'Necessary Targets' seeks answers

Author: Josh Axelrod

This weekend's production of Eve Ensler's '75 play "Necessary Targets" begins with two women meeting for the first time in a posh psychiatrist's office. J.S. (Lauren Turner Kiel '07) and Melissa (Laura Harris '07) immediately rub each other the wrong way since J.S. is a naive upper-class psychiatrist and Melissa is a jaded trauma-specialist, whose view of the world the audience immediately sympathizes with because she seems to understand suffering so well. But what happens, the play asks, when these women are removed to an actual Bosnian refugee camp? Whose side are we really on?

Under the direction of Assistant Professor of Theatre Claudio Medeiros '90, the seven women in the cast brought the life of refugees to the stage with poignant understanding. Singing, dancing, eating and coping as refugees might, the characters suffer through the trials of the real world.

Following the lives of Jelena (Rebecca Kanengiser '05.5), Azra (Caitlin Dennis '06.5), Nuna (Julia Proctor '06.5), Zlata (Myra Palmero '07) and Seada (Lucia Stoller '05), the play unfolds as a series of developments between the American women and the Bosnian women as they come almost to trust one another, offering brief glimpses of their past lives and the horrors through which they have lived.

But the play aims much higher than simply storytelling. From the beginning, J.S. and Melissa are met with open suspicion and scrutiny. The refugees want to know why they are there. "What is normal?" they wonder, questioning why America has decided to send psychiatrists instead of medical doctors. How does being a "tramatized war victim" help them on the road to recovery? Does Melissa's recording of their stories help them confront their past and move on in their current lives?

Ensler takes a large chunk of the philosophical and psychological worlds and attempts to develop them all with ambiguous success. The play puts forth many fairly bland ideas and leaves the audience wondering what new insight Ensler is providing.

The answer seems to be that, like the play itself, our beliefs in the importance of understanding and reporting on traumatic events have become as meaningless to us watching television for entertainment. As Zlata so profoundly puts it, "Cruelty is boring." Or, in other words, we have seen it all before and nothing has changed. In the play's most beautiful moments, the women transcend the lives of refugees and become filled with the beauty of their culture's song and dance, but this, we know, is only a denial of the present.

Nonetheless, why must characters constantly be dragged back to earth where, out of the blue, they are suddenly ready to have their therapy and tell the stories they have been working so hard to hide?

It is a letdown when Seada, reduced to a crawling animal, tells the gory details of her rape and the loss of her child - if Ensler had truly sought to horrify us, Seada's silence would do just that. Only Azra and her wish to die - if only to be with her cow again - seem real and poignant in a play so concerned with situations beyond our understanding.

Likewise, Zlata, with her unwillingness to tell her story, seems a person worthy of our respect because she is skeptical of the "help" that the Americans wish to give. For, in truth, how can J.S. and Melissa help when by the end of the play, they have both left, escaped the lives of refugees where things not only "don't change," but can't?

But beyond these concerns, we must applaud the efforts of the cast and crew who performed the show beautifully, from Dennis' nearly flawless portrayal of a dying woman to Harris' complete transformation from a strong defiance to a morally repugnant figure of American misunderstanding that contrasted so brilliantly with Kiel's journey from blind optimism to heartbreaking awareness.

With Proctor's rebellious youth, Kanengeiser's gossiping matriarch, Palmero's cool and collected doctor and Stoller's broken young woman, all the performances created a cultural tapestry of hope and resistance in the face of tragedy. Their work carried a production that illuminated a text of complexity that was sometimes overdone, though more often commendable.