YASMINE RANA

Kabul Revisited, from The War Zone is My Bed

	La Mama Experimental Theatre  photo by Mark Roussel

I started writing The War Zone is My Bed in an apartment bedroom in the summer of 2000 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the war was still very fresh in everyone’s memories, as the fields were still strewn with landmines, and the wall of the apartment where I was staying was still recovering after being sprayed with bullet holes. The daily newspaper was filled with faces of those killed during the conflict, calling for the absolute necessity to remember. Everyone I met had a story. 

The play began as Sarajevo, a one-act two character scene, set in a Sarajevo apartment bedroom, between a man and woman: a journalist from the outside and his subject from within; one staying and telling the story of the city, the other leaving to seek fortune using that story. Politics was the landscape, but relationships amidst the traumatic affects of war and exploitation of its victims were at the core. Sarajevo wasn’t quiet. It was performed and published, but kept whispering that there was more to say. 

With the events of the world, particularly the plight of women in war, Sarajevo evolved into The War Zone is My Bed. I wrote the play over a span of seven years. I wrote from a hotel room in Paris to a hospital bed here. Despite the elemental rawness of war, people still fall in and out of love, fight, make-up, speak, stop speaking, feel guilty, feel entitled and perhaps regret for the choices they have made. None of that goes away, and that's what I wished for this play to communicate.

Scenes have been publicly read and performed in theatres and festivals in the Czech Republic, South Africa, New York, San Diego, and New Orleans. George Ferencz of La MaMa E.T.C. selected the play to be part of the company’s Experiments reading series, and moderated talk backs following each concert reading. The War Zone is My Bed in its entirety will have its world premiere in October and November of 2007 in New York at La MaMa E.T.C under Mr. Ferencz’s direction as part of the company’s Experimenta Festival, a festival celebrating ten years of plays developed within the theatre’s reading series. 

War Zone stars Alexander Alioto, Sheila Dabney, Jason Howard, John-Andrew Morrison, Candace Reid and Jenne Vath, most of whom performed in the concert readings over the past two years. A symposium on victim art will be conducted during the festival with participants from the fields of journalism, psychology, politics, and art. It was a privilege to have Sarajevo published by Blackbird in the fall of 2005. 

   Kabul Revisited, from The War Zone is My Bed   

   In previous issue, Blackbird Archive v4n2
   Sarajevo, from The War Zone is My Bed

   Contributor’s notes   

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