The theater play "Utopia Today", which is the author's project of Marko Grubić and Milena Bogavac, premiered last night in the large hall of the Tivat Culture Center.
This play is the second of four scheduled premieres within this year's edition of the Mediterranean Theater Festival "Purgatory", and it was produced by the Tivat Cultural Center, Bitef Theater from Belgrade, Trinidad Novi Sad, SKC Novi Sad and KC Grad Belgrade.
The musical performance, as its creators called it, "Utopia Today" is a kind of dystopian review of modern capitalist society in which only a few dozen individuals possess material wealth equal to that of the rest of the total of almost eight billion people on Earth.
The play, which symbolically destroys all the essential futility and vanity of the race for money and material wealth, which is the "spiritus movens" of capitalism, then turns into a science-fiction sociological study of something that could very easily happen to humanity, which the authors of the play call the Great Revolution and by forming the so-called techno-socialism, in which artificial intelligence makes the decisions of the Global Government perfectly, and all people live in material well-being without the need to physically work because almost all jobs in the world have been taken over by AI and machines.
In such a seemingly perfect world, however, man becomes alienated from himself because of the sheer hedonism and laziness that is given to him by this kind of social arrangement where everyone gets the same so-called basic income essentially degenerates man as such, restraining his creativity, imagination and social contacts because almost the entire social life is moving to virtual networks.
How potentially dangerous this outcome is for all of humanity is shown by the solution that the AI ultimately offers to the parents of a naturally conceived child in the play, which shows a slightly above-average level of intelligence and empathy in relation to what is considered acceptable - a lobotomy.
"Intelligence is not a parameter of happiness!", is one of the sentences from the play that remains echoing in the minds of the audience faced with events on stage that sometimes have the characteristics of a kind of impact on the ears, eyes and basic reason.
Danilo Milovanović, Tamara Radovanović and Aleksa Jovčić played in "Utopia Today".
"We have to be more than satisfied because we got a very interesting play, an avant-garde, alternative and thought-provoking play. A lot of questions were asked, a lot of theses for thinking about what kind of social system we live in, what kind of value system we have and what we aspire to," said Goran Božović, director of Centraza Kulturu Tivat, after the premiere.
He expressed the hope that the audience will like the play even outside the borders of the region, and the team announced their aspiration to have this play seen by audiences all over Europe.
"Let's make a serious step forward in Europe with a show that is more timeless and contemporary," said Božović.
"Actually, the thesis of this play is that the meaning of life is not our main question, because if we solved a simple question called 'suffering' we wouldn't care about the meaning of life. I don't see this as a dystopia, the last two sentences of the play are actually optimistic. The play it talks about human nature and there is a real possibility that we actually evolve and that is a very optimistic development. It is possible that we go to a setting that is much more comfortable than the one we are currently in," says one of the authors of the play, Marko Grubić.
Actor Danilo Milovanović points out that the play tries to show the world of the near future, which is still happening now.
"We, as a species, could work on ourselves because we fundamentally do not change ourselves in the most beautiful and best sense. We can get, as seen in the play, the best system in the world and our life doesn't work again," he said. Milovanović.
Actress Tamara Radovanović believes that the new era is leading individuals to hysteria because everything has become superficial.
"I am interpreting the character of a woman to whom the new times have enabled a completely new life, with conditions that she did not have before. Every scene in the play shows that the meaning of life is not that a person has everything he wants and that he leads an overly easy life", concluded Radovanović.
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