Alone Together, or Tomorrow Is in Our Dreams

Alone Together, or Tomorrow Is in Our Dreams is a play by a young dramaturg Nina Kuclar Stiković (b. 1996). The text was created upon the incentive by the Maribor Drama artistic director Aleksandar Popovski as a reaction to the pandemic that has transformed our world. Although the setting of the play is embedded in a time of pandemic, its raison d’être is not being questioned only through the perspective of healthcare, but also from societal, economic, and ultimately human point of view. The configuration of the plot is as follows: a family that was once displaced is now forced to reunite under the same roof due to an emerging economic situation that has paralysed the whole world. The Mother and the Youngest Son, a senior year high-school student, who have both been living in their cosy nest, are soon to be joined by the Eldest Son, the Daughter with her Boyfriend, and the Father, who left the family years ago.

The bizarreness of the present time, the reminiscence of the family past and a premonition of an uncertain future are reflected in the intimate stories of family members, who are forced to confront each other. The play Alone Together uncovers yet another, arguably the most sinister side of the corona era, i.e. the problem of social isolation, loneliness, estrangement, and indifference. In addition to the virus decontamination and its repetitive rituals of disinfecting excuses, the materialistic society, brought to its extremes, wages war against the last remnants of empathy, humanness, solidarity, and genuineness of interpersonal relations. Materialism, egocentrism, alcoholism, exhibitionistic eruptions of unfulfilled sexual fantasies, ghosting, humiliation, contempt, outbreaks of violence … All this and much more is splashing around from the overcrowded family aquarium. “The quarantine did not create new problems – it only amplified the existing ones.”

The director of the play Nejc Gazvoda (also a writer, screenwriter, playwright, film director and dramaturg) wrote the following in his article entitled A Guide to Creating About the Epidemic during the Epidemic: “I think that the epidemic will prove the most dangerous, futile and perfidious topic that could be addressed by various authors in the present time as well as in the near future. People have become like closed clams, like a wine that has dwelled in the dusty part of the cellar for too long. They are tired, moreover, I have the feeling that they feel abused. Abused by the media, politics, science … basically by all societal structures and agents, whom they used to trust, or at least unconsciously put their faith in them. Not only that the epidemic in not over – it hasn’t even begun yet. Although the virus will probably fade out one way or another, its legacy will remain as poorly sewn up wounds on a heavily crippled body of our society. And when the arts dare to poke these wounds, the provoked reaction can be nothing but resistance. Or is it disgust?”

In addition, the dramaturg Mojca Podlesek pointed out yet another moment in her contribution entitled The Generation of Doctors, Who Won’t Know How to Feel the Spleen; of Court Jesters and Birds That Can’t Fly Out of the Nest, and of Zoom Graduates: “The drama text Alone Together is an exact inventory of feelings. An eruption of frustrations that have long been boiling up inside. However, as the Boy states in the text, the crisis hasn’t created new problems, it only magnified the existing ones. The atmosphere, created by the drama, is charged with bitterness, agitation, frustration, leaving no space for anything else. /…/ We, the young, are numb, as everything is literarily fucked. Similarly, the demonstrations are bereft of their momentum, they are losing their potency due to quarantine apathy, and in such moments, I follow the example of other people. I am lucky that we are ‘alone together’, knowing that I am not alone. Knowing that others have suffered far greater troubles than me, and that we are alone together. By overcoming big or small troubles alike, we will get through the third or even the fourth quarantine.”