Pushkin at Boldino

Frustrated by writer’s block, Pushkin turns to drink and begins narrating aloud the early events of his story as the characters from Queen of Spades appear and begin acting out the scenes he’s struggling to create— that is, until they start to take the story in a different direction.

Ultimately, Pushkin at Boldino is a play about the tyrannical relationship between a writer and his creations. “Your existence depends on my thinking about you,” Pushkin asserts, but his characters create tangent plots and even start feeding Pushkin the lines of his narrative. Slowly, they realize, “We don’t need him.”

This will be a staged reading as part of our On The Radar New Works program.