Around the World in 68 Plays

This coming Wednesday, Ghost Road Company kicks off L.A.’s participation in John Freedman’s Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project

By Steven Leigh Morris

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“Many of the texts are quite harsh, describing extreme anger, violence, fear, etc.” Freedman explains. “[co-translator Natalia Bratus] often falls silent as she reads, weeps quietly, falls silent again to compose herself before moving on to the next phrase.”

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In John Freedman’s home on the Island of Crete, a woman fluent in Ukrainian, Natalia Bratus, sits in an armchair behind her American co-translator, Freedman. She holds a Ukrainian play script. She reads it, translating it out loud into Russian, which he speaks fluently – but not Ukrainian. Freedman says he’s fluent in Russian and Polish and has some knowledge of Czech and Slovak. That allows him get a sense of what’s being said in Ukrainian, though he says he’s not conversant in that language’s slang and rare vocabulary.

“I follow along,” he explains, “and type it into English, often asking questions, asking for clarifications. If we have questions left over after we have finished, I take those directly to the playwrights. It has proved to be a good and efficient way of working.”

Freedman and Bratus have now translated 12 plays together; Freedman, another 8 by himself (several were written in Russian), while another four dozen have been translated by a team  — the main partner being John Farndon in London. This makes for a total of 68 plays (110 texts, if you include single plays in multiple languages) and moved them into a digital library for a project called Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, which Freedman developed with the help of Philip Arnoult, of Baltimore’s Center for International Theatre Development. The aim is to get theaters from around the world to present readings of whatever plays move them, as fundraisers for the victims of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

Thus far, Freedman reports, there have been 100 pledges across 18 different countries. Ghost Road Company leads L.A.’s participation in the project with an evening of five short play readings this coming Wednesday, directed by Mark Seldis, at Open Face Food Shop and Outdoor Community Space, 5577 W. Adams Boulevard, 8 pm.

Santa Monica’s City Garage has said that they intend to stage an evening of readings in mid-May. Rogue Machine may present such an evening in the early summer.

“Many of the texts are quite harsh, describing extreme anger, violence, fear, etc.” Freedman explains. “[co-translator Natalia Bratus] often falls silent as she reads, weeps quietly, falls silent again to compose herself before moving on to the next phrase.”

“When she leaves to go home, she is always very bright and happy and strong. It is one of the most incredible examples of the power of “tough art” to heal that I have ever seen.” 

From Apple Valley, California to Crete, Greece

Mysina and Freedman

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As an American in Moscow, Freedman felt the grip of authoritarianism slowly tightening, accompanied, he says, by statues of Joseph Stalin re-emerging across the city.

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Freedman was born in California  —  San Bernardino County’s Apple Valley, to be exact. Now, almost seven decades later, he lives with his Russian actress wife, Oksana Mysina, in Greece.

In those decades, Freedman attended Claremont High School; studied Russian at Cal State, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine; he attended George Washington University and Harvard. In 1989, by then fluent in Russian, he settled in Moscow in order to be with Mysina, who was developing an accomplished career as a stage and movie actress in Moscow. Meanwhile, Freedman was hired as drama critic of the Dutch-owned newspaper The Moscow Times. His guiding principle at that newspaper was to advocate for new Russian writing, in an era (the 1990s) when the Russian Federation, then under the helm of Boris Yeltsin, appeared to be unshackling itself from the temperamental and ideological yoke of the former Soviet Union.

That unshackling turned out to be a mirage, particularly when a mid-level KGB operative named Vladimir Putin was appointed in 2000 to be Yeltsin’s replacement. As an American in Moscow, Freedman felt the grip of authoritarianism slowly tightening, accompanied, he says, by statues of Joseph Stalin re-emerging across the city.

After Russia annexed Crimea (a Ukrainian territory) in 2014 and 2015, Mysina – a Russian stage and screen celebrity – emceed street protests of tens of thousands of people infuriated by the annexation. Sometimes she was invited to emcee by opposition leader Alexei Navalny (now sitting in a Russian prison), who said that the people of Crimea should determine whether they want to be part of Ukraine or Russia. (Mysina was born in Ukraine and is 25% Ukrainian.)

In an interview on Animal Farm – Santa Monica-based City Garage Theatre’s weekly talk show, Freedman tells the stories of interactions with Russian bureaucrats and law enforcement – stories filled with comic absurdities and intimidation — of why he and his wife chose to leave Russia for Greece in 2018.

It would seem predetermined that Putin would choose, in 2022, to “annex” the entirety of Ukraine – given the feeble response from the West to Russia’s 2014 invasion — using many of the same rationalizations and propaganda tropes that he employed then. The difference, of course, is the depth and strength of Ukrainian resistance, and the consequent scale of Russian barbarity that’s as gleefully sadistic as it is gratuitous.

On April 23, Freedman posted an emotional yet nuanced appeal for the project on Facebook:

“I am conflicted every hour of every day. As Russia continues to lay waste to Mariupol, bomb Odessa and Kharkiv and prepare massive attacks in the Donbas – I continue to push the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings. Hard. I continue to facilitate new readings, I promote those just happening or just happened. I take pleasure and joy in seeing the work of our Ukrainian colleagues work its way around the world’s stages. I continue to believe – against all odds – that this matters. I take pride in my colleagues who stand up to evil and say No with their art, their talent, their words, their actions. The news may make me cry 47 times a day, but I am not sentimental. I’m not here to tell you that theater is going to win this war against darkness. But I also know that I, like all my colleagues, refuse to back down before the darkness. Please keep in mind: Every time I share joyous news about a new writer, a new work, a new theater – I am doing so through 47 tears. And keep this in mind, my 47 tears will not stop me from sharing news and joy with my colleagues. Please! This is NOT a plea for you to comfort me or offer supportive words. That is NOT what I, or anyone else needs. NOT. It is, however, a plea to those who have not joined us yet: Get your theater to organize a reading. Bring the wisdom, insight and pain of Ukraine’s writers to the world. Stand with us against darkness.”

Ghost Road Company presents readings of five new plays by contemporary Ukrainian playwrights to raise money for Ukrainian Emergency Performing Arts Fund; Children’s stories, and Humanitarian aid for Ukraine; Open Face Food Shop and Outdoor Community Space, 5577 W Adams Blvd, LA; Wed., April 27, 8 pm. More info here.