Doi in Eden
T w o I n E d e n , C r i t i c s’ E c h o e s . . .
Solitude, the cursed sign
The Skopje premiere of the play “Two in Eden”, written by Tomislav Osmanli and directed by Dimitrie Osmanli, had been set in Kumanovo, Macedonia, and Newport News and Richmond in Virginia, the United States. Although it has been set up in two different hemispheres, this play confirmed once again that all cultural frontiers can be crossed over through the emotional echoes of the universal human themes shown through the simplicity of the theater magic.
The city park, an urban metaphor symbolizing the garden of Eden, the biblical paradise lost because of Adam and Eve’s primal concept of sin, is the ambient of the dramatic tension through which Toto and Nela exchange the cursed morsel from the apple of Comprehension. The two characters enunciate Solitude, an epochal feeling, as the author Tomislav Osmanli asserts. The Dream, or the “second dimension” of their shallow existence is the reflection of the emotional values the two characters are incapable of sharing. The brutal awaking, the reality, is the only thing that separates them from Eden, their mutual Dream.
The solitude, or the unknown, has been very subtly and dramatically revealed to us through the subtle directing of Dimitrie Osmanli. The acting expands the horizons of the minimalist mis-en-scene projecting the emotional variations of the story on the audience…
Victor Shikov
(“Vecher”, May 29, 1998)
A Tale of Loneliness
Everything has an end…just like the fairy tales, but not the ones with a happy one. The theatrical fairy tale “Two in Eden” set on the scene of the Theater for Children and Youth has a bitter end. The play clasps us fiercely into the bitter feeling of loneliness and leaves everyone feeling alone – especially the puppeteer Nela and her friend Toto, in the text written by Tomislav Osmanli which is set through a precise theater metaphor, beautifully expressed in the text, and the excellent visualization done by director Dimitrie Osmanli.
The play functions on a level of completeness: the lyrical text about the human solitude brought to a tragi-comic absurd; the thoughtful directing which makes us turn towards ourselves with a hope for today (and maybe tomorrow), the magical scenery of Ljubomir Chadikovski which is intact with the directing and music, incorporating everything so perfectly together with the costumes designed by Alexander Noshpal and the choreography written by Krenare Nevzati-Keri.
In this extremely visual theatrical atmosphere – a tale of loneliness is narrated.
“Two in Eden” is a play which extorts your feelings (both joyful and sorrowful) that have to be lived up on the spot: at the Theater for Children and Youth stage.
Liljana Mazeva
(“Nova Makedonija”, June 7, 1998)
Eden (One) for Two
Tomislav Osmanli is granting us another bright, small piece: Two In Eden with it’s under-title A Piece For Two, a Moon and Puppets. It is not unintentionally that the idea of Brightness is here linked to the one of the Small. Up to now the dramatic and prose experiences of Tomislav Osmanli instructs us to search the bright things in the small ones. And again, it is not unintentionally that all the dramatic texts of Osmanli , no matter if they are TV, movie or theater scripts, or even short stories as the ones in his book “The Butterfly of Childhood”, have the little man as their main object.
Osmanli’s big little man is actually his fixed idea, something that occupies his discourse from the beginning till the end, and that conducts, moderates and structures it. It is again the same this time, on the example of this very play. In five acts, from which the four belong to his characters Nela and Toto, and the last to his (and the character’s) puppets, the Princess and the Jester – in a miniature and minimal text space, with minimum of existents of the story (characters and decoration), Osmanli gives a severe lesson to the humanity: he warns that we can not further on pretend that that we are happy, because we are lonely. The action takes place in a simple park, that is being transformed into a metaphor of the Garden of Eden, in which since the Genesis, the expulsion of Adam and Eve took place….
Venko Andonovski, Ph.D. ,
Literary theoretic, playwright
Inspiring play
…Two in Eden is an inspiring play, with a skillfully led dialogue, magnificent poetic excerpts full of deep thoughts. Tomislav Osmanli extremely rationalizes the expression, always having in mind it’s juices and the dramatic necessities. That is why this text gets high literary values.
Gligor Stoykovski, poet
Within Life’s Depths
“…Many details make the duo drama Two in Eden an interesting and entertaining experience to the viewer. First, this drama is written in a skillful manner and has an excellent word expression. Second, the characters of the drama are very well described and well presented. Third, the author suggests a colorful structure of dialogues. Fourth, Tomislav Osmanli manages to get rid of the typical scheme and the triviality of the ‘happy-ending story’ in the process of creation of his characters and the establishment of the relationship between them.
All of the above confirm his knowledge of the fine drama techniques. Of course, one of the best qualities of this text is the author’s capability of operating through discrete poetic metaphors, associations and lyrical confessions. This is the reason for the beautiful poetic atmosphere and background created in this text… Shortly, this is a well composed and well written text, created with an excellent touch for theatrical actions…”
Ivan Ivanovski, theater critic
A Universal Look
“…The real world and the world of the Puppets coexist together like two dimensions of the same life. Hence the metaphorical heading of the text is given – Two in Eden meaning also Two in One in Macedonian language, symbolizing two worlds in one. Everything is settled somewhere in between the heat of everyday life and unreality. Everything has its own rhythm, an internal dynamics which simply entertains the viewer and keeps him interested.
The viewer’s attention is first captured through the comical dialogues of the Two and then trapped in the spider’s web through the tragic spiritual conditions of the characters. From a bench in a park the author paints the disturbing ambient of today’s age of conflicts and wars which frustrate mankind in a physical, spiritual and intellectual way…All this is shaped through an exceptional theatrical text and a directing free of political theatralizations…”
Mirche Tomovski, journalist and publicist
Indication for the End of the Century
…Same as Olbi in the Zoo Story, the master-piece of the Absurd theater, Two in Eden are located in the city park, a place that regarding the Garden of Eden seem so be “fallen” such as the contemporary man regarding Adam before his expulsion from paradise, or regarding the cheep woman in comparison with the wife/the fiancee. The city park is, certainly, a strange place – and tragicomic human try to simulate the divine act of creating and controlling the Nature, an ironical asylum for all that do not know weather to escape from loneliness, or toward it. It is a sarcastic, melodramatic answer to the Garden of Eden and the Noah’s Ark, and finally, of the graveyard itself where, according to the final words of the play “everything once ends”. (…)
The Biblical and astrologic, fatalistic connotations of the Two in Paradise make the book contemporary as well ultra(post)modern.
Vladimir V.Golubovich, media theoretic
Two in Eden: One Act of Love
Getting into the spheres from the other side of the simple everyday discussion of two unknown, the play tries to express the whole pathos and tragic of human loneliness and alienation. It is a performance done upon a text with a deep thinking power that is all and again pushing us to actively return to it…
As the title itself suggests , the play is focused on the destiny of two young people, unknown to each other and set up in a common area. They are characters with different philosophical beliefs and approaches to what we name happiness, and further more with different viewing of the way how to rich it. Nela and Toto deliberately resemble contemporary Eve and Adam, much more of those created in Milton’s Lost Paradise than of the ones we reveal in the original story from the Old Testament…
Judy Mercier, critic
The Unknown Archipelago
The text is universal in any concern and we can easily recognize it’s meaning in each milieu, especially in the American. It’s original title is a untranslatable play with words. It might designate “Two in Eden” and in the same time “Two in One”, which is a very amazing paraphrase of Adam and Eve myth. The second rare characteristic of the play is that it is written “for two actor and two dolls”. The puppets’ animation is related to the live actors’ play. In what way?…
Instead of the Apple-tree of comprehension, Nela as a puppeteer gives Toto in first place his, and later her own puppet. The two living puppets decide, by giving live to the un-living ones, to run away into that prehistoric image of life, from the terrible silence and solitude, into the reality of the story, into the tale very similar to Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose… What the puppet-people are not in a position to carry through, the puppets themselves are able to achieve. They can release the tragic catharsis: only the love expressed by the ancient self-victimization, can return the life to this world in all it’s effloresce.
Dalibor Foretich, theatrologist
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Two in Eden is a chamber play and a bitter story devoted to the epochal sentiment of Loneliness. Toto, a funny vagrant, an astrologer and a fortune-teller, meets Nela the puppeteer, a sad and abandoned woman who comes to the park with a suicide intent. They begin their odd, but sincere night meetings under the old tree and the miraculous, constantly changing moon.
Settled in a devastated park, some kind of a distant, shabby semblance of the Garden of Eden, the contact of those two pitiful characters is full of solace. They tell each other compassionate lies creating a tragicomic reality of life. As the life itself is partly a tale and a dream of the lost and re-found Eden, and partly a deserted and unreliable reality…
| O banc` sub un felinar [n parc. Noapte, pe cer str`luce]te secera argintie a lunii. Felinarul e stins. Sub el, [ntoars` cu spatele la public st` Nela. Se smiorc`ie, pl@nge [n mod vizibil. Prin fa\a ei trece Toto, un tip ciudat care caut` ceva [mprejur. Se opre]te ]i o prive]te. Apoi iese din scena. Se [ntoarce totu]i, ap`r@nd [n spatele b`ncii mai aproape de public. TOTO: Juli!  NELA:Po\i s`-mi spui Nela, Teodor! |
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| (Apusul pe orizontul ro]iatic. La banc` vine Nela. Prive]te dac` e cineva, apoi se [ntoarce de jur [mprejur, scrut@nd cu privirea. Din partea cealalt`, cu totul emo\ionat, apare Toto.) TOTO:Nela, Julija [nc` nu s-a [ntors acas`! |
| (Nela st` pe banc`, privind inainte ]i-n sus, ca ]i cum s-ar uita la o a dou` lun` nev`zut`. P@n` acum, pe cer, [n spatele ei ap`rea [ncet adev`rat` lun` plin`, rotund`. Pe suprafa\a ei aparur` diverse umbre. Numeroase figuri de oameni pe care luna le prive]te, aproape de noi. Nela, tulburat`, se ridic`) NELA:Doamne, at@t de mul\i suntem? Iar eu credeam c` sunt unic` singur` [n lumea asta. (Din spate se ive]te o p`pu]` ce seam`n` leit cu Toto. Vine la Nela. O prive]te. }i Nela prive]te p`pu]a. Se a]eaz` pe banc`. Aceea, totu]i, se opre]te pe genunchiul ei ]i o prive]te.) (Pe suprafa\a luniii se ive]te chipul g@nditor al Nelei, pe care [ncepe s` joace [n cele din urm` un z@mbet trist, m@ng`ietor, dar vizibil. Ca o r`fr@ngere de lumin` asupra Nelei-p`pu]a) |
(Toto st` pe banc`. Pe cer [nc` str`luce]te luna, par\ial scoperit`, dar cu totul rotund`).  TOTO:Ba Ju-Julka a]a latr`. C@nd se [ntoarce de la sex doar a]a latr`. Au-au-au! De-deci e mul\umit`. |
(Pe scen` se desf`]oar` joc de p`pu]i [n locul acrtorilor vii. Luna plin`, ce prive]te ireal, din spatele unei ramuri. Pe scena trece o copie admirabil` a Julijei, se a]eaz` [n fa\a lunii pline ]i latr`, apoi pleac`. Din cealalta parte apare p`pu]a – Prin\esa, copia Nelei. Ea merge cu bra\ele [ntinse [n fa\a ]i cu un pas lini]tit, fantomatic, de somnambul. Din ad@ncul scenei apare Bufonul, copia lui Toto, cu un flaut [n m@ini. O prive]te pe Prin\esa adormit` ]i tresare. Apoi [ncepe s` c@nte tandru la flaut o melodie trist`. Prin\esa se treze]te).  PRIN|ESA:Oh, unde m` aflu? 
PRIN|ESA:De plictiseal`, bufonule. {n gr`dina aceast`, totul se hr`ne]te cu bucurie. De c@nd asta s-a pierdut, aici s-a [nstalat triste\ea ]i singur`tatea ]i florile s-au ofilit. Acesta este acum un parc p`r`sit.
PRIN|ESA:Poate, bufonule. V` proclam gr`dinar al bucuriei.
 PRIN|ESA:}ti\i s` c@nta\i?
Copyright © Tomislav Osmanli, published with permission from the author. |