Traumaturgy

These texts proceed from the front lines of extremity in Ukraine — from The Theater of Veterans, newly consecrated. They speak with veracity and intimacy. They testify to trauma. In keenly human terms, in thirteen different voices, the throes of the war in Ukraine are confided.

John Freedman is an American writer and translator who, after working for 30 years in Russia, now resides in Greece. He lived in Moscow from 1988 to 2018, where he was the theater critic of The Moscow Times (1992–2015). His play Dancing, Not Dead (2011) was winner of the Internationalists Global Play Contest (2011) and his short play, Five Funny Tales from the Heart of Buenos Aires (2013), has been performed in New York City, Chattanooga, and Edinburgh. He has translated over 100 plays, of which productions have been mounted in five continents. He is the author or compiler of numerous books, including Silence’s Roar: The Life and Drama of Nikolai Erdman (1992) and Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs (2003). He is the curator of two Worldwide Play Readings projects: Insulted. Belarus (2020 to present) and Ukrainian Play Readings (2022 to present).

Maksym Kurochkin, a playwright and screenwriter, is one of the most respected writers in Ukraine. Born in Kyiv, he studied history and archeology at Shevchenko National University. In the late 1990s, he graduated from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow and split his time between Kyiv and Moscow for the next 18 years. His early iconic productions include Kitchen (Moscow, 2000), Stalova Volya (Kyiv, 2001), Repress and Excite (Moscow, 2008), The Schooling of Bento Bonchev (Moscow, 2010; Austin, Texas, 2012), Dulcey and Roxy at City Hall (Austin, Texas, 2014), Vodka, Fucking, and Television (Moscow, 2006; Austin, Texas, 2012; Kyiv, 2017), Titus the Immaculate (Moscow, 2016), and Be Silent, Oedipus (Moscow, 2016). He returned to live and work permanently in his native city of Kyiv in 2017. Some of his major works during this period were Russiaphobia, Kherson, Asexuals, Laurels, and Tolik the Milkman. His plays have been performed around the world.

Valerii Puzik is a Ukrainian painter, writer, director, and soldier. He was born in 1987 in the village of Telizhyntsi, approximately 40 miles southwest of Kyiv. His paintings and artwork have been shown internationally in exhibits and museums, and he is the author of many award-winning books.

He volunteered for the front in Donbas in 2015, taking part in the fighting as a member of a battalion in the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps of the Right Sector. He continues to serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Homeless Dogs (2018) and Monolith (2018) are collections of his short prose. I Saw Him Alive, Dead and Alive Again (2020) was one of the top 20 Ukrainian prose books of 2020 according to Ukrainian PEN. Mine. Morning Report (2021) is a documentary novel and collection of poems written between 2015 and 2020 about experiences in the volunteer corps of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense. Delphi and the Wizards (2021) is a fantasy children’s book.

Puzik collaborated on a short documentary film, Ceasefire, showing apocalyptic landscapes in the Donetsk region after the devastation of the early days of war when a ceasefire was announced in eastern Ukraine on February 15, 2015. The film received a special jury prize at the Palm of the North (Palma pivnochi) national documentary competition in 2016. Other documentaries and videos have been screened at festivals in Ukraine and Germany. He wrote the screenplay for Trench, a TV miniseries based on real experiences of Ukrainian soldiers in Donbas. A full-length feature film, Our Cats, was subsequently created on the basis of the miniseries.

Yurii Matsarskyi was born in 1980 in Kharkiv into a family of doctors. His father was serving as a surgeon in the occupying Soviet army in Afghanistan when he was born, so it was almost five years later when they finally first met. From his childhood he remembers the constant lines for bread and milk, and how his classmates would take turns chewing gum, which was an incredible rarity in the Soviet Union. Even after the gum had lost all its flavor, it could still be chewed by 10 to 15 people. He began working as a journalist at the age of 18, spending extended periods in the Middle East, and covering events in Central Asia. He was in Japan during the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster; worked in Cairo during both Egyptian revolutions; observed the civil war in Syria; and witnessed the battle against ISIS in Iraq. Ahmed, the Prophet Elijah, and I was included in the longlist of the July Honey competition and was a selected participant of the Festival of First Plays in Kyiv, both in 2025. He is also the author of the monologue, Cadillac Eldorado. On February 25, 2022, the second day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine and has received awards from his command and from the President of Ukraine. His only dream today is to witness the total collapse of Russia while reading The Complete Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings which he bought for his 44th birthday in 2024 with plans to read it as soon as the war ends.

Alina Sarnatska was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1987. She is a writer, radio host, war veteran, combat medic, scholar, journalist, human rights activist, and former sex worker. She studied psychology at the National Aviation University, later earning a Master’s Degree from the Academy of Labor and Social Relations, and a doctorate in social work at the Faculty of Social and Psychological Education of the Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University. Her dissertation was titled Enhancing the Safety of Women in Groups Vulnerable to Gender-based Violence. All her work explores resilience, trauma, and social justice, with a particular focus on veterans, women affected by violence, and communities impacted by war. She has been a prominent spokesperson for the rights of sex workers, working extensively with various NGOs. In 2024, she held a VILNO fellowship for veterans in art and education and, in 2025, was a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2022, she founded Teplonosiї, a charitable organization that provides aid to wounded soldiers in hospitals. She served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine from March 2022 to July 2024. She served as a senior combat medic until December 2023, later moving to the Office for Support of Changes of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. Her recent cultural projects include the book, Those Who Joined Love and Courage: LGBTQ+ Veterans in the Russo-Ukrainian War (Kyiv, 2025); the radio programs [In]Justice (Kyiv FM, since 2024), Strict Reprimand, and Volunteers (Hromadske Radio, 2022–2024), as well as her role as resident playwright at the Theatre of Playwrights in Kyiv (since 2024). Her award-winning dramatic works include Military Mother, Menstruation, and The Tribe that Waits (about women waiting for husbands to come home from war, inspired by The Odyssey). Balance has won awards at Contemporary Play Week- 2024, July Honey-2024, the Drama.UA competition in 2025, the Atypowow Documentary Theater Festival in Wrocław, Poland in 2025, and was a finalist for the Aurora Drama Award 2025 in Poland. It was produced at the Theater of Playwrights in 2025, and the Les Kurbas Theater in Lviv in 2026.

Yurii Vietkinwas born April 12, 1967, in Chernihiv. He studied at the Simferopol Military School (1985-1989), and the Kyiv Military Humanitarian Institute (1994-1996), receiving a degree in practical psychology. He served in the Chernihiv Training Center of the State Special Transport Service (1996- 2008) as an officer-psychologist, retiring from military service as a major in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He participated in the Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east of Ukraine (2015-2016) and was mobilized for active duty on February 24, 2022. On May 5, 2022, he was injured defending the city of Chernihiv, resulting in the amputation of his left leg at the thigh. He was discharged from the Armed Forces of Ukraine on February 22, 2024, for health reasons. Vietkin is currently a blogger, screenwriter, and playwright.

A short film, Interview (2016), based on his script, participated in the Cannes Festival in the Short Film Corner program, and received prizes in Portugal, and Saudi Arabia.

His plays Explosion, Phantomka, Hospital Rhapsody, and Macarius of Valhalla have participated in numerous competitions, including: the Reading of First Plays festival, Contemporary Play Week, the All-Ukrainian Veteran Fest, and July Honey. They have been presented as readings and performances at the Ivan Franko National Drama Theater, the Veterans Theater in Chernihiv, and the Chernihiv Puppet Theater.

As an actor with a prosthesis, he performed in a musical, Confusing and Genius Madness (2024), a joint project of the United Art Space of Chernihiv Region and the Chernihiv Philharmonic Center. He published The Time of Che (2024), an autobiographical narrative of the events of February–March 2022.

He is a participant of the Veterans Theater 2024 project in Kyiv, and is the founder of the Veterans Theater in Chernihiv, where wounded veterans and members of veterans’ families perform.

Antonina Crimeawas given the name Anton at birth in 1985 in the city of Simferopol, but later took the name of Antonina when coming out as a non-binary person. They graduated from the Kotliarevskyi National University of Arts in Kharkiv, receiving a diploma as a director of dramatic theater. They staged several productions in various theaters in Ukraine and were an occasional reader for competitions of contemporary Ukrainian drama.

After the occupation of Crimea in late February 2014, they left their native city, subsequently taking its name as their pseudonym. At the end of February 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they volunteered for the army. Unable to practice theater at the front in combat positions, they participated in online theater projects, and recorded videos that were incorporated into performances. Playwright Tetiana Kytsenko wrote a play, Antonina, based on conversations the two had online. Inspired by this text, and by interactions with the writers Oleksandr Zhuhan and Iryna Harets, Antonina wrote their own first work for theater — A Text for Theater.

“I wrote it in one fell swoop on the battlefield at the end of February 2025,” they said. “The text is about presence. About ‘presence’ as a theatrical term. About the presence of artists in Ukraine now. About my personal presence at the very moment I was writing the text. About the presence of people in the audience at the moment the text is being read.”

Text was first performed on stage by Iryna Harets in Poltava. It was later performed in Lviv, Kyiv, and Cologne. It was included in the longlist of the Drama.UA competition, and shared first place in the Contemporary Play Week competition. It was first presented in English in May 2026 as a staged reading by the Voyage Theater Company of New York.

Crimea was named among the “Ukrainska Pravda 100: Women’s Power” award in the Culture category in March 2026

Oleksandr Bakinovskyi is a businessman and writer who formerly served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He was born in 1977 in Chernivtsi in western Ukraine and is the father of numerous children. He holds master’s degrees in law and public administration. He is the former head of the Coordination Council for Combating and Counteracting Corruption and Protecting Public Order in Chernivtsi.

A participant in the Maidan Revolution, he volunteered for the Anti-Terrorist Operation in the Donetsk Region from the summer of 2014 to the spring of 2015 and was a member of the forces that defended Kharkiv, Bakhmut, and Sloviansk. He served as a contract soldier from 2019 to 2021 and was involved in the development of the Territorial Defense Forces, Ukraine’s reserve forces. From March 2022 to October 2023, he was in active duty in the full-scale war, participating in the liberation of the Kharkiv region, and in the battles for Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. He was appointed an advisor on veteran’s affairs to the Dnistrov District Military Administration in March 2025.

In 2025, he enrolled in playwrighting courses at the Veterans Theater in Kyiv, leading to the writing of his first play, Two Letters (2025). Based, in part, on a real-life experience, this monologue was selected for the Festival of First Plays in Kyiv and Lviv and was a longlist selection at the Contemporary Play Week competition.

Filip Khvorostiankin was born in Kharkiv where he graduated first from a law lyceum, then later from Kharkiv National University. He is a Ukrainian actor and writer. His play Fil was written for the Unbroken Theater in Lviv, a venue that is affiliated with the Theater of Veterans in Kyiv and works with wounded soldiers undergoing rehabilitation. He has also performed in the play, The Elevator Director, at the Jam Factory Art Center in Lviv. Fil is an autobiographical monologue that includes elements of stand-up comedy. It explores the ways in which priorities change with the coming of war; how a life can veer from being a businessman starting up a new brand of sportsmen’s gear into becoming a 3rd assault rifleman; how difficult it is to make fateful decisions, and to find and lose loved ones. It is a play about true love. Fil was selected for participation in the Festival of First Plays in 2024.

Olha Murashko was born in 1981 in Crimea. In 1999, she entered the Karpenko-Kary National University of Theater, Cinema and Television in Kyiv, graduating in 2004 with a degree in professional theater criticism. She became the head dramaturg in the drama department of the National Operetta Theater and later managed the drama department of the Kyiv Atelier 16 theater.

She worked at the Les Kurbas National Theater Arts Center, and as an editor and screenwriter for various Ukrainian TV channels. She wrote her first play in 2007 for an actor friend. It was a monodrama called Peninsula, which was followed by the play Success, shortlisted at the Contemporary Drama Week festival. This play was published in Motanka, an anthology of women’s drama that was edited by the famous Ukrainian playwright Yaroslav Vereshchak. In 2021 she wrote The U-Turn Intersection about her homeland of Crimea. This play was shortlisted at the July Honey play competition. She wrote a documentary text, Look Mom, a Plane! about herself and her daughter, who, together, survived the aerial bombardment of the Russian invaders in her village of Piskivka near Borodyanka in March 2022.

Olha was instrumental in helping to build the important Theater of Playwrights in Kyiv, where she wore many official hats, including those of the venue’s administrator, construction foreman, architect, and janitor. She is currently associated with the Theater of Veterans (ToV). She wrote 21 Days in 2025 as a participant in ToV’s educational program. It subsequently received staged readings at the Molodyi Theater in Kyiv, the small stage of the Ivan Franko National Theater, the Nafta Theater in Kharkiv, and the Maria Zankovetska National Theater in Lviv. It was shortlisted for the Contemporary Play Week competition in 2025. 21 Days premiered in a full production at the Theater of Veterans in February 2026.

Arina Rozvadovska spent part of her childhood in Siberia, Russia, and finished school in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is an ethnic Ukrainian, and her identity is closely bound up with the culture and history of her native country. She graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with a degree in psychology, and she has dedicated her life to helping people in difficult situations. For some time she was a member of the local city council, where she developed and implemented social assistance programs for vulnerable groups. She was in Kyiv when the full-scale Russian invasion began in 2022. The experience was a turning point in her life, and it strengthened her resolve to work with people who have experienced trauma. In 2025, she joined the Theater of Veterans project in Kyiv as a professional psychologist. As part of this project, she wrote her play, I Don’t Want To. It was born of various real stories of Ukrainians united into a single work, and it conveys to the audience the emotions and experiences of those who live next door to an aggressive neighbor — Russia. The project provided her the opportunity to find new ways to express Ukraine’s collective pain and tenacious strength and allowed her to continue her work as a psychologist, where words and the dramatic stage can help heal souls.

Volodymyr Tuka was born February 25, 1986, in the city of Nadym in the Tyumen region of Russia where his parents worked. The family moved to Kherson, Ukraine, in 1991. By profession he is an engineer of naval power plants, his specialty being in internal combustion engines. He has worked as a dance teacher, an animator, a presenter, a performer in the touring Jin Roh Circus, and an actor at the Mykola Kulish Regional Academic Theater in Kherson. Attempting to leave occupied Kherson in May 2022, he was stopped at a checkpoint for carrying a Ukrainian flag, having his car, his money, and his phone confiscated. His captors mocked and beat him for hours, ordering him to run in a field hung with a grenade lacking a safety pin, and a sign declaring, “mines,” while they shot at his feet. He enlisted in the 79th brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on October 12, 2022, and was deployed in Mar’inka in 2022, and Krasnogorivka in 2023. After discharge from the military, he wrote Play 22, or, the Hero’s Path as a participant in the Veterans Theater project. It has been staged twice, once as A Hero for a Day, a one-actor performance, and a second time under the full title as a noise drama at the Kyiv National Theater of Operetta. He acted in both productions. He currently is studying directing and acting at the BeaT Theater in Kyiv. His play, Orange, is still awaiting production. Play 22 was long-listed in the 2024 running of Contemporary Play Week.

Gennadii Udovenko was born December 13, 1972, grew up in Makiivka, an industrial city in the Donetsk Oblast, or region, in eastern Ukraine. In 2014 he moved with his family to Kyiv where he opened a construction company. Immediately upon Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he volunteered for the Territorial Defense Forces, later transferring to the Special Operation forces, an elite, specialized unit focused on engaging the enemy through reconnaissance, sabotage, and psychological operations. After being wounded in the Zaporozhzhia direction, he was treated in the United States. He began studying playwriting at the Veterans Theater in 2024, and has continued to write ever since.

Nataliia Bratus graduated in 1982 with a degree in metallurgical engineering in her hometown of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine, the Soviet Union. She worked as a defectoscopist engineer for ten years before becoming a private entrepreneur after Ukraine declared independence. She escaped the war in Ukraine with her daughter, grandson, and two family pets in March 2022, and immediately began working with John Freedman on translations of Ukrainian dramatic texts. She helped translate 14 texts in A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights (Laertes Press, 2023), 11 texts in Traumaturgy, 13 Texts by Ukrainian Playwrights | from the Front Lines, and has contributed to 55 other translations
in John Freedman's Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings project.

Oleksandr Zhuhan is a director, actor, and acting teacher. He attended Kyiv National Linguistic University, taught at the Black Square children’s theater studio, and is a co-founder of the PostPlay Theater in Kyiv. He holds degrees in psychological and philological education. He is the author of essays and diaries that were included in the 4.5.0 anthology of military literature. His dramatic works include: The Gospel of Housewives and Reptiles (staged at the Theater of Playwrights in Kyiv). He enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and served as a senior mortar gunner in the 241st brigade. He took part in battles in the Kherson, Kharkiv, and Donetsk regions, and participated in the defense of Bakhmut, Toretsk, and Mar’inka. After leave for being wounded in the summer of 2025, he returned to the army and continues to serve as a medic. New York, Donetsk, Ukraine: 100° F was a winner at the Ukrainian Short Drama Competition-2024, and was short-listed at the Contemporary Play Week in Kyiv in 2025. Its English-language premiere took place in May 2025 in a staged reading performed by Voyage Theater Company in New York City.