Tesla’s Letters
"What first drew me to Tesla's Letters was the insight it gave into both the life of Nikola Tesla and the violent division of Yugoslavia in the mid ‘90s,” said director Nick Bowling. “I remember never fully understanding the details of that conflict. It seemed like such a complicated and ugly battle and it was far away. Tesla’s Letters challenges this kind of American complacency. It is a play about the search for heroes in a world where there are no heroes — just real people, trying to survive. It is this aspect of the play that ultimately captured me and what makes it so important for modern audiences.”
This show nicely combines history with a suspenseful story that finds an American PhD student, Daisy (Tien Doman in full Southern accent) traveling to 1990’s war torn Belgrade to study Nikola Tesla, the Yugoslavian born inventor. It is 1997 during the wars that spelled the end of Yugoslavia and ethnic cleansing is in full throttle. Dragan (Joel Stanley Huff), the administrator of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, tricks Daisy to visit Tesla’s birthplace in Croatia where she experiences, first hand, the horrors of ethnic violence. She becomes torn between her obsession with Tesla, the unappreciated genius inventor of radio, AC electricity and a host of inventions and the brutality of ethnic cleansing. As she learns more about the Yugoslavian conflict, she realizes that there are no clear cut villains or victims and that heroes are not perfect by flawed humans. She must decide to be the neutral American academic or the crusading American doing her part to make the world realize just what is happening in the Balkans.