After its Belgrade premiere in May this year at the Heartefact House and its Sarajevo premiere in November at the Sarajevo War Theatre SARTR, the play “They Are All Gone”, written by Doruntina Basha and directed by Andrej Nosov, had its New York premiere from December 4 to 7, 2025 — with as many as five performances.
As part of the first edition of the festival From the Other Side, organized by the iconic New York theatre La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and the organization My Balkans, our play was performed on the stage of the Ellen Stewart Theatre by Mirjana Karanović, Svetozar Cvetković, Alban Ukaj, and others. Structured into four segments, the program offered audiences and professionals a curated cross-section of Balkan theatre through productions, public readings, and panel discussions.
“At the heart of our program is the desire to create space for voices that have long been forgotten or intentionally ignored — a reminder that we are all part of a shared global struggle. Even when they are not in the spotlight, artists from the Balkans speak truths that resonate far beyond their borders,” said the organizers of the festival’s first edition, which was formally opened by Heartefact’s production.
The play “They Are All Gone” artistically examines and seeks to understand the fates and consequences of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It approaches the traumas of the past through an intimate lens, attempting to open a door into the inner world of the victims — those who survived, their memories, their unfulfilled desires, and their fear of being forgotten. Andrej Nosov’s direction subtly and thoughtfully blends psychologically evocative performances by actors physically present on stage with a significant directorial use of audio-dramatic expression. For his direction of the play, Andrej Nosov received the “Ljubomir Muci Draškić” Best Director Award earlier this year.
“In modern theatre, we easily imagine knights, kings, and heroes, but very rarely the ordinary, small lives whose deaths we bear responsibility for — or who were our contemporaries, living at the same moment as we did, burdened by the same anxieties and fears for the future. In the Balkans, we’ve been listening to the same voices for decades — those who hate, who spread fear, and who deepen the consequences of a war that ended thirty years ago,” said Andrej Nosov, who, together with Mirjana Karanović, Beka Vučo, Natasha Tripney, and others, took part in the opening panel “Art and/or/is Politics.”
Balkan artistic expression, the organizers concluded, is a space of new, vital, and — we believe — entirely relevant theatrical reality. The play will be performed in Belgrade from December 23 to 25 at the Heartefact House. Tickets are available on the Tickets.rs website and at all official points of sale.
