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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 topped American newscasts for days.
Three years later, the war drags on. But save flare-ups on the U.S. foreign-policy side, a conflict that’s left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced gets dwindling media attention here.
And indeed, when Moon Township-based humanitarian nonprofit DTCare first contacted performance troupe RealTime Arts, in 2023, about launching a Ukraine-themed project, “Our hope was that we could help Americans not forget that the war was going on,” said RealTime co-founder Molly Rice.
That’s still an important goal. But after months of virtual and in-person meetings with the Ukrainian art therapists with whom DTCare connected them, Rice and fellow RealTime co-founder Rusty Thelin realized there was a more urgent need: the plight of Ukraine’s military veterans.
“It’s very dark days for a lot of Ukrainian veterans,” Rice said.
RealTime has begun connecting Ukrainian vets to U.S. vets as part of a planned theater work that addresses the issue, titled “there is a blue that only children see.”
The group also wants the public’s input. On Sat., April 11, RealTime will host an evening of performance and discussion called “Build Me A Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore,” at the Carnegie Coffee Company in Carnegie.
RealTime practices community-centered theater. That’s meant shows honoring the social fabric of Braddock, celebrating Afghan culture through food, and even highlighting “extraordinary ordinary” individual Pittsburghers.
So why Ukrainian folklore? Rice and Thelin first began exploring it last year, on a fellowship in Italy.
“Folklore is sort of this big umbrella under which people can gather,” Rice says. “It’s usually universal, it points to fundamental truths.”
The tales handed down over generations are Ukraine’s equivalent of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Rice says, complete with anthropomorphized animals.
Yet the stories aren’t necessarily didactic, like some old bedtime stories.
“There’s not a lot of obvious moral lessons, which I love,” Molly says.
One recurring animal character is Sister Fox. “Sometimes she’s the villain, sometimes she’s the hero of the story,” says Thelin.
In their ambiguity, the tales have a taste of Irish folklore or even Native American stories. “There’s a grittiness, a crunchiness,” Rice says.
She adds that the stories can be both Rorschachs for a reader’s own experience and time capsules that evoke a distant time and place.
The story “The Red Death,” for instance, describes what members of one community consider “an honorable death” for their elderly — a way for them to cease being a burden. But the story depicts one old man demonstrating why the Red Death is actually a terrible practice.
Rice says the story echoes the experience of many veterans, who like the elderly are simultaneously honored and shunted aside. Many don’t know how to access benefits, and communities don’t know what to do with physically and psychologically damaged young men returning from war.
That, too, seems a sadly universal experience, which is why RealTime is seeking to recruit veterans from the two countries. “Can we get Americans who have lived through it, who have rebuilt their lives and found meaning and purpose” to connect with the Ukrainian vets, she asks.
Meanwhile, even as the project took shape, Rice says, a new American president continued his history of admiration for the authoritarian Russian leader who invaded Ukraine, and his administration proposed cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“The troubling things that have happened in our government reflect the threats that [Ukrainians are] fighting against,” she says.
“Build Me A Voice” will feature actors including Tim McGeever, Nancy McGeever, Hazel Leroy, Josh Saboorizadeh and Lish Danielle reading folk tales, punctuated musically by the Pittsburgh-based Ukrainian duo Frazé-Frazénkos.
There’ll also be free coffee, tea and smoothies and a discussion with the creative team.
“We really just want to get the feedback from the audience – what rings true to them,” says Thelin.
