Aleksandar Popovic and Pop-Theater: Beyond the Absurd

Aleksandar Popovic and Pop -Theater: Beyond the Absurd E. J. Czerwinski Aleksandar (Ale) Popovic, bom in Belgrade in 1929, has already written fifteen plays for the theater. 1 He was recently commissioned by Nina Talon Karlweiss Productions in New York to write a play on the theme of the fifth gospel according to Judas. His play, Second Door Left, was selected by the Zagreb Student Experimental Theater to represent Yugoslavia in the International Student Theater Festival, which was to have taken place in Prague in May, 1969, but was sud­ denly cancelled because of the unstable conditions in that city. His play The Evolutionary Road of Bora the Tailor was performed in Serbian at the Lincoln Center when Atelier 212 visited New York last year and has been presented by that group in most of East and West Europe’s larger cities. And yet, notwithstanding all this activity, Aleksander Popovic and especially his works, are almost unknown to audi­ ences in the United States and Europe. 2 Some critics attribute his anonymity to the provinciality of his ideas and themes and to the difficulty of his idiomatic expressions, which according to Yugoslav critics, are even difficult for Serbs to understand.3 This may have been partially true of some of his earlier works: Piggy Trot, Bora the Tailor, The Damascus Sword, or even A Stocking of a Hundred Loops, but his latest plays, most notably Kape dole (Hats Off!, 1968), Smrtonosna motoristika (Deadly Motorism , 1967), Utva ptica zlatokrila (The Goldwinged Duck, 1968), and Druga vrata levo (Second Door Left, 1969), are works with universal themes and original constructions, and could very well serve as models to supplant the dying Theater of the Absurd, or as some critics prefer, the Theater of Dramatized or Ruthless Metaphor. In these last four plays, written during the past two years, Popovic, by his own admis­ sion, has finally found a style that has only one thing in common with Absurdist or Metaphoristic drama, and that is freedom of expression. It is not by chance that Popovic likes to classify his type of theater and drama as “Freedom Theater.” 4 He sees in the theater a means of 168 E. J. Czerwinski 169 reaching the masses, not simply the intellectual elite. Although not a member of the Communist Party (in the early fifties, he was jailed for several years because of his writings), he nonetheless has a social con­ science that would have pleased Lenin and Marx: “ I despise writers who preach in the theater. I have no use for Sartre as a dramatist. But I admire Sartre the philosopher. The theater is a place of enter­ tainment. My main purpose is to entertain the audience. O f course, I have something to say, but I want the message to come as a surprise, not as a prepared sermon.” Underlying all of his texts — radio, tele­ vision, theater, and dramas for children — are moral footnotes that develop out of the action in his plays. They are never planted in his texts so as to benumb aesthetic distance. As for the charge of provinciality, most of Popovic’s comments are unprintable. Perhaps they could be best summarized in his fol­ lowing remark, made during one of his infrequent pensive moments: “There is no such thing as a provincial idea or theme. What happens here in Belgrade — in Yugoslavia — could very well happen in Czech­ oslovakia, the Soviet Union, or the United States.” He punctuates remarks such as these with a warm laugh. And although Popovic insists that he has no use for politics, his plays are studied carefully by Yugoslav audiences for their satire against the government and the system. His latest plays most certainly contain political satire and have roots in his early works. They are filled with a bawdiness that the Serbs heartily enjoy. They resemble the early comedy skits of the Marx Brothers. They are fast-paced and contain a great deal of move­ ment. Characters run in and out, interject one line gags into the actions, appear and disappear like clowns from a box, and seldom emote in a realistic manner. When a character does, the speech is a result of prior...