Fred Saas’ wife brought him a script so new that the pages weren’t even numbered.

Before he’d finished reading “Necessary Targets,” the director of Island Theatre had made up his mind to present Eve Ensler’s new play to Bainbridge audiences.

“I thought it would be good for a reading in the library,” Saas said. “There’s not a lot of blocking that’s mandatory to the story line. There’s a minimal set, even in full production.”

Penned by the well-known author of “The Vagina Monologues,” the play treats the experiences of Bosnian women in the aftermath of war.

“Necessary Targets” was conceived in 1993, when Ensler traveled to the region to interview women war refugees – the traumatized survivors of executions, torture and the systematic use of rape for so-called “ethnic cleansing.”

These human rights abuses took place against a backdrop of escalating civil war in post-Communist Yugoslavia. From 1989 to 1999, ethnic animosities were enflamed in the amalgam of national republics that included Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia, as well as two autonomous regions – Vojvodina and the historic Serb kingdom of Kosovo, now populated mostly by Albanian Muslims.

“It’s such recent history – 10 years ago, 20 years ago,” Saas said. “That’s one of the things that intrigues me. And I find how ignorant I really was of everything that happened. I’ve learned a lot just doing some of the research.”

The play, written for eight women, is calculated to take audiences beyond these pictures and images of war to the aftermath and the rebuilding of a country.

“When we think of war, we think of it as something that happens to men in fields or jungles,” Ensler writes in her introduction to the play.

“When we think of war, we do not think of women. Because the work of survival, of restoration, is not glamorous work. Like most women’s work, it is undervalued, underpaid, and impossible.”

Another theme of “Necessary Targets” is what it means for foreign aid-givers to help with post-war reconstruction.

The designated “helpers” in Ensler’s play are two Americans sent by the United States government to work with Bosnian women refugees: Melissa, a tough young trauma counselor, and J.S., a fifty-ish Park Avenue psychiatrist.

The sheltered J.S. seems an odd candidate for the assignment; as she packs, wrapping each pair of socks in tissue paper, she confides to Melissa:

“…The Balkans were not exactly next on my vacation map….

What does one wear…in a war-torn country?”

But once in the field, it is J.S. who dispenses with her agenda to meet the women on their own terms, while Melissa, wedded to her tape recorder, goes after stories with the acquisitive zeal of the obsessed collector.

The Bosnian women see through Melissa and call her the “story vulture.”

With one exception, the Bosnian women do note delve into gory details; their stories are referred to obliquely, and with humor.

“She (Ensler) handles it so deftly,” said Island Theater member Bonnie Wallace, who plays the Bosnian Seada.

“You expect it to be one long horror story, and it isn’t. That’s the surprise of the script.”

Each Bosnian woman is carefully defined as an individual.

“I think one of the things that Ensler’s up to is to cut through some of the objectification that tends to occur when something’s happened ‘over there, to them,’” Saas said. “She’s trying to cut down those walls that we try to erect.”

Kate Carruthers is Zlata, a refugee who is also a doctor.

“She’s from a very wealthy family,” Carruthers said. “How could it happen to a professional, an educated woman?”

Wallace’s Seada is the most deeply traumatized of the women, and it is her story that shapes the play’s climactic scene.

“I don’t want to give away what Seada’s real story is, because it’s important that it be revealed in the script,” Wallace said. “However, I will say that she has undergone such trauma that she has withdrawn from reality.”

As a man directing a play about women’s lives, Saas has had more distance from the material than his actors.

“There are different ways of looking at it,” he said. “Could a woman director relate to surviving a rape camp better? Perhaps. But it also allows the cast to bring it forward with a director who can be a step away from it.

“Ultimately I don’t think it matters. These are themes that should touch us all.”

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Island Theatre reads Eve Ensler’s “Necessary Targets” 7:30 p.m. June 21 at the BI public library. Suitable for teens and older. Free to the public. Information: 842-4162.