Balance
Balance is a brutally honest and darkly humorous monologue drawn from the lived experience of a Ukrainian combat medic serving on the front lines of the war. The narrator reflects on her childhood as an outsider who learned early how to maintain emotional equilibrium in hostile environments; a lesson that becomes essential years later when she enlists after Russia’s full-scale invasion. As the play moves between past and present, moments of mundane civilian life collide with the surreal realities of war: evacuating wounded soldiers, packing bodies for transport, arguing with comrades during shelling, and navigating the strange normalcy of coffee, markets, and social media just miles from the front. Interspersed with ironic “self-soothing exercises” for managing stress, the play reveals the psychological mechanisms soldiers develop to survive trauma. Through sharp storytelling, gallows humor, and devastating emotional turns, Balance becomes a portrait of resilience and dissociation – examining how a person maintains their humanity while working daily in the shadow of death.
