Dragutin “Apis” Dimitriyević, also known as the Captain (Patrick Page, left), offers three impoverished and consumptive youths (from left: Jason Sanchez, Adrien Rolet, and Jake Berne) a banquet and a shot at immortality in Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke.
If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers.
From left: Jason Sanchez plays Nedeljko Čabrinović, Jake Berne is Gavrilo Princip, and Adrien Rolet is Trifko Grabez, the assassins of Archduke Ferdinand, in Archduke.
They are Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez. Under the deft direction of Tony winner Darko Tresnjak, who was born and raised in Zemun, one of the play’s settings, the drama opens in a cellar full of barrels (strikingly designed by Alexander Dodge), where Gavrilo (Jake Berne) is supposed to meet a contact for a job.
Soon Nedeljko (Jason Sanchez) shows up. Both men are 19 and have been sent by the same doctor, an anti-Habsburg activist, who has diagnosed them with fatal consumption. As Gavrilo tells Nedeljko: “Doc told me, come here to this old place at midnight. Told me there’d be a guy who’d give me meaning in my life.” They share stories of rough lives shaped by religion. Says Gavrilo:
I was supposed to die when I was born. Some other doc told Ma, the baby will die. Ma took me to the priest. Priest tells her to change my name to Gavrilo, which is after the Angel Gavrilo [Gabriel].
Meanwhile, Nedeljko, abandoned by his mother at a convent (presumably Orthodox), abhors thoughts of suicide that the depressed Gavrilo has expressed: “I’m not about to suicide myself! God’s got no mercy for the suicide!” Hunger, too, has played a key part in their misery:
Gavrilo: Once, saw a man toss out his sandwich, half finished. I tore into that, no question.
Nedeljko: A nun bought me a sandwich once.
Gavrilo: Brand-new?
Nedeljko: Still hot.
Gavrilo: No!
Nedeljko: That’s what nuns do. … Brides of Christ and they buy you sandwiches.
Soon they are joined by Trifko (Adrien Rolet), another consumptive with a more nihilistic worldview: “There ain’t no meaning in life at all,” he says.
Trifko and Nedeljko wait for the train—and their first ever train trip—to Sarajevo in Serbia. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Trifko brings them to their superior, “Apis”—a nickname for Dragutin Dimitriyević, a Serbian patriot also known as “the Captain,” played with formidable determination and comic exasperation by the booming-voiced Patrick Page. Apis, assisted by his peasant housekeeper Sladjana (Kristine Nielsen, in hilarious form), has prepared a banquet for the hapless youths. But first they must hear his pitch, which begins, “The Habsburg Empire! Shameful in scope, pornographic in nature.”
Ignored and desperate, the youths are ripe for Apis’s blandishments. He promises that the death of Franz Ferdinand will bring them acclaim: “Boys, you are going to die soon, one way or another. Do you wish to be carried off by a peasant disease? … Or would you, instead, strike out for Serbian independence?” But his recruits show some reluctance to taking cyanide:
Nedeljko: I was raised by nuns, Captain, and they were always one to rank the sins. And they always put the suicide number one, above ’em all, like murder, coveting wives and so forth.
Gavrilo: Also, taking poison furthermore … not pleasant.
Eventually, Gavrilo embraces the inevitable: “If I had to choose between bein’ known while alive or bein’ known while dead, I gotta go with dead. Cause I’ll be dead forever. So that means: Remembered forever.”
Although the boys are hamstrung by church doctrine, Apis and Sladjana carry their own irrational baggage. With comic brio, Sladjana declares that cats are evil: “Cats ain’t no creature from God’s Kingdom. No. But one cat means more cat means more cat. Cats lay eggs!”
Apis, too, is susceptible to superstition. His status as a Serbian patriot arises from having assassinated King Alexander I and Queen Draga of Serbia in 1903. As he describes his disembowelment of Draga, he says: “When I finally threw her over the terrace, I was red with gore and—true as I am to God—I was someone else: a man under a witch’s spell.”
Berne, Rolet, and Sanchez are terrific throughout as the prospective assassins. They react like children to the thought of traveling to Sarajevo on a train—and sleeping on it!—as they are persuaded to move forward with the plot. But all of Archduke’s characters are in some way distorted by poverty, disease, hunger, desperation, or superstition.
As the trio eat their sandwiches in preparation for the event, they contemplate what their lives might have been. One cannot help but feel for them in this sad, intelligent, often hilarious play.
Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke runs through Dec. 21 at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater (111 W. 46th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and at 7:30 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday (except for a 2 p.m. curtain Nov. 30). For tickets and more information, visit roundaboutheatre.org.
Playwright: Rajiv Joseph
Director: Darko Tresnjak
Set Design: Alexander Dodge
Costume Design: Linda Cho
Lighting Design: Matthew Richards
Sound Design: Jane Shaw
Hair, Wig & Makeup Design: Tom Watson
Fight Director: Rocio Mendez
