Source Material
Brief Content of the Albanian Scenes:
1. A woman and her son arrive in their ruined house just after the war and decides to rebuild her life despite her husband's disappearance. She is further encouraged by encounter with her friend who had lost and buried her whole family that morning.
2. The dilemma of the same woman 7 years later when the same friend is persuading her to permit a blood sample to be taken from her son to identify a body likely to be her husband's. Her refusal to do so is holding up a communal village funeral. She will not admit her husband might be dead, but her son decides to offer a sample on his own.
3. A woman gives details of her missing husband to an OMPF worker only to realise that the questions she is being asked presume him to be dead. Does she carry on with the interview and what does she tell her daughter waiting outside?
4. A young childless woman from a village comes into to town to meet a woman representative of a family association. Her husband is missing and his family do not wish her to work outside the home in case this causes gossip. The woman from the Family Association offers her work in a sewing group and the young woman, although she refuses the work, realises she is not alone in her suffering.
Brief Content of the Serbian Scenes:
1. A woman inconsolable after the disappearance of her son, and remains obsessed with finding him. She begins to ignore her daughter who eventually leaves her mother to study in Belgrade .
2. A family who have lied to the wife of a 'disappeared' man to protect her during pregnancy then give a secret blood sample to test against recovered remains. They face a dilemma when the man's body is returned 7 years later. The wife wants to prevent her young son from going to the funeral and prefers to tell him his father is missing. The boy arrives home as they are arguing.
3. A lorry driver turns up at a house of a missing person claiming that he has seen their son in an Albanian work camp. The mother is overjoyed, but the sister suspects he is lying. The sister feels torn between her mother's hope and her own disbelief.
4. A doctor decides to go to work during the NATO bombing despite his wife's anxieties about the prevalence of kidnapping. The doctor never returns.
(Neziraj, Jeton and Andrew Zadel. 2006. Voices: An Interactive Theatre Initiative Addressing the Issue of the Missing in Kosovo. OMPF & CCTD: Kosovo)
