Exhibitionist

Fred Miller, a very successful and wealthy stockbroker, ends up in jail again for exhibitionism for the third time. Here, he’s supposed to get therapy or help from two experts, a strict and uptight psychiatrist Eva Stempowska, and a benevolent, if rather unbalanced, social worker Dorothy Jackson. The latter has only recently started her work in the state jail, but has already got herself involved in a dependent sexual relationship with the officer Jimmy Pollack, and also feels special excitement upon meeting Fred for the first time. For the cluster of ambivalent relationships to entangle fully, the author gave us a fifth character: psychiatrist Daniel Parker, Eva’s former spouse (and therapist), who’s been unsuccessfully treating Fred’s deviation for several years and who holds a diametrically opposed view of how to approach the treatment.

Although the story “of disclosing, of an exhibitionist who in addition to his nuts and knob also shows a mirror to the world” is set in America, fifteen years after the text was written, the questions it poses seem even more familiar: How does a society confront pathological sexual phenomena? How well do psychiatrists really cure patients? What compensations do lonely people conjure when faced with the absence of love? ... And finally, is it possible to bridge the division between “normal” and “abnormal”?

Dušan Jovanović, one of our most prolific playwrights and theatre directors won the Slavko Grum Award for the best Slovenian play for The Exhibitionist (2002). After staging it on the small stage of SNT Drama Ljubljana (still using the pen name O. J. Traven) it became a cult performance at the Atelje 212 in Belgrade, and it was also staged in the Theatre d’Esch in Luxemburg. The second Slovenian staging will be directed by Marko Bulc, who graduated from AGRFT in Prof. Jovanović’s class.