When news isn't enough

As a veteran radio news reporter, KPCC 89.3-FM’s Kitty Felde has seen her fair share of drama — disasters, riots, the OJ Simpson trial, you name it.

Perhaps the most profound and unsettling of these experiences, however, was covering the 1996 international war crimes tribunals dealing with acts of genocide committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War.

One trial in particular, that of a guilt-ridden young man who participated in the secret ethnically motivated executions of 8,000 men and boys then risked his life to expose the slaughter, was so troubling that reporting it simply wasn’t enough.

The story of Drazen Erdomovic, who was only 25 when he faced judges at The Hague, became the subject of Felde’s “A Patch of Earth,” a play recently published in the collection “The Theatre of Genocide,” which she will discuss and sign Monday at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. A scene from the play will also be performed that evening by the acclaimed LA-based Ark Theatre Co.

Caught smuggling refugees out of the former Yugoslavia, Erdomovic (Croatian, but married to a Serb) avoided prison by serving in a unit of the Serbian Army which would eventually perpetrate the infamous Srebrenica Massacre, during which Muslims bused out of a collapsing UN safe zone were murdered and secretly buried in a field. Erdomovic, who had a baby son at home, initially refused to participate but was told he must shoot or be shot.

He shot.

Later, against the advice of nearly everyone in his life to stay silent (and let the previously unknown crime remain one of the war-torn region’s many terrible secrets), Erdomovic sought out international officials and the press to confess his deeds — killings, he said at trial, “I had no choice [but to commit].”

While “A Patch of Earth” is not a morality tale and is not at all preachy, it does deal with moral questions: “There were clues from bits and pieces of what was talked about in court, but I wanted to understand how he got to that point where he had to make those kinds of decisions. How would you react? How does that change your life? And what does it do to a marriage?” said Felde, who served as a host of KPCC’s “Talk of the City” for nine years until 2006.

“Supposing I lived in Yugoslavia at that point, how brave would I be? Would I have the guts to say ‘Go ahead, shoot me’?” continued Felde, who before pursuing a radio career worked as a stage actress and co-founded Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood along with fellow UC Irvine drama school alumni. (She also pursued commercial and modeling work, appearing during the 1970s in several “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” Virginia Slims magazine advertisements that featured images of glamorous early 20th-century women being punished for smoking.)

To convey her story, Felde inter-splices actual courtroom testimony with information gathered from news reports — including a scene where Erdomovic’s former comrades shoot him to keep him quiet — which she brings to life on stage by fleshing out scenes with on-point but imagined details.

Treading lightly with creative license — “The absolute truth of the basic story has to be there,” she said — Felde paints a culture not quite ready to believe the atrocities committed during the civil war that split Yugoslavia into Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and later (after NATO forces bombed Serbia and its forces there in 1999) Kosovo.

In her story, Erdomovic’s wife believes he only imagined participating in the slaughter, and his judgmental father refuses to acknowledge the family’s role in helping the Nazis during World War II.
“I think it’s a way of coping. How you go on. Look how long it took veterans of the Second World War to tell their stories of heroism or horror. It takes time, I think, for humans to process these things,” said Felde, who filed daily reports from The Hague for the Christian Science Monitor’s now-defunct radio operations. “That, I think, is the importance of the tribunal. You have an opportunity for victims to tell their stories in a court of law — to have an official record.”

Some of the soldiers portrayed in “A Patch of Earth” have been indicted for crimes against humanity but have not been caught, and many Serbs still don’t acknowledge these genocidal acts. The arrest late last month of former Serbian military leader Radovan Karadzic to face war crimes charges was met with a violent 15,000-strong protest in Belgrade. To this day, said Felde, “There are people who don’t believe the massacre at Srebrenica actually happened. They describe it as just a war.”

The real life Erdomovic served four years behind bars and testified against others before being released in 2000 into a witness protection program, but his conviction and sentencing tend to also provoke emotional responses from theatergoers.

“Every time the show is done, the audience argues afterwards about what the sentence should have been. Some people feel locking him up at all is too harsh. Some people argue he should be locked away the rest of his life,” she said.

As consuming as Felde’s radio career has been — and successful; she has twice been named the LA Press Club’s Reporter of the Year and has won 13 Golden Mike awards from the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California — she has written several other plays, including a period musical about the Dodgers’ arrival in Los Angeles.

“A Patch of Earth,” said Felde, is ultimately about the role conscience plays in the choices people make.

“It’s easy for us to say these are a bunch of things happening overseas in a wartime situation, but on a much smaller scale we are often asked to do things that go against our conscience,” she said. “At what point are we willing to say ‘no,’ and at what cost?”

Felde will appear at 7 p.m. Monday at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd Pasadena. For more information, call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com.