Necessary Targets (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Bosnia: the Land and the People

Bosnia is located in south-central Europe, east of the Adriatic Sea, and shares borders with Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The country, about the size of Missouri, is officially called the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the capital at Sarajevo. The country's geography features both mountains (with the highest point being Maglic in Herzegovina) and plains, which spread out from the Sava River. The people at lower altitudes enjoy moderate weather (cold and snowy, but bearable, winters and humid, but tolerable, summers). Most areas of Bosnia are under constant threat of powerful earthquakes.

Bosnia is a land of many different cultures, most based on the population's religious beliefs, which include Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism. Although outlying villages tend to be homogeneous, the cities (this was especially true before the war) have populations that are quite diversified, and people of different backgrounds and beliefs accept one another. The majority of the population in Bosnia is made up of Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics), and Bosniaks (Muslims). Despite the fact that the three different groups have chosen different names for the language they speak, it is basically the same, differing only in a few mutually understandable dialects and individual alphabets.

War and Its Aftermath in Bosnia

Trouble for Bosnians began in 1990 with the breakup of Yugoslavia, of which Bosnia was a part. Bosnia officially became independent the following year and was ruled by Croat and Muslim political parties, which had come together to defeat the Serb nationalists. This angered the Serbs, who were adamant about creating a so-called greater Serbia by uniting the Serbs in Bosnia with those in Serbia. Serbs in Bosnia began to worry about rumors of mass killings, despite the fact that parliament had declared equal rights for all ethnic groups. Tensions exploded during a demonstration in Sarajevo in 1992, when Serb gunmen shot into the crowds. At that point, civil war broke out.

Serbs were committed to their plan of a greater Serbia and began to expel all Muslims from northern and eastern Bosnia. Homes and mosques were destroyed. Thousands of Muslim men were massacred, and women were raped. In the summer of 1992, Croats took up arms against the Bosniaks (Muslims). The killings in this war culminated in 1995 with a massacre of an estimated six thousand Muslim men in Srebrenica. It has been estimated that at least two hundred thousand people died during the conflict. The city of Banja Luka (which is mentioned in the play) became the provisional capital of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia during the war in the 1990s. One of the largest concentration camps was built there, and it has been estimated that the city suffered the most extreme of the war's ethnic cleansings, a term that arose out of this conflict and refers to forced deportation and even genocide.

For three weeks, from November 1 to November 21, 1995, the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, the Croatian president Franjo Tudman, the Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, the chief American negotiator Richard Holbrooke, and General Wesley Clark met in Dayton, Ohio, to work out a peace agreement that would end the civil war in Bosnia. Through what has become known as the Dayton Accord, the country was divided into two parts, the Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb state, called the Republika Srpska. Despite the seeming success of the Dayton Accord in stopping the fighting, the country struggled in the aftermath of the war. Cities were destroyed and families were torn apart and murdered. The psychological scars remain to contribute to tensions. War tribunals have tried and convicted many of the war criminals, but peace is not assured. In 2005, the European Union Force, an international military group, continued to police the towns and cities. There were no plans for removal of these troops in the foreseeable future.

American Theater, 1990s

Large, extravagant musicals with corporate backing prevailed among the productions that were staged on Broadway in the 1990s. Mainstream plays that could pull a large audience became the mainstay. More provocative plays were often seen off Broadway and in regional theaters. Low budgets curtailed the building of lavish sets in these smaller productions, and many of these off-Broadway plays had only a handful of characters at best.

There was concern, among critics and others who study drama, that the gap was widening between the entertaining, extravagant productions on Broadway, such as the Walt Disney Company's Lion King, and the somewhat radical, small-audience dramas produced in regional theaters. Although the second category of plays might be thought-provoking, very few people had the chance to see them. There was seldom enough money in the budget for these plays to travel around the country, and only if the play was adapted to a film script and made into a movie did anyone outside the region have a chance to experience it.

This does not mean that there were not big successes in the production of serious plays. For example, Tony Kushner was not daunted by the prevalence and popularity of musicals. His Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika (1993), a two-part work, won two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. The plays deal with the very serious topic of the epidemic of AIDS. Other thought-provoking plays that were successful in the 1990s included two by the elder statesmen — dramatists Edward Albee, author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman (1949). Both of these playwrights are considered masters of American drama. Albee's Three Tall Women, a play that looks back at three stages in the life of an elderly woman, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. That same year saw the production of Miller's Broken Glass. Prompted by the civil war in Yugoslavia, Miller wrote a play concerning the troubled marriage of a Jewish couple, set in 1930s Brooklyn at the time when Nazi mistreatment of Jews was beginning to make headlines around the world.