The Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award-winning courtroom drama for college and high school actors. A Patch of Earth is part courtroom drama, part ghost story, part magical realism.
It's the true story of Drazen Erdemovic, the "crybaby" - a 24 year old Bosnian Croat with a hip haircut and bad acne scars who fought for three different armies during the Bosnian war. He says he never killed anyone until the day he and his mates were sent to a cornfield near Srebrenica where he's ordered to shoot or be shot. If he refuses, his comrades say they'll also shoot his young wife and child. He is haunted by the ghosts of those he killed. It destroys his marriage. He tries to free himself from his demons by telling his story to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, confessing to shooting "no more than 70" of the 1200 people killed near Srebrenica.
The play asks the audience to consider two questions: What would I do if I were in his shoes? And what is a just punishment for his actions?
★ "Playgoers yearning for serious, mind-absorbing theater, with dramatic power behind the conscience-reaming message, should avail themselves of A Patch of Earth. It is a shattering experience." The Daily Pilot
★ "Felde first heard about the tribunal in 1995. A veteran radio reporter, she had just finished covering the O.J. Simpson criminal trial when she began hearing the crowd of international reporters talking about going to The Hague for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and its sister tribunal for Rwanda. It was the first time since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II that the international community would hold people responsible for war crimes. 'I was too young for Nuremberg, ' Felde said. 'This was my chance for [viewing] international justice. I just knew I had to be there.'" Daily Journal
★ "The lack of "foreign" dialects--and the directive that the play be performed without an intermission--point toward the playwright's attempt to erase any barriers that might prohibit the English-speaking spectator from entering into what Argentinean playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky calls the 'shared subconscious of the victimizer and the victimized.'" Human Rights Quarterly
★ "Felde concentrates on issues of justice: the juridical process and the accountability of soldiers ordered to participate in acts of mass murder. Felde's drama is somewhat expressionistic as the action takes place in the mind and memory of the Drazen Erdemovic, the real-life Croat who participated in the killing of Bosnian Serbs. Felde fuses factual and theatrical (e.g., courtroom scenes utilize transcripts from tribunal proceedings and Erdemovic's personal/family life is fictionalized)." New England Theatre Journal
"Felde intersplices 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." Pasadena Weekly
