Happy St. Patrick's Day, all! As we continue the run of "The Schooling of Bento Bonchev," I wanted to use this blog to share with you a bit about how we were able to bring Maksym Kurochkin and John Freedman over to the United States this year.  On Monday, they departed Austin for Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a week-long residency there. This is the last of their two residencies on this trip, and it was coordinated by Kate Mendeloff, of the University of Michigan's Drama Concentration Faculty.

Below is an interview I conducted with playwright Maksym Kurochkin as he prepares to travel to Austin for our upcoming New Russian Drama Festival, along with John Freedman. We conducted the exchange in Russian and I subsequently translated it. gs

This morning, as the Uncle Vanya team prepared to go on KUT's radio show Eklektikos with John Aieli, we posed the question to our selves (again), "what is Uncle Vanya about and why is it relevant?"

I answered that Vanya is about the moment before an epochal and cataclysmic culture shift as a culture and these lives look into a future that appears to promise little.

Matt Radford answered that the play is about conservation, of people, of ecology, of society, and of the things that we cannot create.

As we move into pre-tech week run throughs, we're considering differences between our characters' culture (Russia, 1890's), and our own culture (America, 2011). 

One general difference between American and Russian cultures is the locus of action for what happens in our lives. Americans tend to locate action inside the individual; Russians tend to locate it outside of the individual. 

This weekend, we premiere John Freedman's English translation of Olga Mukhina's Flying, and we host our New Russian Drama Festival.

The moment approaches, the lines are converging. 

As we make progress on this here Breaking String website, we want to know what features and kinds of content you'd like to see? If you've got suggestions or requests, please comment on this post, or tweet at us at @Br8kingString.

Test blog. To show it works. It does.