Waiting for Routine

The new book broaches a range of topics, focusing on the creative search and accomplishment of all those young authors that joined dramaturgy in a time of deep crisis, when space, time, and tradition seemed mercilessly torn apart, when the innovative spirit seemed a stillborn child, when cultural values were scattered about with little hope for bringing all this into a semblance of order.

This is probably why most of the plays included in the anthology have no positive or negative characters, just so many totally disoriented personae trying to figure out what is going on around them, adjusting the actual realities to their own psychological complexes. Mostly, they assume that everything happening around them is hostile; they are absurdly addicted to past notions and concepts, awaiting Death symbolizing Nothingness (e.g., Lesia Demska, Anatoly Dnistrovy, and Olena Savchuk), or becoming immersed in surrealistic parables (Serhiy Shchuchenko and Neda Nezhdana). The esthetic obsolescence of such a theme in Western European culture marks the young Ukrainian playwrights as derivative, their indisputable individual talents notwithstanding.

Daily personal and public confrontations make up the core only two plays included in the anthology (e.g., Natalka Vorozhbyt's The Life Stories of Simple Mortals and B territory, also maybe Oleh Mykolaichuk-Nyzovets' Once You Start Getting Undressed You Go All the Way. Here, too, one is keenly aware of the impact of dramatic traditions dating from the 1970s-1980s (e.g., Yaroslav Stelmakh and Oleksandr Vampilov).

Personally, I consider this derivative quality not a drawback or evidence of creative inadequacy. Rather, it is a mirror-like reflection of the existing public situation. Begetting an original drama takes at least several polarized social views between which is structured a hierarchy of social and moral values. A drama represents a conflict in which one opposes a force resisting what one considers right, be it law or banal daily routine. And, of course, it takes routine without which it is impossible to comprehend notions such as freedom, free choice, and consequently the essence of a given drama. Perhaps the heroes of plays written by our young contemporaries act in a setting they create in their own imagination, in some illusory space, or they may be regarded as stuck there for want of a solid foundation in the chaotic environs.

Neda Nezhdana in her School for Clowns proceeds from precisely such an absence of solid foundations characteristic of our times, when one breaks down, totally confused, and instinctively tries to act proceeding from the situation itself, playing a role imposed by circumstances. Can we fail to recognize this situation? Does it not formulate the conflicts of our lives, where ever-increasing stagnation demands individuality instead of just so many buffoons and marionettes?