In March 2022, Jaclyn Biskup came across Yevgenia Belorusets’s book Lucky Breaks in the “Briefly Noted” section of the New Yorker. The magazine described the book as “surreal short stories…ethnographic in perspective but Gogolian in register” centering on Ukrainian women in the Donbas region living through the 2014 Russian invasion. Since Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine in Februrary 2022 (as I write this, now in its 963rd day), Biskup had been looking to read work written by Ukrainian people, instead of just reading about Ukrainian people in the news. She bought the book.
Biskup was immediately taken with the “weird and wonderful” nature of Lucky Breaks—a collection of strange and shapeshifting tales of women living in a time of war. She emailed Belorusets to ask about adapting the book for the stage and was given the go-ahead. Eventually, Sara Farrington came on as a co-adapter, and after close to two years of development, including a 2023 workshop at the now-defunct New Ohio, Biskup and Farrington’s adaptation of Lucky Breaks premiered at the Brick this past weekend, and runs through October 27th. Like its source text, the production is weird and wonderful. A spare and gestural show, Lucky Breaks continually surprised me with its off-kilter humor, baroque and absurd language, and fantastical plot developments. I spoke with Biskup after seeing the opening night performance.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
KD: What stuck out to you when you first read Lucky Breaks?
JB: I loved how much it was explicitly about women. Although there are stories that feature men or have men in them, most of the stories are focused on women. I also loved the book’s idiosyncratic, eccentric language. It’s unlike anything I had ever read before.
What do you mean when you talk about it being “weird”?
The stories in the book vary wildly in scope and style and tone. Some are fairytales and some feel more straightforward; a lot of them have a sort of mystery to them. I also love the reoccurring element of an unreliable narrator [in the stories]. These were stories that Yevgenia Belorusets heard from the Ukrainian people she interviewed, and then she fictionalized those stories, and then her fictionalized stories were translated from Russian to English by another person—and now we are kind of adapting and translating them again from the page to the stage!
How did Sara Farrington come on board to the project as a collaborator and co-adapter?
I got to know Sara through her wonderful book, The Lost Conversation. I don’t totally remember where I was with Lucky Breaks when Sara and I first met, but I remember her saying we should work on something together, and I asked if we could [adapt] Lucky Breaks together. We’d just started working on it a few months before we presented a workshop at the New Ohio Now-In-Process program [in February 2023]. That was an early work-in-progress showing, although I do think a lot of the bones of the play were built in that time. A lot of the different theatrical languages and movements of the piece—including the shadow puppets and the gestural movements—came out of that workshop.
How did you and Sara begin sorting through and adapting the text?
In the two months before the New Ohio workshop, we were reading the stories aloud together. I was in rehearsal with parts of the book, just reading it out loud, and then Sara had cut together some chunks of scenes from chapters that we had talked about using. We all had a copy of the book in rehearsal. When Sara presented cuts of scenes, we would go back to the original chapters in the book and think “what do we miss?” Early on, Sara was adapting scenes more directly into first person, and I wanted to keep some of the third person narration. I think it preserves the feeling of the text coming from a book, and it’s fun to play with the idea of the narrator. Sometimes characters in the play say, “she said this” and they are that she, and sometimes they’re saying “she said this” and they are not that she.
Does the play follow the order the stories are in inside the book?
It mostly follows the order of the stories in the book—with some notable exceptions. There are some chapters that are cut up into different scenes to separate out big chunks. And I really wanted to end on a story which is not at all the original end of the book. My American hopeful heart superseded the Ukrainian sentiment of the book’s original ending, which is maybe more bleak. I just wanted to end on a sort-of hopeful note for a possibility of a different future.
Can you speak a little bit more to that idea of an American hopefulness, and how that may differ from what’s in the original text of Lucky Breaks, or from a more Eastern European outlook toward hope and the future?
I don’t want to speak for Ukrainians; I’m not Ukrainian. I’m ethnically half-Polish and I feel like there is a sort of Eastern European dark sense of humor that maybe comes from many years of political oppression. I have a pretty dark sense of humor, and I always think about my Polish grandmother who lived to be like 95. Every time I talked to her on the phone during the last twenty years of her life I would say “I’ll see you at Christmas” and she would say “if I’m alive!”—it was really nothing to her to say that, and she really believed it. In some ways, she didn’t have a very positive outlook on the future of her life. There is this sort of “life is suffering and then you die but it’s all kind of funny” way that I move through the world. If you see that existence is somewhat absurd, then it’s easier to navigate. I think that some Eastern Europeans share this dark sense of humor about life and the inevitability of death. All of which is very easy for me to say comfortably from my New York apartment that is not currently under siege. I’m wary to say too much more about it because I’m not Ukrainian.
Can you talk about your poor-theatre aesthetic as an artist, and how that intersects with the theatrical style of Lucky Breaks?
[My poor-theatre aesthetic] was definitely born out of necessity of being a poor person! But I think the audience takes great delight when the simple is made magical. And that’s a different kind of delight than technology. I think maybe it’s about childlike wonder. Simplicity is very beautiful. But also, Lucky Breaks—and a lot of the texts I work on—is so poetic and stylized. In a way, the words and the language of this piece are the rococo or maximalist element. It’s cool to see a beautiful set onstage, but it’s also cool to imagine the world in your own mind. Some of my favorite theater experiences have been staged readings, because in its purest form you have a couple of actors who are really engaged, and everything else is taken away. So as an audience member you get to be present in the liveness of the moment. Simplicity provides a certain direct access to the heart and the soul of the thing; sometimes everything else can just get in the way.
Can you speak to the many collaborations behind this production of Lucky Breaks?
This is my fifth project with the lighting designer [Jackie Fox], my third project with the scenic designer [Nora Smith Marlow], and three out of the five cast members in the production have been with the piece since the 2023 workshop at New Ohio. The sound designer [James Worth Bennett] was also part of the workshop, and I’ve worked with them a few times as well. This is really a piece that was collectively made by the ensemble. Everyone has contributed to it and sacrificed a great deal of their time, energy, and earning potential in other places to make this piece that we really care about and that feels important. The ensemble is creating some beautiful, vulnerable work that makes this piece compelling. And I always say to my designers: if you couldn’t be a part of this, I wouldn’t want to make it.
What do you see as the political gesture of this play?
For me the political gesture of the piece is putting a Ukrainian voice onstage. Part of what Ukraine needs is for people to be interested. I don’t have a lot of money and I’m not a medical professional—what is my contribution? As an artist, I can always give space or voice to something that I want people to be thinking about. The humanity of Ukrainians is one of the things I want people to be thinking about. Belorusets has done these incredible projects of documenting economically oppressed, marginalized people in Ukraine. It feels important to give her story and these stories she’s written about a platform. In the “Note Before the Preface,” which is the first thing you read in the book as well as the first scene in the play, it says that these stories are not part of a “dominant historical narrative.” The stories we choose to tell can give more power, can reify certain tropes—just the stories that one tells are political acts.
Lucky Breaks runs through October 27th at The Brick. Purchase tickets here.
The Brick presents
Lucky Breaks
By Yevgenia Belorusets
Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Adapted by Jaclyn Biskup & Sara Farrington
Live Performances October 11-27, 2024
Livestream Oct 20 at 5PM
at The Brick Theater – 579 Metropolitan
Adapted by Jaclyn Biskup & Sara Farrington
Directed by Jaclyn Biskup
Production Stage Manager Sam Kersnick
Scenic Design by Nora Smith Marlow
Costume Design by Kristy Hall
Lighting Design by Jackie Fox
Sound Design by James Worth Bennett
Additional Choreography by Oksana Horban
Featuring Katie Broad, Hanna Datsko, Monica Goff, Jennifer McClinton, and Kara Jackson
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