The assassination shocked the world.
As the Archduke of Austria and presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was chauffeured through Sarajevo in an open car on June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb student shot and killed him and his wife.
We already know the horrific end of that assassination story – 20 million slaughtered over four years during the course of World War I, one of the most brutal conflicts in history.
But what if the end was still a question?
When we go to theater, we expect plays to have an ending, but it won’t work that way in Wilma Theater’s upcoming production of “Archduke,” the first play directed by Wilma’s co-founder Blanka Zizka since she retired four years ago.
“There’s a struggle and we don’t tell in the play how it ends,” Zizka said.
Interestingly, the original script of “Archduke” by playwright Rajiv Joseph, (famous for his Broadway hit “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”) ended where history did, with the assassination that sparked World War I.
But Zizka, who said she loves Joseph’s work and finds it thrilling, wanted a different, less-definitive ending. “It was anticlimactic, because we know the outcome,” she said.
So, before she retired in 2021, she reached out to the playwright suggesting a change. “Last September, he sent me his new draft and the changes he made were fantastic,” she said. Wilma’s trio of co-artistic directors also loved them and decided to slate “Archduke” for this season.
Do playwrights like those kinds of “suggestions”? Zizka says yes.
“I have these kind of conversations with playwrights all the time,” she said. “Playwrights are more collaborative than [people think]. They want their play to be the best. It’s not about ego. It’s what is the best for the play.”
Besides, Joseph and Zizka already had a relationship. In 2020, she directed his play, “Describe the Night,” a political thriller about the origins of Vladmir Putin’s power. It was one of the last plays she directed before she retired.
Team of assassins
“Archduke” focuses on a team of assassins, all young and impressionable, who have been persuaded to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and restore order and justice to the once-mighty nation of Serbia.
In 1389, Zizka said, Serbia lost its identity, subsumed into the Ottoman Empire. But through the centuries, Serbs dreamed of regaining power and influence. By the 1900s, as the Ottoman Empire’s influence was waning, both the Serbian government and a secret Serbian society saw a chance for a change.
“Let’s make Serbia great again” was the goal, Zizka said. If that phrase, with a little editing, sounds familiar, it will help the play resonate with the audience.
“I think when Rajiv writes about history, he’s not writing about history,” she said. “He’s writing about the present by putting a mirror in a historical moment.”
“ ‘Archduke’ is talking through the history about what we are 1744290084 experiencing with Christian nationalism,” she said, with its “brutality, misogyny, creating false enemies, and creating grievances and personal insults or hurt that need to be punished and revenged.
“The brainwashing of these boys is what we are experiencing in our country now,” said Zizka, who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1973 with her husband and Wilma co-founder Jiri Zizka, now deceased.
“We had no money, we had just a suitcase and a little baby,” she told Inquirer staffer Peter Dobrin in an interview when she retired in 2021, a year after designing a new Wilma leadership structure of three co-artistic directors and a managing director.
In the intervening years, she’s been restoring a farm in the Catskills, taking care of her grandchild, riding her bicycle and teaching stage design at Yale University. Besides being tapped as a consultant, she keeps close tabs on the HotHouse Acting Company she founded to develop acting talent and an in-house crew of pros for Wilma productions.
“Each of them has grown in an incredible way – as actors and directors and writers. When I go to see them on other stages and see how good they are, it makes me feel very good,” she said.
On April 1, when Zizka stepped back on Wilma’s stage as a director for the first “Archduke” rehearsal at the theater, she experienced an emotional moment.
“It was suddenly a realization that I had not been here for five years,” she said. “Oh my God, five years. It was a little bit strange for the moment. After the first moment, it was just five actors and our production staff. It was about the work, not about how I feel.”
FYI
“Archduke,” Wilma Theater, April 15-May 4, 265 S. Broad St. Pay what you can for preview tickets on April 15, 16 and 17.
