She misses communism, and it shows
Ines Wurth, a Croatian actress living in Los Angeles, was eating ice cream with her boyfriend in 2002 and complaining about her life in America when she suddenly blurted out, ''I miss communism!"
''I was having a whiny moment where I was missing my home," she explains by phone from Studio City, Calif. Her astonished boyfriend laughed so hard that his ice cream ran out his nose. ''For him, as an American, it was so ironic and crazy."
But his reaction got her thinking about the possibility of mining theatrical material from her life growing up in Yugoslavia. And it led her boyfriend, Mark Soper, a writer, director, and actor, to help her write a piece and then direct it.
Wurth will perform that one-woman show, ''I Miss Communism," tonight through Sunday at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway.
Now, when Wurth says she misses communism, it's not exactly what you think.
''What the show talks about," she says, ''is freedom, whether freedom is living under communism or capitalism. I think the advantage of living under communism is that having a more restricted life, having less choices, gives more depth and purpose in life. Here I find that people have so many choices and are so overwhelmed with everything that their lives can lack purpose."
Wurth also misses the lack of crime and the communal atmosphere she knew growing up. She remembers her parents putting her on a city bus at age 2 or 3 to travel across town by herself, changing buses along the way.
Wurth has been a naturalized US citizen since 2002 and appeared in films including ''Minority Report" and television shows such as ''The Agency." She's so American now that she has little of her Croatian accent left, and her voice goes up at the end of sentences like a Valley girl's.
In the show, she plays 15 characters. Her costumes include an American cheerleader's uniform as well as a larger version of the Croatian Pioneer uniform she got at age 7 -- ''It was a commie thing," she says.
Wurth says the show is about ''coming of age, religion, war, and Oliver Twist."
'' 'Oliver Twist' was one of the few kids' Western movies allowed in, so we played it over and over," she says. ''He was a fantasy boyfriend of mine; I empathized with the kid." There were a lot of parallels between their lives, she says. Her parents -- university professors in Zagreb -- were fairly poor.
Wurth considers her show to be a drama with comedic moments, but there wasn't much that was funny about the war and the breakup of Yugoslavia. She left in 1990, right after high school, but moved back and forth between Croatia and the United States until she settled in New York in 1994.
''I Miss Communism" ran at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer, where it was nominated for the Amnesty International Award and the Writers' Guild Award. It also played for a week at 59E59 in New York. After Boston and a few LA performances, she'll take the show on a European tour.
In Edinburgh, she said, audience members came up to her to talk about wars they'd been through.
''People would tell their personal experiences in concentration camps, because I talk about that in the show -- older people from Poland that went through the second World War," she says. ''That's what we want to achieve. We want to reach audiences across the world and spread the message of healing. It's very uplifting."
255 Elm St., Somerville. Tickets: $18-$20, 866-811-4111, www.jtoffbroadway.com.
