Aleksandar Lukac
Theatre Offensives from Belgrade to Toronto
an interview by Judith Rudakoff
Toronto, Ontario, Canada July
RUDAKOFF: Tell me a little about your early introduction to theatre in Yu- goslavia. LUKAC: I was born in Sarajevo in and lived there until I was , with a brief two-year stint in New York as a two-year-old while my father worked as a foreign correspondent for a Sarajevo newspaper. I learned English, then I forgot English. This has happened several times in my life and is an important parallel to what’s happening right now to my nine-year-old son. He’s in Belgrade for the summer, with his grandparents, relearning Yugoslav, or rather remembering it. I grew up attending MES (Male Experimental Scenes/Small Experimental Plays), an international theatre festival in Sarajevo. In , I saw Hair [], when I was eleven years old, and the Living Theatre production of The Brig [] when I was nine. I attended high school in Montreal in the s and after the Montreal Olympics I went back to Yugoslavia where I studied the- atre at the Belgrade Academy/Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Students received free passes to all the shows at the BITEF [Belgrade Inter- national Theatre Festival] Festival, every September, at the beginning of the school year. In my first year at the Academy [‒] I saw Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach [], Pina Bausch’s Bluebeard [], and Samuel Beckett’s production of Waiting for Godot []. As well, every year Peter Stein toured a show to Belgrade. Experimental theatre was the norm: it was expected, even in institutional theatre. And then in the mid-s, the political theatre movement started. RUDAKOFF: You were an artistic director at the National Theatre before you left in . LUKAC: I was one of the artistic directors of the National Theatre; it’s a huge institution. I was part of a team organizing a new company in a -seat venue
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Prior to coming to Canada, Aleksandar “Sasha” Lukac directed close to productions in a variety of theatres ranging from the Kamerni Teatar in Sarajevo to the Stalhouderij Theatre Company in Amsterdam, often garnering awards as well as public and critical acclaim. As founder and director of the alternative theatre group Plexus Boris Pilnjak in Belgrade, Lukac was at the center of a political controversy in the late- s Belgrade theatre scene, following his productions of Nigel Williams’s The Class Enemy () and his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters: One Hundred Years Later (). Lukac’s freely adapted version of The Class Enemy openly questioned the unity of Yugoslavia, Communism as a system, and specifically exam- ined the relationship between Serbs and Albanians. Audiences responded to lines such as “dirty Albanians who multiply as if their mothers were shitting them out as sausages” with stunned silence (though these type of epithets were commonly heard on the street at the time). The ensuing . Program detail from dramatic response by the character of an Albanian youth, in Albanian, Lukac’s production of The was a monologue written by Mirjana Vulovic, questioning the Serbian Class Enemy featuring a heroic heritage in Kosovo. At first, the Communist censors within the rat-like version of the fa- artistic board of the theatre put a ban on the show until Lukac would miliar American cartoon agree to soften the message. The Belgrade theatre community strongly mouse as part of the supported the play, attending a now legendary midnight performance in show’s promotional mate- full force. As a result of this support, the Communist censors didn’t can- rial. (Photo courtesy of cel the play, but lifted the ban, and The Class Enemy subsequently ran for Aleksandar Lukac) several years. The Albanian community hated the play and threatened to leave a festival in Montenegro if it received an award (which it did not). The Slovenians loved the play. The Croats were indifferent. The Bosnians were reluctant to attack it, but had dif- ficulties with the anti-Albanian monologue. Lukac’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is set in contemporary Belgrade, and Irina’s birthday is celebrated at midnight at the zoo. In this version, the characters want to go to New York City where their parents had been diplo- mats. Chekhov’s fire is replaced by a detonated bomb (presumably set by Albanian terrorists) which explodes downtown and results in panic. Solyoni kills Tuzenbach in front of everyone over a nationalistic dispute, and by morning there is a general mobilization. The men change from their silk suits into army uniforms and leave. Both the dissident and the official Belgrade communities attended this play because of the scandal that The Class Enemy had caused. In a clear celebration of the Yugoslavian paradox, despite the political provocativeness of his work, Lukac held the position of Artistic Director of The New Stage/National Theatre in Belgrade from to , and General Director of the Zoran Radmilovic Theatre in Zajecar from to .
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In a clear celebration of Canada’s support for the arts, Lukac held on firmly to the wheel of the Dicky Dee Ice Cream bicycle while his then four-year-old-son Ilja slept on the fridge through the mostly uphill roads of Toronto. The severe winters caused a shift in Lukac’s early Ca- nadian career toward the much warmer kitchens of the Golden Griddle Pancake House, where he had the opportunity to study the night popu- lation of the city that is the third-largest theatre center in the English- speaking world. In Toronto, Lukac’s artistic work has been seen at the Summerworks, Fringe, and Rhubarb festivals, the Theatre Centre, the Poor Alex The- atre, the Canadian Stage Company, York University, Glendon College, George Brown College, and Thorneloe University. Lukac holds an un- dergraduate degree from the Belgrade Academy of Dramatic Arts in di- recting for theatre, radio, television, and film and an MFA in theatre from York University. He is currently working on his PhD at the Uni- versity of Toronto’s Graduate Center for the Study of Drama.
. The Class Enemy in Lukac’s adaptation at Theatre Plexus Boris Pilnjak in Belgrade, . (Photo by Vlada Radojicic; courtesy of Aleksandar Lukac)
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across the river from the old National Theatre building in Belgrade. Because a couple of other relatively young directors and I were fashionable, we got the chance to start a new repertory company with actors from the national theatre company. One of my projects was my own production, Mirjana Vulovic’s Black Magic [], which I’ve subsequently produced here in North America. We opened in January of , and skipped the country three days later, at : A.M., in our little Yugo car, packed to the brim with our belongings, our son, and as many of our theatre awards, trophies, and plaques as we could fit in—our calling cards, we thought, in our new country. Just prior to becoming an artistic director I had a show banned and then remounted successfully, my adaptation of Nigel Williams’s The Class Enemy []. My career really took off just prior to the war. My wife [actor/playwright Mirjana Vulovic] and I made the decision to leave because we found it impos- sible to create in that environment. I came from Sarajevo, I lived in Belgrade— I had friends on all sides of the conflict. I felt that the war was a manipulation: there was no “good” side to be on, no ideology that I wanted to defend. It was implausible in that context to do political theatre the way I did it, which im- plied criticism and creative thinking about the issues. It was much easier creat- ing my kind of theatre about Communists than about nationalists. It was impossible to survive, so we took the challenge and left. We did a show in Amsterdam (where we lived for the first year), a dark farce called Swine Song [] about the Yugoslav situation, which was pretty bloody. Then we came to Canada. And that was a big cultural shock. You know, my grandparents ran away from Russia in the revolution of , when they were both . They met in Yugoslavia when they were studying to be doctors. Sometimes I think my whole family, for this whole century, has been moving gradually toward the West. RUDAKOFF: Where did you direct Baal in Yugoslavia? LUKAC: I worked on it for two years [–] at the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, which was the center of political theatre and, in fact, of all the interesting theatre in the ’s. It was the space for alternative theatre, in an old police building that had been built in the old Austro-Hungarian style. The huge ballroom had been converted into the Student Cultural Centre and was used to present plays. There was a small stage (where the orchestra would have been), surrounded by arches. You could position the seats in the round and have the stage in the middle or use the stage as the performance space and have the seats positioned like a concert hall, with a little wrap-around gallery. I worked on this production of Baal for two years and it was never formally presented to the general public. The production just...died. RUDAKOFF: Why is that? LUKAC: Partially because of the actors in the group. For the actor who played Baal (unlike his counterpart in my North American version), the no- tion of who and what Baal represented was so intriguing and so personally in- spiring, that he started becoming Baal while rehearsing. He started acting like Baal in his real life. There came a point in the process where he came to the decision that he didn’t need to do the show. His attitude was, “Hey, I don’t need to prove anything. I am Baal. I’ve already lived through a lot of the situ- ations that are written in Baal.” RUDAKOFF: For example? LUKAC: Betrayal, manipulation of power, power over others, roles of power and authority. And examining those issues in a social context led me to iden-
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tify what I see as one of the main cultural differences between Yugoslavia and Canada: the definition, concept, and myth of the hero and the antihero. For us, in Yugoslavia, heroism was mainly connected to World War II. And heroism, like a lot of other concepts, was connected to freedom, to lib- eration from the forces of occupation. We connected with freedom so strongly because, in a Communist regime, freedom was not explored publicly. We had acquired a kind of non-freedom in , when the th of May, the day that WWII ended in Europe, ended a period of our existence; we were told that we were living in freedom and that, as a result, there was not much point in discussing it. All our lives we had been taught that this was the date on which freedom had been won. First this referred specifically to freedom from the Germans, then it gained more general meaning as time progressed. In particular, we were told that our struggle for personal freedom had already been successfully waged during WWII. Or another way of looking at this phenomenon is that freedom was categorized as a philosophical waste of time, so why bother exploring it. Once, as a student at the Academy, while in my twenties, I explored the concept of artistic freedom. With a fellow student director, I wanted to do a Day of the Republic/th of November/Creation of Yugoslavia video. We took a camcorder out on the streets and interviewed people at random, ask- ing, “What is freedom?” About percent of the people automatically an- swered, “We acquired freedom in and...,” and so on—the official answer. And then, we had one person who just stood there and wouldn’t say a word. We asked him again, “Do you need us to repeat the question? What is freedom?” and he said “No, no, no. I understand you. You’re asking, what is freedom?” And again there was silence. And we just stood there holding the camera and then all of a sudden we were horribly embarrassed, and we felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, because all of a sudden we realized that we had touched on a very serious issue that went far beyond our student prank, our satire... For Yugoslavians, heroism was always connected with somebody who conquers single-handedly and in that sense is courageous and untouchably perfect. We had a whole cast of people in Yugoslavia who were labeled national heroes: they had survived the war, they had medals for cour- age or honor, and they had been given the official title of “hero” by the state. These guys could do anything. They had the biggest cars, the riches, and on another level, they placed themselves above the common people. God knows how these “heroisms” actually happened. Maybe they were acts of courage; maybe they were acts of lunacy. There was a strong resentment among the so- called common people against these institutional heroes. To begin my process of creating a Yugoslavian Baal, we started by looking closely at our national heroes, at what they represented. We explored the constants, the common elements. We examined the contradictions: if this per- son is a hero then who is our anti-hero—who and what is our Baal? In North America, you look at heroes and you come up with...who, Audie Murphy, the most highly decorated WWII soldier, who later became a movie star? We can’t even say that name without laughing. Who would be interested in a production that mocks someone who’s already a huge self-mockery? On the other hand, in my York University [Toronto] production of Baal, I was trying to find a parallel within the generations I was working with, so I went to the world of rock music and mythologized heroes in the rock in- dustry. I went back to Jim Morrison, to Janis Joplin, to the ones who acted self- destructively and took it to the limit. The only model that I could find for them that was even in a sense questionable in its morality was itself questionable. How much does today’s generation of -somethings really respect Jim Morrison’s life
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as heroic or even as antiheroic? North American university students don’t tend to think in those terms. As a result, there is no political or theoretical structure upon which to lay the philosophical discourse that Baal brings. RUDAKOFF: The whole issue of values doesn’t seem to have as much weight. LUKAC: Right. Neither values nor the champion of these values—or even the anti-champion. RUDAKOFF: The values are disposable? LUKAC: Exactly. And for us, as students in Yugoslavia, values and heroism were much bigger issues. They related to a very real sense of liberation and op- pression that doesn’t exist here. That’s ultimately why I had problems with the actors in Yugoslavia, because, after hours of conversations, I really had them imagine a total break with society, which forced them to grapple with the huge personal moral dilemma of how one goes through that process and survives. That’s where we found Baal and that’s where we fell in love with Baal. He was the ultimate symbol of that anti-establishment, anti-government, anti- Communist, anti-whatever. That character/hero who could turn a somersault right there in front of everybody and then laugh and write a song or a poem about it. It was so seductive that a lot of the actors started living their lives that way. And as I said before, it became almost logical to say, “I don’t need theatre to live through this.” The border between what is theatre and what is real life got erased, or at least fouled up, and it was very easy to cross from one to the other. We started living Baal after two years of rehearsing it. RUDAKOFF: So actors decided not to perform Baal, and they simply left the project. LUKAC: Yes. They felt that it was going too far into the exploration of per- sonal freedoms. That it was demanding too much of them. I felt that you could not produce Baal unless you were willing to invest profoundly, on a personal level. And once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to go back. It was very difficult for actors to say, “Okay, this’ll be only for this show and after that I’ll be a regular actor, a regular person.” This was before the times of “free democracy.” We all sensed that there was something in the works, but we didn’t know whether it would be war, or revolution, or democratic change. And in retrospect, it probably was all of the above. We just felt that something was...that something had to break. In Yugoslavia, a revolution is always imminent. We always think of a revolution as something that will happen...it’s just a question of time. War will happen. We don’t have a period in our history when we went without a war for long enough that people could forget or think war might be an impossibility. Unfortunately, what is also very close to the character of Baal in terms of behavior patterns is what’s happened in all these new concentration camps, and also what’s happened with the current modified version of Yugoslavia’s . Poster designed by national heroes (on all three sides of the conflict). There are war heroes that Goran Dimic for have now become war criminals because they probably did very similar things Aleksandar Lukac’s pro- to what they did years ago against the Germans, only now they’ve done duction of Nigel them under the watchful eye of CNN news cameras. I don’t think that they Williams’s The Class feel like criminals: they probably have this weird notion of themselves as na- Enemy at Theatre Plexus tional heroes because that’s what they’ve been taught for the past years. Boris Pilnjak in Belgrade, They likely still believe that when push comes to shove, they will be the ones . (Courtesy of who will save the land, who will save the nation. Aleksandar Lukac)
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So the aftermath of Baal is that all of a sudden you are seeing these people who have—without the poetry and without Baal’s sense of the beautiful— gone through a similar breaking of the moral barriers against evil, simply be- cause it’s what they felt like doing. When we were touching on that aspect of Baal’s character, not only were we defining the whole political structure and concept of heroism in Yugoslavia, but we were also exploring the extreme in human behavior, the real person be- hind the image of the hero. We made a full circle and we saw what that hero was capable of doing and possibly did in the real situation years before. RUDAKOFF: Did you have any specific political figures in mind as models for Baal? LUKAC: It was more of a combination of political figures. There were cer- tain people that I really don’t want to name because they’re in power right now. People who operate according to a particular kind of logic. There were a lot of people at that time working for the police who were criminals them- selves. They were in the so-called gray area in terms of culpability: the hit men for the Communist police, who would go out and rob and kill and do whatever they had to do, wherever they had to do it, and then come back without having to go through customs or pay any tax. They were important people, building their little fortunes. Of course, these people were the first ones to shoot in this war, on all sides. These were our models for Baal. There were a large number of people who were, in a sense, preparing— getting prepared for war because they were the units that actually made war possible. By this I mean, they were the ones sent to villages to commit the rapes in the first days of the war so that we could all start foaming at the mouth and start demanding, “Yes, we need the war. We saw the atrocities, on TV, live.” RUDAKOFF: And because you were working with students, I would assume that they were all very much involved in these issues in a quotidian way. Very different than the daily life of a university student in North America.
. Brecht’s Baal directed by Aleksandar Lukac at York University, Toronto, . (Photo by Jeff Logue)
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LUKAC: Well, exactly. We all thought we were going to change the world. We knew we were going to first of all destroy the old theatre (at least any- thing older than minutes) and then build up a new theatre to replace it. We had a similar attitude about what we were going to do to the system. Once we changed the theatre, we would be able to explore our ideas, show our ideas, and of course people would just come to their senses. I know this sounds extremely naive, but you come to theatre with such passion. My adaptations of Baal, which originally had about characters, both in Yugoslavia and here in Canada, ended up using actors. In the Yugoslav version, that’s one of the reasons why the process took so long. We were try- ing to take Brecht’s poems and integrate them into the play and create politi- cal cabaret numbers out of them that were theatrical and very obviously anti-Communist. These scenes mocked the system and mocked the way po- litical celebrations of revolutions and heroes were manifested. RUDAKOFF: Describe one of those scenes. LUKAC: We had a huge egg onstage with two workers hacking away at it with a hammer and a sickle. And then out of the egg came a woman cos- tumed as the Statue of Liberty. The workers tried to cram her back into the egg and make the egg whole again, covering her up, as if they had opened up something that they really didn’t want to see. From there the scene turned into comedy. They were trying to crunch her back into the egg and put the shell back together while the shell was breaking even more. It was a proletar- ian type of political theatre, everything larger than life. And the Brechtian sty- listic component of the piece was that the political cabaret was taking place in Baal’s little cafe. The parallel story in my adaptation was that Baal was imprisoned because of his political views, rather than because of the death of Teddy, as it occurs in the original version. Subsequently, the rest of the gang starts a political movement while Baal is in jail, though he truly doesn’t want to be the front man for a movement. He doesn’t want to be a leader, but the people around him create this myth of Baal the Leader, Baal the Hero. They start printing pamphlets about Baal, leaflets demanding that the state “Free Baal!” and the movement spreads across town like wildfire. So the political issue takes on a life of its own, and when Baal gets out of jail, his followers try to force him to be the political leader of this new antigovernment movement which he supposedly founded. In the end, he simply does not want to do that, and he refuses the mantle of hero/ antihero and kicks them all out of his life. In response, his “followers” kill him, and create a new Baal that looks exactly like him. This adaptation emphasized how a figure can give birth to an idea and then reject the responsibility that comes with this type of vision—the responsibility to follow through and imple- ment ideas, to realize theory. This was a simple but meaningful story to us. The predominant idea for Yugoslavian youth was that Communism was not essentially bad, that it had its good points and that it was ruined by the people who implemented it. And that was the story of Baal for us. That he did not want to implement any- thing. That he was just giving us food for thought and that his biggest thrill was to turn things upside down just to shock the public—in the case of the- atre, the audience. My adaptation of Baal in Yugoslavia focused on the people around Baal who really wanted to use him for their own sense of freedom. They wanted a figure to manipulate, as they’d let themselves be manipulated: physically, mentally, and so on. In order not to make the story so politically simple, I included as many caba- ret numbers as possible. I gave the production a later-Brechtian feel by moving back and forth between the two styles, the two stories. You had what felt like
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documentary drama in the background, with all of the political material, while in the foreground you had the cabaret numbers. The artistic value of the caba- ret numbers deteriorated as Baal stopped being their ideological or creative source. As the people started imitating how he would create a cabaret number, the numbers became simpler and more obvious and derivative. Which is in a sense what happened with our political theatre in Yugoslavia. Originally, we had several very important productions that really dealt with important current concerns and issues and were explorations in modern tragedy. RUDAKOFF: For example? LUKAC: The Karamazovs () by Dushko Jovanovic, which was a story about brothers during Tito’s struggle against Stalin, set in . One was on one side and one on the other of the political struggle. Have you ever heard about the notorious Yugoslavian concentration camp, the so-called Naked Island? It was a major subject dealt with in the political theatre of the era. In , after the split with the Soviets, anybody who was in any way connected with the Russians, or somehow supported the Russians against Tito, ended up there. Innocent people ended up on the Naked Island because of rumors. Prisoners were taken there via ship transports, which would take hours and hours, with prisoners stacked one on top of the other. Because the Naked Island was a correctional institution, you had to prove your loyalty to the system by beating up and converting other prisoners. There were special uniforms for converted prisoners that were worn inside- out: literally converted convicts. These converts would line up in the famous “rabbit run” and the new prisoners found themselves—after days in jail some- where on the mainland and after a three-day trip on the train and then over- night on a boat, after neither food nor water—running inside two lines of prisoners, a corridor, running through them. And they must beat you up be- cause if they don’t then they have to do the run themselves. The biographies and autobiographies of people who survived the rabbit run and who waited years to speak about it talk about people who faked kick- ing you, who missed on purpose. And then they talk about the ones who were really trying to prove to the authorities that they were in line with the Communist Party, who would try to break your legs and ribs, hundreds of prisoners on either side. And it’s a rock island. (That’s why it’s called the Na- ked Island: there are no trees, no way of escape.) The only thing you could do there was break rocks, carry them from one side of the island to the other, and then carry them back. Some people ended up on the Naked Island after surviving Auschwitz, and so for them it was a question of asking—what have I done to deserve this now? When Stalin ousted Tito, the “brother” who founded the Communist Party, it was really a decision made because he was going to die soon and somehow they had to get rid of him or his forces would prevail and Yugosla- via would be out of Russia’s reach. But Tito had to deal with a lot of people who, until then, believed in the triad of Stalin, Tito, and Lenin. In every pa- rade those were the glorified figures, and all of a sudden, overnight, Stalin was bad. There’s a line that was used in Yugoslavian political theatre a lot that . Lukac’s director’s notes went, “How could something that was white yesterday be black today?” And for his production of Swine for asking a question like that you could go to prison for five years. Song by Mirjana Vulovic, Well, in The Karamazovs one brother has to go through the Naked Island which was commissioned by and the other one prospers. Then, years later, they meet and the play deals Amsterdam’s Stalhouderij with what happens then. So it was a family tragedy within the larger context Theatre Company in . of the political system and the political struggle. And this and other political (Photo courtesy of plays were really seriously written pieces, explorations of the actual situation. Aleksandar Lukac)
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Of course, they were created with all the caution that the threat of censorship brings. And even so, several of the versions were forbidden. You know, the beauty about censorship is that it develops your language, that your codes become so complicated that your relationship with the audi- ence changes: they have to know your codes to understand what you’re really saying—so you share a deeper relationship, more of a bond. You and your au- dience are on the same side. You feel a certain loyalty to your audience and the audience feels a certain loyalty toward you. Over here in North America, it’s so different: you pay for the property and you go away and you produce it. After several of these shows went through the censorship process, and be- came popular hits, this became a formula for the less courageous theatre mak- ers to fashion instant hits and make shows that looked like these, but that were not honestly political. They were just repeating the same material, or of- fering variations on a theme. These watered-down versions of political theatre were also successful because there was a hunger in the audience to hear the same statements over and over again—statements that threatened the status quo or that questioned the system. RUDAKOFF: How were cultural attitudes toward sexuality reflected in your Belgrade Baal? LUKAC: One of the biggest taboos that the artists over there still have to deal with are the taboos within relationships and the commonly accepted social roles of women and of men. Men commonly see themselves as the Baal type, you know? Men tend to have those rights sexually anyway, so it’s not really important to explore Baal on that level in Yugoslavia. RUDAKOFF: How did the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality manifest in your two productions? LUKAC: A perfect example of how difficult it is to deal with homosexuality in Yugoslav theatre would be the attempt to produce Bent in the early ’s in a major Belgrade theatre. The two male actors tried to rehearse the play but the project finally fell apart because they couldn’t get through the love-making scene without laughing. They were embarrassed by the sexuality. There was some value to their implicit worry about audience reaction: there would have been only a small group of people who would have been openly supportive, either politically or artistically. When I left in , the situation was similar. The Baal-Ekart relationship in my Belgrade production was more of a best- friend relationship than an exploration of eroticism. The sexuality was practi- cally ignored, while in the scenes where Baal conquered young women, it was overt. In the North American production, the actors playing Baal and Ekart were heterosexual, so for them it was not so much a societal taboo that they had to deal with, but rather personal choices that were being challenged and ex- plored. In one rehearsal our assistant director brought in some of his own transvestite outfits and the two actors dressed and tried out these personae. The relationship onstage developed into a strongly defined homosexual re- lationship. At the climax of the play they died in each other’s arms, dancing while stabbing each other in the back with knives. These actors never ques- tioned the fact that the attraction between Baal and Ekart was necessary to the production and they worked to make it believable. RUDAKOFF: What about issues of censorship, threat, and codes of commu- nication in Yugoslavia? LUKAC: Many shows were banned. It’s a very bad experience because all of a sudden you are castrated, in a sense. You have your voice taken away. You
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can do another show, but then everybody looks at you as if there’s something wrong, there’s something...unspoken, but very wrong with you. RUDAKOFF: How did you manage to circumvent being banned during the two-year creative process of Baal? LUKAC: I knew how to play those codes. Interestingly, here in Toronto I had problems at the university. There were some confrontations about the nudity in my production. My students in Toronto, though, were much more willing to explore the sexuality of Baal, though not really on a private or personal level, but as common ground. They were, for example, very courageous when they were sharing their experiences about sex and death. That was the first round of conversations we had: experiences of death or sex, their choice. A lot of them came with sexual stories, and they were sad stories, stories about abuse. But even though they were contributing the most personal situations, I found it very odd that everybody was “trying to get on with their lives,” which is a common phrase you’ll hear in North American culture. They were trying to minimize those horrible events, trying to put them in context or in perspective, put them somewhere else, and that was disturbing to me. By putting horror aside, it became an observation post, where one could see but not explore the dark side. For example, the blatantly awful idea that maybe there was a sexual turn-on at some point during one of these horrible occurrences. (Which is the type of recognition necessary for a production of Baal.) There was an avoidance of even the suggestion of the dark side that permits someone to admit, “It was a terrible experience, but I had an orgasm.” Or, “I fantasized about something I told you and masturbated over it a hundred times afterwards.” And that was something you could not reach with these students; that’s where the line was drawn. You could share a horrible experience, but that experience was put in a therapeutic perspective: “Okay, I’ve said it and now I can go on with my life.” That’s a huge difference between these two cultures. In Yugoslavia, those events, as bad as they are, are what make up your life. Your life is different be- cause you’ve raped or been raped. As bad as they are, those moments mark your life. Here, in North America, it seems that those events are obstacles. RUDAKOFF: I think you’ve really identified something vital. You were talking about how in Yugoslavia there’s never been a time when war was so far away that you could forget about it. The only instance in my lifetime when my country, Canada, has been openly at war was the Gulf War and it was so far away and it was so televised that it didn’t seem threatening... LUKAC: And it didn’t feel real... RUDAKOFF: It’s the only time this country has been actively involved in a war since WWII [until the NATO/Kosovo war]. LUKAC: One can start “dealing” with atrocity when one accepts that it is not a distant concept, that every single person can find himself in a situation like that. Wars in Europe have proven that. People who have not been particu- larly bloodthirsty have become so. Unless you start thinking of war as some- thing that can really happen to you, whether you’re the one who’s running with the gun or you’re tied down and somebody’s pointing the gun at you, you cannot deal with it constructively—you cannot understand what’s going on. And the problem here in North America is that all of these situations be- come immediately isolated and removed. The sense is that what’s happening is happening in one place, being done by one unit and that no other unit is acting simultaneously. So, every time atrocity happens in another unit or in another household there is surprise: “Oh my god! Again?” And nobody’s put- ting these events in a larger perspective.
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RUDAKOFF: How did you use that naivete when working with your North American students? LUKAC: I had only seven weeks to rehearse Baal, not two years. So I had to find an immediate backdrop. I find that, especially with students, it works very well when you figure out where the authority is and then, as a director, you start playing with that power structure. It becomes a political situation. I did The Caucasian Chalk Circle at George Brown College, also in Toronto. I set the play in Sarajevo and gave it the context of a show being performed for the benefit of CNN by a group of Yugoslavians, a mishmash of nations in- cluding Bosnians, Serbs, Moslems, and Croatians. This group of Canadian college kids were trying to show and deal with their own personal tragedies, and I was leaving more and more of that open. By the end of the process, we had a scene at the climax of the production where their lives were shown to be in almost total chaos. It wasn’t a free-for-all, because the actors were bound by their characters and the outcome of the play.
. Flyer for My Yugosla- via Includes Quebec, a cabaret evening cocreated by Aleksandar Lukac and Mirjana Vulovic. The il- lustration is by their son, Ilja Lukac. (Photo courtesy of Aleksandar Lukac)
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By the second week of the run of the show (we had performances over three weeks) the actors were very much into their characters, and had less and less problems venturing out of the directive. RUDAKOFF: For example? LUKAC: A -minute verbal fight between the char- acter of the director in the show and an actress who did not want to follow his orders. There was a huge argument involving more actors ad-libbing lines and participating in the fight. The student audience was amazed by that freedom, and by the feeling of real life that was somehow coupled with a larger- than-life energy, a tension. There was dramatic con- flict that wasn’t held captive by the form or style of conventional theatre. RUDAKOFF: Did your North American students research the particular ethnicity they were portraying in this comparatively short rehearsal process? LUKAC: They did. I screened Yugoslav films set in Sarajevo so they had a good idea of context. Because the war was still on, there were a lot of discussion groups in the city, and a few people from Sarajevo . David Yeh in The were also giving lectures. But more than that, the actors were responding in Caucasian Chalk Circle, terms of the context of performing for a CNN camera crew and how far the directed by Aleksandar show would have to go in order to portray to the world who “we” were and Lukac at the George Brown what was “really” going on. Theatre, Toronto, . In this interpretation of The Caucasian Chalk Circle characters disagreed with (Photo by Andrew the American portrayal of the war in Yugoslavia. They tried, ostensibly, to Oxenham) open the eyes of the world to what they were going through, and then, as the show progressed, they started getting involved with each other personally, and with the different versions of the truth. When this happened, the stories began to implicate different people, until ultimately, they all forgot that they were focused on the American camera crew. In the end, the character who played Azdak, the judge, committed suicide, after failing to create that wonderful magic of “what is justice?” at the end. Unfortunately, audiences have been in- tellectually vaccinated against that simple trick. So he just gave up. RUDAKOFF: Did CNN come to see the production? LUKAC: No, I don’t think they were aware of our little effort to laugh at them. RUDAKOFF: Do you think it would be different now, several years later, for you to remount a production of Baal at York University, after an acrimonious eight-week strike [the longest university strike in the history of English Canada], where the boundaries of power and abuses of power were clearly delineated and both the student body and the faculty became radicalized and politicized? LUKAC: The most intense energy I felt three years ago at York University was cynicism. Now I think there would be more resentment and more open- ness to radical ideas. RUDAKOFF: More of a “fuck you” attitude. LUKAC: Hopefully.
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For us, in Belgrade, as the reality outside intensified it reduced our world, in a sense, because you were not allowed the same critical dis- tance that you would have in a normal society. Everything around was completely outrageous, from shortages of food to figuring out how to get oil and gasoline. Inside our homes, most of us tried to create a tre- mendous sense of normalcy: in the midst of food shortages we’d have the most exquisite dinner parties and you wouldn’t comment on the abundance. You were boxed into the normalcy you’d created inside your own house. Footsteps outside made you afraid. You’d take note of the fact that your neighbor would always arrive home at exactly : P.M. and here were footsteps at :, and you knew that surely it was the police. If there was a knock at the door, you’d hide. The final decision to leave was made at a moment when my husband and I were in the kitchen and our children (who were three and seven years old) were in the living room, watching television. They were ex- ceptionally quiet for a long time, which, though as a parent you may wish for it, is not a welcome thing. We went into the living room to see what was wrong and they were both glued to the TV, watching the news. We watched the butchery on television. When we had received warnings earlier about what was happening there had been distance, but when we recognized the faces, the expressions that we knew so well, on TV, death became very close. Watching the children in that situa- tion and remembering the bloody imagery of their nursery rhymes... It was a horrifying moment. Part of our families are Jewish, so we had heard for many years about “what it meant to stay” and “what it meant to protect your land and your belongings” and how unwise that decision had been. We simply left. We left everything, from home to careers. We packed up our clothes and the kids’ toys and we left. This was a turning point in our lives. And we recognized that. It’s the type of decision and action that determines forever who you are and changes everything you have known thus far. That three-hour drive to the border in Hungary blended an extraor- dinary sense of loss, the loss of family and friends, and at the same time of excitement that we’d actually done it. There was the anticipation of how we would act at the border and the fear of what would happen. We could hardly focus. If we made it through the border we knew it would be the world starting all over again, that it would be a huge turning point in our lives. And there had been rumors of people turned back, or men taken then and there for the army. Then, they simply
RUDAKOFF: We’re really talking about threatening middle-class niceness and cleanliness and sense of safety at the university, whether we’re referring to students or professors. LUKAC: I’m glad that I managed to threaten that sense with a bunch of people who were not, at that time, looking to be threatened. RUDAKOFF: People for whom politics doesn’t mean anything and danger doesn’t mean anything. That for me is the real challenge in trying to stage a student production of Baal in a North American culture. Can you give me an example of a specific scene that was particularly remarkable in your North American production?
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. Mirjana Vulovic, Michael Achtman, Tedde Moore, and Wayne Boldy in Black Magic by Mirjana Vulovic, a col- laboration of Company of Sirens and University of Toronto, . (Photo by Terry Nichols)
waved us through, with no big scene. They looked at our passports and let us go. And in the car there was a peace. No epiphany or jumping or screaming or hugging as we had anticipated. We simply drove. It was hot and the air was melting, wavy. And I had this intensified sense that the air was melting away and these thoughts of a new life beginning— but only after we found a gas station because we were almost out of gasoline. We kept expecting one big resolution to the war that would put ev- erything into perspective. I kept hoping for one event that would resolve everything. That sense of collective victory over history that has never happened. No photographs of a soldier kissing a woman on the street. I keep expecting an ending like in the film Schindler’s List, where the next generation, the grown-up children appear in technicolor, and the image is that life goes on. That there is a future. That hasn’t happened yet. Once it was all over we felt even worse than ever. Now is the time to count our losses and figure out what the hell everyone died for. —Mirjana Vulovic interviewed by Judith Rudakoff July
LUKAC: My favorite scene is—of course, it’s one I adapted considerably— constructed of several Baal scenes from the original, including where Teddy (who also became Mech, the owner of the cabaret) is trying to force Baal to perform. Baal is mocking both the audience and Teddy. He is refusing to per- form and Teddy sees that his authority over the performers is starting to di- minish. He challenges Baal to a duel in poetry. Within that scene, I used Brecht’s original poems as well as Frank Wedekind’s. Everytime Teddy would quote something from Wedekind, Baal would recognize it. To raise the stakes Baal and Teddy decide that the opponent should have his head held under water in a huge tub for as long as the other can create rhyme and verse in a game to the death. Baal goes underwater first, and Teddy only comes up with
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two or three verses and then gets blocked. They reverse roles and Baal launches into his long “Death in the Woods” poem and in so doing, he essen- tially kills Teddy as two other characters are holding his head under water. It was a horrifying scene, because you saw death happening on stage. Then Baal immediately spoke the eulogy (unlike in the original, where Teddy had died previously from a tree that fell on him) over the newly dead body, while stealing cocaine from the corpse’s pocket and using it while everyone else is grieving. And then the mourners turned on Baal and attacked him. The next segment is funny. Baal starts carrying around the dead body, lunging and swinging at characters with it. Baal was played in Canada by a very large actor who could carry Teddy, and he was squeezing the corpse’s stomach and water was spurting out of Teddy’s mouth over everybody trying to attack Baal. And at the moment when they finally caught Baal, he was us- ing Teddy as a puppet, punching at people with the corpse’s arms. Then the police entered to take him away and that was the end of the first act of the ad- aptation. It was a beautifully playful scene because you saw how Teddy was trying to manipulate Baal, or own him, and how Baal (through the power of his po- etry) turned the tables and killed him. You saw too how Baal was supported by the community, but how he made that characteristic somersault and said, “No, I despise you all!” and went on to do something else. Baal did not come out looking wholly evil in my Canadian adaptation. This was a Brechtian piece, after all, so I was not about to take sides. I showed evil in all its glory, and then demonstrated what people do with evil, how people try to fit evil into their lives. What happened with my group of actors in Yugoslavia didn’t happen here in Canada. Nobody crossed any borders playing Baal or any of the characters, but I think that I pushed them as far as they could have gone. And, as you say, maybe today with the post-strike politicization at the university, it could be different. Maybe. As tame as it was, or as wild as it was, it still offended enough people for me to be happy with the outcome. It proved to me that my style of theatre can work in North American society. I don’t know if it can work commer- cially, but it works in the sense that it touched people, it offended them, and it excited them. It was a three-year battle to get to the point where, despite major cultural differences—besides the fact that I still don’t know enough about this world and how it ticks, even though I don’t know how to do the North American codes yet—I could finally say, “Now I know that I can do theatre here too.”
Judith Rudakoff is a Canadian dramaturg and playwright based in Toronto. She coordi- nates the MFA in Playwriting at York University where she is Associate Professor of The- atre. Her play, Not Having, has been translated into Spanish as Sin Tener, and was produced in by Teatro Escambray in La Macagua, Cuba. Her most recent play, Rum & Cola, was showcased by Montreal’s Teesri Duniya Theatre in and workshopped in Spanish translation at Teatro Escambray in . Her books include Fair Play: Conversations with Canadian Woman Playwrights (Simon & Pierre Ltd., with Rita Much), Dangerous Traditions: A Theatre Passe Muraille Anthology (Blizzard Publishing, ), and Questionable Activities: Canadian Theatre Artists Interviewed by Canadian Theatre Students, vols. (Playwrights Canada Press, –).
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