Playwright: Milena Markovic
At: TUTA at The Viaduct, 3111 N. Western
Phone: 847-217-0691; $20
Runs through: Oct. 29
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Many plays portray the disaffected youth of various times and places, from the recent American plays subUrbia and This is Our Youth, to Frank Wedekind's 1891 Spring Awakening, to numerous contemporary English and Irish plays about violent slackers in drab cities. These plays depict adolescents and young adults alienated through poverty, war, parental neglect/brutality or the chaos of rapid political or social change. In the Balkan nations that emerged in the 1990s from the former Yugoslavia, the kids suffered it all in a wrenching national demolition derby that was much more than the monstrously vicious Bosnian War.
Tracks follows a gang of Serbian adolescent boys as they grow to directionless adulthood, distrusting and disdaining all but themselves, squandering their best qualities, running in a pack against other packs. It's a male-dominant society devoid of tenderness in which sex is aggression and alpha behavior is instinctive. Making the point, one actor plays all the females, suffering emotional or physical depredations in each personification.
Tracks is dramatic terrain we've traversed before, a series of episodes related only through continuity of characters. The play's translator, Dubravka Knezevic, correctly calls it 'a succession of well-rounded dramatic fragments capturing key moments in the history of a generation.' But Tracks has two things going for it. First, this American premiere offers an authentic Serbian voice, Milena Markovic, who grew up in the chaos she portrays. Second, Tracks receives an exceptional production under director Zelijko Djukich and an attractive multi-talented cast, among whom are several new faces. These wired players not only bounce off the walls, but find subtleties that don't exist in the economical and unpoetic text, which creates character types rather than complete people. Each is known only by a categorizing nickname, like a perverse Seven Dwarves: Nasty, Cheery, Greasy, Hero, Idiot, Slut and Buttonhole.
Doubling on musical instruments, the actors perform oddly beautiful interludes of mostly-1960s American pop music serving as ironic, even genteel commentary on the action. Let the Good Times Roll, How Much I Love You, Paint it Black and Going to the Chapel are emotional equivalents, the producers told me, for the original Serbian songs. Keith D. Gallagher, playing Hero, has a particularly sweet voice.
Despite authenticity and a fine ensemble cast, Tracks undercuts its potential power because it lacks specific Serbian points of identity, at least as translated. It was written for Serbian audiences who understood its context, but for Americans it takes place in limbo. Context is vital, especially for those who may be ignorant of recent Serbian history. Unlike American slackers, these kids actually have reasons to be disaffected.
But without context, they're just another group of angry kids in a world they won't make better.