A Theatrical Death Trip through Bosnia's War

I only got to see one film at the year's D.C. International Film Festival, but it was a film that Balkans via Bohemia readers will be interested in seeing if it comes their way: Goran Marković's film Turneja ("The Tour").

It is a bleak and bitter tragicomedy about a group of Belgrade actors who sign up -- out of boredom and perhaps a bit of greed -- to perform on a "tour" of the front lines of Bosnia's three-sided war in 1993.

Problem is, they don't know that they'll be performing literally on the front lines in an effort to lift the morale of Serbian troops. Let's just say: There will be blood. And rakija. And all the horrors of war. And that an attempt to play Feydeau's farce A Flea in Her Ear cannot help but end very badly indeed.

I've always liked Marković's work. His 2002 movie about the winter street protests of 1996 that nearly brought down Slobodan Milosevic -- Kordon -- was brilliant. And The Tour is very good, though stretched out a bit unevenly in plot and tone to make sure that the hapless actors encounter almost every side of the war.

There are, however, many wonderful performances. (Many American TV viewers will recognize Croatian actress Mira Forlan from stints in Babylon 5 and Lost.)

A couple clips are circulating online, including this harrowing scene in which the actors stumble through a mine field, happening first upon encircled Croatian troops and then upon a Serbian paramilitary commander (played with feverish intensity by Sergej Trifunovic) who is clearly based on Arkan and his troops. (Trifunovic is staggeringly good, getting the notorious down the obsession with his soon-to-be-wife, Ceca, and her song "Kukavica.")

The clip of that scene -- this one shorter and with subtitles, and this one longer, and without. The Tour is definitely worth catching if it comes to your town at a festival or otherwise.

Labor and Theater: Wha'ppen?

The article I wrote for The American Prospect on labor and theater in America -- and the overall lack of cultural juice that unions have had over the past 30 years -- is finally up on the magazine's website.

I got the idea to write from a new selection of plays published this month by Cornell University Press called Staged Action: Six Plays from the American Workers' Theatre. The collection is edited by Lee Papa, an assistant professor of drama studies at College of Staten Island/CUNY, and it really is a terrific window into an often ignored corner of America's artistic life.

As I note in the article, Papa opted not to include better known labor plays such as Waiting for Lefty and The Cradle Will Rock (which served as the focal point of Tim Robbins' 1999 film of almost the same name), preferring instead to excavate two plays from college labor movement, two plays from the International Ladies Garments Workers Union (including the phenomenally satiric and successful Broadway revue, Pins and Needles -- which a few colleagues have pointed out was recorded in 1962 after a Broadway revival with a cast including Barbra Streisand) and two plays from the stormy discontent of the 1920s labor movement, including a long dream play about a hunger striking labor organizer by Upton Sinclair.

The limits of word count did not let me unpack these plays as much as I would have liked, but I do think that the book is definitely worth picking up -- especially for John Howard Lawson's 1925 play Processional (poster on left from LOC). While the poster hypes the works as "The First Modern American Play" (and Eugene O'Neill might beg to differ with that), Processional is an astonishingly audacious but curious piece of work that stretches out a broad American canvas of labor, flappers, the Klan, jazz, big business, journalism and every ethnic stereotype in the book and let then lets those forces slug it out . (Genre also takes a beating, as the play veers wildly from slapstick to tragedy to romance to agitprop.)

As I say in the Prospect article, Processional is undeniably flawed. But it clearly provided a bevy of ideas that have been worked into American theatre since that moment. It may not be the first "Modern American Play," but it definitely accelerated the tempo of modernity on the American stage -- and yoked low comedy and stark social critique in a way that hadn't happened before it.

R.I.P. Harry Kalas

Just got word that longtime (and legendary) Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas died this afternoon at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. -- just as he was about to call the Washington Nationals' season opener.

Kalas' voice was a thread woven through my childhood and early adulthood -- through good times (the Ozark/Dallas Green-era, the amazing 1993 season, and last year's World Championship) and bad times (uh, the rest of the time, and the crushing playoff defeats of the late 70s). In part, that was because my brother Tom -- now as sportscaster and anchor for WHYY-TV in Wilmington, Delaware -- does the best impression of Kalas I have ever heard. (Keep an eye on Tom's blog "Unobstructed View" for more info in the next few days: He spent a lot of time with Harry the K as an intern.)

Kalas' idiosyncracies were his best feature: Anyone in Philadelphia circa 1975-1986 could tell you that every home run by Hall of Fame 3B Mike Schmidt was intoned thusly: "Home run Michael Jack Schmidt!" (His call of the Phillies' World Series championship last year is here.)

And for those of you who are so anti-sports that you can't even bear the Super Bowl... Kalas was also the voice of the wonderful Animal Planet counter-programming each year on that day: The Puppy Bowl.

Update 4/13: Tom's post on Kalas here. Though, he sold himself short on his youthful impression of Kalas. It was astonishing in its verisimilitude and nuance for a 10 year-old.