Book Discussion: From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory, by E. Susanna Weygandt

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Affiliate Organization: Working Group on Drama & Performance

Brief Description

Set in late- and post-Soviet Russia, Weygandt’s first book, From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory (2025, University of Wisconsin Press), analyzes performance theories and practices indigenous to Russia and East Europe that have not yet been documented in previous scholarship. It grew out of many months of research in Russia when Weygandt compiled an ethnography of Novaia Drama through her observations of performances and interviews with the leading playwrights of the movement. The dramas themselves are based on document, interview, and ethnography in order to capture representations of an evolving understanding of national identity in the post-Soviet transformation of the region. Thus, the methods that Weygandt uses intertwine with the methods that the New Dramatists themselves practice. She is making a kind of study of New Drama that is true to its own methods.

New Dramatists have retheorized and amplified the disadvantaged voice through their documentary dramas. Aesthetic approaches in the productions of their plays mostly move away from embodied performance toward the performance of text or testimony that occurs in an almost purely sonic performance style. As leading performance studies scholar Richard Schechner wrote in his review of my book, “The cacophonic, vibrant, and shocking ‘new drama’ of social critique and dissent in Putin’s Russia engages the public with powerful street talk and emotive cries, a twenty-first-century ‘new technology of signs.’ Weygandt’s deeply researched book is a necessary read if you want to understand today’s Russia.”

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Anna Hodel, U of Basel (Switzerland)

Roundtable Speakers

• Anna Hodel, U of Basel (Switzerland)

• Kathleen Lillian Mitchell-Fox, Princeton U

• Marjan Moosavi, U of Maryland, College Park

• Elena Susanna Weygandt, UC Santa Barbara

• Elena Yushkova, U of Kentucky