full-length | simonasemenic

BEAUTIFUL VIDAS BURN BEAUTIFULLY, 2020

A play about historically significant and historically less significant women who have been persecuted for being different. Or just for being a female.

A witch-hunt through the centuries is transmitted to a metaphorical level as the play deals with women such as Joanna the Mad, Camille Claudel, Virginia Woolf, and other historically recognized women, but also with unnamed women, all of whom were victims of the patriarchal society in the past. The play intertwines historical facts and figures with the present time inequality issues. The form of the plays is inventive, it's based on pagan rituals and combined with methods of contemporary playwriting.

Estimated number of needed actors: 5 (4 female, 1 male)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Macedonian, Spanish, Ukrainian

THAT'S NOT IT, 2019

A contemporary play questioning the Good and the Evil and the palette of shades in between.

The play is intertwining different genres such as documentary, fairy tale, and metatheatre. It's taking place in an undefined space and time, where the deeds of notorious characters like Carlo Gesualdo, the genius composer and murderer, and Shiro Ishii, the scientist, and a war criminal, clash with the consequences of their acts that are echoing through the centuries into the present time.

Estimated number of needed actors: 8 (4 female, 4 male)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Bosnian, Ukrainian

YOU ARE THE MIRACLE, 2018

The play happens in one single moment, in a second in which all our joys, hopes, fears, and distress unfold in front of us.

Four women from different backgrounds are in a relationship with the same man. Each one of them perceives him differently because they are projecting their dreams, their desires, and their longing for love onto him. The play is inspired by Don Juan, but it's written from the point of view of his seducees. The man they are infatuated with is no more than a screen on which they project their yearnings. All the stories blend into one in a single moment, in a single heartbeat. A moment needed for a body that slips from the bed in the emergency department of a hospital to hit the ground.

Estimated number of needed actors: 18 (12 female, 6 male)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Dutch, Macedonian, Ukrainian

ROWAN, STRUDEL, DANCE, AND MORE, 2017

A comedy about the conflict between two political options, taking place in a Mediterranean village in 1963.

Comedy plays on the one hand with the comic genre by questioning the limits of comedy and on the other hand with the mediocre perception of theatre which is ready to accept provocation, yet only up to a certain point. At first glance, it's a play about a historical era and the manifestations of the underlying Slovenian ideological disunity (the clerical and the liberal poles) in the Mediterranean Slovenian village. But the more the story unfolds, the more the play evolves into a portrait of contemporary society in which pragmatical benefits can quickly replace ideological convictions. In its intensity, the text continually moves between times and places. Last but not least, it's a play about longing and the need for closeness.

Estimated number of needed actors: 14 (7 male, 7 female)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

No available translations.

THIS APPLE, MADE OF GOLD, 2016

An erotic drama questioning the taboo of female sexuality in different stages of life.

Vesna, a student, Živa, a mother in her early forties, and Mira, a widow in her late fifties, are three female characters, whose stories are interlaced in the play. Vesna is gathering strength to deal with the abusive professor, Živa is pregnant with her lover and must face her husband and Mira is meeting with her long-lost love. Through these dilemmas, they are dealing with their sexual desires, their emotions, and their relations with themselves.

Estimated number of needed actors: 9 (5 male, 4 female)
*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Macedonian

WE, THE EUROPEAN CORPSES, 2015

A contemporary play dealing with the invisible intimate story of a woman in a contradiction with loud political voices and an impotent economical context.

The form of the play is non-traditional, there is no dialogue, it’s a dramatic poem, and the dialogue is incorporated into stage directions. The main character is Milica the Partisan, who wants to tell her story. She was fighting in WW2 and then she married an abusive husband and fought her own war for many years. But nobody wants to listen to her story, her story is not important, the political agitation is important, and human rights in words are important. The Master of the Ceremony is talking about important political issues, he is gathering an army of voters, and his voice is the one thing that matters. Throughout the play, many scenes of everyday life pass by us, the European corpses. The title is a paraphrase of a verse in Srečko Kosovel’s poem Ecstasy of Death – “The sun will shine his golden rays on us, the European corpses.”

Estimated number of needed actors:

not estimated, the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Dutch, Ukrainian

THE SECOND TIME, 2014

An autobiographical play as the second part of a Victim trilogy, that deals with taboo diseases such as epilepsy, genital herpes, bedwetting, and similar.

The autobiographical play and performance that the author directed and performed herself dealt with her close encounters with the dark forces of one kind and another. She shared her experience with epilepsy and the health system, with genital herpes and the health system, and a bunch of other things and the health system. The play the second time is a sequel of her first solo; where the first solo ends, the second begins. Literally. “Let me smoke,” the last line in the play I, the Victim. is the first line in the play the second time. The author recounts her recent years, during which she – this way or that – coped with the aggravation of her epilepsy and – what else? – the health system.

Estimated number of needed actors: 1 female character
*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Romanian

7 COOKS, 4 SOLDIERS, 3 SOPHIAS, 2014

A story about the real martyrs, their hangmen, and those cooking for all of them, since the beginning of time

The lives of three women, three Sophias from three quite different historical epochs are told together to create a story of bravery, sacrifice, and selflessness. Sophia Magdalena Scholl, Sophia Lvovna Perovskaya, and Marie-Sophie Germain are presented to the audience in their final hours, before being beheaded by a group of soldiers. Seven cooks observe, comment, and peel potatoes, the way they have been doing since the beginning of time. The cooks are witnesses to all the crimes but they are wise enough to know that these three more deaths mean nothing in the grand scheme of things because the potatoes need to be peeled and soldiers need to be fed.

Estimated number of needed actors: 14 (4 male, 10 female)
*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, German, Polish, French, Ukrainian

43 HAPPY ENDS, 2014

An autobiographical play about a single mother with a chronic condition.

43 happy ends is a stage of developing a play later titled The Second Time. It was conceived based on the research of a contemporary culture's obsession with happy endings implemented into the author's everyday problems such as being a single mother of two, a person with a chronic condition, and a freelance artist.

Estimated number of needed actors: 1 female character
*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English

1981, 2013

A unique form of play that deals with the premise of traveling into your future body and back, thus experiencing the world in the future and the present as one.

Time is fragile and in this play, the author strives to prove just that. Characters who seemingly lead normal, one could even say cliché lives; suddenly find themselves lapsing between their present and future realities – being forced to witness what their decision will inevitably lead to. Boys experimenting with their sexuality, puppy love, and family quarrels at first seem like disjointed stories with little parallels, yet as one dives deeper, the common thread is clearly identified in the way these characters react to their newfound “time-travel” experience. What starts as confusion and delirium, quickly transforms into an inherent curiosity for what has transpired, why, and most importantly, if anything can be done to alter it.

Estimated number of needed actors: 7

*actors are foreseen to play more characters than one

32 characters (24 male, 8 female)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Lithuanian, Spanish, Macedonian

SOPHIA

OR WHILE I ALMOST ASK FOR MORE

OR A PARABLE OF THE RULER AND THE WISDOM, 2011

A surrealistic play about the decay of those in power and their unrelenting resolve to maintain their sovereignty, no matter the cost.

Sophia is a contemporary fairytale that uses its form and characters to wittily mock and critiques the very essence of our society – the state and those who wield the power to govern. The absurdities of old traditions, laws, and customs transcend time and are a clear metaphor for the conditions that we currently live in. Manipulating citizens, creating illusionary enemies, fear of change, and the loss of absolute influence can all be seen in the actions of Vladimir and his trusted ministers. They barbarically deal with any resistance and twist the truth to strengthen their hold on their constituency, leaving an all too familiar comparison with how governments function today, and the haunting question which has inherently tragic answers: “what is the price of freedom?” Faith, Hope, and Love are Sophia’s daughters who resist the governing regime of Vladimir and his ministers and become martyrs as well as tools to strengthen the regime’s power. Sophia is a character that actually is not a character – it’s merely a point of staged directions, a narrator’s position, and yet the most significant character in its absent presence.

Estimated number of needed actors: 7 (3 male, 4 female)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, German

THE FEAST

OR THE STORY OF A SAVORY BODY

OR HOW DO ROMAN ABRAMOVIČ, THE CHARACTER JANŠA, JULIA KRISTEVA AGED 24, SIMONA SEMENIČ, AND THE INITIALS Z.I. FIND THEMSELVES IN A TINY CLOUD OF TOBACCO SMOKE, 2010

A drama crafted to ignite questions of our responsibility for global injustice, and our perceived helplessness to stop it.

The feast begins, and we are instantly transported into intimate, yet strangely cold surroundings. The surface is clear – there are those who eat and those who are being eaten. The nameless victims of war, inequality, of traditional norms, come alive within a single corpse, refusing to lie silent and demanding to be heard. The blame is cast on a variety of characters: the privileged, those in power, and even the author, who sits down and carelessly enjoys the loins of the forgotten. As the cadaver is being veiled in a cloud of smoke from the host’s pipe (or not) and is screaming for its release and the release of everyone it represents, we are left with the simple notion that the offended, the murdered, the humiliated, are in fact no different than us.

Estimated number of needed actors: 2 (1 female, 1 male)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, German, Russian, Serbian

DO ME TWICE, 2009

An autobiographical play about the play-writing process and the making of a theatre piece in the fund-applications oriented every day.

Do me twice is a play that is dealing with absurd mechanisms of fund-raising, and bureaucratic-oriented cultural policy in a very innovative and humorous way. Play is as much a comedy as it is a politically engaged drama and it's as much a study of a cultural and political context as it is an intimate story about an artist struggling to create and suit the funding organizations' requirements at the same time, which makes this play practically a science-fiction piece.

Estimated number of needed actors: 1

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Italian

5BOYS.SI, 2008

Seemingly innocent children play through a variety of games that showcase their innermost prejudice and reveal the violent oppression our society lives in.

Going rogue has never held greater meaning than in the play 5boys.si, as we witness what at first seems like an innocent child’s play of five youngsters, yet it slowly but surely escalates into a perpetuation of violence, intolerance, and hate. The boys, who are ironically named after the beheaded Christian martyrs, play through a wide range of situations and characters, from battles between famous superhero characters to harrowing family abuse and brutal killings based on prejudice and discrimination. As their spiral of twisted games reaches a climax, the form of the play itself starts losing sense, and the dialog is disintegrated into mere sounds of gunshots, punches, and screams. 5boys.si thus unapologetically points at certain deeply internalized truths that haunt us even as mere children, and continue to do so as we grow into the very things we so eagerly, with childish innocence, fought against.

Estimated number of needed actors: 5, preferably female actors

Available translations: English, Albanian, Bolgarian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish, Spanish, Korean

YOU DIDN'T FORGET, YOU JUST DON'T REMEMBER ANYMORE, 2007

A subtly written play that deals with the difficulty of making choices, the similarity of twin souls, and the tenacity it takes to still believe you could change the world.

On the surface, this drama tackles the relationship of a married couple – an older and eminent writer on one hand, and a younger, once full of life, professor. They start quite obviously out of sync – Matjaž desperately trying to reignite his energy-depleted wife, and Lucija clinging to thoughts of house renovations to distract herself from the true nature of her dissatisfaction. Her will is lifted when she gets a surprise visit from Leon, who she quickly shoos away in fear of Matjaž finding them together. Their marital fight continues as they bicker about his new book. Leon keeps appearing and it becomes a constant reminder that something is not exactly as it seems, while bringing up issues of selling out in this capitalistic-driven world. The basic conflict between spouses evolves into the husband’s desire to use her story and thus gain the recognition he believes he deserves. However, beneath the superficial, this play is about loss, about the subconscious desire to overcome grief – in this case, the wife’s sorrow over her deceased twin brother Leon. With the subtle compartmentalization of the protagonists, the fight is not just between them but stands as a metaphor for the struggle between two principles. The immoral capitalistic market logic, and the nostalgic, one might say even utopic call for the restoration of the primary function of art, unencumbered by the time it is created in.

Estimated number of needed actors: 3 (2 male, 1 female)

Available translations: English, Serbian

I, THE VICTIM., 2007

A profound portrayal of someone whose life has tested her in more ways than one, which has led to a twisted fascination and longing for perilous life circumstances.

The anatomy of a victim's mind is on full display in the play at hand and offers a self-deprecating and witty analysis of a soul and body that not only endure tragedy but in their own twisted way, also crave it. As every ounce of humility is shed, we not only sympathize with the given story, but find ourselves reflecting upon our own hardships – how they shaped us, influenced our development, and scarred us irreparably and forever. From bedwetting to debilitating illnesses, the source material deals with the raw complexities of life, growing up, and overcoming crippling odds. By portraying realistic issues it deals with the nature of “the victim”, how it functions, and how it constantly needs an injection of the mishap to nourish itself – all of which leaves us with a surreal realization – we are nothing without the tragedy that we’ve endured.

Estimated number of needed actors
1 female
*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English, Italian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian

PRODUCTIONS

PUBLICATIONS

24HRS, 2006

A melodic and rhythmical harmony of contemporary dramatic composition that deals with interpersonal relationships in times of ubiquitous interferences.

Two couples, 24 hours. The first is trapped in a damp dark tunnel that crashed upon itself. Without supplies, they wait for salvation that might never come. The other is old sweethearts that spend the day in a hotel room, away from their respective spouses, trying to reignite a flame that has long since extinguished. Time is standing still, yet in the same breath, feels endless. Both are being interrupted by the invasive intrusion of so-called internet spam – breaking the flow of the play, and offering a distinct criticism of the electronic age we live in, constantly available, seemingly connected, yet as alone as we’ve ever been. Neither couple reaches a satisfactory end but is instead trapped in a flow of meaninglessness and repetitiveness – quite like the spam that interrupts their every thought.

Estimated number of needed actors: 20 (2 female, 2 male, 16 non-defined)

*Please note that the play anticipates and encourages a variety of casting solutions

Available translations: English