UMaine Readers’ Theater Presents “Necessary Targets” April 14

Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756

ORONO — University of Maine graduate student Jovana Davidovic will play the part in the next University of Maine School of Performing Arts “Readers’ Theater” of Seada, one of five Bosnian women in a refugee camp struggling with the aftermath of war.

Not surprisingly, she’s very sensitive about the part. “The reason I decided to do the play is it is very touching. I am from Serbia,” she says.

Another character in the play “Necessary Targets,” written by Eve Ensler of “The Vagina Monologues” fame and directed by Marcia Douglas, assistant UMaine professor of theater, is Nuna.

Nuna is a conflicted biracial teenager whose mother is Bosnian and her father is from Sarajevo. Kimberlee Perez, a graduate student here, reads Nuna’s part.

“She’s maturing, but at the same time. She’s got this conflict over her racial identity, as well as the influence of the United States,” says Perez, who understands the character’s dilemma because she has experienced it. “I myself am biracial. My dad is Mexican and my mom is Anglo, so I very much identify with this character.”

The play is being presented April 14 at 7:30 p.m. at Minsky Recital Hall in the Class of 1944 Building on the Orono campus. It is the university’s School of Performing Arts’ fourth foray into a genre new to UMaine, the “readers’ theater,” in which actors read parts on a stage, with minimal costume, scenery or props.

Douglas says the productions feature actors who are not necessarily theater majors, or  university students. The readers’ theater is an opportunity for the university to open itself up to faculty, staff, and community involvement and provide others a place to pursue theater.

Douglas’s next play, “Necessary Targets,” once again assembles a cast that promises moving performances with more than a touch of reality.

The play is about women coping with themselves and their conflicts, all with the backdrop of the effects of the Serb-Bosnian civil war. It is the story of two American women, a New York psychiatrist and a human rights worker and journalist, who go to Bosnia to help women confront the memories of war. 

Melissa, played by UMaine graduate student Julie-Ann Scott, is the ambitious young human rights worker and writer. The successful but unsatisfied middle-aged psychiatrist, J.S., is played by Alison Cox, a staff member on campus.

The characters, whose values are opposite, coexist awkwardly from the very beginning. As the pampered Park Avenue psychiatrist begins to feel compassion for the women as she hears of their personal tragedies, she and Melissa collide. Ultimately, J.S. and the women she was sent to treat find common ground, and everyone emerges deeply changed. 

“Necessary Targets,” according to the Random House publishers website, “is a groundbreaking play about women and war — about the violence of dark memories and the enduring resilience of the human spirit. It has been read in New York by Meryl Streep, Angelica Huston and Calista Flockhart, and was performed in Sarajevo with Glenn Close and Melissa Tomei.”

Ensler’s own comments about the book include the observation that, “When we think of war, we think of it as something that happens to men in fields or jungles. We think of hand grenades and Scud missiles.

“We think of the moment of violence — the blast, the explosion. But war is also a consequence — the effects of which are not known or felt for months, years, generations,” Ensler says on the Random House site. “And because consequences are usually not televised, by then the war is no longer sexy — the ratings are gone, consequences remain invisible.”

Other actors in the play include Baycka Voronietsky, an assistant professor of music at UMaine who emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1969. She reads the part of Zlata.

Another graduate student, Alma Delic-Ibukic, is from Bosnia and plays the role of Jelena, one of the five Bosnian women. Sofia Wilder reads the part of Azra, and Jane Snider, associate professor of theater and dance, is narrator.

Douglas says she had approached another student with an eastern European background to audition for “Necessary Targets,” “but when she read the play, she decided it was just too close and too difficult to do.”

While the play doesn’t require an elaborate set, Douglas says she has arranged for a slide show depicting scenes of war, including some from Vietnam and Iraq.

The characters in the play — as happened historically with many of the men and women in Bosnia — experienced terrible situations involving rape, torture and the murder of loved ones, Douglas says, which is why the use of slides depicting war will help the audience understand the tension of the play and the stories the women tell.

“It’s not easy to just block that stuff out,” Douglas says. “One woman in the play says, ‘You Americans, you don’t think it can happen here, but we didn’t think it could happen here.'”

On the other hand, says Douglas, the play also is a lesson in perspective. “You have to keep it in perspective,” she says, and the Bosnian characters do.

Adds Davidovic, in spite of the tragedy of war, “people go on with their lives,” in the play and in life. Like many European movies, she says, this play “has that make you laugh and make you cry kind of thing.”

Both Davidovic and Douglas point out that the play is apolitical. “It’s not about who did what to whom,” Davidovic says.

“It’s about women and about war,” she adds. “I would never have done a play that I thought was propaganda.”

Information about tickets can be obtained by calling the Maine Center for the Arts box office at 581-1755. Admission is $6.