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 The Drama Review , (T), Winter . Copyright © Judith Rudakoff Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263561 by guest on 29 September 2021 Judith Rudakoff 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 . Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263561 by guest on 29 September 2021 Aleksandar Lukac 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) Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420499760263561 by guest on 29 September 2021 Judith Rudakoff 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.