John Freedman

American writer, translator and former theatre critic who has lived in Moscow since 1988. His play Dancing, Not Dead won the new play competition conducted by The Internationalists in 2011, and was performed in various languages in Romania, Germany, Russia and the United States. His short play Five Funny Tales from Buenos Aires has been performed frequently in the U.S. and the U.K. With Jennifer Johnson he co-authored Double Edge Theatre’s production of The Firebird in 2010. He has published and/or edited 12 English-language books about Russian theatre, and was the theatre critic of The Moscow Times English-language daily newspaper from 1992 to 2015.

Freedman has translated 75 Russian plays into English, many of which have been performed in England, the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa. He was the Russia director of The New Russian Drama project at Towson University, 2007- 2010, and the director of the U.S.-government supported New American Plays for Russia program, 2010-2013.

Upon invitation from Boris Yukhananov, Freedman quit his 23-year career as a critic and joined the International Department of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in the fall of 2015. Yukhananov jokingly dubbed him the theatre’s “language director,” which, in fact, is close to the truth. The Electrotheatre puts out an enormous quantity of text every month in the form of press releases, treatises, interviews, website posts, schedule booklets, and more, and Freedman translates virtually all of it into English, thus making the work of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre accessible on an international scale. He has created, or overseen the creation of, subtitles to six of the theatre’s productions, including Drillalians, The Blue Bird and Octavia. Trepanation.