The New Drama Festival Moscow, September 05 Christian Parker- Associate Artistic Director  Atlantic Theater Company Much of the most fruitful dialogue for future collaboration, I believe, might stem not so much from the discussion of the mounting of specific plays, but in the sharing of traditions and methodologies about the process of theatre-making itself. American theatre artists tend to retain a dominant impression that we have a direct aesthetic link to the Russians, but this unfortunately largely based on our own misperceptions about Stanislavsky and Chekhov thanks to the legacy of Strasberg and psychological realism. Indeed, the history and function of the repertory system, near total government subsidy (and thus censorial control), and the dominance of the actual pedagogy of Stanislavsky in Russia distinguish that theatrical culture greatly from our own. As we continually lament the state of American playwriting and tend to feel anguish over the degree to which theatre cannot easily maintain a cultural niche in a media-saturated culture, we would do well to look to Russia to learn from both their producing traditions and from the struggles they face in continuing to generate new theatre in a rapidly changing socio-political climate. Likewise, the Russians, who are seeing subsidies disappear and finding audiences harder to reach, might be able to learn much from our flawed but still extant system of non-profit theatres, fund-raising strategies, and audience development. These are just a few areas in which we may find that it is our differences, not our similarities, which allow for the deepest and most artistically adventurous collaborations down the road.

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