Listen: Young Playwrights Ukraine Chat on LITTLE KNOWN FACTS With Ilana Levine

Little Known Facts is a weekly podcast hosted by stage and film actress Ilana Levine. With over 250 interviews to date with today's most successful artists, Levine engages her celebrity guests in intimate conversations that are hilarious, vulnerable, revealing and inspiring. Ilana's unique brand of celebrity interview has been called "Podcast Vérité," because her conversations are unfiltered, raw, honest and uniquely funny.

In this week's episode,  Levine talks with two Ukrainian teens who are a part of a playwriting group that began during the war and how the pieces they wrote were helpful in their dealing with the trauma of war.

The group, led by American playwright and screenwriter Laura Cahill, has managed to get their work produced in Sweden and an evening of their plays will be produced in August in New York City.

Listen to the full episode below!

In the fall and winter of 2021/2022 Laura Cahill taught screenwriting to 8 young acting students from Kyiv on Zoom in English. Their last class was February 6th, 2022. The war started 18 days later. Most of the students fled their homes. Laura reunited with her students and started teaching them playwriting.

On May 1st, she started teaching a second playwriting class that had been advertised on a a Telegram channel for art programs for Ukrainian Youth. It was supposed to last four weeks. Most of those students were still in Ukraine, but some had fled. The May class went so well, they decided to keep going, so on June 1st, the two classes came together and formed Young Playwrights Ukraine.

On July 24th, six months after the war started, they had a reading of 18 short works with professional actors on Zoom for an audience. The cast included noted actors David Morse, Cara Buono, Ann Dowd, Kevin Corrigan, Misha Brooks, Bridgette Lundy-Paine, Ivanna Sakhno, Stefanie Lavie Owens, Oona Laurence and others.

The plays were subsequently produced by Orion Theater in Stockholm Sweden, directed by Lars Rudolfsson, who had been in the audience on July 24th. The plays opened on March 20th, 2023, to outstanding reviews and ran for 30 performances. Laura and ten of the playwrights met in person for the first time in Sweden for the opening night.

The collection is soon to be published by Smith&Kraus.

Young Playwrights Ukraine continues to meet every Saturday and Sunday to write. They’re currently working with professional mentors including Theresa Rebeck, Peter Hedges, Jacquelyn Reingold, Kate Robin, Alexis Scheer, as well as Will Arbery, Stephen Belber, Erin Cressida Wilson, Keith Bunin, Jessica Goldberg and Suzanne Heathecoate on a collection of ten minute plays that tell their stories of living with war.

Aside from the mentors, they have special talks with professional artists like filmmaker Mary Harron, TV creator Michelle King, Juilliard professor Kathleen McNenny, casting director Rob Decina, Playwright/TV writer Aurin Squire and others. Writers and directors offering help with this project include Warren Leight, Matthew Carnahan, Mark Brokaw, Paul McCrane, Whitney White, Lila Neubauer and more.

The Young Playwrights Ukraine Festival of Ten Minute Plays is set for August 20th on Zoom.