The Brooklyn Rail

In 2016, the playwright Sarah Gancher discovered she was following a group of Russian trolls on Facebook. Their username was Blacktivist, and they were paid by the Russian government to spread disinformation about the US presidential election. Gancher found this fascinating. She started thinking about the trolls all the time—what they ate, how they talked—until she realized why she was so interested. “They’re playwrights,” she said. “Like me.”

She decided to write about it. In her play, Russian Troll Farm, Blacktivist’s most dedicated writer is a man named Egor. He posts more disinformation than anyone in his unit and hopes to win a free microwave. At one point in the play—which premiered over Zoom during the pandemic, and has its first live performance in New York at the Vineyard Theater through March—we see a day in Egor’s life pass by like a drained-out slapstick routine. Everything happens at warp speed: his co-workers rush in to work, flirt, complain about their bowels, kiss, and leave again, all while he tweets. There’s a sadness to the scene—life is passing by without him. But in a way, the life he’s missing is no more profound. The people racing by in the background are simply keeping themselves busy—with arguments, with work, with love. Their life is just as fake as his own. That’s the joke.

Gancher started writing comedies as a teenager. When she was in high school, her father died from cancer, leaving behind an unfinished novel about the Three Stooges. The story was a goofy epic, bouncing from Azerbaijan to Hollywood, about the Stooges trying to spread the magic of a Jewish-Taoist-Buddhist comedy cult to the world. They believed that laughter had the power to heal people, to free them from their suffering. Gancher read it a year after her father’s death, and decided that one day she would finish the story.

She had planned to become a painter but decided to study comedy instead. She found a copy of Dario Fo’s The Tricks of the Trade that her dad had left behind, dog-eared and scribbled-in, and learned how humor could emerge from simultaneous truths. Growing up, she had liked learning about Buddhist teachings with her mother because they felt ancient. Now, she found that Buddhism and comedy shared an essential principle: they recognized that the stories we have are inadequate containers for the world.

One summer in college, Gancher got a job working as the prop master for Big Apple Circus because she wanted to watch the clowns. Every time the circus hopped cities, she put the tent up and took it down again, until her arms and legs were covered in permanent bruises. She imagined that each performance would feel different, but in fact the circus was always exactly the same, down to the faux-wobbles when an acrobat balanced atop their partner’s hands. She preferred the clowns of commedia dell’arte. Each had infinite variations. You could throw them into any story, any place, and they would be both the same and different—uniquely blended with the new terrain. It reminded her of improvising music, the way you could change the same melody to fit new moods. As a teenager, she had played violin in her dad’s band and she loved comedy that felt like a riff, springing from its natural moment.

After college, she started a theater company with her friends. She watched them improvise during rehearsals and saw how each was funny in their own particular way. She liked writing best when it felt like a service, something she did for other people to draw them out. She started creating big comedies, wacky and loud, because it was what her dad had loved, and because she liked that absurdism never pretended the world was logical. It was a peephole that allowed you to see beyond your position—to the general silliness of things.

In 2005, Gancher visited Hungary with her boyfriend, and they decided to move. In Budapest, there were barely any English bookstores, so she read the books in her suitcase again and again. One of them was Peter Schmidt’s translation of Chekhov’s plays. She read The Seagull, and for the first time, she found Chekhov funny. She laughed at how his characters were so relentlessly themselves. They could turn any situation to their own private agenda. “This is what people are like,” she thought to herself. “This is what people do. Everybody is running around trapped in themselves all the time. We are so stupid.”

She started writing plays about Budapest’s Jewish Quarter, and found that history worked like comedy—exposing the simultaneous truths of any given moment. As a child, she had loved reading about other times. It fascinated her that a place could be at once the same and different, changed and unchanged by the passing years. It was the same way with people: she both grew and remained the same. In one sense, she was who she had been at age eight. In another, she was a new person. “Those things are both one hundred percent true and they one hundred percent cancel each other out. That’s a joke as well,” she said.

Her plays became a cycle. In one of them, Seder, a woman accuses her mother of supporting the communist regime. She hangs her mother’s picture on a wall of traitors, violently condemning her, but there’s an uneasy parallel between her mother’s position and her own: the younger woman supports Hungary’s new fascist government. By the end of the play, her own face has appeared on the wall. It’s a punchline without laughter—the collision between two opposing forces, the story we tell and the one we actually live.

In a way, this is the joke of Russian Troll Farm. We’re quick to condemn the trolls, to add them to our wall of traitors. But, as it turns out, only one thinks of monstrosity as “his thing.” The rest go about their work like they’re selling paperclips. One troll puts the job like this: “I know this is evil, but I also want to be good at it.” They might be changing the course of a national election, but they spend more time thinking about promotions and whether people in the office like them—the things we think about at our own morally complicated jobs.

Over the course of the play, the joke roves. At first, it’s funny to watch people treat a sinister job with indifference. Then, it’s funny to watch them care—to see Masha treat her tunnel conspiracy like art, to hear Egor worry over losing his special place in his online community of radicals. These things don’t matter, we think: Masha’s work isn’t art, Egor’s place in his community isn’t real. Then again, what’s the difference between their fictions about themselves and our own? There isn’t one, really. That’s the true joke.

Years ago, in college, Gancher tried to finish her dad’s novel, but stopped after one chapter. In 2012, she started again. She wrote a play about a young comedian who hates the world and struggles with the idea of finishing the Three Stooges rock opera her father died writing. Her dying uncle tells her it’s his last wish. “Oh the Stooges are profound, man,” he says. “Slapstick is samsara in its purest form—pain leads to violence leads to pain leads to violence—but it all builds to this joyful chaos.”

There’s a scene in the play that explodes like a bit from the Three Stooges. Friends and family rush in to mourn the dying uncle. One waves a cardboard box, another climbs into his bed, the comedian strokes his face with a giant foam finger. It all happens too fast for him to take in. He tries to slow the scene down, to hear a few lines, but it just speeds up again. There’s the sense that by the time he understands anything, the scene will be over: it will be too late.

He dies before the story of the Three Stooges is finished. Over the course of the play, the task of finishing it travels from hand to hand, until it reaches the comedian, who wonders if she too will fail to complete the work. She finds an unfinished passage in her father’s notebook called “Shempo Funeral.” It’s about how Stooges go to die, laughing until their sorrows explode, and find that the world was always a joke: “This whole life is an incredible buildup to a cosmic punchline made just for you.”

When Gancher was first living in New York, she had a dream. She was watching an improv troupe make elaborate stories. Someone beside her asked what she was doing. Gancher replied, “We create tiny universes, then we destroy them.” Then she woke up.