Kiddo is a cruel analysis of family and roles within a family. Staging two generations of female characters, Dunja Matic asks essential questions about the role of a woman in today’s society. The author bravely deals with problems of pregnancy and abortion, representing them through the perspective of characters who treat those problems according to their social roles. The author shows that, even in absence of men, the protagonists of her play create relationships with them and build their identities through those relationships, as a mother, sister, girlfriend or wife. Floating between Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Euripides Medea, Dunja Matic’s play creates a specific atmosphere of nausea and agony and tries to question traditional family models. Besides that, the play intensifies questions regarding motherhood and mother-child relationships, which can be, as proven by the author, more than problematic.
Word of the author:
“Kiddo is a play following four female characters: Kiddo, her sister Babe and their Mom and Aunt, as Kiddo is maturing and preparing to leave home. Through a painful relationship, the four of them are trying to fight each other and for themselves, cuddled in a toxic routine of a family they are used to, unaware that the things have gone out of control and their bubble is about to burst. Kiddo is a play questioning primordial family and human relationships and their meaning and influence on everyday life, the weight of social norms constructing our reality and the consequences families cause in individuals.”
Word of the director:
“Leaving home, the “family nest”, is an essential and yet unanswered question for my generation. There are certainly many reasons behind it, in the social, economic and alimentary context, but there is also something in the lack of responsibility of the people from my generation for their own lives, dreams and passions. Dunja Matic wrote a play about all of us, writing about herself, even when it is not literally about her or us. Her poetics may remind us of many contemporary writers but the greatest strength of her writing is in simple, yet poetical, decisive, yet gentle, economic, yet rich, cynical, yet vulnerable poetic language.
Dunja doesn’t portray those passive and apathetic young people, on the contrary, Kiddo is not afraid or at least she is ashamed of being afraid, and that’s what brings the youth and power to our stage.
It was a great privilege and a valuable lesson to create this oasis of work and poetry, theatre and superb acting provided by the actresses in this performance.
Having children, heirs and those who come after us, having parents and being a parent, was something that has focused the main problem of the entire generation of our parents: they never understood Dusko Radovic’s words, when he told them to “beat their children when they start looking like them”.
Because, as Dunja says from the stage: “What do you need the tree for when it’s just like you.”