The assassination shocked the world.
Because the Archduke of Austria and presumptive inheritor to the Austro-Hungarian throne was chauffeured by way of Sarajevo in an open automobile on June 28, 1914, a younger Bosnian Serb pupil shot and killed him and his spouse.
We already know the horrific finish of that assassination story – 20 million slaughtered over 4 years through the course of World Warfare I, one of the crucial brutal conflicts in historical past.
However what if the top was nonetheless a query?
Once we go to theater, we anticipate performs to have an ending, however it gained’t work that approach in Wilma Theater’s upcoming manufacturing of “Archduke,” the primary play directed by Wilma’s co-founder Blanka Zizka since she retired 4 years in the past.
“There’s a wrestle and we don’t inform within the play the way it ends,” Zizka mentioned.
Curiously, the unique script of “Archduke” by playwright Rajiv Joseph, (well-known for his Broadway hit “Bengal Tiger on the Baghdad Zoo”) ended the place historical past did, with the assassination that sparked World Warfare I.
However Zizka, who mentioned she loves Joseph’s work and finds it thrilling, wished a special, less-definitive ending. “It was anticlimactic, as a result of we all know the result,” she mentioned.
So, earlier than she retired in 2021, she reached out to the playwright suggesting a change. “Final September, he despatched me his new draft and the adjustments he made have been incredible,” she mentioned. Wilma’s trio of co-artistic administrators additionally cherished them and determined to slate “Archduke” for this season.
Do playwrights like these sorts of “solutions”? Zizka says sure.
“I’ve these form of conversations with playwrights on a regular basis,” she mentioned. “Playwrights are extra collaborative than [people think]. They need their play to be the perfect. It’s not about ego. It’s what’s the greatest for the play.”
Apart from, Joseph and Zizka already had a relationship. In 2020, she directed his play, “Describe the Night time,” a political thriller concerning the origins of Vladmir Putin’s energy. It was one of many final performs she directed earlier than she retired.
Staff of assassins
“Archduke” focuses on a crew of assassins, all younger and impressionable, who’ve been persuaded to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and restore order and justice to the once-mighty nation of Serbia.
In 1389, Zizka mentioned, Serbia misplaced its identification, subsumed into the Ottoman Empire. However by way of the centuries, Serbs dreamed of regaining energy and affect. By the 1900s, because the Ottoman Empire’s affect was waning, each the Serbian authorities and a secret Serbian society noticed an opportunity for a change.
“Let’s make Serbia nice once more” was the purpose, Zizka mentioned. If that phrase, with slightly modifying, sounds acquainted, it’ll assist the play resonate with the viewers.
“I feel when Rajiv writes about historical past, he’s not writing about historical past,” she mentioned. “He’s writing concerning the current by placing a mirror in a historic second.”
“ ‘Archduke’ is speaking by way of the historical past about what we’re 1744598752 experiencing with Christian nationalism,” she mentioned, with its “brutality, misogyny, creating false enemies, and creating grievances and private insults or harm that have to be punished and revenged.
“The brainwashing of those boys is what we’re experiencing in our nation now,” mentioned Zizka, who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1973 along with her husband and Wilma co-founder Jiri Zizka, now deceased.
“We had no cash, we had only a suitcase and slightly child,” she advised Inquirer staffer Peter Dobrin in an interview when she retired in 2021, a 12 months after designing a brand new Wilma management construction of three co-artistic administrators and a managing director.
Within the intervening years, she’s been restoring a farm within the Catskills, caring for her grandchild, driving her bicycle and educating stage design at Yale College. Apart from being tapped as a marketing consultant, she retains shut tabs on the HotHouse Performing Firm she based to develop performing expertise and an in-house crew of professionals for Wilma productions.
“Every of them has grown in an unbelievable approach – as actors and administrators and writers. After I go to see them on different levels and see how good they’re, it makes me really feel superb,” she mentioned.
On April 1, when Zizka stepped again on Wilma’s stage as a director for the primary “Archduke” rehearsal on the theater, she skilled an emotional second.
“It was all of the sudden a realization that I had not been right here for 5 years,” she mentioned. “Oh my God, 5 years. It was slightly bit unusual for the second. After the primary second, it was simply 5 actors and our manufacturing employees. It was concerning the work, not about how I really feel.”
FYI
“Archduke,” Wilma Theater, April 15-Might 4, 265 S. Broad St. Pay what you’ll be able to for preview tickets on April 15, 16 and 17.