Necessary Targets
By Eve Ensler. Directed by Michael Wilson. Set design by Jeff Cowie. Costumes by Susan Hilferty. Lighting by Howell Binkley. Original music and sound by John Gromada. With Shirley Knight, Catherine Kellner, Alyssa Bresnahan, Sally Parrish, Maria Thayer, Diane Venora, and Marika Dominczyk. At Hartford Stage through December 23.

In 1993, Eve Ensler traveled to the former Yugoslavia to interview Bosnian women war refugees. What Ensler, who is best known for The Vagina Monologues, bore witness to there, at a time when most Americans were paying little attention, has taken eight years to cohere as Necessary Targets. The play is now in its world premiere at Hartford Stage, with Shirley Knight and Diane Venora. Along the way, there have been celebrity readings, among them one in New York with Meryl Streep and one in Sarajevo with Glenn Close, and several workshops. It’s no surprise, then, that the piece plays like one that has been cobbled into being from urgent materials, its very existence a " necessary target. " It is, however, less a drama than, as its subtitle suggests, a painstakingly and sometimes prosaically crafted " story of women and war. "

As she demonstrates in The Vagina Monologues, Ensler is capable of flights of poetry, and there is at least one such winging here. Venora’s character, a hardbitten refugee who had been head of pediatrics in a hospital in Prijedor, mourns " the green green hurt heart of Bosnia, the kindness we shared, how we lived in each other’s warm kitchens, in sunny cafés, in the room of Bosnia. " Numb with loss, Zlata shrugs off the war’s horrifying atrocities, including neighborly violence and brutal rape. " Cruelty, " she intones, " like stupidity, is quick, immediate. " What haunts her are the beet fields, blood-red and beautiful, and the feeling of safety, never to be redeemed.

But Ensler focuses less on the play’s somewhat generic quintet of women refugees than on the strange bedfellows come from America to their war-torn country in a naive attempt to help them heal. J.S. (Knight) is a Park Avenue psychiatrist who is honored — if unprepared — to be sent to Bosnia by the president’s commission. Melissa (a bristling Catherine Kellner), her assistant, is a taut little-girl-lost fleeing the never-specified pain of her own life by immersing herself in the cavernous trauma of war, touching down in Haiti, Rwanda, and now Bosnia. She is writing a book that she hopes will call attention to the atrocities perpetrated against women — and, of course, to herself.

The play begins with an awkward encounter between the two Americans in New York, where backpacking Melissa seems the fitter for their mission. But Melissa is to prove both evangelist and exploiter. It is pearl-draped J.S. who will be truly changed by her Balkan odyssey, returning from the filthy camp — where the smells hang " like a bad mistake " — to her ritzy Manhattan digs figuratively a woman without a country, missing the refugee outpost awash in tears and " mad, thick coffee. "

The story of one American’s awakening, and another’s well-intended if somewhat blindered pursuit, is a legitimate frame for Ensler’s portrait of Bosnian suffering and displacement. And Knight does a nice job of flowering from polished, matronly professionalism to a whimsical and then liberating self-knowledge. During a Bosnian night of vodka, women, and song, her flushed, sloshed J.S. (named by a rigid-musician dad for Bach) demonstrates her programmed life to burgeoning friend Zlata by marching in mincing, self-amused little circles.

But the Bosnian women are more stereotyped than the American ones. Even Venora’s butch, reluctant Zlata, until she gives terse, eloquent expression to the pain of her destroyed country, is the one-note voice of what J.S. calls the women’s " rightful contempt at being patronized. " The earthy Jelena (a husky-voiced Alyssa Bresnahan) yearns for the sensual days of her marriage, before her traumatized husband became a " mutation of war, " taking out his rage on her. Elderly, Old Worldly Azra (Sally Parrish) pines for her cow. Teenage Nuna (a likable, flame-haired Maria Thayer) is a punk-garbed America enthusiast who, the product of a mixed marriage, feels divided against herself. And Seada (Marika Dominczyk) is " the gorgeous one, " cradling a rag baby and an unspeakable story.

Michael Wilson directs the lively, ethnically flavored production, in which Melissa’s tape recorder becomes almost a character. Ensler’s play derives an undeniable power from its material and, especially in the shadow of September 11, succeeds in knocking through the safety wall America has liked to build around itself. " We make decisions all the time, " the author writes in her introduction to the published script. " Decisions about them. Them is always different from us. Them has no face. " In Necessary Targets, Ensler sets out to put a face on her Bosnian sisters. But it isn’t particular enough — perhaps because she focuses too much on the mirror.

Issue Date: December 13-20, 2001

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