American actor Joe Spano once observed, “The real hopeful thing about the arts is that you take painful experiences and shape them, you come out of experience like this not devastated, not demolished by it, but hopefully healed or having experienced a catharsis.” These words came to John Freedman’s mind as he interviewed Spano for the November 4 episode of his Dictionary of Ukrainian Emotions podcast. Spano had just finished a dramatic reading of Tetyana Kytsenko’s Call Things by Their Names, which speaks powerfully to the need to take hold of one’s own fate when coming out of painful experiences.

The issue of what we call what is happening around us became acute for Kytsenko at 5 am on the morning of February 24, 2022, when Russian cruise missiles began to rain down around her. Later, she recalled “We knew what was going on even without news reports. Was this a special operation, a conflict or a crisis? No, not one of these words came to mind, and if these diplomatic definitions are rinsed of their hypocrisy, you will be left with the old standard: War.”

Kytsenko explored the meaning of names and identity in the days following the Russian full-scale invasion. Her piece appears in a collection of 20 plays written by Ukrainian dramatists in response to that invasion. Compiled, edited, and introduced by Freedman, A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights captured the experiences of 18 members of Kyiv’s Theater of Playwrights.

The book won awards and sold well. Several of the plays have had successful readings at theaters around the world; some have had full-fledged productions. Freedman wanted to expand their reach and, at the encouragement of Kharkiv playwright Dmytro Ternovyi, who has been a prime mover in the project, entered into partnership with the Ukrainska Pravda website to create a series of nine podcasts posted over late 2024 into 2025.

The podcasts present works by nine contributors to the original volume: Kytsenko, Anastasia Kosodii, Oksana Grytsenko, Oksana Savchenko, Andrii Bondarenko, Irina Garets, Olga Matsiupa, Liudmila Timoshchenko, and Maksim Kurochkin. Each play is read by an American or  British actor: Alessandra Torresani, Kristin Milward, Joe Spano, Kevin McMongale, Kathleen Chalfant, Jessica Hecht, Sharon Washington, and Kosovar American actor Kushtrim Hoxha. Hoxha’s own experiences fleeing the former Yugoslavia to the United States at a time of war added poignancy into the reading of Kurochkin’s Pobut (Everyday Life).

Freedman follows up the readings by interviewing the actors about their reactions to the texts. The result is an amplification of the printed word when each actor talks about personal experience. This helps lift the Ukrainian works into a universal emotional landscape.

Milward’s interpretation of Savchenko’s commanding play I Want to Go Home speaks to sudden and astonishing dislocations as the protagonist wrestles with whether to abandon her elderly parents in a destroyed Mariupol. Initially, she creates a conundrum: either they leave together or die together. But is this really the only choice? She decides to leave, and they decide to stay. She leaves and tries to remain in touch, though she feels ashamed. Her thoughts turn to a school friend who remained in Bucha, wondering if she was blown to bits during the brutal atrocities there. Images of her defenseless parents, her 12-year-old daughter who is no longer fearful of air raid sirens, a lover reachable only with spotty internet connections fill her with hatred and anger. Hatred makes it hard to breathe, she says, and makes you want to kill the ones who kill you. The reaction is physiological and can’t be explained. The reading by a masterful artist like Milward makes this story into penetrating, universal art.

The first podcast in the series featuring Torresani reading Kosodii’s short post-dramatic monologue "How to Talk to the Dead" was inspired by photos of those who died in Russian atrocities in cities like Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, and others. The need to speak to the dead became palpable, but how to do so? “No special workshops are required,” Kosodii counsels, “we determine our dead to be a fact of life, we tell stories about them, invent stories so that your dead will speak through them….Suddenly there will be such words as there never have been….Your people were alive as they wished to be.”

In the interview with moderator Freedman, Kosodii observed that there is no time to grieve in a time of war. We need different tools to mourn, she said, and talking to the dead creates a new language to talk about everything. We need to invent stories so our dead will speak through them. We need to do so in an ethical way. Ukrainian writers—and playwrights in particular—are tasked with finding these stories to speak to the living.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.