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Babes in Belgrade
Family Stories isn’t child’s play
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Family Stories
By Biljana Srbljanovic. Translated by Rebecca Ann Rugg. Directed by Annie Dorsen. Set by Jeff Cowie. Costumes by Miguel Angel Huidor. Lighting by Matthew Richards. Sound by Jonah Rapino. Fight director Robert Walsh. With Danielle Skraastad, Brandon Miller, Corey Behnke, and Emma Bowers. At the Market Theater through May 19.


In Family Stories, children’s eyes are funhouse mirrors off which bounce ugly realities both political and personal, the images comical and horrifying. Thirty-year-old Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanovic’s 1998 work, originally titled Family Stories: Belgrade, uses a quartet of adult actors playing children playing house to paint a grotesque Punch-and-Judy portrait of trickle-down, war-numbed life under corrupt, nationalist dictator Slobodan Milosevic, who’s currently on trial for war crimes in the Hague.

Slurping imaginary soup with wilted carrots, brandishing cardboard newspapers, and threatening one another with weapons ranging from belts to guns, a 12-year-old boy, his 11-year-old sister, and their 10-year-old chum mimic the narrow-minded, violence-driven milieu in which they live. When a filthy, tic-ridden stranger wanders into set designer Jeff Cowie’s gritty, scrap-laden bunker of a playground, they bully her into the role of the family dog (and believe me, this isn’t A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia). The play is episodic and somewhat repetitive, and the attempt to override cruel comedy with tragedy at the end feels forced. But like its harsh, adult-mocking pubescents playing Donna Reed on a dung heap, Family Stories packs a punch.

Srbljanovic’s play debuted in Belgrade and has since been translated into more than 20 languages. Although the piece was performed by students at Yale School of Drama, this assaultive Market Theater production, staged by Yale-trained Annie Dorsen, marks Family Stories’ professional North American premiere. Srbljanovic, however, has gotten a lot of ink, both for her " Milosevic Generation " –representative, Brecht-influenced plays and for her " Diary of a Defiant Serb, " a day-to-day account penned during the 1999 NATO bombing of Belgrade.

Srbljanovic’s first play, Belgrade Trilogy, which she wrote while she was still a drama student, was about the mass defection of the best and brightest of her generation from Serbia. This one is Pee-wee’s Playhouse as guest-scripted by Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Germany’s Franz Xaver Kroetz (the latter stirring the sexual soup). The play may not ultimately outlive its time and place, but its cartoon depiction of casual, aped brutality adroitly mixes agitprop insistence, vaudeville zaniness, and disquieting fantasy. (Each of the " family stories " ends with the death of the parents, after which they are resurrected for the next scene, bearing their wounds.) And Dorsen’s staging — energetic and cacophonous — catches the strident, almost reckless tone of some child’s play. Neither is irony stinted: the blackouts between sadistic vignettes are filled with the perkily innocent sounds of a children’s folk chorus.

So what are the basic, insular truths parroted by Srbljanovic’s Serb kiddies playing house, fake dad with a roll around his middle, fake mom in a babushka, and fake junior as brightly clad as Jesus in Godspell? That a smart man behaves by the rules, never saying what he thinks. That, should he " accidentally " think something, he doesn’t admit it. That a true Serb is man of his house while acknowledging that what’s beyond the fence is none of his business. That it’s " normal " for the papa to hit the mama and for both to hit the kid. (In one hilariously disgusting mealtime vignette, in which food is spewed like spume, the mama accidentally kills her choking husband with the Heimlich maneuver, then wails over the corpse, Medea-like, " Whose hand will hit me? " )

Family Stories is less an allegory of Serbia under Milosevic than a scary, absurdist depiction of the dehumanization of a society squirming under the boots of repression, nationalism, corruption, and war, its cosmopolitanism a ghost. Enacting it, the Market cast toes the line between relentless exaggeration and emotional truth. Against the loud posturing supplied by Danielle Skraastad, as supercilious mama Milena, and Brandon Miller, as menacing papa Vojin, there is the smoldering resentment, cocksure cruelty, and adolescent bewilderment of Corey Behnke’s all-purpose son (and daughter), Andrija. Most disconcerting amid the vulgar pretend bullying is the genuine abjectness of Emma Bowers’s scabby, cringing, crotch-gripping Nadezda, the stray who wanders in and gets cast as the dog. There is something facile about the orphan’s plea that ends Srbljanovic’s parent- and dictator-bashing burlesque. But Bowers creates a social dreg that clings, at once feral and heartbreaking.

Issue Date: May 2-9, 2002
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