About the Playwright

Yaroslava Pulinovich was born in Omsk, Russia, and lived there until she was eight years old. As the author herself puts it, “then my parents left for the far north and took me with them.” When she turned 16 she went to Yekaterinburg to study. By the time she was 18, she had won her first award as a playwright. Between 2007 and 2009, while studying playwriting under the famous writer and educator Nikolai Kolyada, Pulinovich published six plays in the journal Ural. Now 22, she has created something of a sensation on the Russian theatre scene with readings at events such as the New Drama Festival and productions at theatres including Moscow’s Playwright and Director Center and the Kiselev Young Spectator Theatre in Saratov. In the fall of 2008, she won the debut literary prize in playwriting. By 2009, she had received a commission from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The play she created for that theatre, Beyond the Track, was produced as part of their Russian Season in September 2009. Her other plays include I Won’t Come Back and a play written with Pavel Kazantsev, Washers, which won the Grand Prize at the Kolyada Play Festival in Yekaterinburg. Pulinovich and Kazantsev also collaborated on the screenplay for a comedy about youth in Russia, How to Catch a Shoplifter.

The first staged reading of Natasha’s Dream was presented at the Kiselev Young Spectator Theatre in February of 2009. Critic Oleg Loevsky noted that in this performance, “with the text by Yaroslava Pulinovich from Yekaterinburg and the work of the actress Olga Lysenko from Saratov and the director Dmitry Egorov from St. Petersburg the soul substance which is beyond our views on theatre and life was created. This is the reason for people to work in theatre” (Performances). In November 2009, Pulinovich received her Moscow premiere with a full production of Natasha’s Dream at the Playwright and Director Center. The play, as translated by CONTACT _Con-4103C5B81B1 Noah Birksted-Breen, director of London’s Sputnik theatre, is being presented in England at the Russian Theater Festival in February 2010. The production at Towson University, in a new translation by John Freedman, marks the first performance of Natasha’s Dream in the United States and the first presentation anywhere of its companion piece, I Won. “Performances: Natasha’s Dream.” Saratov Academic Kiselev Youth Theatre. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.