| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Theatre Topics 6.2 (1996) 167-179 In the spring of 1995, in the middle of the third year of the war in Bosnia, I taught a class to undergraduates in the Drama Department at the Tisch School of the Arts called Theatre of Witness: The Play of Poetry and Politics. While grounded in canonical twentieth-century dramatic texts, post-Holocaust psychoanalytic and literary theories of testimony and witness, the course departed from the distancing historical frame by requiring students to consider new plays and theatre work about the genocide against the Bosnian Muslims that was gathering force even as we met. In this class, young acting students were asked to consider the uses of theatre in the face of a present and continuing slaughter they knew about from current media coverage, but which they might have avoided had it not been for the imperative of the class they were taking. How well the students managed the complex task of bearing artistic witness to a contemporary genocide, and what they themselves came to believe they had learned in the process, is the story I want to tell. The semester began with the assignment of two contemporary, noncanonical works: my own play, The Beekeeper's Daughter, which they also saw in performance, and Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder's Snakeskin. Secondary material included the preface to Roy Gutman's Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles, A Witness to Genocide, and an article in The New Republic by Fouad Ajami, reviewing a series of books about the history of the Muslims in the Balkans. Thus from the beginning, students were asked to confront an ongoing crisis by an instructor who did not feign neutrality in the face of this genocide. Both plays have as central characters a Bosnian Muslim woman who is the pregnant victim of genocidal rape. Snajder's play takes place in the basement of an abandoned hospital inside the war zone where a half-dead, pregnant Azra (the name means "virgin") has been dumped. She is cared for by other war victims: a male nurse, Hasan, and a woman, Martha, whose son has been killed, though the playwright says, "she belongs to neither of the warring factions." The Beekeeper's Daughter is set on an Adriatic island, home to an American poet, his young male lover, and his sister, the beekeeper, Sybil. Into this literary and amorous paradise, the poet's daughter, Rachel, a fiercely righteous human rights worker, brings Admira Ismic -- raped, traumatized and very pregnant. For both playwrights, the rapes of Muslim women with the intention of impregnating them with "Serbian nationalist seed" recalled The Oresteia; and both of us felt it necessary to refute the ancient tragic judgment that "the mother is no parent of that which is called/ her child . . . The parent is he who mounts."(2.658-60) Though very different in form and style, both plays imagine the characters' struggle to see and to be with the raped woman (and the new child they come to view as both hers and theirs). At the same time, the raped woman endures a life and death struggle to reclaim herself, as her own body is caught up in the inevitability of giving birth against her will. As the first assignments made clear, the Theatre of Witness class had an interdisciplinary agenda. I wanted to acquaint students with the history of the war in the former Yugoslavia, as, indeed, I would acquaint them with the social circumstances influencing all the plays we read. But the students also needed a conceptual orientation to help process the material. In other words, they needed to understand the basics of psychological witnessing, of testimony psychotherapy, and of current ideas about trauma and recovery. I wanted to present them not only with a way to read dramatic texts, but also with a way to think about their own aesthetic practice and theory in the making -- something made possible through the idea of "the witnessing imagination." The term "witnessing imagination" is one used by me and my collaborator, Dr. Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Project on Genocide, Psychiatry and Witnessing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Weine was also...
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