Staged Reading Showcasing Ukrainian Playwrights To Be Streamed Free By Lincoln Center

A special, staged reading showcasing Ukrainian playwrights, “Just Tell No One,” will be streamed free tonight from Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium.

The site-specific, multi-media event, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. ET, will be co-presented by Lincoln Center and Arlekin Players Theatre, a Needham, Mass.-based company of immigrants led by Ukraine-born artistic director Igor Golyak. It will feature Jessica Hecht, Bill Irwin, David Krumholtz, Nathan Malin, Will Manning and Tedra Millan

According to the co-presenters, the piece, “revealing the human consequences of war, illuminates a part of the world where an incomprehensible set of rules is at play, and people struggle to make sense of the complexity of one another with life and death consequences. This reading (will) immerse the audience in these human stories, using dark humor, intimate moments and images of conflict so exquisitely painful they can no longer be perceived as real.”

In an interview with Forbes.com, Golyak said the plays featured in tonight’s program together “reveal the state that the Ukrainian people have been living in since 2014, and people in the U.S. were not really aware of what was happening there. Now a full war has started and it has our attention, but this has been a long time coming.”

Before the Ukraine war began, Golyak said Arlekin Players’ programming “centered around themes of identity, home, displacement, tradition, anti-Semitism, war, culture and belonging. We have worked with classical and contemporary theater pieces, but our productions are always reinventing something, exploding ideas and putting them back together, searching for something, making something new artistically and being in dialogue with the communities for whom we perform.

“Now that we are working in New York, and have virtual audiences in over 55 countries, that dialogue has expanded and deepened, but the soul and center of our work is still the same. We try to bring people together for a shared human experience that illuminates something, and if we are lucky, creates some empathy and connection between people. What else can we do?”

He also said he hoped tonight’s program—which will showcase the work of Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, a project of the Center for International Theatre Development—would “celebrate Ukrainian playwrights and their work. These amazing artists have been in the shadows of Russian art for too long; they are very unique, very talented— the artists of Ukraine are young, growing, and they have a lot to offer us that we need right now.”

After tonight’s program is streamed, it will be available on Lincoln Center’s YouTube channel.

Seating at the free, in-person event at Lincoln Center will be limited; donations to Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings will be encouraged.