The history of New Drama began in the 1990’s when playwrights united over the consensus to oust paradigms of writing that had still been lingering from the Soviet-era stage. In the period known as Stagnation (zastoi), the late 1960’s through the early 1980’s, the scope of topics that was accessible to direct speech was limited and metaphor remained a key device in the plays of New Drama predecessors – Vampilov, Radzinkii, and Petrushevskaya. The eagerness to speak directly about real-life issues, as opposed to speaking in metaphors, went hand in hand with the celebration of the fall of the Soviet Union and the lifting of censorship in most media. 

The style of verbatim documentary drama, New Drama’s leading subgenre, emerged specifically for the purpose of voicing “direct speech” about societal problems through testimony and oral history. I find that the re-telling of documented, recorded speech on the Russian public stage is not to try to make something “come to life” through re-enactment. Nor is the point to create an imaginary utopia where a real-life tragedy can be salvaged through repetition and rehearsal; but rather to expose the real in crisis, to register its points not only of breakdown but of breakthrough, the new possibilities that such a crisis might open up for the audience. I describe New Drama’s ability to transform individuals, communities, and cultures—as long as it remains an affective art form. I draw on theories of audience reception by avant-garde Russian film directors as I argue that common and social memory more often consists in narratives that are charged with emotions than strictly in archives and facts. The docudramas articulate feelings about nation, kinship, home, and belonging through the emotional and sensorial transactions they produce, thus changing performance in public space from something “boxed in” to a participatory art that offers a gateway to the social activism that is shaping the cultural history of 21st-c. Russia. As such, New Drama connects to themes of dissidence, social critique, and political protest that have influenced the social climate of the post-1989 transformation of the region. In order to trace the ascending, aesthetic theories of New Drama, I spent several months in Russia compiling an ethnography of this movement through interviews with playwrights and directors. Thus, the methods that I use intertwine with the methods that the New Dramatists themselves practice. I am making a kind of study of New Drama that is true to its own methods. 

How does the actor enact the fact? After all, the real is not directly experienced or witnessed, but rather retold, quoted, as a skaz narration. New Dramatists – docudrama writers and also conceptual writers such as Ivan Vyrypaev – build upon the established foundation of skaz in oral performance to create new formal-aesthetics of expressive, radical speech on the 21-st c. stage. It is precisely the structural dissonance of skaz – the ability to mark the author’s voice as separate from the protagonist – that makes the older genre crucial for Russian docudrama’s form of theater.