Home Valley Advocate Stagestruck: Seeking Refuge

Stagestruck: Seeking Refuge

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refugee-el-shatt

You wouldn’t expect to find close connections between the Sinai desert, urban Serbia and the Appalachian mountains, but a new play by UMass theater professor Milan Dragicevich brings them tellingly together. Refugee, previewing tonight (Wednesday) and running this weekend and next, takes an episode from Dragicevich’s family history and follows its “generational aftershocks,” as the playwright puts it, into more recent history and the present day.

Displaced by World War II, Dragicevich’s mother fled with other evacuees from then-Yugoslavia to the El Shatt refugee camp on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. “The story is inspired by my mom’s seven-year sojourn as a displaced person,” he told me, “though we mix it with other elements to create a wider story, leaping forward 50 years in time and space.” The play imagines descendants on two continents – one living in Belgrade during the NATO bombing of Serbia, the other in Appalachia.

milan-crop-sm“I have always been interested in Southern Appalachia, a region that has managed to create and hold fast to its culture and identity in the face of tremendous and rapid change all around it,” Dragicevich says. “In a play that is exploring the impact of place in shaping identity, Appalachia is the first American frontier. It is a place that has seen waves of migration, displacement, refugees.” He recalls that after World War II, “more than two million hungry Appalachians fled those green mountains in search of work up north,” just as African Americans had migrated from the South a generation earlier.

That experience “is balanced against 1999 Belgrade, where displacement, exile and exodus were a daily fact of life. During the bleak decade of upheaval in the 1990s, more than 500,000 young people fled Milosevic’s Serbia. Every day people were faced with life-changing decisions concerning home and place, leaving home and traveling into the unknown world beyond the borders.

“When we change borders, what do we become?” the playwright muses. “I am very interested in how one person’s exodus influences the destiny of subsequent generations. Some things cannot really be known or understood without this long view. Our identity seems to be a grab-bag of many elements, some in our DNA, some in things we acquire along the yellow brick road. It’s a fascinating inquiry.”

The inquiry is abetted by two guest artists – the acclaimed Serbian director Nikita Milivojević, who himself has lived through and made theater during periods of displacement and exodus; and the Oscar- and Grammy-nominated composer/musician/ethnomusicologist Tim Eriksen, known locally as co-founder of the eclectic band Cordelia’s Dad. This premiere run is accompanied by a series of special events, including discussions with the guest artists. See umass.edu/theater for details and tickets.

Refugee performs Dec. 2-3 and 7-10 in the Curtain Theater, UMass Amherst.

Photos of El Shatt refugee camp and Milan Dragicevich
courtesy of the UMass Theater Department

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