Ukraine - "Golem"

Overview IVP is back in Chicago with its festival of contemporary plays in translation. Join us for an evening of theatre across languages and cultures. Experience a live reading of a newly translated script, bringing a fresh international voice to the stage. Following the performance, stay for a talk-back with the artists to explore the translation process, themes of the work, and the journey from page to performance. A short reception will follow—an opportunity to connect, reflect, and continue the conversation. “Golem” | Ukraine May 14th, 2026 Written by Sasha Denisova Translated by Maria Saltykova Directed by Kay Martinovich In partnership with Trap Door Theatre Synopsis Max’s ex-wife, Marta — a bohemian 47-year-old woman from New York — arrives in Ukraine for his funeral. However, his widow Maria, a young artist, refuses to bury him. His body has finally been found on the front line. Yet Maria refuses to identify or bury him. Because Max is alive — he has been coming back. At first, Marta believes Maria. She looks around her former husband’s study — she is back in the apartment where, as young students, they dreamed of becoming writers, reading European literature together. But Max went to the front to defend his country and died. Though he could barely take out the trash — an intellectual, a screenwriter, a poet. Then Marta finds a doll in the wardrobe. The doll looks like Max. The doll has a body sewn from pillows, and a face made of papier-mâché and fragments of Max’s photographs. It is him — half-alive, but loved. Marta is forced to play Maria’s game: to have dinner with the doll, watch the news, argue about whom he loved more, and read aloud their favorite novel — The Golem — about a Prague rabbi who creates a man from clay, neither alive nor dead, but living forever. A ghost.