REFUGEE

This performance lasts approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes.

 

Two sisters gaze across an endless stretch of barren desert at the El Shatt refugee camp, while a war rages across Europe. In the hollows of southern Appalachia, an idealistic guitar-strumming activist fights to preserve a way of life. On the streets of embattled Belgrade, a hustler struggles to survive in the underground markets of a desperate people. What binds them together? Where

is home? When we cross borders, what do we become? This new play with music jumps across time and place, with a multigenerational story of displacement, capricious destiny, and the search for identity.

 

 

REFUGEE examines the lives of two Serbian sisters displaced at the El Shatt refugee camp on the Sinai desert during World War II—and five decades later, their grandchildren, dispersed across two continents. The story is loosely based on the historical sojourn of Dragina Kalanj (playwright’s mother), who came to El Shatt as a teenage girl, the beginning of an epic odyssey that thwarted a return to her native land—and family—until 25 years later. The play explores the memory of family, the search for identity and acceptance in a new land, as well as the myriad meanings of refugee and how that experience shapes one’s destiny—and creates generational aftershocks. REFUGEE also introduces audiences to a forgotten chapter of World War II, the El Shatt experience in Egypt, as well as to a “forgotten” or little-understood region of contemporary America: the people and culture of Southern Appalachia. REFUGEE is a play with music, composed and performed by Grammy-nominated musician, Tim Eriksen.