Yugoslavian émigré actress Mira Furlan
paid a bitter price for artistic independence

By Tony Adler

The overwhelming thing about Mira Furlan's Yerma is her ferocity. She's so perfectly absolute. So completely beyond the cowardice of ambivalence. Even to say that she's resolved is a joke. She's obsessed, and more than obsessed: She's like a piece of petrified wood in which the living cells have been invaded by stone until it's all that's left. Furlan's Yerma is a woman made of rage.

Of course, that how Federico Garcia Lorca wrote the character. The eponymous subject of Lorca's 1934 "poem in six scenes", Yerma is a sort of reverse Medea - the difference being that whereas Medea feeds her children to their faithless father, Yerma feeds her narrow but well-meaning husband to children who aren't even born yet. We see Yerma evolve from a juicy young shepherd's wife, eager to start having babies, into a domestic monster for whom anatomy has become a grotesque destiny. Her inability to get pregnant develops into a mania that finally fills her up and drives her mad

But if Yerma's ferocity is part of Lorca's text, it's also part of Mira Furlan's nature. Furlan, too, is absolute. "Yerma", says the emigre actress, who made her American debut in the play this fall at the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis, "is absolutely an exploration of an observed character - which is something I can connect to. I have that in me".

Happily, it hasn't turned her to stone, like Yerma. On the contrary: Furlan's obsessions seem to have helped her remain sane and human under the circumstances that have driven most of her countrymen mad.

Those countrymen are, or were, Yugoslavian, and until recently she was one of their favorite actresses: the Balkan equivalent - according to Furlan's friend and former colleague Beka Vuco - of a Meryl Streep or a Glenn Close. Although based at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Furlan worked throughout the nation and in every medium. She won the most prestigious awards the Yugoslavian film and theatre industries could confer on her. She was, says Rajko Grlic, a fellow Croat who directed her in two films, "really one of the best actresses in the whole country."

And as one of the country's leading actresses, she was afforded a certain latitude. For instance: Furlan's husband, Goran Gajic, is a film director whose work kept him in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia; in order to be with him, Furlan secured work at Belgrade's Yugoslav Drama Theatre, playing the female lead in S. Ansky's The Dybbuk and Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion Comique, while continuing to perform her repertory roles at the Croatian National Theatre back home in Zagreb. An unusual arrangement in a country where artists tended to bond life with a particular state-run theatre.

The theatrical powers-that-be winked at Furlan's unorthodox peripateticism. They even abetted it by scheduling their seasons around her.

But then the country itself started to crumble. Following the general post-Communist pattern with a very particular vehemence, Yugoslavia broke down into ethnic components, which immediately started murdering one another.

Travel between Zagreb and Belgrade became all but impossible. And yet Furlan continued to make the trip, taking detours into Austria and Hungary that transformed what ought to have been an afternoon's commute into a five-day epic played out on trains and busses.

Much more than her travel plans had been disrupted, however. Furlan's Belgrade performances took on an entirely new and dangerous significance within the context of civil war. Suddenly, working in Serbian Belgrade made her a traitor to Croation Zagreb. Set on, some observers say, by "bad" actors who envied Furlan her privileges, a Zagreb gossip colummist began the process of turning Furlan into an enemy of the people.

It wasn't all that hard to do. If being famous wasn't damning enough, Furlan had personal qualities that made her a Croatian witch hunter's dream. She's Jewish, for one thing - already dangerous in a region famous for its enthusiastic complicity in the Final Solution. She's also a nonconformist.

Something of an enfant terrible, in fact, according to her husband. An only child with an artist's ego and a scorn for small loyalties, Furlan had no patience for the new tribalism. And judging by her caution, no practical appreciation of what such fanaticism might be capable of doing to her. "These separate [ethnic] communities always existed," she admits, "but we didn't want to be aware of that, maybe. We didn't want to accept it. So we behaved as if it didn't exist. We lived according to our wishes and rules." When L'illusion Comique was selected to be performed at Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), she chose to perform there with it.

Which was not, to say the least, a decision in sync with the temper of the times. As Goran Gajic notes, "The people there are very much used to totalitarian regimes - any kind of totalitarian regime. It doesn't matter what kind of ideology stands behind it. If you pushed through the media the idea of Rastafarianism, they would accept it. They would all have dreadlocks after a while. That's making fun of it, but it's a serious thing and a serious disease. It's complete loss of personal identity."

Before long, Furlan was the subject of what Beka Vuco calls "horrifying nationalist gossip," the apothrosis of which came in the form of a three-part article called "The Tragic Fate of a Great Croatian Actress," which appeared in the Croatian newspaper called Globus and purported to trace Furlan's mendacity all the way back to high school.

"I became the witch." says Furlan. "I was burned as a witch in Croatia."

"Indescribably disgusting messages" started showing up on Furlan's answering machine. The Croatian National Theatre found a pretext for firing her, while - just as reprehensibly, in Furlan's opinion - Serbian audiences embraced her as a symbol of their cause.

Ironically, Furlan and Gajic had planned to emigrate before the crisis overtook them. Now, with Furlan under attack, they had to wait until Gajic finished a film. Furlan recalls that she didn't leave her Belgrade home during the final month of her stay there - not because she thought anyone would hurt her, but because she felt she'd lost her identity to the war. Finally, on Nov.17, 1991, she and Gajic left their homeland for New York City. Gajic's film has been lost.

Furlan and Gajic were hardly the only artists to suffer this sort of suppression. "The best people in Yugoslavia are now without work," says Furlan. "It's actually the big victory of the mediocre, of the untalented little cowards."

Furlan has been accepted into the Actors Studio. A beautiful woman with high cheekbones and emotive eyes, she's also won a part in a sci-fi television pilot called Babylon 5 - as a man. She has good reason to expect success in the U.S. Still, her loss remains more than palpaple to her.

"All the good memories - everything that I did, my whole work... everything's ruined. Everything. All the awards that I got, all the recognition that I got in the old Yugoslavia, is somehow spoiled in my head. I ask myself, 'What was I doing there? Did anything that I did there have any importance? Impact? Meaning?' It gives you this horrible thought of completely losing your time. You're wasting your life. Because my audience were these people who are now killing each other, killing little children...

"I'm ashamed, I'm angry, I'm furious. I think they betrayed me. The country betrayed all the individuals - and that's what I consider as my private right: To be an individual. This right has been denied to me, and I condemn that betrayal with my heart and soul."