When The Hurlyburly’s Done, Theater and War in Ukraine

It looks just like a Richard Nelson play. A group of women peel potatoes and knead dough around a distressed wooden table, chatting about offstage characters and events. The audience surrounds them, voyeurs to their communion. But gone are the mild-mannered Yankees of Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama, supplanted by Ukrainians speaking their native tongue, playing characters very much like themselves, but from 105 years ago.

When The Hurlyburly’s Done, which will be performed just this week at the Public Theater, stars a troupe of actors from Kyiv’s Theater on Podil. Based on true events, it’s about a group of actors who have fled Kyiv in late summer 1920 during the most destructive phase of the Polish-Soviet War, one of a series of conflicts that redrew the map of Eastern Europe following the implosion of both Czarist Russia and the Habsburg Empire. Under the direction of Les Kurbas, a titanic figure in the development of the Ukrainian avant-garde, they wander the countryside performing the first Ukrainian language translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

In the play, Nelson imagines what the women’s conversations were like when their director wasn’t around. The setup is similar to one of Nelson’s “Apple Family” plays, except instead of chatting about an impending presidential election, they whisper about what they’ve seen on the road—starving children, vindictive soldiers, and fellow performers made to dance or die.

“I wanted to write a play about young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war to be performed by young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war,” Nelson explains.

His relationship with the company began in 2024 when he traveled to Kyiv to direct a Ukrainian translation of his play about Caesar’s assassins, Conversations in Tusculum. Nelson recalls several rehearsals interrupted by air raid alerts and moved to the theater’s underground lobby, which doubles as a bomb shelter. But even underground, they kept rehearsing.

Terror from above has not stopped Ukrainian theatermakers, nor has it scared away audiences. “The theaters are full,” Nelson states, “and more young people are going than before the full-scale invasion.”

The experience of being a part of a flourishing Ukrainian theater in a time of war profoundly moved Nelson, and he immediately decided to write another play for Theater on Podil once he returned stateside. He dove into research about Ukraine and Kurbas. “I feel like I’ve wandered into a world that is rich and deep and profound,” he says, noting that very little of this culture has been translated into English. He heavily relied on Deepl translations of Ukrainian books. Nelson banged out When the Hurlyburly’s Done in just three months. He was back in Kyiv at the turn of 2025 to direct the world premiere, which took place in March.

Nelson doesn’t speak Ukrainian (the translation is by Julia Sosnovska) and only a few members of the company speak a halting English. That language barrier would be a challenge for any director, but especially for a writer-director like Nelson, who conveys so much through subtext and subtle mood shifts. How does he communicate a nuanced note to his cast like the one I witnessed him giving—that the characters seem too comfortable in their circumstances, that they need to marinate in the disquiet of the present?

A lot of that delicate work falls on the indefatigable Milada Samoilova, who translates between Nelson and the cast in addition to the million other responsibilities of a stage manager (she also translated my questions and the actors’ responses when I interviewed the cast). Despite having arrived with the company via Warsaw just a few days prior to our interview (there have been no commercial flights in and out of Kyiv since the start of the war), she seemed to be in good spirits and claimed to be getting excellent sleep.

Jet lag, which always hits the hardest on the second and third days after an international flight, had not prevented the cast from taking in some of the cultural offerings of the city, including a performance of Twelfth Night at the newly renovated Delacorte Theater. A visit to Hamilton was planned for later in the week. This is the first trip to New York City for most of them.

“It’s a strange feeling walking in the streets and seeing so many men,” says Natalka Kobizka. “On Ukrainians streets you see some men but they are mostly older.” The conspicuous absence of men in the cast (Kurbas is a strictly offstage character) reflects a reality of wartime then and now, when men are sent to the front, leaving women to uphold civilian life. When I asked the company if any of them knew men fighting in the Ukrainian army, all of them raised their hands. Two company members of Theater on Podil, Yuriy Phelipenko and Vasyl Kukharsky, died fighting for Ukraine. When the stakes are literally life and death, how can the show go on?

Kobizka insists that the theater in Ukraine is “critical infrastructure.” This is not a personal opinion, but a government designation that feel justifiable when one considers that Putin’s war is not just about controlling the territory of Ukraine, but denying the existence of a distinct Ukrainian culture and identity. This is a Russian imperialist project that stretches back generations, the resistance to which offers the company its clearest motivation.

On a lunch break from rehearsal, Mariia Demenko became particularly animated on the subject of the Slovo Building in Kharkiv, an apartment complex built by the Soviet regime in the 1920s that offered Ukrainian artists a place to live but also allowed the state to more closely monitor their activities. Multiple residents were arrested and charged as counterrevolutionaries. Kurbas himself was executed in 1937 at Sandarmokh, one of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals murdered in a wave of Stalinist terror that year.

These are just the stories we know about. Moscow’s systemic suppression of Ukrainian history and culture means that there are great Ukrainian artists (and terrible crimes committed against them) that are likely to remain buried forever. That makes telling Ukrainian stories onstage in the Ukrainian language an act of defiance. Just as Kurbas and his company kept the Ukrainian theater alive in the 1920s, the actors of Theater on Podil are doing their part to keep the fire burning in 2025.

“We are tired of this cycle. We don’t want our children to be hurt this way,” says Olena Korzeniuk, who firmly rejects the notion that this is a script Ukrainians are destined to replay for another century. “Calling it fate means just agreeing to it, and we cannot do that.”