Alexander Galin is an internationally renowned Russian playwright, screenwriter, and film and theatre director. Over the course of his career, he has authored a total of 23 plays and 10 screenplays. Galin's first smashing success came in the early eighties: his play Retro (1979), a lyrical comedy, was staged all over the Soviet Union, and has become a Russian classic. The play was translated into many languages, and successfully produced all over the world. Even today, the play is in the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theatre. After Retro, although greatly successful commercially, Galin was drawn to non-commercial, experimental, chamber plays that portrayed the "lower depths" of daily life in the Soviet Union. These plays made him one of the leading Russian playwrights of the so-called "new wave" in Soviet theatre. These pre- and post- Perestroika plays focused on social themes with storylines centered on everyday characters living in squalid conditions, including prostitutes, vagrants, and other destitutes. Galin gained international fame for his play Stars in the Morning Sky, the story of four prostitutes exiled from Moscow during the 1980 Summer Olympics. The play was recently staged in London with great success. Combining merciless portrayals of people with humor and lyricism, Galin's plays have remained popular in theatres in Russia and around the world.
Galin will be visiting the Ohio State campus January 19th-22nd. A public lecture has been scheduled on Wednesday, January 20th at 4:00PM in Hagerty Hall 42. This lecture by Alexander Galin, "From the Eighth Play to the Twenty-Seventh," will not only be the story of his plays (Stars in the Morning Sky was Galin's eighth play and Parade his twenty-seventh) and directing and writing, but about his life too. Galin will talk about his youth in Kursk where he dreamt about acting, inspired by Chaplin and Fellini, while working at a factory; about Leningrad, the studies of directing at the Institute of Culture; and the beginning of writing. Having never studied writing formally, he wrote his first play, The Wall. One of the following plays The Roof was directed at Oleg Tabakov's studio-theatre. And then, suddenly, came the success of the play Retro, which was staged all over the USSR. Having come from the outside (not from a theatrical family), he was "blessed" in the profession by Georgi Tovstonogov, Alexander Volodin, and Maria Knebel, who worked with Stanislavsky and Mikhail Chekhov. The Moscow Olympics of 1980 happened to be the turning point for Galin: he came across a story of prostitutes banned from Moscow for the duration of the games. The production of The Stars in the Morning Sky, directed by Lev Dodin, travelled the world, and Galin travelled with the theatre. He later saw the different interpretations of the play – in Turkey, Greece, England -- and every interpretation brought to the story a wealth of different meanings and shades. Galin's most recent play Parade is about the new Russian totalitarianism. Galin will read scenes from this play, as well as a letter about it written by Lev Dodin, who is interested in directing it. Galin's last novel is called Do-re-mi-do-re-do, and he will read excerpts from it as well.
Co-sponsored by the Departments of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures and Theatre.
