review
"liberation"
rude guerrilla theater co.
at the empire theater
santa ana, ca
18 april 03
reviewed by mark jonas

Imagine a dazzling, cosmopolitan city -- a city of chic stores, good-looking people, great shopping, hot bars and coffeehouses, where the latest cars, movies and designer labels are all around.

Now imagine it shelled, and people bleeding in the streets, and going to work amid gunfire, driving past the ruins of places they used to know and love.

The city was Sarajevo; the time was the early 1990s. If you study photos of Sarajevo during the warfare of that time, you're struck by how "western," even how "American" parts of it look. In the right light, the offices, stores and avenues could pass for Brooklyn, Boston, Cleveland, or Oakland or Los Angeles...even Orange County, CA.

Orange County is where you'll find a powerful new play about Sarajevo: Steve Patterson's "Liberation", now at Santa Ana's Empire Theater. It's brought to you by Rude Guerrilla Theater Company.

Patterson is not Bosnian; he is Oregonian. He is from Portland, where "Liberation" was produced by Stark Raving Theatre. According to the program biography, he has worked as a reporter, and that has probably given him the ability to "shape" a story and to see and interpret different points of view. Appropriately, his play is set in a newspaper office. It's an exciting choice, a useful "neutral ground" from which to explore the psychology of warand ethnic conflict.

It's no ordinary day for the reporters and editors at one of Sarajevo's major newspapers. Paper and ink shortages threaten tomorrow's edition. And suddenly, so does the arrival of a Serb army deserter, Tuna (Justin L. Waggle). Tuna wants to come clean on the Serbian army's atrocities -- the ethnic cleansing, rape and murder of Bosnian Muslims, and Croats. It's a scoop for reporter Petar (Kristian Capalik); it's a path toward asylum for Tuna and his sister Lana (Jami McCoy).

It is January, and the Serbs have been shelling the city for months -- a campaign that will eventually kill more than 10,500 of Sarajevo's half-million citizens, and wound tens of thousands more physically and psychologically. Trying to hold down the fort of the fifth estate are Zlatko, the publisher (David Rusiecki), and his secular Muslim wife Vedrana (Deborah Conroy), who edits. Four other staffers continue to work: Milena and Ismail (Luz Violeta Govill, Craig Johnson), and Sasha and Dado (Melita Ann Sagar, Andrew Nienaber).

There are problems enough harboring a deserter from an enemy army, but things get worse. A Serb general parks tanks and troops up the street from the office, and spreads propaganda painting Tuna as a Muslim terrorist holding the paper hostage. When the building is shelled by the army, blood runs and hope escapes.

"Liberation" does not present an audience with poetic transcendence, comic relief, fantasy sequences or satire. There is simply more of the same awful situation, and this is one of the play's strengths. Its characters attempt to
publish a newspaper because there is nothing else to do; they become noble because the situation demands nothing less.

More than any other quality, "Liberation" conveys the despondency and resignation of life in wartime; its characters feel deadened by degrees. Everyone has a story ("we are pincushioned with stories," Ismail ruefully
notes) of seeing people killed, or shellshocked or maimed. The play's first and last lines come with a signature irony -- one of the only good weapons left.

Director Jody J. Reeves has pulled some strong performances from her cast. (One of her actors, Kristian Capalik, actually spent his childhood in Sarajevo.) Waggle is clearly a very dedicated and very good young actor, playing Tuna with notable presence and nuance. As Vedrana, Conroy projects real dignity and ready compassion. Govill gets to handle the play's best prose (an extended recollection of the old Sarajevo) and the play's most wrenching scene, which really does make you want to leave your seat and grab a first aid kit. Reeves could have kept a closer rein on some things. Govill (playing a Croat) uses what sounds like a thick Russian accent in an otherwise accent-free production, and Rusiecki has been permitted to turn in a placid, almost mellow performance that is out of touch with the emergency of the story. Still, the cast (and script) do collectively resonate.

There's little happiness in "Liberation". It's a heavy, often grueling play. It's also a good one.

"Liberation",
presented by Rude Guerrilla Theater Company
at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana.
Th-Sat @ 8pm, Sun @ 2:30pm thru April 27. $15, $12 for students, teachers & seniors. 714.547.4688.