The play Archduke. playing at Cap Rep in Albany, NY, through Sunday, March 29, is about the plot to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which helped start World War I.
Yet the story is not only informative about the political machinations that preceded the Great War but is often quite laugh-out-loud funny.
Archduke was written by Rajiv Joseph, who has had 17 plays produced in 20 years, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” It was previously produced at a theater in Philadelphia, with mostly the same small cast and the same director, Blanka Zizka
The play opens with 19-year-olds Gavrilo (Suli Holum) and Nedeljko (Sarah Gliko) meeting at a secret location in Belgrade. As John Green would say Everything Is Tuberculosis. The two young men and a third, Trifko (Brandon J. Pierce), are all suffering from the deadly disease.
Meaning of life
Impoverished and looking for meaning in their too-short lives, the trio have been recruited by a Serbian army officer named Apsis (James Konicek, the only one not from the Philadelphia cast) to train to liberate Serbia from its Austro-Hungarian overlords. The leavening of the indoctrination comes from Apsis’s savvy cook, Sladjana (Melanye Finister), who slyly undermines her boss’s mission. Is despair and destruction the only path?
While the dialogue was fictionalized, the narrative of these young men being recruited by the anti-empire Black Hand is historically accurate.
An interesting choice by director Zizka was the casting of 40ish women as Gavrilo and Nedeljko. Per the program: “Zizka believes that casting shouldn’t be based on finding an actor most like the character, because ‘acting is transformation.'”
The production is further enhanced by the imaginative staging – the intentionally anachronistic wheeled chairs cracked me up – and the effective projections designed by Jorge Cousineau and Michael Long.
If the play Archduke comes to your town, go see it. Here’s the page about its Philadelphia run in early 2025 and the Playbill from its off-Broadway production in late 2025. My wife and I saw it at Cap Rep on Saturday, March 14, at the matinee.
