By SHARON EBERSON
For 10 years, RealTime Arts – emphasis on the “real” – has set its creative sights on the people of Pittsburgh, their border-busting roots, and their place in the fabric of our communities.
A taste of that emphasis will be on display in Build Me a Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore, a fundraising event supporting RealTime’s upcoming work that celebrates Pittsburgh as the fifth largest concentration of Ukrainian-Americans in the country.
The April 11, 2025, event at Carnegie Coffee Company will feature performances of Ukrainian folklore, folk songs, and music by Oleksandr and Mari Frazé-Frazénko – she is a singer and musician, he is a filmmaker, writer and musician in residence as part of City of Asylum’s Fellowship for Ukrainian Writers since March 2023.
Molly Rice, RealTime Arts’’ artistic director and lead playwright, and Rusty Thelin, artistic/executive director, plan to offer a staged reading of the new work, titled Blue That Only Children See. The musical play is a collaboration with Ukrainian art therapists through partners DTCare, Ukrainian artists living in Pittsburgh, and others, in advance of a planned full production in 2026.
“We decided to focus on folklore as a touch point,” Rice said recently. “You will see actors – Tim McKeever and Nancy McKeever, and Hazel Leroy and some of our new team … as theatrically reading these stories. We also will have Oleksandr and Mari playing music. They do really cool adaptations of folk songs.”
In addition, Carnegie Coffee will offer free coffee, free smoothies, “all that great stuff, and then we’ll have a little time at the end for our audience [members] to get together in smaller groups and talk about what they saw, what images really struck them, what animals really jumped out.”
Animals? On a screen?
“We thought about it,” Rice said, but they instead went with the premise, “How far can stories still go without that?,” Rice said.
The project came about when DTCare reached out to the RealTime team, whose projects over the past decade have included the Saints Tour of Braddock, teaming with Bricolage Productions; the murderers row musical Angelmakers: Songs for Female Serial Killers; the ongoing People of Pittsburgh, “celebrating the personality, lived experiences and personal history of ordinary extraordinary Pittsburghers”; and Khūrākī, a 2019 nominee for a Pittsburgh’s Mayor’s Award for Public Art that showcased “cultural/culinary performances designed to challenge Americans’ perceptions about Afghanistan, while supporting a group of Afghan female refugees in their goal to start a collectively owned food business in Pittsburgh.”
The Moon Township-based nonprofit DTCare is “dedicated to making a positive impact on vulnerable communities around the world,” with satellite offices in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Lebanon, South Africa, and Ukraine.
“They are fascinating,” Rice said. “They were originally a shipping company that became a humanitarian organization, and they serve a lot of different countries, and one of them was Ukraine. They started bringing medical equipment, but then their programming just blossomed after that. They’re incredibly good at going into a place and finding what the needs are, and meeting them quickly. … They’re an incredible small organization that does the work.”
The same can be said for RealTime, which as part of the Ukraine program will offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of the company’s play development process, as well as post-performance audience conversations and activities.
During a wide-ranging conversation at the cozy Parisi Cafe in Swissvale, Rice took notes often, storing away ideas for another time. The couple are accustomed to juggling more than one project concurrently. For their 10th anniversary year, that includes Hiroshima 2025: The Apology Module, with the aim of unveiling a “serious workshop” in August.
That work by Rice was initially aimed at the 75th anniversary of the United States bombing of Hiroshima, but the pandemic shutdown nixed that effort, pushed back to the 80th-year commemoration.
Trying to nail down what is in the works and what is imminent, Thelin allowed, “I would say we’re working on two things at a time usually, with other projects simmering and percolating.”
Rice began writing the Hiroshima work nearly 20 years ago, and it has had several successful readings over the years. She noted that, “It hits differently now.”
Even as we spoke, there was a story brewing about the Pentagon flagging photos of the Enola Gay – the aircraft that dropped the bomb that killed tens of thousands of people – because it was said that the name violated DEI regulations by including “gay.” However, the plane was named for the pilot’s mother.
That reminder of World War II comes at time when Rice and Thelin are fueled by the urgency to acknowledge the plight of Ukrainians.
The need to create a new project was immediate, Thelin said, recalling that he was fuming about the Russian invasion of Ukraine during preparations for RealTime’s first People of Pittsburgh presentation, The Alchemist of Sharpsburg.
“I remember when the war broke out and being just so sort of enraged about it, I added a line to the show we were working on to acknowledge that it was going on. And then we were immediately, ‘What are we going to do? We had the experience of working with the Afghans. Now, how can we apply that to working with another population that’s going to be in need?”
Khūrākī had been funded by the office of Public Art and an NEA Our Town Grant.
“There are very few theater artists in public art. It’s a really interesting field,” said Rice, noting that grantees are mostly visual artists.
Rice and Thelin worked in a refugee resettlement for almost a year before creating Khūrākī, written by Rice and directed by Thelin.
That piece focused on five Afghan women who had recently become Americans, attempting to answer, “What do they miss about their homeland? What have they been able to preserve in the flight from home–in their traditions, in their cooking, in their hearts? And what do they want you to know about the beautiful land where they were born?”
Having experience working on international projects with knowledgeable and involved partners has led to the cultural event Build Me a Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore.
On April 11, Pittsburghers will have the opportunity to experience and participate in the RealTime showcase, with a 2026 production of Blue That Only Children See on the horizon.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
RealTime Arts’ Build Me a Voice: The Grit and Soul of Ukrainian Folklore, is Friday, April 11, 7-9 p.m. at Carnegie Coffee Company, 132 East Main Street, Carnegie, PA. Minimum donation is $20, and includes free coffee, tea and smoothies, plus snacks, cookies and craft beer by donation. Tickets: Visit https://realtimeinterventions.thundertix.com/events/243337
of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl.
(Image: Dominque Murray)
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