Honey Brown Eyes

Or: There Is No Music for Evil Times

If you go to Honey Brown eyes (put up in collaboration with Alley Rep and Little Branch, theater) come early enough to look at the wall. A handy grid of freestanding images and informative texts waits patiently to one side, giving all the necessary information about the Bosnian war of the 90s. A war that killed tens of thousands and displaced millions is broken up into solemn bite sized pieces. It’s a nice basis for those who know to little about the war (or given the Bosnian refugee community in Boise, a touchstone for those who know too much).

The wall also sharpens the knife that is about to lash out at you when Stefanie Zadravec’s play takes those sad facts and makes them devastating stories. Some images are echoed in the play; as the picture of  a woman sprinting with her grocieries down Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley becomes Jovanka (Terri Dillion) darting down the center aisle as cymbal crashes become bullets. Some stories lurk, too horrible to be put on stage, until there they are, right in front of you.

The action anchors around a pair of ordinary kitchens; coffee on the pot, rice on the stove, a portable television playing American sitcoms. A war is happening pitting neighbor against neighbor, Bosniak against Serb against Croat, but inside there is still a chance for communication, for peace. For folk music and rock bands and dancing. So we think. Alma (director Amela Karadza) is burst in on by Dragan (Trevor Ferguson), a paramilitary soldier. Their objectives are clear, he wants her out of the her apartment, she is not going anywhere. But between them lies a past connection that both might possibly save both in such turbulent times. Meanwhile, in far off Sarajevo, Alma’s brother Denis (Francisco Negron) has sought shelter in the apartment of Jovanka. Two would be enemies becoming friends, to former friends   impossibly divided.

If that sounds like heavy stuff, Negron and Dillion both provide much needed levity into the harsh proceedings, alternating swagger and delicacy with each other. Be warned though, moments of laughter does not mean that the time for tears have passed. Jovanka and Denis might joke around but their hurts are deep. For Dragan and Alma, the tension overrides the jokes. Karadza keeps Alma’s  manners and generosity even while showing the terror and fury behind her eyes at her impossible position. While she reminisces, Scheherazade trying to keep death at bay, Ferguson seems so happy to have found some bit of normalcy. Dragan is, in many ways, just a kid, handed a gun instead of an instrument, and we wait with baited breath for him to wake up from his own fog and do the right thing.

The feeling of the play is of an atomic explosion at the microscopic level. An act of violence spins and splits, pushing character into character, life into life, splitting and dividing anything. The violence began far away and yet, solider to soldier, civilian to civilian, it keeps careening leaving only devastation in its wake. This isn’t a play for the faint of heart, but sometimes we have to look at stories of terrible things, so we can learn to stop them. Even if the horror is ongoing, near at home or far away.