Info Wars: A View from the Balkans

Three Shows From the 2022 Kosovo Theatre Showcase

By Steven Leigh Morris

Prizren, Kosovo — an hour’s drive south-west from the capital city, Prishtina, on the road to Albania (Photo by SLM)

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Sometimes the perspective of distance lends clarity when one dwells in the fog of current events engulfing the homeland. 

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Why would an American have any interest in a theater showcase in Kosovo, a teenage nation (founded in 2008) in the Balkans, still not recognized by dozens of members of the United Nations? Sometimes the perspective of distance lends clarity when one dwells in the fog of current events engulfing the homeland. 

In the wake of the US mid-term elections, at least four platforms of our mainstream press (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian) persevere in their lockstep yet shifting echo-chamber narratives, now “explaining” the “surprisingly” strong showing of the Democratic Party in that voting. Their singular story before the election was that the Democrats were headed for a drubbing. Pundits and pollsters pushed this narrative, based on precedent (the political party of a US president with less than 50% approval ratings always takes a beating) and threadbare theories that women enraged by U.S. Supreme Court’s assault on their right to choose (a Republican liability) had now come to terms with all that, and were now re-focusing on the cost of gasoline and food (a Democratic liability). None of these polls bothered to ask respondents whether their attention spans were really as fleeting as those of newspaper editors, or whether they really blamed the Democrats for inflation, or whether they really believed Republicans would do a better job with the economy. The faulty assumption that worked its way into the national narrative was that everybody would lamely attack the majority party, the Democrats, for local problems that are actually global problems. This is not the first U.S. election in which our experts, propelled by their own reductive reasoning, and exacerbated by their overlords’ hunger for clicks, have predicted and pronounced half-truths. Theirs is a collective folly in modern journalism where the need for attention is at odds with the need for context and accuracy. 

What does this have to do with the Balkans? It has to do with perhaps the most important question of our times, the question at the heart of every great work of art: How do we know what we think we know is true?

In the United States, and large swaths of Europe, encampments of Opinion are not segregated just by ideology, they occupy entirely different realities. This is not new, but our information and disinformation systems have made it particularly pronounced in the 21^st century.

On to the Balkans:

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and with that collapse, the fragile and often brutal ties holding together the republics of Communist Yugoslavia snapped, unleashing warring tribes. Memories of the Yugoslav and Kosovo wars (1991 to 2001) entailing genocidal clashes among republics of the former Yugoslavia loom large and clear over Kosovo, which is one of those republics.

It takes time to recover from such an apocalypse, but the week before I arrived in Kosovo in late October, visa restrictions for travel among the Balkan nations were finally, almost entirely lifted. The notable exception was Kosovo’s neighbor, Serbia – once helmed by “the butcher of the Balkans” Slobodan Milošević, who was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Albanians and Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s. Why would he do that? Let’s start with the basics: Serbia is a predominantly Orthodox nation; Albania and Kosovo are predominantly Muslim. This is an old story.

Even with a US or UK passport, one still cannot travel from Kosovo to its northern neighbor Serbia, for the simple reason that Serbia refuses to recognize Kosovo as a nation. So anybody arriving to Serbia must show proof that they are arriving from somewhere; in Serbia’s administrative eyes, Kosovo is simply not somewhere, or anywhere. In order to get to Serbia, travelers from Kosovo need to maneuver in the opposite direction through North Macedonia in order to get from what should be a beeline from Prishtina (Kosovo) to Belgrade (Serbia).  Imagine having to go drive through Oregon in order to get from Southern California to Arizona.

At the foundation of all this absurdity lies the issue of respect: the binding among us that’s become so frayed in public discourse. Let’s start with the demagogues: the Miloševićs and Trumps, and Orbans, and Putins and their apologists, dozens of them, from Tucker Carlson to Kevin McCarthy to Alex Jones to Elon Musk to Peter Handke. Who? Handke? Not a household name in the US, though he should be. More on Handke in a moment.

Whether or not these people believe their own toxic rhetoric is an open question.

The demagogues have stirred up rage over the fraying of respect – that their partisans stand on the brink of irrelevance, of being replaced, of having the land they walk on, their nations, whisked out from under them by the “other” (even if the “others” are fellow citizens), leaving them to tumble into their graves unremembered and replaced. Remember the chant from the White Supremacists’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia?: “The Jews will not replace us.”

The fear of being invisible, irrelevant, was always present, but it’s become a global pathology in the 21^st century. The smaller the person, the greater the fear, and the world has no shortage of small-hearted people.

View of Prizren, looking down from a fort built 500 BCE, then fortified three hundred years later. (Photo by SLM)

Now imagine living in a country such as Kosovo. Superficially at least, it’s a dirt poor, friendly, trusting, bustling place with clusters of mosques and crowded cafes. Imagine living with the stark reality that your neighboring Orthodox country to the north refuses to recognize you. This is not paranoia, this is policy, and that distinction is worth noting.

It’s not just that they refuse to recognize you as a country. Add to that a recent, catastrophic war, still locked in living memory, yet it barely registers as part of world history, even though it included genocide. As though it never happened.

How do we know what we think we know is true?

When Russia’s Vladimir Putin re-invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Fox News trumpeted that this was “the largest invasion on European soil since the second World War.” 

In fact, according to the United Nations, the civilian death count throughout the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine stands at about 6,000.  Contrast that with Srebrenica in July 1995, up to 8,000 Muslims were systematically killed in five days, reports CNN.

Over ten-years, the Balkan wars took well over 100,000 civilian lives (according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). Yet Russia’s move on Ukraine is the largest invasion on European soil since World War II?

This is not to downplay the horrors of war that Ukraine is currently enduring, nor Putin’s venality, but to underscore the alternative realities in which we live. If you are from Kosovo, you live with the narrative that in the eyes of some, your country doesn’t exist, nor does the memory of so many thousands of friends and family systematically murdered.

The Handke Project, Or Justice for Peter’s Stupidities

Klaus Martini, Arben Bajraktaraj (Photo by Atdhe Mulla)

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What does Handke have to do with us, and why is Neziraj so pissed off at him?    

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And here, we enter the land of Peter Handke, the Peter Pan-like subject of Kosovar playwright Jeton Neziraj’s blistering satire, The Handke Project, Or Justice for Peter’s Stupidities, presented as part of the seven-day festival in an animated staging by Blerta Naziraj at Prishtina’s Oda Theatre.

Handke showed up in last year’s festival in a different Neziraj play, The Return of Karl May. There he was also a subject of ridicule, but that was just a warmup. In The Handke Project, Neziraj goes at Handke full-throttle: merciless, unrelenting and, at times, very funny.

Why? Who cares about this Austrian author other than some local literary fans? What does Handke have to do with us, and why is Neziraj so pissed off at him?    

Handke is an avant-garde playwright, and novelist, recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature and, essentially, a Balkan genocide denier. 2019 was around the same time that Donald Trump was angling for the Nobel Prize. The parallel is striking. Handke spoke at the funeral of his good friend Slobodan Milošević, and offered testimony as to what a great guy he was. Fair enough. They were friends. That’s what eulogies are for.

What is unconscionable is the way in which Handke, from a comfortable distance, continually sewed doubt into the validity of the Balkan genocide and Milošević’s leading role in it. Handke used a rhetorical technique that Trump and his acolytes appear to have borrowed, or perhaps it’s the other way around. As Neziraj puts it in his play, in the guise of intellectual curiosity, Handke raised a question as to whether reports of the thousands of murders happening in the former Yugoslavia were true. Perhaps the atrocities were staged? Sound familiar?

In The Handke Project, the title character is discussing his creative techniques with his Uncle Joseph, in a scene that identifies the influence of one Nobel Prize-winning author in all its horrific, solipsistic and absurd dimensions.

Peter Handke: I like the question mark because it fits in with the character of literature. Literature asks questions, and the question mark is the strongest weapon that it commands. For example, I could write: Genocide occurred in Srebrenica. Then, immediately after this affirmative statement, I could write: Did genocide occur in Srebrenica? Something like that.

Uncle Joseph That’s just getting started because then you could add a more radical sentence, like, “Srebrenica is a fabrication,” or, “The holocaust is a fabrication”…

Peter Handke Can I go that far Uncle Joseph? Don’t you think it’s a bit risky? Won’t it make people angry? I’m worried that I could lose my most faithful readers, the ones who have followed me unconditionally for all these years.

Uncle Joseph But you’re a writer, Peter, my boy. You write literature. In the end, if things get complicated, you can always write a sentence like, “It’s all literature,” or “I come from Homer… Cervantes…”.

Peter Handke Tolstoy…

Uncle Joseph Okay, okay, but Tolstoy is a Russian author, and I would not like you to be identified with him. The Russians are always troublemakers, they just cause problems.

Peter Handke Should I mention Harold Pinter, for example?

Uncle Joseph He’s not very important, Peter, much less significant than you are. Compare yourself to the greats. Compare yourself to Knut Hamsun.

It’s from the Handke School of Inquiry that Info Wars’ Alex Jones graduated, mocking the victims of an American school shooting, similarly suggesting, with a looming question mark, that the whole thing was staged.

It’s from the Handke School of Inquiry that Elon Musk graduated, retweeting a conspiracy theory from the Right-leaning Santa Monica Observer that Paul Pelosi (husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) was in the midst of a homosexual dispute when he was attacked in his own home by a hammer-wielding assailant (who later told police that he sought the absent House Speaker in order to break her knees). Naturally, both Donald Trump and Fox News assumed a prominent position on this garbage pile: “The glass [in Pelosi’s home], it seems, was broken from the inside to the out,” Trump opined at a rally, raising the “question” of whether the assailant was trying to break out rather than break in. Video evidence soon emerged showing the attacker breaking in.

The influence of the The Handke School of Inquiry is viral, in all senses of that word.

How do we know what we think we know is true?

The Handke Project feels like a free-wheeling cabaret performed in English by an excellent pan-European ensemble of six — a couple of actors portray the title character — though “free-wheeling” is a superficial impression because the structure is so taut. For instance, the overriding impression derives from Handke appearing in a dress, and with angel wings, along with a plastic inflatable sheep that gets sodomized in the service of a satirical point.

Neziraj (who authored five of the festival’s 12 main entries) is widely regarded as Kosovo’s national playwright, akin to what Vaclav Havel is to Czechoslovakia. And Neziraj shares Havel’s innate playfulness and awareness of cruel, bureaucratic absurdities – all serving as a thin mask for the author’s fury. All of these qualities emerge in flashes and clashes, like a fireworks display, through Blerta Neziraj’s staging. 

Together, writer and director transform fury into an artistic bullet. (Anton Chekhov, this ain’t.) The question in a polarized world is whether or not such bullets cause detractors to shut down or open up. What’s the point if theater only speaks to the like-minded? Speaking to the like-minded is what Fox News, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Telegram are for. And it’s now documented in research how the algorithms of those platforms (disinformation aside) merely exacerbate and then cement polarization. Is this also true when the theater employs vicious political satire to make its point?  

Unlike those media platforms, Neziraj and his festival want to build bridges. Last year’s production of his Balkan Bordello — a look at the Balkan wars through the lens of Agamemnon — was performed by an ensemble of Kosovar, Serbian and American actors. There were Serbian actors, also, in The Handke Project, though I heard that one of them, uncomfortable with the content, dropped out. A journalist colleague mentioned that when The Handke Project was performed in Serbia, one local audience member appeared staunchly unamused at the opening, but slowly, as the production progressed, he began to relax and finally started laughing. The ability to change one’s mind depends in large part on the willingness to change one’s mind, and that’s mostly beyond the artist’s control.

Our Son

Dragana Varagić, Amar Ćorović (Photo by Milena Arsenic)

As an indication of its larger intentions, the festival invited a Serbian company (Heartefact Fund) to present writer-director Patrik Lazić’s Our Son, a production that could not be further apart in tone and content from The Handke Project.

In place of symbols such as angel wings and inflatable sheep, it engages in the kind of hyper-realism one might see at Rogue Machine or Playwrights’ Arena in Los Angeles. Lazic’s play is a Serbian cousin to Rogue Machine’s recent production of Samuel D. Hunter’s A Great Wilderness, which concerned the misgivings of an aging male Christian camp director (played by John Flynn), facing regrets over his life spent trying to “reform” gay boys through conversation and prayer. That production was set in a rural Idaho cabin, with all the details that come with cinematic realism — the kitchen, the stove, literal and functional. The confused young man in Hunter’s play, having endured shock therapy at other “conversion” facilities, runs for his life, or from his life, into the forest.

John Perrin Flynn and Jeffrey Delfin in Samuel D. Hunter’s A GREAT WILDERNESS at Rogue Machine in Los Angeles. (photo by Alex Neher)

The young male subject (Amar Covovic) of Lazić’s drama does precisely the opposite: He comes home, confident and cognizant, to the kitchen of his now divorced, fucked-up parents (Dragana Varagić and Aleksandar Đinđić) who want desperately to love him but cannot comprehend how he could have turned out this way. There’s that oven, that monument to kitchen sink realism, and the lasagna that emerges from it.

Now, it’s true that in a metatheatrical twist, the young subject is writing a play about his parents, and that the play we’re watching is actually his play-within-the-play. And though that removes all pretense of an objective biographical docudrama, stylistically it’s just the cheese dressing that goes with that lasagna.  

The production is presented in Serbian with English supertitles within the lapidarium of the National Museum of Kosovo, Prishtina, with the audience on bleachers looking out beyond the stage through glass windows onto the museum’s courtyard. This only underscores the realism, as it seeks to dispense with all theatrical trappings. We’re in a kitchen, in a play-within-a-play that’s lodged inside a museum. Except for the stage lights, there’s a minimum of artifice.

To some extent, Our Son is a revenge melodrama, a variation on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? — a kind of trial in which the prodigal son (the only son) tests his parents (as estranged from each other as they are from him), and their capacity to meet his offstage male partner whom he claims he has invited to this dinner.

His mother, with whom he has a bond (the father has been largely absent from his life) has been torn between accepting him for who he obviously is and trying to “reform” him. (She is armed with all manner of pop literature of what “turns” a boy gay, including a father’s indifference.) Before his arrival, his parents squabble over the extent to which they each bear responsibility for their son’s condition, through riffs of dialogue that’s both earnest and sarcastic, and with pristinely executed body language. These are three finely textured performances containing pathos and wit, and Lazić’s staging is pitch-perfect.

I won’t dwell further on this except to say that the ingratiating efforts by the character of Đinđić’s father — saturating his son with gratuitous praise (“Son, you really are amazing”) in an attempt to undo the damage of his former indifference — is as painful and funny as his son’s bemused response. The young man doesn’t suffer fools easily, and his father is behaving foolishly.  

Also, Our Son challenges assumptions that European theater is all electronics and multimedia, abstractions and symbols. Based on the extended, emotional ovation after the performance I attended, kitchen sink realism in alive and well in the Balkans.

Both The Handke Project and Our Son are angry plays seeking larger truths though their senses of grievance, humor, and empathy. The damages done by Milošević and Handke are overt and quantifiable. The Handke Project puts both characters on trial, raising questions of truth and accountability in a polarized world. In Our Son, the damages done are interpersonal and murky — hence the need for the play-within-the-play to be honest about the subjectivity of the author’s view and how, in a similar quest for accountability, the truth lies between the lines we speak at home, and the lines that divide our values.

Death Hour

Adrian Morina, Albulena Kryeziu Bokshi, Arben Derhemi (Photo by Rilind Beqa)

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I then heard a large crowd roaring in the distance and wondered for a moment if the Balkan wars hadn’t just returned to Prishtina.

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Walking towards the venue for the production of Death Hour, there appeared to be some kind of rally in Prishtina’s tony central promenade, and a strong police presence. I turned away from the commotion, walking downhill before having to duck out of the way of three dozen or so armed police charging uphill, by me in the opposite direction, giving credence to the term “storm troopers.” I then heard a large crowd roaring in the distance and wondered for a moment if the Balkan wars hadn’t just returned to Prishtina. The commotion turned out to be the offshoot of a soccer match at the nearby stadium between Prishtina’s team and that of a visiting squad from Prague. I didn’t know that at the time, and it was an apt preview to the site-specific event I was about to encounter. 

Police outside Prishtina’s soccer stadium in a place that knows the costs and benefits of crowd control (Photo by SLM)

Before the Balkan wars exploded into genocide, the President of communist Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, had separated himself from the more draconian policies of his contemporary Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. Tito is known for keeping the tribes of Yugoslavia from killing each other by granting some kind of autonomy to regions and republics, Kosovo being one of them. Specifically, Tito granted Kosovo veto power over Serbian parliamentary decisions, a kind of benevolence that did not sit well with Serbia. In the period between Tito’s death in 1980 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, things were already starting to unravel in the former Yugoslavia. And it’s in this period that Ulpianë Maloku and Agnesa Mehanolli’s fastidiously researched and viscerally wrenching Death Hour occurs.

Moreover, Death Hour is set in a prison. Not just the play, but the presentation of it by Albania’s Bokshi Theatre Company and Artpolis, and directed by Ilir Bokshi.

View, pre-show, from the set of DEATH HOUR (Photo by SLM)

In order to access the stage, the audience is guided through the austere, enclosed concrete walkways of a former Prishtina prison (now the Prishtina Prison Museum), past cellblocks containing men banging cans and tin dishes against their cement walls. These are the actors we’re about to meet in the courtyard stage, a courtyard that’s rimmed with barbed wire and a looming walkway overhead. The play is spoken in Albanian, with English supertitles.

Four brilliant performers inhabit multiple roles — from prisoners to judges — depicting the stories of an Albanian prisoner (Albulena Kryeziu-Boskhi, breathtaking) on trial for disparaging the quality of a local apple, and by extension, Communist Albania where it grew. She can confess and face a comparatively lenient sentence of several decades in prison, or proclaim her innocence at the risk of capital punishment, since her guilt is pre-ordained. The “trial” recalls a macabre blend of Kafka and Genet as applied to a local context; three judges squabble with spitfire repartee, before one judge (Arben Derhemi) pontificates in a basso profundo with a slow, rolling cadence – evidently an impersonation of that era’s Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha.

There’s the story of two men, part of a prisoner swap on that overhanging bridge — one an Albanian from Albania, notably cynical; the other an Albanian from Kosovo (then a republic of Yugoslavia). The latter, from that distance, sees Albania through a crystalline lens: gulfs of incomprehension unveiled on a thin overhanging walkway.

And finally, there are scenes of torture – pliers for teeth and electrodes for the anus, you get the idea. Through the visceral horror of it, through the blood dripping out of mouths, there’s a kind of grim humor in the glibness of the guards — “grim” being the operative adjective.

 And through all this, in the courtyard’s night air, beyond the barbed wire wrapped around all of us, comes the roar of the crowd from the nearby soccer stadium. It could be a revolution unfolding. It could be the arrival of NATO. It could be liberation or termination. But those roars are as unplanned and spontaneous as a forest fire or a political explosion. Even though the play is a theatrical contrivance set inside a former prison, site specific doesn’t get much more specific than the roar of that crowd, and what it contributes to the illusion of authenticity.

The production’s other two superb actors deserve naming: Kushtrim Sheremeti and Adrian Morina,

 Leaving Kosovo, I was funneled through passport control. Handed my passport to a fellow inside a glass booth. “How long were you in Kosovo?” “And what did you do here?” “Enjoy your flight.” He spoke in a basso profundo, in ever-so-slow, rolling cadences. Was this a reincarnation of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha? Or was it the actor Arben Derhemi who’d impersonated him as that judge in that prison?

No. Neither. It was guy who worked for Kosovo immigration. I think. It was an echo in a festival of echoes, in a land of echoes.

How do we know what we think we know is true?