The Weather for Tomorrow: Young Playwrights Speak

Abstract

The young playwrights who will share their concerns and hopes with you have thus far not established a foothold in all Soviet theaters. Perhaps in the bottom of their souls they envy or feel anger against playwrights from the older generation, whose plays are currently deflning the theater repertoire in our country. It seems as if young writers today are having a difficult time finding a common language with the country's older playwrights (Viktor Rozov, Alexandr Shtein, Afanasy Salinsky) and with the middle generation (Alexandr Gelman, Mikhail Shatrov, Mikhail Roshchin, Edvard Radzinsky, or Grigory Gorin) as well as with those who are still considered young, the 'new wave' playwrights, although many of these already have fully-grown children (Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Alexandr Galin, Viktor Slavkin, Semyon Zlotnikov, and others).Those who are beginning writers do not share the social temperament and political worldview of people like Gelman and Shatrov. Young writers are for the most part developing the traditions of their immediate predecessors, the 'new wave' p1aywrights. They are explicitly engaged in an artistic study of the 'private man.' But their plays contain the pulsebeat of a tense social existence, something present in the profound psychological searchings of their protagonists. The young playwrights have not, in my opinion, written their best works yet. But they are already speaking in a language of their own, a language of late 1980s writers, writers who are the future.