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STAGE PREVIEW End of a Century Stark Raving Theatre premieres a new piece by one of Portland's finest playwrights. BY STEFFEN SILVIS 243-2122 EXT. 343 |
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Liberation by Steve Patterson Stark Raving Theatre at Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St., 232-7072. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 pm Sundays. Opens March 11. $13.50-$15. The 20th century was born in Sarajevo, when Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist, gunned down Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir-presumptive to the Austrian throne. From that cry of war, the next 86 years would be a terrible series of bloodbaths as old empires crashed and nations rose. The bloodshed continues and, with only nine months to spare, one thing seems certain: in the words of Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak, "We will have to learn to live with new values and ideals in the coming century. Our century's died in Sarajevo." The world the media presents is one of Manichaean struggle, a playground fight between good and evil. In the scramble to reduce everything to a single image or sound bite, the complexities of a situation are laid waste, and nowhere has this been more obvious than in the handling of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The conflict, as it's been presented to us, has been between the Serbian people, who are evil incarnate, and the innocents who stand in the way of a Greater Serbia: Croatians, Albanians, Slovenes and Bosnians. This isn't just poor journalism; it's a continuation of nationalist nonsense. The myriad paths to the Balkan killing ground are twisted, and to someone unfamiliar with the region, the causes for the war are confounding. No one understands this better than playwright Steve Patterson, whose latest play, Liberation, is about to premiere at Stark Raving Theatre. Patterson sets his play in the offices of a newspaper during the siege of Sarajevo--a city that was, in many ways, the intellectual and spiritual capital of multicultural Yugoslavia. Inspired by the story of Oslobodenje, the Sarajevo newspaper that continued to publish during the endless assault on the city, Patterson focuses on the real battle, the struggle for human values. "This is not a political play," Patterson told WW, "I've written this piece as an attempt to understand the people who are involved." Like Sarajevo, the newspapers, both real and fictional, represent a fusion of cultures: Croat, Serb, Muslim. They represent, as Debeljak said, "the differences that once made Yugoslavia a paragon of Europe's cultural richness." "I'm fascinated by the dynamics in this environment," said Patterson. "None of my characters are types, confined or defined by ethnicity; rather, they are individuals trying to stay alive and find out what truth is worth." To prepare the cast for the play, director Lisa L. Abbott assigned the actors--including Jim Davis, Paul Palazzolo, Nancy Wilson, Steve Boss, Jim Garcia, Cami Idzerdza, Virginia Belt, Jennifer Hartman and Daniel Flint--to do research on the cultural background of their particular characters. Immediately they found themselves embroiled in arguments about the causes of the war, and especially for the actors playing Serbs, a new picture of recent history emerged. In her book, Belgrade: Among the Serbs, American author Florence Levinsohn reveals how confused the Serbs are by the West's view of them. For centuries the West honored Serbia as a land of heroes and poets. Serbia's fight for liberation against the Ottoman Turks was as noble as Greece's. The plight of Serbs in World War II is little discussed: 500,000 Serbs and Serbian Jews were murdered by the fascist Croatian Ustasa. Led by the fanatical Ante Pavelic, the Ustasa's cruelty made even some of Hitler's SS officers blanch; Mussolini was so horrified by the Ustasa's treatment of Jews that he ordered the Italian military to rescue as many as they could. None of this can excuse the atrocities that have been committed by Serb forces in the current war, but to deny an entire people their humanity, as the Western press is wont to do with the Serbs, is also inexcusable, and is a product of the same disease--nationalism--that's helped destroy a vibrant and diverse culture. Patterson has followed events in the Balkans since problems between Serbs and Kosovo Albanians flared up in 1988. He wrote an early draft of Liberation almost three years ago for the Stark Raving company, which gave the play a public reading in its New Rave Festival. Abbott, who directed Patterson's excellent Waiting on Sean Flynn, both in Portland and Chicago, became an early admirer of the piece. Together they have expanded Patterson's original ideas to create the current play. "It's a departure for me," says Patterson. "My work is very non-linear, full of dreams and visions. But what happened in Sarajevo was surreal enough and seemed to warrant a linear approach." Abbott says, "One of the most important lines in the play is, 'I'm trying not to judge.' These people are being tested. They're walking a tightrope that we may one day walk." In Banquet in Blitva, the great Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza wrote, "What is left us? A box of lead type, and that is not much, but it is all that man has so far devised as a weapon in defence of human dignity." Liberation is about this.
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