Staging Contemporary Russian Teenage Femininity in Yaroslava Pulinovich's Natasha Plays

Abstract

For this project, I analyze two of twenty-two-year-old Russian playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich's works, Natasha's Dream and I Won, to examine how she explores the tensions present in contemporary Russian youth culture. In addition to my literary analysis of her plays in relation to contemporary Russian youth culture, I also consider how Pulinovich innovates contemporary performance for audiences between ages sixteen and twenty-five via her work in the Russian New Drama movement. As Pulinovich negotiates the competing forces of progress and tradition within the liminal space of contemporary Russian adolescence, the stories of her Natasha characters emerge as microcosmic examples of sociopolitical and cultural trends that shape the lives of young people, particularly young women, in contemporary Russia. Pulinovich's Natasha plays offer an important new perspective on young adults' lives from the field of Russian theatre for youth.

Notes

¹See Applebaum (1998), Aragón (2002), Chapman (2000), Garcia (2008), Libman (1998), and van de Water (2000) for a few examples of how TYA researchers have examined adolescence in the context of performance.

²See van de Water's (2006) chapters on “The Moscow Theatre of the Young Spectator,” “Central Children's Theatre,” and “Kama Ginkas at the Mtiuz,” for additional discussion of Russian TYA during this period.

³See Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky's Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (2009) for an important and path-breaking discussion about the evolution of Russian New Drama between 1990 and 2010, particularly the following chapters: “The Precursors of New Drama” (69–102), “Communicating through Violence: Kurochin, Koliada, Sigarev, Klavdiev” (133–76), and “The Presniakovs and Performing Violence”(271–300).

⁴Throughout this analysis, I reference John Freedman's translations (Pulinovich 2009a, c), the texts used for the Towson University production in March 2010. Although I include Noah Birksted-Breen's translation (Pulinovich 2009b) in my References list and it is quite similar, I opt not to use it in my analysis because it contains language specific to a British audience.

⁵For clarity and flow of my analysis of Natasha's Dream and I Won, I deliberately condense the citation and only reference the page numbers and title (when necessary) for quotes from the play's respective English manuscript.