In addressing the issues which arise from the coming together of theatrical

cultures, I will choose to highlight specific issues of praxis and infrastructure. These, I

think, can be covered to some degree in a short monograph. A discussion involving

Canadian drama, Romanian theatre, and a German ethnic minority living within a

majority Hungarian enclave of the Romanian state gives rise, as one can imagine, to an

infinitude of possible treatments. Some aspects of my experience, though anecdotal, will

be used to communicate some feeling of the immediacy and intensity of my experience

directing two plays in a non-native culture.

I first visited Eastern and Central Europe in 1987, on a Canada Council grant,

seeing productions and meeting directors and theatrical personnel in the then West

Germany, then-Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Yugoslavia still existed; Romania

was still within the grip of the bizarre Ceausescu; Moldavia existed, but not Moldova.

The fading currency of this national nomenclature is an apt indication of the fluidity that

has marked the evolution of these cultures in the past 15 years. I returned on a second

Canada Council grant in 1988, and again in 1991 to assistant direct at a large theatre for

young audiences in Prague. By this time the "Velvet Revolution" had taken place and

Slovakia had acquired a tenuous independence. In 1996 I travelled to Debrecen, Hungary,

to direct the European premičre of Morris Panych's 7Stories at the Csokonai Színház; I

also lectured in Canadian drama and taught scene study at what was then Lajos Kossúth

University. In 1997, I returned to Debrecen to direct my own play The White Bear at the

Vojtina Bábszínház, a puppet theatre.

From the beginning of my experience, I was struck by how open theatre directors

were to the idea of f 14414r171o oreign directors working at their theatres, in contrast to the colonialist

conservatism and slavish adherence to theatrical fashion which marks the approach of

Canadian regional theatres. Not that the process is easy; interpreters must often be hired

for rehearsal and for liaising with the administration, translations must be commissioned

and approved, and the complexities of language can be a hindrance to the search for a

commonality of aesthetic vision. Further to this, directors from North America are often

unaware of the practical realities of theatre production in these countries. I heard stories

of - and personally witnessed - directors basing their approach variously on an inflexible

definition of directorial responsibility, and/or a complete lack of knowledge of the means

available to theatres in the region since the fall of authoritarian governments.

For it's indisputable that, for all the privations of socialism, with or without "a

human face" , theatres within the Soviet satellites generally did very well. In countries

such as Czechoslovakia audiences flocked to theatres like Jan Grossman's Theatre On

The Balustrade to witness the coded performances that were the philosophical heirs to

"the good soldier Schweik" . National theatres were well funded and superbly resourced;

they were seen as cultural advertisements for the success of a regime, and full attendance

a measure of popular support. Audiences, of course, though complicit in this naked

endorsement, came for other reasons. Theatre presented a window, however small, to

another world; a theatrical world where all emperors are revealed for what they truly are.

This furnishes a small context for my own recent experience in Romania, which I

will now elucidate.

I arrived in Sibiu, a prosperous Transylvanian city, in late March of 2003. After a

negotiation spanning almost 7 years, an agreement had been reached to produce the

Romanian premičre of a Canadian play at the Radu Stanca theatre. There are far too

many reasons why such a negotiation took so much time, but a short listing of the issues

involved in undertaking such a project is germane to our discussion.

The first of these issues to consider is the choice of a play. First, it has to be

suitable, in the company Director's view, for his audience. The Sibiu audience is quite

sophisticated. Many plays, however, do not travel well, for reasons having to do with

their lack of intercultural appeal. As well, in choosing a play, there is a need for some

dramaturgical currency, a reason to do this play, now, in this place.

A second issue involves theatre infrastructure. The Radu Stanca has no

dramaturgie ; decisions on production and play choice are in the hands of the theatre's

Managing Director. This is a position which doesn't formally exist in Canadian theatre;

the closest equivalent would be a Producing Director such as Martin Bragg at Canadian

Stage in Toronto. A Canadian Producing Director, however, must pass his choices by a

Board of Directors, and usually a screening committee. There is no evidence, in my

experience, that a Managing Director in Romania is subject to anyone but himself.

So the negotiation quickly becomes a relationship; and the success of the venture

depends on understanding the theatre and its region and culture as represented in the form

of this single individual, with all the biases and subjectivities an individual possesses. It's

not a merit-based process, though merit is involved; it's a complex web of diplomacy

and politics. Is the Canadian Embassy on side? How much will they contribute? Do the

playwright and the translator have a realistic understanding of royalty levels in Romanian

theatre? Is the play castable within the two companies of Radu Stanca?

A third issue is timing; a fourth, the repertory system. The Radu Stanca is

a large state theatre, producing a repertory of anywhere from eight to twenty shows over

a period of several years. Unlike the Canadian system, plays in Romania are re-mounted

from year to year; a successful production may survive several years. This creates several

issues. One is the availability of actors from the company for rehearsal; another, in the

case of foreign directors, is the play's ease of reproduction, that is, how well it can be

subsequently re-mounted without the director's presence. So the number of

new productions in a year varies, according to the company's needs as perceived by the

Managing Director. When is the appropriate time to fit the project into a season of sixteen

or more productions?

Related to the challenges posed by the rep system, in which actors typically

rehearse in the morning and afternoon and then perform in different productions at night,

is the availability of designers. I'm atypical of Canadian directors in that I prefer to use a

scenographer, rather than a series of designers, responsible for lights, set, costumes, and

sound. In this way my approach to directing suits the European system, where the

scenographer is better established than in North America.

However, in eastern Europe, as exemplified by my experiences in both Romania

and Hungary, a scenographer will design only set and costumes for you. The director is

expected to design lights and sound. The technicians on staff will simply not initiate

ideas - they will insist on executing yours.

Some North American directors, notably the first with whom I worked Off-

Broadway in New York, like to style themselves as designers, and meddle in lighting and

sound. Working closely with real designers in either of these fields should deter any

director from this kind of hubris. Yet those directors, like myself, who are influenced by

the Czech "Total Theatre" movement that arose in the late 1960s like to inform ourselves

of these aspects of the art, so that our collaboration will be a truly reciprocal one.

This reciprocal relationship is very difficult to achieve in Eastern Europe, where

the directors are overwhelmingly male, and the hierarchy is astonishingly rigid. Actors,

designers and technicians sit and wait for you to tell them what to do. A North American

director, then, finds him or herself doing complicated breakdowns of lighting cues and

placements, and detailed elements of sound design. This is simultaneously thrilling -

what director wouldn't wish for this kind of artistic carte blanche ? - and terrifying.

Because a director is not a lighting designer, or a sound designer.

Immediately one can see that this kind of project is totally different from, and far

more challenging than mounting a production invited to a festival. A director must

understand the inside of the producing theatre, must learn more about its audience, its

national culture, its way of doing things. A festival production imposes its culture on the

host. It's a welcome guest, but essentially it is a foreign organism that will soon be

expelled from the corpus of the locale it invades. A foreign director who comes to live in

a country (in my case for nearly four months), who works with local actors, technicians,

and administration, cannot impose his or her own culture; they must find a meeting point

of cultures, and above all, they must accommodate themselves to the culture in which

they find themselves.

Before enumerating other issues perhaps I should give some details of my

experience and some answers as to how I approached the challenges I've already

outlined.

The simplest answer as to how I finally persuaded the Radu Stanca theatre to do a

Canadian play was that, in true Cold War style, I utilised a mole. Two moles, in actual

fact, if one includes the Canadian Embassy Officer who worked so diligently behind the

scenes to enable the project. This officer is intimately knowledgeable about the individual

who runs the Radu Stanca, Constantin Chiriac, and offered me timely advice on how to

proceed through the Byzantine obfuscations presented by the theatre's Managing

Director.

My main mole, however, was a woman who I had met in 1997, the first

time I visited the international theatre festival organized annually by that theatre. This

woman worked as a high-level coördinator for the festival, and so knew the theatre, its

internal processes, and its method for dealing with outside artists, intimately. Through her

I came to know indispensable things a North American director would never otherwise

know - private e-mails to the director are publicly read on the theatre's network, for

instance. This can seem like an obstacle - it might be days or even weeks before Chiriac

actually reads your e-mail - but one can use it to advantage. With a champion inside the

theatre, and the judicious copying of e-mails to the embassy, I was able to exert a degree

of pressure on the director to which he was eventually forced to respond.

Romanian culture, as it's been paraphrased to me, "promises everything - just not

today" . One learns to be excessively patient, by North American standards, in waiting

for a response to an e-mail, or a commitment. The theatre said "yes" a number of times,

but it was always difficult to discern to what it was saying "yes" to. There is always an

English speaker writing the e-mail for a director in a European theatre, and they can be

clear if they choose to be: more often it suits their purpose to mangle the language and

leave you wondering what it is they're talking about. At other times, they will simply

pretend not to have received your communication.

The intent of this, of course, is to say "no" without having to actually utter or

write the words. Most project initiators take the hint. My moles enabled me to avoid this

hint. I would receive e-mails telling me "he read your e-mail today", so that I might query

him immediately about it, or the cryptic "Chiriac is in the office tomorrow", a piece of

information which seemed to indicate the time and place for a coup d'état. This

information ensured that the fax I inevitably sent after my e-mails would be placed in

front of Chiriac rather than consigned to an unread pile of papers on his desk.

By this one can observe that I was already acculturating myself to the negotiative

and dyadic relationship and procedural structure of Romanian culture while still on this

side of the Atlantic. In some respects, it's all a game. Extreme levels of politesse, discreet

e-mails expressing disppointment to the Canadian Embassy, staged displays of umbrage,

carefully timed suggestions - the description may sound redolent of the court of Louis

XVI. It continued, in my case, once I was actually in Romania, this dance of give and

take, of promise and disappointment. One learns to demand only what one needs, and ask

for what one can do without.

The decision to proceed with a project, once it was made, precipitated a manic

period of preparation on my part; I knew that information on the Canadian aspects of The

Orphan Muses would be unavailable in Romania, for one thing; I secured a Spanish-

English translation of the song lyrics to La Paloma which figure so prominently in the

text; I down-loaded a sound design software programme, liaised with the playwright's

agent - and did my text work. I had managed to get agreement from two companies for

back-to-back productions, in different cities. The first would be at Radu Stanca, a

Canadian play to be produced by the German Section of the theatre. The second would be

decided upon while I was rehearsing the first - three weeks before its first rehearsal.

Radu Stanca has two acting companies, one acting in Romanian, the other

comprised of Romanians who are ethnic Germans (called "Saxons", though they have no

ancestral connection with that German region). The German section has eight actors, so a

play's cast must conform to fit the members of this repertory. My task was to find, in

three days, a Canadian play which had already been translated into German, that would

fit within the German Section's acting roster, which would somehow be appropriate for

the Radu Stanca's core and ethnic audience, and which, oh yes, they would subsequently

send as their representative to a major theatre festival.

So I did. I found a well-known Canadian play, Michel-Marc Bouchard's The

Orphan Muses, had been produced successfully in German . His agent was refreshingly

realistic about the money the playwright and translator could expect from a Romanian

theatre. More importantly, the play's thematic heart is re-birth and re-invention; it takes

place at Easter in the Québec of 1965. We were scheduled to produce the play between

Orthodox and Catholic Easter. This was a play I could be passionate about, please forgive

the pun.

I arrived March 18 in Bucharest, a town which has to be experienced to be

believed, and travelled the six hours to Sibiu by train, settling into my small hotel room

on the 20^th. I met the actors of the German section for the first time that evening. I

noticed that four of the eight German section actors were absent; I suspected this was the

Managing Director's attempt at pre-casting. There was no option but to read the play

using the four who were present, and mentally cast them as they read. Over the next three

days the other four showed up - without warning - and I made adjustments to the casting.

My Martine was 50 years old and around 110 kilos, my Catherine 43 and only slightly

smaller; Luc and Isabelle were closer to the ages stipulated in the play, and tiny. In sizing

up this motley collection meant to represent sisters and a brother separated only by a

small span of years, I thought, perversely, I can make this work. I am, if nothing else, an

incurable optimist.

In such an environment one soon learns to become unsentimental about the more

precious aspects of the theatre. The fact that the actors were invariably late for rehearsal -

a summary offence in North America, because of our insecurity with regard to the status

of the profession - was easily mitigated by the presence, in the theatre, of a woman

whose sole responsibility, it seemed, was to provide fresh espresso to actors and director.

Rehearsal began late; you planned your objectives around it.

Actors were absent for medical appointments, for meetings with the theatre brass,

often, in the case of my male actor, Roger, because he had a shift as a tour guide at the

big historical church in town. We rehearsed in five different spaces, most of them off-

site, and all of them subject to change. "Purcarete is coming in for one day to rehearse -

you must change your space". "Tompa wants the big rehearsal space today" - change.

There were two other directors working concurrently with me at any one time at the

theatre, both testosterone-filled males bellowing and making demands, competing for

scarce resources.

My response to these and other potential distractions was to get to know the

women in the theatre's administration exceedingly well. At one point I was suddenly

moved from my hotel room to an apartment, which then filled up with other theatre

workers, after which I was suddenly moved back to the hotel. We went through five

interpreters. For all of these issues I would calmly walk upstairs and chat with the women

in the office. In North America, a director heads straight for the top - you're wasting your

time with the staff, and often they seem expressly hired to obstruct you. In Romania (this

was equally true in my second experience). They can do things for you that you could

never achieve by waiting for the Managing Director to show up. For one thing, Chiriac

travels about twenty days of every month. For another, he's not a details man; he can't

afford to be. The women in the office are details people. They are, above all, people. If

you take an interest in people, I've learned, they will work hard for you. So it proved in

Romania. The office staff solved everything from non-appearing pay-cheques to

scheduling conflicts.

Through them, I learned how to conduct myself in a Romanian theatre. It was a

clinic in organizational behaviour.

Other obstacles soon appeared. My scenographer, a delightful man who was

thrilled at the level of creativity and responsibility I had given him, spoke no English.

This in itself was no barrier. My fifth and final interpreter was a woman of outstanding

ability. Once I had coached her in theatre terminology, (having stolen a book from the

office which translates theatre terms in seven languages) Alin and I could transmit our

ideas to each other through Amelita. The real rub was what the theatre could afford.

I had come to Romania, knowing something of the culture and having seen theatre

productions there. I wasn't totally ignorant of the environment. Still, I was shocked to

discover that the theatre could not give me wood for the platform I wanted to build on the

stage. We had to do with chipboard, in large sections, which groaned every time one of

my plus-sized actresses trod the non-boards. There was simply no budget for wood.

Iron, strangely enough, they could do. I entered the theatre's courtyard one

morning to see welders hard at work constructing an intricate matrix of iron bars to

support the groaning chipboard. Welders, like costumiers, are already on staff; it's not an

extra expense. Where did the iron come from, I asked, wondering at the cost. They

wouldn't tell me.

I will digress to the second production for a moment, to discuss the issue which

most often arises when people ask me about my international work - language. I have

now directed in Hungarian, German, and Romanian. There is no linguistic obstacle that

the theatre, with its universal vocabulary, cannot surmount. In Sibiu the actors spoke

reasonable English, so an interpreter was necessary only for liaising with technicians. I

worked with a music stand, the German text on one page and the English on another.

After a time the music stand is discarded and one leaps into the river of the unknown

language, working from remembered phonic sounds and physical context. Even when

giving notes I would speak English but quote the German. My French-accented German

was a source of great amusement. German, after all, was the language in which the actors

were performing - it was crucial to the process that it be the focus of the director's

concentration, both in appearance and actuality.

I could, to borrow a Spolin term, even side-coach them. They listened in English,

spoke their lines in German and addressed theatre personnel in Romanian. It was a

satisfying respite from the hegemony of English, with all of its culturally imperialist

connotations.

In Tîrgoviste, where I directed my adaptation of Brecht's St. Joan of the

Stockyards, the challenge was somewhat different . I can only mention it briefly here, but

the cast, which was much larger than the four of Orphan Muses, was not proficient in

English. We had no interpreter, the Managing Director having vastly over-estimated the

linguistic abilities of his company. So we improvised.

Initially, in explaining specific concepts or beats, I would work through the two or

three actors in the cast who spoke English well and who could translate it quickly to the

other actors. One of them ended up being the translator of the play: the Managing

Director having first promised to find an existing Romanian translation (there was none),

then promising to have a translation done within three days (promise everything, just

not today.). In rehearsal this meant, in practical terms, that there could be no pretense of

actors "losing themselves" in their roles; it was an entirely conscious process, as in fact it

should be in directing Brecht. For the first five days of rehearsal I was without the

promised translation. Denuded of all other directorial approaches which depended on

language or text, I regressed. Armed with a clear aesthetic purpose, I took the actors back

to theatre school. I coached them in improvisation, used animal work, exercises in

Brechtian gestus. I asked them to develop gestures for the work their characters did, then

a psychological gesture for the way they performed this work - an inter-mixing of Brecht

with Michael Chekhov. Over an intense period of rehearsals I asked them to develop

these gestures and physicalisations - the animal for their character, their working gestus,

and their psychological gesture - into a sequence they could perform at random and in

combination in the play's first scene, a framing scene set in an abandoned factory yard

full of homeless people. The sequence, in its multiple variations, would tell us not who

these characters were at this moment, but who they might have been, who they might

become. Because, like all of us, they do take on new roles.

The characters in my adaptation, which was entitled "Brecht In The Garbage" ,

find a copy of St. Joan in a garbage can; provoked by an opportunistic television reporter

with her camera crew (the production featured live video displayed selectively on a huge

screen at the back of the stage), they transform into the characters of Brecht's play. Over

the course of the play the actors retained these three gestus elements, bringing them in at

moments when the character was in flux; a kind of liminal space between character,

actor, and original character. In this way Brecht's intention was realised with regard to

conscious representation, as the audience witnessed each transformation and, critically,

all the physical and psychological transitions as well.

Additionally, the television reporter addresses the camera, whose screen image we

regard. We are unable to be passive viewers, however, as the action constantly spills off

the stage into the audience, altering their gaze, implicating them in the injustices Brecht

seeks to question.

As a further extension of this approach to overcoming linguistic barriers, we did

extensive ensemble-building with a small ball I've used for fourteen years in actor-

training. The principles of communication highlighted by ball work, and its emphasis

on play as a medium of communication, transcend and extend our understanding of text

and verbal articulation. Together over those five days we developed not only a rapport,

but a vocabulary - physical, gestural, and even a pigeon language of our own, comprised

of Romanian, French, and English. This initial work set us free to concentrate on the

semiotic and signifier aspects of representation on the stage, rather than a robotic

adherence to the modified Stanislavkian psychologising the actors had been wedded to..

In the case of both productions, opening nights were postponed, not for

production reasons, but those having to do with other exigencies within the theatres. In

Sibiu, as at last the day drew near, Chiriac politely asked me if I could postpone the

show for several days. The actors, he said, had come to him, saying they were nervous

about all the text they had to memorize. The actuality (as I discovered from the women in

the office) was that he had a money-making booking for another show which he booked

with the Romanian section on two days' notice. I agreed, dyadically, in exchange for a

return to my hotel room from what was an uncomfortable experience in the smoke-filled

apartment. The dates remained fluid throughout the last two weeks of rehearsal, as they

did in Tîrgoviste. No one except me was in the least concerned by all this fluidity. We

finally opted for a date closer to the opening of the Festival of German Diaspora Theatre

in Timisoara, where we our second night was to take place - one week after the first.

This fluidity marks an aspect of East European theatre practise that is completely

distinct from Canadian practise. Think of it: my production had been booked into an

ongoing theatre season in late February. Then its opening was changed ten days before.

Then, its second production took place seven days later, in a different city.

None of this could ever occur in Canada, where the subscription marketing

system demands fealty to dates and locations. This rules out the kind of exciting

opportunism that Radu Stanca demonstrated in taking on my project. It's the New World

that looks stodgy and conservative in this respect - no surprise, really, given the

colonialist tradition of theatre our regionals still insist on following.

"Comparisons", says Dogberry, "are odorous" . Certainly I have much to learn

about Romanian, and even Canadian theatre practise. Still, while comparisons should

always be treated with care and diligence, and should avoid the general and the

prescriptive as much as possible, I think it is valid to set down these experiences in a

context which contrasts the comparative values of either culture's theatre structures. I

could summarize these differences most simply, I think, through a perceptual means: the

intensity which could be felt at each moment of the working day in Romania.

This wasn't merely the by-product of a kind of vicarious touristic thrill, the

frisson of the outsider on the inside. It represents, to me, a truly demarcative aspect of a

comparison between Romanian and Canadian theatre praxis.

In Canadian theatre, we believe in the efficiency of our artistic approach and

believe that is motivated by the market, in a positive way, rather than simply out of

expediency. Time is money, and that's a good thing, because you apply yourself to what

you do, in the most efficient manner. So we believe; but in fact the bulk of a theatre

director's experience consists of long waits, unionized breaks, lacunć between meetings,

periods of disconnection from the industry. In Romania I experienced something quite

different. For all the frustrations of having to hurry up and wait, my six weeks in Sibiu

were a non-stop round of meetings, rehearsals, prep sessions, and creative generation.

After The Orphan Muses opened, I had four days to produce a complete concept,

design cues, and a written adaptation of Brecht's mammoth St. Joan of the Stockyards. I

never doubted I could do it. Significantly, for this could never happen at a major

Canadian regional, the Managing Director of the theatre in Tîrgoviste never doubted it,

either. For a short, too short time, I worked in an evolving theatre culture where the

evident constraints are used to set the work, and the artists, free.

Michael Devine