Theater In A Warzone: An Interview With Richard Nelson

January 2025

In the more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine the question of how art can respond to barbarism has taken on urgent significance. Theodor Adorno famously said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Today, in the aftermath of atrocities like Mariupol, artists in Ukraine have to ask themselves whether or not they agree with his analysis. Since February 2022, there have been tens of thousands of casualties and more than 1,300 documented attacks on Ukraine’s health system. Amid this devastation, Richard Nelson brought his timely play Conversations in Tusculum to audiences in Kyiv, Ukraine in the spring of 2024. 

Set in 45 BC in a villa fifteen miles southeast of Rome, the play stages conversations among Brutus (Roman Khalaimov), his brother-in-law Cassius (Artem Atamaniuk), and his friend Cicero (Serhii Boiko) as they navigate life under Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Pardoned by an offstage Caesar after siding with Pompey and Cato in the recent civil war, the men reflect on their personal and political waterloos and the humiliation of their clemency. Brutus recounts his degrading surrender to Caesar, who manipulates him to ensure loyalty. Meanwhile, Cicero, grieving the loss of his beloved daughter, questions the purpose of life under tyranny, especially as Caesar consolidates power: petitions are circulating to name him “Dictator for Life.” Certain lines in the play—such as Brutus’ observation that Caesar “seems to have no one around him whom he trusts. And we know — he’s getting very bad advice” — had a shivery immediacy in 2024. 

For all the obvious similarities between the days leading up to the assassination of Caesar and modern-day autocrats, Conversations in Tusculum can’t be compressed into a single message. Above all, it dramatizes the activity of thinking not as a purely intellectual activity, but, following Hannah Arendt, as a human activity that develops meaning and that allows one to experience plurality in its highest form. If Plato thought largely from wonder, the Romans, for Arendt and, one senses, for Nelson as well, thought largely from unhappiness, division, fear, and a need to escape the state of nature. Like certain Stoics, they turned inward to preserve a sovereign sense of self and this withdrawal from the wider world — or “internal emigration” — that Conversations in Tusculum depicts so effectively.

First staged at The Public Theater in New York in 2008, Conversations in Tusculum was translated into Ukrainian by Valentina Zhigalova and Larissa Volokhonsky in 2024. Nelson’s new book, “A Diary of War & Theatre,” chronicles his experience directing the play at the Theatre on Podil during the ongoing war as well as the indomitable spirit of Ukrainian artists. In the face of relentless air-raid alerts, infrastructural challenges, and personal loss, the theater emerged as a space for reflection and resistance. Though Nelson originally budgeted for nine weeks of rehearsal, in the end he had less than half that time with his actors due to their changing schedules and to air alerts, which could be triggered by Russian planes overhead or ballistic missiles. On opening night, two such alerts — including one lasting 35 minutes — halted the performance. I spoke with Nelson over Zoom in December about his book and his time in Kyiv. The below interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I want to congratulate you on this heroic undertaking. You pulled double or even triple duty, serving as your own production manager for Conversations in Tusculum. What was that like?

Nelson: It was complicated, but as I always said to anyone who asked, “What’s it like?” — it’s a gift. I mention this in the book: it was clear to me that what I was doing — what we were doing together — had real value. It wasn’t just for me, but for the actors, the theater, and the audience. It affirmed that theater has a purpose, a function within society and culture, even — especially — in times of crisis. That understanding was what drove me forward. Whatever the problems were — whether someone was too busy or forgetting about things — you couldn’t complain. These were people living and working in the middle of a war. You just had to be patient, understanding, and constantly remind yourself of the extraordinary circumstances they were facing.

In your book, you note that the Ukrainian actors you worked with often juggled multiple productions. How did this repertory-style approach affect your rehearsals?

Nelson: It’s a system we in America don’t understand or don’t experience. The theater has a company with over 40 actors, and they have at least 40 plays in repertory. Every single day, they rotate performances across two theaters, staging two different plays each day, six days a week. That’s 12 different plays in any given week — it’s incredible. During rehearsals, I remember sitting with the company manager as she went through each actor’s time conflicts, which were immense. The actors had shows starting at 6 p.m. during the week due to curfews, which meant I had to wrap rehearsals for those performers by 4 p.m. On Saturdays, performances began at 4 p.m., and on Sundays, at 2 p.m., so if someone was in a Sunday show, I could only work with them for about an hour in the morning. It was a very complicated schedule, but you just roll with the punches. They gave me eight-plus weeks to rehearse, which ended up being far, far less. But they’re used to it, they’re game, they work unbelievably hard, and so, you stand back and just admire and go with the flow.

The frequency of air-raid alerts throughout the rehearsal process was alarming. How long did the longest air alert last?

Nelson: About five hours. Now it’s worse. I still get the air-raid alerts every day on my phone. I’ve just turned off the volume, so it doesn’t make air-raid sounds. I woke up this morning to two air-raid alerts from last night, both fairly short. But about two weeks ago, it was happening almost every day, with alerts lasting four, five, six hours at a time — almost always through the night. You can only imagine what it’s like, especially for families with children. The goal of these air alerts isn’t necessarily to kill people, it’s to make them psychologically unsettled.

Even though you call yourself an “accidental director,” I’m still going to ask you about directing this specific production. One thing you often say to your actors is, “Just be. Don’t show or do.” You also write in the book that what you want to achieve in the theater is “a real event, not presented.” And I think that’s clear from the very beginning of the performance where you see the actors setting the table, taking down chairs. In your Apple Family plays, the actors will often prepare a real meal on stage while conversing. Can you say more about your actor-centric approach to directing? 

Nelson: The voice I have as a playwright is dialogue, which is the voice of the character. I come from a world in which the character is the center, and adding to that, visually, or in terms of extra style, is a way of, I think, moving away from that. In Western Europe, especially, that’s become the style — the so-called “director’s theater” style. We have a bit of it in America, but in Europe, it’s really everywhere. And so the play, the characters, the actors, sort of get lost a bit. You can take away everything in theater except two things: the actor and the audience. Without those, there’s no play. So you begin with that and you focus on that. In a time of deep cultural divisions, I think human conversation—where people actually talk and listen to one another—becomes a release and almost a moral statement about society as it really is as opposed to how it’s presenting itself. The necessity of portraying that is very much what I’m about both as a playwright and a director.

What was it like to work with the translators Valentina Zhigalova and Larissa Volokhonsky? 

Nelson: Valentina was always in Paris so I didn’t really work with her. Larissa came for the first and last weeks, but I always had a translator with me — a very good one. She’s also an actress and understood what I was trying to do and really embraced what I was trying to do. I would make changes in the script along the way and she would work on those. 

In adapting “Conversations in Tusculum” for the Kyiv production, were there specific moments or lines that felt particularly challenging to translate?

Nelson: There were many moments during rehearsal when we had to ask, “What does this mean?” or “Is this the right translation?” It wasn’t so much about specific lines, but more about my writing style. I write basic, ordinary language that shouldn’t call attention to itself except in certain cases. But this ordinary language is written so that often there’s more going on than just the kind of conversation you’d get if you took a tape recorder to a cafe and just surreptitiously caught conversation. It’s chosen ordinary language, so there’s often double meanings and other things going on. I’m open to the challenge of translating those subtleties but i recognize it is a challenge.

Before working on this play in Ukraine, I did a play in Paris, for which I worked with a French translator. I don’t speak French or Ukrainian, and we went through a very similar process. In French, maybe more so than in Ukrainian, often when you start a sentence, you know where it’s going to end. In English, you often go word by word. As I say to my actors, I am very interested in them thinking and speaking at the same time, so it feels like they’re discovering their words as they say them, finding ways of not knowing what they’re going to say as they begin to say it, to keep it so present and alive, as if you’re witnessing thought. That was tricky in French, but we figured it out. 

How did the Ukrainian audience’s reception of Tusculum differ from what you experienced with the earlier American productions?

Nelson: It’s a lot of different things. One, I have grown — and hopefully keep growing as a writer and a director — since the earlier production. In the Public Theater production, the play was set in different locations so there were scene changes and we moved things around. For the Kyiv production, I rewrote parts of the play to set it all in one place so it could move, move, move. And that rhythm was very important to the production in Kyiv and I didn’t have that rhythm in New York, which was my mistake.

What surprised me in Kyiv was the way people responded to the way the actors just spoke to each other, as opposed to having any heavy theatricality. People would constantly say, “I felt like I was in the room.” Audiences at the Public were much more used to plays of a naturalistic style, so it’s not quite so different. And of course the historical context in Kyiv was also interesting. After the first preview or press performance, Bohdan Benyuk, the artistic director [of Theater on Podil], said, “How did this guy from America put this play on which is about the last 15 years of Ukrainian history?” And I was so moved because what he saw in the play was the argument of compromise, of how we convince ourselves of things that are not true, and we get ourselves into a very bad situation. 

When I did the play at the Public Theater, we were coming out of the Iraq War, and the audience wasn’t at quite the same place that I was — I don’t think they got exactly what I was asking. Oddly enough, we did a screening of the Ukraine show at the Public just six weeks ago — right after the U.S. election — and the reaction was very visceral. It’s exciting as a playwright when you can write a play that can resonate in different ways across different cultures and languages.

One of the reviews by a Ukrainian critic that you included in your book remarked that your play expresses: “a nostalgia for normal live family communication, something that is impossible for so many, and for which many of us would give a lot today. This nostalgia is so powerful that during the performance you repeatedly catch yourself thinking: even if I didn’t know what they were talking about, I would feel good just listening to their chatter in this quiet house, illuminated by the evening light.” That quote made me think about the writer and cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s description of nostalgia as an “incurable modern condition.” In her book The Future of Nostalgia, she writes that “nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.”

Nelson: It’s complicated, but I would use a different word. I would use the more Chekhovian word “longing.” I think that’s what he wrote about — a sense of loss in many ways, not just political, but human and familial as well. It’s that feeling when you suddenly realize what you’re missing, but you’re not quite sure what it is you want yet you feel this deep longing for it. I think that’s what the reviewer was talking about and I think that’s what a lot of people feel right now, in terms of a vicious longing for something. Sometimes that longing gets misplaced or gets used by other people. We’ve seen this in politics — people long for something and that longing is packaged into something else. For me, theater is totally about relationships. That is all it is and comes from the dialogue. That’s how we articulate our humanity, and that’s the goal of writing a play — to present truthful human connections on stage. I think that’s what the critic [Vitaliy Zhezhera] was feeling — that [he] was in the presence of human beings with each other. And that’s a good feeling.

In a previous interview with BOMB, you said that “The sense of being displaced is very important to me and perhaps one that I myself feel.” 

Nelson: I did that interview decades ago, but it’s true. I grew up in a family that moved around a great deal so I have no clear sense of where I grew up. When you move every three years or so, you don’t have a real feeling of “home.” Now, I’ve lived in Rhinebeck, New York, for 43 years, so I found a home. So that’s been very important — I raised a family here. 

Given the proximity of the Bulgakov Museum to the Theatre on Podil, did the literary legacy of Kyiv influence your creative process or frame your understanding of Ukrainian theater traditions? I’m also curious to hear your thoughts on Ukrainian theater’s ties to Stanislavsky and Les Kurbas, the father of modern Ukrainian theater.

Nelson: The Bulgakov Museum is right across the street, but it’s not really called the “Bulgakov Museum” anymore because there’s been an effort to erase his name from Ukrainian literary history. I learned a great deal [during my time in Kyiv.] I go back to Kyiv in 10 or 12 days to do a new play called When the Hurly Burly is Done. It came out of my trip to the museum and hearing about Les Kurbas and seeing the poster for Macbeth, and I decided to do some research. The play is set in 1920 in the countryside south of Kyiv. Les Kurbas is a 33-year-old man who brings together a group of young actors and takes them to the countryside. Why? Because Kyiv, Ukraine, is in the middle of a massive civil war. Kyiv itself is in the midst of a famine. They’ve moved out to the countryside so they can do plays and barter tickets for food from the farmers. And one of the plays they produce is Macbeth, which becomes the very first time that any Shakespeare play has ever been performed in the Ukrainian language. [Before 1920,] the Russians wouldn’t allow Ukrainian to be spoken in anything but a low-class farce or folk drama. My play doesn’t have Kurbas directly on stage — it was too hard to figure out. The research is so interesting: he was arrested in 1933, he was shot in the head in 1937, and then his name was wiped clean. And then slowly, in the 50s, his name started to reappear, but came to reappear as a good communist. Figuring out what’s true, what’s not true in terms of his own life is tricky. No one’s put together a recent biography of Kurbas.

The play features six women, all between the ages of 20 and 32. Four of them are actresses in the Macbeth production: one is Lady Macbeth, two are witches, and two of the other characters are a pianist and a choreographer, who would later become famous as Bronislava Nijinska, the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, who would go on to create, a few years later, “Les Noces,” one of the great ballets of the 20th century. She’s 32, living in Kyiv, has a school there called the School of Movement, and she’s close to Kurbas. As the other actors in the company go into town to see a play that’s being done for their benefit by a Yiddish theater, these women remain. So it’s just these six women, and as in the Apple plays, they make a meal, eat the meal, rehearse some dances, talk, complain, laugh, and that’s the play. One evening, one meal. As I wrote to Mr. Benyuk, when I sent him the play, what I’m trying to do is write a play about a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of the war to be performed by a group of young actresses putting on this play in the middle of a war. The potential resonances and connections are huge. The actress who plays Porcia in Tusculum [Mariia Demenko] is also in this new play; the others are all new to me and I cast them over Zoom.

It’s interesting to compare your play with other, more contemporary plays that focus squarely on Ukraine’s current crisis. Have you read “A dictionary of emotions in a time of war. 20 short works by Ukrainian playwrights”? 

Nelson: No, I haven’t.

The work was edited by John Freedman and published last year and a few of the chapters have been turned into short radio plays. The latest episode features a reading by Jessica Hecht. Also, last year, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. produced Sasha Denisova’s “My Mama & the Full-Scale Invasion.” And earlier this year, the Brick Theater’s staged a production of “Lucky Breaks,” about the 2014 Russian war on Ukraine and adapted from the short-story collection of the same name by Ukrainian writer Yevgenia Belorusets. 

Nelson: I’ve read that book. What’s interesting is that I wanted to and assumed I could tour Tusculum. But when I arrived in Kyiv and asked about the possibility of touring there, they said, “You can’t tour because your two leads are military age”. They can’t leave the country.” The new play, by happenstance, has six women, which makes it possible to tour.

Do you have any last words about making plays in times of crisis?

For the two days in Kyiv when my translator couldn’t be there, two young women, around 19 years old, stood in as translators. They spoke English and told me, “Before the war, we didn’t go to the theater, but now we do.” I later talked to a class and asked them if it was true that they were going to the theater more. They said yes and they gave two reasons. First, they wanted to learn about their culture because now the theater is performed in Ukrainian, not Russian. The war, they said, has made them more interested in their own cultural identity. Second, they said the theater brings them together. The theater is about a bunch of people that don’t know each other, but come together and sit together as one. In the play I did in Paris, a character says, “What we do is see ourselves in others and others in ourselves.” What greater thing could theater do at a time when we are divided, we are siloing ourselves, we are separating ourselves. We should simply say, Wait a minute. I’m going to see myself in you, and you in myself. How necessary is that today? It seems to me essential.

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