Witness Onstage is the first monograph dedicated to documentary theater in twenty-first century Russia. Although documentary practices in Russian theater have received growing attention from Slavists in recent years, as has the more wide-ranging movement of New Russian Drama within which they emerged, Molly Flynn's erudite study represents the most thorough attempt to understand these practices and to distinguish Russian documentary theater both from other theatrical genres and documentary theater as it is practiced in the west. Benefitting from the author's expertise in theater and performance studies, as well as first-hand experience with Russian documentary staging practices, Flynn's study will undoubtedly become an important source of reference for future investigations into this provocative and influential genre.

Flynn's book is comprised of six chapters framed by an “Introduction” and a “Conclusion,” though Chapters 1 and 6 function as a kind of second-order frame, describing the origins of Russian documentary theater and reflecting on its uncertain future. Setting this study apart from earlier examinations is Flynn's contention that, far from exhausting its creative energy, Russian documentary theater saw a resurgence in the years surrounding the 2011–12 Russian protest movement. As a result, the productions she has chosen to analyze all date from 2008–12, making her book a perfect companion volume to Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky's seminal study Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (2009).

Flynn begins by introducing several theoretical concepts that she believes can be productively employed to understand Russian documentary theater. Drawing on the work of performance theorists such as Rebecca Schneider, Diana Taylor, and Joseph Roach, she contends that documentary theater is a form of enactment that has the capacity to transform the communities it addresses. One way it does so is through what she calls anamnesis. Derived from the ancient Greek word for “remembrance,” this term, Flynn notes, appears in three distinct contexts: in the medical professions, where it refers to a patient's recounting of personal medical history for the purpose of diagnosis; in philosophy, where it stems from Plato's belief that people do not gain knowledge through the process of learning but rather through the act of remembering; and in Liturgy, where it has the sense of “‘recalling’ or ‘representing’ before God an event in the past, so that it becomes here and now operative by its effects” (15). All three meanings underlie Flynn's vision of Russian documentary theater, which she sees as a type of “communal anamnesis” through which audiences gain access to a body of knowledge about the past “in such a way as to make it unusually operative in the present” (15).

Given the extremely contentious nature of Russia's relationship to its past, however, Flynn also connects Russian documentary theater's anamnestic practices to juridical questions surrounding the evidentiary status of documents, the performance of justice, and the sincerity of testimony. As she observes: “[A]ny attempt to reenact or revive the events of the past in Russia is inherently tied to questions of justice, and, conversely, any attempt at the constitution of justice in contemporary Russia necessitates an acknowledgement of and engagement with the events of the past” (95). She examines documentary theater's concern with justice in the four analytical chapters that make up the “core” of her study, which provide close readings of documentary productions. Judiciously chosen, the productions allow Flynn to connect Russian documentary theater practices to a range of cultural debates and models: from early Soviet mock trials—which, Flynn contends, share surprising resemblances with contemporary documentary theater—to late and post-Soviet polemics around “new sincerity.” Each production also highlights different features of Russian documentary theater: its ritualistic character, its capacity to challenge corrupt institutions of justice, its creation of spaces of intimacy and antagonism that compel audience members “to reconsider their own complicity in a society where corruption is normalized and indeed embedded in the practices of everyday life” (127).

Of course, one can take issue with some aspects of Flynn's study: for instance, there is more similarity between documentary theater and contemporary Russian commemorative rituals than Flynn wants to admit (the Immortal Regiment, too, uses surrogation to “make present” rather than “mark as absent”); in my opinion, Flynn overstates contemporary theater artists’ debt to early Soviet documentary practices (I distinctly recall Elena Gremina's surprise when a theater critic described such practices at a 2017 event organized by Teatr.doc); and her brief excursion on the meaning and status of documents in Russia could have profited from a familiarity with Irina Kaspe's edited volume Status dokumenta: Okonchatel΄naia bumazhka ili otchuzhdennoe svidetel΄stvo (2013). However, these minor quibbles are more than amply compensated by Flynn's elegant presentation of the material and attentive readings, which draw in equal measure on her expert knowledge of Russian cultural history and performance theory. Witness Onstage fills an important gap in current scholarship on New Russian Drama, making the most radical side of this still vibrant movement more accessible to Anglophone audiences, it may also inspire theater artists in the west to consider how their own practices might be made more “operative.”