The Reality of Fiction

Gianina Carbunariu¨ in conversation with Bonnie Marranca

n the last decade, the playwright and director Gianina Carbunariu¨ has become one of the prominent young voices in contemporary European theatre. Mihaela, Ithe Tiger of Our Town, which premiered at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, will be performed at the 2016 Avignon festival by Sweden’s Jupither Josephsson Company. Other plays include Stop the Tempo, For Sale, Typographic Letters, Solitarity, Metro is Everywhere, and mady-baby.edu (later titled Kebab). The plays have been translated into more than fifteen languages, and they have been performed in Romanian cities and in theatres across Europe, in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, Athens, Warsaw, Budapest, Dublin, and elsewhere in Moscow, Istanbul, Santiago de Chile, New York, and Montreal. Ca rbunariu= has had residencies at the Lark Theatre in New York and London’s Royal Court. Her plays and productions have received numerous awards in Romania and in Canada. She is a founding member of the dramAcum independent theatre group in Bucharest. This interview was taped in New York City on December 19, 2015.

You represent the post-1989 generation of Romanian playwrights in this particular era that extends from the old Communist world to, let’s say, the New Europe. How much does this transitional period still figure in your work?

There was this period before 1989 when a lot of the plays and playwrights had a kind of elusive language, very metaphorical. And then what happened in the nineties is that reality was so interesting for everybody that people left the theatres for about ten years. When they came back in the 2000s, the reality was changed, but the language of the theatre had not changed. In 2000, I started to study directing at the university in Bucharest, and there I really felt that the way things were taught in school, and the plays we were studying, were not really what I was interested in.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 We were a few directors, students, in 2001, and we did this dramAcum project. What we wanted was to connect the very young playwrights to this reality of transition. For me that was a very important moment as a director and as a playwright. “DramAcum” is a play on words. It means drama now—how you write drama now, actually. “Acum” means now. I was very interested to speak about this reality that was around me and my colleagues, a reality that I couldn’t understand very well, because I didn’t have a perspective. I was quite young. In 1989, I was eleven years old. The nineties were very important years because they were connected with what happened before, but as a kid I couldn’t really understand the connections. From 2009, I started to do projects that were very much connected with the recent history of Romania because there were a lot of questions that I had myself, as a person, not just as a theatre person. I did a lot of projects that were connected with what happened before 1989 or what happened in the nineties.

It seems also that you had a particular interest not only in Romanian history, but especially about young people in Romania. I’m thinking of the earlier plays, such as Stop the Tempo, which has to do with the new consumerism or “mady-baby.edu,” which in Europe was retitled Kebab, and addressed the problem of young people leaving the country. Another play, Typographic Capital Letters, features a high school student writing graffiti about social justice on public buildings in his hometown. These plays are very connected to problems of youth while also relating to larger issues in society.

Stop the Tempo and Kebab were the first performances that I did after I finished my studies as a director. They were produced independently because at that time, 2004–2005, Romanian institutional theatres would not produce contemporary drama. Their repertoires were made out of performances that were reinterpret- ing the classics. I wanted to make performances that would speak about what I was confronted with at that time, about people my age who were quite confused about their lives in what looked like a never-ending situation of transition from a dictatorial regime to wild capitalism. Typographic Capital Letters was produced in 2013, eight years later, and it was about a teenager who had the courage to express his questions about the social and political situation before 1989. It was a performance that had as a scenario a collage of texts from the file that Securitate—the Romanian Secret Police—recorded out of the investigation they did in 1981. I wanted to do this research in the archive because that was one thing that I really felt after 2000, that the present we are living in is so much connected with the past. You cannot say that 1989 was a cut in history.

We have an institute that collects all the archives of Securitate, and there I started to read and go through papers because what interested me was the way these files were produced. I didn’t go there to find the truth. It’s impossible, because

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 if you say you can find the truth in this file, it’s saying that Securitate is right, again, twenty-five years later. It is very interesting how these files are produced because there are a lot of lies, a lot of omissions, a lot of things that you know were not like that. But there are also a lot of recordings of real fragments of con- versations—transcriptions of discussions on the phone, for instance—and this mixture of standardized language—declarations, reports of Securitate officers— and everyday language interested me. It says a lot about how history is produced: the language of power versus the language of normal people confronted with an abusive power.

Everything became a kind of misreading.

Yes, yes. Actually, we have this archive, like a heritage from the past, but we don’t know how to handle it. I think that it is important to raise a discussion about what this archive means because we have forty-two kilometers of papers. In a way, it’s good because you have this about your past, you have some record. For me, the most interesting things in the files were the things that were connected with everyday life. In a file you can find different people who speak about you—people like neighbors, friends. You can have very unpleasant surprises, members from the family as well, but also photos. It’s like a family album sometimes.

A kind of perverse history book. Are these files as extensive as the Stasi files?

Oh, yes. They were. It is a perverse history book.

The first play that I saw of yours was when I was in Romania on the jury of the New Romanian Drama Festival, in 2012, and we gave your production of X mm a prize for best actors. This play was also based on the Securitate files of a famous writer.

Dorin Tudoran.

You’ve worked a lot in the documentary form. Is that because of the interest in history and the archive?

Yes, I was using the methods of documentary, but actually, I don’t see myself as a documentary artist. Yes and no, because actually in X mm out of Y km, my approach was to see how such a thing is produced with all of its repetitions. We have now some words on a paper, but we don’t know what the reality was at that moment. I was trying to do a collective exercise with the audience to understand how such a thing is produced, and of course this exercise is a fictional one. We took a fragment of the file as a theatre script and we tried to give different inter- pretations, different situations to the same lines.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 I suppose that’s why there is so much attention to language, even readymades and different speech styles, in your work. Do you have particular ideas about language that you are working with?

I think language is so important because language reveals a person, but it can also hide ideas. Everything is connected with language, and in the files, it’s very interesting and hard to translate into another language this kind of language that is so standard a language. It’s a dry language, a language without life, bureaucratic. The funny thing with this language is that when it tries to describe something really alive or something really strange in a standard reality, that’s very interesting. Also, when I’m doing performance, sometimes I do research and interviews with people. I also like very much to listen to what people say and to listen to the things they avoid saying.

Many of your plays, including the play that we’re publishing in this issue, Mihaela, the Tiger, are based on interviews. I know that it was based on a true story, and you interviewed people around Sibiu. How did this play come about?

Every time I do a project it’s connected with research. During the research period, I do the concept for the show, and every time the reality is different because the subject is different, and in this case, with Mihaela, what I did was to listen to the people in this town. It started from a real story of a tiger who escaped from the zoo, and she was free for three hours in the city, which is quite unusual. I was amazed to see how the press described that event. It was an event that actually troubled all the community and put a lot of questions in our way to react to fear, to real or imaginary dangers. I went there two years after this happened, so there was a perspective on it, and every time I would start to speak with the people, they wouldn’t speak so much about the tiger but a lot about themselves, about their prejudices, their fears, about the realities of the town. It is a town that is very special, and in 2007, it was the European Cultural Capital.

Actually, I am a director, and I write the scenarios for my own performances. I define what I’m doing like this. Of course, when I’m doing the performance, it’s not only the words that are important, but sometimes I decide that I need an object from reality on stage, and I would start to build around an object, not only around the situation or around the word. That’s why I said that my shows are very, very different. I met a different reality in this town. Just to give you an image of that, in my performance the set was formed out of porcelain figures, which are very kitschy, in this German kind of kitschy style. It’s very common in that city to have these porcelain figures and animals, everything as porcelain. This kind of European town, not only this city, which is so polished, so nice, so beautiful, is so easy to break.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 It is a very special place because it’s a very old place. It used to be in the Austro- Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century. It is a very conservative place. People are very proud of their hometown, which is unusual for Romania, because people in Romania usually complain about their cities. There, they have pride, and even though they have international events, festivals, all kind of things, they have this sense of a closed community. At least for me, that was quite clear. It looks very much like you can find this town in Germany, in France, in Sweden, a little bit everywhere. The play was produced in Sweden in different towns, and people said, “But it’s like they’re speaking about our town.” Having interviews with real people and making birds or cars or schools gives speeches, somehow changed the perspective, the style, and you see the things in another way.

That relates to one of the strong aspects of your work in that it is very panoramic. Even though your plays deal with the personal as well as the political dimensions of the many themes, they always show different segments of society. For example, the sense of classes, jobs, perspectives, generations, and racial issues or ethnic sensitivities as well.

I would just add to that when I wrote Mihaela it was 2012. In Europe, it was just the beginning of nationalist trends. Then it was Hungary, and now we are in 2016, and we have Poland. We have Sweden. We have France. There are now problems in Germany with people demonstrating. We really have a problem in Europe. It is something that we wouldn’t imagine happening five or six years ago.

In fact, only a few years ago when I was returning home from Europe I was sitting on the plane with a Vienna representative of Doctors Without Borders whose wife was a member of the European Parliament. I said to him, “What do you think of the current situation in Europe?” He said he was most concerned about the rise of the far right. For a long time, the entire post-war period, especially in Eastern Europe, the “idea of Europe” was very strong. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, many people spoke about the idea of Europe. As far back as the Hungarian Revolution anti-communists were broadcasting to the outside world: “We are Europe. Save Europe.” That has been a strong theme for artists and intellectuals, and for many people who were part of the Soviet bloc, who were separated from the Western culture they helped to create. Now, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with Romania part of the European Union, what does the idea of Europe mean to you and to your generation?

Romania was one of the countries most enthusiastic about joining the European Union, but now I think there is less enthusiasm about that because what we could see in these years since 2007, when we joined the Union, is that if we build a Europe based on the economical foundation, we will lose because you can see that you have first class citizens, second class citizens, and so on. I’m doing research for another performance now, and I did interviews in Germany about

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 cheap labor, about people who are working from Romania and other countries from the East working in Germany. The very poor conditions they are offered is modern slavery, sometimes. If this is Europe, I don’t want to be part of that, honestly, but if Europe is based on other ideas, like free access, culture, education, tolerance—that’s a Europe I want to be part of. A lot of the projects that I’ve done in the last three or four years were international projects, and I think for us in Europe, this is a very good thing that you can connect with an artist from Germany or Sweden, and you have some solidarity.

With European funds? Are there companies from each of these countries?

Yes, it’s governmental. The theatre I’m working with in Romania will produce the entire production, and then we find the money to present it in Germany. When I was in Germany, I was doing research together with Clemens Bechtel, the German director and initiator of the project, and that’s interesting because we share this research. I traveled through different cities and spoke with workers—Romanian workers, people from the unions who are trying to protect these workers, with people who protested against the abuses. We tried to speak with people who know the conditions. Clemens Bechtel will come to Romania and we’ll do the second part of the research. So we share the same research and we’ll do two different shows, in Romania and in Germany.

A number of artists use interviews in the theatre here and abroad, mainly for a collective text or group-oriented work. On the other hand, you are still very much working as a playwright experimenting with dramatic forms, with drama. Do you have any feeling about the rise of what’s called the “postdramatic”?

The post-dramatic theatre, the way Lehmann described it, was about the theatre that is not so political. And I connect with another kind of theatre. I might use forms of the postdramatic or I might experiment, but I think that, for me, the political and the social dimensions of an artistic approach are essential. In the postdramatic theatre, or at least the way the way I see it, is connected very much with experimenting with the form and less with a political approach. On the other hand, the discourse of the book is focused more on Western theatre and I think that due to different experience of Eastern countries in the last decades, it is normal to have a different approach. Also we are facing now a new reality and Lehmann’s approach is very valuable, but we need to reconsider things while we’re going through a situation that is changing right before our eyes, a social and political situation that has a huge impact on the way theatre is produced today.

Your dramaturgy often comprises short, non-sequential, episodic scenes. Often, actors present themselves as actors or play other roles in the productions. There are many things

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 going on with the subversion of certain dramatic forms, in the way that you use language. You called Mihaela a “mockumentary.” What do you mean by that?

As I work a lot with documentary methods, I felt that I would do a kind of documentary performance, but in a way in which I could afford to be ironical toward my own methods. When you’re saying you are documenting a reality, that’s a lie. It is just a meeting between you and that reality. Today when you speak about reality, it’s not that—it’s realities. When I am doing interviews with people or when I am documenting something, I realize that, actually, it’s a meeting, and sometimes this meeting can be very disturbing for me. What I’m trying to do is to translate this feeling of being disturbed on stage. I’m not trying to translate a reality, but this feeling, this meeting. Many times the actors join me in the research. It’s a group of artists meeting a reality, not only me. There are even polemics between us, like “I think he wanted to say that” or “I think the reality was there,” and somebody else says, “No, I think it’s just the opposite.” I do not understand why that thing is going on, and that’s why I start to ask questions.

Maybe this is a very truthful way to go, especially in an era when people have less and less conversation among themselves—don’t they—because of texting and not using the phone as much. The art of conversation, where you really learn about people and you have to be responsible in the conversation and you commit to something, is also being lost in contemporary societies as people hide behind the technology. The interview has its own truth if people are very revealing, even in what they don’t reveal, as you say.

I noticed something really strange while I was doing the interviews for Mihaela, but not only that play. People are afraid to speak, and I thought that belonged to another era, and it doesn’t. People have new fears today. They do not speak, not because of some dictatorship, but because they are afraid to lose their jobs, because they are afraid of how they will look in society. They have the fear of an image being damaged, in a way. There is a fear to speak, and it’s interesting in the sense of what the person will let us see.

That’s so suggestive in creating a new kind of dramatic writing, because it may be that the theatre is one of the last places of private language, of a certain privacy and intimacy. What is the reality behind that reality that really gets to the basic question of being and the soul of contemporary life? That’s often missing.

I really like what you say about this privacy of the theatre. I love working in studio places, in small venues, because I’m so interested in this connection with the audience. When I had to work in a big stage for the performance that I did for Avignon, for Solitarity, I had to be very aware of the space and about these conventions. For me, this relationship between the audience and the performance

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 and the performers is so important. That’s one of the things I start with: “Where am I doing this and for whom am I doing this project?” Like in X mm, if you remember, the audience would enter the space. There were no chairs. Everybody could stay wherever they wanted. So in this sense, I think, my most important experiments are in this area, how do I connect with the audience?

When you started working in the theatre, there was no real alternative theatre. There were only the big state theatres, and so you began working in the café theatre in Bucharest. Do you still work primarily in smaller studios or are you now going to bigger theatres?

In Sibiu, they only have the big stage, so there was not so much choice. But, for instance, when I worked on the last two productions, For Sale and Typographic Capital Letters, I chose the studio space. In For Sale, the audience sat on big bales of straw, on structures that were made especially for the performance. They were meant to be the set design and also the places for the audience. The performers while performing different scenes would make the audience move. So every scene was presented in very different angles, and by the way they performed, they would force you to change your place. It had a meaning because it was about land-grabbing and about how people constantly leave they give up their space. It was also an idea about different perspectives, different angles through which you can perceive the performance, different degrees of proximity to the performance and the performers. At some point the performers were a few feet from the spectators, speaking directly to them, asking questions while looking directly into their eyes.

When I was in Romania, I had occasion to be driven around for several hours in the countryside, and I saw many small villages with only old people. You see very few young people. The multinationals and other big European countries are buying up this land. For Sale took on the subject of fracking. The play is about Romania and Europe at the same time, and demonstrates a Euro-skepticism as well.

It’s again about Europe—what kind of New Europe? In the last scene of For Sale I use a readymade, a fragment from Grapes of Wrath. I took the fragment from the book and worked on it: the situation that when Tom runs away he had to give up his place in the world. The performance starts with the Romanian land-grabbing and fracking, but then it goes to very deep and universal issues.

Your play Typographic Capital Letters, for instance, is based on a real story, and, you said everything in it is a readymade.

Everything. The dialogue as well. They are recordings from the phone. All the dialogues, father-son, mother-son are real.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 Still, this differs from what the English call “verbatim theatre,” and it is different from documentary or simply taping people because the final text has truly gone through a creative development in which you make the language your own.

I’m playing a lot with this on-the-edge style, like you think it’s readymade, but then you realize it’s fiction, or you think it’s fiction, but then you say, “Oh my god, but that’s really readymade. This exists.” A lot of people, after they see Typographic Capital Letters, think that I wrote the dialogue between mother-son or father-son, and I say, “No, they are real. It was all recorded and written in the file.” Sometimes you don’t have to do a lot. You have somebody in a town saying that it’s only us who should be here. No other visitors, no foreigners. You take this speech, and you put a pigeon to say that, and all of a sudden, it’s different. You have some distance and you get the irony, and it wouldn’t be so funny or interesting if a white person in a town would say that.

What makes me feel that your work is so European is the panoramic quality of it. The big plays that we’ve seen in the last century show the whole town as a character, and you see the station master, the mayor, and the rich person and the peasant. I’m thinking of Gombrowicz or Witkiewicz or many of the German plays, like Durrenmatt’s The Visit. I see your work very much in that tradition as opposed to contemporary work, which has two or three characters—a husband and wife or a family.

That’s a very good point because, actually, I’m not so much into this kind of drama couple or kitchen sink.

I think it has been more true of German plays and Eastern European plays that we get panoramic views of an entire society, whereas a lot of Scandinavian drama or British drama tends to focus intensely on a family unit or an individual against the town, like Enemy of the People.

Which is a great play, I think.

That reminds me, your next play has to do with whistleblowers. What prompted you to move into that new theme?

I realized, reading newspapers while traveling through Europe, that for ten years this is happening, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we have new technology. Like, now, it is easier to write on Facebook or somewhere when you want to make something public. You also have a photo camera and you can copy things. You can record things, and so on. Whistleblowers always existed. You mentioned Enemy of the People. There is this in the human nature, to say at some point, “No, I will not do that,” because if we do, a whole society will be affected,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 and I have to say it’s wrong. But what is missing in the European legislation are good laws for protecting the whistleblowers.

Now, more and more, we have these discussions. That’s how I realized it is an important topic. In Europe, a lot of countries do not have a word for “whistleblower” and they use the American, the British word. In Romania, we do have such a law protecting whistleblowers, which you wouldn’t expect in Romania compared with the others, but there is an explanation. Before joining the European Union, we were forced to have some laws because it was such a corrupted country. The whistleblowing law was one of these laws that we had to have. So I was interested to see the similarities and differences of the same topic in three countries in Europe with different or no laws on whistleblowing. But more than this, I wanted to meet people who had the courage to put in danger their careers, health, family for the sake of the public interest. The performance is called Common People because they are people like us, they are not Superman or Batman, it’s just that they were put in a situation when they had to take a moral decision and they did the right thing no matter the consequences.

Your work has been tracking the important themes and political events in Europe. When you started out around twelve years ago your plays focused on youth, and then after a while, cities and towns, with important themes like exploitation of the land, the problems of prejudice toward Roma and foreigners, and later outcasts in society who promote justice and freedom. Now it seems like you are taking the larger subject of Europe more and more.

Yes, and I also think it is global. It’s not only Europe. In the project For Sale, we were nine artists from India, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, Burkina-Faso, UK, and Switzerland. You have actually a global problem, which is food, and that was the big topic. And you have all these people, nine artists doing interviews in their own country, and then sharing these interviews with English subtitles. So I could be inspired by other stories from Brazil or South Africa, and I did interviews that maybe helped artists from Burkina-Faso or Germany. There are global problems today, and they need a global answer, an artistic answer, and in this sense, I think, yes, my work becomes European. But also, I might be very interested in something that is going on outside of Europe. The world is bigger than Europe. The world is bigger than my village or my town, everything is so connected.

Didn’t you say earlier there was something else you were doing with other countries?

Yes, with Germany and Burkina-Faso and India, we will do the next project on cheap labor. It’s a way of working to support each other, to speak, to be always in a conversation. I have to say that in Romania, for me, it was quite difficult and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00323 by guest on 23 September 2021 it still is. I’m not somebody who would work a lot with institutional theatres. I was an independent artist working for nine years as an independent artist. So I’m not having an easy life with the Romanian system. In this sense, the support coming from other artists and from other countries, for me, was vital. I could say, “Well, I’m not crazy.” I’m doing things that are interesting for other people, even though they are not so interesting for the Romanian mainstream, which I didn’t care too much about, because I always had my audience in studio theatres. I knew to whom I was speaking and, I could build an audience in different places where I worked in Romania.

One of the things I’m curious about is that you have a PhD. I know that the playwright Bogdan Georgescu also does. Is this something that playwrights in Romania generally do or is it your particular interest in education?

I studied directing for five years, and my teacher Valeriu Moisescu, who is now eighty-four, was the kind of professor who was very much into theory and also practice. He would always ask from us to reflect on what we are doing. Okay, inspiration, that’s great, but then you had to reflect on your methods and everything. For me that was very important. I’m always trying to leave behind all the shows that I’ve done until this moment. I feel so happy as an artist that I can change the methods I’m working with and I can reinvent myself. That’s something that I really like, and I don’t know if it’s a postmodern or post-postmodern turn. There are few things that I am very sure about: that I am interested in the political approach, in things that are touching, things that are vital for a society. I like meeting people and going out of the theatre and doing interviews with people who are so different, people from corporations but also peasants. I like working on things that are happening right now, but also with the memory and stories of people who can share the experience of their lives before 1989. It makes me feel alive and ready to go back to the theatre because if I would stay only in the theatre, I would probably go crazy.

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