FINAL COUNTDOWN (BALKAN BLUES)
By Saviana Stanescu

Directed by Cosmin Chivu
Music by John Stone
Costumes by Oana Botez-Ban
With Kathryn Foster, Jeremy Holm, Lisa Germ, David Hale and Stephanie Wissinger.

The Lark Theatre produced the play in July 2003 as part of The New York International Fringe Festival - Fringe NYC.

Final Countdown (Balkan Blues)- is a dark comedy about a train, an artist gravedigger, a professional mourner, balloons and a homeless woman with no fleas or perspectives. The play is a torrid Balkan Americanized absurdist comic adventurette about balloons, children and deviant parents: Zozo, a homeless Romanian, confronts her weird past as the daughter of a professional mourner and an artist gravedigger as she copes with rape and murder in the present.

"FINAL COUNTDOWN is a comedy about being homeless at least in the sense that one cannot find her own place in the world. Zozo lives in a poor Eastern European country as the daughter of a professional mourner and an artist gravedigger. She has a totally screwed up life. Can we laugh at the misery of human condition or lack of opportunity? Can we exorcise the little (psychological) murders and small atrocities of everyday life in a country whose dark memories are about to explode into violence? Yes, I think so. I think we deserve to laugh. Can we forget? No." Saviana Stanescu (Playwright) "Final countdown could be defined as a dark comedy about balloon children and deviant families. I envision the story more like a journey where fear and love, birth and death, dreams and violence are blending together, represented with irony and sensibility. The illusion of happiness comes from a place where the characters enjoy living, reading newspapers, talking, digging graves, drinking, and ultimately killing. Their actions can be seen as an attempt to restore the normal state of the world they live in, ignoring the reality of their condition. The motifs of the Romanian and Balkan culture pictured by the playwright almost in a cartoon-ish way, are becoming even more powerful and complete. What is ultimately shocking is not related to their actions, but to their existence that has become trite, mechanical and complacent