KRYMOV LAB NYC

Presented by BRIC

The internationally renowned Russian art maker Dmitry Krymov is generally acknowledged as one of the creative titans of his era, particularly for his copious work in the theater as a sceneographer and director. Today, Krymov finds himself a man without a country, unwilling and unable to return from America to Putin’s Russia following the criminal invasion of Ukraine. Since founding his NYC-based studio in 2022, Krymov’s company has already won significant acclaim from The New York Times, The New Yorker and New York Magazine, selling out a much in-demand 2023 run of his adaptation of Eugene Onegin at La MaMa Theater.

Now, that work returns for a limited encore as part of Under the Radar’s 2024 season at BRIC Arts Media House. Every Russian grows up learning the story of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s landmark novel in-verse. The work and its poetic images form a key part of the country’s national consciousness. In Krymov Lab NYC’s production, four immigrant Russians desperately try to communicate the value of an untranslatable classic to a New York audience. Why should we be made to care about the trials of a shallow Byronic hero, a too-deep teenage girl, and a less-than-successful birthday party? In the face of wartime atrocity, is there still a place in today’s world for Dostoevsky, for Tchaikovsky, for Pushkin? Can beauty and intellect survive such horrors? And should it?