Restaging Romania

Romanian theatre artists are grappling with the realities of integrating into the new Europe

By Randy Gener

Upon our toothed round country are we bound
As upon a wheel
—Ioana Ieronim

It was a rude awakening. "This is the new writing in post-communist Romania?" I thought. "Why, Peca Ştefan's The Sunshine Play is no more radical than a sad-romantic comedy on Lifetime TV." Romania is the birthplace of world-class playwrights (Caragiale, Ionesco, Visniec). It has produced a succession of great stage directors (Andrei Serban, Lucian Pintilie, Liviu Ciulei) whose boldly conceptual productions have broken ground in the American theatre. Yet here I was sitting in a smoky jazz club, Green Hours, on Calea Victoriei in downtown Bucharest in May 2006, taking in a conventional variation of a love triangle, set on a sloping roof in Romania where young people meet to smoke. The play had a witty cast led by Isabela Neamtu, but it didn't rock my world. It turned up a week later at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, which takes place annually in May and June in a small Transylvanian city located at the foot of the green and hilly ranges of the Carpathian Mountains, about a five-hour drive from Bucharest.

I curbed my disappointment, aware that my bewilderment might be rash skepticism. As a consequence of the Chinese-style "cultural revolution" initiated by Romania's former communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, the mere mention of carne to refer to meat or a lover's flesh was once a crime. So a little bit of erotic intrigue on stage isn't so harmful; it might be curative. Besides, the 23-year-old Ştefan turned out to be a bright, adept writer with a prolific output. I met him last year at the Odeon Theatre where he was paired with the American playwright Tanya Barfield as part of that Bucharest company's American-Romanian Theatre Exchange (ARTE) with New York City's Lark Play Development Center. (ARTE was initiated and led by Saviana Stanescu as part of her TCG New Generations fellowship. Funding was also made possible by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, U.S. Department of State and the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, headed by Corina Şuteu.) Ştefan belongs to an underground wave of new Romanian playwrights in their twenties who, since 2000, are visibly claiming their place in the country's director-driven milieu.

Meanwhile, in Sibiu, I finally saw the arresting work of Radu Afrim, one of today's most talked-about directors. Emblematic of a younger generation who trade in pastiche, collage, ironic quotation, quick tempo and taking outrageous liberties with scripts, this enfant terrible has been criticized by some established directors for using shock tactics. The Guardian lambasted Afrim's "vaudevillian doodling" of Three Sisters at the Odeon—described as "after Chekhov"—which recast Olga, Masha and Irina as scantily clad flash dancers, with Natasha peeing in the samovar. Dorina Lazăr, Odeon's general manager, tells me of Afrim's Seaweed: Bernarda's House Remix ("after Lorca"), taking place totally out of Spain and out of time, in which a glamorous Bernarda executes gymnastics, Nadia Comăneci-style.

At the Sibiu festival, the flagrantly creative Afrim put on an intimate psychological study that showcased a noticeable characteristic of the Odeon ethos—heightened physicality. With Lazăr as the kindly host Zsuzsa, Hungarian dramatist Katalin Thuróczy's joi.megaJoy depicts a regular Thursday meeting of working-class elderly people who dream of salvaging their lost nobility by playing games around the dinner table. (Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before it became communist.) The show is a banquet of spellbinding acting. Afrim deftly eases this riotous comedy into a stirring musicality.

Looking back at my trip to Romania and my yearlong study of Romanian theatre, I am struck and deeply moved by the strong new-wave currents in playwriting, directing and acting that are simultaneously issuing from this formerly communist country. Broad global trends are impacting these new and old players dramatically and providing them many opportunities for encouraging social and artistic developments, even though not everyone in Romania is eager to make a case for higher expectations and economic security. For instance, the success of the decentralization of the financing of cultural institutions from the Ministry of Culture to local councils remains an open question. Poet and playwright Ioana Ieronim tells me: "There have been very critical places where theatres faced the risk of being wiped out, or of mergers being imposed on them. But there have also been success stories." Local officials in each specific area were supposed to hold up and maintain their cultural institutions. In reality, decentralization stirred up petty quarrels; some measures were executed arbitrarily, others faced inertia.

I am overwhelmed by the paradoxes and contradictions that Romanian artists have to cope with. Changes happen so fast, everything seems up for grabs, and the belief that nothing an individual does matters is pervasive. In the urban crush of Bucharest, a new generation of young writers, many alienated by the conservatism of the establishment, looks to the wider world of possibilities that Western countries, strangely enough, represent for them. In the tranquil, medieval Saxon town of Sibiu, where the works of native and émigré directors are showcased, a hugely popular festival is angling for global recognition as well. But even as translation exchanges allow for Romanian writers to create a new status abroad, the country's richest capital, at this juncture, lies in the fields of directing and acting—and most Romanian directors and actors are unknown quantities in America. A different kind of cultural translation has first to be created for Romanian directors to, say, be invited to U.S. festivals or for tour exchanges to occur.

Writing is easier to transport. Take Ştefan, whose New York [Fuckin' City] and Bucharest Calling are social comedies wearing a grim or absurdist smirk. This year, his Romania 21 is being produced at the National Theatre of Timisoara. But when we met last year, Ştefan had not yet been premiered by any of the national theatres. Having studied at New York University, Ştefan is bypassing translation by writing directly in English.

Ştefan and his peers—Gianina Cărbunariu, Lia Bugnar, Vera Ion, Bogdan Georgescu, to name a few—hang out at Monday Theatre at Green Hours. Part of a busy alternative-theatre movement in Bucharest, such unconventional spaces (Club A and La Scena Club are others) have expanded their fare to embrace the Off-Off-Broadway-style plays of these energetic artists. Arguably the most important among the many small or privately owned companies in Bucharest, ACT Theatre, several blocks down from Green Hours, feeds the appetite for foreign plays, especially American works, in a large basement space. Run by the stage and film actor Marcel Iures, ACT has offered David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Eric Bogosian, Brian Friel and Edward Albee—and it actively supports dramAcum (a pun: "DramaNow"), a stubborn, unruly gang of gifted new Romanian voices, all young directing students who want to write.

Among the large repertory theatres that dominate Romania, Odeon is reputed to be the crown jewel of Bucharest after the demise of communism. The famed Bulandra Theatre has lost some of its luster. The National Theatre of Bucharest is often denounced as a dinosaur of conservative tendencies. Having scrapped in 1990 its original incarnation as a theatre for railway workers, Odeon now employs 42 actors and has reinvented itself as a theatre that's open to experiments and international exchanges, like ARTE.

In addition to Ştefan and Barfield, ARTE teamed up two other U.S. playwrights with their Romanian counterparts: Kelly Stuart with Alina Nelega Cadariu, and Doug Wright with Ieronim. Directors were also part of the exchange: The Romanian émigré Saviana Stanescu, now living in New York, was partnered with an American, Gordon Edelstein, artistic director of Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre; Wright and Ieronim were paired with a Romanian, Beatrice Rancea, a black-haired beauty, former ballerina and artistic director of the National Theatre of Constanta, near the Black Sea. For Odeon, the sheer novelty of new-play development, an institutionalized recipe in the U.S., proved to be eye-opening, quirky, stimulating, attention-grabbing (in the local media), but also really tough to convey. Wright's one-man play I Am My Own Wife became a testing ground for Rancea's own radical ideas—she expanded the cast to six and shot a film in which Wright recited his own words as the interrogator of the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Mentored by Serban, Rancea is one of the few accomplished women in Romania's largely patriarchal directing scene: Wright says he submitted to Rancea's "innovative vision" because Wife is essentially a finished work (and had won a Pulitzer).

Amid the caprices of Romania's hierarchical milieu, the notion of the playwright as the final authority butts heads with a director's controlling vision. Odeon actors looked askance when during rehearsals Edelstein directly inquired Stanescu's opinion about how a wacky scene from her Lenin's Shoe (about the son of a Russian immigrant in Queens adrift in Internet chat rooms) ought to be performed. One Romanian actress, worried about how the public might perceive her as an artist, adamantly refused to say căcat ("shit") because she found it offensive. Younger actors, mostly freelancers, don't think twice about saying căcat this or căcat that.

The aesthetic tradition of "theatricalization," which began during socialist realism, holds powerful sway. The idea of the "director's cut" began as a new direction in radical abstraction, a poetics of estrangement that wrenched the theatre from its literary origins. During the Cold War, theatricalization became infected with the notion of an "Aesopian language," a doublespeak in which a show might contain kernels of subversiveness directed to informed members. Aesop's language—I am informed—is no longer spoken in Romania. Censorship, cliché, double-codedness, encrypted reference—all of it crumbled. The central direction of building a repertoire based on the ideals of socialist realism—that, too, went out the window in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse.

My sense, however, is that for Romanian theatre artists Aesop has simply shape-shifted during the current period of rapid transition. After 1989, Romania traded one form of ambiguity—one sense of indeterminacy and insecurity—for another (the grip of a neoliberal capitalist ideology). Communism had frozen the artistic tendencies of theatricalization and submerged the aspirations of writers and directors. Now, 18 years after the bloody overthrow of Ceauşescu, Romanian theatre is experiencing a great thaw—a sense of rebirth—but this does not indicate a complete break. The 1990s generation that wanted to transition into direct language still struggles to break into a rigid system, so these writers had to become theatre managers, create alternative workshops or leave the country for greener pastures.

Another example: the rowdy scandal in the Romanian parliament that greeted Nicoleta Esinencu's electrifying FUCK YOU, Eu.ro.Pa!. This punch-in-the-gut monodrama was published in a catalog at the Romanian pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2005. Many traditionalists thought it was an embarrassment, if not disastrous, to Romania, which was, at the time, knocking on the European Union's door and fighting to maintain a positive relationship with Russia. A scream against the sky, in which a young woman angrily tells off her father, FUCK YOU, Eu.ro.Pa! inveighs against Russia, Romania, Europe and America. Few people knew that the 28-year-old Esinencu came from Moldova. Throwing out a litany of barbs and memories, her play rubs salt on the inter-ethnic conflicts between Romania and Moldova, the two Romanian-speaking states. Yet FUCK YOU, Eu.ro.Pa! is precisely what good drama is about. Despite her political incoherence, its protagonist gives furious voice to the feelings of betrayal, adolescent pain and traumatic loss among Eastern Europeans. It's telling that the play's title was changed for its Moscow debut into Papa, I Absolutely Must Tell You Something.

Queer expression is another area where the internalization of double-codedness and the paranoid fear of informers have left indelible marks. Only in 2001 did Romania, compelled by E.U. officials, repeal its repressive anti-gay discrimination law; Bucharest's first gay pride in 2005 was protested by the Romanian Orthodox Church. In the same year, Afrim asked writer Nicole Dutu to insert cross-dressing into her America-Ştie-Tot, about lonely women desperately looking for love at a matrimonial agency called "America-knows-it-all," staged at the Green Hours bar. Connected to gizmos, a sleepy transvestite clerk wakes up, launching into an extravagant, self-ironic slapstick full of illogical jokes and kinky songs. One lyric, recalls Afrim, refers to "a man in a sailor's shirt with a lightship inside his lace panties." Such campy irreverence seems like sheer provocation.

Theatre in Romania exists in an uneasy cohabitation of a laggard market economy, a massively subsidized state-owned theatre system and privatization efforts. The renewed visibility of multiethnic minorities (especially the Hungarians and the gypsies), the old communist officials who still have their jobs in the newly democratic bureaucracy—intense realities such as these have been stirred up by this Latinized country's speedy integration into the European Union, which was completed this year. My fear is that international exchanges naïvely occur against the large backdrop of an uneven political milieu—a sort of inferiority complex that sends the message that Balkanized Romania has to catch up with Europe or America.

Sharp cynicism, social dislocation and disillusionment already color the collective outlook of young writers. Their plays lurch, confound and stagger in search of the meaning of being Romanian today. Cărbunariu's Stop the Tempo dreams up the anarchism of fucked-up club kids spreading panic. In the Play Company of New York's piquant staging, Georgescu's Romania. Kiss Me! flings onions on stage. Ion's Red Bull depicts the caffeinated boredom of young people trying to make ends meet. Ioana Moldovan's Diagnosis leaves her elderly characters stranded in an "End of the Road Motel." As their expletive-ridden titles suggest, the plays are confrontational, so there can be something empty, trendy and imitative of the Royal Court Theatre school of contempt. Many of these writers were barely teenagers during the revolution.

Stanescu, in Lenin's Shoe and Waxing West, earns her mordant lyricism. A comic artificer, she is also in a class by herself: Her plays about the Romanian-American immigrant experience exist in an in-between space of multiple identifications. In its audacious parallel of Ceausescu's fall with the tumbling of the World Trade Center, Waxing West grapples, in an absurdist way, with how the revolution still rebounds in people's minds today. I wonder how Waxing West will be received in Romania, when East Coast Artists brings the play from La MaMa E.T.C. to be presented in May at ACT Theatre and then in June as part of the Sibiu festival. How will the Romanian intellectuals and artistic elite, especially in Transylvania, react to the play's depiction of the Ceauşescus as vampires returning from the dead to torment its immigrant heroine's new life in New York?

I question the facile Western conviction that somehow Romania must simply import new aesthetic modes. In the field of directing, it is not Romania but America that needs to catch up. While Romania's new guard tends to be more attuned to style-for-style's-sake, older directors, who lean on textual exploration, plumb and refract Romania's rich ethnic makeup. Sibiu's heady 11-day festival, budgeted in 2006 at 7.2 million euros—general manager Constantin Chiriac tells me—invites directors to work on Radu Stanca National Theatre's two stages. On the Romanian side, Gábor Tompa, who headed the Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj, staged Ionesco's Rhinoceros. For the German-speaking side of the company, the Sibiu-born Radu Alexandru Nica, in his late twenties, demonstrated rhythmic vigor in his spare staging of Roland Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night.

Equally stirring was Mihai Măniutiu's Electra, a melodic fusion of Greek texts performed to the live folkloric music from Maramures, a remote agricultural region in the extreme north of Romania, largely unscathed by communism. The people of Maramures have preserved archaic communal traditions that Măniutiu confidently exploits and spins out into a series of pictorially striking funeral-like odes about violence, ritual justice and revenge. His Electra is a bravura turn.

The same goes for Silviu Purcărete, the legendary Romanian maestro based in France, whose only U.S. outing was his Greek reconstruction Les Danaides at Lincoln Center. It is a scandal that not even his Shakespeare productions have reached American shores. Purcărete's Waiting for Godot, starring Chiriac as a schlubby Gogo holding a portfolio and Virgil Flonda as the wise but suffering Didi, is a triumph in every sense. By setting Godot in an unfinished set (metal scaffolds placed diagonally with a tree suspended in the air, a scorching light bulb that seems to bake the ragged red plush curtain), Purcărete scrupulously layers Beckett's theme of longing for ultimate recognition and gives it specific theatrical resonance. To the side, a stage manager pays no attention to Didi and Gogo. The group of musicians playing a Schubert piece in the first act morphs into strange creatures at the end of the second act. An unnamed threat, an inexplicable violence, saturates the overly bright environment. I am tempted to read Purcărete's poignant Godot in light of what is happening in Romanian theatre.

This is a historic year for that country. With its accession to the European Union, Sibiu has been performing its grand role (along with Luxembourg) as Europe's Capital of Culture for 2007. Every morning, in this new Europe, Romania starts over again. If the rules of the game are not clear, the artists improvise. As the poet Mihai Eminescu says, "What is a wave, passes like a wave." All the while, Romanians keep looking for signs of recognition—from abroad and from within. The economic situation is bright and precarious. But the greater threat is indifference. "The difficulties facing Romanian culture are caused by a series of errors in a certain way of seeing and understanding it," says Aura Corbeanu, executive vice president of UNITER, Romania's theatre guild. "The deadlock originates in the very idea of development."

Ebulliently, Romania is avid to reconstruct its dour, frayed image to the world. Cities like Bucharest and Sibiu are vast stages for a radical renovation. The more I think about how Romania improvises the present to survive these tumultuous transitions, the more I think the future of this place is bound up with the fate of its theatre artists.