The Lubimovka Young Russian Playwrights Festival

Lubimovka is a nonprofit annual festival for Russian speaking playwrights from Russia or any other country of the world.

It was founded in 1990 and initially was held at a country estate named Lubimovka which used to belong to Konstantin Stanislavsky in late XIX - early XX century. Nowadays the festival takes place at the Teatr.doc in Moscow early September annually.

What we believe

We believe that theater today is a place for emotional, intellectual and spiritual communication. We believe that theater can and must help society to comprehend changing reality outside and inside human beings, to elaborate ways to cope with eternal conflicts and new difficulties, and to empower the efforts to follow those ways.

We believe that playwright is one of the key figures in theater today. We believe that a playwright can and must create plays that are capable of involving audiences and artists in discussions concerning the most crucial issues in life of contemporary person and society. We believe that support of theater community and live reaction of spectators are essential for both emerging and accomplished authors.

We believe that theater must be open and renewed constantly. We believe that both continuity and contrast between generations make theater deeper. We believe that plays by young authors challenging theater let theater stay alive, stay actual and relevant and keep being in-demand.

What we want

We want to discover new playwrights and introduce them to theater. We want our festival to be a place where young authors meet established writers, spectators, theater professionals representing all generations and art movements.

We want to give emerging authors an opportunity to find their voice and be heard. We want young playwrights to be bold, honest, sensitive and open in their creativity, to be dedicated to their artistic vision. We want them to get the experience of communication with audience and theater professionals on the early stages of their writing careers to develop their playwriting skills. We want to inspire young authors to create new pieces.

We want to enrich theater with new high-quality plays which are relevant and actual for the audience. We want our festival to be a cross-roads of thoughts, opinions and attitudes with new plays in the center of it, plays concerning nowadays reality and values essential for contemporary society.

What we do

For more than 25 years we annually conduct open call for new plays by emerging and established writers. Every year we receive 500-700 new plays from Russian speaking authors.

We present the plays that were selected by our board of readers which includes critics, playwrights, directors, dramatic theorists, dramaturges and art-directors in a form of stage readings for theater professionals and wide audience. Every festival consists of about 40 events including master classes and workshops by theater professionals. All our events are free of admission.

After every reading we invite authors and the audience to discuss the play. We respect playwrights’ intentions and their choice of artistic means and trust him in his further work.

Since 2014 we've been conducting an annual reciprocal translation exchange program between playwriting communities of Russia and the USA in partnership with The Lark Play Development Center (New York). 

We believe that open dialogue and co-creative process build up involvement that advances theater community to a new level and helps the whole society to develop.