A play about how history needs to be told from the perspective of the one whose voice is either silenced or marginalized. In this case, on the one hand, Laika’s voice, the first (female) creature to be sent and die in space “in the name of science” and, on the other hand, Dog’s, an immigrant from the Middle East who thought starting a new life in “the new world” would be the adventure of his lifetime.

Script history:
During the U.S. Presidential election of 2016, an episode from my adolescence resurfaced. It was the summer of 1989. I went on my first trip abroad. The lights blinded my eyes. The morning buffet made me feel like a queen. Mind you, both were ordinary: street lights at night and ordinary food in the morning, but they were not part of my routine in communist Romania. When we were about to leave, a girl escaped. She had staged her exit flawlessly. But that was bad news for me. The girl was in my classroom and since I was her only classmate, then and there it was decided I was an accomplice. I was slapped and grilled in an abusive, intimidating interview, and I was harassed that I would be kicked out of school and my parents would lose their jobs. I lived with that induced terror and terrifying looks for a few more months. The Iron Curtain would come down soon. Harsh as those moments were, I started to realize that political regimes and doctrines could harm people badly, like a contagious disease. I promised myself to refuse to be mistreated and make sure I speak up, especially since the abuse typically concerns the marginalized and weak people. That’s how I felt during the last U.S. Presidential election. I knew that the best way for me to keep my sanity while voicing out my opinions would come therapeutically via writing.

In 2018, the play had a stage reading directed by Marcy Arlin at TheaterLab in New York. In 2019 Olga Levina of Jersey City Theater Center staged it twice, one time at JCTC and a second time at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. With the same play I was invited to give a talk, “Playing a Game Called History” in Berlin.
The play had a reading with an innovative all-female cast this last summer at the Finnish Institute of Culture. With the same play, actresses, and director, the play travels to Birmingham this coming December. Finally, we work on its full production for next year.

My first play written directly in my native language. It’s a play marking the centennial anniversary since the Great Union in Romania that solidified us as one nation. But due to corruption, political immaturity, and socio-economic discrepancies, we can see and feel those 100 years not as fruitful as we would have hoped. Which in turn begs the question, since this is not an exclusive Romanian problem, but it applies to other ex-communist countries, has their journey to adapt to democracy a victory or a forever delayed achievement?

An immersive play in three tableaux with two presidents from two different countries morph into puppets, more specifically piñatas. This is an intergenerational, transnational play with two pairs, a niece and her grandfather, and a nephew and his grandfather, respectively, plus one character in V.O. In this play, history becomes exactly what it should (have) be(en): a geographical map overlapping an anatomical one. When the two pairs from the two different countries meet, they discover that they have been sharing the stage the whole time. By so doing and by inviting the audience to participate, the play seeks a way to alleviate the heavy load of political propaganda transforming it into something else. There is no ending to the play, not in the strict way anyway, because with each audience the play has the option to be rewritten via a set of uncoreographed bodily gestures and sounds. At this point, language is superfluous.

Greetings from the Land of Pastries and Churches starts with a girl being lost both literally and figuratively. The girl’s name suggests is not Romanian just to mess up with people’s assumptions. She faces People’s Salvation Cathedral looking for her lost doll. In a split of a second she is in the same location, now a teenager looking for a hospital to have an abortion after rape. In the next scene the teenager, now a mature woman is nicely dressed making a stop in front of the colossal architectural nightmare on her way to her law firm. She is a successful lawyer suing the government for all the abuse she and others have faced over the years.

At first look, Greetings from the Land of Pastries and Churches traces only one woman and her journey is, in a way, like a bildungsroman. At a deeper look, however, the piece actually reveals the frustrations and fights of generations trapped after communism. Finally, this piece has bits of words uttered in various languages that are currently spoken in Romania and by so doing to emphasize one more time that just because we are born in a country that does not automatically implies complete submission to one set of ideas, one language, one religion, etc.