Family Stories: A Slapstick Tragedy

By Biljana Srbljanovic
Translated by Rebecca Ann Rugg
Directed by Grady Weatherford
April 12 – May 10, 2003

“In Rorschach Theatre’s hyperkinetic production, they careen madly over Matt Soule’s multi-leveled set, slamming into the corrugated tin walls and hanging from scaffolding as they play out domestic dramas gone nuclear. In the surreal world of these war-damaged Peanuts, where grownups are people who dissemble, murder, betray or die, nearly every tiff ends with spilled blood or scorched flesh.”
– Washington City Paper

Emerging from the wreckage of a bombed out Yugoslavian playground, a group of four children is caught “playing house.” Through a brilliant marriage of slapstick and tragedy, Family Stories creates a world in which children and the games they play reveal the effects of a complex ethnic conflict that has haunted Europe for a thousand years.

“Rorschach Theatre has bravely brought to stage a production that offers, without any trace of sentimentality, all the banality, boredom and terror of war.”
— Washington Post

PRODUCED BY Jenny McConnell and Randy Baker

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR/DRAMATURG Rahaleh Nassri
FEATURING Maggie Glauber, Sarah Painter, Andrew Price, Mark Sullivan
DESIGNED BY Mark Anduss (Sound), David C. Ghatan (Lighting), Suzen Mason (Props), Matt Soule (Set), Denise Umland (Costumes)

FAMILY STORIES: A SLAPSTICK TRAGEDY was sponsored in part by The Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro and Peter Miller & Sara Cormeny

Performed in THE SANCTUARY THEATRE at Casa Del Pueblo Calvary Methodist Church
(Rorschach Theatre’s home: 2002-2007)