Lena Antman doesn't remember the Bosnian War, which raged in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995. Antman, now 16, was too young for the occasional news story coming from the Balkans to leave an impression.
But since October, the 16-year-old and six fellow female actors have been learning about the hardships women living in the Balkans endured.
"These people weren't worried about not having iPods," Antman says. "Sometimes they didn't have their own place to live."
Antman is playing the role of a Bosnian woman who's lost her farm in Eve Ensler's play "Necessary Targets," being staged by the advanced studio group with the Rocky Mountain Theatre for Kids Friday through Sunday.
In 1993, Ensler, the playwright most known for her groundbreaking play "The Vagina Monologues," spent time in the former Yugoslavia interviewing women survivors of the war and wrote "Necessary Targets" as a result of her experience. The story follows two American women — a psychiatrist and journalist — who travel from the United States to a center for female refugees in Bosnia. The two idealistic Americans find they have as much to learn and gain from the women they encounter as they have to give.
"These two women go there with these very ambitious ideas of how they are going to save these women, and they have the shock of their lives," says Michelle Romeo, who directs "Necessary Targets."
Ensler writes in the prelude of the play, "When we think of war, we think of it as something that happens t o men in fields or jungles." But she found that the women — Croats, Muslims and Serbs — suffered a particular kind of brutality during the Bosnian conflict, when rape and torture were widely used as a weapon of war.
Many Bosnian women were left without families, their homes and communities destroyed in the conflict's aftermath.
"It makes you think about what the news doesn't cover," says Faith Pramuk, 16, who plays the American psychiatrist.
Romeo, artistic director of 10-year-old RMTK, held auditions for the advanced acting group last fall. When no boys showed interest, Romeo cast the seven girls, who range in age from 13 to 16. Then she went about choosing a play for them to work on. "Necessary Targets" fit three criteria Romeo was looking for: It required female actors, it had roles that would challenge the young actors' skills and stretch them personally.
"I really wanted to strengthen this idea of young women doing a play that felt relevant to them as young women," Romeo says.
But that took some time. What could teenage girls from the suburbs of Colorado have in common with women surviving in a war-torn European region many American teens couldn't even find on a map?
"It's really difficult for us to understand what they've been through," Pramuk says.
Romeo edited out the passages from the play that speak graphically about the rape some of the characters endured. But the play still covers plenty of difficult emotional territory. One scene calls for a young actress who plays a mother to fall into a screaming panic about the well-being of her baby, while another character tries to comfort her.
Along with researching the Bosnian War, mostly on the Internet, the cast met once or twice per week to rehearse. Romeo led the cast members through various acting exercises designed to explore some of the young actors' deeper emotions. She says the actors found they could make connections to the trauma of their characters, even though they hadn't experienced the same kind of trauma in their own lives.
"We talked a lot about the emotional landscape of these women," Romeo says. "All of us have experienced loss, all of us have experienced a sense of injustice. Most of us have experienced a sense of feeling victimized, feeling humiliated. So it's been a really powerful experience for us. It's been more than just show up and go to rehearsal."
Another idea the rehearsal process triggered was to do something tangible for women like the characters in "Necessary Targets" the girls are portraying. The acting group found an organization based in Washington D.C. that helps female refugees of war-torn regions.
The group plans to donate proceeds from Friday night's performance of the play to Women for Women International. Women for Women's mission is to help women survivors of war "move from crisis and poverty, to stability and self-sufficiency," according to the organization's literature.
"They learn how to support themselves," Pramuk says.
Members of the acting troupe will present information about Women for Women prior to each performance.
Romeo says the rehearsal process has been eye opening for the cast. After some resistance early, the actors embraced the project. However, next time, something lighter might be in order.
"I'm really glad that all of us have had this experience, but our next play is going to be a comedy," she says.
Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at (303) 473-1369 or theater@dailycamera.com.
