Muharem Pervić is for Milica Novković's drama A stone for the head, out of a desire to praise a "young writer" (gender-sensitive language has not yet come into use), wrote that Milica Novković wrote a "male drama". And it's not that he wasn't right, because he was A stone for the head a drama about a difficult family legacy that suffocates three generations of men in the Dinaric hinterland. Drama Oblivion, stream, snake eyes Mine Petrić could be seen as a testimony of the path that Serbian playwrights have taken in half a century - from a "man's drama" written by a woman's hand to a woman's drama written by a gentle woman's hand. Drama Oblivion... talks about the difficult and complex legacy of three generations of women, about traumas and guilt that are passed on from generation to generation, about a woman's relationship to literature written by another woman and the need to preserve the memory of loved ones through tenderness and love.
The drama takes its name from a humble flower called forget-me-not or water lily or snake's eye, which is a symbol of the memory of love. Name of the piece, Oblivion, indicates the theme of the work, but also the gentle, delicate form of the piece. When we say that the piece has a gentle and delicate form, we mean, in fact, that the piece has a fragmentary structure in which we constantly go from the present to the past and vice versa. A situation from the present encourages the memory of a scene from the heroine's past, which, when relived, leads to changes in the present moment. This opens a new crisis and brings back the memory of another scene from the past. That jumping from the present to the past, then back to the present and back to the past again requires an attentive and concentrated viewer. The writer helps the viewer to maintain concentration on the action of the play by coloring each scene differently emotionally: one scene is dramatic, the next has elements of humor in it, and the third is, for example, melancholic... And all those scenes, although different in emotional charge, vary the same thought about the constant love between three women that is threatened by oblivion - forgetfulness, a stream, snake eyes...
The drama begins when Ksenia - the granddaughter, without the permission of Danica - the mother, takes out the demented grandmother Olga, pensioner and poetry expert Marina Tsvetaeva, from the nursing home. Ksenia believes that the library and familiar space will help Grandma Olga in her fight against dementia. At the same time, returning to the family apartment for Ksenia is an attempt to put together the fragments of her life and to argue with her mother, whom she accuses of abandoning her, i.e. left with her grandmother when she was very small. Danica, on the other hand, reminds Ksenia that she left her and her grandmother at a time when they were having a hard time because her grandmother was suffering from dementia. For three women, returning home is a return to a past that they have never been able to overcome, and which fundamentally determines their characters, their relationships, their present and their future. Mina Petrić shows us how memory is not a matter of the past, but fundamentally determines our current view of the world and people, and how digging into old wounds can sometimes be healing, but also cause new traumas. The only sure way to get out of everything is to save love.
When reading a play for the first time, it can be difficult for you to immediately understand who is who in this memory puzzle. That is why the main and successfully completed task of the director (Tara Mitrović) and playwright (Đorđe Kosić) was to trace a clear and effortless path through the dramatic story to the audience. The director cast three actresses, Aleksandra Pleskonjić (grandmother), Sonja Damjanović (mother) and Alisa Lacko (daughter), who are very expressive and different in their habits. Costume designer Senka Ranosavljević made an effort to dress the three actresses differently. Everything happens in the space of a slightly ruined bourgeois apartment (set designer Marija Kalabić), in which the furniture seems to have been left over from the eighties of the 20th century. That patina of worn furniture gives the impression that the whole drama takes place in the space of memory. This feeling is further enhanced by the fact that the play begins with the unveiling of the furniture, and ends with its re-covering.
The main value of the play is the three actresses who clearly differentiated their characters. It was especially a pleasure to watch Aleksandra Pleskonjić play a grandmother who is sometimes really demented and scared, and sometimes she doesn't seem to want to know what her daughter and granddaughter are saying. With the help of a few details in the costume and with a clear facial expression, Pleskonjićka managed to portray the same person at different ages. From her acting, we understand that the grandmother was a strong and unyielding woman once, and that in the old days, that character trait of hers only broke through here and there. With Sonja Damjanović and Alisa Lacko, those jumps through time were a little less noticeable. It helped us to be able to follow the obvious changes in Pleskonjićka's way of acting (and dressing), which very clearly suggested to us in what age (of her life) the scene is taking place. Sonja Damjanović played her character as a mother as a counterpoint to her grandmother's character. She plays the kind of women who can go through anything and everything, but never change and are even proud of the fact that years go by and they remain the same. Alisa Lacko had to play both a girl and a mature woman in her thirties. Alisa actually played Ksenia, the little girl, as the adult Ksenia's memory of herself as a child. All three actresses were successful in the scenes where there is humor. The humor of this play is the humor of the situation and the humor of the character, not the humor of unnecessary gags. The grandmother's bath scene is remarkable when mother and daughter try to bathe the grandmother who is having an attack of aggression in her demented phase. The situation could have been played both pathetically and melodramatically, but Sonja Damjanović and Alisa Lacko played simply, but effectively - by changing their facial expressions and hairstyles, they showed us what a simultaneously terrible, funny and grotesque fight the two of them have with a demented person. That dose of humor and lightness in the play were key to making this play, which essentially has a difficult theme, seem drinkable and gentle, that is, feminine in the most beautiful sense of that adjective.
