Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama by Freedman John

Author:Freedman, John [Freedman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990447177
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Mikhail Durnenkov

In Brief:

• Born October 11, 1978, in the village of Larba in the Amur Region.

• Currently lives in Moscow.

• Married to leading Russian designer Ksenia Peretrukhina, who has created sets for several of Durnenkov’s produced plays.

• Began writing plays in 2001.

• First significant success was The Cultural Layer , co-written with brother Vyacheslav, presented in 2003 at the May Readings Festival in Togliatti and staged under the title of The Last Day of Summer at the Moscow Art Theater in 2005.

• A play collection, The Cultural Layer , published in 2005, contained five plays written with brother Vyacheslav, five plays by Vyacheslav alone, and one more by Mikhail alone.

• His play Easy People was staged in ten theaters throughout the former Soviet Union, including a production at the ARTiSHOK Theater in Kazakhstan in 2008.

• His play The Drunks , co-written with brother Vyacheslav, was staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 2009.

• Became the artistic director of the Lyubimovka new play festival in 2013.

• Wrote approximately 15 plays through 2013.

• His plays have been translated into French, German, Finnish, Turkish, Belarusian, Polish, Castilian and English.

• Author of screenplays for five feature films and teleplays.

Mikhail Durnenkov was born in the far reaches of Siberia, although his family moved to the southern Russian city of Togliatti when he was a teenager. Togliatti, sometimes called the Russian Detroit, is a tough, workingman’s town. Its primary reason for being is the local auto factory which, after the fall of the Soviet Union, came on hard times. In Togliatti Durnenkov and his older brother Vyacheslav became interested in theater. In the early 2000s, they joined a theater club run by playwright Vadim Levanov. Each year in May, the club held a series of readings and performances called May Readings, and the Durnenkovs, sometimes jointly, sometimes individually, were regular participants. By mid-decade both Durnenkovs, as well as Levanov and another playwright from their circle, Yury Klavdiev, gained national renown as the “Togliatti phenomenon.”

The first major play written by the Durnenkov brothers was The Cultural Layer, an episodic play that followed the lives and fates of various inhabitants of a single apartment over the course of many years. It had the unusual quality for a new drama play of being tastefully nostalgic, although its picture of a society falling apart was very much on target for its time. The Cultural Layer was performed throughout Russia and was staged at the Moscow Art Theater in 2005 under the title of The Last Day of Summer . At that time, Durnenkov moved to Moscow in order to study screenwriting at the State Institute of Cinema; and he and his brother increasingly wrote separately of each other. However, their jointly-composed play The Drunks was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009 and was a critical and popular success.

Among Durnenkov’s best-known plays are The Blue Plumber , an exploration of an educated young man’s experience working in a crude factory milieu, staged at Teatr.doc in Moscow; The Preserve , which explores disappearing historical places in St.

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