The Battle of the Sexes Russian Style

Nadezhda Ptushkina is the author of more than seventy plays and nine screenplays. Since 1997 she has held first place for the number of plays and audience attendance among all contemporary Russian playwrights. Her plays are staged throughout Russia and in the Soviet successor states as well as in Europe and Japan. Ptushkina also has written screenplays for nine films, three of which she directed herself. As she said in a recent interview for The Novye novosti [The New News], she moved into the media of film in search of what Chekhov once called "new forms", which the playwright hopes to find at the juncture of the most ancient and the most characteristic dramatic art form for the 20th century and beyond. In recent years Ptushkina also has turned to directing her own plays at several theaters.Ptushkina has had an extraordinarily diverse and colorful biography before her success as a playwright. Earlier in her life, she experienced years of financial hardship and was forced to work to provide for her family. During Gorbachev's perestroika, when the entire cultural infrastructure of the USSR collapsed, Ptushkina became a businesswoman. Ptushkina's fame as a playwright began in 1994 when St. Petersburg's "Experiment" state theater produced her play A Monument to Victims. The success led to the same theater releasing a production of another of Ptushkina's plays - A Mad Woman the same year. Eventually, Vitaly V. Lanskoy's production of her play Somebody Else's Candlelight at the "small stage" of the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow in 1995 after which she became the most staged playwright in the capital almost overnight.