THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES RUSSIAN STYLE Features Nadezhda Ptushkina's Works in English

The Battle of the Sexes Russian Style, Selected plays by Nadezhda Ptushkina, has been released.

Nadezhda Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes.

Ptushkina questions the nature of love, and explores the boundaries between the spiritual and the base, the constructive and the destructive, that lie within every human being. Conflict between the sexes constitutes the core of Ptushkina's plays, in which she warns the audience against confusing sex and love. Ptushkina rejects any notion that men and women are the same, seeing gender differences rather than personality differences as the main source of tension between men and women. Her plays thus dwell on this 'battle of the sexes' and the resulting lack of respect for women that she sees in today's Russia.

In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such wide appeal in the Russian theatre.

"In fact, as a leading figure of post-Soviet Russian drama, she has indisputably helped to revitalize and broaden parameters of contemporary Russian theatre and dramaturgy. Not only has Ptushkina introduces to the Russian public a new kind of comedy - a comedy that targets human foibles instead of a satire that ridicules the shortcomings of a regime - but she is also to be credited as one of the first playwrights in the post-Soviet era to write melodrama." - Slavic and East European Performance

About the author: Nadezhda Ptushkina is the author of more than seventy plays and nine screenplays. Ptushkina has had an extraordinarily diverse and colorful biography before her success as a playwright. Earlier in her life, she experienced years of financial hardship and was forced to work to provide for her family. During Gorbachev's perestroika, when the entire cultural infrastructure of the USSR collapsed, she became a businesswoman. Ptushkina's fame as a playwright began in 1994 when St. Petersburg's "Experiment" state theater produced her play A Monument to Victims. Since 1997 she has held first place for the number of plays and audience attendance among all contemporary Russian playwrights. Her plays are staged throughout Russia and in the Soviet successor states as well as in Europe and Japan. In recent years Ptushkina also has turned to directing her own plays at several theaters; she also has written screenplays for nine films, three of which she directed herself.