BY Jenn Q. Goddu

When a play merits a “this is ridiculous” response, the next thought is not typically, “We really need to do this.”

But that is just what The Utopian Theatre Asylum, better known as TUTA Theatre Chicago, does, says executive director Jackie Stone.

“I joke about this a lot, but I think it’s probably true,” she said. “When I read something and it seems like the absolute most impossible thing, nobody would ever put this on stage, that is often the scripts that we do.”

Consider the first show the company put up in the city in 2002 after relocating from the Washington, D.C.-area: The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other was a 90-minute wordless play, “basically a series of stage directions,” Stone said. “We choose impossible plays.”

Artistic director Zeljko (pronounced JAY-co) Djukic sees it differently. TUTA’s aim is “to explore as many forms as possible.”

“When we started, material picked me,” he said. “But as the company is growing, it’s becoming more defined and we want to be able to articulate more what we want to say with the whole season. What comes out as an important principle is that we always take people somewhere different.”

The company’s latest work, a June 15-July 8 remount of Tracks, an American premiere from a Serbian playwright, takes audiences on a journey alongside young people coming of age in a time of war. Up next, after a hoped for tour of Europe this summer with Tracks, is Jean-Luc Lagarce’s It’s Only the End of the World. The contemporary French play about a man with AIDS returning home to his family to break the news of his diagnosis is expected to be followed by a fresh approach to Romeo and Juliet.

Audiences never “quite know what to expect” of a TUTA show, Stone said. “Whenever they think they’ve pigeonholed or figured out what it is, they come in and it’s something completely different than before.”

This unwillingness to be pinned down does pose a challenge for TUTA in trying to market their company. There is no one label that fits, Djukic said. The company can’t be defined ethnically or aesthetically. “We want to be a modern American theatre that presents a variety of material.”

Fortunately for TUTA, their audiences are loyal to the experimentation. While the company may share the challenge of bringing in new people with most theatre companies in the city, Stone says TUTA enjoys a retention rate in the 80-85 percent range.

Perhaps what helps is that for all the diverse forms and styles, TUTA takes a consistent approach behind the scenes.

“What’s unique for TUTA is how we do theatre, how we make theatre,” Djukic said. “I always thought that putting up a show in four weeks is not realistic, at least not a good show. So one thing that we do is try to extend that period of rehearsal as much as possible so that actors have more time.

“The material dictates how rehearsals will be conducted, but the focus is on collaboration and on trying to create a safe environment where everyone can contribute their maximum and inspire each other,” Djukic said. “I’m trying to guide people that work with me away from constantly thinking about the [final] product. The exchange that comes between ensemble and designers is much more intimate.”

 Djukic’s wife, Natasha, a designer and the company’s managing director, says the collaborative process builds on “phenomenal trust.”

“[Zeljko] never starts with the final point in mind. He is very interested in traveling to it. He has a departure point and everyone joins in, and pitches in, and everybody responds to each other,” she said. “In essence you have this open space, and there is a set of boundaries, but within that there is a playground that you can do anything you want. That is a beautiful thing. It is a very liberating thing. It pushes the envelope every time in a different way. And you can’t repeat yourself even if you wanted to.”

She added: “What we are trying to do in TUTA is, every time, reinvent the language; by language I mean words and visuals and audio and whatever else, movement, that exists only in theatre that you cannot replicate in any other art form.”

Or as her husband puts it: “What’s consistently, I’m hoping, present in our work is a focus on the unique language of theatre. I think we’re trying to re-evaluate what’s left of the theatrical language in the age when media is so present and so influential. What is so powerful about the direct live contact between the audience and the actor?”

It’s a reinvention or re-evaluation that is more welcomed in Chicago than it was in D.C. where the Djukics moved in 1990 after meeting as undergraduates at the Radio and Drama Conservatory in the former Yugoslavia.

“Chicago as a community has great theatre audiences,” Natasha Djukic said. “People here are very used to seeing different things.”

TUTA first began presenting work in D.C. in the mid-1990s while Djukic was completing graduate studies at the University of Maryland. But the company was then “basically a group of enthusiasts” and didn’t incorporate until the Djukics relocated to Chicago.

Chicago was so “much more vibrant” than D.C. that moving here simply made sense to Djukic. “There is only a certain amount of audience, or only a certain amount of feedback that you can get in D.C. as a smaller theatre company,” he said. “It was totally different energy and a totally different environment here. There is just enormous potential here, much more talent and less provincialism, I would say.”

Coming to America from Europe, Djukic found he was at odds with the “text-as-dogma” approach common in Western theatre. Today, nearly 20 years later, he feels he’s drawing on all manner of traditions—where he’s from, his training background, and trying to “open up and see what happens when you mix those colors with the local colors.”

Stone, for one, has vivid memories of Djukic first mixing in at the University of Maryland. “He came into the department and kind of threw the entire thing into a tizzy,” she recalled. “Students were rebelling in their acting classes. It was a big deal. He changed a lot of perceptions.”

 It was a department that emphasized the internal to external, emotion-based approach to acting, Stone said. “I had never worked with anyone that said, ‘Your physical body is much more reliable and consistent to you as an actor on stage.’ You know how your body is going to move, so therefore it was much more working from an exterior place to an interior place.’”

It was an approach that made sense to Stone as an actress. When taking an emotion-centric approach, she said, “Sometimes you could do the scene and it was great and other times you weren’t feeling it. With [Djukic’s] approach it was much more consistent.”

Stone moved to Chicago years before the Djukics, but was eager to join them again artistically when they arrived in town. TUTA today is a company of 22 ensemble members, but Djukic is quick to say, “We are not a closed group or people.” Only 16 ensemble members live in Chicago. People come and go and every show is done with people from outside the core ensemble. “I think it should be an open circle, an open group where people come and stay and go and develop.”

To further the developing, TUTA has recently initiated its own Fulton Street Sessions, in which ensemble members meet once a week to workshop, with no particular final product in mind. “Hopefully we will develop something, but we really did not define what we wanted out of it,” Djukic said. “But as long as it’s there, it will allow us to communicate better.”

Along with the ongoing ensemble training, TUTA continues to run Actor’s Lab workshops taught by Djukic or Stone. “It’s important that TUTA doesn’t stay with just producing shows,” Djukic said. “That’s also part of the reason why many companies disappear and vanish, because you get into a habit of just producing two shows and that starts to get boring after a while.”

And TUTA plans to stick around, Natasha Djukic said. The company’s founders are past the “we need to prove ourselves and have people come and see us” phase. “There is less ego and more honestly wanting to share and have a dialogue, which theatre can do almost better than anything else,” she said.

“Longevity is important to us and maturity is important to us. We would like to get to the point where, as an organization, we are just as stable as we are as an artistic force, in that you can expect the unexpected artistically, but know that we are going to be here.”

Djukic enjoys what progress TUTA has already made. “We are in a good place in a sense that we are not anymore just a small company that runs out of Natasha and my’s basement,” he said. “It is important to keep making these steps, to continue doing it, because it is really hard to sustain good work. That’s what’s most difficult—to really do it long-term. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but it has to happen.”

TUTA remounts Tracks, written by Milena Markovic and translated from Serbian by Dubravka Knezevic, at Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St., from June 15 -July 8. Tickets are $15-22. Call 847/217-0691, or visit www.tutato.com.