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Fatulescu's Triumphant Return
| Article
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11803 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1994 |
2,094 Words |
| Author
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Claudia Woolgar
Claudia Woolgar is a free-lance theater critic and arts
journalist based in London. |
An almost totally bare stage. Actors who hardly move. Dinner dress "costumes." Lighting that does not change. A reading, fast, furious, and heavy in varying accents. A nonlinear text. And an audience that does not speak English. Dramatic suicide, or a theatrical challenge?
Los Angeles' Stages Theatre Center was invited to perform at the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre in Brasov, Romania. With Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks fame in the cast, the company's presence at the festival was quite a coup for the festival director, Alexa Visarion--not least because Twin Peaks had just opened at a movie house down the road. No small coincidence. The Romanians are learning fast.
But Visarion knew the invitation would be accepted. The play, Don't Blame the Bedouins by Rene Daniel Dubois, was directed by a Romanian, Florinel Fatulescu, from Brasov. Fatulescu had been a director at the theater. His family lives in Brasov. This was his first visit back since he had left Romania before the revolution. An irresistible apple if ever there was one.
American Dream
Fatulescu's story sounds like the true American dream. He left for America in 1988 with his wife, Rodica, and there worked as a porter in a school. One evening he went off to the Friends and Artists Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles to see Marat/Sade, but there were no places left. He insisted, and the director, Sal Romeo, found him a chair. Afterward he got talking to Romeo, and by the end of the conversation he had been invited to direct Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide. His wife, who speaks English, translated for him. The play won five prizes in Los Angeles, and this unknown Romanian director became an overnight success.
Don't Blame the Bedouins was first performed in 1984 at the Cafe Theatre La Licorne in Montreal, where it won the Governor General's Award for the best new play published in French. Though it is hard to count exactly, there are over fifteen characters in the play--and Dubois performed it as a one-man show.
Fatulescu's production was only slightly less ambitious with a cast of four, and the result is astonishing. It is one of those pieces of theater that makes you gasp at its sheer energy, speed, and technical achievement. But it is also hypnotic, soothing, heart racing, moving, and aurally enchanting, frightening, and beautiful in turn. Yes, it is a piece that inspires
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