“MILOSEVIC AT THE HAGUE”
                                    NEW SERIOUS PLAY! THEATRE ENSEMBLE PRODUCTION- OPENING FEB. 2009
The Production Team:
Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble is led by Artistic Director, Sheryl Stoodley, and Ensemble Manager, Robin Doty.  Playwright, Milan Dragicevich, will co-direct ‘Milosevic at The Hague’ with Ms. Stoodley, David Dello Russo, local musician with The Primate Fiasco will coordinate musical needs, Len Berkman, Hoyt Professor of Theatre, Smith College, will act as Dramaturge.

The Play:
The historical chain of events on which the characters and their encounters in this play are hung is the story of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s rise to power from an obscure low-level party official to his final deportation to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague.  But while its telling will shed politically revealing light on circumstances that shaped his destiny in the 1990s yet received little Western press scrutiny, the play’s heat comes from realizations about the ‘Slobo’ potential in all of us and Milosevic’s view that history is forged by charismatic appeal.   Through real characters from a Lady MacBeth-like wife and political manipulator, Mira Markovic to Carla Del Ponte, the intractable chief prosecutor at The Hague, the story reveals the many faces of human surrender to the intoxication of power. Fictional encounters with figures from Serbian folklore and the American Civil War force soul-searching responses to age-old questions. When do the ends justify the means?  Is right beyond the reach of a madman? When does one person’s justifiable act become someone else’s war crime? 

“Milosevic at the Hague” will investigate contrary visions of truth and reality, and the unique personal and historical circumstances that create such competing interpretations.  Young people will be the innocent center of the play, offering uncolored lenses through which to see.  An eager American high school student sent by his school to cover the trial will open opportunities for the presentation of the points-of-view of American youth.  A young Serbian girl steeped in her culture’s history grasps the shallowness of blind romanticism and  travels to The Hague to lay bare the hollow defenses of a defiant Milosevic. Through all of it, the play moves freely between events at the trial itself to earlier formative scenes that took place in the former Yugoslavia.

Musicians will participate directly in the unfolding onstage events. Modeled on Serbian brass based music like that of the band Belo Platno, Western Mass. rooted group, The Primate Fiasco, will fuel many of the play’s scenes. .  “Milosevic at the Hague” will also capitalize on the physical expressiveness that is a signature of the Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, utilizing dynamic Balkan dance, American rhythms and overall movement choreography to invigorate the story.  The Ensemble actors, key in Serious Play’s work, have always demanded that contemporary themes be integral to its work.  The themes of justice, power, and accountability, and the variations in perceived individual reality explored in ‘Milosevic at The Hague’ resonate with the times.  The work is compelling because, with its central young characters that provide the unobstructed lens for seeing the raw reality under the political veneer. It provides an ideal way to reveal the power and clarity that Serious Play! believes in .

Artistic Collaborators:
Milan Dragicevich: Playwright and Co-Director, is an Assistant Professor of Theater, specializing in performance, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Previously, he served as Visiting Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Film, Television, and Theater; the University of Delaware Professional Theatre Training Program; and, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.  Mr. Dragicevich’s original screenplay, ‘Big Band,’ was selected as a quarterfinalist by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting.  In the early 1990s, Mr. Dragicevich served as the Artistic Director for the Serbian-American Theatre Company of Los Angeles, which presented theatrically bold productions of the modern and classical Serbian repertoire at various ethnic festivals throughout the west coast.

Sheryl Stoodley, Co-Director:  Co-founder and Artistic Director of Serious Play!.  Ms. Stoodley has taught and performed with regional and academic theatres throughout New England for the past 25 years.  She has directed the majority of  Serious Play!, productions including Alice Tuan’s ‘Coastline’; “Matermorphosis” a Serious Play commissioned adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis by Haitian playwright Lenelle Moise, ‘What’s Left is Not Right: Marat/Sade,’ with new music for Serious Play by Elizabeth Swados; ‘Becoming Antigone,’ developed in collaboration with the hip hop ensemble Universes; and, ‘Hamlet – Asalto a la Inocencia,’ a reinterpretation with new text by Migdalia Cruz.    Ms. Stoodley holds an M.A. in the History of Theatre and Dramatic Literature from Smith College.  She has studied with Anne Bogart at the SITI Company; Eric Hill at the Suzuki Theatre Training Workshop StageWest; Kristin Linklater and the Company of Women; and Jerzy Grotowski and the Polish Theatre Lab. She teaches in the Theatre Department at Holyoke Community College.

Len Berkman, Dramaturg: Smith College’s Anne Hesseltine Hoyt Professor of Theatre and a playwright, dramaturge, and essayist, has taught dramatic literature and playwriting at Smith since 1969.  He has dramaturged new script and production development at NY Stage & Film Co., Sundance Institute, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Rep, Voice & Vision, Epic Theatre Ensemble and elsewhere for decades.