New drama for new teenagers: revisiting typological features of modern drama

The article is aimed at identifying the main typological features of modern drama for adolescents. While the “new drama” of the XXI century is an object of serious comprehension by domestic literary criticism, the modern drama for adolescents represents an entirely new field for scientific understanding. Identifying the specifics of this phenomenon seems very relevant. Modern drama for adolescents, on the one hand, has discursiveness that is characteristic of the “new drama” (deconstruction of reality, a new type of hero, aesthetics of trauma, etc.), and on the other hand it reflects the main motifs of modern children’s literature (conflicts at school, first love, orphanage, single-parent families, teenage suicide, bullying, domestic violence, etc.). While the new drama for adults can be understood both as an antithesis and as the synthesis of historical tendencies in the representation of violence, the new drama for adolescents, in a sense, continues the traditions of the “dark”, gruesome mass culture of the first decade of the XXI century. In their often outrageous plays, the new generation of young playwrights (I. Vaskovskaya, A. Bukreeva, Yu. Tupikina, S. Orlova and others) embodies the endless absurdity of our reality. The genre and thematic repertoire of contemporary drama for teenagers quite representatively reflects the aesthetic and sociocultural coordinates of the time.