On March 5th, for the fiftieth time, Our Son will face the Belgrade audience.
On Tuesday, the Heartefact Queer Caravan began at the National Theater in Pirot, during which Heartefact’s plays with queer and minority perspectives will be performed in around ten cities in Serbia. After Pirot, the next stop for the caravan was the National Theater in Niš, where Patrick Lazić’s play Our Son was also performed last night. After each performance, a discussion between the audience and actors is organized to further expand on this important topic. Through this Caravan, Heartefact aims to bring plays with queer themes to smaller towns and cities in Serbia where such content is traditionally less included in repertoires.
In Pirot, over 250 people watched the play, and in Niš, 100 people attended. It is particularly important that students from the local high school also attended the performance and discussion.
In this way, Heartefact’s award-winning play Our Son continues its successful theatrical life after Belgrade, Bratislava, Dresden, Dublin, Zagreb, Pristina…
The play features Dragana Varagić (who was awarded the main acting award at the Zaplet Festival in Banja Luka for this role), Aleksandar Đinđić, and Amar Ćorović.
“We are already accustomed to the closeness that is created between our audience and the play, whether we perform in Belgrade or cities in Serbia or at international festivals in Europe. But what is happening now in this caravan is that the audience stays after the play to talk to us, and it’s an audience of different generations and viewpoints because this play doesn’t exclude anyone; it invites. This audience not only needs to hear us but also for us to hear them, and that’s what’s exciting. Our family is indeed a product of our society and its closed topics and the inability to talk about sensitive issues in a different way. In the play, we have three people who love each other; they are good people, but they don’t know how to communicate,” said actress Dragana Varagić.
“Right these days, when we witnessed brutal, shameful, and humiliating police abuse of two LGBT young people, the queer caravan began. LGBT individuals suffer violence at all levels, and this play focuses particularly on violence and non-acceptance within the family, in that place where we should feel safest. I am especially glad that there were many young people at the play in Pirot. So far, we haven’t managed to get any school to bring their students to the play; they always rejected us because of the play’s theme. But it’s great how much young people love this play and feel it as their own. Probably because it encourages them that it’s okay to fight for themselves and their feelings, to become a satisfied individual within their family, which is the most difficult task,” said Patrick Lazić, author and director.
The next performance within the caravan is in Ruma, on March 30th, at the Art Trema Festival, and before that, the play will celebrate its fiftieth performance in Belgrade at the Heartefact House on March 5th at 8 PM.
The caravan is realized with the support of the Swedish Institute through the Creative Partnership program.