In “Sickle,” a play about the Holodomor, the Soviet-engineered genocide of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, a group of women try to overcome starvation while a fresh-faced ideologue struggles between her dogma and the devastation it has caused.
The Ukrainian women are alone in the Holodomor, as the men have been deported, but they’re still at the mercy of a world dictated by the powerful men of the USSR.
Grim, but full of tragic humor, the show feels all too relevant in 2025, said its directors.
“There’s something about a circle of women at this moment in history – there’s a lot of rage,” said Lisa Channer, the co-founder and co-director of Theatre Novi Most (which means “new bridge” in Russian) together with Vladimir Rovinsky.
“It’s still the same story, of men badly running things and making our lives hard,” she said, “and sort of a real kind of open misogyny, open sexism, inside of the authoritarian moment that we’re entering.”
At the same time, “there is something very profound, with this resilience and resistance and commitment to each other” in the show, Rovinsky said.
“Sickle” will have its Minnesota premiere from May 1-10 at Mixed Blood Theatre. The show is in English, but will have Ukrainian subtitles projected during the show.
The production is part of a Theatre Novi Most season that includes a reading of a play, still early in development, that tells the real stories of how Ukrainians in Minnesota have grappled with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“An Ocean Away,” a collaboration between the theatre and Belarusian dissident playwright Andrei Kureichik, can be seen on May 16 and 17 at the University of Minnesota.
While Theatre Novi Most is not an explicitly Jewish company, Jewish artists are regularly involved (including several in “Sickle”) and both Channer and Rovinsky have Jewish backgrounds.
Rovinsky has Jewish heritage from a grandparent, but didn’t know about it when growing up in Soviet St. Petersburg. Only later did he realize the impact.
“When I look back, all my best friends are Jewish – it was so obvious to everyone, but we were, like, brainwashed a little bit,” he said.
Channer, meanwhile, is not Jewish but grew up in a very Jewish part of upstate New York. She regularly attended seders and b’nei mitzvahs, and that Jewish community has carried over to her work in the Twin Cities.
A decade of lead-up
“Sickle” is the first full production by Theatre Novi Most since before the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a way, Channer and Rovinsky have been living with the play since its development.
In 2016, Channer was hired to work with Abbey Fenbert, the show’s playwright, as part of a workshop for “Sickle.”
At the time, both Channer and Rovinsky “clocked it. We were like, if any company is going to do this, it should be us,” Channer said.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shutting down the theatre industry. In 2022, while planning for Theatre Novi Most to return to full form, Russia invaded Ukraine in an openly genocidal war. Channer and Rovinsky felt it was time to come back to “Sickle.”
As they put together the production, the co-directors worked closely with Fenbert to adjust the show.
“Even talking with Abby the other day, we’re like, ‘Wow, that line hits different now, that moment needs a shift,’” Channer said. “The moment, it’s just different in 2025 than it was in 2016.”
One of the unique changes is the inclusion of live Ukrainian singing by two singers, meant to represent an ancestral spirit of the land. It’s an addition that gives a transformative power to seeing the Holodomor onstage.
Lisa Channer (left) works with the cast of “Sickle” (courtesy)
“We kind of see the daily routine of this village, and when it’s [interspersed] with singing, with this half dance, half real movement, it strikes a very powerful tone for me,” Rovinsky said. “It penetrates this time of today, and brings us to a different level, like almost to the different time. It’s a portal to a different dimension.”
While full of dark humor, the show is challenging. Alongside starvation, there is also a subplot about parenting, as the group of Ukrainian women work to keep a newborn baby alive.
It’s a fine line to walk between trauma exhibitionism, and telling a story about staying “human in inhuman circumstances,” Channer said. “We don’t think, right now, anyone needs to just watch five women in turmoil and being brutalized and suffering.”
In telling this story – of authoritarianism, struggle, perseverance, and community – Theatre Novi Most hopes to uplift audiences.
It should give people “something to live for and something to fight for,” Channer said. “So I hope people aren’t leaving the play like, ‘Well, that was a bummer.’ I hope they’re leaving the play [thinking], ‘How can I get involved?’”
Docu-theatre with Minnesota voices
In 2020, celebrated Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik had to flee Belarus after a presidential election where, by all accounts, dictator Alexander Lukashenko lost.
Despite the results, with a police state and Russian reinforcements, Lukashenko brutally crushed the political opposition and widespread civil protests that erupted against him. Kureichik, as part of a committee meant to secure the rightful president-elect’s transition to governance, feared for his life.
Now a dissident in exile, Kureichik wrote a documentary play about his experience called “Insulted. Belarus.” Theatres around the world staged readings. Channer and Rovinsky joined in, and got to know the playwright.
That connection would prove fortuitous. A few years later, Theatre Novi Most was performing readings of Ukrainian plays written in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Every time, after our performances, the audience members would want to stay and talk and tell their stories,” Rovinsky said.
As they heard from the community, Channer and Rovinsky decided to compile these stories would make an important piece of theatre – with Kureichik’s help. And given Kureichik’s style is about using verbatim quotes from real people, he agreed to participate.
So the group did in-depth interviews with 16 Ukrainians in Minnesota, spanning refugees from the current war to people who immigrated decades ago, and even young American-born Ukrainians who held onto their heritage.
There was one “Ukrainian mother who, we asked her one question, and she basically talked to us for about three hours, nonstop, just telling her story,” Rovinsky said. “Andrei and I both were sitting holding our breath, because this is the power of those kinds of witness accounts.”
The project is now called “An Ocean Away,” and Kureichik will be in the Twin Cities for the workshop reading of the play in mid-May. Interviewees who contributed will also be invited to the reading.
“It’s a generative moment, and then we’ll share what we have at the end, this sort of draft, with our audience,” Channer said. “It’s very, very early on, and it’s a very tender moment for a play, because these stories are real peoples’. [They are] sacred words. You have to be careful.”
An uncertain future
Channer and Rovinsky plan to continue development of “An Ocean Away,” hopefully with a more developed presentation in the fall and a full production in 2026. They also hope to stage another collaboration with Kureichik in 2026 or 2027, an adaptation of a play by Czech writer Karel Čhapek.
But those plans are anything but secure, in a time where arts funding is at serious risk, including by the Trump administration.
For example, Theatre Novi Most was awarded their first National Endowment for the Arts grant this year in the form of $10,000 to work on “An Ocean Away.”
But the money hasn’t come through.
“There’s now all these varying proposals about, you have to sign this sort of pledge of never using [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and never leading women astray in their gender values and all this,” Channer said.
“At some point we have to decide how, if we’re taking the money, if we’re not taking the money…if they’re just going to not award it…which is heartbreaking, because it’s hard to get the NEA grant,” she said. “It took us a lot of years to get up to that point.”
Meanwhile, state funding is also likely to be strained due to budget cutbacks at the legislature this year (fueled, in part, by the effect of President Donald Trump’s policies on the future Minnesota budget deficit).
And while both Channer and Rovinsky are professors – Channer at the University of Minnesota and Rovinsky at the Minnesota State University of Mankato – it’s hard to expect institutional support when universities are also seeing threats of federal funding cuts.
Finding enough support to survive the next few years will be a challenge. Still, Channer and Rovinsky are confident that, one way or another, the work of theatre will continue.
“Maybe we’ll just be doing it in people’s living rooms, you know, around a campfire, like the old days, like the way we all started, which is ok,” Channer mused. “The thing about theatre – it never quite dies, because everyone wants to sit around a campfire and hear stories.”
Interesting -thank you!