Theater Kids Revisited

 

[Last June, I posted “Theater Kids,” devoted entirely to “How To Tell If You’re a Theatre Kid,” an excerpt from John DeVore’s memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, Theatre & Cinema Books, 2024), published on the American Theatre magazine website.  This past January, a New York Times article caught my attention, so now I’m going to revisit the topic of “theater kids.”  I think the titles of the individual articles I’m reposting pretty well reveal what this collection is about.

[In the introduction to the 23 June 2025 post, I define what a theater kid is:

a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows.

[I go on to say, “I wasn’t a theater kid,” referencing my autobiographical post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010)—though I acknowledge that that label did fit me.

[The three articles below are the New York Times report that started off a little brouhaha in the theater world, the Playbill article that called attention to that to-do, and a management association article that lays out the insiders’ response.  If you were a theater kid, or you knew one, you might find the exchange interesting—perhaps even touching.] 

“HOW ‘THEATER KID’ MORPHED INTO A POLITICAL INSULT”
by Sopan Deb 

[The New York Times article ran on 8 January 2026 in “Arts” (Section C).  It was posted online on 21 December 2025 as “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult.”]

Used as a pejorative, usually by the right, the phrase tags ‘the outsiders, the weirdos.’

Move over Karen and snowflake. There’s a new go-to political put-down: Theater kid.

Last month, the comedian Tim Dillon referred to New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, as a “theater kid,” arguing that Mr. Mamdani’s victory speech was “a little cringe.”

[Tim Dillon (b. 1985) is a stand-up comic, podcaster, and actor known for his unrestrained satirical humor and social commentary. He hosts the popular podcast The Tim Dillon Show, which covers news, politics, and culture and airs at 9 a.m. (Pacific Time) Saturdays on YouTube (video) and Spotify (audio). The referenced show about Mayor-Elect Mamdani was broadcast on 8 November 2025, four days after Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.]

After Mr. Mamdani appeared in the Oval Office for a surprisingly cordial meeting with President Trump [Friday, 21 November 2025], Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, wrote on X, “Theater kids always crumble if you actually press them.” (He also released an episode of his podcast titled “MAGA vs The Theater Kids: Do You Want Drama or Do You Want Victory?”)

Mr. Mamdani, a former improv student, actually is a theater fan. But he’s not the only target.

When Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was forcibly removed from a news conference in June after trying to question Kristi Noem, the [now-former] homeland security secretary, The Daily Caller [right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. and founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson and political advisor Neil Patel] published an article with the headline ”Democrat Theater Kid Learns He’s Not Above the Law.”

Weeks later, the conservative publication American Thinker [daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint] ran an article saying that Mr. Padilla and a Who’s Who list of prominent Democrats were, you guessed it, theater kids. After a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video last month reminding troops that they could refuse illegal orders, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center [U.S. government agency responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts], described them as ”theater kids encouraging an insurrection.”

You get the picture, which raises the question: What did theater kids do to attract so much scorn?

It depends on whom you ask.

For Scott Jennings, a conservative CNN commentator, the increased use of the term is a result of “performance-based radicalism” on the left. As an example, he cited a video from 2019 that resurfaced in the final weeks before a special election for a House seat in Tennessee. It showed the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, in tears, being dragged out of Gov. Bill Lee’s office during a sit-in protest, which called for the removal of a state legislator accused of sexual assault. (Ms. Behn lost by 9 percentage points in a district that Mr. Trump carried by 22 points last year.)

“These people are a sandwich board and a megaphone short of the loony bin,” Mr. Jennings said in an interview. “They think it’s actual politics. They think this is something good, and the rest of us are looking at it going, ‘Man, there go the theater kids again.’”

It’s not clear when the term gained currency, but an early example of its use as a pejorative dates to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign when the conservative operative Matt Whitlock said on social media that Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was “just a theater kid performing a sketch.”

Caricaturing political opponents with simple insults has become a hallmark of Trump-era politics. Think “Low Energy” Jeb Bush. Republicans, led by the president, have elevated name-calling to an art form, but Democrats have dabbled, too, with mixed results.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called Republicans “weird” and turned it into a calling card of his candidacy. More recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a leading Democratic critic of Mr. Trump who has worked to position himself for a possible 2028 presidential run, has taken to mimicking the president’s approach — calling him “Dozy Don,” among other insults.

Social media has made such put-downs catch on faster.

“In politics, just like in journalism, you’re always trying to make 10 words five, five words three, two words one, right?” Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, said. “The way to do that really effectively, and we’ve seen this for generations, is you find ways to short-circuit that through connotations.”

Using “theater kids” pejoratively is a way of tagging opponents as dramatic and performative without having to use those words, Mr. Gorman said.

Theater kids became an indelible part of the culture when television series and films like “Glee,” “High School Musical” and “Smash” [see “‘What I learned from Smash (if I didn’t know anything about theater)’” by RonAnnArbor (9 June 2013)] hit the airwaves, though the popularity of those shows set theater kids up as the subject of parody.

“We are a ton of energy and we can be chaotic, but I find that that’s not actually the qualities that people are pointing out when they talk about the theater kid,” said Zhailon Levingston, a director of the upcoming Broadway production of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” “What they’re talking about is the person who refuses to stay silent in the face of something that needs to be spoken to.”

For the last half-century or so, it hasn’t been considered “cool” to be a theater aficionado, said Julia Knitel, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Dead Outlaw” [2025].

“‘Theater kid’ being the bullied party is a tale as old as time,” Ms. Knitel said. “We’ve always been the outsiders, the weirdos. It’s a quick cultural shorthand to treat us as the underdog.”

Some see a more harmful motive for deploying the moniker as a political insult.

“My initial reaction was just that it feels homophobic,” said Jacob Kerzner, an assistant professor of musical theater at Syracuse University. Mr. Kerzner added that theater is an unusual art in that “you couldn’t replace theater with any other art form in this context.”

“‘They’re all painters now’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it,” he said.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda [Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025)], said that using the term was part of a larger culture battle.

“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” Mr. Pollack-Pelzner said in an email. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.”

The dings against theater lovers have come mostly from the right, but not exclusively so. Dhaaruni Sreenivas, a data scientist who has worked for Democratic consulting firms, wrote on X that the perception of the Democratic Party “as a safe space for rule-following theater kids is really bad for our image.” She followed that up with a Substack post [Substack is an online, ad-free platform that enables writers, podcasters, and creators to publish content directly to subscribers via email, while offering options for monetization through paid subscriptions] titled, “Theater Kids and Playing Risk.”

“You know the kids in ‘Glee’? Super cheerful and go-getters?” Ms. Sreenivas, who was a delegate for Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said in an interview. “They’re kind of despised by their peers. And it’s a problem because Americans kind of are nerdist. They do not like nerds.”

To Ms. Sreenivas, theater kids are “desperate for the approval of authority figures” and “really want to follow the rules and get rewarded for it.” Basically, she added, “they want to perform being good kids.”

Not everyone minds the moniker. Theater kids, Ms. Knitel said, are emotionally intelligent, empathetic, communicative, charismatic and in touch with their feelings. Those qualities, she said, don’t align with the “current administration.”

“They don’t want us to be empathetic and they don’t want us to care about those around us,” she said, “and they don’t want us to be open to expanding our horizons and feeling things deeply, because then we’re not as easily going to fall in line.”

[Sopan Deb is a New York Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.]

*  *  *  *
“IN RESPONSE TO NEW YORK TIMES,
EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION LAUNCHES
PROUD THEATRE KID CAMPAIGN”
by Diep Tran

[Playbill, the National Theatre Magazine, picked up the story with a report on 23 December 2025 revealing that the Educational Theatre Association had taken umbrage at the content of the Times’ article.]

The campaign is in response to an article that said that “theatre kid” is the new conservative insult.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article with the headline: “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [that's the online title; see above]. It attributed the rise of conservative pundits using “theatre kid” as an insult, to denote a “performance-based radicalism”—such as a conspiracy theorist calling incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani a theatre kid (though Mamdani has said he listens to Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen in the car).

In response, the Educational Theatre Association has launched the Proud Theatre Kid campaign to celebrate theatre kids everywhere. Said Dr. Jennifer Katona, executive director of EdTA, “This weekend, our members made it clear that the New York Times article touched a nerve. We felt it was important to stand up as leaders of the theatre education community and affirm what ‘theatre kid’ really means: creativity, discipline, collaboration, and empathy. The response today has been overwhelming, and it underscores the pride and unity of this community.”

The Association asked its followers to share why they are proud theatre kids. One respondent, who is a reverend, wrote: “My son is 14 and is confident, kind, and creative. I couldn’t be prouder! What a wonderful life both of us have found in the theatre. The world needs more of what theatre creates.”

Another respondent wrote: “The best description of theatre that I’ve ever heard is ‘the gym for empathy.’ It strengthened my ability to listen, to express complex ideas, and to put myself in others’ shoes. I can see why that’s threatening to certain politicians and pundits.” 

The Educational Theatre Association is a nonprofit focused on theatre education, serving as a professional association for theatre educators. EdTA is the parent organization of the International Thespian Society, a student honor society that has inducted more than 2.5 million thespians since 1929. Additionally, EdTA operates the Educational Theatre Foundation, the organization’s philanthropic arm dedicated to increasing opportunity and access to school theatre.

Said a representative from EdTA: “At the heart of this campaign is a simple belief: if even one student misses out on the life-changing impact of theatre education, we are all worse off. We want our community to stand together and refuse to let anyone else define what ‘theatre kid’ means.”

EdTA and Playbill are currently collaborating on a new Content Creator Scholarship that will send three students to the 2026 International Thespian Festival.

[Diep Tran is an arts journalist and editor based in New York City.  She is currently the Editor in Chief of Playbill.  Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, New York magazine, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, Primetimer, Broadway News, New York Theatre Guide and other publications.  Her previous day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine.  In 2023, she was named on Gold House’s A100 list as one of 100 most impactful Asians.  She loves musical theater, period dramas, and sci-fi/fantasy TV shows.]

*  *  *  *
“TEACHERS’ GROUP LAUNCHES
EFFORT TO RECLAIM ‘THEATER KID’”
by Mark Athitakis  

[EdTA’s position and its response were laid out in Associations Now in a 13 January 2026 post.  Associations Now is a daily news platform of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which serves professionals in the association management field.]

The Educational Theatre Association’s #ProudTheatreKid campaign caught attention on social media, providing a boost to its advocacy message. 

A national theater organization launched a pop-up campaign to push back against the increasingly pejorative use of the term “theater kid,” galvanizing its member base in support of its advocacy goals.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article titled “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [see above]. The story showed how the term has been used to criticize New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), and other Democratic lawmakers.

The story naturally caught the attention of the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA), which represents theater-education professionals and supports middle- and high-school theater students through its awards and foundation programs. 

“We absolutely felt like there was no space to not respond,” said EdTA Executive Director Dr. Jennifer Katona.

According to Katona, the organization has two million alumni across its 97 years of existence. “That’s two million theater kids,” she said. “The theater kid is our brand. It’s who we are, it’s who we care about, it’s who we talk about every day. We take a lot of pride in that, and we truly believe that a theater program in a school is not just about the performances, but about all the skills that are developed for students’ involvement in that, and also what that program does to the school and the community at large.” [See the post on this blog “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).]

Though EdTA’s staff was largely off for the holiday break, it developed a rapid social-media response, using the hashtag #ProudTheatreKid on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. “Theatre kids are academically strong,” the posts read in part. “They are emotionally intelligent. They are collaborative leaders and creative thinkers.” Readers were encouraged to share their own theater experiences growing up.

The posts struck a chord with EdTA members theater fans in general. The Broadway industry bible Playbill covered the campaign [see above], and the posts drew more than 1,200 shares on Facebook and more than 7,700 likes on Instagram. “If it wasn’t up by that evening, it was the next day,” Katona said. “It’s probably four or five times the reshares, if not more, that we usually get,” she said.

More than just attempting to blunt the use of “theater kid” as an insult, the campaign has given EdTA a platform to promote its advocacy work entering 2026. Last week, EdTA used the term “proud theatre kid” as a way to encourage registration for its annual March advocacy summit, which includes a visit with legislators on Capitol Hill and workshops on how participants can promote theater education in their own communities. 

“This comes at a time of years of their craft being under attack, with no-drag bills, the slicing of budgets, and the way some of our states and teachers have been censored,” Katona said. “So this felt like a line in the sand for everybody. This is really propelling us into action. It goes beyond just asking people to change your Facebook status. It’s: Let’s try to come together and go to DC and talk about the value of what we do. That’s where we’re taking it.”

[Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications.  He is a coauthor (with Mark Lasswell) of The Dumbest Moments in Business History (Portfolio. 2004).]

Theater Kids

 

[The term "theater kid" (or “theatre kid,” as it is below) typically refers to a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows. 

[I wasn’t a theater kid.  As I explain in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010, I was introduced to theater as a young boy, but though I did the usual school performances in elementary and middle school, I wasn’t “deeply passionate” about acting.

[I also don’t insist on spelling it t-h-e-a-t-r-e, as John DeVore asserts below that all theater kids do.  I will honor the preference of each theater organization for the spelling of its name, but otherwise, I go with the American spelling.  I do not buy the distinction that theatre refers to the art form and theater to the venue.

[By the way, "Broadway baby" most commonly refers to someone, often a performer, who is deeply involved with or passionate about Broadway theater.  I guess that applies well enough.  Though, I go to a lot of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater, and regional repertory productions as well.

[I did a couple of plays in high school, but only my first two years.  I transferred to schools in Switzerland for the rest of high school, and they didn’t have student theater—and I didn’t miss it.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School” [29 April, 2, 5, 8, 11, and 14 May 2021].)

[I did more stage work in college and joined the university’s Troubadours, the extra-curricular theater group, and then, when I was in the army and stationed in Berlin—and no longer a “kid”—I found myself drawn to theater and acting as an amateur.  (See “Berlin Memoir” [16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017].)

[Then I got out of the service and came to New York City—I’m a native Washingtonian—to go to acting school.  I got an MFA in acting, knocked around New York auditioning, doing a lot of Off-Off-Broadway shows, trying my hand at directing and doing a little teaching. 

[Then I saw that I wasn’t advancing in the profession.  I went back to school for a doctorate with an eye on teaching full time—just at the moment when I was offered a role by one of the theaters back in the city where I was born!  I’d already committed to attending school for that Ph.D., but I toyed with blowing it off for the stage gig . . . but I decided it was a chimera, and stuck with my original plan. 

[I discovered that what I was good at was writing about this subject.  I got some articles published, delivered a few papers at conferences—not really my favorite thing, it turned out—and contributed to a couple of books.  I even won a prize with one of my essays.  Then, in 2009, I started this blog.  This will be my 1,281st post—though not all of them have been on theater, or written by me.

[Now, to the matter at hand in this post, John DeVore’s memoir of his sojourn into the land of theater.  He says theatre, but I’m stickin’ to my guns (prop guns, of course).  In addition to “A Broadway Baby,” which is my memoir of encountering theater at a boy, I have posted a number of pieces here that touch on children and young people’s encounters with theater. 

[Some are about youngsters engaging in the theater world itself, and others are about theater in the schools.  What I’m not going to list here are the posts about “children’s theater” or “theater for young audiences,” which cover theater for young people by adults.  That’s an important gateway for kids to get into theater, but it’s different, I feel.

[Here’s the list, with links, to ROT’s coverage of theater and kids (note that several of these titles contain multiple articles):

    • “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (28 August 2009
• “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013)
• “Kids on the Broadway Boards” (30 November 2013)
• “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” by Oona Haaranen (9 January 2014)
• “Musical Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018; rerun on 5 February 2023)
• “Jimmy Awards” (2 September 2024)

[For the other posts on children and theater and the arts in schools, I suggest using the search engine a the top left corner of the screen, or browse through the archives to the left of the text column.  You can also click on an appropriate label at the bottom of the post.]

“HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE A THEATRE KID”
by John DeVore

[This excerpt of John DeVore’s memoir appeared on the American Theatre website.   The piece is categorized as “Book Excerpts” and is dated 6 September 2024.  It wasn’t published in the print edition of the magazine.]

In this excerpt from a new memoir about his years toiling Off-Off-Broadway, the author reflects on what it means to be young and bitten by the acting bug. 

Lights up on a small theatre in Brooklyn, New York. Enter John DeVore, late 40s. His hair and beard are streaked with gray. He stands in a spotlight centerstage and says: 

My name is John, and I’m a theatre kid. I’m a theatre kid the way a raccoon is a raccoon, or a pineapple is a pineapple. I like to think of it as my astrological sign, something about me that is fixed. It is who I am, and I had little choice in the matter.

During one of my very first school plays, a teacher suggested I had been bitten by the acting bug, contracting a virus with no known cure. But I knew better: I had been screaming for attention since I was born. If I could have been the opposite of a theatre kid, I would have. But I can’t be who I’m not. I’m pretty sure the opposite of a theatre kid is a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Being a theatre kid is like that Groucho joke about not wanting to join a club that would have you as a member. That’s my experience, at least. I’ve never been a joiner. If I could change that about me, I would. I want to be loved and left alone at the same time. That is my default setting. My therapist is always telling me to open my heart to other people, and my usual response to his gentle requests is, “I’m trying, Gary.”

[Groucho Marx (1890-1977) was a comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed on the vaudeville stage and in films and on television, radio, and the stage. Groucho made 13 movies with his brothers (Chico [1887-1961], Harpo [1888-1964], Gummo [1892-1977], and Zeppo [1901-79]), who performed under the name the Marx Brothers. He later had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show You Bet Your Life (radio: 1947-60; NBC-TV: 1950-61).

[As for the joke about joining a club, it was long attributed to Groucho, and in both his son’s biography of his father, My Life with Groucho (Simon and Schuster, 1954) and Groucho’s own memoir, Groucho and Me (Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), both men quote the “Resignation Joke,” which they record as Groucho’s withdrawal from the Friars Club (sometime around 1950-52). In Groucho’s rendering, he sent a telegram stating: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”]

I once denied being a theatre kid, a bit like how the apostle Peter repeatedly lied when asked by the mob if he knew Jesus. My denial happened years ago, in the late aughts. 2008? Right before the economy cratered. Those were dark times for me. I had gone on an impromptu weeknight bender with a former colleague—a lonely old journalist with a talent for sniffing out bullshit and a sickening thirst for crème de menthe—who suspected I had acted in high school or college. I just laughed him off. Me? A theatre kid? No.

And my ruse would have worked had we not stumbled, piss-drunk, into a nearly empty karaoke bar and had I not insisted on performing a sloppy, surprisingly poignant rendition of the popular torch song “On My Own” from the blockbuster 1987 Broadway mega-musical Les Misérables—which, if you’re not aware, is a weepy, blood-and-thunder pop opera written by Claude-Michel Schönberg [French; b. 1944] and Alain Boublil [French, born in Tunisia; b. 1941] and based on Victor Hugo’s [French; 1802-85] 19th-century novel [1862] about poor French vagrants suffering beautifully. “On My Own” is sung by the forlorn street waif Eponine, who pines after handsome revolutionary Marius, whose heart in turn belongs to Cosette, the adopted daughter of our hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean. Eponine is a lonely victim of unrequited love, and later she dies in Marius’s arms, fulfilling the deepest, darkest, most pathetic fantasy of anyone who has ever longed for someone they could never have.  

[The French version of Les Misérables premièred in Paris at the Palais des Sports on 24 September 1980. Its English-language adaptation, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (1925-2020), produced by Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946), has been running at the Barbican Centre London since 8 October 1985. The London show had its 15,000th performance on 28 September 2023.

[The musical had a pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in Washington, D.C., on 27 December 1986 and ran there for eight weeks through 14 February 1987. The production then transferred to the Broadway Theatre on 12 March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre on 17 October 1990, and after 6,680 performances in 16 years, it closed on 18 May 2003. It won eight 1987 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. There were Broadway revivals in 2006 and 2014.]

My former colleague could see the truth in my tear-filled eyes as I sang with everything I had. I couldn’t help myself. I was feeling it. I sang like I was competing for a Tony Award. I did that thing Broadway divas do where they slowly push one jazz hand toward the heavens as the emotions swell. I was in church, and from the back pew, I could hear him laughing and pointing at me like I was a fool. He knew a theatre kid when he saw one.

Like I said: dark times.  

How can you tell if someone you know, or even love, is a theatre kid? Ask yourself this: Do they take a lot of selfies? Do. They. Enunciate. Every. Word? Do they frequently sigh heavily? Do they talk about themselves and their manifold feelings incessantly? These are just a few of the signs. Do they spell it t-h-e-a-t-r-e instead of t-h-e-a-t-e-r? That’s a good one. Only a true theatre kid spells it “theatre.” A “theater” is where you watch “theatre.” You see? No? This difference matters, and if you don’t think it does, you’re probably not a theatre kid, which may come as a relief to many of you.

Now, I need you to know that I know that t-h-e-a-t-r-e is just the British spelling of the word. But I much prefer the other explanation, don’t you? It’s more romantic. The theatre is an ancient art, a sacred, almost holy occupation. It’s a way to teach moral lessons and to celebrate the human condition; it is a story full of sound and fury that can levitate you or knock you sideways. The theatre is a spirit—and the theater is where you sit and cough politely, and then the curtain rises. There might not even be a curtain. A theater can be a space, any space. A storefront, an apartment living room, a parking lot.

This wisdom has been passed down from theatre kid to theatre kid from time immemorial. It was a veteran of my high school’s drama program who taught me the difference between theatre and theater. She was a full year older than me, but she knew things. I thought she was brilliant. I remember listening to her intently: Theatre was life. This lesson probably happened over cups of creamy, sugary coffee and plates of baklava at the local 24-hour diner, where all the theatre kids at my high school would go to celebrate after a successful production—a one-act or the spring musical.

We’d pour into the diner like an army of frogs, laughing and talking a mile a minute and singing show tunes, and the poor servers endured our overbearing youthful cheerfulness. My true theatre education happened either at that diner or backstage, during rehearsal breaks, and these impromptu lectures are the closest thing to an oral tradition in action I’ve ever encountered.  

These 16-year-old elders patiently explained the superstitions and rules of the theatre, and I did the same when it was my turn to pass on the lore. I remember the rules like commandments: Never whistle backstage or say the name of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy about that Scottish couple who make a series of poorly thought-out career decisions. Both of those things are bad luck. [See my four-part series “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” (14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020).]

Saying “good luck” is also bad luck. You’re supposed to say “break a leg.”  

There are all sorts of explanations as to what that phrase means. I was told, over a plate of french fries, that in ye olden times, the mechanism that raised and lowered the curtains was called a leg, and so to break a leg would mean that the audience cheered for so many encores, the curtain went up and down and up and down until it broke. Is that true? I have no idea. That’s just how I heard it.  

Here are a few more sacred rules: Give flowers after a performance, not before. Always open the stage door for one of your fellow castmates and invite them to enter first with a graceful bow. One of my favorites warns against putting your shoes on any table backstage. Don’t do that. Why? I don’t think you want to find out. 

There were also practical, straightforward rules about rehearsal and being part of a production. Always be on time. (“If you’re 10 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” That was the mantra. I was told to repeat it and to repeat it.) Don’t skip rehearsal. Memorize your lines. Stretch before every performance, and drink nothing but hot water with lemon juice and honey if you catch a cold. And never, ever become romantically involved with someone in the cast—a rule that was broken during every production at my high school, sometimes multiple times. Show romances were a huge no-no. This rule was meant to keep rehearsals drama-free. But rehearsals are intense and intimate, and it’s almost impossible to keep theatre kids from trying to make out with other theatre kids.

Show romances—also known as “showmances”—were looked down on, even by those who had them. The only exceptions were hookups between cast and crew, which worked in my favor. I will always be a sucker for a girl who can use power tools, because I cannot use power tools, and I fell for stage managers and set builders. A boy never hit on me, but I was ready for it, just in case, and had practiced a flattered, “I like you, but I don’t like-like you” speech in the mirror. I never got to perform that speech, which disappointed me. A few years later, in college, a beautiful man kissed me on the dance floor of a party. It was a deep and playful kiss, and before I could stammer, “I like you, but I don’t . . .,” he had disappeared into the crowd, and now that I think about it, that was disappointing too.

When I was a senior I gave the newbies at the diner a variation of the speech I was given in ninth grade. It went something like: “Look around at this table. These are the friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.” That wasn’t true, but in the moment it felt true, and that’s good enough. I also passed along to them what was passed to me, from senior to frosh, and that is to always, always attend the closing night cast party, and to stay until the very end.

*  *  *  *

The publisher’s description:

Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s [1897-1962] novel As I Lay Dying [1930] inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.

The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.

An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre and the weirdos who bring it to life, Theatre Kids is DeVore’s buoyant, irreverent, and ultimately moving account of outsize ambition and dashed hopes in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City. Sharply observed and bursting with hilarious razzle-dazzle, it will resonate with anyone who has ever, perhaps against their better judgment, tried to bring something beautiful into the world without regard for riches or fame.

Editorial Reviews:

“A wry and boisterous account . . . .  Electric prose elevates this homage to an enduring art form.” ―Publishers Weekly

“For those of us lucky to call John DeVore a friend, the skill and warmth with which he’s written Theatre Kids comes as no surprise. If you should not be in the elect group, however, the next best thing would be to read this book. There’s something funny, moving, surprising, or trenchant on every page. Often there’s all of these at once. Theatre Kids is a lemon tart made by someone who loves you, sweet and light and sharp and substantial all at once.” ―Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (see on Rick On Theater “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025], both by Kirk Woodward)

“John DeVore is a master storyteller, and Theatre Kids is a delightful and moving read. It's a valentine to the New York City theatre scene in the late ’90s and early aughts, told through the eyes of one of the many young people who have for generations come from hamlets, small towns, and sprawling suburbs hoping to make their mark in the glittering city. DeVore will keep you laughing, gasping, and sometimes cringing all the way to the last page.” ―Catherine Burns, former artistic director of The Moth, a storytelling theater group in New York City’s Financial District

“Like all beautiful memoirs, John DeVore’s Theatre Kids will tell you not just about the author, but about things and places and people dead and gone. DeVore brings them alive again. How glad you'll be to meet them, and him. This is a funny, sad, loving, and mournful look at what artistic strivers and dreamers put themselves and others through on the quest for greatness―or, perhaps, just plain old survival.” ―Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don't Teach You in School)

“"Theatre Kids is a rickety roller coaster ride into the hearts of New York City’s downtown theatricals – that rare breed that can turn a moldering black box and a couple of folding chairs into a diorama of the divine."” ―Mike Errico, author of Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter

“This moving memoir recounts DeVore’s life-changing experience having a bit part in a tiny, four-hour production adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel “As I Lay Dying” as he struggled with addiction and grief. The cast and crew were scrappy but passionate as they tried to bring their vision to life in a windowless theater in Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York.” ―New York Post

[John DeVore (b. 1974) is an award-winning writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and one-eyed mutt, Morley.  His debut memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway, was published by Applause Books and came out in June 2024.]

Yevgenii Shvarts: Biography & Literary Criticism

[In 1984 and ’85, I served as literary advisor for the Off-Off-Broadway StageArts Theater Company in New York City.  My responsibilities included, among other things, establishing a script-reading and -evaluating process, creating a reporting format, and advising and assisting the artistic directors in matters of script selection.

[StageArts had reached a certain level of success in its five years of producing, but it wasn’t attracting the kind of attention the artistic directors wanted—and needed if the company was going to advance in the very competitive and crowded field of professional theater in New York.  The artistic directors wanted my help to find the kinds of scripts that would attract critical and funding interest.  One way to accomplish this, they observed from the theaters like theirs in the city, was to present new plays.  They wanted me to help them start a program for finding and evaluating new scripts for StageArts to produce.

[While the new-play tactic had been effective for some years by this time—it really started with the origins of Off-Off-Broadway in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s—by the ’80s, the New York theater scene was glutted with small companies presenting original plays.  I advised the artistic directors that just doing new plays was not going to get them what they wanted.  What I didn’t say was that the two women, one an actor and one a director, who founded StageArts were partial to somewhat old-fashioned plays, well-made, Realistic  plays with upbeat endings. 

[I broached the idea of finding some older plays that had been forgotten or overlooked because they were unusual.  I pressed this notion while I was soliciting and reading the original scripts the directors wanted and occasionally gave them reports on older plays by authors I thought were noteworthy but ignored—especially foreign authors who weren’t well known on the U.S. and British stages.

[One such writer was a wonderful Soviet-era playwright of whom I’d become a fan (though I’ve only read his plays; I’ve never seen one on stage), Yevgenii Shvarts (whose names are both transcribed many different ways, unfortunately: Eugene Schwartz; Yevgeny Shvarts, Evgenii Shvarts, Evgeny Shvarts, plus, mix-and-match).  He’s the author of 25 plays and the screenplays for three films, plus poems, short stories, ballet libretti, and circus sketches..

[A playwright who flourished briefly in the 1930s and ’40s but was soon blacklisted by the Soviet authorities (he was posthumously rehabilitated in the ’60s during the post-Stalin Thaw), Shvarts (1896-1958) wrote several terrific (in my opinion, of course) plays based on Russian and international fairy tales.  The plays, which are for adults even though they contain a lot of magic, include The Naked King, The Shadow,  and The  Dragon, and I’ve always wanted to persuade someone to produce one.  (Shvarts also wrote realistic plays for both adults and children, but they are of less interest.)

[Most people don’t know Shvarts but I think his plays are wonderful.  They used to get done in U.S. regional theaters, particularly The Dragon, from time to time back in the ’80s, but they never caught on big, to my disappointment.  They’d catch on nicely, I was sure, if presented well at a theater where large audiences and a more widespread press could see them—such as in New York City.. I never did persuade the StageArts leaders to mount one, however.

[Below is a short profile of the playwright, followed on 9 March by the three script reports I prepared for the StageArts artistic directors.]

Yevgenii L’vovich  Shvarts (Russian: Евгений Львович Шварц) was born on 21 (in the modern calendar) October  1896, in Kazan, Russian Empire (510 miles east of Moscow, on the Volga River), to Lev Borisovich Shvarts (1874-1940), a physician, and Maria Fyodorovna Shelkova (1875-1942), an obstetrics student (one source said she was a midwife).  Lev Borisovich was from a bourgeois family of liberal Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1895, before his marriage.  Maria Fyodorovna’s family was Russian Orthodox.

(At his baptism, Lev Borisovich changed his patronymic to Lev Vasilyevich.  Vasilii, or Basil, is a saint’s name in the Russian Orthodox Church, especially Basil the Blessed, namesake of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square, a symbol of the Russian nation.  Basil the Blessed, c. 1469-1552 or 1557, is buried in the cathedral.  For a brief explanation of Russian patronymics, see my Rick On Theater post “Michael Chekhov, Part 1,” 2 November 2019.)

The Shvarts family was especially gifted and talented. Yevgenii L’vovich’s brother, Valentin L’vovich  (1902-88) became an engineer and his grandson was the poet Andrei Olegovich Kryzhanovsky (1950-94).  His cousin Anton Isaakovich Schwartz (1896-1954), with whom he was close their whole lives, was an Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR – that is, Russia). 

Yevgenii L’vovich’s father was an accomplished surgeon and played the violin superbly and all his Shvarts relatives were musically talented and arranged evenings with recitations and performances.  The Shvartses were renowned as improvisers and wits—loquatious, bright, hot-tempered. 

His Shelkov relatives, restrained and thoughtful, were no less artistic: the whole family played in the amateur theater of Ryazan, a city about 500 miles west of Kazan (where the Shelkovs were from), and Yevgenii L’vovich’s mother, Maria Fyodorovna, was praised in the local press as a commanding actress.

Discovering that their son Zhenya (that’s Russian for ‘Gene’) not only lacked a musical ear, but was also incapable of simple recitation, his parents didn’t hide their disappointment. Without his family’s support, the shy, timid teenager could only resign himself to his certain fate.

Yevgenii L’vovich  described his father as a strong but ordinary man; he enjoyed playing the violin, singing, and taking part in the impromptu performances.  Nevertheless, Lev Vasilyevich was arrested in 1898 for revolutionary agitation among factory-workers in Kazan; he was sent into internal exile in Maykop (nearly 1,100 miles south of Kazan in the northern Caucasus), a town of about 30,000 people at the time.  This is where Yevgenii L’vovich  grew up. 

By the time he was eight, Yevgenii Shvarts knew he wanted to be a writer . . . except that he had terrible penmanship and was embarrassed to turn in completed work.  In diaries Shvarts kept in the 1950s, he wrote that his attempts at writing annoyed his teachers and that his parents, especially his father, “had already decided firmly that nothing would come of me.”  His mother often told him: “People like you grow up as losers and commit suicide.”

Shvarts finished his secondary education in natural sciences and mathematics in Maykop in 1913 and went on to study law at Moscow University from 1914 to 1916.  In Moscow, he was introduced to theater and his interest in poetry and drama sidelined his focus on the law.  Yevgenii L’vovich  began spending all the money his parents sent him on tickets for the circus and the opera—theater seats were impossible to come by, he complained.  By the end of 1916, the money had run out and the impecunious student went home to Maykop.

In the fall of 1916, Shvarts was drafted into the Russian army for the First World War (1914-18); he was destined for the front as a private, but in August 1917, he was sent to a military school for officer training,  Graduating in October, he was promoted to ensign, the army’s lowest ranking officer, a sort of under-lieutenant, established for officers commissioned through a crash course in wartime. 

The Great War was interrupted in the Russian Empire by revolution in 1917: first the February Revolution (so-called because of Russia’s old-style calendar; it actually occurred in March), which overthrew the imperial regime and declared a republic; then the October Revolution, also called the Bolshevik Revolution (November 1917), which established the communist Soviet Union.  The Russian Civil War broke out in November 1917 between the Reds, the forces of the communists, and the Whites, the forces of a coalition of anti-Soviet forces.

By the beginning of 1918, Shvarts had joined the Whites and he ended up in Yekaterinodar, the city in far-west Russia from which his father’s family came (now known as Krasnodar).  In the first major combat between the Red and White Armies, the Battle of Yekaterinodar, part of what was known as “the Ice Campaign,” was fought from 10 to 13 April 1918 and, as a consequences of the severe concussion received in the battle, Shvarts suffered shell-shock, lost several teeth, and acquired a tremor of the hands (which some sources identify as Parkinson’s Disease) that plagued him for the rest of his life. 

After a stay in the hospital, Shvarts was demobilized and in 1919, he enrolled at the university in Rostov-on-Don, where he also began working in the Theater Workshop of young experimental director Pavel Veysbrom (1899-1963; his name is sometimes also transliterated as ‘Weisbrom’ or ‘Weisbrem’), a troupe of amateurs.  In May 1920, he joined the political department of the Caucasus Front of the Red Army as an actor and theater instructor.

Also in 1920, Shvarts married actress Gayane Nikolayevna Khalaidzhieva (1898-1983). The marriage would last a decade and produce a daughter, Natalya Yevgenievna (1929-95), Shvarts’s only child.

Veysbrom’s Theater Workshop (Театральная Мастерская, also translated as Theater Studio) toured the Russian provinces and in October 1921, it moved from Rostov-on-Don to Petrograd (later Leningrad, 1924-91, and then Saint Petersburg, its original name from 1703) in an effort to turn professional.  The troupe gave its first performance in Petrograd on 8 January 1922, Gondla by Nikolai Gumilyov (1886-1921).  In the spring of 1922, however, the Workshop ceased operation, though Shvarts and his wife stayed in Petrograd, performing in sketches in fairground booths. 

The couple lived from hand to mouth on their take of the admission charge.  Shvarts also played in small theaters, but he had little acting talent, so he supplemented his meager earnings by working as a salesman in a bookstore.

During this period, Shvarts met with a group of writers called “The Serapion Brothers” (Серапионовы Братья)—the name’s a reference to a collection of short stories by the German fantasy and Gothic horror author E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822)—and began to write short satirical articles, essays, and reviews under various pseudonyms. 

In 1922 and ’23, he worked as secretary to Korney Chukovsky (1882-1969), one of the most popular children’s poets in Russia, sometimes compared to Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-91).  Shvarts soon became known as a brilliant storyteller and improviser. 

Shvarts left for the Donbass in the Ukraine with his friend, writer and memoirist Mikhail Slonimsky (1897-1972) in the summer of 1923, where he began to write.  Both men were invited to work on the miners’ newspaper All-Russian Stoker (Всероссийская кочегарка), published in the city of Bakhmut (renamed Artemivsk the next year, but returned to its original name in 2016).   

At first, Shvarts just processed readers’ letters, then he began to turn his responses into small stories, which began to gain popularity among readers.  The novice writer published a literary supplement to the newspaper called Slaughter (Забой).  In the editorial office of the newspaper, he met Nikolai Oleynikov (1898-1937), an editor, avant-garde poet, and playwright with whom Shvarts later became a friend and collaborator.

Through Oleynikov, Shvarts became close to the literary group OBERIU (ОБЭРИУ – Объединение Реального Искусства; Union of Real Art), a short-lived collective of avant-garde Surrealist, Absurdist, and Futurist writers, musicians, and artists.  Like the Serapion Brothers, the formalist experiments of the Oberiuty—as the members of the group were called (singular, “Oberiut”)—appealed to Shvarts.

(OBERIU, whose members also included actors, musicians, and filmmakers, was a sort of amalgam of Larry Kramer’s late-1980s ACT UP without the socio-political-sexual agenda and Ken Kesey’s 1960s Merry Pranksters without the drugs.  They were declared “literary hooligans” and deemed “the last Soviet avant-garde.”)

When he returned from the Donbass, from the second half of 1924 to October 1925, Shvarts worked as executive secretary of Leningrad magazine, an illustrated literary magazine published by the Leningrad branch of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP).  Then he went to the Rainbow (Радуга) children’s book publishing house, where he worked until 1928. 

Between 1925 and 1931, Shvarts also worked in the children’s department of the State Publishing House (Госиздат – Gosizdat) under the leadership of Samuil Yakovlevich (S. Y.) Marshak (1887-1964), a poet, playwright, translator, literary critic, and screenwriter who was also the author of popular children’s books.

In 1924, Shvarts’s first children’s book, The Story of the Old Balalaika (Рассказ старой балалайки), a collection of poems, was published in the July issue of Sparrow (Воробей; renamed New Robinson in August 1924), a children’s almanac (an ongoing series of literary, artistic, and/or popular science works, united by any criterion).  

After 1925, Schwartz became a regular contributor to the children’s magazines Hedgehog (Ёж – abbreviation of Ежемесячный Журнал [Monthly Magazine]; ёж is also the word for ‘urchin’) and Chizh (Чиж – ‘siskin,’ a kind of finch; I’ve also seen this title rendered as Canary, a variety of finch), and his first story as a separate book came out.  Later, there were other books for children: The War of Parsley and Shaving-Chisels (Война Петрушки и Стёпки-растрёпки, 1925), Camp (Лагерь, 1925), Balloons (Шарики, 1929), among others.

On 21 September 1929, the Leningrad Youth Theater (Ленинградский Театр Юных Зрителей or ЛенТЮЗ – officially the State Theater for Young Audiences [LenTYUZ]) staged Schwartz’s first play, Underwood (Ундервуд), about a witch who steals a typewriter but whose plan is foiled by a brave little orphan girl.  The audience received the play well, but the responses of Daniil Ivanovich Harms (1905-42), an Oberiut, and Marshak, who was his boss at Golizdat, were cold.  Nonetheless, Shvarts continued to write for the stage and the Leningrad Youth Theater mounted his plays Island 5-K (Остров 5-К, 1932) and The Treasure (Клад, 1933).

While he was associated with LenTYUZ, Shvarts began collaborating with Nikolai Akimov (1901-68), an experimental theatre director and scenic designer, to write contemporary plays based on the folk and fairy tales of Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75).  Among these adaptations are The Princess and the Swineherd (Принцесса и свинопас, 1934 – parts of the story is from “The Swineherd”),The Naked King (Голый Король, 1937 – from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with elements of “The Princess and the Pea”), The Shadow (Тень, 1940), and The Snow Queen (Снежная Королева, 1948), reworked and adapted to contemporary—often political—reality.  (Shvarts’s stage versions of The Snow Queen and The Shadow were made into movies in 1967 and 1971, respectively.  Akimov was the scenic and costume designer for Shvarts’s 1947 film of Cinderella.)

In 1930, changes took place in the writer’s family life: he left his first wife and their six-month-old daughter and married Yekaterina Ivanovna Zilber (née Obukh, 1904-63), whom he met in May 1928.  They were both married to others at the time they began their liaison, and they divorced their spouses to be together.  Shvarts dedicated the play An Ordinary Miracle (Обыкновенное чудо, published 1956) to Yekaterina Ivanovna, whom he called Katya.  His first wife, Gayane Nikolayevna, became the prototype of the stepmother in the 1947 film Cinderella (Золушка – Zolushka [zola is ‘ash’ or ‘cinder’ in Russian]; written 1945).

In the years after his remarriage, Shvarts wrote a lot and was very successful, composing novels, short stories, poems, plays for children and adults, funny captions for drawings in Hedgehog and Chizh, satirical revues, libretti for ballets, comic sketches for the circus, puppet plays, and movie scripts.

Shvarts attained recognition as a children’s author: on 1 July 1934, he was admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR.  After the magazine Chizh was shut down (for being apolitical and bourgeois), Shvarts wrote mainly plays and screenplays.  Uncharacteristically tough when it came to principles, Shvarts refused to renounce his convicted friend, Oberiut poet Nikolai Oleynikov, in 1931, and helped the family of another friend who’d been arrested, poet Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-58). 

When asked about his literary activities, Shvarts commonly responded: “I am writing everything except denunciations.”  In 1940, he wrote the play The Shadow, which was banned immediately after its première on 12 April at the Leningrad Comedy Theater (Ленинградский Театр Сатиры и Комедии – literally, Leningrad Theater of Satire and Comedy).  The Shadow is anti-Fascist political satire and the Soviet Union had entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany the year before.

The Shadow, based on Andersen’s tale of the same title, tells the story of a young scholar who falls in love with a princess, only to have his Shadow, an evil force, separate itself from him and seek the Princess for itself.  Through various machinations, the Shadow also gains power over government officials and uses them for its own ends.  Then the Scholar begins to wonder if the Shadow could survive if he died.  Told with considerable wit and irony, this fantasy also raises questions about the relationship of power to those being governed.  Could it survive without their acquiescence? 

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the pact was terminated and World War II (1939-45), known as the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) in the USSR, came to Russia.  Shvarts tried to join the militia, the reserve of the armed forces convened during the war as a home guard.  The writer hid his shaking hands behind his back, but when Shvarts went to sign the papers, the local military commissar noticed his hand tremor, which precluded him from firing a rifle, and Shvarts was rejected for militia service. 

When Leningrad was besieged by the forces of the Third Reich (from 8 September 1941 until 27 January 1944), Shvarts spoke at recruiting stations and wrote anti-Hitler sketches and plays for the radio.  At night, on the roof of the Writers’ Skyscraper (Писательский небоскрёб – also called the Writers’ House)—where he served as a civil defense warden, he and Yekaterina Ivanovna were on duty: Shvarts made sure all “lighters,” as they called incendiary bombs (зажигалка/zazhigalka is the Russian word for ‘cigarette lighter’), were extinguished and his wife set up an aid station for the wounded. 

Between July and December 1941, Shvarts broadcast from the Radio Center (Радиоцентр) and in August 1941, the Leningrad Comedy Theater premièred Under the Linden Trees of Berlin (Под липами Берлина), an anti-fascist play about the projected capture of Berlin by the Soviet troops Shvarts wrote with Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958). 

On 11 December 1941, the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council decided to evacuate Shvarts and his wife from Leningrad by plane and airlifted them to Kirov, 860 miles east.  For the evacuation, the baggage limit was 22 pounds per person so Shvarts took a typewriter with him, and burned the diaries from his youth and his manuscripts—his entire archive, accumulated over 45 years of life.  After the siege, Shvarts was awarded the Leningrad Defense Medal.

In Kirov, the writer worked for the regional theater until July 1943.  During this period, he wrote the plays Far Land (Далекий край, 1943), about children in an orphanage evacuated from Leningrad, and One Night (Одна ночь, 1944), about the defenders of Leningrad.  He also started working on The Dragon (Дракон, written 1942-44), arguably, his most popular play abroad. 

The Dragon is a political satire aimed at totalitarianism in all forms and was banned from the stage by both Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), the head of the USSR from 1922 till his death, and Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), Soviet leader from 1958 to 1964.  The story of the effort of Lancelot to liberate people in a land suffering under a dragon’s brutal rule, the play wasn’t fully staged in the Soviet Union in Shvarts’s lifetime. 

In 1943, LenTYUZ was evacuated in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan (then officially called the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the city was named Stalinabad until 1962), and Shvarts went there and served as literary manager of the theater. 

In May 1944, he moved to Moscow with LenTYUZ and in August, the première of The Dragon was staged there with Akimov directing and designing the sets and costumes.  Ostensibly, the play was about Hitler and totalitarianism, which wrenched the souls out of people; this was the power of the Dragon after death.  However, any Soviet citizen would have recognized the Dragon as Stalin—and after only three performances of the début production in Moscow, the play was banned.

(The Dragon’s toady, the corrupt Mayor, was seen by Russian audiences as Nikita Khrushchev, one of Stalin’s closest advisers at the end of the Soviet leader’s tenure.  In the play, Heinrich, the Mayor, takes over after the Dragon is slain—there is no true relief from tyranny—and, as if predicting the future, Khrushchev did succeed Stalin as head of the USSR in 1958, following a caretaker premier.)

The Dragon wasn’t properly mounted in the Soviet Union until 1962 (in Leningrad), 18 years after it premièred and four years after Shvarts died (and nine years after Stalin died).  Stalin’s death initiated what became known as the Khrushchev Thaw (Хрущевская Оттепель), a component of the new premier’s de-Stalinization reforms.  (A filmed version of the play, To Kill the Dragon [Убить дракона], was produced in 1988.)

After the war, Shvarts again began to keep diaries.  Along with events of the day and memories, he recorded notes for plays.  From these notes, the writer compiled the Telephone Book (Телефонная Книга) with almost 200 portraits of Shvarts’s contemporaries drawn from his memoirs.  According to Shvarts’s script for the film Cinderella (1947), it was shot from a screenplay based on these notes and character sketches, as was Don Quixote (Дон Кихот, 1957) and others.

In the last period of his life, Shvartz wrote several more plays, among them An Ordinary Miracle, which premièred in January 1956 at Moscow’s Theater Studio of the Film Actor (Театр-Студия Киноактёра) and then played at the Leningrad Comedy Theater in April.  In March 1956, the Main Directorate of Arts of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR (Главное Управление по Делам Искусств Министерства Культуры РСФСР) approved Yevgenii L. Shvarts for membership on the artistic council of the Leningrad Comedy Theater.

After suffering several heart attacks, when the doctors prescribed him bedrest, the writer fell into apathy and stopped working in anticipation of his death, which he called “a day of incredible length.”  He joked darkly that he’d subscribed to the 30-volume collected works of Charles Dickens (1812-70) and wondered on which volume “this will happen.”  It happened at the third, his beloved Pickwick Papers: on 15 January 1958, Yevgenii L’vovich  Shvarts died in Leningrad; he was 61 years old.  His last words were: “Katya, save me!”

Shvarts is a hard fellow to suss out.  He was timid and easily frightened, even avoiding “dangerous” places of novels and stories he was reading.  After he’d read War and Peace as a teenager, for instance,  he didn’t know how the duel between Pierre Bezukhov and Fyodor Dolokhov ended because he’d skipped over it!  Even in his own writing, he avoided despair; in his play One Night, about the Siege of Leningrad, he gives the audience hope. 

Yet he fought in World War I and the Russian Civil War and tried to volunteer for the militia in World War II.  Instead of evacuating the city during the Siege of Leningrad, he served in the fire brigade in his building and stood watch on the roof.

He was committed to anti-totalitarianism, which is why he fought for the Whites against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, but he went to work for the Red Army in Rostov-on-Don, served the Soviet Union in the Siege of Leningrad, and took jobs at Soviet state agencies and on state-controlled journals.  (He also joined writers’ organizations such as RAPP, which were government sanctioned and controlled, but in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, membership in such unions was a requirement in order to work in the profession represented.) 

During the Second World War, Shvarts participated in propaganda activities like his radio broadcasts and even wrote an essentially propagandistic, anti-Hitler play in Under the Linden Trees of Berlin.  Before the war, however, he’d bravely stood up for friends who’d run afoul of Stalin’s authoritarian regime. 

He was an anti-communist—but he was a Russian patriot.  During the war and the Siege of Leningrad. Shvarts wrote a number of other Realistic, patriotic plays.  I’ve mention Under the Linden Trees of Berlin and, earlier, One Night and Far Land, but Brother and Sister (Брат и сестра, 1940) and Our Hospitality (Наше гостеприимство, 1941) also extolled the courage and resourcefulness of the Russian people.

His writing was full of such dichotomies as well, of a more literary nature, to be sure.  He composed eccentric fiction that on one level dramatize fairy tales suitable for children, yet on another, contain political commentary.  He wrote for both adults and children but when he addresses children, adults carefully listen to him and whatever he wrote for adults, regardless of its depth, is accessible to children’s understanding. 

The writer’s dramaturgy also has a split personality.  He mixed startling visual effects, acrobatic movements, contrasting moods, and moments of improvised humorous dialogue like Commedia dell’Arte.  He used a wide variety of literary devices to create his dramas, blending fantasy, irony, parody, lyricism, and lampoon, often one after another but sometimes together in a scene.  Indeed, the action of his plays is marked by swift transitions from one tone to another. 

Shvarts didn’t engage in direct allegory in his fairy tale plays.  He preferred to mix or muddle his sources so as to obscure his intentions.  He generates an ambiguity so engaging that the official censors can’t easily suss out his criticism—at least not as it pertains to the Soviet regime.

In this way, his plays and stories are simultaneously witty and wise adult fairy tales that are straightforward yet evocative socio-political satires, unique fare during the era of strict Socialist Realism.  He took familiar fairy tales and legends and transmuted them into satirical parables about contemporary life.  He used fairy-tale characters and a fantastic environment to comment on the international scene, the Soviet system, or human nature In general.  In Shvarts’s world, fairy-tale heroes and heroines don’t just “come to life” as in a Disney movie.  They meld organically with the real world.  

This was how Shvarts communicated his contemporary themes without literally spelling them out.  One of the playwright’s most unique attributes was that while, in his political commentary, he was ostensibly writing against Fascism and Hitlerian authoritarianism, Russian audiences could see, without being told, that his criticisms simultaneously fit Stalinism and the Soviet state.  It’s part of what compelled the Soviet authorities alternately to ban and permit the publication and production of his work:  They were often unsure what he was up to!

(This always reminds me of the Antigone of French playwright Jean Anouilh, 1910-87.  Staged in 1944, during the German occupation of France in World War II, it was a thinly disguised indictment of the Nazi occupiers and their French enablers—but the German occupiers didn’t twig to Anouilh’s message.  Stalin’s repressors in the Soviet Union often fell for Shvarts’s similar deception.)

One trait of his dramaturgy was his base language, a sort fable-speak reminiscent of Aesop.  (Another practitioner was American humorist James Thurber, 1894-1961, who also wrote short fables—of a more directly humorous vein.)  This somewhat artificial language made Shvarts’s meaning rather elastic—much to the consternation of the official minders. 

The playwright’s socio-political critiques were openly aimed at Hitler and Nazi totalitarianism, but they were equally, though less obviously, applicable to the USSR’s capitalist allies (that is, principally the United Kingdom, France, and—after 1941—the United States), as well as, by implication, to Stalin and his authoritarian regime.

Among Shvarts’s main inspirations were the fabulists Hans Christian Andersen, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Frenchman Charles Perrault (1628-1703; his 1698 version of Cinderella was the basis for Shvarts’s film script); he also drew on indigenous Russian folktales.  He stubbornly revived an interest in fairy tales at a time when they were viewed with skepticism and disapproval by the state for being bourgeois and incompatible with socialist practicality and rationality.

Philosophically, he was influenced by the late-19th-century French symbolists, who believed in the duality in life as expressed in the “correspondences” described by French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67): the pairing of the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible, the material and the mystical.  The Shadow is a study of this “doubleness,” displaying one person’s capacity for both good and evil and honesty and duplicity.

With respect to style, Shvarts borrowed from another great theatrical contemporary and fellow Russian, Yevgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a director and actor who helped found the famed Moscow Art Theater.  The Vakhtangov principal Shvarts’s plays (as well as his poems and stories) adopted was “Fantastic Realism” (Фантастический Реализм), which manifested a joyful theatrical dualism. 

Fantastic Realism can be seen as a blending of Stanislavsky’s psychological Realism with Meyerhold’s extreme stylization.  Vakhtangov saw that Realism is capable of revealing only that part of truth which can be perceived by the five senses, while the more profound aspects of truth are seen in mystery and myth, expressed by chimerical and dreamlike figures rather than the flesh-and-blood characters of the material world.

While Vakhtangov devised Fantastic Realism for stage production, Shvarts adapted the concept for his dramaturgy.  Vakhtangov would add this vision onto a script such as Erik IV by August Strindberg (1849-1912), but Shvarts wove Fantastic Realism into his scripts and screenplays.

Shvarts liked to play with words, twisting them into puns, taking idioms literally, reviving old meanings of words and expressions, and much of the humor in his plays comes from this tactic.  He frequently took a fairy-tale cliché, and adapted its literal meaning to the plot or took an everyday phrase and put it into the mouth of a fairy-tale character. 

Cinderella, the 1947 film, is a model of this practice.  As with all Shvarts’s fairy-tale scripts, familiar fairy-tale stereotypes transform and spectators accept the new conditions of fairy-tale life.  For instance, the Stepmother (the character, you’ll recall, modeled after Shvarts’s first wife, Gayane Nikolayevna) is indignant with the King, scolding him: “And put on the crown!”  Such behavior is more like the old lady from next door, not fairy-tale characters.  The King in Cinderella isn’t a crowned monarch seated majestically on a throne, but an ordinary guy who simply works as a king and talks about his workaday problems:

Here, for example, Puss in Boots.  Nice guy, smart, but when he comes in, he will take off his boots and sleep somewhere by the fireplace.  Or, for example, Tom Thumb [literally, “Finger Boy” – Мальчик-с-Пальчик]. Well, he’s playing hide and seek all the time.  And try to find him.  It’s a shame!

Is this the pathos of a royal personage?  These are just the day-to-day complaints of royal life.  In another scene, the Fairy [Godmother] says, “It’s bad for your health not to go to the ball when you deserve it,” and in another, the Page quips, “I’m not a wizard yet, I am only a pupil.”  Here are some more samples of dialogue from this script (courtesy of IMDb):

King: [to Prince] Why won’t you talk?

Prince: [Smitten by Cinderella] I can’t.

King: [to Cinderella] Don’t believe him, he can talk!  He talks very well.  He even recites poetry.

Cinderella: I have to go!

Prince: [Blocking her way] No, please don’t!  I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided that after the ice-cream was served, I’d tell you that I was in love with you.

(As this snippet from Shvarts’s Cinderella demonstrates, I think, there are considerable echoes of his style and approach in the popular 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress [music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer], based on Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.”  Mattress has a very similar satirical and irreverent take on the fairy tale itself, but lacks Shvarts’s political critique.  Without an extensive search, I haven’t seen any acknowledgement that Rogers, Barer, Thompson, and Fuller deliberately took inspiration from Shvarts—or, indeed, even knew of his work.)

[My evaluation reports on The Shadow, The Naked King, and The Dragon will be posted on Monday, 9 March.  The reports were written in 1984, though I took this opportunity to up-date the history notes, but not the assessments themselves, to include information I didn’t have at the time.]