CAST:
Melissa............. Julie Knoch
J.S. ...........Angelee Favoino
Zlata............... Jan Malstedt
Seada........... Susan Maurer
Jelena......... Mary Van Nest
Nuna........... Kerstin Walker*
Azra................. Judy DiVita

* denotes CTWS student

Setting: The play is set in a New York City apartment and in a Bosnian refugee camp.

Time: 1995

Dramaturg’s Diary
By Marion J. Reis

About the Author:
Eve Ensler, born in1953, in Scarsdale, New York, was abused sexually and physically by her father, now dead. As a young woman, she sought relief from her pain in alcohol and drugs. She married Richard McDermott, the bartender who persuaded her to go into rehab, in 1979, adopted his son, and later divorced him. She attributes her salvation to her focus on writing; nevertheless her depression began to lift only after she recounted the details of her father’s actions in her mother’s presence. Thus she believes that if a victimized woman names the atrocities, painful as that is, it “breaks her isolation, begins to melt her shame and guilt.” She graduated from Middlebury College in 1957 and returned in 2003 to receive an Honorary Doctor of Letters.

After the success of The Vagina Monologues, her most famous play, she established V-Day, re-naming Valentine’s Day, internationally dedicated to end every kind of misogynistic violence.

Ensler, an award-winning dramatist, is the master of a difficult theatrical form — the nonfiction play. She has traveled in fourteen countries interviewing women to gather material for her life’s work. Necessary Targets is based on interviews Ensler conducted in 1995 with women who survived the civil war in Bosnia. Our play addresses the traumatic effect of rape on female refugee victims. Ensler dares call attention to the gender specific underside of war, often overlooked in the male dominated media, i.e., to rape as a systematic weapon of genocide.

Eve Ensler advocates the notion that storytelling is therapeutic. Facing the suppressed truth cannot help but empower and release women from their agony. One theatre critic praised Necessary Targets as an honest attempt to present the Bosnian women coming to confront this complexity. The Bosnia women are, as Mellisa puts it, “necessary targets,” of Serbian ethnic cleansing, but also ironically for Mellisa’s own ambition to exploit them for her book.

Ensler sent the material she started with through an evolving process of a series of readings by celebrities begun in 1996. In its present dramatic form, it made its world premiere on November 2001 at Hartford Stage in Connecticut and opened off-Broadway at the Variety Arts Theater in February 2002. A book version followed.

Ensler tells us why she wrote the play. “When we think of war, we do not think of women because the work of survival, of restoration, is not glamorous work. Like most women's work, it is undervalued, underpaid, and impossible. After war, men are often shattered, unable to function. Women not only work, but they create peace networks, find ways to bring about healing. They teach in home schools when the school buildings are destroyed. They build gardens in the middle of abandoned railroad tracks. They pick up the pieces, although they usually haven't fired a gun.” But she also targeted the “spiritual poverty of consumer-obsessed Americans” and what they can learn from Bosnian women.

Ensler is a workaholic — writing, traveling, interviewing, and speaking at fund- raisers. She tries to spend more time with her partner, Ariel Jordan, a psychotherapist, and looks forward to the day when she will no longer have to tell her V-Day stories.

Historical Background for the Play:
To understand this “non-fiction” play, we need to understand the ethnic cleansing policies of Slobodan Milosevic, leader of the Serbian republic of Yugoslavia after the collapse of Communism in 1989. After Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, he convinced Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian leader, fearful of Serb power, to divvy up Bosnia-Herzegovina. For the Serbs, ethnic cleansing was a euphemism for genocide. They carefully formulated a plan to claim areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina for a “Greater Serbia” that could be “purified” of Muslims and Croats. On the day, 6 April 1992, the European Community recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina’s independence, the Serb dominated Yugoslavian army invaded and occupied Bosnian towns. The Muslim populations were deported and/or placed in detention camps where men and boys were starved, tortured, and systematically executed. Women and girls went to separate detention/rape camps. A large number of Muslims fled to become displaced refugees in their own country, Croatia, and elsewhere. By the time of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, over 200,000 people had been killed, over 20,000 women and girls raped, and over 2 million forced from their homes.

The ethnic forces of religion and nationalism had lain dormant under Communism in Tito’s Yugoslavia — a patchwork of six republics and two autonomous regions. However, Milosevic and, to a lesser degree, Tudjman re-ignited these quiescent ethnic hatreds. The Serbs particularly appealed to fear, falsely depicting Bosnian Muslims as fierce Mujahedin warriors out to destroy their Serbian heritage and culture. This was reinforced by the Serbian protest in April 1987 against so-called infringements of their rights in Kosovo by the ethnic Albanian Muslim majority. The religious mindset of the Orthodox (Serbs) and to a lesser degree of the Catholics (Croats) regards the Muslims as Christian turncoats, even though Ottoman rule in Bosnia dates from 1322. The split between Byzantium and Rome in 1054 gave the Orthodox reason to view Roman Catholics as break-away Christians as well. Thus Milosevic inflamed ethnic fears and “patriotism” to feed his political ambitions by shifting his appeal from Communism to these deeper cultural roots. Polls taken in 1988 and 1998 showed an increase among those who identified themselves as believers, from 55.8% of Croats to 89.5% and Muslims from 37.3% and Serbs from 18.6% to 78.3%, each.

The weak Bosnian army of President Alija Izetbegovic (a Muslim) had little chance of stopping the Serbs and Croats, especially since the United Nations and the United States had imposed an arms embargo and were very reluctant to intervene until the atrocious Serbian siege and bombardment of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica compelled NATO under the leadership of President Bill Clinton to intervene with military force and sponsor the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. Even after this peace treaty was signed, the eruption of war in Kosovo between the Serbs and the indigenous ethnic Albanian majority, with ethnic cleansing policies firmly in place, sent hundreds of thousands Muslims fleeing into Macedonia.

PRODUCTION TEAM:
Director...................................... Linda Roberts
Technical Director....................... Thad Hallstein
Stage Manager................................ Ed Barrow
Asst Stage Manager....................... Sue Valenta
Costume Designers...................... Linda Bremer
......................................................Debby Mills
Costume Crew....Carolyn Redding, Donna Sauers
Dialect Coach.................. Susan Murray Miller
Dramaturgs.............. Ed Barrow, Marion J. Reis
Hospitality Chair.......................... Carol Clarke
Hospitality Crew
Cindy Blaszak, Andrea Imes, Donna Kanak, Eleanor Kanak, Rich Kanak, Karin Kramer, Pat Rafferty, Catey Sullivan, Merrilyn Tomchaney, Gini Welch
Lighting Designer .......................... Dick Jacoby
Lighting Crew.......... Linda Bugielski, Larry Horn,
Peggy Jacoby, Mike Janke, Paul Roach
Makeup Designer............................... Pat Huth
Makeup Crew.......... Bridget Bittman, Terry Harrold,
Stacie Heintze, Diane Oppenheim, Arlene Page,
Marilyn Weiher, Stephanie Williams.
Set Designer................................................ Art Kelly
Set Construction Chair............................ Terry Locke
Set Construction Crew..... Grace Abrahamson, Joe Delaloye, George Dempsey, Tim Feeney, Mark Hewitt, Harry Hultgren, Heinz Karplus, Art Kelly, Craig Mahlstedt, Jan Mahlstedt,
Rich Ptacek, Paul Roach, Bill Rotz, Fred Sauers, Noel Smith, Peter Sonnenberg
Set Painting.....................................Mary Pavia
Props................................................. Bill Love
Set Construction............................ Terry Locke
Set Painting Chair............................ Mary Pavia
Set Painting Crew.......................... Fred Sauers
Properties Designers.... Susan Cardamone,
William FitzGerald, Bill Love
Properties Crew .... Linda Auer, David Bremer,
Eileen Crow
Sound Designer............................. Peggy Solick
Sound Crew.... David Holton, Jan Quinn, Fred Sauers
Dramaturg.................................... Marion Reis
Production Coordinator..................... Jon Mills
Box Office Chair............. Mary Ellen Schutt
Box Office Crew .... Terry Fanning,
Patti Roeder, Marilyn Wilson
House Manager Chair............... Bill Wilson
House Managers.... Jack Calvert, Rob Cramer,
Harry Hultgren, Jon Mills, Denny Wise
Front Row Center Flyer................ Joe Petrolis
Group Sales Chair........................ Betsy Stiles
Poster Distribution: .............. Kathleen Kusper
Production Coordinator.................... Jon Mills
Program Advertising................ Peggy Carlson
Publicity Chair........................... Janette Quinn
Program Editors.... Ed Barrow, Bill Hammack,
Marion J. Reis
Program Production.......... Stephanie Williams
Website....................................... Judy DiVita

Director’s Corner
By Linda Roberts

As our cast and crew have mined this deceptively compact script, we’ve discovered its theme is much more than the journeys of seven diverse women. It addresses global issues.

When we think of casualties of war, we think of men, the soldiers whose lives were extinguished or damaged. However, according to the U.N., 70% of the world’s 35 million refugees of war and violence are women. Ensler gives us a glimpse of a cross-section of Bosnian women who were displaced by the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Their stories are true, culled from Ensler’s interviews. The ethnic cleansing practiced in Bosnia was another instance of genocide witnessed in Auschwitz, Rwanda, and the Sudan.

In exploring this play, my journey has paralleled that taken by J.S.: I’ve become educated, empathetic, and ultimately changed by the understanding I’ve gained of this particular war and the effects of war on women. I ask, are the “necessary targets” of the title simply the American crisis counselors, as Melissa asserts? Or are they the Bosnian women, tens of thousands of whom were systematically raped as a deliberate tactic of war? Or women in every corner of the world who are subjected to gender-based violence on a daily basis?

Join us in/on the journey.

Acknowledgments

Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Sponsored by Bornquist, Incorporated

Special thanks to: Lori D'Asta for her contribution in providing psychological insights and advice.

Wylie Crawford for his assistance with the folkdance rehearsals.

Zana Fader and Franceska Spahic for their authentic and extremely helpful information on manifold aspects of Bosnian culture and life.

Karen Kopryanski, Hazim Malkoc, Tatjana Radisic, and Marcia Waller for their assistance to our dialect coach.

Mary Pavia for the Lobby Display

Starbucks, Western Springs, for providing decaf coffee for the second Thursday performance.

...Continued from previous column
To this very day the Serbian political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, chiefly responsible for the criminal conduct of the civil war, are still wanted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague; although their leader Slobodan Milosevic died there on trial.

Necessary Targets asks audiences to set aside their prejudices and to judge on humane terms, not along political lines, not along religious lines, not along ethnic lines. Ethnic cleansing is condemned for what it is —– GENOCIDE. In our own times there are on-going instances —– Israel, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia. Eve Ensler’s fears still survive and thrive. Crimes against women including the violence of rape have become a systematic tool of genocide.

For the very first time in history, the outrageous violations of the Bosnian War led the UN to recognize that the multifaceted victimization of children and women demands its official designation as a war crime.

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