Brandeis Magazine

Winter 2024/2025

Theater Matters

Director Dmitry Troyanovsky ’98 teaches Brandeis students how to create art in tumultuous times.

Dmitry Troyanovsky seated on a spiral staircase.
Dmitry Troyanovsky ’98

Photo Credit: Dan Holmes

By Sarah C. Baldwin

Associate professor of theater arts Dmitry Troyanovsky ’98 is passionate about the power of a great stage production. But you won’t find him standing in line to buy tickets to the latest must-see Broadway musical. For him, theater is less a source of entertainment than a creative medium that explores timeless truths, especially those that apply to the most urgent events of the day.

Troyanovsky, an acclaimed director, teaches courses on directing as well as acting, Russian theater, and theater and the Holocaust. In every class, he takes his students as seriously as he takes his material, treating them like junior colleagues, whatever their major.

“Dmitry doesn’t fill the classroom or the rehearsal room with an overpowering, outsized personality,” says Dylan Hoffman ’18, a writer, director, and translator who took several classes with Troyanovsky, and has collaborated with him professionally. “He has a reserved essence, a quiet confidence, an almost stately ability to direct things while still encouraging his actors to come toward him. I’d walk into the classroom and think, ‘I want to grow. I want to show Dmitry what I have. I want to go meet him.’”

In summer 2022, Troyanovsky, a native of Ukraine, traveled to Berlin to serve as a volunteer interpreter for Ukrainians who had escaped the conflict with Russia. He encountered a theater scene pulsing with solidarity for Ukraine: performances by Ukrainian refugee actors, public conversations with Ukrainian theater makers, fundraising events.

A few months later, Troyanovsky co-wrote a journal article that exhorted American theater institutions to “redouble our efforts to engage with one of the most consequential events of our lifetime.” Theater companies could showcase Ukrainian culture, the article suggested. Assist local refugees. Upend traditional holiday programming by replacing “A Christmas Carol” with a Ukrainian fairy tale.

Yet, with the exception of a co-production by Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, Troyanovsky knows of no major regional theater in the U.S. that has undertaken a play by a Ukrainian about the war being waged in Ukraine.

“If that’s true, that’s a pretty dismal state of affairs,” he says. “I can’t shake off the feeling we’ve become very parochial in our theater culture.”

A puppet-show epiphany

For the first 13 years of his life, Troyanovsky called Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, home. It’s where, at age 3 or 4, he discovered what he calls the “terrible magnetism of the stage.”

His mother had taken him to his first live puppet show, starring a duckling and a fox. When an actor asked for a volunteer from the audience to defend the duckling from the fox with a stick, Troyanovsky bolted onto the stage and grabbed the weapon. When the fox puppet suddenly leaped out from some bushes with a shriek, the little boy burst into tears and ran back to his seat — Troyanovsky remembers feeling flooded with an almost “metaphysical” double wave of fear and fascination in that moment.

Obsessed, he began building puppets and designing sets with whatever materials he could find at home. “No tablecloth or sheet was safe,” he admits.

“The way that puppet show made me feel — ecstatic, interested, terrified — stayed with me,” he says. “Other kids go through phases: I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a doctor. For me, it was always about performance.”

In 1989, as the U.S.S.R. began to collapse, Troyanovsky and his family (along with more than 50,000 other Soviet Jews) emigrated to the United States. Living in New York City — displaced, stateless — the shy teenager auditioned for and got a lead role in a documentary play commissioned by the United Jewish Appeal to tell stories about Soviet teenagers and their American counterparts.

Scripted by renowned dramatist Joyce Klein, who conducted interviews with the all-teen cast, and featuring original songs by composer Jeff Franzel, “Immigranti!” opened and toured — including at the Public Theater, the beloved institution founded in 1954 by Joseph Papp — for the next three years. The experience “filled my life with meaning, friendships, community,” Troyanovsky says. “Theater saved me.”

He enrolled at Brandeis in 1994 and continued to act, playing several roles in theater arts professor John Bush Jones’ production of “The God of Isaac.” (Though he almost missed that chance. Confounded by the design of Spingold Theater, the first-year found himself walking in circles, unable to locate the classroom where auditions were being held, until a good Samaritan, seeing his lost expression, directed him to the building’s middle level.)

Troyanovsky on stage with other performers in Brandeis' 1994 production of “The God of Isaac.”
‘THEATER SAVED ME’: As an undergraduate, Troyanovsky (far left) appeared in the university’s 1994 production of “The God of Isaac,” by James Sherman, GSAS MFA’83. (Photo courtesy Dmitry Troyanovsky)

His true path was charted the following semester. In a class on avant-garde theater taught by Arthur Holmberg, the Blanche, Barbara, and Irving Laurie Professor of Theater Arts, he studied such experimental theater makers as JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, and Robert Wilson.

“That course was an explosion for me,” he recalls. “It opened my mind to what theater can do.”

Troyanovsky’s final project for the course was a staging of short plays by Italian futurists. His theater professors were impressed. “They made me believe I could become a professional director,” he says.

And he loved directing. “I express myself better through the combination of images and sound onstage,” he says. “It’s a way to communicate things that are important to me that I can’t put into words.”

Escaping the theater bubble

As immersed as he was in theater, Troyanovsky — already shaped by a personal experience with geopolitical events — added a politics major to his theater arts major. It gave him an additional lens through which to study the workings of the world, a perspective he believes is crucial to his vocation.

“The least-stimulating theater people are those who can only talk about the ‘biz,’ the next audition, the next directing workshop,” he says. “There’s more to intellectual life; there’s more to art. If you want to be a director, you have to get out of the theater bubble.”

After graduating summa cum laude from Brandeis, Troyanovsky earned a Master of Fine Arts in directing at Harvard University. Since then, he has directed for and taught at companies all over the world, from Shanghai, Prague, and Moscow to Sarasota, Boise, and Boston. Teaching at the college level (including at New York University and Tulane University) has afforded him additional venues in which to stage experimental work and hone his art.

Critics have called him a “true visionary” who “creates vivid stage images and stirring emotions.” His work has been labeled “gutsy,” “fearless,” “inventive,” “haunting,” and “elegant.”

He’s been teaching at Brandeis since 2015. “The projects I gravitate toward either express something in the zeitgeist, something that’s relevant, or they’re plays I believe wouldn’t be done by the bigger nonprofit theaters in Boston,” he says. “Why replicate what they already do? I want to do something that wouldn’t otherwise be seen, that my students wouldn’t be able to see, and something that, frankly, I wouldn’t be able to work on outside of Brandeis.”

Troyanovsky speaks to a group of students.
QUIET CONFIDENCE: Troyanovsky teaches a directing class at Spingold Theater Center.
Photo Credit: Gaelen Morse

The university’s innovative 2019 production of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” is a case in point. The show was a collaboration between director Troyanovsky and his colleagues Cameron Anderson, the Barbara Sherman ’54 and Malcolm L. Sherman Associate Professor of Theater Arts, who created the scenic design, and Joel Christensen ’01, GSAS MA’01, professor of classical studies, who provided an updated translation of the 2,400-year-old play. Lyricist Stephanie Fleischmann and composer Daniel Kluger wrote original songs and arrangements.

“There’s practically no way for small and midsize companies to do that kind of work in America today,” Troyanovsky says. “And the bigger regional theaters don’t seem interested in the material, even though they have the budget.”

A group of people in stage performing in costumes.
DIONYSIAN PASSION: A collaboration between Brandeis faculty — including Troyanovsky, as director — created a powerhouse production of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in 2019.
Photo Credit: Mike Lovett

This spring, he plans to direct “Intractable Woman” — described by The New York Times as “cool, carefully composed, and frightening”— at Brandeis. Written by Stefano Massini, the play is about Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose reporting on the brutality of the Russian campaign in Chechnya inflamed Russia’s military and government leaders. In 2006, Politkovskaya was assassinated in her Moscow apartment building.

“The time is right, because Russia is waging yet another war,” Troyanovsky says. “I thought, ‘We have to do it.’”

Troyanovsky emphasizes he’s not training his students to enter the workforce of American theater. Rather, he is teaching them how to think like artists.

“It’s one thing to put a fact in someone’s head,” he says. “The more exalted way of teaching is to inspire students to make their own discoveries. If they’re able to articulate something in their own way, I know the knowledge will stay.”

“The least-stimulating theater people are those who can only talk about the ‘biz,’ the next audition, the next directing workshop. There’s more to intellectual life; there’s more to art.”

Dmitry Troyanovsky ’98

Former student Hoffman explains how Troyanovsky influenced him: “In the conception of theater I inherited from Dmitry, you have an opportunity as a director to take a text and combine it with a novel image or sound, something that you discover. And that combination can cause something completely unexpected in the audience, something the writer might not have anticipated.

“Dmitry’s ambition is toward an art that is invigorating, curious, politically alive, socially alive, in conversation with the history of art and also the history of the world.”

Troyanovsky doesn’t believe art alone can save the world. But he thinks it can and should make a difference. “The higher point of theater,” he says, “is to create moments that open up meanings, that move people from one way of understanding to another.”


Sarah C. Baldwin is a freelance writer living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.