Tesla's Letters is a play by Jeffrey Stanley.It opened at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City in April 1999, directed by Curt Dempster. The cast included Victor Slezak and Judith Roberts. It later opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2000 produced by the USC School of Theatre. The play went on to many other productions and public readings including the November 2007 Chicago premiere at the TimeLine Theatre Company which was nominated for 3 Joseph Jefferson Awards.
The play takes place at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, a bus on the Serbian-Croatian border, and Tesla's birthplace in Smiljan, Croatia in 1997 two years after Operation Storm and the Dayton Agreement and two years prior to the start of the Kosovo War and the US-led 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Daisy Archer is a trendy young Ph.D. student from the US who has won a research grant to fly to Belgrade to research the life of eccentric electrical pioneer and arch-rival to Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla. Tesla was of Serbian descent but was born and raised in Croatia, and spent 60 years of his life as a US citizen; this tri-national pedigree alone will present Daisy with semantics problems more complicated than she imagined.
On her first day in Belgrade she meets museum director Dragan and his elderly secretary Biljana. Dragan will decide whether Daisy is to be granted access to an archive of Tesla's personal letters. He begins making aggressive advances on her, and his plan seems simple: sex in exchange for the letters. But Dragan explains that he wants Daisy to go into a dangerous part of Croatia to take photographs of Tesla's house and the church in which his father was a Serbian Orthodox priest. If Daisy will do this he will give her access to Tesla's letters. She agrees to strike the dangerous bargain.
On the bus to Croatia, Daisy meets Zoran, a handsome, charismatic young man and ex-Croatian soldier. When he learns that she is planning to drive to the remote village of Smiljan, an area which US State Department travel advisories have warned Americans to avoid, he insists on coming along as her guide. In Smiljan, Daisy witnesses the immediate aftermath of a military attack on a civilian neighborhood and sees a moment of deadly violence as it occurs. She takes photographs of Tesla's birthplace and returns to Belgrade for a final confrontation with Dragan.
In the end Daisy rejects nationalism in any form, refuses to take sides and arrives at a cynical and seemingly prophetic conclusion that the war will soon resume in the Balkans and around the world because humans, including even her hero Tesla, are savages who enjoy plotting, planning and executing it.