MG (aka I want a baby! reimagined) : a feminist, speculative, queer exploration of the content and context of Tret’iakov’s 1926 play, I want a baby!

Abstract

My project “M.G. (aka I Want a Baby! Reimagined)” is an experimental, speculative, feminist, and queer iteration of Tret’iakov’s historically important, originally censored, and now lesser-known play, which was performed at EMPAC in April 2019. In both my interpretation of the play and my dissertation analysis, I feature what was so central but invisible and under-acknowledged in Tret’iakov’s I Want a Baby!, the pregnant and yet absent center of Milda’s pregnancy. My dissertation is intended to draw out the “queer potential” embedded in the revolutionary visions of this work: hidden within these earlier utopian ideas, we may find other (un/intentional) radical propositions that, in our return to this history, can spark new future trajectories. As an artist and scholar, I am interested in what I am calling proximity, probability, and plausibility. Examining the likely, but absent or only alluded to, imagined LGBTQ+ lives partially represented in words, objects, photographs, and archival records. What can we imagine and create in this speculative space? In the space of this speculation, I pose the question: What would it mean to imagine Milda as queer.

This dissertation, “M.G. (aka I Want a Baby! Reimagined),” is a scholarly and artistic examination of Sergei Tret’iakov’s play Хочу ребëнка (I Want a Baby!), originally written in 1926. Central to Tret’iakov’s plot is Milda Grignau, a cultural worker dedicated to building a collective nursery, who decides that she would like to birth the ”perfect” proletarian without a participating father/partner. Tret’iakov’s play is of great interest for its place in 1920s Soviet theatrical history, for its depiction of the themes of sex, sexuality, and gender, topics that were hotly debated at the time, and for the proposed stagings by Igor Terent’ev and Vsevolod Meyerhold, involving multimedia elements and audience participation, which were strikingly innovative for the Soviet 1920s. The play, however, was censored by Glavrepertkom (Soviet theatrical repertoire committee) in 1927, and it never saw the stage during the lifetimes of both Tret’iakov and Meyerhold. The original play was not published in full until 1988 and not performed on a Russian stage until 1990.