Theater on Podil to Present WHEN THE HURLYBURLY'S DONE at The Public

Kyiv-based theater company Theater on Podil (Bohdan Benyuk, Artistic Director and Yevhen Syvnov, Managing Director) will make their New York debut with a limited run of WHEN THE HURLYBURLY'S DONE, a new play written and directed by Tony Award winner Richard Nelson and translated by Yulia Sosnovska at The Public Theater. Performances will begin in the Shiva Theater on Tuesday, September 16 and continue through Sunday, September 21. The production is performed in Ukrainian with English supertitles.

This marks the second play Richard Nelson has directed at Theater on Podil; the film of his Ukrainian-language production of Conversations in Tusculum, a play which first premiered at The Public, was screened at The Public last fall. Nelson’s Public Theater premieres also include The Apple Family plays, The Gabriels, The Michaels, and Illyria.  

Nelson shares, “My ambition has been to write a play about six young women putting on a play in the middle of a war to be performed by six young women putting on this play in the middle of a war.”  

Artistic Director Oskar Eustis adds, “When the Hurlyburly’s Done is a magnificent artistic response by Richard Nelson to the art of a brave and heroic nation, Ukraine. We are proud to celebrate Richard’s astonishing artistic and humanitarian achievement, and humbled by the opportunity to express our undying solidarity with the theatermakers of Ukraine.” 

In 1920, 32-year-old Les Kurbas, the founder of the modern Ukrainian theater, takes a group of young actors out of war-torn Kyiv into the countryside where they will perform plays, bartering tickets for food. One such play is Macbeth, the first Shakespeare production ever performed in Ukrainian. While Kurbas and most of the company attend a show by a local theater company performed in their honor, six young women— four actresses, a pianist, and a dancer—stay behind with their children. Over a meal which they cook using the proceeds of that evening’s show, the young women talk, complain, joke, make fun of themselves, laugh, and rehearse dances from the show, all while in pain, heartbroken, lost, scared, and with a need to be together.