In the Spotlight: Cultural Events in the Theater

The Harvard Serbian Society and the Serbian-American Alliance of New England (SANE), represented by Ana S. Trbovic ’01 and Marina Jovanovic ’01, produced the play Emigrants at Paine Hall two weeks ago. This educational and cultural experience brought together nearly 200 people, constituting about three fourths of Boston’s Serbian community, mostly graduate students and professionals.

The idea of adapting a play by Slawomir Mrozek, a Polish émigré author, to the context of Yugoslavian integration today came from Jack Dimic, originally from Republika Srpska, now a student at the Lee Strasberg Institute for Theater and Film in New York. The project was realized with the assistance of Zarko Lausevic, a renowned Serbian stage and screen actor now in the United States. Emigrants themselves, Dimic and Lausevic partly depicted their own life stories—a political emigrant from Belgrade and an economic emigrant from Bosnia, an intellectual and a gastarbaiter—roommates in the poor suburbs of New York. The personal émigré experiences of the actors and of the audience combined to transform the play into a means of self-analysis, attempting to resolve the personal dilemmas of the Serbian emigrants in America today. In the words of Sasa Lekic, a Serbian émigré in Boston, Dimic and Lausevic successfully managed to “break the border of the stage reality and transform it into our own, audience’s, reality.”

Emigrants inspired a lively discussion among the Serbian students, leading to many different and oftentimes conflicting interpretations of the piece and what it represents. Natalija Novta ’04, though she does not identify with the play’s characters, considers them realistic—recognizing other real-life emigrants in them. In contrast, Srdjan L. Tanjga ’01 describes the play as a “classic stereotype about Serbian emigration,” reproving a lack of originality and a non-convergence with the present moment. “A combination of an old-fashioned gastarbaiter model and a rather narrow personal story,” says Tanjga, “did not succeed in reflecting either the tragic or the comic side of the dilemmas of Serbian emigrants in the world, especially not of those in America today.”

Conflicting interpretations are expected given the ambitious nature of the project: to adapt the universal theme of emigration to the Yugoslav émigré audience, with each different socio-economic and educational subgroup having its own specific émigré dilemmas. Although each audience responds to the play in a unique way, “people react almost uniformly in self-recognition,” says Lausevic. Be it recognition or denial, sympathy, humor or sorrow, the audience is left with a strong emotional experience.

The emigrant is “a kind which is disappearing,” the epitome of “a conscious self-sacrifice—he died in his homeland, but was never born elsewhere,” claims Lausevic. Similarly, Dimic envisions emigration as a “pathological state” of a person who does not belong anywhere. Individual personal émigré dilemmas intertwine in the play. “Speaking to Jack [in the gastarbaiter role], I was speaking to myself,” says Lausevic. Similarly, Lausevic warns us of the threat of the “Americanization of the soul,” which especially strikes children. He calls on us not to forget “who we are and where we come from,” explaining that, “even though the play will not bring the emigrants back home, it will at least make them reflect upon the return.”

The premiere took place in New York last September, and the next performances are scheduled for April in Washington and San Jose. The finale is to take place next year in Belgrade, capital of Yugoslavia and Serb cultural center. As Dimic explains, the idea is to see if “those who stayed in Serbia can recognize someone of their own.”

—Ivana Tasic-Nikolic is the Vice-President of the Harvard Serbian Society. She can be reached at itasic@fas.harvard.edu