Playwriting Is Her Healing Art : With ‘Name Day,’ physician-writer Jovanka Bach revisits an earlier reign of terror in the former Yugoslavia.

You may get a little history lesson about the former Yugoslavia in Jovanka Bach’s “Name Day,” but that’s not the point.

“The focus of my story is on the consequences of war,” says the Santa Monica-based playwright, whose nine-character drama opens Saturday as a guest production at the Odyssey Theatre. “Name Day” (the title refers to a celebratory day in Eastern Orthodox religions on which parents pick a patron saint for their baby) had its genesis in childhood stories Bach’s Serbian mother told her: of desperate families hiding from the Germans during World War II, in which the women had to smother their crying newborns to escape detection.

Bach’s play, set in 1985 Los Angeles, centers on the reunion of Kara and Nina, who were partisans in Yugoslavia during the ‘40s. A compliant Kara killed her baby (agonizingly, on his name day), but Nina couldn’t bring herself to do the same to her child--and its subsequent cries led to the group’s discovery and several executions. “It’s about guilt, retribution, remorse, and one woman’s inability to come to terms with her action,” Bach explains. “It’s a wound that eats at Kara, that her friend got away with it, that that child lived and is now an adult, that Kara killed hers for no reason.”

Kara’s type of intransigence--holding onto the past, unable to get beyond a grudge--is something ingrained in the factions fighting in the former Yugoslavia, Bach believes. “It’s a quality I detected in people living in the Balkans. So in that sense, there’s some resonance [in the play] to what’s going on there now.” Bach researched and wrote “Name Day” almost a decade ago, so the story does not refer to the civil war that’s ravaged the country for the past four years. Yet she hopes to develop this play into a trilogy, perhaps having Kara’s second son Mischo return to his homeland and confront the crisis there.

Although Bach sees the Balkan conflict as “primal, very tribal, blood-related,” her relatives there (distant cousins with whom she occasionally exchanges Christmas cards) have historically crossed those ethnic boundaries, marrying Croatians, Muslims and Slovenians. But the writer has deliberately winnowed the global focus, personalizing her tale of self-destruction: “In Nina’s case, she didn’t physically kill her son, but she smothered him emotionally. And Nina is very manipulative, denying the past; the play is a revealing of her. Kara wants Nina to be accountable, and in so doing, drives away her own young son.”

Bach’s work provides an ironic counterpoint to Mona Koppelman’s female-bonding-in-Bosnia tale “Borderlands” (through Dec. 10 at the Rose Theatre), and also stands in stark contrast with the title character in “Antigone” (which closed Saturday at the Hudson Guild), a new adaptation by Deanne Stillman that transplants Sophocles’ noble heroine to the Balkan war, with the heedless Antigone challenging the vain, power-consumed King Creon. Not coincidentally, the piece starred Croatian actress Mira Furlan, and was staged by Furlan’s husband, film director Goran Gajic (“The Fall of Rock and Roll.”)

“Antigone was born to love, not to hate,” says Gajic, who with Furlan fled his homeland in 1991. “But her point of view is as rigid as Creon’s.” The director was clearly uneasy casting the former Yugoslavia as his playground (“I didn’t feel right to use it”), yet was drawn to the universals he found in the ancient drama. “They are the same elements 2000 years later: war, loyalty, love, family, traitors, believers. Obviously, my point of view is anti-war, and I hope we used our own personal experiences to deal with those issues.”

Bach realized that she’d hit a sensitive nerve when “Name Day” had a reading earlier this year at the Egyptian Arena in Hollywood. “Interestingly, the Serbian community heard of it, and it stirred up some things,” she says with a sigh. “I’m not really a part of that community; for better or worse, I’ve been assimilated. But some of them sought me out after the show: they saw political things in there I hadn’t even intended.”

Born in Michigan to a family of 10 children, Bach moved to California at 14 and later graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree and, in 1966, a medical degree. She completed her residency at County-USC Medical Center and has worked as an assistant professor at UCLA. Since 1989, she’s had her own dermatology practice in Santa Monica. “Before that,” she says cheerily, “I lived in England, and I wasn’t being a hands-on doctor. Before that, I was raising my girls [Lara and Tanya, now grown], and doing medicine part-time.”

In between, she also managed to live in Newport Beach, New York and Canada. It was, she admits, “a theatrical vagabond life.”

Bach wrote her first play, “A Matter of the Heart” (about the competition surrounding organ transplants and heart surgeons) in 1974; subsequent stage works include “Sylvie,” “Chekhov and Maria,” “Mrs. Warren’s Tea” (which won the American Radio Theatre Award) and “An Evening With Stephen Leacock” (a solo show starring her husband, writer-actor-director John Stark), which was broadcast on PBS and the BBC, and is upcoming onstage at UCLA. Continuing the partnership, Stark is directing and producing the premiere of “Name Day.”

As for her dual careers, Bach (who lives a few blocks from her medical office) no longer worries about managing the balancing act. “I see myself as a writer first,” she says firmly. “This is the lifestyle I wanted. And doing plays gives me a whole different energy than I get from my medical work. It really gets me geared up, thinking about doing other writing. I’m already making notes on my next play.”

*

“NAME DAY,”Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Dates: Opens Saturday. Plays Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Closes Dec. 17. Prices: $17.50; $12.50 for students and senior citizens. Phone: (310) 477-2055.