Sterija's 'Reconciliation' Opens in Vrsac, Fans Pick Ending
Vrsac's National Theater 'Sterija' opened its new season with a play the town had never staged, letting the audience vote on whether two feuding women make peace.
The crowd that filed into the National Theater “Sterija” in Vrsac on Saturday evening didn’t just take a seat and wait for the lights to dim. Audience members spent the night moving through the building, from the foyer to a stage that spills partway into the seating rows, and by the end they had voted, themselves, on whether two feuding women would make peace. Few premieres in this town open their doors quite this way, pulling the viewer into the play before a single actor has spoken a line.
The play is “Reconciliation,” the first comedy Jovan Sterija Popovic wrote, at just 24 years old, though it didn’t reach a stage until after his death. It premiered in 1956 at the Belgrade Drama Theater, and in Paris it has since been staged more than 2,000 times. In the author’s hometown, though, the text had never been produced until this season, which makes Saturday’s premiere something of a homecoming: the play returned to Vrsac after seven decades of life on other cities’ stages, and in a considerably altered form, with characters added that don’t exist in the original.
The adaptation and direction are credited to Bojana Ivanov Djordjevic, working with young Vrsac dramaturg Nikola Stanisic on the rewrite. The premiere was originally announced for the first half of April, then postponed, and finally staged in early September, opening the theater’s new season in a year marking 220 years since Sterija’s birth and 170 since his death.
The reason for the added material is practical, and the director doesn’t hide it. “Given that the original text isn’t long enough on its own to fill a full evening, certain roles were written in during the process, and some situations were expanded further, while the basic context and meaning of Sterija’s work stayed unchanged,” Bojana Ivanov Djordjevic told the newspaper Vecernje novosti. It’s a more honest admission than it first sounds: rather than framing the adaptation as a director’s reinterpretation, she calls it plainly what it is, an expansion of a short text, which clears her of the charge of turning Sterija into something he never wrote.
How does the audience decide the ending?
The plot itself, in both the original and the expanded version, is a small lesson in how much work the word “reconciliation” can demand. Two women go to the same lawyer seeking justice, neither realizing they are both his clients. He isn’t interested in justice at all; he’s a fraud and a manipulator who pushes for their reconciliation for one reason only, so he can bill them both later. At one point the audience is handed the floor and votes on the outcome itself, giving Sterija’s nineteenth century satire of the justice system a mechanism common in experimental theater today but rarely seen on a provincial stage.
The spatial staging goes further than the vote alone, and it’s here the production is at its most ambitious. “The stage design also breaks from conventional theatrical form. It begins in the foyer, continues into the seating area, develops on a stage that partly extends into the audience’s space, and ends with the participation of special guests, who will change with every performance,” the director adds. Shifting the line between stage and hall this way isn’t decoration, it’s an extension of the plot itself: a play that asks its audience to render a verdict first has to physically pull them into the courtroom, and the foyer, as the point where the story begins, turns an ordinary arrival at the theater into the opening act.
Guests who change from one performance to the next carry a second kind of risk, the sort usually reserved for live television rather than repertory theater: no single evening will look like the one before it. For a house the size of Vrsac’s “Sterija,” that’s a gamble with no safety net of a repeatable formula, but it’s also the only way to keep a bicentennial from turning into one more obligatory commemorative production staged once and shelved. “Reconciliation” chose the harder path, and the only one that makes an anniversary feel alive rather than merely marked, a distinction this business rarely gets right.
