor. It is tearful laughter, but always the question arises as we are discussing it: how to get out of this situation of violence against women? Because often the real problem is inside one’s mind, not outside. The protagonist ultimately destroys her male tormentor, but then she sits down and starts to regret his absence, and we understand that she will find a similar partner. I have done the monodrama Vicious Circle, people like to recite it, the protagonist suffers from an authoritarian mother, but when she has a child, she begins to treat her exactly the same way. It is believed that I am probably the only author to touch upon such topics in Ukraine. But I do not think about it when I am writing.

“Kherson critics took a very strange attitude to my works. They were able to listen to them at the local Festival of Drama ‘Liuty-Fevral’ [Ukrainian and Russian words for February. – Ed.]. They liked my one-act plays dealing with various subcultures, but did not understand the big ones, asking ‘Why do you write about these people?’ My most recent play, a documentary which we have staged in Kherson, shown in Lviv and in Kyiv, and will now bring to Dnipro, is even called that way: Widening Veins, or Why We Need Feminism. It tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who was raped and cannot find anybody willing to listen to her. For example, one man said after the performance in Lviv that this topic should not be addressed or discussed from the stage. Violence, abortion... Only the mom should whisper it in her daughter’s ear. However, we should not fool the viewer and ourselves by pretending that everything is fine and we will whisper it in someone’s ear at home.”

 What is it like, to be a playwright in Kherson?

“It is nothing special. I live an ordinary life. No one, except my family, knows that I am a playwright. And people who do know do not treat it seriously. I am better known as an activist of the organization ‘Other,’ which holds many events. There is also the performance Day after Day, which Mai staged in our Kulish Academic Drama Theater; its script is taken from the texts of Kherson playwrights; our names are present on the posters, but this has not affected anything.”

 Is it hard to earn your living as a playwright?

“Very much so. We receive tiny royalties, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. Also, I receive requests all the time from people who want to get my texts free of charge – for a reading, for staging a play with children. So I earned money as a copywriter, even supported my husband in this way while he was studying, and now I engage in civic activities and work a lot in various fields. However, I hope it will get easier soon.”

 Are theaters paying attention to young drama now?

“Yes. Five years ago, we had neither the Dyky Theater, nor the Postplay Theater, there were no young art directors, and accordingly, very few contemporary texts got staged. While now, even senior directors try to keep pace with time and accept contemporary plays. Still, they accept few of them, and none of them deals with gender equality or feminism. So, it is unlikely that my harsh texts will be popular on academic stages in the near future. Although everything can happen, for a few years ago, I would not believe that my work would appear in the repertoire of the Zoloti Vorota Theater or the Kherson Drama Theater.”

 What a well written play is like?

“First of all, this is good language, and secondly, emotions. It is not even a certain structure... It can be even without events. Someone may see a good play as something like a Hollywood movie. Here is an event, there is a problem with the protagonist, and here is such and such turn of events affecting him, while here we have the catharsis and the final. Everything is easy and simple, directors love it very much, but the plays I like are not so clearcut, they have some air in them, and you can do something unexpected with them. It happens that you forget about the text during the reading, but follow the plot, the protagonists – this is a well written play. And when you get stuck in words, try to think it out instead of the author, then the text is possibly weak. You waited for something, but did not get it.”

 I was impressed by your monodrama Through the Skin. The war manifests itself directly on the bodies of people as a disease...

“It shows that we are so accustomed to the context of the war that we do not notice it. It is like an atmosphere which we breathe. The protagonist breathes war, and khaki-colored spots appear on her skin. She does not know what to do. It applies to all of us, I guess.”

 Even victory of Ukraine and peace do not help her...

“After all, our dead will not return, and wounds suffered by our land, too, will be very difficult to heal. The stresses and fears that we have experienced will resurface many years down the line. Of course, I can afford to write that Crimea has been returned and the war has ended on July 18. The writer can dream. But what is happening today is very painful to me.”

 The final of the play I Am Worried about All This Sh*t, in which the protagonist wants to do a sex reassignment surgery not because she feels like a man, but because she cannot live as a woman, seemed to me to be full of despair. So, is everything really so bad?

“It is even worse for some. Some people cannot live at all, let alone live as a woman. This is what I talked about at the beginning – the impossibility of freedom. Here is a woman, quite free, who does what she wants, even getting her lover liberated from the captivity he was held in by the militants, but still something tells her that her entire freedom is actually a deception, she remains unhappy and defective. Therefore, she takes that desperate step: make me into a man, because it is impossible to live as a woman.”

 Can a woman achieve all that she aspires to by herself in Ukraine?

“It seems to me that no woman can feel confident and easy in this country. This is evidenced by the statistics of violence against women, the number of their deaths and the circumstances of these deaths. After all, most killings of women are committed by their family members and relatives. That is, it turns out that it is safer to live by herself. It is easier to build a career then because there is no ‘second shift’ – the work done servicing the husband and the family, but there are still ‘glass ceilings’ hampering career growth, there is a 30 percent gender pay gap, there are social prejudices. So, I do not think that a woman is free to do whatever she wants. My son will soon turn 18, but I have not received any child benefits, I have supported him on my own. I was forced to refuse many career offers for reasons including childcare closing at 4:30 p.m., and I would have to stay in the office until 6 p.m., and there were no grandparents to lend a hand, and had he got sick, nobody would go easy on me.”

 So how to break the cycle of violence about which we have just spoken?

“On the one hand, it is simple, on the other, it is hard. We need education starting at an early age. We must eliminate that split when girls and boys are told what they should do: the former are to stay at home and raise children, while the latter are to be breadwinners, aggressors. When a woman or a man understands that this is only a social construct, they leave this circle. Then they get the freedom to act, to build relationships as they want, to develop as they want, and indeed, become happier, freer, can live as families and with a bunch of children. It is like getting out of the matrix: at first scary, and then very comfortable. In many countries, people have already got out of it, but it is still a distant prospect in Ukraine, unfortunately.”

 Finally, what kind of hobby does this feminist have?

“I once had so many of them. I sewed a lot, knitted, bred goats, but everything has gone away somehow. Lately, my chief hobby is my dog. It is good for my health, too.”