Review: Belarus Free Theatre Brings Illegal TIME OF WOMEN To Under The Radar Festival

Traditionally, you can regard the name of The Public Theater's annual January festival, Under The Radar, as a reference to the relative obscurity of the companies and artists involved. But in the case of Belarus Free Theatre, the meaning is a bit more literal and a lot more serious.

Founded in 2005 by spouses Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, the troupe was formed to create works protesting their government's censorship of free speech. By 2011, the company's impact had been recognized enough so that Khalezin and Kaliada needed to be smuggled out of the country. Residing as political refugees in London, they continue to direct their secret, illegal productions, communicating with their actors in Minsk via Skype.

TIME OF WOMEN, the company's entry in this year's recently completed festival, was penned by its two founders (directed by Khalezin) and has been performed privately in a Minsk apartment where participants and attendees risked arrest by the Belarussian K.G.B. Though there was no danger in attending the production at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Shop Theatre, the cramped, improvised setting was at least partially recreated in a space that is essentially a classroom with a few rows of seats and set pieces placed on the floor.

The three women in question, played by Maryia Sazonava, Maryna Yurevich and Yana Rusakevich are based on PEN Pinter Prize-winning journalist Iryna Khalip, pro-human rights news editor Natalya Radina and political activist Nasta Palazhanka. The three of them were each imprisoned for their protests against their country's fraudulent presidential election in 2010.

The play begins with the three of them preparing for a Christmas celebration but flashes back to their time spent as cellmates. Moments of mutual support spent on their bunk beds contrast with scenes where each is privately interrogated by a calmly businesslike K.G.B. investigator (Kiryl Kanstantsinau) as he casually sips his instant noodle soup. While male prisoners might be physically tortured for information and confessions, the women are threatened with dehydration and malnutrition meant to damage their reproductive systems and leave them undesirable to men. ("Their main goal is to kill the woman in you.")

The hour-long play was performed in Russian, with English supertitles flashed on the upstage wall. With the audience so close to the action, even those in the back row would have difficulty watching the actors while reading the translation, but even without understanding the dialogue, the excellent company communicated the courage and sisterhood that helped the women see each other through the ordeal.

Along with that, of course, is the rare experience, at least for Americans, to watch a theatre production that must be hidden from a powerful government that is frightened of free creative expression. The risks some people take for the sake of creating important theatre can add up to the most powerful of dramas.

Photos by Georgie Weedon

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