Serbia has a long history of exodus and displacement, most recently during Nazi occupation in World War II and the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Now Valley playwright and director Milan Dragicevich hopes his production “REFUGEE,” a play about family and exile that is partially set in Serbia, will resonate with Serbians when the cast and crew bring the production to the country this fall.
“REFUGEE” has enjoyed a number of sold-out performances in the Valley, first at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2016 and then at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls in 2017. Now it’s headed for a 10-day run in October at JoakimInterFest, an international theater festival in Kragujevac, Serbia.
Dragicevich, a theater professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, based the play on his mother’s experiences during the waning years of World War II. She lived for five years in a British refugee camp called El Shatt in the Sinai peninsula deserts in Egypt after fleeing Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia; she later immigrated to America.
“It’s a very little-known chapter, even to people in the former Yugoslav Republic, including Serbia,” he said. “I think 99 percent of the people will not know about this chapter. They will not know that 25,000 Yugoslav citizens were evacuated first to Italy, and then because Italy was overcrowded, the British decided to take the 25,000 people to the Sinai peninsula where they lived on the sand, essentially in a huge tent city.”
For Dragicevich, “REFUGEE” is a very personal story. He interviewed his mother, Dragina Kalanj, more than a dozen times over the course of several years to learn about her experience living as a displaced person.
She and other refugees survived “under very harsh conditions for years and lived to see another day,” he said, “so I think those kinds of life experiences need to be shared with people today, especially as we’re seeing refugees across our television screens every day.
“We have a lot of issues right now in this country about immigrants and refugees,” he added. “I think a lot of times we don’t remember that many of these people do not choose to leave their country voluntarily.”
The play chronicles the lives of two Serbian sisters, Mara and Sava, at El Shatt and later follows the children and grandchildren of the siblings. One part takes place in rural Appalachia in eastern Kentucky and another during the turbulent 1990s in Belgrade, Serbia. The story spans a 50-year period.
“You have those ancestral fumes coming from that camp, and people are trying to recollect their family history and reconcile their own identity with changing borders,” Dragicevich said. “I think one of the questions the play asks is, ‘When we change borders or when we cross borders, what do we become?’ ”
Dragicevich noted that during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, more than half a million young Serbians left the country due to economic sanctions and war.
“This notion of displacement and crossing borders is something I think [Serbians] will relate to — that’s part of their recent history,” he said. “I’m really intrigued to share [the play] with this audience. In their gut they know a lot about displacement, exodus, and exile.
“Serbia has seen a lot of refugees,” he added. “Even today, it’s a place where Syrian and Iraqi refugees are going across to E.U. countries … a few years ago when I was there, I saw columns of refugees coming up the main highway toward Hungary.”
Dragicevich previously attended JoakimInterFest in 2009 for the first play he wrote, “Milosevic at The Hague,” a two-act production about the rise of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was tried for genocide and war crimes for the 1995 Bosnian genocide. The annual international theater festival showcases productions from many countries.
“It’s a part of the world where people don’t go to or know much about,” he said. “But it’s a very vigorous theater festival. It draws not only regionally, but across the globe. It’s a great opportunity to not only take our show there, but to experience a different part of the world culturally, politically … it’s where East meets West in Europe.”
“REFUGEE” also uses music as a key part of storytelling. Tim Eriksen of Amherst, the multi-instrumentalist and interpreter of old-time folk music — he contributed to the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of the 2003 film “Cold Mountain” — uses 19th-century Americana and music from the Balkans to transport audience members to a specific time and place (Eriksen will be traveling to Serbia to perform in the production).
“This is a play with music,” Dragicevich said. “It is not a musical. Songs come naturally out of the dialogue. It’s not like the play stops … A lot of our identity as people is connected to music; music we grew up with, our parents played, music played around the campfire. Music is vital to the play.”
He said in one scene the two sisters at the El Shatt camp start to sing a song from their native village in a moment of despair. As the two sisters begin to harmonize, that song lifts them up and they find “a kind of redemption by singing together.”
Dragicevich said his play isn’t about politics: It’s a humanistic story about family.
“I think that’s the power of theater,” he said. “Theater is uniquely qualified to talk about family stories. The mystery of theater is the mystery of family, whether you go back to the ancient Greek tales or ‘Death of a Salesman.’ ”
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@gazettenet.com.
Tim Eriksen and the cast of “REFUGEE” will perform songs from the play at a fundraiser for the production’s debut in Serbia, which takes place Friday, Sept. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Shea Theater, 71 Avenue A in Turners Falls. For more information about the event, visit https://sheatheater.org/d/1473/The-cast-of-REFUGEE-and-TIM-ERIKSEN-in-concert