[THEATRE] Play Reading: Six Men Dressed Like Joseph Stalin by Dianne Nora

ABOUT THE PLAY

When Soso is left for dead on the Eastern Front, he’s taken in by the Kremlin due to his shocking resemblance to a certain someone. Koba is tasked with training him to perform the role of a lifetime: Stalin’s body double. While Soso is a performer—trained to dance, juggle, and tour the countryside entertaining peasants, Koba is an Actor’s Actor, a student of Stanislavski himself (maybe you’ve heard of his System?), committed to the pursuit of perezhivanie, or experiencing a character’s reality. Based roughly on the life of Felix Dadaev, one of Stalin’s known doubles, the play draws on the historical events of Stalin’s life, the acting methods of the 1940s, and the demise of Yakov Dhugasvilli (Stalin’s real son, who died in a Nazi prison as his father refused to negotiate for his release), as the doubles prepare for the Conference at Tehran, when three so-called Great Men (or were they merely players?) decided the fate of the 20th century.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Dianne Nora is a playwright, dramaturg, and comedy writer. She was a 2018-2019 member of Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, where she was commissioned to write Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Living Document. She recently assisted her mentor Tracy Letts on the world premiere and Broadway productions of his play The Minutes, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. In 2019, an abbreviated version of her play Monica: This Play Is Not About Monica Lewinsky premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe, where The Spectator named it the "Best of the Fringe." Her play for young audiences, Journey Around My Bedroom, was produced at New Ohio Theatre in 2020, and recommended by The New York Times (Top 5, Weekend Section). She's a headline and features contributor at The Onion, and her humor writing has also appeared on Funny Or Die and The Hard Times, where she was previously Head Writer of Breaking News. BA: New York University; MPhil: Trinity College Dublin; MFA: Columbia University School of the Arts.