Forget the Dramatics, Liberate

by Robert Tomoguchi WALLFOUR.COM
There are many good reasons to see the current production of Steve Patterson's "Liberation" at Rude Guerrilla. Maybe you know nothing about the atrocities committed by the Serbian Army. Maybe you heard
they play Mozart's Requiem during the show. Maybe you wanted to see something billed as the "California Premiere". Or maybe you just want to see really good theater.

Though paling by comparison to the atrocities related on stage, it would certainly be criminal to reduce this show by merely calling it a drama. A drama would suggest dramatics. But somewhere during this
show, you will feel so caught up in it that you will forget that you are an audience member, watching anything at all that resembles performance. Director Jody J. Reeves has successfully taken this moving script with a powerful subject, and carefully combined it with an atmosphere and performances that make it impossible to avoid being
enveloped by its plot and characters.

Set in the last surviving newspaper room in Sarajevo, a Serbian army deserter comes seeking refuge, but his mere presence there is what ultimately takes the news people hostage, and thus we have a very interesting role reversal, where the refugee becomes the captor. Beyond the civil war going on outside, we witness the divisions going
on inside the newsroom as well: between brother and sister, husband and wife, war criminal and janitor.

The deserter is named Tuna and is played by Justin L. Waggle. Along with his sister Lana (Jami McCoy), he is first brought to the newsroom by Petar (Kristian Capalik). Though certainly preoccupied with danger of his present classification as a deserter from a criminal army, as well as being hardened from the human atrocities in
which he has participated, Waggle's entrance seemed to rigid if not Cro-Magnon in his posturing. It isn't until later, as he interacts more personally with Lana, and then the heads of the newspaper Zlatko (David Rusiecki) and Vedrana (Deborah Conroy) that Waggle evolves his character into something less stiff, and thereby brings a real potency to the energy of the show.

Playwright Steve Patterson has set up this newsroom to work like forum to give space for each of these characters to tell their stories, both before and during the war. In doing so he shows us that all of these people, including the participants, were victimized in one way or another. The atrocities that unfold in each re-telling work to demystify while producing an abhorrently vibrant account of the events of and surrounding the war. The plot ultimately drives toward the story Tuna has to tell. Having himself participated in the systematic atrocities committed by the Serbian Army, it is his story that must be told to the world, and their current hostage crisis cannot end until he tells it. Yet in hearing the accounts of what each of these news-reporting-civilians had to endure, the teasing manner in which Tuna's story is dangled before the press and the audience--will he talk? or will he not talk?--made me care less about hearing his story at all, especially because the motivations of getting his story are undermined by something as ignoble as simply getting a scoop. But hey, I said this thing felt real, and Patterson himself has been a reporter, so maybe that's the way it is. Eventually Tuna tells his story, but when he does we don't hear it. Lights fade on the scene, etc. Now I feel betrayed. Teased and betrayed. Was it too horrible for us to hear? Was Patterson afraid we would no longer feel sympathetic to Tuna?

But beside all of that nitpicking, Patterson has created a show that is charged with energy and emotion around a subject that really matters. The relationship between the husband and wife Zlatko and Vedrana, certainly bring about some of the most compelling dynamics, as a couple of mixed ethnicity in a war torn country being brutalized by ethnic cleansing. The forceful conflict between Dado (Andrew Nienaber) and Tuna, balanced with the more subtle and recessed tension between Milena and Sasha (Luz Violeta Govill and Melita Ann Sagar), at once gives a good illustration of the war currently raging alongside the underlying and historical feelings that helped it culminate. And still with all of that, Patterson is able to give us the character of Ismail (Craig Johnson). Though himself not beyond
the reaches of war, he was able to add his own comedic flair to the show. Certainly sarcastic, Johnson's punch lines were certainlywelcome when they were delivered.

All in all, the show is so powerful that it moves through you as its scenes fly by. But as an audience member, you may not walk out of a performance of Liberation feeling liberated, the show inside is so encompassing that it is hard not to take it home with you.