The Brooklyn Rail

Early in Danny Strong’s new book for Chess on Broadway, the narrator proclaims, “Welcome to the first, and—depending on how this goes—last Cold War musical.”

It’s possible Chess won’t have any successors; a forty-plus-year mass geopolitical conflict waged through ideology, pop culture, and an arms race is unwieldy fodder for a musical. But while the show stands alone in the musical category, the current revival is not the only Cold War-inspired story on stage this winter: Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia, playing at Signature Theatre, and Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice at MCC Theater are both historical comedies exploring the impact of the Cold War, capitalism, and global politics on young people.

Set immediately after the Cold War in 1992 St. Petersberg, Mother Russia follows two twenty-five year olds fumbling their way into the surveillance business while contending with the overwhelming introduction of new American products. Yee said her play is about “the collision between communism in Asia in the twentieth century and Western pop culture,” joining her series of plays that explore “Americana through an outsider’s lens.”

Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice, meanwhile, offers the decidedly American perspective of Meek, a young Black girl living in Syracuse in 1987. Meek might be only ten, but with the help of her choir, the Seedlings of Peace, she’s hoping to garner empathy from world leaders and prevent nuclear war. Reddick wrote the play in graduate school, infusing what she learned in a class about the “intersection of art, politics, and mid-century technology cybernetics” with her experiences as a child in a choir “pleading for our lives via song.”

The Cold War is no stranger to artistic interpretation: it is seen in modern TV shows (Ponies, Slow Horses, Stranger Things), films (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Bridge of Spies), and even podcasts (Wind of Change). The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and yet here it is loudly appearing in multiple stage productions in 2026.

In both plays, the USSR is an omnipresent force. “What if I told you Mother Russia will give you what you most desire?” a mysterious acquaintance asks Meek.

“Russia is a complete fantasy,” Reddick said, an idyllic escape from fear and family drama. Yee’s titular Mother Russia is a mystical “symbol of national identity [and] propaganda,” but she’s also fully realized, performed (in drag) by David Turner and offering a “frame to ground the play’s absurd goings on.”

Absurdity is key to Yee and Reddick’s works, and Reddick says that one of her aims is to “reflect back the absurdity” of the era. Mother Russia feels like a workplace comedy/caper-meets-Chekhov, and Choir Practice sees its ensemble shapeshifting from children to carolers to cult members. Yee said she always strives to find “something hilarious in bleak, dire, desperate circumstances,” but neither playwright sacrifices historical specificity for outlandishness. There’s a lovely, lived-in feeling to the works that comes through, particularly in their use of pop culture. Yee references everything from McDonalds to Pussy Riot, while Reddick, who describes her research process as “just completely submerging” herself into the era, establishes 1987 Syracuse with Atomic Fireballs and Speak & Spell toys.

It helps that the playwrights both have ties to the time period—Reddick with her choir, and Yee describing Mother Russia as an homage to classmates who “came over in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union.” Reddick and Yee also credit the help of Russian collaborators; Reddick had a Moscow consultant, and Yee cites developmental conversations with Mother Russia’s sound designer, Mikhail Fiksel.

The two plays are concurrently running, are both written by women, and concern a similar time period: but why now?

Spy thrillers, government surveillance, and heists are always compelling subjects. On a geopolitical level, Russia remains on the mind as its war in Ukraine continues. But to look more broadly, world peace feels impossible, injustice is everywhere, and democracies are teetering on a knife’s edge. Such concerns parallel the politics of a bygone era that is creeping back. Per Reddick, “There's a realignment happening at a global level that is creating a lot of uncertainty and tension that must feel familiar.”

A history professor agrees: “Today, there’s apocalypse everywhere,” so perhaps such dramatizations have “something to do with a nostalgia for when things were equally terrifying, but easier to understand,” said John J. Curley, a professor at Wake Forest University and author of Global Art and the Cold War. Although the Cold War is nuanced, it’s easy to plot in simple terms—West vs. East, us vs. them—and there’s comfort in that easy binary.

Yee finds comfort, too. “One day the Cold War just disappeared,” she said. “We’re fascinated with that because it’s just a reminder that things can very quickly shift.”

Cold War Choir Practice and Mother Russia offer laughs, and relevance, but perhaps also hope. As Yee puts it, “We may be living at a time that feels absurd and unprecedented,” but in the meantime, there’s delicious comedy, rich history lessons, and the tangibility of positive change.