Report on the Moscow New Drama Festival September 2005 Murph Henderson - Arden Theatre Company Our group of five Americans (three dramaturgs, an associate artistic director, and a director of new play development) all traveled to Russia to experience this Russian aesthetic as guests of the Center for International Theatre Development, an organization headed by our host, Philip Arnoult. All of us were struck by the license that Russian directors took with texts. Evgeni Grishkovets’s THE CITY, which we saw in two productions, provided a remarkable example of directorial free rein. In the first version of the play, the hero wandered off into his new life at the end, while in the second he was knifed to death, and a scene from earlier in the text finished the play. One Russian playwright complained of this practice in a later discussion. “If you don’t like the ending, write your own play,” she said. Russian playwrights sell their scripts and then lose control of them. Again and again, we were told that Russian theatre belongs to directors.