About the Playwright

People everywhere are the same. We want the same things. We want to understand why the things we want are not happening and what we can do to make them happen.
Yury Klavdiev

Yury Klavdiev was born in 1975 in Togliatti, a major center for automobile manufacturing in Russia. Although his grandfather organized the first theatre in Togliatti, Klavdiev himself felt little connection to this art form. He found acting difficult to believe and the aristocratic characters portrayed on stage seemed unconnected to his life. Instead, he spent his youth with the street gangs of Togliatti, while he secretly composed poetry at home. In 2002, however, he attended a production of Ivan Vyrypaev’s Oxygen when a traveling version of Moscow’s New Drama Festival visited Togliatti. The experience of seeing characters and subjects from a life that he recognized convinced him to start writing plays.

Klavdiev in his plays seeks to capture the real lives of those outside of privileged spheres in Russian society. His characters, who are often homeless or involved in criminal activity, both endure and inflict emotional and physical violence. They struggle for survival and attempt to understand their fate in a harsh world that mirrors what Klavdiev sees in his society. Children and teenagers hold a special place in Klavdiev’s imagination and he often depicts young characters caught up in a world that forces maturity on them too soon. At the same time, he believes that his plays are written in between the real and ideal worlds. His characters express both despair at the way they see the world in the here and now as well as hope for the way they would like it to be. Critic John Freedman writes that the playwright “examines volatile loners and outsiders who precariously, though nimbly, maneuver on tight wires stretched between the poles of violence and tenderness.”

Klavdiev’s plays include I Am the Machine Gunner, Martial Arts, The Bullet Collector, The Slow Sword and The Polar Truth. He and his wife, Anastasia Moskalenko, wrote the children's play, Piggy and Carp: A M-m-m-Monstrous Vegetarian Drama. Productions of his plays have toured and been produced throughout Russia and Europe. His U.S. debut came just last June in a production of I Am the Machine Gunner by Generous Company at WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory. Klavdiev, along with Vyacheslav Durnenkov, wrote the controversial Russian television series, School.

Work Cited
Freedman, John. “Maksym Kurochkin: A Writer for Paradoxical Times.” TheatreForum 32 (2008): 85 – 87. International Index to the Performing

Playwright Yury Klavdiev in conversation with actor Jessie McLaughlin. Towson University. May 2010. Photo: Julia M. Smith

Yury Klavdiev and actor Edmond Cofie. Photo: Julia M. Smith