Bitef

SHOWCASE

182

What looked at the outset as an enforced inevitability due to the company's young age, became, as it turned out, a very interesting choice. Namely, in Urban's production former heroes, famous doctors, successful artisans, musicians'celebrated the breadth and length...' - all die young (all, of course, except the local sot Janko).The only young man in the world of the living is the professor's son Ivan, an embittered and disgruntled lad ready to fight for all he's worth for what he believes he has a right to. And in the world of the living... as Janko says:"only the teetotallers die, the drunkards slip through". And that is not the end of the vices we come across here. There are adulterers, quacks and traitors of brothers, greedy and insatiable, reckless and irresponsible. Kovacevic himself says that his play is about how we came without knowing where from or where next. Our Gathering Place does not pretend to look for answers to these questions. And it is not a space where souls are recruited for heaven or hell. At this meeting point there is neither heaven nor hell; the stairs leading to red-hot lava will take you to the same place that you left from. And whoever may be above the two worlds, the world of the dead and the world of the living, only flies over us, with no intention to land and join the all-round chaos. What remains for us, it seems, is to go on waiting and waving. Olja Oordevic Director Serbian Language Drama and dramaturgist of Gathering Place DUSAN KOVACEVIC (1948, Mrdenovac near Sabac) studied at the Academy for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television in Belgrade and graduated from the Dramaturgy Department in 1973. In 1973 he became a member of the Association of Writers of Serbia. From 1973 to 1978 he worked as the dramaturgist of the TV Belgrade Drama Programme. In 1986-1988 Kovacevic was thedozent at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. In 1998 he became the director of Zvezdara Theatre in Belgrade.