Ivan Viripàiev visits La Perla 29

The author of Unbearably long hugs will have a talk with the public on May 10 at 7pm at Teatre La Biblioteca .

Ivan Viripàiev (Irkutsk, Siberia, 1974) is a Polish playwright, director, actor and screenwriter, the greatest exponent of the New Russian Drama. Widely represented in Europe (especially in Poland, where he is a highly acclaimed author, but also in Germany, Italy and Greece), as well as in the United States, Canada and Brazil, Viripaiev is a radical voice in European drama, the works of which they drink from tradition and offer, at the same time, a raw and stark look at reality.

Viripáiev is the author of Unbearably Long Hugs , the upcoming release of La Perla 29. And he is a playwright who has never shied away from political engagement or public denunciation of the Putin regime. For this reason, years ago he left his country to settle in Warsaw (Poland) and following the invasion of Ukraine, he wrote a letter stating that all copyrights generated by his works represented in Russia will go to the refugees. Recently, and as a definitive gesture, he renounced his nationality and has been a Polish citizen for a few weeks.

Viripayev started in the world of theater as an actor in the Magadan Drama Theater and the Petropavlovsk Drama and Comedy Theater in Kamchatka. Between 2013 and 2016 he directed the Praktika Theater in Moscow and, between 2019 and 2021, he was director of the Okko Theater, also in Moscow. He is currently the director of the WEDA company, based in Warsaw.

The author is part of the so-called New Russian Drama, a movement born at the beginning of the 21st century characterized by offering characters on the margins of the system - orphans, homeless people, psychiatric patients - who have been overlooked in the political discourse. The New Russian Drama talks about issues such as alcoholism, drug abuse, threats of terrorism or illegal immigration.

Viripayev's characters confess their actions openly and struggle to find appropriate language for their experiences. In the words of the Polish theater critic Roman Pawlowski, "Viripayev joins the tradition, the elements that have been feeding Russian literature for the last two hundred years: the limits of human freedom, the sense of sacrifice and redemption, the relationship between men and God. Even if his characters are mentally ill, drug addicts or murderers, his aim is not only to analyze a social problem. His theater tells us about a human being who has found himself lost, at the foot of the abyss: about his relationship with others, with God, and with himself.”

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