A Stormy Night in Deva

The Bucharest National Theater and the “Nottara” Theater. Claudiu Bleont, Maria Teslaru, Eugen Cristea. And not only. On the stage of the “Dragan Muntean” Culture Center in Deva, with “A Stormy Night”, by I.L. Caragiale. An old play, for new times. A Caragialean comedy, always en vogue, slightly adapted in the vision of director Toma Enache to a public living in the century of speed, in the world of crass music. No kitschism is meant here. The audience from Deva – or from other parts of the country – was granted to see a casual Claudiu Bleont, in jeans, who at first remembers that formerly Deva meant “New York” to him (he made his debut in Petrosani). Now it is no longer that. Then the play goes on normally, as we all know it (or at least should know it).

Then we see a Chiriac making pushups, a Veta tied to bed by a Bleont in a Zorro suit, with a red rose in the mouth, miming the beginning of a strip-tease turn, humming Joe Cocker’s well-known song, “You Can Leave Your Hat On”. Love notes, set by messengers, now reach their destination by e-mail in the Caragealean play.

The play ends powerfully; the actors kneel before their audience.

As for behind the scenes in this show, the reader of the Gazeta de Hunedoara finds out from the manager of the artists, Gheorghe Patrascu, about the difficulties they faced in Deva with organizing this artistic action. First of all, the posters. Although they posted 300 advertisements across the entire town, the management company was astonished to find all of them covered, after only a few hours of being posted, by other advertisements of the public transportation companies. “We stuck posters in Deva so many that we would have stuck that many in four other towns. I’ll sue the transportation company, because they simply sabotaged us”, the manager declares.

An institution that met the first-class artists of the Romanian stage with hostility, was this time… a cultural one – the Hunedoara County School Inspectorate. The manager wouldn’t give names and concluded: “All the school inspectorates in the country call us. In Hunedoara, things were not the same. No use for me making any futher comments”.

From behind the scenes, we heard that a woman from Timisoara, who failed to see the show when played in her town, arrived two weeks earlier and bought six tickets.

And, finally, we find out that the tickets for this show, performed in the entire country, were the cheapest in Deva. Nowhere else, in no other town were the tickets sold at less than 400-500 thousand old lei, while in Deva, a ticket cost only 200.000 lei. Thus, the hall of the Culture Center in Deva was filled at last, and not by Adi Minune (or DeVito, whatever, pardon).

n Hannelore STANASEL