The American postmodernist playwright Don Nigro dedicated a block of plays to real historical figures, which includes the so-called Russian Cycle – the plays about the classics of Russian literature. Two of them are about the lives and works of the Silver Age poets – Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam. A philologist by education, Don Nigro writes biographical fantasies about famous poets, calling his plays the process of “searching for truth”. Nigro’s method of biographical writing is based on a consistent and detailed enthymeme. The play “Marina”, dedicated to the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, has the character of “notes”, which are a stream of consciousness that is formed under the influence of the biographical context and contains the “product” of the main “text”, that is, conclusions about the personality of the Russian poetess. While the play “Mandelstam” is more focused on the historical context of the era; for Nigro, the story itself serves only as a palimpsest for the creative search for answers to the questions about the ambiguous and contradictory period in Russian history. In his plays about the repressed Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam, Nigro pays special attention to the theme of the poet and power: the playwright examines the old conflict from a new angle.