Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir
Andrew Kushnir, a proudly queer Ukrainian-Canadian playwright, director and activist, has since February 2022, sought out theatre’s place in the war, and how his own practice could connect Canadians to Ukraine’s resistance against attempted cultural erasure. Dr Kathleen Gallagher, a long-time friend and collaborator of Andrew’s, asks him about how theatre can collapse distances, help participants cross ‘borders of difference’, and ultimately bring the monolith of war to a human and local scale. She has engaged with all of Andrew’s war-time theatrical efforts to date.
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Kathleen Gallagher: We’ve previously talked about the strange feelings that come with producing a book or article or play. That for its audience, understandably, it’s an end-in-and-of-itself. But for the author, the artist, the researcher, it’s a segment of a continuum. What you produce shares a moment in your sustained practice. You’ve previously said to me that it’s like catching someone midway through an ellipsis.
Andrew Kushnir: Yes, from my vantage point, I can’t help but feel that some outputs are the ‘press through’ to the next idea or impulse. Which is not to diminish the output. I’d liken it to our long conversation. We’ve been in conversation for 16 years now with various collaborative outcomes. But the conversation continues while it continues to generate ‘things’.
KG: This word conversation is important to your practice as an artist and activist. And I think it will give us valuable entry into a specific part of your ‘ellipsis’. I’m reminded of you saying, back in 2019, while doing press on our show Towards Youth, that you relish theatre being more of a ‘call to thought’ than a ‘call to action.’
AK: I think that we culturally rush to alleviate our own discomfort when it comes to questions of (in)justice. We don’t like to feel inculpated. So, we often do things to release the pressure in advance of pausing, reflecting and considering our relationships. I’m thinking of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and how many folks wrote me after they’d rushed online to donate to one global humanitarian organization or another, not having consulted with folks in relationship with Ukrainians about where the greatest need existed or where the greatest impact could be made. I have activist colleagues in Ukraine who didn’t see a drop of those donations and they’re on the frontlines managing the essential needs, housing needs and safety of their community members.
KG: You started the second year of the full-scale invasion in a very distinct way, with a ‘call to thought’ to the Canadian theatre community.
AK: I wrote an essay for Intermission – which is a primarily Toronto-focused online theatre magazine. The title of the piece created a stir, but it brought people to the table. To the conversation.
KG: It was entitled ‘Why Is Canadian Theatre So Russian Right Now?’ What was your chief aim with the piece?
AK: I wanted my community of theatre-makers and programmers across the country, one year into the full-scale invasion, to consider the cultural front of this war and their level of engagement. To recognize that we have a longstanding and underexamined relationship to Russian literature and drama in this country. In the first year of the full-scale invasion, we had 4 productions of Chekhov in the city of Toronto alone. Toronto’s Buddies in Bad Times – North America’s largest LGBTQ+ theatre – had put out a call for artists to submit work that strove to ‘filter Fyodor Dostoyevsky’ through a queer lens. Meanwhile, an initiative called the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings had been underway since February 2022 and documented 74 solidarity theatre events in the United States and 47 in the UK. Canada had had three. I was baffled by our Canadian business-as-usual while Ukrainians were dying at the hands of a Russian regime extolling – and imposing – its cultural legacy.
KG: You mention in the article that the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was bombed in March 2022 and that the fencing around its ruins, erected by Russian forces, depicts oversized images of Pushkin, Gogol and Tolstoy.
AK: These are the so-called ‘Great Russian Writers’ that live large in our own milieu and everywhere. They, metaphorically speaking, do create a kind of fence between our gaze and the atrocities being perpetrated by Russia. I think that Russian cultural imperialism is something that few people consider, in part, because it leads to us discovering how our own imaginations contribute to its power. We have invested in Russian culture in this country. And sustaining our relationship with it in the absence of reflexivity or adjustment is doing harm.
KG: But you don’t propose boycotts.
AK: I’m not into boycotts. I don’t think the answer is abolishing our Chekhov plays and Tolstoy novels. But I do think we need to pause and consider how the works of these writers have been (and are currently being) weaponized by tyrants and how framing them as apolitical in our current context is myopic. It’s a luxury afforded to those who are not withstanding erasure at this time and can decide that Chekhov (let’s say) is no longer a Russian writer but ‘belongs to the world.’ As a Ukrainian-Canadian, it is hard not to feel an affronting cognitive dissonance when my local community programs, resources, and celebrates Russian stories without critique. I can only imagine what this may feel like for over 250,000 Ukrainians who have been displaced and relocated to Canada since February 2022. Or the massive existing diaspora they’ve integrated into – Canada has the third-largest Ukrainian population in the world, only outnumbered by the diaspora in Russia and then Ukraine itself.1 Giving space and time to Ukraine, in this country at least, hardly feels like a niche undertaking. And yet in Canada’s theatre space, particularly in the first year of the full-scale invasion, it was.
KG: That article served as a launch for a year’s worth of Ukraine-focused interventions from you. You conceived of, curated, and directed Encountering Ukraine: Readings in Solidarity at the Stratford Festival, which included the reading of classic and new works by Ukrainian playwrights.
AK: Our key readings included Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra, Mykola Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique, Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads, and then the last event featured ten short plays written by contemporary Ukrainian playwrights since February 2022. I called that collection of plays Witnessing War.
KG: How did you go about choosing the series’ plays?
AK: It’s the first time something like this has been done in Canada, to my knowledge, and I wanted to legitimize the last hundred years of playwrighting in Ukraine. Putin’s rationale for this war, largely, is that Ukraine is not a distinct country, people or culture. That Ukraine is a relatively new concept. I wanted to demonstrate Ukrainian personhood through Ukrainian artistry, and how this well predates 1991’s dissolving of the Soviet Union. Not only that; I think Ukrainian dramatists, for a long time, have been speaking out against subjugation and the narrative that Ukraine is simply Russia’s ‘little brother.’
KG: And you chose to call the event an encounter. I know that word lives large in your practice. And I also know that as I was sitting in that audience at Stratford, I felt I was being invited to ‘encounter’ something intimate, but also enormous and important, as an audience member, from the very welcome speech you gave at the event. I further discovered, in that moment, that I was sitting beside a Ukrainian woman because her uncontainable emotions at the sound of your words affected me. Can you remind me how you greeted us?
AK: ‘I want to recognize and acknowledge that you are taking part in this war, just by being here. You are not in danger, I assure you. But you are in action. You have shown up at the cultural front of this war and your attention, your care, your giving of your time, your delight, your engagement, your witness is actively countering something that is unfolding on the other side of this world. And that is the attempted erasure, the attempted eradication of a people and its culture.’
It was important for me to remind those in attendance that they are consequential to the act of theatre and to the validation and survival of a culture. The word ‘encounter’ does live large for me. I think it’s what we can pull off in the space of the theatre: a meeting. I don’t want to be told what to think or feel. I don’t want to be told what to do. I want to make contact, make meaning, and spend some ‘slow time’ with something complex in the company of others. In the theatre, we narrow the gap, we shift our proximity between ourselves and the unfamiliar or ourselves and our assumptions and imposed stories. As we are confronted by the monoliths of war and unfathomable strife, the theatre is a space wherein we can get closer to the thing without it burning us. And it’s in that space that we can reorder our hearts a little, renew our engagement with what is numbing about senseless violence and violation, and ultimately restore our sense of responsibility to strangers-in-trouble. What happens after, that’s not the theatre’s job, but in that space, you can be revived, if only temporarily, to your human capacity to connect across seemingly big divides.
KG: Natal’ya Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads was not only featured in the reading series in Stratford, but you went on to direct an award-winning North American premiere of the play in Toronto in the fall of 2023.
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AK: It came about after my Intermission article. Chris Abraham, artistic director at Crow’s Theatre, was programming their 40th anniversary season and he asked me how the theatre could show up for Ukraine. We landed on this idea of me directing Vorozhbit’s play.
KG: I can’t help but think of what you just said about violence and violation. These are key elements of Vorozhbit’s dramaturgy – with that one scene in particular, where a journalist is taken hostage and raped by an Eastern Ukrainian separatist. It felt almost ‘unstageable’. And yet you found a way to do it.
AK: I had extraordinary collaborators on that show. Actors with whom I explored new ways of working and communicating, at least new to me. We had an inspired intimacy and fight director. I worked with our lighting designer to minimize what could be seen by the audience, utilizing thin shafts of light from a flashlight to afford us glimpses, small doses of imagery. But the biggest directorial gesture around that scene was that the actors never made physical contact. In fact, we bisected our playing space and called them hemispheres, with an equator never to be crossed. I needed the audience to trust that things wouldn’t become naturalistic beyond the sound and energy of the violence. This is what the theatre can afford us, an extraordinary palate of options and abstractions to help keep people’s ears and eyes open to the un-hearable, unwatchable, unbearable. I trusted that the audience could connect things in their mind’s eye in a way that was sufficient to honour Vorozhbit’s theatrical desires – which I think, fundamentally, is about bringing the vastness of war into a personal and relational frame.
KG: And you were in touch with her during the process.
AK: Yes, we had a number of exchanges. I was most struck by her reminding me that her characters are all ‘unhappy people’ but still deserving of our time and affection. Also, that we shouldn’t be afraid to laugh in this work. Ukrainian humour is more than a way of coping, it has struck me over the past few years – be it through the plays being written now or the memes being generated online – how it’s a way of preserving one’s humanity and feeling un-subsumed by the darkness of war.
KG: What came alive for me in that production was the extent to which we don’t know who we will become when plunged into war. And for all of our proclaimed values, war mutates and tests them in ways that cannot be anticipated.
In our work together, we talk about the drama classroom being a workshop for young people’s lives; I called it a ‘laboratory for hope’. Theatre of this kind, raw and immediate and staring the contemporary moment in the eye, feels like it’s doing something different than journalism and activism and something similar to the investigations and discoveries I’ve seen unfold in drama classrooms for decades. It’s affording people a way to step into the feeling of something, a way to deeply perceive self-other relationships, a way to harness emotion in order to act in concert.
AK: And then when audiences or theatre-makers read that next article, or hear that next radio interview about Ukraine, they have a renewed capacity for it. I think the theatre becomes a space where we can listen with ‘new’ ears. The art form’s aesthetics and its potential for in-person care can do that.
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KG: It was clear that care was central to your ensemble’s bold work. I felt it in the audience experience too, how we had been considered. Care is a good place for us to land as I ask you, lastly, about The Division, which you wrote and directed with students of Toronto Metropolitan University at Tarragon Theatre, and then you had an outing in the States, at Lincoln Center with the Criminal Queerness Festival. You directed its award-winning world premiere in April 2026 in Toronto. This play is about your own family history as it pertains to the Second World War.
AK: My grandfather was a famous watchmaker and I inherited one of his custom timepieces after he died. In 2019, I took it back to his home village in Western Ukraine and retraced his journey to Canada as a seventeen- to nineteen-year-old soldier, through Italy and England. I interviewed people along the way about war, about time, and memory.
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KG: What has stayed with me about that play is your willingness to grapple with your inheritance as a queer, Ukrainian-Canadian man and the consideration you give to what you will pass on, be it to your nephew (to whom the piece is addressed) or general audiences. And your concern about the feelings of hatred you have contended with over the past few years of this war and struggling with that now being a part of your movement through the world.
AK: I’ve found that the only way I’ve been able to metabolize those feelings is through creativity and collaboration. I always go back to that quote, one that you alerted me to, in fact. It was a segment on CBC radio back in April 2022 that you had caught. A man being interviewed by the name of Bogdan Bolkhovetsy of Kraina FM, who’d been running a makeshift radio station in Ukraine in the early weeks and months of the invasion. The host had asked him what sense he was making of this war and he said: ‘Believe me, there is no sense into this, there is absolutely no sense. You just support and you do what you can do. People who bake bread, they bake bread. People who drive, they drive. People who do radio, do radio.’ I think of that quote from Bogdan often. And I’ve imagined that if we focused some small part of what we do well, each and every one of us, towards Ukraine’s freedom, it will be inevitable.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression and deliberation. She has published numerous books and articles on theatre pedagogy and socially engaged theatre-making. Her newest SSHRC-funded ethnographic research project, working with collaborators in Canada, Greece, India, Ireland and Nigeria, is called The Drama Workshop: Collective discernment and artistic practice as relational pedagogies for an epoch of intersecting ecological, social, and economic crises (2025-2030).
A multi-award-winning director, playwright, teacher and activist who lives in Toronto, Andrew Kushnir is artistic director of Project: Humanity, a leading developer of verbatim theatre in Canada. His produced plays include The Middle Place, Small Axe, Towards Youth, and Wormwood. His direction of the North American premiere of Bad Roads by Natal’ya Vorozhbit earned him both the 2023 Dora Award and Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award for direction. He is a Loran Scholar, Senior Fellow at Massey College and founder of We Support LGBTQ Ukraine: lgbtukrainesupport.com. In 2023, the Globe and Mail named him one of ten “Canadian Artists of the Year”.
Notes:
- Multiple waves of immigration have contributed to this demographic reality, starting in 1891 with several decades of resettlement of Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Canadian prairies. Post-World War waves (in the 1920s and mid-1940s to mid-1950s), followed by another Post-Soviet immigration wave (after 1991), precede the most recent arrivals displaced by the full-scale Russian invasion. ↩