The Beginning (An Editorial for Audition: A Journal of Drama and Performance)

With every single production of the Milena Theatre Group I feel the need to look back to where it all began and remember my mistakes, my victories, and my moments of absolute, unquestionable happiness. Most of all though, I look back to remember why I started all this: the group, the long hours of rehearsal late into the night, the endless doubt before each show. 

The answer is simple: I did it because I couldn’t do otherwise, because I missed the intensity of the theatre back home, because I had something to say and wanted to find a different way of saying it, because I could no longer sit passively and watch dozens of mediocre productions get standing ovations every night from a public who would have withheld applause had it been exposed to a different kind of theatre – immediate, alive, courageous, and beautiful in its recklessness. And so, in 2001, the Milena Theatre Group was born.

In the beginning I didn’t have a name for the kind of work we did but that didn’t matter: poor theatre, homeless theatre, vagrant, vagabond, exiled theatre. Anything would have sufficed because that’s how I felt back then, deprived of the spaces and performances that used to keep me alive for weeks. I realize this sounds both vague and abstract. Let me try to explain.

Romanian theatre exists at a level of intensity that only Artaud’s image of “victims burned at the stake signaling through the flames” begins to capture. The shows I grew up with – The Brothers Karamazov, The Master and Margarita, Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry, Ubu Roi, Faust, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Strange Interlude, Camino Real…I could go on (the list is endless). What I was going to say is that the shows I grew up watching changed me forever. I don’t know who I was supposed to be, but I know who I have become: someone who has always felt more at home on the stage than in everyday reality; someone who agonizes over this or that small gesture, over the way a spotlight imprisons a silhouette, over the fluidity of every movement, over rhythm and words, and images of love and death that require the actor to let go completely with a never-before-experienced sense of abandon.

Perhaps communism is the best thing that happened to Romania. An odd statement, I know. Let me explain (again): take away from people who have a high regard for the soul every imaginable freedom (travel, choice of any kind, the right to think a thought to its ultimate conclusion), take away from them the bare necessities (decent food and clothing, good wine – yes, I consider that a “bare necessity” – anything that says comfort, safety, home), and you will end up with a nation split into two large categories: tortured intellectuals and cunning factory workers. At some point there will be a rebellion and one group will try to exterminate the other out of shame, or anger, or a misplaced sense of patriotism. The motive is irrelevant. Before such a civil implosion takes place, though, something else happens: an insatiable hunger for expression, a profound intensity sublimated into artistic work, a delirious dance at the margin of danger, a celebration of the freedom of the mind – in other words, the Theatre. That’s what I grew up with. In a prison shaped as a country, the only art that escaped scrutiny was the theatre and nothing ever stopped a show: neither death, nor threats, nor the promise of torture and imprisonment, nor love, or misunderstandings, or perfect storms, or earthquakes. Nothing. On the grave of a solitary, tragic event, a play would emerge, a performance that would cleanse everything and restore the memory of whatever it was that the event had taken away.

That’s my understanding of theatre, the great force of all that is alive and beautiful. That’s why I started the theatre group which got its name after the first full-length production of a play I called Milena, Stripping, a play inside which I buried both the illusion of grand love affairs, and tragic but promising adventures.

Fourteen years later, I still agonize over the smallest gesture on the stage convinced that the absence of attention to details destroys a play as sure as a thousand plane raid. Fourteen years later, I still rely entirely on instinct, and find actors without holding a single audition. People walk into my classes, unaware of my ability to see them, to imagine them imprisoned by a spotlight on the stage - willing, beautiful captives of my fantastical scenarios.

The cast changes over the years (“Everyone I know goes away in the end”). I often work without a stage manager, or proper lights, or an adequate performance space, or money. But the group’s productions get more and more intense, a little more devastating every year, a little more difficult to forget or contain within specific memory compartments.

In moments of reflection and extreme solitude, images of the Milena Group performers (exiles?) parade themselves before my eyes like a great procession of friendly ghosts. I can never show them enough gratitude, but I forget no one.

One of them has had the greatest impact on my work, on the way I approach a new production, on the way I now understand the most elemental human impulses.

In every play I’ve tried to capture a meaningful and unavoidable encounter. This is not my definition of destiny but an illustration of my lack of belief in coincidences. Coincidences exist only to point out that the encounter is inevitable, and that it changes everything in its path. And the change is necessary, painful, spectacular, reckless, and immensely beautiful.

Welcome to the Milena Group. We bare our souls so you don’t have to.