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Kosovo’s Molière: Mocking Hypocrites and Autocrats
Playwright Jeton Neziraj’s Department of Dreams premieres at City Garage
By Steven Leigh Morris
Kosovar Playwright Jeton Neziraj
In 1999, the country formerly known as Yugoslavia was crumbling into six agitating republics. At the same time, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević led a campaign of ethnic cleansing, displacing or killing over 230,000 people. U.S. President Bill Clinton, working with his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke, directed the Pentagon to lead 38,000 NATO airstrikes on Belgrade and the Serbian military across the region. It was a rescue operation. Those actions paved the way for Kosovo to declare independence from Milošević in 2008. Though Kosovo is recognized by most members of the United Nations, 11-years later it’s no surprise that its independence remains disputed by Russia and China, thereby blocking Kosovo from even applying for UN membership.
At the time of the NATO bombing runs, Kosovo-born playwright Jeton Neziraj was 22-years-old, hanging out and largely protected by soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – a group that was declared a “terrorist organization” by the Serbian government.
Neziraj explained that until he started studying dramaturgy, his contact with literature was superficial, and that he had no contact with theater.
“I would say most of the young people of that young generation had no possibility to see theater – so we were a so-called powerless generation of the ‘90s. The military regime threw us out of the public schools because [Milošević] wanted to impose a Serbian curriculum – so basically we were excluded from public life in Kosovo, which was suddenly taken over by a few idealogues.”
(This was also a religious conflict within the six republics, with the largely non-practicing Islamic Albanians in Kosovo pitted against Milošević’s mostly Christian Orthodox Serbs.)
Twenty years later, in March 2019, Clinton was welcomed as a national hero at Kosovo’s 20-year-liberation ceremony in the capital, Prishtina. A statue of Albright was unveiled as part of the celebration.
Clinton’s actions to protect Kosovo, a nascent democracy in the Balkans, remain contested by conservative pundits such as Charles Krauthammer. And though the United States has a long, tortured history of cozying up to dictators in southeast Asia, Latin America, and now North Korea, Turkey, Syria and Russia, Clinton’s actions in 1999 nonetheless remain an emblem of how the United States once showed that it could still represent some lofty principles, i.e. rescuing the people of a burgeoning democracy from a genocide inflicted by an autocrat.
That was then.
In the intervening years, Neziraj, now 42-years-old, has written over 25 plays; many have been produced internationally, from Wales to Turkey to the United States. From 2008-2011 he served as artistic director of the National Theatre of Kosovo in Prishtina, and he currently runs a different company, also in Prishtina, Qendra Multimedia. He says he was kicked out of the National Theatre “for making work that challenged the dominant political narrative.” (More on that in a moment.)
His play, Department of Dreams will receive its world premiere at Santa Monica’s City Garage, October 25 through December 8, directed by Frederique Michel. Neziraj will fly in from Kosovo to take part in a weekend of promotional events Nov. 8-10.
Department of Dreams is an “Orwellian comedy about an autocratic government that demands its citizens deposit their dreams in a central bureaucratic depository so that it can exert the fullest possible control of their imaginations.”
To provide some insight into Neziraj’s Molière-ish temperament, he would be the kind of kid in the back of the classroom who shoots spit wads at the teacher through a straw, regardless of the teacher’s religious or political affiliations. Rather, it’s pomposity and authoritarianism that inspire him to write. Neziraj’s One Flew Over the Kosovo Theatre was premiered under tense conditions by the Kosovo National Theatre in 2012. The play is a political satire set during the formation of the Kosovo government, about a troupe of Kosovar actors who have to stop work on their production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in order to perform a play celebrating the independence of Kosovo, written by the prime minister and incorporating his speeches. (As a student, Neziraj had written political speeches.)
ONE FLEW OVER THE KOSOVO THEATRE
In actuality, Neziraj told London’s The Stage 2018, feeling the mockery of the concept, a former Kosovar minister of culture tried to block performances, while ambassadors to Kosovo from Germany, Austria and Switzerland urged the company to persevere. The play did go on, by which time Neziraj was no longer serving as the theater’s artistic director.
At the beginning of rehearsals, Neziraj said, the company sent out fake press releases saying that the play was being produced with the full support of the Kosovo government (it wasn’t), then added to the mayhem by announcing that there were only five copies of the script, that they had all been stolen, but the actors had memorized their lines, so all was well. By the time the play was produced, police had been called in to protect the theater, there were bomb threats, audience members took to the stage and shouted that the play was “anti-national” and funded by the Serbs, etc., etc.
Neziraj’s literary influences are 19th and 20th century playwrights Heinrich Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, and Eugene Ionesco, but mostly short story-writers and novelists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and the Italian short-story writer Dino Buzzati.
“The magic realism of Márquez was sweeping my perception of the society, and keeps inspiring me in many directions, he’s an extraordinary story-teller, and of course Kafka, who confronts his characters in bizarre situations.”
Stage Raw reached Neziraj by phone at the National Theatre of Kosovo, in Prishtina, where he ducked out of a rehearsal to take the call.
From Naziraj’s play 55 SHADES OF GAY (Photo by Jetmir Idrizi)
STAGE RAW: In the American theater, telling a story seems to be a priority. On the page, Department of Dreams reads as a series of symbolist vignettes. How important is it for you to “tell a story” in your plays?
JETON NEZIRAJ: It is more important that I communicate ideas to an audience. My plays mix various styles and genres, prose and poetry, song and dialogue, monologue and dialogue – through this arsenal, I tell a story, sometimes a very small one, yes, it is a little story, compared to the ideas that should come out of the play, the story remains secondary, unimportant. In this way Department of Dreams can be seen as a series of vignettes. It’s not important for me to tell a story, I hope it’s not important for the audience either. I’m writing about an autocratic state that seeks to control people’s lives. When the play is over, I don’t want the audience to think about the characters or the composition of the story, I would rather they discuss the ideas of the play, for its content. This does not mean I should be perceived as an activist, because I am not.
The content of modern American plays mostly doesn’t interest me, though we don’t see all of the American plays. Family problems, property, land, this is okay, those are old-fashioned topics. Here, it takes time, it takes energy and lots of money to put on a play. This we don’t have. Whenever I have the possibility to write a new play, I should think deeply before writing, not just another play that’s “ah, this is interesting, this is entertaining.” It needs to be “needed,” urgent to tell. Urgency. Not stories that are being told by media and by television. What can the theater find that’s not being told everywhere else? And in a way that’s not being shown anywhere else?
SR: It’s true that family issues continue to pervade new American writing, but often they’re attached to gender- and trans-gender issues, LGBTQ issues, which are really issues of bigotry and oppression, and battling autocracy and theocracy, which is your world. Is there no connection there to your work?
JN: Yes, there is. I wrote a play called 55 Shades of Gay. You’d think it was about family and gender, but for me, it was more important to tackle policies: Who is manipulating? Who is profiting from the homophobic environment? Who is trying to benefit from this? The struggle of LGBT is a universal, permanent struggle in every society.
(Note: 55 Shades of Gay is a 70-minute burlesque that premiered in Prishtina in 2017 and was presented in early 2019 at New York’s LaMama. It’s the story of a male couple applying for a wedding license in a homophobic Balkan town, where a condom factory is also opening with the support of the European Union.)
55 SHADES OF GAY, at New York’s LaMama (Photo by Theo Cote)
SR: From what you say, one can infer that the 20th century Theatre of the Absurd informs your writing, or do you now find that school of theater irrelevant to the 21st century?
JN: I don’t know whether the Theatre of the Absurd had any direct influence of me, I was never fascinated by Samuel Beckett plays the way I was by [the writings of] Gabriel Márquez. I believe every school of drama is important, but we cannot expect writers of the 21st century to have the same writing style, temperament and energy. My style is determined by what I’ve lived through. It’s true, I am interested in Brecht and Heiner Mueller. But to answer the question, yes, the period of the 20th century is inspiring but it now belongs to the history of the theater. The contemporary theater should be based on the pulse of the moment. Even when a writer writes about the past, the past should speak to the contemporary time. At least that’s my personal approach.
SR: We live in a world that traffics in advertising and political disinformation; both are powerful influences when broadcast through social- and other media. How is the theater supposed to confront that? How do you get to the truth of something? And what has been your experience confronting that in the productions of your plays? Do you feel this is something you’ve been able to do? Or is it something you’re still working on?
JN: The only way to confront fake news and information on social media, is insisting on doing quality theater that does not fall into the trap of what the audience wants you to do, which is determined by social media. The theater is, has always been, that third, missing voice in the society, a playground where we discuss real problems of the society. It has to be some kind of opposition, particularly in opposition to the bad governments that we all have. Opposition to the stupidity and all of the trash that’s on social media. Theater is powerful, and is sometimes considered as dangerous by the authorities. In Kosovo, theater’s power is demonstrated by the police who are often present, there are often protests and other forms of discontent before a production.
DEPARTMENT OF DREAMS at City Garage (Photo by Paul M. Rubenstein)
SR: A political question: Do you find parallels in the current Turkish invasion of Syria to events that transpired in the former Yugoslavia? What are the similar patterns, and what are the differences?
JN: That’s not an easy question. I don’t know about easy differences and similarities, because my work has been published and presented in Turkey more than any other country. I’ve been there a lot. You can see the fear people have. There’s no doubt that there’s a dangerous autocrat that’s interested in not only oppressing people in Turkey but also in Syria. Now Kurds are left at his mercy.
America is not the same America of the 1990s that bombed Serbia – to help contain Milošević. And here we are, from total paradox, [playwright] Peter Handke was just awarded the Nobel Prize, a supporter of Milošević. This is weird and a disgrace.
Kosovo was lucky that Bill Clinton was president in 1999. Many people don’t agree with his role, but in Kosovo he’s almost like a national hero. The major difference is that Bill Clinton was president of the United States. If Bill Clinton could stop Milošević in 1999, who will stop Erdoğan today? Unfortunately, it won’t be the USA.
DEPARTMENT OF DREAMS | by JETON NEZIRAJ | performs at CITY GARAGE, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Building T1, Santa Monica | Champagne preview, Friday., Oct. 25, 8 p.m.; opens Sat., Oct. 26, 8 p.m.; perfs Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Dec. 8. (310) 453-9939, or www.citygarage.org.| (Panel discussion Sunday Nov., 10, following the 3 p.m. performance: Panelists: STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS, Moderator, Editor Stage Raw; DR. MIETEK BODUSZYNSKI, Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College; DR. VIKTORIJA LEJKO-LACAN, Department of Slavic East-European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures UCLA; LAUREN MURPHY YEOMAN, Assistant Professor of Theatre, USC School of Dramatic Arts.)
