This well-edited and beautifully translated volume introduces an English-speaking readership to one of the most interesting Russian cultural phenomena of the twenty-first century: New Drama. The term New Drama refers to the extraordinary proliferation of Russian dramatic writing that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. The works and authors associated with the movement exhibit a remarkable degree of stylistic and thematic diversity, resisting facile categorization. As Maksim Hanukai and Susanna Weygandt also astutely note in their introduction, the emergence of New Drama coincides roughly with the years that Vladimir Putin has held power, “making it one of the most important documents that we have of this period” (xxix). Given the multifaceted nature of New Drama, the numerous playwrights who have been associated with it, and its importance as a historical document, the editors of this volume faced several daunting tasks. How to select an array of plays that captures the disparate voices comprising the contemporary Russian dramatic landscape? How to render those voices accessible to readers as well as to English-language theater practitioners? And how to place New Drama in the context of both Russian and western theatrical and dramatic histories? Hanukai and Weygandt, along with their translators, have succeeded admirably in meeting all of these challenges.

The volume opens with an engaging foreword by Richard Schechner, a well-known American theater practitioner and scholar. Schechner reminds the reader of the formidable influence of Russians such as Konstantin Stanislavskii on Anglo-American theater practice until the 1930s, and how the years after World War II, by contrast, were marked by a cessation of that cultural cross-pollination. The plays in this volume, Schechner hopes, will herald a new chapter in Russian drama's relevance for a global audience. In their introduction, Hanukai and Weygandt also situate the anthologized plays amidst broader dramatic and theatrical trends. They argue that the playwrights and practitioners associated with New Drama continue the attacks on theatricality that have characterized western theater since the nineteenth century. New Drama, however, emerged out of the social chaos and profound instability of Russia of the 1990s, compelling the formation of a distinctive concept of the real. It is this specific “pursuit of the real” that Hanukai and Weygandt identify as one of New Drama's key unifying characteristics, a quest that renders these plays especially relevant in an “increasingly digitized and mediated world” (xxxviii). The editors helpfully chart New Drama's journey from obscure provincial playwrighting festivals and cramped basements to productions on the stages of Moscow's preeminent stages and an outsized influence on Russian cultural production well beyond the theater—particularly on film and visual art. The reader is further assisted by a timeline of crucial events in the development of New Drama, as well as by brief biographical notes about each featured playwright, including the production history of the anthologized play, at the end of the volume.

New Russian Drama: An Anthology contains ten translated plays, written between 2000 and 2013 and presented chronologically, all but two of which are rendered into English for the first time. Plasticine by Vassilii Sigarev and Playing the Victim by the Presniakov Brothers, both translated by the British translator Sasha Dugdale, are here modified for an American English-speaking audience. The texts selected by the editors successfully highlight New Drama's stylistic and thematic diversity. September.doc, for example, written by Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina—founders of New Drama's “spiritual home,” the Moscow-based Teatr.doc (xx)—showcases the verbatim technique of documentary theater: the text is comprised solely of messages posted to internet blogs and forums in the wake of the terrorist school siege in Beslan in 2004. At the other end of the spectrum, Project “Swan” (by Andrei Rodionov, a well-known contemporary poet, and Ekaterina Troepolskaia), about a futuristic Russian society that forces all would-be citizens to pass a poetry recitation exam, is written entirely in verse. Translator Thomas Campbell deserves special praise for his efforts in rendering this complex text into vibrant English. Thematically, the plays contain elements as diverse as the brutalizing of teenagers by former convicts (Plasticine); marital infidelity (Summer Wasps Sing in November, Too, by Ivan Vyrypaev, and Somnambulism by Yaroslava Pulinovich); and the familial histrionics of the Chekhov clan (Brothers Ch. by Gremina). Many of the texts are united by their depiction of the radical atomization that characterized Russian society after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The following question reverberates throughout the plays: have the circumstances of contemporary life rendered human qualities obsolete, perhaps even harmful? For example, a character in Mikhail Durnenkov's The Blue Machinist declares that “whatever you imagine, everything already exists,” and so it's best to “never think again” (214–15). The only way to survive being taken hostage is to stop being human (September.doc, 152). An exhausting, nearly logorrheic stream of words concludes without any new insights or human connections, ending with the characters abandoning communication altogether in favor of an animalistic tickling session (Summer Wasps Sing in November, Too). Radical atomization is, of course, not unique to post-Soviet Russia; considered together, these plays compel a sobering rumination on the twenty-first century human condition.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary Russian culture, as well as to anyone concerned with international trends in theater and drama. Because of the prominence of several New Dramatists, such as Sigarev and Vyrypaev, as filmmakers, it will also prove valuable for specialists in Russian cinema. The consistently excellent translations of the individual plays lend themselves well to staging by English-language theater practitioners. Along with John Freedman's Real and Phantom Pains: An Anthology of New Russian Drama (2014), Hanukai and Weygandt's volume effectively introduces New Drama—one of the most confounding, important, and dynamic Russian cultural movements of the twenty-first century—to the broader audience that it so richly deserves.