Early in the Ukrainian play Vertep for Homo Sapiens, which had its world premiere at the Hopkins Center for the Arts on June 2, the character Joseph describes in a video what it was like passing through Russian roadblocks after the 2022 invasion of his homeland. The school bus of students and staff makes it through numerous checkpoints until, at one, the Russians demand that Joseph, played by Jacob Bowen-Glazeroff ’28, come inside.
Joseph speaks quietly. “I won’t tell you what happened there, but I kept myself from screaming so I wouldn’t frighten the children, you understand?” he says, head down, face veiled in shadow.
His is one of a number of documentary-like, black-and-white videos describing life in a war zone that punctuate the 90-minute play by the noted Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko. The production, which was livestreamed to Ukraine, was the culmination of an intensive nine-week process this spring by Dartmouth students to translate Rafeyenko’s play into English and bring a fully realized production to the Hop Garage for a two-day run.
Victoria Somoff, an associate professor in the Department of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies, spearheaded the translation and the production. She and Rafeyenko grew up during the late Soviet period in the eastern Ukrainian, primarily Russian-speaking, city of Donetsk and became friends at university after Ukraine’s independence. Somoff immigrated with her family to the U.S. in the late 1990s and has taught at Dartmouth since 2007.
When Donetsk was seized in 2014 by proxy Russian forces, Rafeyenko moved to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, vowing to never again write in Russian, Somoff says. He learned to speak and write Ukrainian fluently, and, Somoff adds, “to create literature in it, which is quite amazing.”
Somoff, who specializes in folklore and the theory and history of the novel, with recent work on Ukrainian literature, culture, and oral tradition, introduced a Ukrainian language class at Dartmouth in 2023, and began incorporating theater in 2024 with two short Ukrainian plays about the war, which the students translated and presented as staged readings.
But for this spring term, she says, she wanted to create something different: a collaborative translation and theatrical production bringing together students from Ukraine and Dartmouth students studying Ukrainian.
Somoff recalls the exchange with Rafeyenko: “Can you write me a play? And he said, okay, I will write you a play.”
Two truths in one play
Rafeyenko drew on a venerable Ukrainian tradition, the vertep, the traditional Christmas folk theater that brings together surreal comedy, sacred texts, elaborate wordplay, songs, dancing, and music in a celebratory ritual. He joined two seemingly irreconcilable truths, the humor and spirituality of the vertep and the ferocity of war, into a single play.
Peter Webster, an actor and director who co-directed Vertep with Alexander Adele Campbell ’26, pinpoints what makes the play such a revelatory experience for audiences unfamiliar with vertep and the Ukrainian theatrical tradition. “It is a dense, profound, surrealistic, euphoric, tragic, dark, passionate, cruel play,” he says. “And it is completely not North American. It’s not Anglo Saxon. The references in the play are hard to understand to most Americans. The images, the references, the use of language is completely other to the way we do that.”
The production included props specific to Ukrainian culture, sound effects mimicking the bombardment of war that were created for the play, and reproductions of Eastern European religious icons. The students also recreated drawings made by Ukrainian children during the war, of burning houses, crying children, and falling bombs.
Victoria Kartashev ’29 (left) and Nico Bezzerides ’27
Fifteen students played parts that included angels, queens, a journalist, a shepherd, a racoon, and the Spirit of Ukraine. In all, 21 people from Dartmouth and the Upper Valley community worked as techs and actors, in addition to the Hop’s professional staff. Shakeb Arsalan ’26 was the cinematographer. The performances were part of the international initiative Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings, which brings new Ukrainian plays to audiences through translation and performance. Dartmouth’s Leslie Center for the Humanities donated funds to the project.
The native Ukrainians and those with Ukrainian ancestry felt strongly about doing the play, even though the rehearsals had their painful moments, Somoff says.
“They feel that they want to speak about their country, and they want to speak about their people’s experience, and this is a way to give voice to those people who are dying in Ukraine right now. They’re advocating for their nation,” Somoff says.
Rafeyenko, who will be writing and teaching at Harvard for a year beginning in the fall, worked on Vertep for nearly a year, including writing the video monologues. “As I gathered, reflected on, and transformed the real stories of real Ukrainians into the documentary foundation of the play, I spent weeks in what I can only describe as a state of elevated melancholy,” he wrote in an email that Somoff translated into English.
Making it their own, word by word
Somoff helped the student actors and translators transform Rafeyenko’s allusive, sometimes fantastical text into a production a largely English-speaking audience could understand and appreciate.
Working in teams, the students spent hours ensuring that Rafeyenko’s writing, particularly sections in which he rhymes, had an equally sophisticated English-language counterpart. The fluent Ukrainian speakers schooled the non-Ukrainian speakers on the subtleties of the language, while native English speakers conveyed how the translation would sound to American ears, while retaining the Ukrainian character of the original.
The result, Somoff says, was that “we were able to bring the original in all its depth and complexity, and to really explain what words mean, and all the cultural reality, and the context.”
Bowen-Glazeroff, a government major, was happy with “what we were able to accomplish. Most of the people in the course had little to no acting experience, so I was proud that we had put on a play which was worth seeing,” he says.
Cinematographer Arsalan was struck by the number of Ukrainians who signed on for the play. “It’s not a project that a distant third party is creating in honor of something, or celebrating something. It’s a very deeply personal experience for all these folks,” he says.
For Sasha Gol’dina ’29, a Ukrainian who plays the queen of Kyiv, the production gave her the sensation of actually being heard. A quantitative social science and linguistics major, she spent part of her childhood in Crimea before the Russians occupied it in 2014. She and her family now live in unoccupied Ukraine.
“It matters to me that audiences see Ukraine as a living culture—with its own music, poetry, humor—not only as a place being bombed,” Gol’dina says, adding that her parents stayed up until 2 a.m. to watch the livestream of Vertep.
Somoff had invited friends to the production, including Ukrainians who told her afterward how moved they were, including one who wept through the play. “The war was in the present, as opposed to in the morning news,” Somoff says.
For Rafeyenko, seeing his play staged for the first time, “this was not simply a Ukrainian language course or a group of people learning a language and reading a translated text by a contemporary Ukrainian author,” he says. “These were people who collectively brought a living theatrical work into being. It was alive, youthful, and inspired.”