Marina Constantinescu – Playwriting. Playing

It seems that the problem with the contemporary plays written in Romania is that they are talked about rather than staged. The playwrights in the older generation are still active. The works of Dumitru Solomon are staged most and the plays by Matei Vişniec are performed in France, Romania and America as well. The new generation playwrights get published, they say what they have to say and their pieces are staged. Sometimes. I am talking about Vlad Zografi, Radu Macrinici and more. An interesting new name that has mad it to the scene, keeping a low profile and making no fuss, is Valentin Nicolau, a geophysicist and now a president of Nemira Publishing House in Bucharest. It is to be noticed that most of the new playwrights have got a science background, as most of them are physicists, engineers and so on. This triggers a different use of the Word, maybe more concision and, not last, another kind of human experience and perception of reality.
“If I Were an Angel”, the collection of plays by Valentin Nicolau published by Nemira, is a good illustration of the statements made above. It includes three plays, we don’t know if the author has written more. And these three plays were remarked in various competitions: “The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” or “If I Were an Angel” was selected for the UNITER award in “the best Romanian play of 1998” category; one year later, “Oh, World, Vain World…” won the same prize; “Like Snow White and the Two” was the Great Prize of the “Camil Petrescu” Playwriting Competition in the 7th edition, held in 1999, a competition organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. Still the texts weren’t ordered in this collection only chronologically and only on accounts of awards. Not at all. This order expresses a fulfillment of writing, of the sense for drama and for stage. There is something very important we must mention at this point. There three plays weren’t written as literature first of all, but made as an offer for stage performance. The dialogues are true and overt and the characters in the author’s world have no sophisticated speech, but they develop more in terms of situations, context and moves and they thus create a parable of the palpable reality we live in. Valentin Nicolau is a very resourceful mind and he puts the spotlight on the individual and human relations as they are in postcommunism. The characters of his political, abstract or psychological plays are contained in the sauce of existence, which is rough and maybe unmerciful, making a universe wearing no make-up, but expressed in words. Conflicts seem plain, because they are of the kind we run into everywhere. This is why they don’t shock at once. But underneath such conflicts we can feel torments, alienation, loss of identity and our every day obsessions, together with the issues typical of the transformation that our postcommunist society is going through. It is a society still marred by the past and burdened by the present, still a society on which universal difficulties effect, a world of people confused at the turn on the millenium. Such threads get to tide the characters, strangling them or at least making them uncomfortable. In all the three plays there is a search for a new definition of man at the end of the century, for the means to fit in the new reality and avoid failure. But in all these pieces individual failure of that of society is present. Moreover, it is the main character. There is dark, gloomy and even cynical humour in “If I Were and Angel.” Characters seem to have lost their guardian angels, they looked abandoned by a meaning to guide their lives to and they choose incidental things, the better or worse context, almost not at all successful.
“The Ghost in the First Class Waiting Room” makes us spend some more time in a railway station, not to take a train, but to look at things. And there seem to be no trains in this station anyway or, in other words, that train everyone needs doesn’t seem to arrive: the train to take us away from the past and carry us to a present, if not to a future. The text is both political and social. It is the theatrical radiography of a case, that is today’s Romania. Waiting rooms are also haunted by a profiteer boss – a boss of powerlessness and disaster -, a prostitute, a nun and several people pretending to be deaf and dumb and making a mass to be manipulated. There is also a peasant woman, many homeless people and a demagogic politician who rules over the degradation caused by this time of transition. The dictator’s ghost still frightens people and the train going to a settled society arrives no longer. “Oh, World, Vain World…” has got an almost cinema-like cut. The spaced present in the previous play are present in this one as well: a train station and pubs. Things get complicated in human, moral and social terms: alienated people, peasants expelled from their villages and moves to towns to work on industrial sites, who become neither peasants nor townsmen, people who swarm in lies and dirt, condemned to never find their place and feel fulfilled. There is one single solution that seems true: death, but attained by committing suicide, the supreme sin for Christians.
“Like Snow White and the Two” may be the best-structured and most substantial of these plays. It is very close to the theatre of the absurd, it displays modern writing and subtle humour. It is not at all a political play. I would say it is a metaphysical play. All the three characters are places in situations they have never gone through before. A single and lonely old man, full of habits and memories, wakes up one day to face an intruding tenant, who works like magnet on a hotline operator. A series of misunderstandings almost mystify the truth and places them in a truly absurd scene. The tenant proves to be a participant in every possible game: Bingo, “listen and win”, “watch and win”, “shut up and win” and so on. He is not just a player, but also a winner. Soon the old man’s one-room apartment turns into a storeroom crammed with TV sets, squeezers and so on. Well, the old man had never lived such an adventure. And neither had the phone operator, who had been raped when a child, learnt what to love meant until experiencing such a strange and straining cohabitation. But her traumas healed. And there is one thing that is out of any all control: the tenant has got no identity. So he borrowed his name from the old man’s tomcat. But after the cat is killed, the mystery breaks. And the guy vanishes just like he came, out of the blue, but troubling a preexisting order.
We are looking forward to a good stage director reading at least one of these plays. A performance on a text by Valentin Nicolau is sure to appeal to the audience and meet specialists’ expectations. One way or the other, we run across the playwright’s world anyway, because it is our world, the world of the end… of the world.  (Marina Constantinescu, România literară, 2000)