Introduction

The Gloves Are Off: Contemporary Romanian Playwriting

by Daniel Gerould

When the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu was violently overthrown in 1989, after years of being stifled by censorship and other means of state repression, Romanian playwrights in the new era of freedom, instead of flourishing, fell almost completely silent. Like starving prisoners suddenly set free, they were too hungry to be able to eat. There is the paradox. My task in this introductory essay is first to explain why playwriting in Romania became virtually extinct at the moment of its liberation and then to consider how the new generation of twenty-first-century playwrights represented in this anthology are again finding their own voice, or rather voices.

During the forty years of communist rule from 1948 to 1989, Romanian playwriting did achieve a distinctive voice and some notable successes, but at a very high price. In the old East bloc of Soviet satellites, totalitarian control and fostering of the arts through censorship, financing, and organization made the theatre a part of the state apparatus and a tool of the regime. Theatre enjoyed a privileged position because the state needed artists to validate its existence and propagate its myths both at home and for export. To make the stage a showplace for communist ideology, the totalitarian rulers wooed theatre artists and tried to attract the best talent.

After Stalin's death in 1953, a short-lived relaxing of controls throughout the satellites led to varying degrees of liberalization in the different countries, allowing some criticism within controlled areas and permitting a flowering of the drama. Several of the principal ingredients for the making of memorable theatre were present: a high level of material support, the centrality of theatre in social and cultural life (theatre took over the functions of other media), writers and artists working at the edge of the permissible, and an alert and eager audience.

In the brief "liberal" period that took place in Romania from 1964 to 1971 playwrights were able to produce some of the outstanding plays coming from the Soviet bloc. This was the second phase of the theatre of the absurd, in its Eastern European manifestation, represented in Poland by Sławomir Mrożek; in Hungary by István Örkény and Géza Páskándi; in Czechoslovakia by Václav Havel and Milan Kundera; and in Romania by Marin Sorescu, Iosif Naghiu, and Teodor Mazilu, among others. The godfather of the movement was the exile Romanian Eugène Ionesco, whose plays became forbidden in his homeland after 1971.

Under conditions of state control and regulation, the East bloc authors became expert in the creation of grotesque and absurd parable plays that made use of myth and legend, metaphor and poetic image, to address issues of freedom versus tyranny, the pressures of conformity, and the dilemma of the beleaguered individual, in an abstract and ambiguous manner (known as Aesopian language) that kept censorship at bay. A half-century earlier Lenin had objected to "that accursed Aesopian language" of cautious hints and allegorical circumlocutions that tsarist censorship compelled all revolutionaries to use, not realizing that Marxist-Leninist censorship would force writers to vastly expand the system of hidden allusions.

Alert audiences behind the iron curtain, skilled in reading between the lines, saw theatre as the only possible forum for discussion of public issues. Playwrights were able through subtly coded texts to provide counter-truths to the pseudo-reality offered by the state propaganda machine. No matter how intricate the game with the censor or how strict the rules imposed, the theatre with its spontaneous interplay between live performers and spectators was an arena never totally controllable.

The complex and contradictory circumstances that produced this temporary flourishing of the arts under totalitarian communist rule put theatre artists, particularly playwrights, in a hopelessly compromised position that eventually proved to be untenable and led to the demise of playwriting. The function of art in a totalitarian regime was to celebrate the state and its ideology, but the goal of theatre artists was to circumvent and subvert these purposes. Thus playwrights were paid and pampered to be instruments of official ideology, while in fact they spent their energies and ingenuity covertly trying to sabotage what they were hired to do. Many fled abroad when they could and were branded defectors out of touch with the reality of their homeland; those who stayed behind were put under increasing pressure to conform and denied the possibility of writing about reality. Of course, many hack playwrights were quite willing to collaborate and carry out the wishes of those in power.

After Ceauşescu's visit to China in 1971, the repression of the arts grew more sinister, the screws tightened, and playwriting fell prey to a devious, multilayered censorship that was particularly debilitating. The regime deliberately cultivated an atmosphere of uncertainty, conjecture, and fear that encouraged a self-censorship deadlier than official repression. The maze of different censors and levels of censorship disoriented writers and led them into compromises and confusions that rendered their plays less critical and more subservient to governmental dictates.

When the revolution came and the communist regime was toppled, the structure that sustained Romanian playwriting collapsed. Theatre was no longer a unique place for the discussion of public issues. Now any street filled that function. Playwrights were suddenly stripped of their self-assumed importance and inflated status. The special relation between stage and audience was gone, and the ways in which the theatre had communicated with audiences no longer held true. An entire theatrical language died overnight.

Unless one has witnessed such a radical shift, it is impossible to understand how closely a dramaturgical system can be tied to the reigning political order. The demolition of the communist regime meant the dismantling of the old system of theatre, even though its outer structures remained in the form of buildings, institutions, and personnel. Where the change showed most quickly and drastically was in the least tangible and most conceptual sphere: playwriting.

After the fall of communism, the rules of playwriting totally changed, but it took a long while for the theatrical world to understand what had happened. The older generations of playwrights were unable to think in innovative ways and remained haunted by ghosts; they saw only the highly visible losses: of national identity, of mission, of status, of funds. Profound changes in taste, once choice was available, and massive competition from other media (especially foreign) left the theatre without an audience.

Having achieved freedom, the Romanian theatre had lost its reason for being and became directionless. As money-making entertainment copying Western European and American models, it would soon become just another minor part of the European culture industry. Like all other institutions, the theatre had to rediscover its own national identity and purpose, but playwrights seemed unable to make the transition.

Perhaps the most important Romanian playwright of the 1990s was Matei Vişniec, who left his country for France in 1987. The cold-war concept of defector was a tool of totalitarian coercion; it is obvious that living outside one's native country is sometimes the best and often the only way of writing about it. Ibsen, for example, wrote his plays about contemporary life in Norway while living in Italy and Germany, and expatriation has become a basic condition of much twentieth- and twenty-first-century creativity.

In order to move ahead, artists in Romania had to overcome a state of noncreation, which is what the poet-playwright Marin Sorescu called the inerta that resulted from the crumbling of the old system. But this did not prove to be easy. Sorescu, who became Minister of Culture in 1991, confessed that censorship had stimulated him, whereas too many choices stifled his creativity. Free to say anything they wanted to, playwrights discovered they had nothing to say.

After the revolution of 1989, Romanian playwrights faced extinction. A virtual elimination of Romanian plays from the repertory took place. In the first years of freedom, fewer Romanian plays were produced than in even the most repressive period of communist rule, from 1971 to 1989, when it was officially dictated that fifty percent of the performances be by Romanian authors.

What were the causes of this disdain for Romanian playwrights? In large part Romanian playwrights and playwriting had become discredited through collaboration with the regime. Before and after now represented a steep divide, apparently impassable. The entire old repertory reminded audiences of the Ceauşescu years. Writers and intellectuals in general were regarded with contempt as hypocrites and sycophants. Playwrights from before, even if not suspected of direct complicity with the authorities, were stigmatized for simply having been part of the old dramaturgical system that no longer communicated with audiences. Any attempt to insist on the performance of Romanian playwrights would seem a return to government-mandated quotas. As Romania sought integration with the West, long forbidden works from Western Europe and America that could now be performed for the first time had far greater appeal to audiences than home-grown products.

In this period of transition, emerging young Romanian playwrights hoping to get their plays performed faced an almost impossible situation. The big state-financed repertory theatres survived as relics of the past, and directors, who dominated these institutions, wanted texts that were familiar and could be treated freely. There were no independent private theatres. Cultural liberation proved more daunting for playwrights than state oppression.

The world-famous expatriate Romanian directors who returned from exile to the country after 1990 had no interest whatsoever in new Romanian plays; for their productions they chose instead classic foreign texts (above all the Greeks and Shakespeare) that lent themselves to new interpretations and stagings, that would be widely understood by audiences anywhere, and that could be taken on tour to world festivals.

When one of the most celebrated of these expatriates, Andrei Serban, returned in 1990, after twenty years of exile, to assume the direction of the National Theatre in Bucharest, he expressed the hope that "The big mirror that is our theatre would no longer be condemned to reflect reality indirectly only through metaphors, but freed from censorship and cleansed of the old and no longer in need of metaphors, the mirror could reveal the truth of our present human experience." But it was still too early for the theatre to reflect reality directly and reveal the truth of present experience—that would be the task of the twenty-first-century Romanian playwrights. Serban, disillusioned, left after three years for a second exile, feeling that the vicious cycle of history was repeating itself.

In passing, I should note a minor irony. While Eastern European theatre sought to rid itself of metaphor, American theatre intellectuals continued to envy Eastern European theatre its metaphors and poetic images, feeling that American theatre was impoverished by its fidelity to observed reality.

Released from constraints, the new generation of Romanian playwrights were now free to choose whatever themes or subjects they wished, and an eclectic plurality of styles and genres was available. What they most needed was a new mode of playwriting, and new ways of communicating with new audiences. If the playwrights from before were unable to define themselves in new era of freedom, it was because they were stuck in the preservation of past theatrical performance and tradition. The new direction inevitably lay in relating to the audience members' experiences of the contemporary world by writing about directly observed life and reporting directly overheard speech, no longer filtered through metaphor or other oblique means. "When art is in trouble, realism comes to the rescue," the French novelist Stendhal shrewdly observed as the romantic era came to an end.

The new generation of Romanian playwrights are not in the least put off because the former rules have been scrapped; in fact, they are happy that the old game is over. They are ready to start from scratch, from a tabula rasa. Repression and oppression are no longer the frames of their expression. Freedom to speak has not rendered them mute. Unabashed and uninhibited, they have something to say about their lives and futures.

Sparring with the regime is a thing of the past, because the bogeyman is gone (although ghosts of the old dictatorship sometimes reappear in comic form, exorcised through laughter). But that does not mean that there is nothing to fight about. Often angry and always eager to challenge the status quo, the new Romanian playwrights are prepared to go down into the streets and fight. And what they are prepared to fight for has nothing to do with any ideology, creed, program, or party. The only party they wish to join is one where drinks are served.

Now the gloves are off. This idiom seems to me to describe aptly the difference between the new generation of Romanian playwrights and their predecessors. Where does the idiom, "the gloves are off," come from and why does this vernacular phrase take us to the heart of the change that came over Romanian playwriting in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century? "The gloves are off" is an expression from boxing, referring to the hard-hitting, bare-knuckled fisticuffs that occur when the big protective padded mittens are removed.

The totalitarian system put gloves on its playwrights, interposing a protective layer of insulation between the artist and reality—insulation which in this context is also suggestive of a straitjacket or padded cell. With gloves on, the battle waged in the ring was a system of control and containment, of subterfuge and indirection, of cunning and deception, of feint and counterpunch. "Gloves off" suggests both freedom and anarchy—the fight takes place in a back alley without any regulations; it's a free-for-all that may at any moment turn into a brawl. The new Romanian playwrights are scrappy, hard-hitting street fighters, unafraid of cuts and scratches.

What are the consequences of a "gloves off" dramaturgical approach?

Instead of ideological constructs and neat dialectical twists and turns, the new dramaturgy provides immediate contact with directly experienced life. The feel of dirt and grim is ever-present. Bodies are pushed and shoved; flesh oozes and bruises. The concern is less with the universal, the abstract, and the political than with the local and regional. The here-and-now is home, street, transport, workplace, and there are many problems of not being able to find one's place: at home, in the family, at work, in society, in the nation.

The new dramaturgical system is plebeian, consumerist, and heavily addicted to cheap brand names and trash popular culture. It's egalitarian rather than elite; every one slugs it out, gets splattered with muck, rolls on the ground. Human dignity and decorum come down to earth; stuffed shirts are skewered. The boundaries of the permissible are constantly overstepped linguistically, sexually, morally. The unmentionable is mentioned. Impropriety is the order of the day. Ragged, tattered, and battered humankind has its finest representatives in the down-and-out, the marginal, the neglected, the discontent, the abused, the alienated, and the frustrated.

On the basis of everything that I have said, it is clear that the new generation of Romanian playwrights is pursuing realist goals in their wish to discard abstract systems and anti-systems in order to get at the truth of their own experiences. Although they reject the arbitrary conventions of nineteenth-century realistic stagecraft and use every available stylistic device, they remain committed to a deep sense of realism without borders that does not exclude fantasy and freedom of the imagination.

Of course, just because the new Romanian playwrights are irreverent toward tradition does not mean that they themselves are not part of a tradition. In fact, there is in Central European drama a long tradition of subjective youthful rebellion against the stifling hypocrisies and enforced proprieties of the bourgeois world. Even if they may not be aware of the heritage of which they are the heirs, the ancestry extends back to the Sturm und Drang movement of rebellious young German writers in the 1770s, to the twenty-three-old Georg Büchner's Woyzeck in 1837, to Frank Wedekind's social misfits and perverts at the fin-de-siècle, to the Italian film neo-realism at the end of World War II, to Edward Bond's Saved (with its stoning to death of a baby) in 1965, above all to Franz Xaver Kroetz's naturalistic folk plays of the 1970s (about the pent-up violence of underprivileged fringe characters trapped by socio-economic conditions and the lure of TV-driven consumerism), and finally to Sarah Kane and the British "brutalists" of the late twentieth century.

To convey a sense of lived experience, colored by irony and mockery, but not devoid of compassion, the new generation of Romanian playwrights was created a fresh theatrical language and forged a new relation to a young audience into whose lives it has entered and whose fears, frustrations, and desires it expresses. This is a drama fraught with risks but full of possibilities.