Natalya Baldyga is an Instructor in Theatre and History and an Instructor for Empathy, Balance, and Inclusion (EBI): Foundations. Before coming to Andover in 2018, she received a PhD in Theatre Historiography and taught in various states including Florida, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. As a historian, playwright, director, and translator, Baldyga is currently working on an adaptation of the play “Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.)” which will come this February. In her free time, she enjoys reading, knitting, and watching Marvel movies.
How does your love of storytelling apply to both history and theatre?
What draws me to history and why I love teaching history probably has to do with my love of telling stories. As a director and as a playwright, your job is to tell a story and tell it compellingly, draw people into that world and help people visualize a whole other world. That’s something that as a history teacher, I really try to do, where it’s not just learning some dates, learning some facts, but imagining this world… I do think that my love of storytelling, my love of imagining a whole new world is something that carries over.
Why did you decide to come to Andover?
“Youth from Every Quarter,” it’s one of our sayings. I love [that] if I look in my classroom… someone’s from one place and they’re like, ‘Yes, but what really feels like home to me is this other place.’ I absolutely love being in a room full of different people, you’re bringing your experience as someone from the Midwest or Florida or far away overseas and we all bring these different viewpoints. We all bring these different knowledge bases and understandings. That is so much richer of an environment than what we all grew up [in].
Why do you love to travel?
Travel is definitely something that feeds me. My parents were diplomats, so I’ve lived here, there, and everywhere. I was born in Austria. I lived in Poland, Mexico, Italy, and then in the United States. I’ve lived in Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, and now Massachusetts. I love the newness of travel. I love that experience of getting to know a new place and getting to know what people do there, what they’re like, and different cultures.
What initially drew you to theatre and directing?
I am one of those people who has always been interested in theatre… So, for me, the career path was really figuring out what role theatre was going to play in my life. I’ve done theatre since I was a small child and I went on to get a PhD in theatre history. [However,] I was always continuing to direct and act the whole time… I’ve directed so many different kinds of theatre, because it really is one of my deepest loves… I started as an actor back in the day. When I was five, I was Annie in my plays, and I was, I think, Bagheera in “The Lion King.” I had this very vivid memory of getting hit in the eye with one of my cat whiskers. Well, I always say that those of us who do theatre, we love to swap war stories. We’re never like, ‘I was in a play, and it was wonderful.’ I was in a show, and the set fell down, and caught on fire, and we kept going. Part of the joy is overcoming these crazy things that happened to us on stage.
How exactly are you adapting the upcoming Rossum’s Universal Robots play?
Our play “R.U.R.” is trying to put a play from 1920 that invented the word “robot” in conversation. Especially now where we have a whole virtual world, where we have the whole existence of different kinds of artificial intelligence. What’s really interesting is how there are themes that playwrights talk about in 1920 that resonate with the [present], but we’ve had to think of how to put it in a more direct conversation with the now. How we manipulate the world of the theatre is part of the fun. It’s super exciting because it is going to do something different based on where you put your bodies in space, either the actors or the audience. And so you have to think really carefully what [you] want the experience to be and why.
What languages do you know?
Languages are something that I love. I speak a number of languages, and then I read a number of languages that I don’t speak, but I work in translation with. For my dissertation, I had to work in German, French, English, Spanish, and I feel like there [were others] as well. But in terms of Slavic languages, I can understand a little Russian because of the Polish and the Czech, but Cyrillic is not something I’ve had to wrestle with yet… I’ve worked on an Ibsen play, which is Norwegian, and so I had help with that because I don’t speak Norwegian. But I did a lot of work on a play called “The King’s Stag,” it’s published now, and for that I had to work with not only Italian, but also Venetian… This play, “R.U.R.,” is Czech, so I was working from Czech.
You won an award as the editor of the “Hamburg Dramaturgy” from German into English. Could you expand on that experience?
The “Hamburg Dramaturgy” was written by this guy named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and he was a really important figure in the eighteenth-century theatre… I got involved with it [because] the only English translation was from the 1890s and only a third of it was translated. My job was to explain to the reader what he was talking about… I ended up writing 50,000 words worth of footnotes. I spent probably 20 years of my life reading everything that he read and just writing about him. This is the pinnacle of this work. It took three of us seven years to get that project done. It’s my baby, I’m still very proud of it.
What are your favorite movies?
The first Captain America movie is just some really good storytelling. It gives you someone that you know what’s motivating them… I like the movies where the bad guys have a real motivation and you understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. I do love the Avengers because I love a good ensemble, where you have all the people working together. I also do cry when I watch Endgame… [when] people come back and they pull together. I get very weepy. I am also very fond of the better Thor movies because I like the quirkiness. Some action, some just demented humor, and people pulling things together. This is absolutely my formula.
What do you wish people knew about you?
It could be the colossal nerd factor. I played D&D when I was young [and] what got me through the pandemic was Marvel movies. I just have this really spectacularly, colossally nerdy thread that… walking through campus, most people would not realize. I’m terrified of STEM, that’s the hilarious thing. I love science, but the doing of it just terrifies me.
Any departing words you would like to share?
There’s not a lot of people who are teaching in two departments at once. To be able to teach in two departments at once so that I don’t have to give up one of my loves, I feel so lucky because I would be happy in either department. To be in both is such a treat and such a dream. I get to do both things that I love, which is to try to get people to understand the joy of research, try to get them to see how history can be such an exciting world to enter and also to create a brand new world on the stage with students. Who wouldn’t want to do that? I’m the luckiest person ever.
