OSAMA – A KASABA IN NEW YORK

A word from the director

Darko Bajic

I approached the play Osama – a Kasaba in New York from an angle different than the one the same story was approached from in the novel. For me it was first and foremost a story about a generation that is close to me, which, after a carefree childhood and youth in Yugoslavia went straight into a bloody war. Some were sent directly to death, some into expatriation, while some were left to live here, facing the consequences of the tragedy they had been through. Thorough this play I tried to find an answer whether it is possible for my generation to cleanse itself from the wounds or whether such cleansing is only possible for the next generations – our children.

A word from the author

Vladimir Kecmanovic

Just as Andrić’s wretched hero imagined he was a Turkish sultan and paid for that delusion with his life, the novel’s Bajazid-Bajo imagines that he is the terrorist Osama Bin Laden and ends up in an equally tragic way. They both end up in a damned yard – one in an Ottoman Turk gaol, from which no one has ever got out, and the other in the global prison, from which there is no escape, neither metaphorically nor physically. In the dramatic text Osama – a Kasaba in New York, which is a free adaptation of my novel, this truth is transposed in a somewhat less fierce way. Perhaps that’s because the audiences don’t like to be faced with painful truths. Maybe it is also because it is not wise to provoke the rulers of today’s world by comparing them directly to the Ottoman evildoers. But, the most likely explanation is that these two reasons are deeply and firmly connected.

Show must go on.

A word from the dramatist

Kosta Pesevski

Osama – a Kasaba in New York is perhaps the biggest challenge I have faced as a dramatist so far. A lively and expressive story of growing up, friendship, love and war in the form of a novel is told in such a way that its transformation into a theatre play was quite a puzzle. It had the potential to come alive on the stage, but it was necessary to find a way to transpose the story’s main stream and its most important branches into a different canal, the dramatic one. The solution was in fact in front of my eyes the whole time. The novel’s main hero, in his New York bar, is actually performing a play the whole time, retelling his memories to someone. That was the key to dramatisation and the play. It was necessary to bring to the stage his entire solo act and all the characters and events that inhabit his mind. I hope the dramatisation has preserved the strength of the characters and their tragedy, and that this will give it a long life on the stage of Zvezdara theatre.