Sailing from Byzantium: Goran Stefanovski's Hotel Europa

I would like to examine two different master narratives in their ugliest, most vulgar forms. Let me call the eastern world Byzantium. It is a closed society, vertical, patriarchal, macho, rural . . . no democracy, no tolerance, no logical space for homosexuals--or women. . . . This is a world of ethnic fundamentalism. It allows primarily for a big National Theater, casts of thousands, operatic reckonings. . . . On the very opposite of this world stands Donald Duck. He lives in an urban, fast, global, consumerist, post-industrial society. He has no mother, no father, no wife, no children. . . . He is like a cowboy in a saloon whose life depends on being quick on the draw. Donald Duck is the bastion of political sterility and metaphysical failure. What eastern Europe has been witnessing in the last ten years is the entrance of Donald Duck into Byzantium.

--Goran Stefanovski

Hotel Europa is about the people of Byzantium at the doors of another world, as they flee Donald's disastrous wild capitalism and the violence and corruption of their own postCommunisms and land in Western European social democracy. Seven scenes by Stefanovski, a Macedonian playwright now living in England, were staged by seven Eastern European directors, each with his own company, and performed in spaces scattered through an abandoned hundred-year-old cable factory on the outskirts of Vienna. All the scenes are about immigrants from the East stashed in transit limbo: a drunken patriot, a whore, a Mafioso, a blood-feuding Albanian, a homeless woman, runaway kids on their honeymoon, Odysseus.

I saw Hotel Europa in Vienna, a not-so-golden door between East and West, where an invigorated racism ripples under the bland surfaces of comfy consumerism. There is fear and contempt in this part of the West, matching the rage and self-pity of the East.

Being American provides some useful distance in thinking about these Europes. Immigration is not only part of our present politics but also acknowledged as our history; Western Europeans tend not to dwell on the waves of Huns and other mobile strangers who shaped their nations, or on their connection to Ellis Island's wretched huddled masses. To an American the West can seem strange, the East familiar. A couple of days ago I traveled from Serbia to a small city in southern Austria, so clean, kitsch-laden, and free of visible police, so nicely laid out for the walking and biking public, so absent the ragged and disabled, that it was as alien to a New Yorker as hustling, desperate Belgrade had been. I was in "Europe," and that it was Haider country is illuminating, not contradictory. Four blocks from my hotel and conveniently near the train station stood a real Hotel Europa: a no-star establishment, rooms by the month, contact the manager weekdays if interested.

At the "hotel" created in the old cable factory in Vienna, the audience was divided into six groups, guided by six local actors representing hotel staff--a bellhop, a social worker, and so on. Each of the scenes except one was performed six times; between performances, loudspeakers in the halls announced emergencies and warnings (which really were codes telling the guides how many minutes they had for their entr'actes before moving their groups to the next scene). The seventh was done for the full audience at intermission. If this structure sounds familiar, you're remembering Dragan Klaic´'s description (Theater 29, no. 1) of Euroalien (1998), also produced by Intercult, the Stockholm-based "center for intercultural research and production," as part of their overall project investigating "geographic, ethnic, and mental" migration.

As the spectators moved from performance to performance, they walked through installations by the brilliantly subversive Serbian "art action group" Skart: mysterious archives, militant red music from another age, the detritus of eastern memory. Before the first play, my guide quoted Auden: "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark...