Brief Connections

Vladislava Fekete (Slovakia)

BRIEF CONNECTIONS (KRÁTKE SPOJENIA)

M 6, F 4

The winning entry of the annonymous playwriting competition for Alfréd Radok Awards 2008 is based on the author’s personal experience: similar to her hero female character she grew up inside Slovak minority in Serbian autonomous province of Voivodina. Since the years of her studies she lives in Bratislava.

The character, called simply She in the script, maintains contact with her closest family using the “short cuts” offered by modern communications technology – phone calls, text messages and e-mails, similar to many inhabitants of the so-called “civilized” countries. Nevertheless, in the play these shortcuts link the characters removed hundreds of miles from each other. At first, they represent a superficial network which only gradually reveals the worlds of individual characters and their stories in both flashbacks and present-time scenes.

She goes through a painful process of splitting from Him, her partner married to another woman unable to solve his complex life situation. At the same time, she has to listen to the unending reports about things happening every day in the life of her mother completely immersed in the life of the Slovak minority in Voivodina. She also plays the role of a confidante of her homosexual friend Milija who goes through a crisis similar to hers, only he is somewhere in the British Islands. And finally she functions as a life anchor for her fifteen year old niece and for the Serbian family of her friend Dara that fell apart under the stress of war trauma.

During on the few face to face meetings, both friends agree saying: “If only we knew it would end this way... We would never be born. We would refuse this! We would fuck this kind of life in the maternity ward already.” She has her suitcase ready all the time under her bed – the only problem is she does not fit in it herself...

The play opened as soon as 6 May 2009 at the South Bohemia [Jihočeské] Theatre

in České Budějovice; the production was directed by Petr Štindl.