Introduction by Susan Smith Nash

For information about performing this play, or purchasing the collected plays, please e-mail texturepress@beyondutopia.com

Collected Plays, I (Texture Press, 2006)

I’m not sure what I expected when I first read Evald Flisar’s plays. I have long been an admirer of his short stories, novels, and critical essays. However, his plays were not readily available in English translation, although they have appeared in numerous languages and have been performed around the world. For example, Nora Nora was performed first in Slovene and then in Arabic by an Egyptian company. Later, I had the opportunity to see a performance in German by an extremely talented an Austrian theatre group. It was fascinating to listen to the debates about which interpretation felt more comfortable for the audience. The debate illustrated what a complex challenge it is to perform a play that centers around relationships that are disintegrating or which are revealed to be not exactly what they were thought to be.

Because so much of Flisar’s writing involves travel, I wondered if his plays would be about being a stranger in a strange land, where the narrative propels the reader into a state of what I like to think of the “extended exotic.” To be more specific, the “extended exotic” is a state of being, a philosophical stance, or a psycho-social connection by which the reader (or audience member) becomes hyper-aware of a sensation of alienation, estrangement, or bemusement as what was previously familiar transforms into something utterly odd. Some of this occurs by means of an intense focus on previously overlooked details, or what used to be unremarkable words, places, or actions. Through the engagement of the audience or reader with the play, the reader feels profound awkwardness and suddenly it seems that nothing fits quite correctly.

In Flisar’s travel narratives, the journey becomes increasingly uncomfortable and it is not clear what (if any) final destination might be projected. The journey becomes about a process of becoming, but it is a process that gets hung up on itself as the traveler looks, Janus-like, simultaneously backward and forward. Instead of making progress or metamorphosing, the individual is like a butterfly pinned by an insensitive entomologist or a plywood display, or to the absolute midpoint of the traveler's path.

A similar phenomenon unfolds while reading or observing Flisar’s plays. All the beliefs and values one previously took for granted are suddenly revealed to be unfamiliar; a creature or being that is somehow too “exotic” and which one neither loves or wants. In fact, this process occurs accompanied by quite a bit of fear. For the reader, Flisar’s characters and the rawness of human nature stripped bare are deeply unsettling. They precipitate a re-examination of everything that one had used to maintain his or her social self, which now reveals itself to consist of an attractive façade, like the painted cardboard shank of lamb in Tomorrow. In fact, the plays make one vulnerable by unmasking or stripping away the façade. Alternatively, they ask the audience to bite into the cardboard representation of meat they've been substituting for the real thing for a long time.

The “extended exotic” is not just about the defamiliarization of the familiar. It is also about how the unmasking process strips some of the truly “exotic” of its otherness. What was previously compartmentalized as an “Other” is made disconcertingly recognizable, and the audience begins to recognize aspects of herself or himself in the personae on stage. This is not a comfortable revelation. After all, in Flisar’s plays, the characters can be quite a disreputable or disturbing crew. For example, in Uncle from America, family members shamelessly plot and scheme to steal away the fortunes of the uncle they believe returned a millionaire. Little do they realize that a different family member is actually the one with money. In the meantime, men and women alike use all means possible to seduce, pressure, and extort money and unwanted behavior from others.

As the “extended exotic” bestranges the familiar, it establishes connections between the world one would consider far from one’s existence. Similarly, the short stories in Flisar’s Tales of Wandering depict an individual who goes into various places and cultures to find that he is confronted with uncomfortable feelings or a new level of awareness. Flisar’s plays do so as well, primarily by forcing previously hidden truths to come to the surface and be revealed by precisely the one person who would be most upset by the revelation.

Because Flisar’s plays push the characters to extreme behaviors, such as necrophilia and shooting each other with plastic guns (in Nora, Nora), they have often been characterized as postmodern, with clear provenance in the theatre of the absurd. However, Flisar’s plays are much too relentlessly psychological to be so easily reduced. The elements of the grotesque in his plays may remind one more of Rabelais than Ionescu. Where postmodern or absurdist theatre often gravitates toward allegory, Flisar’s characters are painfully realistic. Their actions may be extreme, potentially symbolic rather than purely representation, but they never detach themselves from a very real grounding in the psychological realities of interpersonal relations. The characters can be analyzed from many vantage points, from the psychological and archetypal to the behavioral.

Rather than being surreal or an example of magical realism, Flisar’s art displays hyperrealism, which is the genre of ultra-realism that paints objects with a level detail, precision, and focus that makes Vermeer seem like Seurat or Monet. The edges are razor sharp and, in profile, the characters are revealed to have aspects that one cannot forget.

Like Francis Bacon, who shocked audiences with his depictions of the human form as misshapen and unhealthily tinted mounds of flesh, bone, and sinew, Flisar paints his characters in a hyperrealistic manner that reveals what lies inside. This includes uncomfortable views of what people would prefer to label as the grotesque, implying that this is, somehow out of the ordinary and a deliberate distortion rather than exhibiting the purest form of verisimilitude. The audience knows that what polite society calls an exaggeration is actually precisely how humans behave. The more conservative members of the audience inevitably walk away in shock and yet there is no denying that no matter how grotesque or outrageous the behavior of Flisar’s protagonists, they are enacting the psychodynamics of everyday life.

Finally, a characteristic of Flisar’s plays that can be found in his fiction is the fact that characters are drawn to each other while in a state of enchantment. They see in each other a sort of magic; a short-cut to a place they’d like to be, a form they’d like to assume. The characters often initiate a relationship or perpetuate it because of their hope that they will be transformed through and because of human contact. Although the underlying assumptions often prove to be false, the characters soldier on. They perversely cling to the delusion or the false hope. The moment that they give up their irrational desires, their grip on a giant transforming fantasy, they die, disappear, or are humiliated. In many of Flisar’s plays, one sees the existence of a doppelganger world; a parallel dimension. When the characters begin to penetrate the thin film between the worlds, they strengthen their abilities to dream. Ironically, they also increase the likelihood of falling. However, that combination of relentless dreaming and perversely persistent falling create what are perhaps some of the most emotionally charged moments in the history of theatre.

Susan Smith Nash

April 2006, New York