2022 Spring Stage Readings: Exile Is My Home at Bohemian National Hall

Excerpts from four plays Exile Is My Home, The Town with Very Nice People, House in a Boat with Food and No God, Crossings: A Play of Immigrant Voices will be read on stage, followed by a discussion with the Romanian-born American author, Domnica Radulescu. Exile Is My Home traces the eerie journey of Lina and Mina, a refugee couple from the Balkans who cross the galaxies as they travel from planet to planet in search of home and peace after having survived wars and atrocities. The planets represent different states of the world, both utopian and dystopian, from serene spheres of tolerance to nightmarish visions of a cataclysmic future. These worlds are also states of mind and consciousness, embodying our strongest desires and deepest fears. Planet America combines all of these ideas into an ambiguous spaceboth frightening and alluring, both hopeless and hopeful. The Town with Very Nice People: A Strident Immigrant Operetta is a satirical comedy of manners whose flamboyant heroine, Roxana, a Romanian writer living in a small Southern town full of bigotry, attempts to reform the town into a space of diversity and tolerance. House in a Boat with Food and No God is a dystopian, ecofeminist play that takes place on water and whose characters, the mother-daughter pair Nermina and Sinistra, struggle for survival while attempting to reinvent the world by piecing together the massacred body of the original Goddess, mother of the universe. Crossings: A Play of Immigrant Voices is dedicated to those who cross borders every day, to those who survive and persist, and to those who have perished (and continue to perish) in their strenuous crossings.