Inna Tsyrlin

Inna Tsyrlin

Inna Tsyrlin’s work responds to society’s responsibility to the natural environment, ideas of political freedom through the lens of historical and current events, and identity in a diaspora. She received a Graduate Fellowship (Ohio University) for STITCHED WITH A SICKLE AND A HAMMER, and the play was the 2019 Renaissance Theaterworks New Play Festival finalist (Milwaukee, WI) and 2020 Alliance/Kendeda...
Inna Tsyrlin’s work responds to society’s responsibility to the natural environment, ideas of political freedom through the lens of historical and current events, and identity in a diaspora. She received a Graduate Fellowship (Ohio University) for STITCHED WITH A SICKLE AND A HAMMER, and the play was the 2019 Renaissance Theaterworks New Play Festival finalist (Milwaukee, WI) and 2020 Alliance/Kendeda Playwriting Competition finalist (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been presented in New York City at The Rising Sun Performance Company (TATTOO ON MY ARM), Emerging Artists Theater, HB Playwrights Theatre, and Manhattan Repertory Theater. She holds a MFA in Playwriting (Ohio University) and is a member of the Dramatist Guild.

Plays

  • Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer
    Aleksandra, a university student arrested by the Soviets for reading an article from the West, is sent to a Gulag camp for seven-years. To help survive her sentence, she joins the camp’s theatre troupe but when she learns that she’ll be performing for the American Vice-President Henry Wallace, she faces a life or death decision. Will she comply with the charade and pretend she is a free woman so she can survive...
    Aleksandra, a university student arrested by the Soviets for reading an article from the West, is sent to a Gulag camp for seven-years. To help survive her sentence, she joins the camp’s theatre troupe but when she learns that she’ll be performing for the American Vice-President Henry Wallace, she faces a life or death decision. Will she comply with the charade and pretend she is a free woman so she can survive the Gulag? Aleksandra realizes she has unintentionally signed up for a scheme to deceive Wallace, and the world, that she and other political prisoners across the Soviet Union do not exist. She prepares for two roles: the character on stage – Nina from Chekhov’s The Seagull – and the role of an actor who’s isn’t imprisoned. The theatre troupe becomes Aleksandra’s family, she even falls for the director. While preparing for the performance she realizes that truth requires even greater sacrifice than her arrest. Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer is centered around an actual event where Wallace visited the camp in May of 1944, but instead of seeing a hard labor camp, he saw a façade of a town.
  • Marine Biologist
    When everyone around you is a marine biologist, all you want is support to do your own thing.
  • The Waters Rose
    After the waters have risen and everyone is an environmental refugee, compassion is harder to find.
  • Gone Down Under
    An American couple travel to Tasmania, Australia to discover that gun control can work... but only in Australia.
  • Tattoo On My Arm
    After a supernatural occurrence in the Amazon rainforest, Diana becomes determined to embrace her culture; far more than a representation on her skin. With support from her fiancé she commences a campaign to protect the physical and spiritual home of a tribe living in the rainforest. Mixing conservation with corporate Western ideology sees Diana become entangled with a ruthless financier. Now Diana has to...
    After a supernatural occurrence in the Amazon rainforest, Diana becomes determined to embrace her culture; far more than a representation on her skin. With support from her fiancé she commences a campaign to protect the physical and spiritual home of a tribe living in the rainforest. Mixing conservation with corporate Western ideology sees Diana become entangled with a ruthless financier. Now Diana has to decide if she is prepared to sacrifice all she’s ever known.